I’ve learned a lot from and am admirer of Jonathan Haidt. But I’m not sure his analysis of the difference between the parties, “structurally”, or in terms of their operational sanity works, even when limited to the federal level as he does. What’s the difference between a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski in one party, versus a Joe Manchin…
I’ve learned a lot from and am admirer of Jonathan Haidt. But I’m not sure his analysis of the difference between the parties, “structurally”, or in terms of their operational sanity works, even when limited to the federal level as he does. What’s the difference between a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski in one party, versus a Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema in another? Both parties have purged their moderates both as retaliation for not complying with leadership and as part of the structural polarization of having to pander to more radical primary electorates. Of course this is most pronounced where districts can be Gerrymandered, but it’s still happening statewide in US Senate races, too. And not just because Trump, the singular bogeyman, is playing kingmaker in primaries (e.g. in Georgia he failed; in Ohio, Rob Portman’s replacement would have likely always been well to the populist right).
Re: Trump’s worst and most reckless moment, Mike Pence, who’d been derided as a pushover, did stand up to him. It’s in the Democrats’ interests to portray an entire party gone crazy, entirely enthralled by a madman would-be despot, and consumed at the base by Q-anon conspiracy theories and support for “insurrection”. Even Dems running the literal show were dead set on only amplifying and showcasing two Republicans who have become close political allies of theirs and who are distinguished by their own personal monomania re: destroying Trump. As much as Dems have suddenly fallen in love with her and try to promote her as a paragon political virtue, the rest of us know we’re still looking at Liz Cheney, scion of an actually far scarier right-wing Republican, and standard-bearer of a remorseless, relentless Neocon branch of the party enraged to have been mocked (finally!) and displaced, supplanted by Trump. I don’t even know how to begin to evaluate Adam Kinzinger, except to note his district is just far enough outside Chicago’s burbs to elect a moderate Republican, and his views on military intervention everywhere, all the time, seem to be in close alignment with Liz Cheney’s. There is a core point here I don’t dispute: yes, too many Republican leaders saw what Trump did to his 2016 primary opponents, the intensity of support he could command, and cravenly got on board with many of his excesses.
I’ll join others in saying I’m not quite sure how one can cleanly separate policy from the structural. The sense I honestly get sometimes is that for some leading academics coming from the left of center (as I always did, too) and living in NYC, condemning and dismissing basically the entirety of the Republican Party as a cult led by madman or an institution that’s structurally ceased being rational or reasonable, is like the initial price of admission to even have any standing or get any hearing from even the more open-minded and moderate in the deep blue milieu which comprises almost the water they’ve got to swim in, personally, professionally, as public intellectuals. This is the case even if one knows plenty of pro-business libertarians who teach at business schools, or makes an effort to cultivate a lbroader intellectual network. It still strikes me as a bit of an easy false equivalency. Something on the right has to be condemned as a fair handed equivalent. And it’s the entire other major party, the only realistic alternative to the party that’s achieved extreme cultural as well as political and policy hegemony over the geographic, cultural, and professional regions they inhabit.
But the Dems? No, they’re sane, reasonable, moderate, diverse in opinions and welcoming of debate? I’d disagree. There is no equivalent to Trump among the Dems. But we have to be honest about a party that has put Stacey Abrams on as high a pedestal as imaginable, based in large part on not only her identity but her shameless refusal to concede a very high-turnout statewide election she lost by a good fifty thousand votes. Why is her claim to fame Donald Trump’s claim to shame? She didn’t recklessly excite a crowd of true believers and encourage them to march on the state capitol. But her whole image and career (and personal windfall for what that’s worth) have been based on her pushing a divisive lie that only was an election stolen from her because she’s a black woman and her opponents don’t want black Georgians to be able to vote, and on the larger contention central to her party nationally, that we live in an emergency of revanchist white supremacist voter suppression, in which “our very democracy is at stake”. She’s even compared her cause to Ukrainians being slaughtered defending their homes and country. The chair of the Jan 6th Commission himself opposed certification of a Presidential election result he did not like. But for those of us who have spent decades as volunteers and activists and sometimes staffers within that very party and now feel politically homeless - it’s not because the party has remained intellectually diverse and welcoming of debate. I’m not sure how Haidt even draws a line between all of the institutions on the left he argues have become captured by very narrow and dogmatic ideologies, in part by expanding and attempting to enforce such dogma into all areas of public and private life, and the party which houses and increasingly panders to, depends on the zealotry and amplification, of those true believers and their institutional power. It’s been posited that many Republicans disagreed with Trump about various issues or means of pursuing them, but were afraid their political careers would be ended if they took a stand. I’m not sure how different that dynamic is among Democrats. Look at the crazy commitments Dem primary candidates made almost in lockstep, debate after debate. Was it really possible for a candidate to disagree politely but firmly and remain viable, after explaining why they didn’t support, say, removing any formal prohibition, any penalty, from crossing our borders without authorization - and to top it off, somehow guaranteeing full access to health care for any and all unauthorized border-crossers which many long-suffering American citizens do not have? Joe Manchin is a vestige, just as Susan Collins is a vestige. The energy, the ideological force, the base activists, and the rising and future leaders among the Dems are represented by ideas like: black Americans in 2021 are not and have never been free; any nominee to be Sec of Health and Human Services must first be vetted by a trans child. If that sounds out there, a distraction from the real guy in charge: common sense, middle of the road Joe Biden, I’d counter: look at why he was chosen and for what purpose. He’s to a large extent a figurehead who was meant to reassure by his familiar shtick as much of the political middle and unaffiliated voters as possible.
Here, I just get the impression Haidt is trying to force the present Democratic Party to fit a characterization it no longer does. One of the first things Joe Biden did in office was order that not only must every decision throughout every agency and every department of the federal government comply with a new “equity” regime, which imposes a new ideological schema and racial hierarchy not only throughout the federal government but seeks to impose it on any entities doing business with or receiving funds from the federal government. Sure, those are mainstream ideas on the left of center now. But that’s the same institutional left of center Haidt correctly describes as having gone crazy or become stupid. This is the full force of the federal government under what is supposed to be the most moderate, reasonable, centrist Dem’s administration, imposing and enforcing ideas from Ibram Kendi and embedding them not just in internal staffing decisions but throughout legislation proposed by the executive and passed by partisan majorities in Congress and signed by the President, expressly privileging certain racial groups and excluding others. They’re just getting started. Opposing defund the police? What about all of the White House meetings just last year in which top admins officials met with several of the leaders of top organizations pushing for defunding if not abolition. Just because Joe Biden finally very belatedly realizes that “defund the police” rhetoric and movement is not only extremely unpopular outside Dem activists but has done real damage to cities and the vulnerable people most directly exposed to exploding violent crime, and theatrically repeats “no, we’re going to fund the police, we’re going to fund them” does not mean that’s where he and his party have actually been on that issue and demand from the time it arose. Others have effectively listed further examples of just how crazy the supposedly sane, functioning, non-stupid party has behaved on key issue after after issue. How is such a sane, non-stupid party continually producing a combination such unhinged extremist rhetoric (precise timing and context matter a lot re: incitement, but Chuck Schumer sure sounded like he’d lost control and was indirectly with the crowd as his proxy physically threatening Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh) and extreme policies? On the other hand, look at the Trump Admin. In rhetoric, Trump was obviously both petty and divisive, to say the least. But I don’t remember him referring to up to half the country and all of the voters who strongly opposed him as being akin to if not literally domestic terrorists who needed to be tracked, censored, monitored, maybe imprisoned, using the combined weight of the federal government (most chillingly federal law enforcement and spy agencies), Big Tech, and mass media as amplifiers and propagandists. I don’t remember Trump relentlessly singling out one group by skin color and cheering on their demographic dilution and marginalization and scapegoating them for every problem in American life, past, present, or future, by endlessly conflating Americans who are opposed to him politically with actual violent white supremacists almost entirely of the distant past. I don’t remember Trump creating a “Misinformation Bureau” to generate politically targeted propaganda and track and monitor and marginalize if not censor opposing viewpoints and housing it within a huge department with vast law enforcement and domestic security powers. None of these actions taken by the Biden are normal. And I don’t mean “not moderate policywise”. They’re the fundamentally illiberal, despotic actions of a party that when in power increasingly treats political opponents as enemies of the state.
Policywise, there was much I strongly disagree with during the Trump Admin. Not surprising, given I’ve only volunteered for and donated to and occasionally worked a staff job for Democrats. But I also saw a lot of fairly mainstream conservative policy goals and accomplishments, as well as policies which proved broadly successful and popular in terms of the common material interests of most Americans (e.g. a rising standard of living that also benefited some of the lowest income Americans and included progress for some of the lower-wage workers of all colors or ethnicities).
One final point, and it’s hardly a novel one: I’m not sure framing our parties, institutions, voters, as mainly sitting on one side or another of a left-right, Dem-GOP dichotomy is the most insightful lens anymore. As many have posited, we are in a global moment in which elite institutional actors, who/which often transcend borders in their self-perception and goals, are both imposing ever-more sweeping and undemocratic policy agendas on publics, but are facing inchoate populist uprisings from publics who correctly object that they never democratically supported nor often even had a meaningful opportunity to deliberate and express a preference re: some of the most monumentally impactful policy changes imaginable. And global elite actors are certainly engaged in trying to scapegoat, smear, marginalize, and bypass these publics as ignorant, backwards, irrelevant. This is where much of the real tension in our society lies. Trump may largely be a phony populist who keyed in on some legit grievances being ignored almost everywhere else in our politics, or being held out of reach and determined by elites beyond public deliberation, and somewhat cynically echoing those grievances back. But it’s telling the answer from so many of Trump’s critics who say they only want a return to a “normal” “sane” “functioning” Republican Party really seems to mean they want truly dangerous corporatist Neocon authoritarians like the Cheneys back at the center of the party. Or they’re cool with a restoration in which more of the apparently now saintly Bushes are in charge. A GOP led by politicians of Mitch McConnell’s ilk entirely of by and for the corporate and upper middle class Republican business elite is reassuringly normal. I guess I’d ask: normal for whom? Maybe that’s a familiar GOP for your own party to usually oppose and occasionally work with, if you’re a very comfortable, established left of center academic or professional. But maybe that kind of leadership isn’t and wasn’t so normal and sane for the large swath of working poor and working class voters of both or neither party, who found themselves absolutely ignored but hammered (materially and in their standing as citizens) by the self-serving tacit consensus imposed by elites of both major parties around issues like immigration, trade, or even what it meant to be an American (cause mostly for unity and pride - or division and shame?)
We can all see our country is riven by extremes and is in political crisis and that many institutions seem to be behaving irrationally or at cross-purposes with their supposed missions (how about the chilling specter of an extreme-woke military brass which seems to advance by focusing on “white rage” seeing enemies within, but can’t manage a withdrawal or winning a war). But the insider-outsider frame sometimes captures more re: what fueled Trump’s rise and support for other at least nominal populists, here and in many other countries. The “normal” Republicans like GW Bush not only started senseless forever wars of choice, and justified torture on a large scale, opened black sites around the world, and ran renditions, and illegally spied on a law abiding public, and imposed an environment of intimidation and fear on critics of their wars. They also ignored the broader public including their base when it came to trade, immigration, and ever more reckless financialization of the economy - always choosing elite profits at the expense of battering their own core voters financially and leaving them to feel forgotten if not despised in their own country. If much of this actually sounds like a collaboration between the establishments of both major parties, it’s because it was. There are ways of course for the GOP to become a more populist Conservative party, without Trump. We may be well on our way to getting there. Democrats and their media allies often appear to be more addicted to Trump’s centrality as a foil and ratings boon than much of the actual GOP. But it’s hard to blame voters for losing patience permanently with the GOP establishment that came before and responding to someone who at least could describe and pretend to care about their concerns.
Ikr. I agree with a lot of what you said but one thing really struck me that I haven't heard anybody talk about, and that is the effect on the military. It really creeped me out when Milley and that black general were talking about thinking the troops were white supremacists with "white rage". Is that what they're doing when they're supposed to be doing their jobs? I mean, can you picture Al Haig or General Schwartzkopf or even Colin Powell saying such things? Is that why Afghanistan went down the way it did? It seems they have really lost their way. And I think that is dangerous.
I’ve learned a lot from and am admirer of Jonathan Haidt. But I’m not sure his analysis of the difference between the parties, “structurally”, or in terms of their operational sanity works, even when limited to the federal level as he does. What’s the difference between a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski in one party, versus a Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema in another? Both parties have purged their moderates both as retaliation for not complying with leadership and as part of the structural polarization of having to pander to more radical primary electorates. Of course this is most pronounced where districts can be Gerrymandered, but it’s still happening statewide in US Senate races, too. And not just because Trump, the singular bogeyman, is playing kingmaker in primaries (e.g. in Georgia he failed; in Ohio, Rob Portman’s replacement would have likely always been well to the populist right).
Re: Trump’s worst and most reckless moment, Mike Pence, who’d been derided as a pushover, did stand up to him. It’s in the Democrats’ interests to portray an entire party gone crazy, entirely enthralled by a madman would-be despot, and consumed at the base by Q-anon conspiracy theories and support for “insurrection”. Even Dems running the literal show were dead set on only amplifying and showcasing two Republicans who have become close political allies of theirs and who are distinguished by their own personal monomania re: destroying Trump. As much as Dems have suddenly fallen in love with her and try to promote her as a paragon political virtue, the rest of us know we’re still looking at Liz Cheney, scion of an actually far scarier right-wing Republican, and standard-bearer of a remorseless, relentless Neocon branch of the party enraged to have been mocked (finally!) and displaced, supplanted by Trump. I don’t even know how to begin to evaluate Adam Kinzinger, except to note his district is just far enough outside Chicago’s burbs to elect a moderate Republican, and his views on military intervention everywhere, all the time, seem to be in close alignment with Liz Cheney’s. There is a core point here I don’t dispute: yes, too many Republican leaders saw what Trump did to his 2016 primary opponents, the intensity of support he could command, and cravenly got on board with many of his excesses.
I’ll join others in saying I’m not quite sure how one can cleanly separate policy from the structural. The sense I honestly get sometimes is that for some leading academics coming from the left of center (as I always did, too) and living in NYC, condemning and dismissing basically the entirety of the Republican Party as a cult led by madman or an institution that’s structurally ceased being rational or reasonable, is like the initial price of admission to even have any standing or get any hearing from even the more open-minded and moderate in the deep blue milieu which comprises almost the water they’ve got to swim in, personally, professionally, as public intellectuals. This is the case even if one knows plenty of pro-business libertarians who teach at business schools, or makes an effort to cultivate a lbroader intellectual network. It still strikes me as a bit of an easy false equivalency. Something on the right has to be condemned as a fair handed equivalent. And it’s the entire other major party, the only realistic alternative to the party that’s achieved extreme cultural as well as political and policy hegemony over the geographic, cultural, and professional regions they inhabit.
But the Dems? No, they’re sane, reasonable, moderate, diverse in opinions and welcoming of debate? I’d disagree. There is no equivalent to Trump among the Dems. But we have to be honest about a party that has put Stacey Abrams on as high a pedestal as imaginable, based in large part on not only her identity but her shameless refusal to concede a very high-turnout statewide election she lost by a good fifty thousand votes. Why is her claim to fame Donald Trump’s claim to shame? She didn’t recklessly excite a crowd of true believers and encourage them to march on the state capitol. But her whole image and career (and personal windfall for what that’s worth) have been based on her pushing a divisive lie that only was an election stolen from her because she’s a black woman and her opponents don’t want black Georgians to be able to vote, and on the larger contention central to her party nationally, that we live in an emergency of revanchist white supremacist voter suppression, in which “our very democracy is at stake”. She’s even compared her cause to Ukrainians being slaughtered defending their homes and country. The chair of the Jan 6th Commission himself opposed certification of a Presidential election result he did not like. But for those of us who have spent decades as volunteers and activists and sometimes staffers within that very party and now feel politically homeless - it’s not because the party has remained intellectually diverse and welcoming of debate. I’m not sure how Haidt even draws a line between all of the institutions on the left he argues have become captured by very narrow and dogmatic ideologies, in part by expanding and attempting to enforce such dogma into all areas of public and private life, and the party which houses and increasingly panders to, depends on the zealotry and amplification, of those true believers and their institutional power. It’s been posited that many Republicans disagreed with Trump about various issues or means of pursuing them, but were afraid their political careers would be ended if they took a stand. I’m not sure how different that dynamic is among Democrats. Look at the crazy commitments Dem primary candidates made almost in lockstep, debate after debate. Was it really possible for a candidate to disagree politely but firmly and remain viable, after explaining why they didn’t support, say, removing any formal prohibition, any penalty, from crossing our borders without authorization - and to top it off, somehow guaranteeing full access to health care for any and all unauthorized border-crossers which many long-suffering American citizens do not have? Joe Manchin is a vestige, just as Susan Collins is a vestige. The energy, the ideological force, the base activists, and the rising and future leaders among the Dems are represented by ideas like: black Americans in 2021 are not and have never been free; any nominee to be Sec of Health and Human Services must first be vetted by a trans child. If that sounds out there, a distraction from the real guy in charge: common sense, middle of the road Joe Biden, I’d counter: look at why he was chosen and for what purpose. He’s to a large extent a figurehead who was meant to reassure by his familiar shtick as much of the political middle and unaffiliated voters as possible.
Here, I just get the impression Haidt is trying to force the present Democratic Party to fit a characterization it no longer does. One of the first things Joe Biden did in office was order that not only must every decision throughout every agency and every department of the federal government comply with a new “equity” regime, which imposes a new ideological schema and racial hierarchy not only throughout the federal government but seeks to impose it on any entities doing business with or receiving funds from the federal government. Sure, those are mainstream ideas on the left of center now. But that’s the same institutional left of center Haidt correctly describes as having gone crazy or become stupid. This is the full force of the federal government under what is supposed to be the most moderate, reasonable, centrist Dem’s administration, imposing and enforcing ideas from Ibram Kendi and embedding them not just in internal staffing decisions but throughout legislation proposed by the executive and passed by partisan majorities in Congress and signed by the President, expressly privileging certain racial groups and excluding others. They’re just getting started. Opposing defund the police? What about all of the White House meetings just last year in which top admins officials met with several of the leaders of top organizations pushing for defunding if not abolition. Just because Joe Biden finally very belatedly realizes that “defund the police” rhetoric and movement is not only extremely unpopular outside Dem activists but has done real damage to cities and the vulnerable people most directly exposed to exploding violent crime, and theatrically repeats “no, we’re going to fund the police, we’re going to fund them” does not mean that’s where he and his party have actually been on that issue and demand from the time it arose. Others have effectively listed further examples of just how crazy the supposedly sane, functioning, non-stupid party has behaved on key issue after after issue. How is such a sane, non-stupid party continually producing a combination such unhinged extremist rhetoric (precise timing and context matter a lot re: incitement, but Chuck Schumer sure sounded like he’d lost control and was indirectly with the crowd as his proxy physically threatening Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh) and extreme policies? On the other hand, look at the Trump Admin. In rhetoric, Trump was obviously both petty and divisive, to say the least. But I don’t remember him referring to up to half the country and all of the voters who strongly opposed him as being akin to if not literally domestic terrorists who needed to be tracked, censored, monitored, maybe imprisoned, using the combined weight of the federal government (most chillingly federal law enforcement and spy agencies), Big Tech, and mass media as amplifiers and propagandists. I don’t remember Trump relentlessly singling out one group by skin color and cheering on their demographic dilution and marginalization and scapegoating them for every problem in American life, past, present, or future, by endlessly conflating Americans who are opposed to him politically with actual violent white supremacists almost entirely of the distant past. I don’t remember Trump creating a “Misinformation Bureau” to generate politically targeted propaganda and track and monitor and marginalize if not censor opposing viewpoints and housing it within a huge department with vast law enforcement and domestic security powers. None of these actions taken by the Biden are normal. And I don’t mean “not moderate policywise”. They’re the fundamentally illiberal, despotic actions of a party that when in power increasingly treats political opponents as enemies of the state.
Policywise, there was much I strongly disagree with during the Trump Admin. Not surprising, given I’ve only volunteered for and donated to and occasionally worked a staff job for Democrats. But I also saw a lot of fairly mainstream conservative policy goals and accomplishments, as well as policies which proved broadly successful and popular in terms of the common material interests of most Americans (e.g. a rising standard of living that also benefited some of the lowest income Americans and included progress for some of the lower-wage workers of all colors or ethnicities).
One final point, and it’s hardly a novel one: I’m not sure framing our parties, institutions, voters, as mainly sitting on one side or another of a left-right, Dem-GOP dichotomy is the most insightful lens anymore. As many have posited, we are in a global moment in which elite institutional actors, who/which often transcend borders in their self-perception and goals, are both imposing ever-more sweeping and undemocratic policy agendas on publics, but are facing inchoate populist uprisings from publics who correctly object that they never democratically supported nor often even had a meaningful opportunity to deliberate and express a preference re: some of the most monumentally impactful policy changes imaginable. And global elite actors are certainly engaged in trying to scapegoat, smear, marginalize, and bypass these publics as ignorant, backwards, irrelevant. This is where much of the real tension in our society lies. Trump may largely be a phony populist who keyed in on some legit grievances being ignored almost everywhere else in our politics, or being held out of reach and determined by elites beyond public deliberation, and somewhat cynically echoing those grievances back. But it’s telling the answer from so many of Trump’s critics who say they only want a return to a “normal” “sane” “functioning” Republican Party really seems to mean they want truly dangerous corporatist Neocon authoritarians like the Cheneys back at the center of the party. Or they’re cool with a restoration in which more of the apparently now saintly Bushes are in charge. A GOP led by politicians of Mitch McConnell’s ilk entirely of by and for the corporate and upper middle class Republican business elite is reassuringly normal. I guess I’d ask: normal for whom? Maybe that’s a familiar GOP for your own party to usually oppose and occasionally work with, if you’re a very comfortable, established left of center academic or professional. But maybe that kind of leadership isn’t and wasn’t so normal and sane for the large swath of working poor and working class voters of both or neither party, who found themselves absolutely ignored but hammered (materially and in their standing as citizens) by the self-serving tacit consensus imposed by elites of both major parties around issues like immigration, trade, or even what it meant to be an American (cause mostly for unity and pride - or division and shame?)
We can all see our country is riven by extremes and is in political crisis and that many institutions seem to be behaving irrationally or at cross-purposes with their supposed missions (how about the chilling specter of an extreme-woke military brass which seems to advance by focusing on “white rage” seeing enemies within, but can’t manage a withdrawal or winning a war). But the insider-outsider frame sometimes captures more re: what fueled Trump’s rise and support for other at least nominal populists, here and in many other countries. The “normal” Republicans like GW Bush not only started senseless forever wars of choice, and justified torture on a large scale, opened black sites around the world, and ran renditions, and illegally spied on a law abiding public, and imposed an environment of intimidation and fear on critics of their wars. They also ignored the broader public including their base when it came to trade, immigration, and ever more reckless financialization of the economy - always choosing elite profits at the expense of battering their own core voters financially and leaving them to feel forgotten if not despised in their own country. If much of this actually sounds like a collaboration between the establishments of both major parties, it’s because it was. There are ways of course for the GOP to become a more populist Conservative party, without Trump. We may be well on our way to getting there. Democrats and their media allies often appear to be more addicted to Trump’s centrality as a foil and ratings boon than much of the actual GOP. But it’s hard to blame voters for losing patience permanently with the GOP establishment that came before and responding to someone who at least could describe and pretend to care about their concerns.
Ikr. I agree with a lot of what you said but one thing really struck me that I haven't heard anybody talk about, and that is the effect on the military. It really creeped me out when Milley and that black general were talking about thinking the troops were white supremacists with "white rage". Is that what they're doing when they're supposed to be doing their jobs? I mean, can you picture Al Haig or General Schwartzkopf or even Colin Powell saying such things? Is that why Afghanistan went down the way it did? It seems they have really lost their way. And I think that is dangerous.