Too Left or Not Too Left

Photo by Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters, via.

One thing on the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the Democrats' vice presidential candidate that I think it's up to me to say, because it's about one of my hobbyhorses, in the face of the fatwah issued by ayatollah Jonathan Chait:

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Need to Pivot to the Center Right Now

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. (I guess Chait means "the center right! now!" rather than "the center! right now!", but both are problematic.) 

He doesn't bother to specify what exactly they need to do in terms of policy, other than suggesting that Walz needs to back off of "providing free health care to unauthorized immigrants"—because Chait thinks it's politically more advantageous to punish the undocumented than it is to protect the broader public against the spread of a deadly pandemic ("Healthcare exclusions contribute to extreme inequities...Latinx Minnesotans have died of COVID-19 at twice the age-adjusted rate of white Minnesotans and their age-adjusted ICU-admittance rate for COVID-19 is nearly four times higher"). It's "moderate", for Chait, to force a susceptible subgroup of the population to seek care in the emergency room or just die untreated, and what you need right now is that kind of "moderation":

Left, Right, and Enter

 

You guys have seen the map before. I've written it up longer, and I hope more coherent, with new material, and corrected French history (which now looks very poorly done in the old post, especially the art history), so there's a lot to read that you haven't read. It was also a lot of work, which is a reason I haven't been here much, so I hope you'll all read it.

Left But Not Left Behind

 

Mercator projection with Tissot's indicatrixes of distortion in the form of the red circles, each of which represents an area with a 10,000-kilometer diameter. Image by Justin Kumimune via Wikipedia.

A brief encounter with some Naderite yielded a pretty good analogy

That's ironic. At least a flat earth would have two dimensions, whereas your perspective is to insist that there's only one, the single line from L to R.

— Yaslight (@Yastreblyansky) May 8, 2022

it's kind of spectacular how much he didn't get it:

If you want to get granular, you can subdivide them into various other "axes". But broadly speaking, you can compress them into a single spectrum that moves left to right.

— Jonathan Hibberd 🌹🏳️‍🌈☯️🍣 (@kageneko) May 8, 2022

Yes indeed, you can, and you can flatten a globe into a Mercator projection,  but when you're planning global activities you don't pretend to believe that Greenland is really twice the size of South America or that Anchorage is 25,000 miles from Vladivostok. Making a practical use of the left-right spectrum as a basis for decision making is like deliberately setting out to make yourself an order of magnitude dumber than a flat-earther.

Heuristics

 

Vie The Decision Lab,

You know who lost big in yesterday's election? Both sides—I mean, both sides of the "progressive"-"centrist" debate among Democratic party strategists. In Virginia, old-hat neoliberal Terry McAuliffe seems to have lost, just barely, to an empty-suit multimillionaire and the threat of Critical Race Theory. In New Jersey, Phil Murphy, one of the nation's most progressive governors, may or may not have just barely squeaked through against an empty-suit multimillionaire and the threat of "schools teaching sodomy in sixth grade." 

Murphy's bête noire, New Jersey Senate president Stephen Sweeney, ally of Camden kingpin George Norcross and leader of one of the most obstructionist "centrist" factions of Democrats, seems to be losing, also just barely, his own seat, which he's held for 20 years, in what they inevitably call a "stunning upset": 

Why I Hate The New York Times: Centripetality

Josh Gottheimer gets a commitment from the Speaker, 24 August. Via.

 

Josh Marshall does an excellent job of skewering the dreadful New York Times reporting on what happened yesterday on Capitol Hill, according to which the House's failure to vote on the "BIF" (Bipartisan InFrastructure bill, though it's getting less bipartisan every day as its few Republican supporters dwindle in number and commitment) is a "significant setback" for Biden's agenda produced by a "liberal revolt" and a "humiliating blow to Biden and Democrats" ("Something's Very Wrong With the Times"):

The president’s goal throughout has been both bills. They both have to pass. The last week has appeared to be on a steady course toward decoupling the two bills, passing the BIF bill and then facing negotiations over a reconciliation bill with no leverage at all over the two Senate holdouts who seem increasingly happy to let the reconciliation bill die on the vine. This is far from over. But what really happened is that the threat to kill the BIF bill got the two holdouts or at least Joe Manchin to actually start negotiating. What the Times calls a “significant setback” and a “humiliating blow” is actually the two bills being recoupled which has been the White House’s aim literally for the entire time.... But the outcome of yesterday is th[e] first good news supporters of the President’s agenda have gotten in days. Not seeing that means having a profoundly distorted understanding of the most basic dynamics at play here.

But he's not so clear on what exactly is wrong with the paper—what exactly is the profound distortion, and where does it come from? 

Joe Did What? Ideology Edition

Via Unwanted.

Let me try from a different direction:

There is something better happening at the moment than in the Clinton (certainly) or Obama (probably) presidencies. Though Biden is officially to the "right" of Obama (certainly) or Clinton (possibly—way to the right of Hillary Clinton, anyhow), he seems to find himself leaping into things that are "left". Why would that be?

One possibility is that there's some kind of disconnect between the "left"-ness of the president's personal identity and the "left"-ness of the things she or he does. Is that possible?

Joe Did What? Abolishing ICE

This is very cool. Biden doing surprisingly awesome things and I'm here for it.

Making Chapo and Greenwald look like idiots is just icing on the cake. https://t.co/VK7tgAltET

— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) February 5, 2021

All respect to Atkins, but as I say keep saying I don't think we should be that surprised. It's the mistake of taking the ideological spectrum, left to right, as a literally existing phenomenon with an unambiguous place for every politician to inhabit, and then trying to predict what Biden is going to do on the basis of his place—as measured, say, by his DW-Nominate score as a senator, which put him well to the right of Senator Obama, who was well to the right of Senator Clinton, who was well to the right of Senator Warren, who is to the right of almost nobody—and it just isn't a smart way to look at Biden, because it's so distant, I believe, from the way he thinks.

As illustrated perhaps in one of my favorites so far in those "Joe did what?" moments, the rules he's imposing on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), requiring them to stop hounding basically harmless members of the undocumented community

For the Record: Biden's Proposal

You wouldn't fuss about moving the Overton window if it was a big enough window. You wouldn't even want to. Photo via.

Incredibly impressed with myself over this tribute from my favorite moderately famous economics professor.

That started with a quick Twitter version of an argument I feel like I've been making forever, attached in this case to the Biden Covid relief proposal-package, which is pretty amazing:

Whig measures & Tory men!

— Brad DeLong: 'Live long, & prosper!' (@delong) January 15, 2021

Well, sort of. Lovestoneite measures and Whiggish men and women, more like, in my case, but it's the same principle, where you might talk about widening the Overton window instead of moving it.

But I do feel tremendously justified by the radical character of this Biden package, with its demands for

For the Record: Why the Affordable Care Act Will Survive

Photo by CQ Roll Call via Forbes.

 

 A heavy Twitter day, sorry. Some more arguments with friends:

There's too much Grassley in it. We need to get it rewritten by a committee with fewer Republicans.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

That I have never believed. Huge financialized corporations--hospitals, insurers--have a very big stake in preserving it, and finding for Texas would cause serious chaos https://t.co/kdHUAkVLFi. The Court cares more about them than it does about Trump.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 24, 2020

Brooks on Biden's Green New Deal (Spoiler: He doesn't know it's there)

Mary Pickford in D.W. Griffith's The Hessian Renegades (1909), via Fritzi.

David Brooks Self-Shorter (President Biden's First Day):

Joe Biden may turn out to be what radical centrism looks like.

Then again, who can say? David Brooks has been talking about "radical centrism" for years and he still doesn't know what it looks like. 

David Brooks interviews Joe Biden:

I asked him to describe the big forces that have flattened working-class wages over the past decades. Other people would have spun grand theories about broken capitalism or the rise of the corporate oligarchy. But Biden pointed to two institutional failures — the way Republicans have decentralized power and broken Washington and the way Wall Street forces business leaders to focus obsessively on the short term.

He spun a grand theory about broken capitalism and the rise of the corporate oligarchy, but he didn't use any mean or divisive language, so Brooks didn't notice. Maybe. What does "the way Republicans have decentralized power" refer to? Is that a phrase Biden actually used, or a garbled expression in Brooks's notepad, or something Brooks simply made up? Here's how Biden's website accounts for stagnant wages:

For the Record: A note on passion and politics

Captain Picard in genuine fake bronze, $74.87 from Amazon. 

I'm a passionate Democrat and believer in democracy. I don't believe in personality cults and Great Men but in broad political movements. There are reasons the party majority is choosing this guy I haven't been crazy about and I'm starting to understand them. It's a good choice.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 2, 2020

That godlike charisma thing that John Kennedy and Barack Obama had is a valuable thing in electoral politics, and of particular interest to the young male voter (the same population sector that lets itself get recruited into war fighting), and apparently Senator Bernard Sanders has some of that too, though it's hard for me to see, since I've been around people like him all my life, as I've pointed out before, but it has its limits, especially, in the American system, in the way it doesn't carry over into those midterm elections like 2010 and 2014, if only because the young male voter really can't be counted on to remember to vote. And it's not the only effective way of rousing politically effective emotion.

Biden has that ability to convey the impression that, as James Clyburn said, "He knows us," or he really does know us, as the case may be. Either way, he worked it brilliantly in two presidential elections as Obama's deputy, and he seems to have been working it pretty well in this year's primaries up until the appearance of the plague brought it all to a kind of standstill where we feel too shaken to understand what's going on.

Spectrum Disorder

Photo by Bill McCullough, New York Magazine, April 2019.

Hillary Clinton ran a David Brooks-style campaign in 2016 and tore apart the Obama coalition. She suffered the worst Democratic Electoral College results since 1988. https://t.co/hRqlCsvpFF

— The Nation (@thenation) July 6, 2019

This turned out to be a post by Jeet Heer, and not nearly as idiotic as The Nation's teaser makes it look; he was thinking not of the celebrated public philosopher of centripetality David Brooks and a campaign such as Brooks might design on the basis of his own political thinking, but of the fictional David Brooks who was the protagonist of Brooks's column of 28 June, looking for a Democratic presidential candidate he could support. But it was kind of idiotic:

The best thing about Brooks’s column is his frank use of the first person singular. Although he makes gestures to other hypothetical moderate voters, he is candid that the question is whether the Democrats will nominate someone “I can vote for.” This “I” is honest, since Brooks is speaking for a tiny faction, Never Trump conservatives, who twice demonstrated in 2016 that they were a powerless rump minority in the real world of politics.

But he's wrong about that for starters, since Brooks in fact isn't honest at all—he claimed at the outset to be speaking for 35% of the electorate:

Left Behind

Kevin Kühnert. Photo by Tibor Boz/Redux/laif vie Die Zeit.

In a nice piece on Kevin Kühnert, leader of the youth organization of Germany's Social Democratic party, who is trying to bring back socialism into the party's conversation, Jochen Bittner in The Times reminds them that our DSA politicians really aren't:

Forget the wannabe socialism of American Democrats like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 29-year-old Mr. Kühnert is aiming for the real thing. Socialism, he says, means democratic control over the economy. He wants to replace capitalism as such, not just to recalibrate it.

In the United States, policies frequently branded as “socialist” — health care for all, a national minimum wage, and tuition-free universities — have very little to do with actual socialism. Big government, yes — but all of them fit comfortably in a traditional free-market economy.

In contrast, German neo-socialism is profoundly different from capitalism. In an interview with my newspaper, Mr. Kühnert took specific aim at the American dream as a model for individual achievement. He said he questioned a system “in which millions start a race, very few make it over the finishing line and then shout back to the others, ‘You could have made it, too!’”

Kühnert wants collective ownership of industry—by the workers, not the state—and an end to the home real estate investment market: