Monthly Archives: May 2021

To: The Libs; Interested PartiesFrom: A New FriendRe: Wedging the crap out of the new working-class party phonies

If you havent seen it yet, my padna James Carville is on one this week. In a Honey Badgeresque Vox interview, which was helpfully transcribed for the faculty-lounge Yankees who cant decipher his clipped Cajun, Carville laid out the problems he sees with his party in the wake of a narrow victory over a world-historical buffoon that also resulted in the loss of congressional seats.

Carvilles concern is a practical one: An imbalance in the Senate, Electoral College, and to a lesser degree the House gives working-class white voters disproportionate sway in our politics. Thats just a fact. And it isnt going anywhere, no matter how it makes you feel.

Democrats who want to win campaigns need to come up with a plan to address this fact and not just fantasize about Joe Manchin getting hit by falling piano, suffering amnesia, and waking up wanting to end the filibuster, add three new states, and coin a new tagline for Ocean Breeze soap.

As Carville says:

Heres the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. Thats the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.

The last sentence is the key. Hes not suggesting Democrats try to dominate rural America. But he recognizes that, as a matter of national political survival, Democrats must claw back part of their old coalition.

His advice for doing it:

I concur on all three, but Id like to revise and extend the third item. Because Democrats dont just need to do a better job branding the benefits of the Biden agenda.

They need to make the working class Republican party pay for opposing them.

From my vantage point Republicans are giving the left a massive opportunity to wedge them.

Consider:

Following the 2020 defeat the Republicans plan for moving forward is to

Wink.

In sum, the Republican plan is to stick with the Trump coalition, hope to attract some working-class minorities, and make it harder for Democratic groups to vote.

You might not like that plan, but its viable. Theres a path to victory for Republicans thereespecially in the midterm but absolutely in 2024, too. Theres only one weakness in it. Are you ready?

Republican politicians tried to stop Bidens (popular) programs which help working-class voters.

Sure, they have gone hard-populist on cultural issuesas God is their witness, theyll never cave on trans athletes (well, almost never). They will rant and rave about Dr. Seusss self-cancelation. But what are they gonna do? Tell voters, Vote for me and Ill pass a law forcing the Seuss estate to publish everything, forever. Promise to hold a hearing about drag-queen story hour?

On the real parts of populismthe parts where legislators vote on bills that change the tax code or give working parents a benefit to help pay for the cost of raising kidsRepublicans are in large part still stuck in the Tea Party / Chamber of Commerce days.

If anything, Republicans are sitting in the sour spot of populist economics. You get Marco Rubio tweeting that he wants to use the government to punish woke corporations if they dont support his conception of the common goodbut then hes going to oppose Bidens attempt to raise the corporate tax rate in order to fund a bigger social support network for workers.

If Democrats cant make a guy like Rubio pay for those conflicting positions, then theyre going to lose at least the House. And theyll deserve to.

Because Republicans are going to be in the position of being anti-corporate when it comes to popular companies endorsing popular issues and pro-corporate when it comes to companies keeping the former guys tax breaks.

At least Josh Hawley is putting some meat on his kayfabe, proposing a $1,000 cash bonus for families with kids under 13 (alongside his lonely vote against legislation aiming to address anti-Asian hate crimes). But thats not going anywhere. And the main body of the GOP will never get behind itespecially not when it would be Joe Biden signing the deal in the Oval Office.

This disconnect between the Republicans new coalition and what they are willing to actually support hands the ice pick to the Democrats and begs them to use it.

Politics is about expanding your coalition while creating wedges in the other side.

A Navigator poll in February showed that half of Republicans making less than $50,000 a year were worried that the government would not do enough to help regular people suffering from COVID-19 fallout.

And then every Republican voted against Bidens American Rescue package.

How do Democrats take advantage?

(1) It starts with Carvilles suggestion about branding the Biden agenda. Yes there were the $1,400 checks. But what else was in the COVID package? What are the three items in either the rescue package or the infrastructure bill that workers can grasp and know are improving their lives? Can non-political obsessives answer that question right now? I dont think so. Democrats need to change that ASAP. Biden will have a first crack at that in tonights big speech.

(2) Dare the Republicans to live up to their rhetoric. Cant get a $15 minimum wage through Manchin and Sinema? Then cut a deal that gets them on board for a smaller number. Call Cottons bluff on his $10 minimum wage proposal by offering a $12 or $11 compromise and watch him buckle. Do the same with Ernst, Lee, and Rubio on Paid Family Leave.

(3) Find the most tangible, popular items with working-class voters. Not bullshit pablum about economic securitywere talking about actual benefits. Get them into legislation, get them voted onand then relentlessly crush any Republicans who opposes them. In the case of the popular stuff that was already in the American Rescue Plan, every single R is already on the hook.

(4) Figure out how to tell this story inside the R information bubble. Yes, that means adsbut if you wanna get really crazy, go on Fox and talk about it. If the host badgers you about fiscal responsibility and pay fors then youre doing the wedge thing right.

Put in a more Twitter friendly format:

Push economic agenda items that are popular with working-class voters. Watch Republicans vote against them. Beat them over the head with these votes. Ignore all the faculty lounge/Latinx bullshit.

Every single day Democrats should wake up and ask themselves, What am I doing to make sure working-class voters know exactly how we helped themand how Republicans tried to stop us?

As a former Republican, is this my dream politics? Not really, no.

Do I wish we could create a big, beautiful technocratic centrist party that was restrained in its view of what government could do effectively? That paired new programs with cutting wasteful ones? Sure thing.

But at the moment, thats just a fantasy, no more realistic than the progressive dream of killing the filibuster and moving 150,000 liberals to Cheyenne.

Make the GOP own the insurrection and the bigoted, conspiratorial crazy in the suburbs. And make them own blocking economic help in working-class communities. Be relentless about it. Thats the whole ballgame.

Because heres the thing: Republicans are betting that working-class whites only care about the culture-war populism and dont actually give a crap about populists economics.

Now maybe thats right and maybe Republicans will be able to ride online cancel culture to victory while also fighting to make sure that Mark Zuckerberg never pays a dime more in taxes.

And if they are right, then youre probably screwed.

But if Democrats are going to have any hope of growing their coalition further, the best move on the board is to try to bring the R-margins among working-class white voters down a few points. Shift the GOP margins with these folks from Saddam Hussein-level blowouts to normal levels of dominance. Move from 80-20 to 72-28.

If it works, that shift, combined with maintaining the existing Democratic majority would be enough to net a few Senate seats in 2022 and go into 2024 with a winning coalition that Joe Biden is better suited to hold together than basically any other living politician.

See the rest here:

Memo to Dems: Call The GOPs Populist Bluff - The Bulwark

Where Hawley is most far afield is in talking about content moderation. This is a broad, thorny issue that essentially concerns what kinds of posts a social network should allow and what kind it shouldnt. Big companies like Facebook employ thousands of third-party content moderators who help keep social networks free of the flood of gore, animal abuse, child porn, and other ghastly material that is being constantly uploaded to these platforms. At a scale of millions or billions of users, content moderation decisions carry a huge potential impact. For that and other reasons, these systems are far from perfectand reflect corporate policies that are often political in nature, privileging some types of speech over othersbut without them, most popular websites and platforms would be almost impossible to use. Its a flawed system crying out for reform, public education, and debate; its also all we have right now.

Conservative commentators like Hawley have no understanding of these complexities. To them, content moderation is censorshipfull stop. Its an inhibitor of free speech and a way of coercing users into behaviors and modes of thought that Silicon Valley prefers. Its another manifestation of Big Techs progressive social agendapro-LGBT, pro-abortion, proBlack Lives Matter. Instead of quoting academics, content moderators, or anyone else with a hand in this misunderstood industry, Hawley turns to a pseudonymous Facebook whistleblower, from whom we learn, in muddled terms, about some internal Facebook tools that the company uses to manage content moderation and sometimes coordinate decisions with other companies. In Hawleys view, this is only further evidence of the perfidy of content moderation, which he depicts as a concerted censorship regime designed to promote liberal policies. (To that end, Hawley approvingly cites a widely discredited study by a man named Robert Epstein, who claimed that Google search suggestions shifted millions of votes to Hillary Clinton in 2016.)

Hawley may be smarter than this, but put-on ignorance is a feature of a Republican leadership that would rather deny its elite credentials. (At one point, Hawley disparagingly refers to the founders of Google as Silicon Valley PhD students without acknowledging that they attended Stanford at the same time that he was an undergraduate there.) Fusing the false populism of Trumpism with a Republican establishment that has never seen a tax cut it doesnt like, Hawleys proposed solutions to our Big Tech problem are lacking. He says nothing about strengthening unions or raising corporate tax rates. He says little about actually breaking up companies or using the power of the Department of Justice and regulatory agencies to check tech behavior. He seems to want it both ways, aspiring to a more activist, trust-busting government while never actually promising substantive interventions, since he must maintain his congenital opposition to big government.

Some of Hawleys ideas, like his proposed Do Not Track legislation to give users more ability to opt out of online surveillance, bear consideration, or at least are founded in worthwhile principles. He seems aghast at the scope of digital surveillance, though he overlooks the U.S. governments own complicity in this state of affairs. He wants a new Glass-Steagall Act for the tech sector [that] would halt techs march into every industry in America and circumscribe its dominance over American life, but he says nothing about other forms of corporate consolidation and influence. Other suggestions seem insignificant or misguided: Hawley would like to ban the infinite scrolling of the Facebook news feed and YouTubes autoplay feature, saying they enmesh users in addictive habits. Hed also like to raise the legal age to open a social media account from 13 to 16 and require that users submit an ID. Perhaps most significantly, he would like to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Acta brief but profoundly influential law that essentially immunizes internet companies from legal liability for the content posted on their services. Hawley seems to have little idea of how to replace it (or what the consequences of not doing so might be).

See more here:

Is Josh Hawley Serious About Taking On Big Tech? - The New Republic

Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar deconstruct the nationalist-populist conspiracy narratives that seek to divide and rule

It is of no wonder that the right-wing commentariat greeted the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities Government-commissioned report with unalloyed joy. The report seeks to divide communities of colour against one another and validates a crucial element of the current national-populist narrative: the concept of the white working-class.

This narrative alleges that a liberal, cosmopolitan elite is flooding the country with immigrant workers, in the interests of global finance capital.

The cosmopolitan elite concept is not a new idea or an exclusively British one a virulent version was around in the 1930s, and the current variant is being cultivated by nationalist populists across Europe and America. In Britain, it is being promoted by culture war Conservatives and some former Labour supporters.

Despite the iniquities of the voting system, the Conservatives know that the ground is moving against them, hence their drive for a new divisive model focused on cultural warfare

In his 2013 book on immigration, The British Dream, David Goodhart blamed the increase of immigration under New Labour on a conspiracy between New Labour globalisers wanting to suppress wages and multiculturalists wanting to rub the rights nose in diversity. In her 2016 conference speech (co-written by national-populist Nick Timothy), Theresa Mays citizens of nowhere were people in positions of power in thrall to international elites.

Just before a short stint at Downing Street, former Times journalist Tim Montgomerie set out the clearest exposition of this politics in Prospect magazine, arguing for a social Thatcherism a re-balancing from a conservatism of freedom to a conservatism of locality and security.

Montgomerie argued that, within the Conservative Party, the magnetism of national sovereignty needs to overtake the magnetism of free markets. The political significance of this anti-globalisation shift from market economics to national populism is that it enables Conservatives to appeal to workers with an apparent anti-capitalist message, challenging the iniquities of foreign capital at the same time as decrying foreigners and refugees.

This new model is advocated by a group of commentators attached to the national-populist Unherd website including Goodhart; philosopher John Gray; Blue Labour guru Maurice Glasman; trade unionist Paul Embery; and Matthew Goodwin, an academic who co-wrote a perceptive book on the rise of UKIP but has become a fervent advocate of what he started out analysing.

Goodwin has now given the conspiracy theory an explicitly racial twist. Writing about the recent report into racial and ethnic disparities in the Daily Mail, he noted that minority ethnic groups are now pulling ahead of white people a conclusion which does not sit neatly with woke dogma. This dogma is promoted by highly educated whites in alliance with multinational firms, with the end result being an informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities, against the white working-class.

In Britain and America, the conspiracy narrative is currently corroborated by the phenomenon of woke capitalism, whereby as Goodwin puts it multinational firms voice strong support for the new belief system, while doing all they can to avoid paying a fair share of tax and doing more for their working-class employees.As the new belief system is racial equality, working-class employees are clearly cast as white, as if workers of colour dont have an interest in companies paying tax.

The principal target of British critics of woke capitalism usually the consequence of pressure from a multiracial workforce is clearly not so much the capitalism as the woke: would Matthew Goodwin have been quite so appalled by Sainsburys announcing redundancies in a tweet had the company not also been supporting Black History Month?

Both the white working-class and woke capitalism are ideological constructs designed to obscure the fact that Britains workplaces from factories to farms, hospitals to hospitality are now largely multiracial. But the working-class of which Goodwin writes is never black, Asian or mixed-race nor does it appear to be Polish, Irish or Scottish. In 2019, Goodwin employed the Powellite trope of indigenous workers feeling like strangers in their own country.

Class divisions certainly still scar British society, but the class dividing line is not between white workers and their colleagues from minority backgrounds, but where it has always been between workers of all ethnicities and their employers.

For Goodwin, the conspiracy theory is not just about elites seeking to impose their liberal values on the mass of the people, it is those elites working in alliance with racial minorities against white people. Goodwin blames highly-educated elitists for encouraging everybody to view the world through the prism of race, but it is he who offers a racialised, conspiratorial narrative to attractnationalist-minded working-class voters to the Conservative Party.

The contemporary conspiracy theory has clearly gained traction in the Red Wall seats which Labour lost to the Conservatives in the 2019 General Election.

In her granular analysis of first-time Conservative voters, Beyond the Red Wall, pollster Deborah Mattinson finds that, although many of their grievances are actually economic (lack of job opportunities, inadequate local facilities, decline of the high street), Red Wallers have assimilated the key concepts of national-populist theory including hostility to London, students and graduates (when not their own children).

Living in places with lower immigrant populations than cities, they have picked up tabloid mythologies about scrounger immigrants. (One of the most striking omissions in the recent report on racial and ethnic disparities, which claimed that racial discrimination is exaggerated, is any reference at all to the tabloid press). Most importantly, Mattinsons Red-Wallers have ingested key national-populist terms including political correctness, socially conservative and especially the elites.

Anyone looking at the inter-war years is aware both of the dangers of conspiracy theories and of their potential appeal. Donald Trump used them to alarming effect in the 2016 US Presidential Election, claiming that Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.

In his co-written book, National Populism, Matthew Goodwin outlines an adjacent conspiracy by billionaire Hungarian-Jewish financier George Soros, seeking to flood Christian Europe with Muslim refugees to usher in a borderless world that is subservient to capitalism a theory which Goodwin describes as not entirely without credence.

In the UK, these arguments are not just dividing working people along racial lines they are also driving a wedge through the alliance between the working-class and liberal middle-class, which brought about most of the progressive social achievements of the past century, from the founding of the welfare estate to the social reforms of the 1960s and beyond.

The new fault-line in politics constructed by the national-populists is designed to have supporters of that alliance make an agonising choice between voting for interventionist economics or social liberalism. In fact, it is possible and practical to vote for both, as more than 12 million people did in 2017, as well as in 1997 and 1966.

We face a clear choice about our future. Do we remain a deeply divided country, fiercely unequal in terms of income and race, defined by toxic, conspiratorial fantasies? Or do we seek to build on the progressive national unity demonstrated in the first months of the Coronavirus pandemic?

The terrain is more favourable than it looks. Attitude polling suggests that in reality Britain is moving left-ward on social and economic issues. For all of Paul Emberys contempt for what he calls a protracted moral lecture, more Premier League football fans support taking the knee than oppose it, and the nation will cheer on a multi-racial England team this summer.

Even in the harsh reality of electoral politics, liberal progressivism outdoes conservatism. In every election this century bar 2015, the combined popular vote as opposed to seats won by the progressive parties (Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and Nationalist) comfortably exceeded the votes cast for the Conservatives and UKIP/the Brexit Party, even in 2019.

Despite the iniquities of the voting system, the Conservatives know that the ground is moving against them, hence their drive for a new divisive model focused on cultural warfare.

In response, progressives need to focus on the economic and social issues that concern the various components of todays working-class, combined with new ways to talk about race. A savvy Left can defeat the divisive ideas offered by the national-populists.

Jon Bloomfield is a writer, environmental practitioner and author of Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham. David Edgar is a playwright and commentator, whose recent work includes an autobiographical solo show, Trying it On. Since 2009, Edgar has written extensively about the new fault-line in world politics. In the 1980s, both authors were on the editorial board of Marxism Today

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The 'White Working-Class' and 'Woke Capitalism': Fake Constructs in the Right's Cultural War Byline Times - Byline Times