This is the best commentary I've run across on both yesterday's results and the spin-cycle that is now being spun up to "explain" or "downplay the significance" of what happened. It's interesting that "loud" is a criticism of the "progressive" faction, but "well funded" isn't mentioned as a criticism of the "conventional" faction—as if unlimited campaign isn't somehow loud (despite the saturation advertising it funds). This strikes me as particularly odd, as the Roberts' court explicitly equates money with speech.
It awaits more data and analysis, but I was struck by the apparently limited value of massive campaign spending and the importance of grassroots organizing.
Quite aside from the fact that the missing chapter of the postmortem points out that the Democratic Party has never held its consultants accountable for wasting money on campaigns that hindsight shows were seriously miscalibrated, it seems like a basic message at the moment should be "don't let AIPAC spend money backing a candidate that you want to win". Even AIPAC should see that at this point: that if it has preferred candidates, the best thing it could do is NOT fund them. And any candidate in a state, city or district that is strongly majoritarian Democrat should know better, no matter how desperate they are for money. I don't even think that's about support for Israel or opposition to it per se--that at least for some voters, there's something distasteful and suspicious about any PAC that is driven by an issue that doesn't matter all that much to many voters dumping unbelievable shitloads of money on a particular candidate. If I think of an issue that I really don't care much about in the grand scheme of things but I find out that a candidate in a primary is being showered with money from a single-issue PAC involved with that issue, that instantly puts me on my guard and makes me pay attention to something that otherwise wouldn't have had much effect on my voting.
"Long-time readers also know that despite my scornful tone and exasperated criticism, I understand the historic appeal of this ideology. It is the predominant ideology of the social class to which I belong, even in some cases the people whose issue-based affinities are “progressive” or “leftist”."
But that's not really the split in actual voting terms. Sure, technocrats broadly prefer non-insurgent candidates who aren't clamoring to burn it all down in some broad sense. But within the Democratic coalition, Al-Sayed's win appears to have been driven by significant margins in college towns, and among college-educated voters. Stevens, by contrast, won in Detroit and surrounding counties, and in a bunch of tiny counties. But El-Sayed won by bigger margins. Stevens won Wayne County by ~17,000 votes. El-Sayed won Kent County, which had barely a third the number of total votes cast, by ~28,000 votes. Micro-data aren't available, but on the county level, El-Sayed won counties with higher proportions of college-educated voters.
So it is probably distrust of "politicians" and the status quo that drives El-Sayed's support. But it's not coming from on high privileged white people; it's largely college educated suburbanites, at least in Michigan.
That's pretty much my point, though. The demographic that ought to map onto managerialism is increasingly alienated from it. And I think what ties other demographics to the "establishment" leadership is essentially something close to patron-client relationships--the establishment has been seen as a reliable source of particular services, of public-sector employment, and of a certain kind of stability or predictability in the midst of precarity. This is the kind of analysis missing entirely from the political reportage--Lerer doesn't really know what she means exactly by "backbone"--it functions rather like Nixon's "silent majority", a kind of certainty that whomever is not vocally against you must be unified in some social logic for you that is unspoken.
But as the Democratic establishment's actual leadership increasingly drifts away from its close social ties to that client base and is less able to keep various kinds of pipelines open in battleground states, that base is potentially in motion in all sorts of ways. If your appeal to one part of your base is more transactional and less aspirational, you'd better pay off. Mamdani is showing a really adroit grasp of exactly this point in NYC--he's more focused on potholes than revolution, because he grasps that social democracy is a retail-level thing long before it's a sweeping ideal.
Perhaps it's a patron-client relationship. Or perhaps it's that those demographics generally see the party as delivering results for them. Your non-college educated non-white voters are big beneficiaries of Obamacare and SNAP and TANF and other concrete programs. It's not that they're super pro-Israel or whatever; I'm quite confident they don't care much either way about Israel, which is the narrative we broadly hear.
Ultimately, though, you're right you do have to deliver. And that's what Mamdani's done quite well in the task of day to day governing, as far as I can tell, at least in terms of things that are in his immediate control. And then the question becomes whether he was elected to deliver revolution or vibes. Because he's not gonna lose many voters if the city runs smoothly and he makes noises about arresting Bibi Netanyahu or whatever. But if the subway doesn't run on time and the streets don't get plowed and he gives pressers about arresting Bibi Netanyahu, he's gonna get swept away massively.
Isn't that what usually happens at the municipal level? I'm hard-pressed to think of a mayor of a major city who has easily survived an inattentiveness to basic services.
"Delivering results for them" is what a patron-client relationship is. And right now what's left of the tattered safety nets that have survived three decades of neoliberal reduction is evaporating. The old guard of the Democratic Party can't deliver relief on most of what falls under "affordability" and increasingly they're not even trying.
This more than anything else might mark a difference between the base of the current Republican Party and any other political fraction in America. The Republican base is still fixated on "owning the libs", and in many cases takes the demolition of government capacity, the waste of money, and the failure of services to be a sign that Trumpism is succeeding. Whereas no matter what Democratic constituency you're running towards, you have to actually succeed in governing.
Which is ultimately the greatest weakness of the old-guard leadership and their consultants: since 2016 they have proposed that the reason to vote for them is to prevent fascism from winning. The problem is that not only did they fail to prevent fascism from winning, they failed to understand that changing the status quo in dramatic ways was how you might prevent fascism from winning--that incremental managerialism accelerated authoritarian power rather than inhibited it.
Sure, municipal leaders are elected to deliver stuff. It’s where our progressive big cities have notably failed. But I wonder how popular Mamdani stays with his base if he delivers filled potholes and functional subways but fails to arrest Netanyahu.
And the issue with calls against incremental managerialism is they uniformly lack any semblance of a plan, either practical or political, for how to achieve it. Which is why the pointy headed public policy types run away from them. Like they rightly observe that the US healthcare system has long had significant holes and hugely higher costs relative to its peers. But their “plan” for Medicare for All is less a plan and more “we’re going to give everyone all the care they want, at no cost, by taxing billionaires.” Which is the adult politics version of the elementary school class president’s “double recess and pizza for lunch every day” platform. And, even if they did have a serious plan, the politics are a fantasy. Obamacare was a hugely impactful and important policy. But to pass that, in a historic wave cycle for Democrats, they had to abandon a modest public option. Not because Democrats didn’t want it, but because Joe Lieberman didn’t want it. The plan to overcome that inconvenient reality is that the magic power of President Bernie will force them to. Seems like a stretch.
If there's one thing to learn from Trump, it's that it's unnecessary to lett somebody like Joe Lieberman stop you dead from delivering a modest reform package that would have been far more popular and enduring if it had offered more. Much as the Democrats should have learned from Trump that you can win without expensive polling and campaign consultancies. It's one reason Trump's base loves him--not just his destructiveness but that he is not constrained by the political timidity and reflexive stalemating of Washington in "normal" times. There's space for more forceful action in positive directions as well as in turning a modestly stinky swamp into a vast sewer the way Trump has.
It is worth asking why a conception of political pragmatism that supposedly rests on some degree of acceptance of rational defense of particular interests is not able to imagine a shared interest among many groups with strong stakes in the status quo in more dramatic reforms to the status quo that would prevent mass alienation, anger or insurrection against the order of things. This has, after all, happened before--it is a conventional frame for understanding the New Deal and European social democracies--that they had to make dramatic reforms in order to preserve the core foundations of the existing order. I suppose one answer is that the the powers that be, including establishment Democrats, simply disbelieve than any such mass unhappiness is possible or likely. And yet, that's pretty much what Trumpism is, on some level--if it weren't so weighted down by white nationalism and far-right ressentiment, as well as the vile character of the man at the head of it, it might well have been a strongly majoritarian revolt against the status quo. Trumpism is some kind of chicken coming home to roost, certainly; there are conditions under which it might have been a Big Bird indeed.
Well, for one thing, Trump hasn't actually delivered anything legislatively over 5.5 years in office besides the usual grab bag of Republican priorities-- a large high end tax cut, coupled with further cuts to the safety net. What he's mostly done has been flouting the law by executive fiat and executive order. Even setting aside the fact that completely tearing up the Constitutional order probably isn't something Democrats should aspire to, it's also something that you can get away with if your goal is to destroy. Since Democrats ostensibly want to create, there's no way around going through Congress. And that's where the other issue drops. Republicans, after all, are more or less a cult. Democrats, needless to say, are not. Even now, with Trump at historically unpopular levels, no one in that party dares to cross him. That doesn't happen with Democrats, nor should it. Hence, the Joe Lieberman problem.
But the New Deal example is notable mostly in that it happened at a particular moment of really unimaginable mass suffering, combined with a less ossified political system. Unemployment had hit 25%. In the depths of the 2008 crisis, it barely touched 10%. And that was the moment where we got the most significant set of legislative achievements in half a century-- health care reform, re-regulation of the financial system, a massive economic rescue, etc.
What we've had since hasn't been a crisis in any real sense. It's been the Republican Party turning into a full-on vehicle for white grievance politics, combined with people broadly not liking things like Covid lockdowns and rising prices that they associated with Democrats. The issue with comparing anything in the Democratic Party to Trump is that Trump pretty much encapsulates the Republican id and what their base cares about. No one in the Democratic Party does that, nor can they, because there's no unifying principle behind what Democrats are. There are factions within the party, but none of them are individually very strong. The best you can hope for is a generationally popular politician coming in at a time of crisis that's blamed on the other party being able to pass some reforms that are unanimously popular within their party. But the theory of the case self-proclaimed progressives have seems to be that Bernie Sanders would be some kind of mecha-Obama who could bend the political system and the country to his will. If only he could've come close to winning a primary campaign.
This is the best commentary I've run across on both yesterday's results and the spin-cycle that is now being spun up to "explain" or "downplay the significance" of what happened. It's interesting that "loud" is a criticism of the "progressive" faction, but "well funded" isn't mentioned as a criticism of the "conventional" faction—as if unlimited campaign isn't somehow loud (despite the saturation advertising it funds). This strikes me as particularly odd, as the Roberts' court explicitly equates money with speech.
It awaits more data and analysis, but I was struck by the apparently limited value of massive campaign spending and the importance of grassroots organizing.
Quite aside from the fact that the missing chapter of the postmortem points out that the Democratic Party has never held its consultants accountable for wasting money on campaigns that hindsight shows were seriously miscalibrated, it seems like a basic message at the moment should be "don't let AIPAC spend money backing a candidate that you want to win". Even AIPAC should see that at this point: that if it has preferred candidates, the best thing it could do is NOT fund them. And any candidate in a state, city or district that is strongly majoritarian Democrat should know better, no matter how desperate they are for money. I don't even think that's about support for Israel or opposition to it per se--that at least for some voters, there's something distasteful and suspicious about any PAC that is driven by an issue that doesn't matter all that much to many voters dumping unbelievable shitloads of money on a particular candidate. If I think of an issue that I really don't care much about in the grand scheme of things but I find out that a candidate in a primary is being showered with money from a single-issue PAC involved with that issue, that instantly puts me on my guard and makes me pay attention to something that otherwise wouldn't have had much effect on my voting.
"Long-time readers also know that despite my scornful tone and exasperated criticism, I understand the historic appeal of this ideology. It is the predominant ideology of the social class to which I belong, even in some cases the people whose issue-based affinities are “progressive” or “leftist”."
But that's not really the split in actual voting terms. Sure, technocrats broadly prefer non-insurgent candidates who aren't clamoring to burn it all down in some broad sense. But within the Democratic coalition, Al-Sayed's win appears to have been driven by significant margins in college towns, and among college-educated voters. Stevens, by contrast, won in Detroit and surrounding counties, and in a bunch of tiny counties. But El-Sayed won by bigger margins. Stevens won Wayne County by ~17,000 votes. El-Sayed won Kent County, which had barely a third the number of total votes cast, by ~28,000 votes. Micro-data aren't available, but on the county level, El-Sayed won counties with higher proportions of college-educated voters.
So it is probably distrust of "politicians" and the status quo that drives El-Sayed's support. But it's not coming from on high privileged white people; it's largely college educated suburbanites, at least in Michigan.
That's pretty much my point, though. The demographic that ought to map onto managerialism is increasingly alienated from it. And I think what ties other demographics to the "establishment" leadership is essentially something close to patron-client relationships--the establishment has been seen as a reliable source of particular services, of public-sector employment, and of a certain kind of stability or predictability in the midst of precarity. This is the kind of analysis missing entirely from the political reportage--Lerer doesn't really know what she means exactly by "backbone"--it functions rather like Nixon's "silent majority", a kind of certainty that whomever is not vocally against you must be unified in some social logic for you that is unspoken.
But as the Democratic establishment's actual leadership increasingly drifts away from its close social ties to that client base and is less able to keep various kinds of pipelines open in battleground states, that base is potentially in motion in all sorts of ways. If your appeal to one part of your base is more transactional and less aspirational, you'd better pay off. Mamdani is showing a really adroit grasp of exactly this point in NYC--he's more focused on potholes than revolution, because he grasps that social democracy is a retail-level thing long before it's a sweeping ideal.
Perhaps it's a patron-client relationship. Or perhaps it's that those demographics generally see the party as delivering results for them. Your non-college educated non-white voters are big beneficiaries of Obamacare and SNAP and TANF and other concrete programs. It's not that they're super pro-Israel or whatever; I'm quite confident they don't care much either way about Israel, which is the narrative we broadly hear.
Ultimately, though, you're right you do have to deliver. And that's what Mamdani's done quite well in the task of day to day governing, as far as I can tell, at least in terms of things that are in his immediate control. And then the question becomes whether he was elected to deliver revolution or vibes. Because he's not gonna lose many voters if the city runs smoothly and he makes noises about arresting Bibi Netanyahu or whatever. But if the subway doesn't run on time and the streets don't get plowed and he gives pressers about arresting Bibi Netanyahu, he's gonna get swept away massively.
Isn't that what usually happens at the municipal level? I'm hard-pressed to think of a mayor of a major city who has easily survived an inattentiveness to basic services.
"Delivering results for them" is what a patron-client relationship is. And right now what's left of the tattered safety nets that have survived three decades of neoliberal reduction is evaporating. The old guard of the Democratic Party can't deliver relief on most of what falls under "affordability" and increasingly they're not even trying.
This more than anything else might mark a difference between the base of the current Republican Party and any other political fraction in America. The Republican base is still fixated on "owning the libs", and in many cases takes the demolition of government capacity, the waste of money, and the failure of services to be a sign that Trumpism is succeeding. Whereas no matter what Democratic constituency you're running towards, you have to actually succeed in governing.
Which is ultimately the greatest weakness of the old-guard leadership and their consultants: since 2016 they have proposed that the reason to vote for them is to prevent fascism from winning. The problem is that not only did they fail to prevent fascism from winning, they failed to understand that changing the status quo in dramatic ways was how you might prevent fascism from winning--that incremental managerialism accelerated authoritarian power rather than inhibited it.
Sure, municipal leaders are elected to deliver stuff. It’s where our progressive big cities have notably failed. But I wonder how popular Mamdani stays with his base if he delivers filled potholes and functional subways but fails to arrest Netanyahu.
And the issue with calls against incremental managerialism is they uniformly lack any semblance of a plan, either practical or political, for how to achieve it. Which is why the pointy headed public policy types run away from them. Like they rightly observe that the US healthcare system has long had significant holes and hugely higher costs relative to its peers. But their “plan” for Medicare for All is less a plan and more “we’re going to give everyone all the care they want, at no cost, by taxing billionaires.” Which is the adult politics version of the elementary school class president’s “double recess and pizza for lunch every day” platform. And, even if they did have a serious plan, the politics are a fantasy. Obamacare was a hugely impactful and important policy. But to pass that, in a historic wave cycle for Democrats, they had to abandon a modest public option. Not because Democrats didn’t want it, but because Joe Lieberman didn’t want it. The plan to overcome that inconvenient reality is that the magic power of President Bernie will force them to. Seems like a stretch.
If there's one thing to learn from Trump, it's that it's unnecessary to lett somebody like Joe Lieberman stop you dead from delivering a modest reform package that would have been far more popular and enduring if it had offered more. Much as the Democrats should have learned from Trump that you can win without expensive polling and campaign consultancies. It's one reason Trump's base loves him--not just his destructiveness but that he is not constrained by the political timidity and reflexive stalemating of Washington in "normal" times. There's space for more forceful action in positive directions as well as in turning a modestly stinky swamp into a vast sewer the way Trump has.
It is worth asking why a conception of political pragmatism that supposedly rests on some degree of acceptance of rational defense of particular interests is not able to imagine a shared interest among many groups with strong stakes in the status quo in more dramatic reforms to the status quo that would prevent mass alienation, anger or insurrection against the order of things. This has, after all, happened before--it is a conventional frame for understanding the New Deal and European social democracies--that they had to make dramatic reforms in order to preserve the core foundations of the existing order. I suppose one answer is that the the powers that be, including establishment Democrats, simply disbelieve than any such mass unhappiness is possible or likely. And yet, that's pretty much what Trumpism is, on some level--if it weren't so weighted down by white nationalism and far-right ressentiment, as well as the vile character of the man at the head of it, it might well have been a strongly majoritarian revolt against the status quo. Trumpism is some kind of chicken coming home to roost, certainly; there are conditions under which it might have been a Big Bird indeed.
Well, for one thing, Trump hasn't actually delivered anything legislatively over 5.5 years in office besides the usual grab bag of Republican priorities-- a large high end tax cut, coupled with further cuts to the safety net. What he's mostly done has been flouting the law by executive fiat and executive order. Even setting aside the fact that completely tearing up the Constitutional order probably isn't something Democrats should aspire to, it's also something that you can get away with if your goal is to destroy. Since Democrats ostensibly want to create, there's no way around going through Congress. And that's where the other issue drops. Republicans, after all, are more or less a cult. Democrats, needless to say, are not. Even now, with Trump at historically unpopular levels, no one in that party dares to cross him. That doesn't happen with Democrats, nor should it. Hence, the Joe Lieberman problem.
But the New Deal example is notable mostly in that it happened at a particular moment of really unimaginable mass suffering, combined with a less ossified political system. Unemployment had hit 25%. In the depths of the 2008 crisis, it barely touched 10%. And that was the moment where we got the most significant set of legislative achievements in half a century-- health care reform, re-regulation of the financial system, a massive economic rescue, etc.
What we've had since hasn't been a crisis in any real sense. It's been the Republican Party turning into a full-on vehicle for white grievance politics, combined with people broadly not liking things like Covid lockdowns and rising prices that they associated with Democrats. The issue with comparing anything in the Democratic Party to Trump is that Trump pretty much encapsulates the Republican id and what their base cares about. No one in the Democratic Party does that, nor can they, because there's no unifying principle behind what Democrats are. There are factions within the party, but none of them are individually very strong. The best you can hope for is a generationally popular politician coming in at a time of crisis that's blamed on the other party being able to pass some reforms that are unanimously popular within their party. But the theory of the case self-proclaimed progressives have seems to be that Bernie Sanders would be some kind of mecha-Obama who could bend the political system and the country to his will. If only he could've come close to winning a primary campaign.