My biggest issue with that Twix video (besides the extremely boring plot) is the total lack of candy. How is this an “ad”?? What are they selling besides moralizing? (A habit that, like you, I can only hope to manage.)
I agree w pretty much everything your wrote. What I find interesting about the ad, from a trans/gender ideology perspective, is that the child is not identified as trans at all. No pronouns are used. The bully says “you look like a girl, boys don’t wear dresses.” As far as we know, this is just a cisgender boy who likes to wear a princess dress. Conservatives who are worried about the mental health of children and who are worried about messages to them that their gender identity is some mystery they’ll sort out in time would be much better to lean in to the “if you have XY chromosomes, you’re a boy, but wear whatever the heck you want” approach. The progressive “if you like to wear dresses, you’re probably a girl, regardless of your genitalia” approach is strangely regressive. Can’t we just have a discussion that challenges gender essentialism entirely?
Anyway when I was a kid, the right would have been all over this ad for promoting the occult, so, progress I guess?
On a final note, this conundrum highlights the progressive power problem. Progressives are fixated on theories about power structures, power imbalances, etc. They/we fixate on the political power that the GOP manages to hoard through gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, etc. And rightly so. But the left is totally blind to its massive power over pop culture, a million little power moves like this ad. It’s a different kind of power but the right is hyper-attuned to it. Feeling powerless in pop culture is why the right feels justified in hoarding political power. It’s why they get so pissed about “cancel culture” even though they effectively invented it with conservative moralizing. Each side sees the other one’s unchecked power and feels justified in turning the dial to 11 to combat it. Whoever made this Twix ad felt like they were taking on The Man, even though they are The Man(x).
Progressives would be well-served to "interrogate the Foucaultian space", examining the assumption proposed back at the formation of deconstruction/semiotic approaches to analysis that have led us to the insights (and excesses) of CRT, that all human interactions are defined by "power" dynamics.
This questionable, or partially true assertion has become bedrock-engraved dogma among the "smart set", and it produces really, really ugly results. The fact that it isn't 100% absolutely true in every case produces downstream distortions, inaccuracies and vast amounts of bullshit posing as "critique".
I liked Foucault back in the day, esp. compared to Derrida, Lacan, and some of the other, later proponents. He was comprehensible, and had some good ideas about the real-world utility of the critical approach. But no: Not every human interaction is entirely based on power dynamics. (or rather: Human power relationships are seldom simple enough for this approach to be universally useful.)
"Conservatives who are worried about the mental health of children and who are worried about messages to them that their gender identity is some mystery they’ll sort out in time would be much better to lean in to the “if you have XY chromosomes, you’re a boy, but wear whatever the heck you want” approach."
I'm largely conservative, in some areas basically a libertarian (in others more traditionally liberal--as defined by the liberalism of the 70s and 80s) but that is the approach. As with gay marriage: heck, let people do what they want in their own lives. Let consenting adults live and speak freely. Little dude wants to wear a princess dress, that's fine with me. I might or might not impose a stricter dress code with my own kids--while still children--but neighbor should raise their kids however they see fit, and adults should do what they want. Why do I care if you wear a dress?
That said, the commercial is boring and its biggest sin is exactly what you say: where's the candy? Why does this make me want a Twix bar? I have always despised non-ad ads. Why are you doing this? Tell me about your damn product or remind me how much I used to like it--or get off my TV.
Fortunately, I watch so little commercial TV I literally would have never seen this ad had it not caused a stir amongst people who find rolling their eyes insufficient.
Well stated. They really are a wretched bunch. Like you, I was one of them most of my life (Seattle native with multiple graduate degrees). I once thought the world would be a better place if educated leftists had more power, and that it was only those damn Republicans standing between us and utopia.
But over the past couple of years in particular, I turned in my progressive card and became a libertarian. With the combination of the Great Awokening, "defund the police," the complete collapse of much of the media's anti-Trump narratives under the weight of contrary evidence, absolute nonsense getting published in once-respectable academic journals as long as it advances The Narrative, embrace of authoritarian Covid policies and attitudes, etc., etc., I came to the belief that basically no one should be in charge of anything, ever.
Likewise. I've always been a strong civil libertarian, but I was pretty much your typical progressive prior to 2017. Yet, thanks to all the same bullshit you mention, now consider myself a classical liberal independent.
My politics don't matter nationally right now, because my state of residence is never in play. But as one of those elusive, legitimately up-for-grabs swing voters, I will say that messaging is important but not enough by itself. It cannot *just* be sane messaging slapped onto insane policy. Like, you can't just avoid the words "defund the police", while still quietly trying to remove or divert as much funding as possible. There needs to be *actual* sanity underneath the message.
Skepticism of power itself, all the time, no matter who's wielding it -- perhaps *especially* if it's yourself or your allies -- is definitely the way to go, in my opinion.
I feel like demonstrated competence is important. If you keep advancing a policy (even ones not all that important to a great many people), you should have some demonstrated competence in getting decent results. Otherwise, if the vote is between you with no experience and the other with demonstrably poor results, no experience wins (i.e., that's how you get Trump).
Of course that's a problem of both the left and the right, especially among the political class. Demonstrations of competence are not broadly available. But there's no shortage of politicians who are "on message" and "feed red meat" to the base.
I've been observing Seattle politics with a kind of morbid fascination for about six years now. (I'm a longtime resident of the PNW, but only moved to Seattle 6 years ago)
Besides everything you mentioned in your second paragraph, (which is a lot that's gone wrong with the modern left and the MSM) watching far left politicians and activists allow Seattle to fall into ruins has turned me against the far left forever. The current Seattle city council is a joke...which would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Many here won't even go downtown anymore.
As a fellow PNW native, I couldn't agree more. Seattle used to be a verdant, gorgeous city that charmed visitors. Yet, in the span of only a few years, it became an embarrassing San Fran Lite trash heap that repels visitors and is full of needles and homeless encampments. I wouldn't have thought it was even possible for it to change that fast had I not seen it with my own eyes.
I think some of that is monolithic control. Not all of it--but a good deal of it. Once you get everything controlled by everyone of the same ideological stripe, and they all agree on everything, it allows bad ideas to get near unanimous support. There aren't a lot of great examples of long-term, universal domination of states by the far-right or even very-right. And even if that happened, it's different when the mainstream media and entertainment culture all moves in the other direction. Bad decisions in Chicago or Seattle are not going to be lampooned on SNL or inspire a Hollywood writer to write a parable--which they tell everybody what its a parable of--about the consequences of those bad decisions. The fact that the institutions and the (entertainment) culture is generally leftwards leaning prevents us from having any theocratic states or cities run by some version of Jerry Fallwell. Nobody is at risk of going to jail for denying God or burning a Bible or something, but there are people at real risk of getting in trouble for having the wrong kinds of opinions regarding progressive orthodoxy.
While some on the right might like to "drink liberal tears", I think it's a bad thing when one side has too much authoritarian power while also self-immolating. I would prefer healthy left/right or conservative/progressive parties, with some moderates and independents thrown in, and most states and cities being made up of a combination of both. It would be imperfect because people are imperfect but I think it would be better than what we've got.
Growing up in Seattle in the '80s and '90s was awesome. It was the place to be. I couldn't have asked for a better childhood. Present day Seattle is inching ever closer to being a post-apocalyptic hellscape, especially downtown. I haven't lived there in years, but every time I go back to visit my parents, I'm appalled at what the city has become. It's pretty sad, and I really don't see things getting any better. I don't have any constructive solutions. Other than moving.
Going to art school changed my self-description from liberal to moderate. The first year of working for a living turned me into a conservative--but now I think I'm more of a conservative libertarian liberal. I think there's at least a little good stuff everywhere. It's unfortunate that governments (almost everywhere, as far as I know, anyway) find it almost impossible to try something, see if it gets positive results, and if it doesn't--try something else. They can't seem to analyze the cost-benefit of anything. They rarely do pilot programs, and if they do they ignore the results of the pilot if they really want whatever they were piloting. I worry less about government spending as I do: what are we spending it on? Are we getting any results from the expenditure, beyond lining the pockets of grifting businesses and lobbyists that live off government largesse?
As far as nobody being in charge: I agree! That was originally the idea of congress and the senate. Two bodies on entirely different election cycles, representing their voters and their states, would do most of the governing and the president would be able to veto them if they went nuts. It has since changed dramatically, and not for the better.
Okay, I just took the Hidden Tribes quiz and I have the same problem with it that I did with the old "Political Compass" quiz: The questions are designed to aggregate social liberalism with economic collectivism and economic libertarianism with social conservatism, as if these two pairings are the only ones that exist and have ever existed. In other words, it asks the quiz-taker to choose over and over again between social liberalism and social conservatism ("children should be self-reliant" v. "children should be obedient") or economic collectivism v. economic libertarianism ("people should help themselves" v. "government should help people") but never between, say, social liberalism and economic collectivism ("self-expression is important even if vulnerable people get hurt"), as if there is no such thing as a pro-life Catholic who thinks the government should help homeless people, or a hedge fund manager who donates to LGBT causes.
My point is just that whoever designed the Hidden Tribes methodology did so with a raft of assumptions about types of people who exist in American society and wrote the questions to screen out any evidence to the contrary. These assumptions, paradoxically, seem very much in line with the thinking of the "Progressive Activists" that the study singles out as the problem, which leads me to wonder if this isn't yet more narcissistic self-criticism from, for want of a better term, progressive activists.
The other built-in bias seems to be toward polarization. Otherwise why ask me about Donald Trump (the most polarizing figure in the history of American politics) as opposed to, oh, i don't know, Joe Biden?
I also have problems with the survey; I think these surveys are always imperfect because there's a lot of nuance they just can't capture. It always frustrates me when I get a question like "does hard work or luck cause a person to get ahead?", and there's no button for "well obviously both are extremely important".
That being said, I think sometimes they show something interesting, and I think this one did. The landscape they describe seems to roughly fit what I observe in US politics.
The question has to do with how you treat your own disgust reactions and whether you rely on them as objective moral data. To highlight the kind of thing the question is trying to get at, by way of example, consider the difference between someone who finds a certain kinky sex act disgusting and therefore thinks it should be illegal vs. another person who is also disgusted by it but who thinks that it's none of their business what consenting adults do.
The child rearing questions in particular posit a dichotomy that I don’t think exists, and if it DOES exist must be smashed ASAP. If my child is naturally creative (as indeed every child not being abused into a catatonic chill is by nature), must I then abandon all attempts to instill discipline and respect? Should the wee lad be allowed to tell me “Fuck you, Dad, suck my balls!” when I try to put him to bed, just because he draws pretty butterflies during arts and crafts time?
Why was “Child should be raised in a structured environment and learn to participate in society with courtesy and respect, and also DoorDash drivers ought to unionize” not an option?
I've taken the intrinsic bias test a couple times, at least a year or more apart. My political views have changed somewhat in that time frame (although in reality I think it's more that the left has shifted farther left and I haven't shifted that much at all). But the funny thing is both times the test showed I had a slight bias in favor of black people (I'm white). Leads me to believe these tests are definitely telling us something but what exactly is up for interpretation.
That's funny, I had the same thing happen (though I only took it once). I didn't know what to make of it and have since seen some critiques of the test.
66-year-old leftie guy here who's about to change sides because of the rise of the totalitarian trans cult on the left. (Totalitarian in that, in several states today, your kids can be taken away from you by the State if you, as their parents, don't confirm the gender fantasies that the trans cult seduced them into, and commit them to dismemberment and sterilization.)
But I'm here to make this point of scientific order: there is (almost) NO SUCH THING as a "nonbinary" human:
Today, even my beloved mistress science has been corrupted by the trans cult, so these former facts are being suppressed, 1984 style.
Alas, the only alternative to the trans cult (here in the US anyway) is the Trump cult, which is actually more sane. The future under Emperor Donald II will look a lot more like most of the human past than the sexless future than the trans cultists want.
I'm conservative-ish, generally, but I have no problem (although also no interest in) someone who wants to think of themselves as non-binary. Or bisexual. Or transgendered. Or whatever.
Do have a problem with the bizarre assertion that sex is something assigned at birth when it's a biological reality, or that there's something wrong or oppressive with words like "man" and "woman" or "male" and "female" being used to discuss people's biological sex--which is a real thing. If culturally we want to abstract gender from biological sex, I'm okay with that. But that doesn't mean that biological sex isn't real, and isn't still a very useful data point.
Also, all my tolerance for 37 different genders and transgenderism starts post-puberty. At age 18 or whatever age the person demonstrates the real, average maturity of an 18 year old (which is not rolling up into a ball and crying while screaming "stop dead-naming me!! Also I want a new iPhone").
I think this is exactly right. Democratic politicians are backing off from some of the woke language after seeing the backlash, but people's impressions of the left come from activism, journalism, entertainment, and social media. They also encounter it at work (diversity training) depending on the industry, and sometimes in schools.
Democratic politicians get punished for it whether they're woke or not, if only because Republican politicians score points by telling the left to go fuck themselves. And every time they goad us, a media/Twitter meltdown is guaranteed.
I don't know the solution. Identity politics is already unpopular, but as long as academia and the media are swept up in this stuff, it's not going to stop. And within those institutions, there are enormous benefits to being the most insufferable woke tool on the staff--and you can't disagree without risking your job. So it's not looking great for the near future.
> David Shor’s argument, in a very small nutshell (like a pistachio), is that Democrats should focus on popular things. Nobody really disagrees with this; there’s no “let’s throw Buzz Aldrin down a flight of stairs” contingent within the Democratic Party.
Don't kid yourself, there absolutely is! I would bet real money that if you went up to the GenZ Twixers who pushed this ad, and told them "this ad will lose the Virginia gubernatorial race," they would have doubled down on the ad.
There are just too many on the far-left who believe in the old trope of "rights > life" and are happy to sacrifice actual power for their own self-justification. These people are the most dangerous ones inside of the Left coalition and must be defeated if we're to make any progress.
I'm pretty sure there are also a lot of people who--because of the bubble they exist in--believe that pretty much any idea they like, even if it polls with 1% of support in the general public, is popular--because all their friends think it's a GREAT idea.
> I would bet real money that if you went up to the GenZ Twixers who pushed this ad, and told them "this ad will lose the Virginia gubernatorial race," they would have doubled down on the ad.
They might or they might not, but either way I'd hope that some of them would ask the obvious question: "what's your evidence that this ad would lose the Virginia gubernatorial race?"
I think one piece of evidence would be that right-wing media is talking about it constantly. They obviously believe it's bad for Democrats.
FWIW, if anyone argued that the Twix ad would "lose the Virginia gubernatorial race" for McAuliffe, it wasn't me. I'd guess that this ad probably had a teeny-tiny impact, if any. I used it in the article because it's a goofy, illustrative example that sets the tone comedically. It matters, at most, only a very small amount, but to the extent that it matters I think it's bad for Democrats.
They also think it's good for ratings. And every form and slice of media has a "I better cover this" bias. Once a couple of conservative outlets covered it, they all had to.
It's a little bit of the conservative's bubble--outrage for the sake of outrage. Although plenty on the right also focused on the fact that there was no candy in the ad. And often used it to illustrate the assertion, common on the right, that the corporate left base their assessments of general public sentiment exclusively on what's trending on Twitter. It wasn't all just kvetching about a boy wearing a dress.
If there was "they believe it's bad for Democrats" part to it, that part was more about how insular and bubble-occupied certain people, institutions, and corporations are (or are becoming) so if you want more of this kind of stuff, buy Twix and vote for Democrats!
The major problem is (IMO) one of demonstrated competence. The "bad for Democrats" was basically: "This is how the left thinks you sell candy. Yeah, sure, let's let them run everything."
When right-wing media talk about gender-nonconforming candy, or gay Froot Loops (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z2Mq65iCUE&t=31s), or whatever, in the same way as tax credits for kids and free dental coverage for retirees...that could be read as a sign of gender-nonconforming candy being Bad For The Dems, but we could read it as right-wing media just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
> FWIW, if anyone argued that the Twix ad would "lose the Virginia gubernatorial race" for McAuliffe, it wasn't me.
Understood, I was just following JasonB on that one.
> to the extent that it matters I think it's bad for Democrats.
If we had a good way to measure this I'd take the other side of that bet! I suspect the people turned off by gender-nonconforming Twix ads, nonbinary Patagonia cliff-climbers, and gay Froot Loops might be outnumbered by the Dem leaners and LGBTQ independents they help activate, and I've little reason to argue with Shor's argument that nonpartisan ambient pro-LGBTQ messaging like this makes people more liberal in the long run.
"but we could read it as right-wing media just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks"
This could describe most media. Ratings are important!
But I tend to agree: there is not a well-oiled right-wing messaging machine that's keeping Democrats or progressives down. I think it's the case that for most politicians, and most partisan sides, everybody is their own worst enemy.
Here's some anecdotal evidence: I'm 66, I have never voted for a Republican in my life, but today if I lived in Virgina I would vote Republican, because the totalitarian trans-cultishness of today's left has finally convinced me that the Trumpista right, as awful as it is, is actually less bad.
I typically vote either Republican or 3rd party, but I have voted for Democrats (typically more moderate Democrats) more than once. And I'd have gladly voted for Tulsi Gabbard. Next time out I'm planning to vote a straight Republican ticket. As trying to suss out which candidate is the best seems less important to me than telling the folks presently in power in DC to chill.
Not that my individual vote matters, it's just where my head is at.
Even for an anecdote that's very weak, indirect evidence, since the question is the marginal impact of the advertisement, not "the totalitarian trans-cultishness of today's left" in general. Like, you'd still be voting R even if this Twix ad didn't exist, right?
Can't speak for Mark, but the Twix ad has no impact on me. Other than being slow and kind of boring and also not selling candy, why do I care? I don't work for Twix, they can waste their money however they please. More power to them.
It was one of the straws on the camel's back. Marginal impact of one specific ad is indeed extremely small, it's that there are now a ton of these. Here's another from a company I used to enthusiastically support but will never buy from again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXIaslwYsFw
Hadn't seen that Patagonia "They/Them" ad, thanks for putting it on my radar. Although it's even more innocuous than the Twix princess ad (nobody even gets blown away by a goth witch!), I'll admit to smirking when I saw a bunch of ads for "Men's" and "Women's" coats on Patagonia's video list...sandwiched between the "They/Them" videos.
Pronoun politics is a challenge to navigate, especially if you're a company trying to sell products to a population--the vast majority of which identify as cisgendered (a word I also despise but I'm afraid we may be stuck with). Again, I don't feel like this really sells much but . . . eh, whatever. I don't think I've ever bought a single thing from Patagonia.
People tend to be awful about predicting the future so it's a "thought experiment" type of question. It's very difficult to have hard evidence about future events. Things as complex as elections--very hard. Polling is the closest thing you have, and even that's not great. And nobody asked the Twix question, as far as I know.
How about Twix as a name for people who haven't yet made up their mind about their gender but have promised everyone they will. he/she/I'll get back to you
The fact you expected traditional liberal but instead got progressive activist is actually a pretty good summary of the situation! The same happens with almost all cultural elites like yourself. They have a distorted view of where the centre is, and what traditional liberalism means to most of America. That 55 year old landscaper in Wisconsin gets pretty confused when he finds out you think you're in the same tribe as him.
Of course the quiz is flawed. But it's interesting how everyone on the left thinks they are a traditional liberal these days.
I’m the opposite. I consider my self hard economic left (by modern standards at least; if I’d bummed around with Lenin I’d have been renounced as a mere trade unionist) but I got trad liberal. I assume because my answers about child rearing were coded right wing.
Yup my wife's youtube history is a mix of Richard Wolff and Jordan Peterson. Her answers seem to cancel each other out and she ends up in the middle of all these quizes.
"This creates a huge structural disadvantage for Democrats. Obviously, the left has our own garbage-y, partisan media sources — and also Twitter — but it’s nothing like the maximally-efficient bullshit factory that exists on the right."
I think this perception is part of the problem. The left has dominance of all the major networks and newspapers--for the most part--and outside of Fox, the right has YouTubers and Ben Shapiro and OANN and so on, the vast majority of which is no more polished or efficient than the NYT or the Atlantic or MSNBC or CNN.
But this is a gap that is hard to bridge: folks on the right tend to feel that the left completely controls all major media (and not without reason) while being more dismissive of Fox (who is not right wing enough for a lot on the right) and all the websites and YouTube channels and Rumble channels and Locals hangouts and the WSJ editorial page. Many on the right would suggest the right wing media is insignificant in the face of WaPo, NYT, Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, the big three networks, NPR, the vast majority of everything that comes out of Hollywood, the apparently loyalties of big tech, etc.
While on the left, they tend to see Fox and the "right wing bullshit" machine as being this massive and devious, highly-efficient killing machine and will often lament "they have nothing like it"--which I'd argue seems hopelessly delusional to anyone actual in the political center-to-right--and at least center-right to far-right. To the degree Fox and the rightwing machine enjoys PR successess, it's mostly using the fodder provided by folks on the left.
And even then, who won in 2020? Biden did. Right-wing machine was out in force for those Georgia senate seats, but no go. I'm dubious of how much the media machines effect outcomes, at least nationally. Or how efficient or effective the really are. I don't think either the right or left--despite reach and institutional power--actually are that efficient at doing anything, except outrage theater and clickbait (and some folks--Daily Wire comes to mind--are actually doing investigative reporting, so that's nice).
If Republicans have proven to be more efficient at anything, it's been--most of the time--managing politics on the local level. In 2020 they enjoyed a net gain of 1 for both governers and state legislates, and hold the majority of state legislatures and governorships. Youngkins is just the latest addition, there.
But a lot of that is good campaigning, candidate selection, GOtV efforts and so on. Appropriate messaging for the local market plays a role--but it's not Fox or the rightwing bullshit machine that helped Youngkin win there. It's actual on-the-ground political work ... and McAuliffe being nice enough to run a blazingly awful campaign.
That being said, I think your general message is going to fall on deaf ears. But good luck! My experience is that (most) highly-partisan ideologues on both sides are literally incapable of reading the room, or demonstrating sufficient empathy to wonder how anybody who is not specifically them might take something.
Very nice. Teetering on subscription, but I've jumped into such relationships before and it didn't end well. Still, though. Very perceptive.
Especially the insight or analytical strategy you break out in the Shor/Yglesias smidge/some bit. Two ideas that are different are NOT automatically opposed. It seems that waaaay too many people take any thought about politics, or Current Year Culture and assign it a binary value "black/white", "good/bad", etc., assigning any differing perception the opposite binary value. And that does not represent the galaxy of opinion. It is not a good way to think about things. Hell, it really isn't even useful.
Keep doing that, and I got a sweet fiver here for ya lol.
PS) "Too often, our politics are like a jaunty hat: A desperate attempt at an identity that makes people not want to be around us." Taibbi-worthy, lol.
“You talk to older people and they’re like, ‘Dude we sell candy bars, we don’t sell politics,’” ... “Then you have younger people being like, ‘These are political candy bars. This is political chocolate.’”
Right, see, I got to the bit where you said a lot of nonwhite, working-class Democrats are more "popularist" than PMC Democrats and asked why people can't acknowledge that, and I think you're missing why people can't acknowledge it.
The basic way the progressive activism industry works is that every group, to get funding, basically has to portray themselves as a revolutionary vanguard lacking only This Grant to surge forward with a mass support base. If they just admit that there's no insurgent mass waiting to take the Capitol but looking for its leaders, they're out of a job.
Is it possible that the party is in a lose-lose? If they don’t play the game with the 8% they won’t get the turnout from that group AND they’ll pay dearly in the cultural centers that amplify the slogans of the 8%. If they play along however they continue to lose the median voter.
In a lot of ways, this is the $64,000 question. There's definitely a tightrope to be walked; in a perfect world, you'll appeal to the center without giving the finger to your base. In the worst case scenario, you alienate everybody.
Drawing on my years as a speechwriter, my instinct is that if you talk about an issue like race by saying something like "we need to make sure that everyone has a fair shot" instead of "we need to fight systemic racism and achieve equity", you sound like a normal person speaking the language most Americans speak, but far-left progressives aren't going to bolt just because you didn't use their favorite buzzwords.
It seems that the far left places a huge emphasis on the of moral weight of language and in another sense the reactive right does to (or pretends to). Is “we need to make sure that everyone has a fair shot” a cat call for radical left socialism or is it a cover for perpetuating a color blind ideology that perpetually fails to address the specific injustices brought upon black, brown and indigenous peoples? I’ve heard both interpretations from the loudest voices. Has the tightrope become an impossibly small piece of string given the current environment?
The answer there is "Less virtue-signaling" and more on-the-ground work on the issues.
We had complaints about policing last year (you may have noticed). But was there any concrete attempt to change police procedures? Any legislative addressing of qualified immunity? Any direct attacks on the practices of police unions??
HELL NO! Instead we got self-indulgence, virtue-signaling and no small amount of summer fun vandalism, violence, fires and the liberation of high-end goods from those racist Nike and Apple stores.
I have a bunch of proposals to address the issues we have with policing communities of color, but BLM didn't appear to have a single actual proposal to improve the lives that they claim "matter". F 'em.
NOTE: I am not considering "defund the police" to be a useful attempt to improve the safety of those communities or any other.
I, the medium voter hear your language and say, “yes!” On my right and my left are the voices saying, “Don’t be naive, look at history. We know what this language REALLY means. And also, come join our epic and existential struggle 😂 ”
Well, be prepared for "the most important election ever" in 2022. Then again in 2024. Then again in 2026. Then again in 2028. Then again . . .
There are writers I generally like who are constantly going on about how "we've lost our democracy, there will never be another fair election" or that we are on the verge of losing our democracy, because, you know, Trump and the January 6th riots. Or we're on the verge of losing our Democracy because of perfectly sane and reasonable election laws. Or because parents complain at school board meetings.
That everything is an existential disaster (no doubt to some the Twix add signals that we have lost our democracy) is so tiresome.
Also, complaining about losing our democracy is just irksome to me. The US is a republic.
She used them but she wasn't great at it. None of her woke signaling came across as natural, to me. Whereas AOC is a genius at it. For what that's worth with the current state of woke-ism.
My point is that far-left progressives will bolt at the slightest provocation. That's the problem with them, they're flighty and unreliable when it comes to actually getting anything done because whatever it is, it's never good enough for them.
I'm skeptical of your point. In the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 77% of Sanders supporters (a reasonably simple proxy for far-left progressives potentially willing to vote Democratic) reported voting for Clinton — and the other 23% were more likely to lean Republican or to dispute the existence of white privilege (i.e. the defectors weren't so much the far-left progressives).
There's also a desire to be more specific: "fair shot" is too unspecific, so they want to communicate that there needs to be action taken to ensure equity (thus, the word "equity" rather than "equality"--other reasons for that, obviously, but that's one). Thus you get attacks on meritocracy and color-blindness (as not actively using race as a criteria when judging someone, or deciding to help them, is now a bad thing on the left--in some cases it appears they subscribe to a kind of racial essentialism and so race or "victim group" is the primary lens through which everyone should be seen.
You can't advance towards that goal--or appeal to voters who want to--by saying that "everybody needs a fair shot". There seems to be a smallish but very vocal wing of the progressive left that considers the idea of "civil liberties"--the kind shared by all--to themselves be racist.
This reminds me of your "In Defense of Dumb Nationalist Bullshit" piece.
Dumb Nationalist Bullshit inserted into everything is annoying to many progressive activists in exactly the way that this sort of thing inserted into everything is annoying to the 80% that think political correctness has gone too far.
If the secondary message in that Twix ad had been "USA is great", then it would have annoyed 6% of the population and been a positive for 80%.
My biggest issue with that Twix video (besides the extremely boring plot) is the total lack of candy. How is this an “ad”?? What are they selling besides moralizing? (A habit that, like you, I can only hope to manage.)
I agree w pretty much everything your wrote. What I find interesting about the ad, from a trans/gender ideology perspective, is that the child is not identified as trans at all. No pronouns are used. The bully says “you look like a girl, boys don’t wear dresses.” As far as we know, this is just a cisgender boy who likes to wear a princess dress. Conservatives who are worried about the mental health of children and who are worried about messages to them that their gender identity is some mystery they’ll sort out in time would be much better to lean in to the “if you have XY chromosomes, you’re a boy, but wear whatever the heck you want” approach. The progressive “if you like to wear dresses, you’re probably a girl, regardless of your genitalia” approach is strangely regressive. Can’t we just have a discussion that challenges gender essentialism entirely?
Anyway when I was a kid, the right would have been all over this ad for promoting the occult, so, progress I guess?
On a final note, this conundrum highlights the progressive power problem. Progressives are fixated on theories about power structures, power imbalances, etc. They/we fixate on the political power that the GOP manages to hoard through gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, etc. And rightly so. But the left is totally blind to its massive power over pop culture, a million little power moves like this ad. It’s a different kind of power but the right is hyper-attuned to it. Feeling powerless in pop culture is why the right feels justified in hoarding political power. It’s why they get so pissed about “cancel culture” even though they effectively invented it with conservative moralizing. Each side sees the other one’s unchecked power and feels justified in turning the dial to 11 to combat it. Whoever made this Twix ad felt like they were taking on The Man, even though they are The Man(x).
Good insight, especially about the "power" thing.
Progressives would be well-served to "interrogate the Foucaultian space", examining the assumption proposed back at the formation of deconstruction/semiotic approaches to analysis that have led us to the insights (and excesses) of CRT, that all human interactions are defined by "power" dynamics.
This questionable, or partially true assertion has become bedrock-engraved dogma among the "smart set", and it produces really, really ugly results. The fact that it isn't 100% absolutely true in every case produces downstream distortions, inaccuracies and vast amounts of bullshit posing as "critique".
I liked Foucault back in the day, esp. compared to Derrida, Lacan, and some of the other, later proponents. He was comprehensible, and had some good ideas about the real-world utility of the critical approach. But no: Not every human interaction is entirely based on power dynamics. (or rather: Human power relationships are seldom simple enough for this approach to be universally useful.)
"Conservatives who are worried about the mental health of children and who are worried about messages to them that their gender identity is some mystery they’ll sort out in time would be much better to lean in to the “if you have XY chromosomes, you’re a boy, but wear whatever the heck you want” approach."
I'm largely conservative, in some areas basically a libertarian (in others more traditionally liberal--as defined by the liberalism of the 70s and 80s) but that is the approach. As with gay marriage: heck, let people do what they want in their own lives. Let consenting adults live and speak freely. Little dude wants to wear a princess dress, that's fine with me. I might or might not impose a stricter dress code with my own kids--while still children--but neighbor should raise their kids however they see fit, and adults should do what they want. Why do I care if you wear a dress?
That said, the commercial is boring and its biggest sin is exactly what you say: where's the candy? Why does this make me want a Twix bar? I have always despised non-ad ads. Why are you doing this? Tell me about your damn product or remind me how much I used to like it--or get off my TV.
Fortunately, I watch so little commercial TV I literally would have never seen this ad had it not caused a stir amongst people who find rolling their eyes insufficient.
Well stated. They really are a wretched bunch. Like you, I was one of them most of my life (Seattle native with multiple graduate degrees). I once thought the world would be a better place if educated leftists had more power, and that it was only those damn Republicans standing between us and utopia.
But over the past couple of years in particular, I turned in my progressive card and became a libertarian. With the combination of the Great Awokening, "defund the police," the complete collapse of much of the media's anti-Trump narratives under the weight of contrary evidence, absolute nonsense getting published in once-respectable academic journals as long as it advances The Narrative, embrace of authoritarian Covid policies and attitudes, etc., etc., I came to the belief that basically no one should be in charge of anything, ever.
Likewise. I've always been a strong civil libertarian, but I was pretty much your typical progressive prior to 2017. Yet, thanks to all the same bullshit you mention, now consider myself a classical liberal independent.
My politics don't matter nationally right now, because my state of residence is never in play. But as one of those elusive, legitimately up-for-grabs swing voters, I will say that messaging is important but not enough by itself. It cannot *just* be sane messaging slapped onto insane policy. Like, you can't just avoid the words "defund the police", while still quietly trying to remove or divert as much funding as possible. There needs to be *actual* sanity underneath the message.
Skepticism of power itself, all the time, no matter who's wielding it -- perhaps *especially* if it's yourself or your allies -- is definitely the way to go, in my opinion.
I feel like demonstrated competence is important. If you keep advancing a policy (even ones not all that important to a great many people), you should have some demonstrated competence in getting decent results. Otherwise, if the vote is between you with no experience and the other with demonstrably poor results, no experience wins (i.e., that's how you get Trump).
Of course that's a problem of both the left and the right, especially among the political class. Demonstrations of competence are not broadly available. But there's no shortage of politicians who are "on message" and "feed red meat" to the base.
I've been observing Seattle politics with a kind of morbid fascination for about six years now. (I'm a longtime resident of the PNW, but only moved to Seattle 6 years ago)
Besides everything you mentioned in your second paragraph, (which is a lot that's gone wrong with the modern left and the MSM) watching far left politicians and activists allow Seattle to fall into ruins has turned me against the far left forever. The current Seattle city council is a joke...which would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Many here won't even go downtown anymore.
As a fellow PNW native, I couldn't agree more. Seattle used to be a verdant, gorgeous city that charmed visitors. Yet, in the span of only a few years, it became an embarrassing San Fran Lite trash heap that repels visitors and is full of needles and homeless encampments. I wouldn't have thought it was even possible for it to change that fast had I not seen it with my own eyes.
I think some of that is monolithic control. Not all of it--but a good deal of it. Once you get everything controlled by everyone of the same ideological stripe, and they all agree on everything, it allows bad ideas to get near unanimous support. There aren't a lot of great examples of long-term, universal domination of states by the far-right or even very-right. And even if that happened, it's different when the mainstream media and entertainment culture all moves in the other direction. Bad decisions in Chicago or Seattle are not going to be lampooned on SNL or inspire a Hollywood writer to write a parable--which they tell everybody what its a parable of--about the consequences of those bad decisions. The fact that the institutions and the (entertainment) culture is generally leftwards leaning prevents us from having any theocratic states or cities run by some version of Jerry Fallwell. Nobody is at risk of going to jail for denying God or burning a Bible or something, but there are people at real risk of getting in trouble for having the wrong kinds of opinions regarding progressive orthodoxy.
While some on the right might like to "drink liberal tears", I think it's a bad thing when one side has too much authoritarian power while also self-immolating. I would prefer healthy left/right or conservative/progressive parties, with some moderates and independents thrown in, and most states and cities being made up of a combination of both. It would be imperfect because people are imperfect but I think it would be better than what we've got.
Growing up in Seattle in the '80s and '90s was awesome. It was the place to be. I couldn't have asked for a better childhood. Present day Seattle is inching ever closer to being a post-apocalyptic hellscape, especially downtown. I haven't lived there in years, but every time I go back to visit my parents, I'm appalled at what the city has become. It's pretty sad, and I really don't see things getting any better. I don't have any constructive solutions. Other than moving.
Going to art school changed my self-description from liberal to moderate. The first year of working for a living turned me into a conservative--but now I think I'm more of a conservative libertarian liberal. I think there's at least a little good stuff everywhere. It's unfortunate that governments (almost everywhere, as far as I know, anyway) find it almost impossible to try something, see if it gets positive results, and if it doesn't--try something else. They can't seem to analyze the cost-benefit of anything. They rarely do pilot programs, and if they do they ignore the results of the pilot if they really want whatever they were piloting. I worry less about government spending as I do: what are we spending it on? Are we getting any results from the expenditure, beyond lining the pockets of grifting businesses and lobbyists that live off government largesse?
As far as nobody being in charge: I agree! That was originally the idea of congress and the senate. Two bodies on entirely different election cycles, representing their voters and their states, would do most of the governing and the president would be able to veto them if they went nuts. It has since changed dramatically, and not for the better.
Okay, I just took the Hidden Tribes quiz and I have the same problem with it that I did with the old "Political Compass" quiz: The questions are designed to aggregate social liberalism with economic collectivism and economic libertarianism with social conservatism, as if these two pairings are the only ones that exist and have ever existed. In other words, it asks the quiz-taker to choose over and over again between social liberalism and social conservatism ("children should be self-reliant" v. "children should be obedient") or economic collectivism v. economic libertarianism ("people should help themselves" v. "government should help people") but never between, say, social liberalism and economic collectivism ("self-expression is important even if vulnerable people get hurt"), as if there is no such thing as a pro-life Catholic who thinks the government should help homeless people, or a hedge fund manager who donates to LGBT causes.
My point is just that whoever designed the Hidden Tribes methodology did so with a raft of assumptions about types of people who exist in American society and wrote the questions to screen out any evidence to the contrary. These assumptions, paradoxically, seem very much in line with the thinking of the "Progressive Activists" that the study singles out as the problem, which leads me to wonder if this isn't yet more narcissistic self-criticism from, for want of a better term, progressive activists.
The other built-in bias seems to be toward polarization. Otherwise why ask me about Donald Trump (the most polarizing figure in the history of American politics) as opposed to, oh, i don't know, Joe Biden?
I also have problems with the survey; I think these surveys are always imperfect because there's a lot of nuance they just can't capture. It always frustrates me when I get a question like "does hard work or luck cause a person to get ahead?", and there's no button for "well obviously both are extremely important".
That being said, I think sometimes they show something interesting, and I think this one did. The landscape they describe seems to roughly fit what I observe in US politics.
I sent this post to my husband and he took a test. His response:
I fell into the Passive Liberal category, which sounds like the one for all the most depressed people.
I felt like I needed more information for this one:
"People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed."
The question has to do with how you treat your own disgust reactions and whether you rely on them as objective moral data. To highlight the kind of thing the question is trying to get at, by way of example, consider the difference between someone who finds a certain kinky sex act disgusting and therefore thinks it should be illegal vs. another person who is also disgusted by it but who thinks that it's none of their business what consenting adults do.
The child rearing questions in particular posit a dichotomy that I don’t think exists, and if it DOES exist must be smashed ASAP. If my child is naturally creative (as indeed every child not being abused into a catatonic chill is by nature), must I then abandon all attempts to instill discipline and respect? Should the wee lad be allowed to tell me “Fuck you, Dad, suck my balls!” when I try to put him to bed, just because he draws pretty butterflies during arts and crafts time?
Why was “Child should be raised in a structured environment and learn to participate in society with courtesy and respect, and also DoorDash drivers ought to unionize” not an option?
EXACTLY!
*catatonic shell
I've taken the intrinsic bias test a couple times, at least a year or more apart. My political views have changed somewhat in that time frame (although in reality I think it's more that the left has shifted farther left and I haven't shifted that much at all). But the funny thing is both times the test showed I had a slight bias in favor of black people (I'm white). Leads me to believe these tests are definitely telling us something but what exactly is up for interpretation.
That's funny, I had the same thing happen (though I only took it once). I didn't know what to make of it and have since seen some critiques of the test.
66-year-old leftie guy here who's about to change sides because of the rise of the totalitarian trans cult on the left. (Totalitarian in that, in several states today, your kids can be taken away from you by the State if you, as their parents, don't confirm the gender fantasies that the trans cult seduced them into, and commit them to dismemberment and sterilization.)
But I'm here to make this point of scientific order: there is (almost) NO SUCH THING as a "nonbinary" human:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264
Today, even my beloved mistress science has been corrupted by the trans cult, so these former facts are being suppressed, 1984 style.
Alas, the only alternative to the trans cult (here in the US anyway) is the Trump cult, which is actually more sane. The future under Emperor Donald II will look a lot more like most of the human past than the sexless future than the trans cultists want.
I'm conservative-ish, generally, but I have no problem (although also no interest in) someone who wants to think of themselves as non-binary. Or bisexual. Or transgendered. Or whatever.
Do have a problem with the bizarre assertion that sex is something assigned at birth when it's a biological reality, or that there's something wrong or oppressive with words like "man" and "woman" or "male" and "female" being used to discuss people's biological sex--which is a real thing. If culturally we want to abstract gender from biological sex, I'm okay with that. But that doesn't mean that biological sex isn't real, and isn't still a very useful data point.
Also, all my tolerance for 37 different genders and transgenderism starts post-puberty. At age 18 or whatever age the person demonstrates the real, average maturity of an 18 year old (which is not rolling up into a ball and crying while screaming "stop dead-naming me!! Also I want a new iPhone").
I think this is exactly right. Democratic politicians are backing off from some of the woke language after seeing the backlash, but people's impressions of the left come from activism, journalism, entertainment, and social media. They also encounter it at work (diversity training) depending on the industry, and sometimes in schools.
Democratic politicians get punished for it whether they're woke or not, if only because Republican politicians score points by telling the left to go fuck themselves. And every time they goad us, a media/Twitter meltdown is guaranteed.
I don't know the solution. Identity politics is already unpopular, but as long as academia and the media are swept up in this stuff, it's not going to stop. And within those institutions, there are enormous benefits to being the most insufferable woke tool on the staff--and you can't disagree without risking your job. So it's not looking great for the near future.
> David Shor’s argument, in a very small nutshell (like a pistachio), is that Democrats should focus on popular things. Nobody really disagrees with this; there’s no “let’s throw Buzz Aldrin down a flight of stairs” contingent within the Democratic Party.
Don't kid yourself, there absolutely is! I would bet real money that if you went up to the GenZ Twixers who pushed this ad, and told them "this ad will lose the Virginia gubernatorial race," they would have doubled down on the ad.
There are just too many on the far-left who believe in the old trope of "rights > life" and are happy to sacrifice actual power for their own self-justification. These people are the most dangerous ones inside of the Left coalition and must be defeated if we're to make any progress.
I'm pretty sure there are also a lot of people who--because of the bubble they exist in--believe that pretty much any idea they like, even if it polls with 1% of support in the general public, is popular--because all their friends think it's a GREAT idea.
> I would bet real money that if you went up to the GenZ Twixers who pushed this ad, and told them "this ad will lose the Virginia gubernatorial race," they would have doubled down on the ad.
They might or they might not, but either way I'd hope that some of them would ask the obvious question: "what's your evidence that this ad would lose the Virginia gubernatorial race?"
I think one piece of evidence would be that right-wing media is talking about it constantly. They obviously believe it's bad for Democrats.
FWIW, if anyone argued that the Twix ad would "lose the Virginia gubernatorial race" for McAuliffe, it wasn't me. I'd guess that this ad probably had a teeny-tiny impact, if any. I used it in the article because it's a goofy, illustrative example that sets the tone comedically. It matters, at most, only a very small amount, but to the extent that it matters I think it's bad for Democrats.
> They obviously believe it's bad for Democrats.
They also think it's good for ratings. And every form and slice of media has a "I better cover this" bias. Once a couple of conservative outlets covered it, they all had to.
It's a little bit of the conservative's bubble--outrage for the sake of outrage. Although plenty on the right also focused on the fact that there was no candy in the ad. And often used it to illustrate the assertion, common on the right, that the corporate left base their assessments of general public sentiment exclusively on what's trending on Twitter. It wasn't all just kvetching about a boy wearing a dress.
If there was "they believe it's bad for Democrats" part to it, that part was more about how insular and bubble-occupied certain people, institutions, and corporations are (or are becoming) so if you want more of this kind of stuff, buy Twix and vote for Democrats!
The major problem is (IMO) one of demonstrated competence. The "bad for Democrats" was basically: "This is how the left thinks you sell candy. Yeah, sure, let's let them run everything."
> I think one piece of evidence would be that right-wing media is talking about it constantly. They obviously believe it's bad for Democrats.
True as far as it goes, but right-wing media are hilariously indiscriminate in what they talk about. E.g. Fox trying to own the libs by regurgitating AOC's econ-heavy platform like that isn't free advertising for her (https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1170474350937542658) and by telling viewers that "DEMORATS" want to give them free stuff (https://twitter.com/timjhogan/status/1435350169411796993).
When right-wing media talk about gender-nonconforming candy, or gay Froot Loops (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z2Mq65iCUE&t=31s), or whatever, in the same way as tax credits for kids and free dental coverage for retirees...that could be read as a sign of gender-nonconforming candy being Bad For The Dems, but we could read it as right-wing media just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
> FWIW, if anyone argued that the Twix ad would "lose the Virginia gubernatorial race" for McAuliffe, it wasn't me.
Understood, I was just following JasonB on that one.
> to the extent that it matters I think it's bad for Democrats.
If we had a good way to measure this I'd take the other side of that bet! I suspect the people turned off by gender-nonconforming Twix ads, nonbinary Patagonia cliff-climbers, and gay Froot Loops might be outnumbered by the Dem leaners and LGBTQ independents they help activate, and I've little reason to argue with Shor's argument that nonpartisan ambient pro-LGBTQ messaging like this makes people more liberal in the long run.
"but we could read it as right-wing media just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks"
This could describe most media. Ratings are important!
But I tend to agree: there is not a well-oiled right-wing messaging machine that's keeping Democrats or progressives down. I think it's the case that for most politicians, and most partisan sides, everybody is their own worst enemy.
Here's some anecdotal evidence: I'm 66, I have never voted for a Republican in my life, but today if I lived in Virgina I would vote Republican, because the totalitarian trans-cultishness of today's left has finally convinced me that the Trumpista right, as awful as it is, is actually less bad.
I typically vote either Republican or 3rd party, but I have voted for Democrats (typically more moderate Democrats) more than once. And I'd have gladly voted for Tulsi Gabbard. Next time out I'm planning to vote a straight Republican ticket. As trying to suss out which candidate is the best seems less important to me than telling the folks presently in power in DC to chill.
Not that my individual vote matters, it's just where my head is at.
Even for an anecdote that's very weak, indirect evidence, since the question is the marginal impact of the advertisement, not "the totalitarian trans-cultishness of today's left" in general. Like, you'd still be voting R even if this Twix ad didn't exist, right?
Can't speak for Mark, but the Twix ad has no impact on me. Other than being slow and kind of boring and also not selling candy, why do I care? I don't work for Twix, they can waste their money however they please. More power to them.
It was one of the straws on the camel's back. Marginal impact of one specific ad is indeed extremely small, it's that there are now a ton of these. Here's another from a company I used to enthusiastically support but will never buy from again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXIaslwYsFw
Hadn't seen that Patagonia "They/Them" ad, thanks for putting it on my radar. Although it's even more innocuous than the Twix princess ad (nobody even gets blown away by a goth witch!), I'll admit to smirking when I saw a bunch of ads for "Men's" and "Women's" coats on Patagonia's video list...sandwiched between the "They/Them" videos.
Pronoun politics is a challenge to navigate, especially if you're a company trying to sell products to a population--the vast majority of which identify as cisgendered (a word I also despise but I'm afraid we may be stuck with). Again, I don't feel like this really sells much but . . . eh, whatever. I don't think I've ever bought a single thing from Patagonia.
People tend to be awful about predicting the future so it's a "thought experiment" type of question. It's very difficult to have hard evidence about future events. Things as complex as elections--very hard. Polling is the closest thing you have, and even that's not great. And nobody asked the Twix question, as far as I know.
How about Twix as a name for people who haven't yet made up their mind about their gender but have promised everyone they will. he/she/I'll get back to you
You should hold out for royalties on that usage. It's great.
The fact you expected traditional liberal but instead got progressive activist is actually a pretty good summary of the situation! The same happens with almost all cultural elites like yourself. They have a distorted view of where the centre is, and what traditional liberalism means to most of America. That 55 year old landscaper in Wisconsin gets pretty confused when he finds out you think you're in the same tribe as him.
Of course the quiz is flawed. But it's interesting how everyone on the left thinks they are a traditional liberal these days.
I’m the opposite. I consider my self hard economic left (by modern standards at least; if I’d bummed around with Lenin I’d have been renounced as a mere trade unionist) but I got trad liberal. I assume because my answers about child rearing were coded right wing.
Yup my wife's youtube history is a mix of Richard Wolff and Jordan Peterson. Her answers seem to cancel each other out and she ends up in the middle of all these quizes.
"This creates a huge structural disadvantage for Democrats. Obviously, the left has our own garbage-y, partisan media sources — and also Twitter — but it’s nothing like the maximally-efficient bullshit factory that exists on the right."
I think this perception is part of the problem. The left has dominance of all the major networks and newspapers--for the most part--and outside of Fox, the right has YouTubers and Ben Shapiro and OANN and so on, the vast majority of which is no more polished or efficient than the NYT or the Atlantic or MSNBC or CNN.
But this is a gap that is hard to bridge: folks on the right tend to feel that the left completely controls all major media (and not without reason) while being more dismissive of Fox (who is not right wing enough for a lot on the right) and all the websites and YouTube channels and Rumble channels and Locals hangouts and the WSJ editorial page. Many on the right would suggest the right wing media is insignificant in the face of WaPo, NYT, Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, the big three networks, NPR, the vast majority of everything that comes out of Hollywood, the apparently loyalties of big tech, etc.
While on the left, they tend to see Fox and the "right wing bullshit" machine as being this massive and devious, highly-efficient killing machine and will often lament "they have nothing like it"--which I'd argue seems hopelessly delusional to anyone actual in the political center-to-right--and at least center-right to far-right. To the degree Fox and the rightwing machine enjoys PR successess, it's mostly using the fodder provided by folks on the left.
And even then, who won in 2020? Biden did. Right-wing machine was out in force for those Georgia senate seats, but no go. I'm dubious of how much the media machines effect outcomes, at least nationally. Or how efficient or effective the really are. I don't think either the right or left--despite reach and institutional power--actually are that efficient at doing anything, except outrage theater and clickbait (and some folks--Daily Wire comes to mind--are actually doing investigative reporting, so that's nice).
If Republicans have proven to be more efficient at anything, it's been--most of the time--managing politics on the local level. In 2020 they enjoyed a net gain of 1 for both governers and state legislates, and hold the majority of state legislatures and governorships. Youngkins is just the latest addition, there.
But a lot of that is good campaigning, candidate selection, GOtV efforts and so on. Appropriate messaging for the local market plays a role--but it's not Fox or the rightwing bullshit machine that helped Youngkin win there. It's actual on-the-ground political work ... and McAuliffe being nice enough to run a blazingly awful campaign.
That being said, I think your general message is going to fall on deaf ears. But good luck! My experience is that (most) highly-partisan ideologues on both sides are literally incapable of reading the room, or demonstrating sufficient empathy to wonder how anybody who is not specifically them might take something.
Awesome.
Very nice. Teetering on subscription, but I've jumped into such relationships before and it didn't end well. Still, though. Very perceptive.
Especially the insight or analytical strategy you break out in the Shor/Yglesias smidge/some bit. Two ideas that are different are NOT automatically opposed. It seems that waaaay too many people take any thought about politics, or Current Year Culture and assign it a binary value "black/white", "good/bad", etc., assigning any differing perception the opposite binary value. And that does not represent the galaxy of opinion. It is not a good way to think about things. Hell, it really isn't even useful.
Keep doing that, and I got a sweet fiver here for ya lol.
PS) "Too often, our politics are like a jaunty hat: A desperate attempt at an identity that makes people not want to be around us." Taibbi-worthy, lol.
Came across this “behind the scenes at Twix” expose: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/business/gen-z-workplace-culture.html
“You talk to older people and they’re like, ‘Dude we sell candy bars, we don’t sell politics,’” ... “Then you have younger people being like, ‘These are political candy bars. This is political chocolate.’”
Right, see, I got to the bit where you said a lot of nonwhite, working-class Democrats are more "popularist" than PMC Democrats and asked why people can't acknowledge that, and I think you're missing why people can't acknowledge it.
The basic way the progressive activism industry works is that every group, to get funding, basically has to portray themselves as a revolutionary vanguard lacking only This Grant to surge forward with a mass support base. If they just admit that there's no insurgent mass waiting to take the Capitol but looking for its leaders, they're out of a job.
Compelling data that backs you up (and is, to my elation, getting attention in Dem circles): https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/08095656/CWCPReport_CommonsenseSolidarity.pdf
Is it possible that the party is in a lose-lose? If they don’t play the game with the 8% they won’t get the turnout from that group AND they’ll pay dearly in the cultural centers that amplify the slogans of the 8%. If they play along however they continue to lose the median voter.
In a lot of ways, this is the $64,000 question. There's definitely a tightrope to be walked; in a perfect world, you'll appeal to the center without giving the finger to your base. In the worst case scenario, you alienate everybody.
Drawing on my years as a speechwriter, my instinct is that if you talk about an issue like race by saying something like "we need to make sure that everyone has a fair shot" instead of "we need to fight systemic racism and achieve equity", you sound like a normal person speaking the language most Americans speak, but far-left progressives aren't going to bolt just because you didn't use their favorite buzzwords.
It seems that the far left places a huge emphasis on the of moral weight of language and in another sense the reactive right does to (or pretends to). Is “we need to make sure that everyone has a fair shot” a cat call for radical left socialism or is it a cover for perpetuating a color blind ideology that perpetually fails to address the specific injustices brought upon black, brown and indigenous peoples? I’ve heard both interpretations from the loudest voices. Has the tightrope become an impossibly small piece of string given the current environment?
The answer there is "Less virtue-signaling" and more on-the-ground work on the issues.
We had complaints about policing last year (you may have noticed). But was there any concrete attempt to change police procedures? Any legislative addressing of qualified immunity? Any direct attacks on the practices of police unions??
HELL NO! Instead we got self-indulgence, virtue-signaling and no small amount of summer fun vandalism, violence, fires and the liberation of high-end goods from those racist Nike and Apple stores.
I have a bunch of proposals to address the issues we have with policing communities of color, but BLM didn't appear to have a single actual proposal to improve the lives that they claim "matter". F 'em.
NOTE: I am not considering "defund the police" to be a useful attempt to improve the safety of those communities or any other.
I, the medium voter hear your language and say, “yes!” On my right and my left are the voices saying, “Don’t be naive, look at history. We know what this language REALLY means. And also, come join our epic and existential struggle 😂 ”
But I don't *want* to be in an epic and existential struggle! Too old for that shit.
How did we get to the point where the drama class kids are running the mass media? Maybe they always were.
This. It's. So. Tedious.
Well, be prepared for "the most important election ever" in 2022. Then again in 2024. Then again in 2026. Then again in 2028. Then again . . .
There are writers I generally like who are constantly going on about how "we've lost our democracy, there will never be another fair election" or that we are on the verge of losing our democracy, because, you know, Trump and the January 6th riots. Or we're on the verge of losing our Democracy because of perfectly sane and reasonable election laws. Or because parents complain at school board meetings.
That everything is an existential disaster (no doubt to some the Twix add signals that we have lost our democracy) is so tiresome.
Also, complaining about losing our democracy is just irksome to me. The US is a republic.
"far-left progressives aren't going to bolt just because you didn't use their favorite buzzwords"???
Hillary Clinton begs to differ. How many people do you know on the left who didn't vote for her against Trump in 2016? Personally I know quite a few.
She used them but she wasn't great at it. None of her woke signaling came across as natural, to me. Whereas AOC is a genius at it. For what that's worth with the current state of woke-ism.
But didn't Hillary Clinton use those sorts of "buzzwords"? I remember a couple of her tweets — https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/706649487696130048 and https://twitter.com/hillaryclinton/status/706670045410299904 — getting roundly mocked in 2016 for smushing together "Systemic racism", "Food deserts", "Health disparities", "accountable", "communities of color", etc. into tangled spaghetti diagrams.
My point is that far-left progressives will bolt at the slightest provocation. That's the problem with them, they're flighty and unreliable when it comes to actually getting anything done because whatever it is, it's never good enough for them.
I'm skeptical of your point. In the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 77% of Sanders supporters (a reasonably simple proxy for far-left progressives potentially willing to vote Democratic) reported voting for Clinton — and the other 23% were more likely to lean Republican or to dispute the existence of white privilege (i.e. the defectors weren't so much the far-left progressives).
See https://sites.google.com/view/brianfschaffner/public-outreach-analyses/how-sanders-supporters-behaved-in-the-2016-general-election on Prof. Brian Schaffner's website.
Progressives in the House currently blocking infrastucture, trying to get a better deal that isn't coming.
There's also a desire to be more specific: "fair shot" is too unspecific, so they want to communicate that there needs to be action taken to ensure equity (thus, the word "equity" rather than "equality"--other reasons for that, obviously, but that's one). Thus you get attacks on meritocracy and color-blindness (as not actively using race as a criteria when judging someone, or deciding to help them, is now a bad thing on the left--in some cases it appears they subscribe to a kind of racial essentialism and so race or "victim group" is the primary lens through which everyone should be seen.
You can't advance towards that goal--or appeal to voters who want to--by saying that "everybody needs a fair shot". There seems to be a smallish but very vocal wing of the progressive left that considers the idea of "civil liberties"--the kind shared by all--to themselves be racist.
This reminds me of your "In Defense of Dumb Nationalist Bullshit" piece.
Dumb Nationalist Bullshit inserted into everything is annoying to many progressive activists in exactly the way that this sort of thing inserted into everything is annoying to the 80% that think political correctness has gone too far.
If the secondary message in that Twix ad had been "USA is great", then it would have annoyed 6% of the population and been a positive for 80%.