Steve Teles and Robert Saldin wrote,
there is no politically viable future for moderates outside the Democratic and Republican parties. And within those parties, moderates will only get the power that they desire by organizing as a coherent bloc, recruiting attractive candidates, mobilizing moderate voters in each party to participate in partisan politics, and developing ideas to inspire their base and provide opportunities for policy change. Without strong, durable, organizationally-dense factions, individual moderates or even entire state parties will not be able to distinguish themselves from their national brand or fight for leverage in national politics. In other words, what influence moderates will have in the coming years will only emerge as a result of organizing as coherent minority factions within the Democratic and Republican parties.
As a thought experiment, imagine a 1990s moderate today. What policies that are in place now would appear right-wing to such a moderate? What policies would appear left-wing?
I have just started to read the authors’ new book that takes a look inside the Never Trump movement. It could be a scholarly work or a vehicle for gossip. But if it turns out to be too scholarly, I’ll be disappointed. That would be like getting old issues of Playboy with nothing but the articles.
For right-wing ideas, I’ll say the forever war, the existence of a Department of Homeland Security, NSA surveillance of electronic communications as the default, and bankruptcy “reform”. The changes toward the left are more cultural than policy-driven, but gay marriage is a policy that didn’t exist back then. The Affordable Care Act may count, if you live in one of the markets where the name isn’t hideously ironic.
This seems patently wrong given that the Democratic Party just categorically rejected Sanders and Warren in favor of Biden.
Nobody considers Biden an attractive candidate with inspiring ideas.
So it’s a lot easier to read what happened as the Democrats rejecting more attractive candidates with outlandish and extreme policy proposals.
Where is Biden in relation to Bill Clinton?
Biden says transgender rights is the new civil rights. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act and had V-Chips and school uniforms.
Biden says he wants to expand Obamacare. Bill Clinton completely abandoned healthcare reform after his wife’s plan polled badly.
Biden is de facto open borders. Bill Clinton and the entire 1996 democratic platform was astoundly anti illegal immigrants. Remember when he had a SWAT team raid that home and send the cuban boy back to Cuba.
Bill Clinton passed the crime bill. People like Bloomberg are apologizing for stop and frisk.
If Biden 2020 ran against Bill Clinton 1996, he would be considered a far left fringe candidate.
A man who did his honeymoon on the Soviet Union just got 1/3 of the vote in a field of a dozen candidates and won outright majorities of people under 40 and Hispanics.
Another way to put it is where is Joe Biden of 2020 in relation to Joe Biden of 1990?
Clearly, you’re correct that overall we’ve moved massively to the left. But Biden was in the middle both then and now.
I think what the article is getting at, vs. what Kling asks and you respond to, are somewhat different questions.
It could rightly be said that Moderates, like the US in Vietnam, win every nearly tactical victory but still lose the war, because the underlying battlefield keeps shifting left.
I don’t think we have a good theory of this phenomenon. It’s obviously not a coincidence, but calling it a conspiracy and framing it in some sort of dramatic terms comes out sounding like ridiculous Moldbugism that presumes we should be eagerly expecting war and concentration camps.
My incomplete view is that societally we have always been unwilling to argue against really bad, stupid ideas. It’s easier just to ignore them most of the time, and there are costs to arguing against them.
But as costs of communication have fallen, these ideas less frequently die on their own, and even within academic and purely scientific circles, the the marginal dollars are going to bad and unnecessary ideas because it’s increasingly hard to distinguish bad from good
CHINA VIRUS killed liberalism
Journalists? BAD
American made? GOOD
Plastic? GOOD
Chemicals? GOOD
Borders? GOOD
Vaccines? GOOD
Globalism? BAD
Climate Change?
Can’t stop a virus from spreading = can’t stop the weather from changing.
Costco? GOOD
Trump? GREAT
Socialism? BAD
Prayer? Maybe? 🙂
The two party system is not well matched to the discontinuities of legislative skew between Senate and House.
I know the two party system is our only hope, short of a wave of common sense, but it fails predictably. Once the predicted failure becomes know, then it is every special interest for themselves. We are at the regularly scheduled failure of the two party system, the result is default.
I think the political center is an illusion created by the Overton window, and a lack of awareness of that window’s tendency to drift randomly. There is no such thing as a centrist position over time, only what is centered in the window at a particular moment in history.
Right.
It is no shame to say our government screws up now and then, causing the center to shift around.
The shame is on those who think otherwise, or think that we can fix this without cost. I think is it provable that our government is erratic. But it is not that big of a deal, mostly, as long as we all accept a bit of reality.
“Visions of submission” is more accurate. The piece would make a fine sociology classroom exercise for teaching students about “the iron law of oligarchy.”
The Britannica site explains: “ Iron law of oligarchy, sociological thesis according to which all organizations, including those committed to democratic ideals and practices, will inevitably succumb to rule by an elite few (an oligarchy). The iron law of oligarchy contends that organizational democracy is an oxymoron. Although elite control makes internal democracy unsustainable, it is also said to shape the long-term development of all organizations—including the rhetorically most radical—in a conservative direction.”
Joel Kotkin writes persuasively on this phenomenon in an article entitled Oligarchy and Pestilence at realclearenergy . People are not rejecting the parties because they are in search of some baby-splitting moderation, they are seeking radical reforms that rein in the corrupt self-serving rule of the oligarchs plundering the nation in bureaucracy, education, business, and law.
The piece is not bad by Niskanen standards, it gets two things right: people who want radical reforms need to organize and participate, and given the limited democratic outlets available elsewhere, working within the primary process is a necessary first step. But radical constitutional reform is the only answer to the current corruption. A constitutional convention to adopt a Swiss-style constitution should be the second step.