1. Tyler Cowen was interviewed by Max Read and David Wallace-Wells a couple of weeks ago. He sees a growth in non-libertarian right-wing politics, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
That seems correct. I think that the Republicans can do well electorally by throwing libertarians under the bus. The Democrats’ best chance in a national election is to throw coastal progressives under the bus, but I don’t think they will be able to do that.
2. Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni (WSJ) wrote,
a campaign for Congress in many places starts with 60% of college-educated white women favoring the Democratic nominee. An even larger share of white men without degrees favor the Republican—making both essentially unreachable by the opposing candidate.
…The differences between the two groups are stark on many of the issues dominating the midterm campaign: immigration, gun control and health care. In each case, white men without college degrees support Mr. Trump’s policy stance, while white women with degrees are opposed.
For me, this is the most useful polling analysis that I have seen in a long time. I brought it up with a friend, and she said, “Of course, those two groups despise one another sexually, as well.”
The first story in Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest story collection, You Think it, I’ll Say it, concerns the sexual tension between a professor of gender studies attending a conference and the Trump-supporting driver who takes her from the airport to her hotel.
In movies of an earlier era, there is a theme of tension between a prim, proper, attractive woman and a blue-collar male played by an actor like Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, or James Garner. If the movie is a comedy, the man wins the affection of the woman. If it is tragedy, it ends. . .differently.
There is certainly a sexual element to it all, but I’ll posit a few other electoral findings.
If your earnings are higher than your education level would predict, you tend to favor Trump/the right. If your earnings are lower then your education level would predict you tend to favor the progressive left. This effect was really strong with Trump. I call it “unapproved success”.
If you work in an industry/profession where output is more concretely measured and based on individual performance, you tend to favor the right wing. If performance measurement is subjective and dependent on social standing, then you favor the left wing. More education tends to mean a profession is more subjective and dependent on having learned to say the right things, especially outside of STEM.
Note that those parts of tech dealing with social media are highly dependent on PR and social cache, so even if the coding itself is meritocratic the social issues are more important to success.
If your profession is wealthy, educated, and brazenly cynical you mix and match (think investment bankers or corporate lobbyists).
Can you document any unbiased research to justify any of your fanatics?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/
https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11
And like five others in the top Google results.
My observation is if GDP growth impacts your life in a positive manner, you tend to vote GOP. If not, you tend to vote democratic. For example, welfare moms and college professors tend to vote democratic, while small business owners and now blue collar whites tend to vote republican. And I know of no research to back it up.
…
Zittner and Chinni’s pre-election polling did a good job of predicting mid-term voting. At least according to Pew, whose post-election polling found very similar results with women college graduates voting Democratic 59% to 39% Republican and white men with no degree voting Republican 66% to 32%. Pew found an even bigger divide though between the young and the old. They found 67% of 18 to 29 year olds and 58% of 30 to 44 year olds voting Democrat. Older oters ages 45 and older were divided, 50% Republican, 49% Democrat.
I’m guessing the Republican Party is over at the national level and that the Democrats will control House, Senate, and the Presidency following the 2020 elections for a couple of decades.
The “vote harvesting” process by which anyone can go out and get a bunch of absentee ballots and turn them in, which worked so spectacularly in California, is pretty much the future for the rest of the country. That and all out legal warfare against Republicans in office. It is hard to say when a country has crossed the line into banana republic territory but for the US it was 2018.
These are mail ballots and not harvested by anybody and is the mirrored after the Arizona system. The reality is the last minute casual voter tends to be younger ones.
The San Diego Union Tribune describes vote harvesting in California: ““Ballot harvesting” is political jargon for a practice in which organized workers or volunteers collect absentee ballots from certain voters and drop them off at a polling place or election office.”
If not for ballot harvesting, Orange County would still be red. Per usual, the GOP was caught flat-footed.
Republican strategists identified 2012-2024 as the transition period where it would become increasingly difficult for the GOP to win nationally due to demographics. This was all before Trump, it was apparent with Romney in 2014 (who did about as well as Reagen with whites, and poorly with minorities despite being very cuck). Trump picked up the Sailer strategy which basically shows that you can piece together an electoral majority without a national majority if you win the Rust Belt, but that strategy as a limited lifetime.
And yet Romney got a higher percentage of votes than Trump against a harder opponent, an incumbent Obama. And Romney was literally a Deporter in the private sector making it hard to convince WWC he was on their side and chose a VP that was for cutting Social Security and Medicare. (Which made Trump seem more center than HRC in November 2016.)
Romney won voters in electorally uncompetitive states. Trump traded coastal educated voters for Rust Belt voters. They are worth more in the electoral college.
I think that combining the points that asdf and collin are making, you would expect someone running on Trump’s platform but without much of his shenanigans (Trump’s misogynistic shenanigans were really bad for him politically, just look at the polls after the Megan Kelly incident and the Access Hollywood tapes) to do even better than Trump pretty much everywhere, including the rust belt. Not that there are likely to be any Republicans that will follow in his footsteps; he basically ditched all that is considered holy and true to movement conservatives on the campaign trail, excepting abortion. And Trump doesn’t care enough to fight to change the Republican party and its nominating system to favor candidates willing to jettison the Republican parties most unpopular economic ideas in favor of the most popular economic ideas (i.e. protect and strengthen social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, raise taxes on the rich, expand health care coverage, spend more money on infrastructure etc.).
So…no mention of North Carolina? The only vote harvesting scheme in 2018 was run by Republicans. And the election remains uncertified.
Are there zero issues OC Republicans might have voted out their reps over? SALT deduction? Trade war? OC is a diverse, export oriented county. The Republican party was not the party of business in 2018.
SALT does hit coastal professionals, but tax deductibility of state taxes has long been a distortion that subsidizes blue state prolifigancy. Libertarian economist have been arguing for an end to such deductions for a long time. Meanwhile, taxes on business were in many cases lowered, and the increase in the standard deduction makes taxes much simpler for the working class.
We also ought to ask if, despite high incomes, coastal professionals are part of the business sector. Rather then paid foot soil diets of the government/regulation complex. Maryland is full of highly paid government contractors with fancy degrees who are not adding anything to the economy. They can eat SALT.
So I get that SALT cost Reps in coastal suburbs, but OC turned because it’s not white anymore, not because a few highly paid professionals are kicking in an extra grand or two.
This seems like an overly partisan take, putting all the blame on Democrats for what is essentially a flawed constitutional and electoral system. To put it simply, the US wasn’t set up to be able to handle ideologically distinct parties, especially when those ideologies map onto other identities (such as race, or region, or urban versus exurban/rural, or religion, etc.). The last time we had ideologically distinct parties, I believe, was in the run up to the civil war. Since we have so many checks and balances, neither side is able to actually implement their policy agenda, and face the test of whether voters actually like the results. But since the parties are ideologically distinct and geographically sorted, politics becomes more or less war by other means, a “cold civil war” as Bob Woodward has called it.
The Democrats’ best chance in a national election is to throw coastal progressives under the bus, but I don’t think they will be able to do that.
Did you see the 2018 Midterms? Although it is easy to rage against Bobo Coastal Elite, the reality was across the nation House elections all had the same vote trends. The Ds would clean up in the urban and suburban areas while Rs clean up the rural and small city vote. College educated women and increasingly men continued to move away from Trumpublicans and not all them are that well off.
And how much of 2016 was Hillary Clinton was a terrible campaign skills and her and husband’s scandals hit at all the wrong times? It is true Democrats have to understand incumbents usually win reelection in decent economies and Trump holds a electoral college advantage compared to popular vote but Trump is very unpopular for a host of reasons.
I also think that Trump is likely a once in never Republican candidate. How many Republican candidates in the future do you think are going to say they want to protect Social Security and Medicare? How many are going to say that they want to expand subsidized health coverage? How many are going to say that they want to raise taxes on billionaires?
I think that Democrats are going to go very, very hard on economic populism in upcoming elections. Given how partisanship works, I think that does not bode well for the future of the Republican party, as too many partisans who support Republicans because they hate Democrats will make unpopular economic policy a litmus test for Republican candidates.
Marlon Brando?? Not sure what RomCom you’re thinking of, but The Last Tango in Paris certainly ended … differently. Plus, the actress hated the recently deceased director for the rest of his life.
I’m pretty sure the normal non-college men remain a bit hot for the good looking college women, but it is the women’s (hypergamy?) contempt for less educated men that close off most copulations — unless the woman’s desperate enough to go bar hopping and gets drunk enough to not care who she hooks up with until the morning.
I also think women who are married with kids, even white college educated ones, were more supportive of Trump than those unmarried.
I also see Trump more often winning districts that are close (less than 60% for the winner) than the midterms showed, when he wasn’t on the ballot.
Still, the tax-funded US University indoctrination camps, which have long been practicing secret discrimination against Reps, is the biggest culture problem in America today. It needs to be talked about honestly, more often, and the college indoctrinated are filling up the media, gov’t, and, increasingly, big company bureaucracies. Big and increasing problem, that neither Trump nor Reps are talking about, much less suggesting solutions.
There was a movie about an affair between a high-status woman (Meryl Streep) and a working class man (Robert DeNiro) about 20 years ago.
It makes sense from a simple “which party is enhancing the status and furthering the interests of people like me” analysis.
I think an even more important sexual impact on voting is the “marriage gap” between married and unmarried women, which is most pronounced for white females because of even more dramatic racial gaps.
As for the GOP and Libertarians, I would put it the opposite way, which is that libertarians would do better – that is, expand their intellectual influence and better achieve elements of their preferred policy agenda – if they could adopt a Perpetuationist perspective and compromise on points that harm the electoral prospects of the Republican party which, for all the criticisms it clearly deserves, is still, and will certainly remain by a longshot, the only game in town for those who think the state should be limited and have a smaller role in peoples lives.
Instead, most prominent libertarians find it expedient to maintain respectability by focusing on initiatives that don’t trigger the objections of high status progressives, which – by means of the ideological-electoral feedback mechanism – almost always also means they are good for Democratic Party politics. I believe you referred to this earlier as behaving like a naive and deluded mistress hoping her lover will leave his wife for her. This is a suicidally counterproductive approach in the long-term.
Maybe there is a bit of disillusionment with the Republican party? In the past twenty years or so, the party has controlled congress and the presidency, and so far as I can tell, all libertarians got out of that was tax cuts. And tax cuts don’t convince anyone that libertarians have good ideas or an accurate world view. So maybe a lot of libertarians are thinking that they have tried and failed to influence Republicans, so it might make sense to see if they can influence Democrats.
Looks like the libertarians have already had great success in influencing the Democrats to support open borders, legalized pot and letting felons out of jail. Unless you entertain the crazy idea that the Dems would have supported these ideas anyway, for cynical, self-serving reasons of their own.
Good luck to libertarians naïve enough to believe that they will have more influence with the Democrats than they’ve had with the GOP. In case they haven’t noticed, the Dems are now becoming even more antagonistic to free market principles than they’ve been in the past.
Oh well, maybe the libertarians will convince Dems to get behind ending the licensing the hair-braiders. What a victory that would be!
Well, considering that Scandinavian countries are arguably more libertarian than the US, just with higher taxes and a larger welfare state (just look at those international rankings), I don’t think that it is crazy for libertarian to try to forge a liberal/libertarian fusion. Conceptually it is very easy to see how to combine a free market economy with a very light regulatory touch and a large welfare state, and there are reasons to think that such a combination might be politically popular and stable over time. I don’t see how you can reconcile libertarian ideas with the party of Trump.
So, in other words, libertarians should just redefine themselves as Scandinavian welfare statists. Fine with me, but then, I’m not a libertarian.
You seem to view the most important achievable goal for libertarians as reducing regulation of economic activity, accepting that the welfare state and the tax rates necessary to support it are here to stay (which has been obvious for about 70 years, but nice to see libertarians catch up with reality). Fine, but Trump, regardless of his other faults, is actually cutting business regulation – the exact opposite of what Obama did. There is no reason to believe that a future Dem administration or Congress will be interested in cutting regulation. In fact, the Dems want to start regulating speech, which was previously thought to be immune from content regulation under the First Amendment. But if you libertarians, with your vast popular appeal, think they can persuade the Dems to change course, knock yourselves out.
I tend to agree with Handle that the libertarians are more concerned with being accepted by their upscale progressive peers and avoiding association with icky, unfashionable conservatives.
Welfare states work when you have:
1) A high productivity population that can generate surplus
2) High trust homogenous populations that follow the rules even when you don’t have to
3) A welfare state whose mechanisms emphasize personal responsibility as much as possible (for instance, forced savings is better than transfer payments. social insurance better than welfare).
Outside of those contexts they haven’t worked too well. Even in Sweden just see how well the welfare state works with the Muslim imports. Not very well.
@asdf
I agree with you about how things work in practice, but the problem libertarians face isn’t about finding what is the theoretically optimal policies, but findings ways to substantially move US policy and law in a more libertarian direction. The whole fusionist project with conservatives has turned out to be a failure, or maybe just run its course, depending on how you view the deregulation of Carter and Regan; all that libertarians have really been able to get for their efforts over the past three decades are lower taxes (and maybe you can count charter schools as a success as well). However, I think that the example of charter schools is instructive, as was the example of deregulation in the late ’70’s and ’80’s. Both of those are things that had some amount of bipartisan support. My suspicion is that libertarians are at their most effective when they aren’t partisan, but instead look to find areas where there is potential for bipartisan support for libertarian policy.
@djf
All that you say may well be the case.
I don’t really consider myself a libertarian; I view myself as more of a technocratic liberal (maybe Whig is the right word to describe that?). However, as a technocratic liberal, I do think that the US is way over-regulated in all sorts of ways, and I have been convinced of this by libertarians who have tried to find an audience among liberals, which is why I think it may well be worth the effort for libertarians to try to seek common ground with liberals.
It seems to me that the Trump lesson is that the Democratic Party and Republican Party are just formalized slot names with squishy identities. Whoever becomes President provides the ideological dividing line for a particular time, but it resets with each administration. Associating a particular demographic with loyalty to one of the parties is a mistake. The candidates matter, not the parties.
For me, this is the most useful polling analysis that I have seen in a long time. I brought it up with a friend, and she said, “Of course, those two groups despise one another sexually, as well.”
This seems overstated. The two groups self-segregate, largely, and don’t date across this class divide, but “despise” feels like too strong a word.
“despise” is exactly the word from the college educated women who mostly don’t actually know many unmarried responsible less educated guys, and seldom interact with them on any “equal social” level.
The normal high school only plumbers seldom, if ever, actually despise the co-eds. They more often dream of being with “an Uptown Girl, who’s been living in her white bread world”; but they expect to be with such cuties about as much as they expect to be with Harley-riding calendar girls they hang up on the walls.
However, it’s convenient for the Dems to believe that both sides despise each other, just like they like to say both sides are extreme, both sides are polarized, both sides are terrible … yet I only see the Dems being terrible, extreme, and polarized. Dems who are elected; Dems who are paid on TV; Dems who are paid as professors. Yes, the extreme Dems getting paid on TV can find some unpaid Trump supporter being extreme, but the “establishment” extremism I see all comes from the Dems.
Internationally, one can call them the Left — but it is Dems on the ballots, not “Leftists”. The power of the Dems comes from their votes.
How much longer will the Dems get 90% of the black vote? I predict Trump gets over 15% and won’t be surprised if he gets 20% of the 2020 black vote.
Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, or James Garner.
James Garner? What movies, let me see.. Looked, when he was macho it was generally a satire.
I would leave him off and add Bogart, as in African Queen. The classic dufas male is Slim Pickens in 1942 and Dr. Strangelove.
The Democrats’ best chance in a national election is to throw coastal progressives under the bus
I doubt it would be that extreme; the Democrats won California quite handily and certainly don’t want to jeopardize that. If they’re shrewd, they’ll treat coastal progressives like they treat black people. There are only two parties bidding for their votes, and the other party’s bid is always “screw you”. A bid of “I won’t screw you unless there’s something in it for me” wins that auction.
Progressives give blacks a lot. Welfare. Corporate sinecures. Cultural power. Control of very valuable real estate.
What exactely do you think they should be doing for black people that they aren’t already doing? I think that relative to their contribution to society, blacks are getting a lot more then they give. Progressives can’t make them high IQ. They can’t pay janitors like doctors. They can’t be even more lenient on crime then they are. I think blacks have understood this and it’s part of why they stick with Hillary types. What does Bernie Sanders free college do for them. Most wont go to college and those that do have schools bending over backwards to woo them.
Asdf,
Yes, isn’t it remarkable how successful blacks have been in taking advantage of the smarter races.
It’s surprising all that extra intelligence wasn’t more of an advantage for us.
Generally they want to be less overrepresented in prisons and less underrepresented in highly paid jobs; less hassled by the cops and less likely to send their kids to horrible schools. Whether these desires could be satisfied in practice is an open question. Since about the 1970s the Democrats haven’t really pushed for any of these things at the national level, presumably because they think pushing would cost more white votes than it would gain black votes. When’s the last time you heard a national politician pushing for reduced policing, expanding affirmative action, or bussing black kids to better schools*? The Republicans are more likely to be on the opposite side of these issues (tough on crime and indifferent to both public schools and discrimination claims).
If you live in a majority black city like Baltimore or Detroit, it may be different at the local level.
I think that relative to their contribution to society, blacks are getting a lot more then they give
That’s true of a lot of groups, like investment bankers. Politics is about power, not fairness. Investment bankers have lots of power; the black working class has much less. That’s why the welfare state has diminished greatly since the ’70s but the carried interest deduction (beloved of bankers) isn’t going anywhere.
* Bussing was a big idea in the 1970s. Predictably, most of the white families left the affected schools for the suburbs and the newly-black schools went downhill fast.
* Bussing was a big idea in the 1970s. Predictably, most of the white families left the affected schools for the suburbs and the newly-black schools went downhill fast.
Most of the teachers stayed. Funding was the same or higher. Why, oh why did the schools go downhill?
Or did they?
They did. Read Joshua Dunn’s Complex Justice.
We are about as light on crime as we can get. My wife’s experience on a Baltimore jury for a violent black on black assault actually drove this home to an absurd degree. Baltimore was very friendly to the BLM movement and all it got us was more murders.
Affirmative action already is worth hundreds of SAT points. Hard to see how it could get any bigger. I guess we could go full Malaysia, that is my fear if we go majority non-white.
“Good schools” are just schools without blacks. The second blacks show up the school “goes downhill”. This happened in Baltimore City in the 1970s but has been happening in Baltimore County over the last two decades. Owings Mills “went black” and became a “bad school”. Lock Raven is heading in the same direction. As blacks move out of the city they trashed into the county school districting discussions have generally become charged affairs. Bottom line is you can’t bus the problem of low black IQ and misbehavior away.
Once you accept that genetics is the problem most blacks face, you realize that there is nothing much that can be done that isn’t already being done.
I did say that Baltimore might be different. In other places the trend has been to be tougher on crime (e.g. “three strikes” laws, “truth in sentencing” laws, “broken windows” policing, etc.).
And you may be right, but that’s not going to stop black people from trying to use what power they have to make their lives better. Nor should it.
Does it make their lives better?
If you’re a member of the black middle class, school busing and soft on crime attitudes are really bad for you. In fact it’s WAY easier for lower class blacks to move in near middle class blacks. And their children are way more likely to fall in with a bad crowd if it does move in because they are the same race. Sure, you don’t want to admit to an “anti-black” stance because it could hurt your status, but I don’t see any desire on these peoples part to be actively revolutionary.
For the black lower class, none of these reforms really provide more than temporary or muted positive impacts. So you chased the whites out of another high school. Or got another criminal released onto your own streets. Meh. I think that people, even black people, had high hopes of these kinds of reforms in the 1970s, but since they failed nobody except young people with no memory has any passion for going through all that again.
So while the official line has never changed, what I mostly see is anyone over 30 acknowledging that this is about as good as we can do. And thank god they do. Do we really need the 1970s failures all over again.
But when you take these “tough on crime” things away all that seems to happen is that crime increases in the ghetto.
I’m sure there are some smart arguments out there for certain targeted reforms, but I don’t think anything earth shattering is on the horizon. Meanwhile, the heated rhetoric surrounding the issues hurts more than helps.
I pretty much agree with you, but I can’t blame lower-class blacks for trying. What else can they do?