Until AOC and her ilk, there was no radical group that could be a productive junior partner. The purity pony left could not partner with anybody, and the mainstream Democrats were right to mollify and ignore them. (Jesse Jackson was no purity pony, but he could not subordinate his career to his cause: a very dangerous ally.) But we have developed a much better kind of radical over the last two decades or so: eyes on the horizon, and feet on the ground. Schumer & Co. may not have recognized this.
That's a problem with old people. Their view of the world is as accurate as anybody's--maybe more so, since they have seen more things. But their accurate view is often that of a past world. (I'm an old person, and have suffered from this problem.)
This is wild. I never would have thought to compare the Dems of today to the GOP of the 1850s, especially on the subject of systems based on exploitative labor.
Like if you presented two different historical cases specific to the radicalism of the 1850s/60s, Harpers Ferry and firing on Ft. Sumpter, and asked me which one most resembled an attack on an ICE facility, I would have said it was the firing on Sumpter. But it looks like a lot of Dems think they're in the John Brown role today? Good luck with that!
I found the arguments persuasive at rebutting Yglesias's points. But the idea that today's junior/radical factions aren't powerful enough is absurd. The real problem is that radicals are too powerful vis-a-vis the party, which stymies the senior partners' ability to unify. The reasons are well established
- grassroots fundraising gives junior partners independent power and takes it from the party
- geographic sorting by ideology plus gerrymandering reduces competitiveness in house districts, allowing more extreme members to win and diminishes the need to compromise
- post Watergate reforms and the primary system dramatically reduce party power
- nationalized, decentralized, always-on media reduces party power
- all of these, plus reduction in pork and corruption make back room deals that forge unified positions nearly impossible
- all of this has killed the incentive of the opposition party to bargain.
Yglesias wants the radicals to "shut up and rally around the party." This post refutes that this is what happened in the mid 1800s. But he's right that trying to win control of national power first and win the intra party debate second is in their interest. And, he's right to point out that the radicals on the right do those but the left does not.
Crazy to think that a person could look at the last three Democratic presidential candidates and come to the conclusion that the "radicals" in the party (who would be moderates in any other country) are the ones with the power. Perhaps the epithet "radical" is applied to make certain politicians seem allergic to compromise - no matter what actually happens in the legislative process - and thus *any* party failure to cohere around a convincing message can be laid at their feet? Of course, *everyone* believes that *they* are uniquely willing to compromise and that anyone who disagrees with them is just being stubborn, kinda like how anyone who doesn't agree with me must be "closed-minded." Hard to get past that mental default!
To clarify: I'm not claiming that "radicals" are the ones with power in the party. Waleed's framework of junior partner vs. senior partner, with junior partners driving the agenda and senior partners driving the consensus is very good. I should have used that language. I personally really like a world in which multiple extreme positions are represented within and across parties, because that forces debate. I also liked Waleed's point that the role of junior partners is to be uncompromising -- it's a feature, not a bug!
I'm pushing back on his claim that radicals are less powerful today than they were in the 1850s. That is absurd.
I also don't think that the choice of presidential candidate is a useful metric for the power of junior factions. The impediments to somebody from a junior faction getting the presidential nomination are too high. It's better to look at the influence of junior partners on the governing agenda. While Biden was fundamentally a moderate and ran as a moderate, junior factions really drove his agenda. How much of this was because of their power, Biden's weakness, or his senatorial bias to prioritize coalition management is hard to determine. But Trump is not politically weak and the religious right has incredible influence over his agenda. They don't get everything they want, but it's clear that Trump has consistently pursued unpopular policies through his supreme court nominations in order to satisfy them. Compare them to Obama, both Bushes, and Clinton, all of whom were able to more effectively enact moderate agendas.
Yeah, the nominations aren't great examples here, esp for the clarified question of Junior Partner Power. My first instinct is to think that maybe JPP has neither increased nor decreased: The centrifugal forces democratizing mass communication that benefit the juniors being counterbalanced by the centripetal forces of partisan identification and consolidation; lower barriers to entry with higher barriers to effectiveness. That said, it still *seems* like the ratio of Senior to Junior Partner Power is pretty lopsided and getting worse. Maybe the big change from the 1850s is that fewer areas of policy were considered "settled" between the parties then: Imagine if the issue of slavery were as agreed upon between the Senior Partners of the parties as certain questions of foreign policy are today. Idk, I'm spitballing at this point, I generally get your points.
As we're seeing with the supreme court's "history and tradition" test, the challenge with historical analogues is that people with conflicting beliefs can each find a cogent argument for why the analogue supports their preexisting view. They are useful thought starters, but not argument enders.
I would quibble that Republicans in the 1850s didn’t actually build a majoritarian agenda. Lincoln got 40% of the popular vote in 1860 and only won the Electoral College because there were 3 pro-slavery candidates on the ballot.
Until AOC and her ilk, there was no radical group that could be a productive junior partner. The purity pony left could not partner with anybody, and the mainstream Democrats were right to mollify and ignore them. (Jesse Jackson was no purity pony, but he could not subordinate his career to his cause: a very dangerous ally.) But we have developed a much better kind of radical over the last two decades or so: eyes on the horizon, and feet on the ground. Schumer & Co. may not have recognized this.
That's a problem with old people. Their view of the world is as accurate as anybody's--maybe more so, since they have seen more things. But their accurate view is often that of a past world. (I'm an old person, and have suffered from this problem.)
Why can’t the fight against autocracy and the fight to save our freedom and democracy be important enough to unite us.
This is wild. I never would have thought to compare the Dems of today to the GOP of the 1850s, especially on the subject of systems based on exploitative labor.
Like if you presented two different historical cases specific to the radicalism of the 1850s/60s, Harpers Ferry and firing on Ft. Sumpter, and asked me which one most resembled an attack on an ICE facility, I would have said it was the firing on Sumpter. But it looks like a lot of Dems think they're in the John Brown role today? Good luck with that!
I found the arguments persuasive at rebutting Yglesias's points. But the idea that today's junior/radical factions aren't powerful enough is absurd. The real problem is that radicals are too powerful vis-a-vis the party, which stymies the senior partners' ability to unify. The reasons are well established
- grassroots fundraising gives junior partners independent power and takes it from the party
- geographic sorting by ideology plus gerrymandering reduces competitiveness in house districts, allowing more extreme members to win and diminishes the need to compromise
- post Watergate reforms and the primary system dramatically reduce party power
- nationalized, decentralized, always-on media reduces party power
- all of these, plus reduction in pork and corruption make back room deals that forge unified positions nearly impossible
- all of this has killed the incentive of the opposition party to bargain.
Yglesias wants the radicals to "shut up and rally around the party." This post refutes that this is what happened in the mid 1800s. But he's right that trying to win control of national power first and win the intra party debate second is in their interest. And, he's right to point out that the radicals on the right do those but the left does not.
Crazy to think that a person could look at the last three Democratic presidential candidates and come to the conclusion that the "radicals" in the party (who would be moderates in any other country) are the ones with the power. Perhaps the epithet "radical" is applied to make certain politicians seem allergic to compromise - no matter what actually happens in the legislative process - and thus *any* party failure to cohere around a convincing message can be laid at their feet? Of course, *everyone* believes that *they* are uniquely willing to compromise and that anyone who disagrees with them is just being stubborn, kinda like how anyone who doesn't agree with me must be "closed-minded." Hard to get past that mental default!
To clarify: I'm not claiming that "radicals" are the ones with power in the party. Waleed's framework of junior partner vs. senior partner, with junior partners driving the agenda and senior partners driving the consensus is very good. I should have used that language. I personally really like a world in which multiple extreme positions are represented within and across parties, because that forces debate. I also liked Waleed's point that the role of junior partners is to be uncompromising -- it's a feature, not a bug!
I'm pushing back on his claim that radicals are less powerful today than they were in the 1850s. That is absurd.
I also don't think that the choice of presidential candidate is a useful metric for the power of junior factions. The impediments to somebody from a junior faction getting the presidential nomination are too high. It's better to look at the influence of junior partners on the governing agenda. While Biden was fundamentally a moderate and ran as a moderate, junior factions really drove his agenda. How much of this was because of their power, Biden's weakness, or his senatorial bias to prioritize coalition management is hard to determine. But Trump is not politically weak and the religious right has incredible influence over his agenda. They don't get everything they want, but it's clear that Trump has consistently pursued unpopular policies through his supreme court nominations in order to satisfy them. Compare them to Obama, both Bushes, and Clinton, all of whom were able to more effectively enact moderate agendas.
Yeah, the nominations aren't great examples here, esp for the clarified question of Junior Partner Power. My first instinct is to think that maybe JPP has neither increased nor decreased: The centrifugal forces democratizing mass communication that benefit the juniors being counterbalanced by the centripetal forces of partisan identification and consolidation; lower barriers to entry with higher barriers to effectiveness. That said, it still *seems* like the ratio of Senior to Junior Partner Power is pretty lopsided and getting worse. Maybe the big change from the 1850s is that fewer areas of policy were considered "settled" between the parties then: Imagine if the issue of slavery were as agreed upon between the Senior Partners of the parties as certain questions of foreign policy are today. Idk, I'm spitballing at this point, I generally get your points.
Thanks. I appreciate the tone of the debate.
As we're seeing with the supreme court's "history and tradition" test, the challenge with historical analogues is that people with conflicting beliefs can each find a cogent argument for why the analogue supports their preexisting view. They are useful thought starters, but not argument enders.
I would quibble that Republicans in the 1850s didn’t actually build a majoritarian agenda. Lincoln got 40% of the popular vote in 1860 and only won the Electoral College because there were 3 pro-slavery candidates on the ballot.