Please don’t start off like this. It’s going to make Charlie’s absence even harder to bear.
No, Biden should not step aside. No evidence that the alternatives will be any better and they might be substantially worse.
People who thought Biden was too old pre-Hur now feel vindicated. The rest of us think he’s a terrific president who is not too old to do the job but was the victim of a nasty hit job. We know we have our work cut out for us, but we can see that attack for what it was.
I’ll repeat what I wrote in another newsletter’s comments this am. Biden is the nominee. You can be for Trump or against him. Those are your choices right now. Stop feeding the flames (this is exactly what the Republican/Russian disinformation effort wants us to do, btw) and just get to work electing Democrats.
Yes yes yes, and here’s a news flash for you: Josh Freaking Shapiro is NOT an option. It isn’t fair, but it’s fact. Bill is sounding like someone who can’t see any country west of the District of Columbia.
Thank you, Christine. I am so sick of the attacks on Biden!! 😡😡 You said it much better than I could have. My comment would have been profanity-laced. 😡😡
I thought it was an excellent newsletter I think people worry too much about chaos. American political history is full of contested conventions mere months before elections.
Christine, I am a lifelong, center-left Dem. I think Biden has been a very good president in terms of his legislative accomplishments, his leadership of NATO and his handling of the Israel/Hamas war that has cost him in approval. (He's not managed the border or the crime issue well.)
Until I saw Biden at his press conference Thursday night, I would have agreed with you. Now I don't. He looked old, he sounded old and he walked old. I hadn't seen him live since his outstanding performance at the State of the Union address a year ago. And that wasn't just reading the teleprompter. He improvised a bit and "showed flashes of humor and effective off-the-cuff retorts to Republican hecklers in a setting not known for improvisation" as the NYT put it. I thought that if he kept this up, he wins reelection. He didn't Thursday night.
When Biden announced he was running last April, I and a lot of Dems thought he was the only one who could beat Trump. Why? Whitmer was a female, Pete B was gay, Shapiro was a Jew and Kamala was unpopular with center-left and -right voters which is where elections are won.
After Thursday's performance, I'm concerned he CAN'T beat Trump, and beating Trump is all that matters.
It was when he took reporters' questions, not in his remarks, that I saw the decline in his performance. (And they looked like vultures leaning over the rope hurling questions at him.)
They looked horrible. He looked like he wanted to kill them. Not sure I blame him. The thing about Beau was so far out of line and he was furious at the entire thing. Even so, his response to Doocey was 100% right on and faster than I could have thought of it. I thought he was fine. He’s allowed to be mad and hurt. It was an incredibly hurtful insult. Would it have been better if he hadn’t reacted? Who knows? He’s Biden. I like him.
Agree the report mentioning the DATE of the death of his son - not THAT it happened - was obscene. I like Biden too. His looking, sounding and walking old doesn't change that. But we're talking about him beating Trump. It's definitely a liability and Thursday night made it stronger. My sister, a lifelong Dem like me is 81. She can't stand to look at his signs of aging and figures everyone agrees with her. That's what we're up against.
It’s not about whether or not Biden is too old to complete another term, it’s about whether a large enough slice of the American electorate BELIEVE that Biden is too old to complete another term to prevent him from being re-elected! And THAT is a question that needs to be considered with clear eyes.
I personally feel the narrative needs to be “yes Biden is old! But he’s accomplished some things for the American people, and his opponent is a dangerous, incoherent lunatic, who by the way is old as well!”
Yes, what the electorate believes is paramount and agree with the narrative. However, since Biden's performance Thursday night that confirmed what the vast majority of the electorate believes, I've come to believe that narrative is not enough.
Seems like polls show people think they’re both too old. Under the circumstances, and with a healthy grasp of reality, that is a good place to be. So no, he shouldn’t step down.
You are 100% right. I am sick of Democrats and anti Trump journalists helping Trump by apologizing because Biden is not Superman. FDR had polio and is still considered one of our best Presidents. Reagan, the Republucan saint, clearly had cognitive issues in his 2nd term.
I'm going to laugh if Tim brings on Ruy Teixeira as his first guest in the driver's seat this afternoon. Would be the most divisive start for our little audience possible here haha.
Travis, did you listen to his interview (Ruy’s) with Ezra from New York Times? It’s actually a good interview (fyi I don’t like ruy). Ezra pushes back on his thesis and it kind of showed that ruy hasn’t really thought through his theories
Travis I feel like you are moving the goalpost. One party wants to tax the wealthy the other doesn’t. Just because it isn’t as much as you want doesn’t change the differences between the 2 parties and it doesn’t explain why working class is mad about such an economic policy.
You are right that self sorting is a choice to some extent. That being said if I work with all people who have college degrees and went to school with people who have college degrees. That is life. It’s true of people who don’t have college degrees as well. Life is busy. Life is hectic. I hangout with people because it is easy. I don’t have time to walk around and look for new friends that isn’t easy. That is life and it’s not going to change.
"One party wants to tax the wealthy the other doesn’t."
Strong disagree. I'd rephrase this as "one party talks about wanting to tax the rich and then never actually puts their legislation where their mouth is, and the other wants to give the rich more tax cuts."
"I don’t have time to walk around and look for new friends that isn’t easy."
So then what was so hard about retaining friends from HS who didn't go to college then? Since they were already friends you didn't have to look for new ones right? But instead I'm guessing that a lot of those folks got replaced by friends who you *did* have to "walk around and look for" in college.
98% of my high school went to college. The ones that didn’t weren’t in my classes. There were 3 friends from junior high who went to my high school but dropped out after a year.
Fair enough. But what I'd say is that the bulk of people who go off to college leave a whole lot of non-college friends behind. It explains why they often have so few non-college friends later in life. Getting back to the original point, it's stuff like this that leaves Ezra with such few non-college friends and thereby stuck in his post-college bubble. Sorting is a choice, and choosing to do so leaves you in a bubble with social and political blind spots. That's been my larger point with respect to this topic.
Oh I’m not disagreeing with you on that but it’s a fact of life. Like I said, my four younger siblings who continued in public schools instead of transferring to private high schools all didn’t go to college. None of their friends went to college because that wasn’t the crew they hung out with in high school. I lost some high school friends but not because they didn’t go to college but they made new friends at college as did I. Then we graduated went to work with college grads and it continued. Not surprising at all when you think about it.
I started off in chip design. Shit, most of the people I worked with had a PhDs
I did! I caught it the morning it dropped. I definitely appreciated Ezra pushing back in the places he felt necessary. I talked about it a bit with some other Bulwarkers on Reddit and mentioned it in at least one of my replies to a Triad or Morning Shots post from the same week it dropped (my memory evades me on dates here).
I'm one of the only liberal Bulwarkers who appreciates Ruy's inputs so I'm a bit of an odd fish within these circles. Do I agree with *everything* he says? No. But I do think that the current dem coalition has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the things they've lost over the years since at least 2012: economic populism falling off of the liberal policy platform totem poll, non-college men of all skin colors leaning more and more toward the GOP, and the liberal voter base remaining obsessed with identity politics that can often be counter-productive in political elections. So in that sense, I appreciate that he's one of the few voices that brings this up.
The problem I have with ruy is that he doesn’t really prove or show his theory works. Honestly, his economic populism stuff I agree with (to some extent) but I don’t agree that this is why democrats have lost the white working class. He is right on the cultural stuff though (not that I agree with his policies but that they are the reason that dems lose white voters). However, he never deals with what happens to the parts of the coalition that care about those issues (youth = climate, black voters = voting rights, progressives = cultural things). For some reason he thinks you can jettison those issues and still have them vote for you. He needs to prove that
The white working class voting for the MAGA banner are *very* anti-elitist and feel the economy and country are rigged for the elites they detest. That ties heavily into economic populism and the sense of a broken meritocracy that serves wealthy city liberals. MAGA was able to eject the Big Foreign Policy leg of the old GOP, and I'm wondering if one day they'll try to eject the Big Money leg of the old GOP under a similar premise of populism.
Perhaps my greatest fear is that one day in the near future the MAGAfied GOP will take on the mantle of taxing the rich before dems get to--in effect stealing the economic populism issues out from under dem control moving forward. If they do that, then the dems will truly have lost any claim on the working class. If you think this can't happen, just remember that MAGA is now the official isolationist party after the very same voting base supported GOP global military interventionism going all the way back to Reagan at the very least.
As for those other issues, I'm a big fan of putting them on the backburner and getting that stuff done in office *quietly* after you've already won office running on retail voter issues like the economy, immigration, and social issues. Most retail voters don't give a shit about climate change--that's a *post-college* liberal issue for progs--and to the extent that the youngs care about it it's because they're college students themselves who don't have to worry about bills that their parents are currently covering. They have wayyyyy more economic freedom to care about stuff that's not related to the economy than most post/non-college voters do.
I hear you but like Ezra it doesn’t make sense that white working class detested democratic economic policies because they helped the rich for the party that was far more against taxing the rich, against sticking up for labor, privatizing social security, against cheaper healthcare, etc. imo, they went right for cultural issues.
I would love to do things “quietly” but that isn’t feasible in our political environment. You have to win in primaries and the voters care about those issues
Both parties have been for helping the rich for quite some time now. Liberal voters in general forgot about their economic populism ever since their duly-elected billionaire mayor used the cops to clear the Occupy Wall Street protestors out of Zuccotti Park. The liberal voting base barely mentions "eat the rich" anymore because they're far too worried about identity issues that the working class retail voters frankly don't really give a shit about (liberals certainly don't press their politicians to tax the rich either). I cannot state strongly enough that the people most obsessed with identity politics aren't the disenfranchised minorities who suffer from institutionalized discrimination or anti-LQBTQ sentiments, it's the post-college white kids who have enough economic privilege and income to allow themselves to care more about identity politics that don't affect them personally than about the economic populism that they feel doesn't affect them either (many of them work for the corporations they once swore needed to be taxed more as white collar scribes too).
One place I disagreed with Ezra in the interview is his inability to accept the degree divide in this country that Ruy talks about a lot (go figure, because Ezra himself is a product of the post-college bubble who cares more about climate change than economic fairness). Ezra refuses to acknowledge Bill Bishop's Big Sort and the degree divide in this country as a matter of political polarization and chooses instead to ascribe the divide to "traditional masculinity" politics (don't get me wrong, there's some of that going on too in MAGA). It's no wonder that people like him are running the party's thought circles--given the party's continued catering to its core post-college base, and it's no wonder that people like him can't see what the degree divide did to their party since they're the ones who themselves are stuck in the post-college social circles and don't have an outsider's perspective as a result.
If you were to wager a guess, how many people are in Ezra's personal social life who don't have diplomas on their wall? My guess is that you can count them on one hand and it would include the nanny and/or house cleaner he likely has hired to look after his kids and his home. For me, that tells you a lot about people like Ezra. They need more non-college friends in their lives than they currently have, and that's a huge blind spot for them politically when they suffer from the same collective post-college group think within their post-college social bubbles.
With respect to the economics I just don’t understand that point of view. One party does want to tax the rich. The other does not. It’s like saying I hate being slapped by my friend Jim but Henry slaps me harder so I dropped Jim for Henry.
You are right that maga hates the elites. This is absolutely true but their definition of elite has nothing to do with economics (see Trump). It has to do with education (imo).
With respect to Ezra’s friend group, absolutely but this is not new and it’s true of everyone because of friend groups and where you work. My family is huge. I have 8 brothers and sisters. The 4 oldest went to college and the majority of their friends are college educated. Why? That’s who they hung out with in high school, college and at work now. The 4 younger didn’t go to college. Their friend group doesn’t have any college degrees (for the most part). Why? For the exact same reason the 4 oldest have college educated friends. It’s self sorting
"One party does want to tax the rich. The other does not."
When was the last time an elected dem put forward a bill specifically designed to tax the rich more at either the state or federal level? The last one I can think of was the voter prop that Gov Newsom vetoed that would have levied a 4% wealth tax on California's rich to fund--of course--carbon offset initiatives. Gavin didn't like the idea of him and his rich buddies having to pay a 4% wealth tax to pursue fighting against climate change, so he sunk the initiative and is still popular with the libs of California who didn't seem to take it as a slight against their policy wishes.
"This is absolutely true but their definition of elite has nothing to do with economics (see Trump). It has to do with education."
I'm glad to see that you can see the diploma divide at work in our political polarization but I'm sad that Ezra still can't for some reason.
"Why? For the exact same reason the 4 oldest have college educated friends. It’s self sorting."
Self-sorting is a choice, and it's often a selective choice to leave those who are unlike you behind in favor of new friends who are more like you now. For post-college liberals, this is a choice to leave behind friends from high school who didn't go on to college and replace them with new friends who did. I don't know exactly HOW to tell post-college liberals this, but that shit is really really hurtful to the people they knew who didn't go to college and who were socially left behind because of it. I myself was one of those people even though I'm post-grad school now. I watched all my friends go off to college before me while I served in the military as a 2nd responder after 9/11. I watched those people slide out of my life because they were too busy partying and making new friends than to keep up with someone who had been with them from the start and who was going through some of the worst times of my life as I redeployed to combat 3 times in 2.5 years between the ages of 19-21. Real friends would have stayed in touch and would have tired to help support me in any way that they could. While I understand now that separations of geography can indeed cause friendships to attrite, you can't say that there's no choice involved because the folks who go on to college can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time by making new friends and staying in touch with older ones who didn't get a degree at the same time. That it's so easy for them to socially leave the non-college friends behind is a big statement about who they are and how they saw those older friends. There was a lot of self-sorting alright, and it came at the cost of abandoning others. It's no wonder that so many of the non-college who were socially abandoned by the post-college have such feelings of resentment and a desire for retribution. It also explains why they're so angry at the political party who wrapped their arms so tightly around the post-college crowd.
We should replace Biden with Teixeira! If not Ruy, then Mark. Both have true heartland appeal. The Deep State could set them up with Tay-Tay (who'd probably prefer Mark, but who knows), and we'd win every state but Guam.
Amen. Plus, even if another Dem could win the presidency - which I doubt - it's unlikely that any would be as good a President as Biden's been. The presidency is a hard job, and he's done it incredibly well. Better than we had any right to expect. And he's done it well in large part because of his age and experience. Foreign leaders respect him. Congressional leaders, even some Reps (on the record), respect him. The press and MAGA criticize his age and physical frailty, but they can't really criticize the way he's done the job.
The guy has been batting over .500 (.750?, more?) and racking up RBIs in a deadball season and against good pitchers and you want to bench him next season?
My second reply because I’m screaming… kinda. Can the new management please make some effort to remember a good chunk of the reliable voters have had a Constitutional right yanked away. We’re not getting over it. It’s not a mood. It’s a thing…a really big thing. And we will vote like mad until the two worst members of the Court breathe their last foul breaths, and a Democrat gets to appoint two justices who aren’t making it up as they go along.
This is 100% right. R’s are trying to change the focus to immigration. It’s up to us to remind women that they didn’t have a federal right to hold a credit card in their own name until they were able to reliably control whether they got pregnant. And they couldn’t control that until they had reproductive rights (including the right to use contraception which is also in the firing line now!). Reproductive rights are economic rights; they are central to our ability to make a living. Without them we’d be dependent on men. Oh, wait. Do you think *that’s* the point? 🤔
I share the sentiment, but Charlie held those same viewpoints. I thought this first column was just fine for my reasons in first subscribing to The Bulwark - it's not meant to be an echo chamber.
Agreed. Look, this place is still conservative, and as a liberal Democrat I go here to take my medicine and be informed. I don’t agree with Bill on Biden but I respect his opinion.
I respect their opinions and I’m a regular here (although not fed up enough to comment til today! I don’t think these *are* Bill’s real opinions — I think he’s being played by a Republican effort to change the narrative from “Republicans in disarray” back to where they think it properly belongs. Biden is fine but if they can get Trump’s opponents all worked up about Biden it takes the heat off of them. I’m tired of it. Everyone wants Biden to quit today. He’s not going to. Is this how we have to spend our time? It wastes mine. I have work to do and so do we all.
The sad thing is I read Democrats writing the same. Democrats can NOT stop apologizing for their candidates. You couldn't pick a worse candidate than Trump and conservative intellectuals, voters and journalists promote him even though he is Putin's dog. Trump supposedly borrowed from Russian banks in NYC when he couldn't get loans elsewhere (I heard this from a retired New York City buildings dept inspector). Where is the outrage?
I agree. I believe the question about Biden's fitness is overblown. It's not the gaffes that are important, it's the actions and Biden has out performed much better than we would have a right to believe that ANY candidate could have done. Biden is steady, he believes strongly in what is best for this Country. He has the respect of our like minded allies. He doesn't have to win them over like any other possible candidate would have to do. We're on the right path - why would you want to take a chance of derailing it. I trust Biden to do what's right and I believe the majority of the people who believe in this Country and it's success against dangerous forces who would like to destroy our way of life and our democratic principles. There is no argument for Trump. Hopefully, his conviction/s will remove that possibility. I believe that is more likely than the insane rhetoric regarding Biden will succeed.
You are absolutely right that people should rally around Biden whose age and experience has benefitted the country. Why the Republicans support Russia's stooge is beyond me. Reagan is rolling in his grave to see how far Trump has taken a once serious and conservative party and turned it into a freak show.
Please don’t start off like this. It’s going to make Charlie’s absence even harder to bear.
No, Biden should not step aside. No evidence that the alternatives will be any better and they might be substantially worse.
People who thought Biden was too old pre-Hur now feel vindicated. The rest of us think he’s a terrific president who is not too old to do the job but was the victim of a nasty hit job. We know we have our work cut out for us, but we can see that attack for what it was.
I’ll repeat what I wrote in another newsletter’s comments this am. Biden is the nominee. You can be for Trump or against him. Those are your choices right now. Stop feeding the flames (this is exactly what the Republican/Russian disinformation effort wants us to do, btw) and just get to work electing Democrats.
Yes yes yes, and here’s a news flash for you: Josh Freaking Shapiro is NOT an option. It isn’t fair, but it’s fact. Bill is sounding like someone who can’t see any country west of the District of Columbia.
Thank you, Christine. I am so sick of the attacks on Biden!! 😡😡 You said it much better than I could have. My comment would have been profanity-laced. 😡😡
Those who support a democratic republic might want to see where they can help out locally.
I actually had to check I was on a Bulwark site because it read like the Washington Post.
I thought it was an excellent newsletter I think people worry too much about chaos. American political history is full of contested conventions mere months before elections.
Not recent political history. Not since primaries were introduced.
Christine, I am a lifelong, center-left Dem. I think Biden has been a very good president in terms of his legislative accomplishments, his leadership of NATO and his handling of the Israel/Hamas war that has cost him in approval. (He's not managed the border or the crime issue well.)
Until I saw Biden at his press conference Thursday night, I would have agreed with you. Now I don't. He looked old, he sounded old and he walked old. I hadn't seen him live since his outstanding performance at the State of the Union address a year ago. And that wasn't just reading the teleprompter. He improvised a bit and "showed flashes of humor and effective off-the-cuff retorts to Republican hecklers in a setting not known for improvisation" as the NYT put it. I thought that if he kept this up, he wins reelection. He didn't Thursday night.
When Biden announced he was running last April, I and a lot of Dems thought he was the only one who could beat Trump. Why? Whitmer was a female, Pete B was gay, Shapiro was a Jew and Kamala was unpopular with center-left and -right voters which is where elections are won.
After Thursday's performance, I'm concerned he CAN'T beat Trump, and beating Trump is all that matters.
God. I saw a different press conference. He was pissed off, he was funny, and he was thorough in his despise to substantive questions.
It was when he took reporters' questions, not in his remarks, that I saw the decline in his performance. (And they looked like vultures leaning over the rope hurling questions at him.)
They looked horrible. He looked like he wanted to kill them. Not sure I blame him. The thing about Beau was so far out of line and he was furious at the entire thing. Even so, his response to Doocey was 100% right on and faster than I could have thought of it. I thought he was fine. He’s allowed to be mad and hurt. It was an incredibly hurtful insult. Would it have been better if he hadn’t reacted? Who knows? He’s Biden. I like him.
Agree the report mentioning the DATE of the death of his son - not THAT it happened - was obscene. I like Biden too. His looking, sounding and walking old doesn't change that. But we're talking about him beating Trump. It's definitely a liability and Thursday night made it stronger. My sister, a lifelong Dem like me is 81. She can't stand to look at his signs of aging and figures everyone agrees with her. That's what we're up against.
It’s not about whether or not Biden is too old to complete another term, it’s about whether a large enough slice of the American electorate BELIEVE that Biden is too old to complete another term to prevent him from being re-elected! And THAT is a question that needs to be considered with clear eyes.
I personally feel the narrative needs to be “yes Biden is old! But he’s accomplished some things for the American people, and his opponent is a dangerous, incoherent lunatic, who by the way is old as well!”
Yes, what the electorate believes is paramount and agree with the narrative. However, since Biden's performance Thursday night that confirmed what the vast majority of the electorate believes, I've come to believe that narrative is not enough.
It’s not whether or not
Here’s a few thousand more likes for ya.
Seems like polls show people think they’re both too old. Under the circumstances, and with a healthy grasp of reality, that is a good place to be. So no, he shouldn’t step down.
You are 100% right. I am sick of Democrats and anti Trump journalists helping Trump by apologizing because Biden is not Superman. FDR had polio and is still considered one of our best Presidents. Reagan, the Republucan saint, clearly had cognitive issues in his 2nd term.
🎯🎯🎯🎯
I'm going to laugh if Tim brings on Ruy Teixeira as his first guest in the driver's seat this afternoon. Would be the most divisive start for our little audience possible here haha.
Travis, did you listen to his interview (Ruy’s) with Ezra from New York Times? It’s actually a good interview (fyi I don’t like ruy). Ezra pushes back on his thesis and it kind of showed that ruy hasn’t really thought through his theories
Travis I feel like you are moving the goalpost. One party wants to tax the wealthy the other doesn’t. Just because it isn’t as much as you want doesn’t change the differences between the 2 parties and it doesn’t explain why working class is mad about such an economic policy.
You are right that self sorting is a choice to some extent. That being said if I work with all people who have college degrees and went to school with people who have college degrees. That is life. It’s true of people who don’t have college degrees as well. Life is busy. Life is hectic. I hangout with people because it is easy. I don’t have time to walk around and look for new friends that isn’t easy. That is life and it’s not going to change.
"One party wants to tax the wealthy the other doesn’t."
Strong disagree. I'd rephrase this as "one party talks about wanting to tax the rich and then never actually puts their legislation where their mouth is, and the other wants to give the rich more tax cuts."
"I don’t have time to walk around and look for new friends that isn’t easy."
So then what was so hard about retaining friends from HS who didn't go to college then? Since they were already friends you didn't have to look for new ones right? But instead I'm guessing that a lot of those folks got replaced by friends who you *did* have to "walk around and look for" in college.
98% of my high school went to college. The ones that didn’t weren’t in my classes. There were 3 friends from junior high who went to my high school but dropped out after a year.
Fair enough. But what I'd say is that the bulk of people who go off to college leave a whole lot of non-college friends behind. It explains why they often have so few non-college friends later in life. Getting back to the original point, it's stuff like this that leaves Ezra with such few non-college friends and thereby stuck in his post-college bubble. Sorting is a choice, and choosing to do so leaves you in a bubble with social and political blind spots. That's been my larger point with respect to this topic.
Oh I’m not disagreeing with you on that but it’s a fact of life. Like I said, my four younger siblings who continued in public schools instead of transferring to private high schools all didn’t go to college. None of their friends went to college because that wasn’t the crew they hung out with in high school. I lost some high school friends but not because they didn’t go to college but they made new friends at college as did I. Then we graduated went to work with college grads and it continued. Not surprising at all when you think about it.
I started off in chip design. Shit, most of the people I worked with had a PhDs
Ruy is responding to his new paymasters, the AEI. AEI is conservative. They want Ruy toeing the line… without appearing to toe the line.
Lol. So true. The interview is good though. Ezra doesn’t let him get away with his strawman arguments. He gets called out
I did! I caught it the morning it dropped. I definitely appreciated Ezra pushing back in the places he felt necessary. I talked about it a bit with some other Bulwarkers on Reddit and mentioned it in at least one of my replies to a Triad or Morning Shots post from the same week it dropped (my memory evades me on dates here).
I'm one of the only liberal Bulwarkers who appreciates Ruy's inputs so I'm a bit of an odd fish within these circles. Do I agree with *everything* he says? No. But I do think that the current dem coalition has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the things they've lost over the years since at least 2012: economic populism falling off of the liberal policy platform totem poll, non-college men of all skin colors leaning more and more toward the GOP, and the liberal voter base remaining obsessed with identity politics that can often be counter-productive in political elections. So in that sense, I appreciate that he's one of the few voices that brings this up.
I like the things you say (always) but I think he’s what my husband’s grandmother would have called a “fecking eejit.”
The problem I have with ruy is that he doesn’t really prove or show his theory works. Honestly, his economic populism stuff I agree with (to some extent) but I don’t agree that this is why democrats have lost the white working class. He is right on the cultural stuff though (not that I agree with his policies but that they are the reason that dems lose white voters). However, he never deals with what happens to the parts of the coalition that care about those issues (youth = climate, black voters = voting rights, progressives = cultural things). For some reason he thinks you can jettison those issues and still have them vote for you. He needs to prove that
The white working class voting for the MAGA banner are *very* anti-elitist and feel the economy and country are rigged for the elites they detest. That ties heavily into economic populism and the sense of a broken meritocracy that serves wealthy city liberals. MAGA was able to eject the Big Foreign Policy leg of the old GOP, and I'm wondering if one day they'll try to eject the Big Money leg of the old GOP under a similar premise of populism.
Perhaps my greatest fear is that one day in the near future the MAGAfied GOP will take on the mantle of taxing the rich before dems get to--in effect stealing the economic populism issues out from under dem control moving forward. If they do that, then the dems will truly have lost any claim on the working class. If you think this can't happen, just remember that MAGA is now the official isolationist party after the very same voting base supported GOP global military interventionism going all the way back to Reagan at the very least.
As for those other issues, I'm a big fan of putting them on the backburner and getting that stuff done in office *quietly* after you've already won office running on retail voter issues like the economy, immigration, and social issues. Most retail voters don't give a shit about climate change--that's a *post-college* liberal issue for progs--and to the extent that the youngs care about it it's because they're college students themselves who don't have to worry about bills that their parents are currently covering. They have wayyyyy more economic freedom to care about stuff that's not related to the economy than most post/non-college voters do.
I hear you but like Ezra it doesn’t make sense that white working class detested democratic economic policies because they helped the rich for the party that was far more against taxing the rich, against sticking up for labor, privatizing social security, against cheaper healthcare, etc. imo, they went right for cultural issues.
I would love to do things “quietly” but that isn’t feasible in our political environment. You have to win in primaries and the voters care about those issues
Both parties have been for helping the rich for quite some time now. Liberal voters in general forgot about their economic populism ever since their duly-elected billionaire mayor used the cops to clear the Occupy Wall Street protestors out of Zuccotti Park. The liberal voting base barely mentions "eat the rich" anymore because they're far too worried about identity issues that the working class retail voters frankly don't really give a shit about (liberals certainly don't press their politicians to tax the rich either). I cannot state strongly enough that the people most obsessed with identity politics aren't the disenfranchised minorities who suffer from institutionalized discrimination or anti-LQBTQ sentiments, it's the post-college white kids who have enough economic privilege and income to allow themselves to care more about identity politics that don't affect them personally than about the economic populism that they feel doesn't affect them either (many of them work for the corporations they once swore needed to be taxed more as white collar scribes too).
One place I disagreed with Ezra in the interview is his inability to accept the degree divide in this country that Ruy talks about a lot (go figure, because Ezra himself is a product of the post-college bubble who cares more about climate change than economic fairness). Ezra refuses to acknowledge Bill Bishop's Big Sort and the degree divide in this country as a matter of political polarization and chooses instead to ascribe the divide to "traditional masculinity" politics (don't get me wrong, there's some of that going on too in MAGA). It's no wonder that people like him are running the party's thought circles--given the party's continued catering to its core post-college base, and it's no wonder that people like him can't see what the degree divide did to their party since they're the ones who themselves are stuck in the post-college social circles and don't have an outsider's perspective as a result.
If you were to wager a guess, how many people are in Ezra's personal social life who don't have diplomas on their wall? My guess is that you can count them on one hand and it would include the nanny and/or house cleaner he likely has hired to look after his kids and his home. For me, that tells you a lot about people like Ezra. They need more non-college friends in their lives than they currently have, and that's a huge blind spot for them politically when they suffer from the same collective post-college group think within their post-college social bubbles.
With respect to the economics I just don’t understand that point of view. One party does want to tax the rich. The other does not. It’s like saying I hate being slapped by my friend Jim but Henry slaps me harder so I dropped Jim for Henry.
You are right that maga hates the elites. This is absolutely true but their definition of elite has nothing to do with economics (see Trump). It has to do with education (imo).
With respect to Ezra’s friend group, absolutely but this is not new and it’s true of everyone because of friend groups and where you work. My family is huge. I have 8 brothers and sisters. The 4 oldest went to college and the majority of their friends are college educated. Why? That’s who they hung out with in high school, college and at work now. The 4 younger didn’t go to college. Their friend group doesn’t have any college degrees (for the most part). Why? For the exact same reason the 4 oldest have college educated friends. It’s self sorting
"One party does want to tax the rich. The other does not."
When was the last time an elected dem put forward a bill specifically designed to tax the rich more at either the state or federal level? The last one I can think of was the voter prop that Gov Newsom vetoed that would have levied a 4% wealth tax on California's rich to fund--of course--carbon offset initiatives. Gavin didn't like the idea of him and his rich buddies having to pay a 4% wealth tax to pursue fighting against climate change, so he sunk the initiative and is still popular with the libs of California who didn't seem to take it as a slight against their policy wishes.
"This is absolutely true but their definition of elite has nothing to do with economics (see Trump). It has to do with education."
I'm glad to see that you can see the diploma divide at work in our political polarization but I'm sad that Ezra still can't for some reason.
"Why? For the exact same reason the 4 oldest have college educated friends. It’s self sorting."
Self-sorting is a choice, and it's often a selective choice to leave those who are unlike you behind in favor of new friends who are more like you now. For post-college liberals, this is a choice to leave behind friends from high school who didn't go on to college and replace them with new friends who did. I don't know exactly HOW to tell post-college liberals this, but that shit is really really hurtful to the people they knew who didn't go to college and who were socially left behind because of it. I myself was one of those people even though I'm post-grad school now. I watched all my friends go off to college before me while I served in the military as a 2nd responder after 9/11. I watched those people slide out of my life because they were too busy partying and making new friends than to keep up with someone who had been with them from the start and who was going through some of the worst times of my life as I redeployed to combat 3 times in 2.5 years between the ages of 19-21. Real friends would have stayed in touch and would have tired to help support me in any way that they could. While I understand now that separations of geography can indeed cause friendships to attrite, you can't say that there's no choice involved because the folks who go on to college can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time by making new friends and staying in touch with older ones who didn't get a degree at the same time. That it's so easy for them to socially leave the non-college friends behind is a big statement about who they are and how they saw those older friends. There was a lot of self-sorting alright, and it came at the cost of abandoning others. It's no wonder that so many of the non-college who were socially abandoned by the post-college have such feelings of resentment and a desire for retribution. It also explains why they're so angry at the political party who wrapped their arms so tightly around the post-college crowd.
We should replace Biden with Teixeira! If not Ruy, then Mark. Both have true heartland appeal. The Deep State could set them up with Tay-Tay (who'd probably prefer Mark, but who knows), and we'd win every state but Guam.
I live in OH and can’t stand Ray. I don’t know who Mark is.
He might do that just for fun.
If Tim does that, I'm done. Tim will have broken my heart.
Unless Tim uses the time to take Rudy to task. That would actually be a good listening experience.
Amen. Plus, even if another Dem could win the presidency - which I doubt - it's unlikely that any would be as good a President as Biden's been. The presidency is a hard job, and he's done it incredibly well. Better than we had any right to expect. And he's done it well in large part because of his age and experience. Foreign leaders respect him. Congressional leaders, even some Reps (on the record), respect him. The press and MAGA criticize his age and physical frailty, but they can't really criticize the way he's done the job.
Why do you doubt another Dem could beat Trump? Biden is historically unpopular.
The guy has been batting over .500 (.750?, more?) and racking up RBIs in a deadball season and against good pitchers and you want to bench him next season?
Sure, but what's his WAR?
My second reply because I’m screaming… kinda. Can the new management please make some effort to remember a good chunk of the reliable voters have had a Constitutional right yanked away. We’re not getting over it. It’s not a mood. It’s a thing…a really big thing. And we will vote like mad until the two worst members of the Court breathe their last foul breaths, and a Democrat gets to appoint two justices who aren’t making it up as they go along.
This is 100% right. R’s are trying to change the focus to immigration. It’s up to us to remind women that they didn’t have a federal right to hold a credit card in their own name until they were able to reliably control whether they got pregnant. And they couldn’t control that until they had reproductive rights (including the right to use contraception which is also in the firing line now!). Reproductive rights are economic rights; they are central to our ability to make a living. Without them we’d be dependent on men. Oh, wait. Do you think *that’s* the point? 🤔
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Well said, Christine. This is a bad start. I’ll give them till the end of the week. But if they are still Biden Bashing, I’m gone. Where is Charlie???
I share the sentiment, but Charlie held those same viewpoints. I thought this first column was just fine for my reasons in first subscribing to The Bulwark - it's not meant to be an echo chamber.
You’re right but maybe he framed them differently? I’m not sure, but I like seeing how real Republicans (not Maga) feel too. Information is power.
Agreed. Look, this place is still conservative, and as a liberal Democrat I go here to take my medicine and be informed. I don’t agree with Bill on Biden but I respect his opinion.
I respect their opinions and I’m a regular here (although not fed up enough to comment til today! I don’t think these *are* Bill’s real opinions — I think he’s being played by a Republican effort to change the narrative from “Republicans in disarray” back to where they think it properly belongs. Biden is fine but if they can get Trump’s opponents all worked up about Biden it takes the heat off of them. I’m tired of it. Everyone wants Biden to quit today. He’s not going to. Is this how we have to spend our time? It wastes mine. I have work to do and so do we all.
The sad thing is I read Democrats writing the same. Democrats can NOT stop apologizing for their candidates. You couldn't pick a worse candidate than Trump and conservative intellectuals, voters and journalists promote him even though he is Putin's dog. Trump supposedly borrowed from Russian banks in NYC when he couldn't get loans elsewhere (I heard this from a retired New York City buildings dept inspector). Where is the outrage?
I agree. I believe the question about Biden's fitness is overblown. It's not the gaffes that are important, it's the actions and Biden has out performed much better than we would have a right to believe that ANY candidate could have done. Biden is steady, he believes strongly in what is best for this Country. He has the respect of our like minded allies. He doesn't have to win them over like any other possible candidate would have to do. We're on the right path - why would you want to take a chance of derailing it. I trust Biden to do what's right and I believe the majority of the people who believe in this Country and it's success against dangerous forces who would like to destroy our way of life and our democratic principles. There is no argument for Trump. Hopefully, his conviction/s will remove that possibility. I believe that is more likely than the insane rhetoric regarding Biden will succeed.
You are absolutely right that people should rally around Biden whose age and experience has benefitted the country. Why the Republicans support Russia's stooge is beyond me. Reagan is rolling in his grave to see how far Trump has taken a once serious and conservative party and turned it into a freak show.
Same, Rob. I'm not here to have my priors confirmed but to broaden my mind while engaging with sane conservatives.