From Venezuelan Andrés Miguel Rondón.
a hissy fit is not a strategy.
The people on the other side — and crucially, independents — will rebel against you if you look like you’re losing your mind. You will have proved yourself to be the very thing you’re claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy. And all the while you’re giving the populist and his followers enough rhetorical fuel to rightly call you a saboteur, an unpatriotic schemer, for years to come.
Rondón’s piece in last Sunday’s WaPo focuses on an analogy between Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump. What that analogy glosses over is the fact that the Americans who hate Trump loved Chavez, at least initially.
Calling Chavez a Trumpian populist is a way for the American left to disown the fact that it supported Chavez. It is not clear to me that Rondón is aware of this, but my guess is that the WaPo readers will take away from the article that Chavez was bad because he was a populist, not because he was a socialist. And that will be all that they take away from the essay. I doubt that they will take the passages I quoted to heart.
It seems like a conscious or sub-conscious exercise in confirmation bias, sunk cost and endowment effect. If you get enough people to participate in rallies and opposition they will not be able to come down to reasonable and rational evaluation.
Trump is not helping matters because in a 2 party system all he needs is the support half plus one. So if he feels an immigration pause is supported by the majority, he wants his opposition to become even more histrionic, which makes his support that much more radicalized. His supporters don’t blame him for escalating it as long as he doesn’t make a misstep, or in the example of the Khan debacle, course corrects quickly enough.
There is the reality of the Left Center Democrats and yes they are in hysterics because:
1) We remember 2009 well!
2) The voting results were fairly divided but not a Republican heavy government. Trump pulled off an electoral inside straight.
3) Trump has not made any attempts to work with Democrats and in fact is calling us losers!
4) With Obama as an ex-President and HRC (should be) retired, the Democrats don’t have a leader at the moment.
5) I have put Trump with the Putin/Nixon axis.
Anyway, I always thought Chavez would not end well especially when he starting throwing out American oil companies.
3) I’ll take a properly structured bet on this dimension.
But first, why would a Republican work with Democrats?
Btw, somebody has to go first, and why should it be Trump?
Well, simple…As much as I like Obama, I still think one of his biggest weaknesses was he did not work well with Congress. It did not have to like the olden legend of Tip & Ronnie days (which has been exaggerated now) but I wish Obama had work better with Republicans in 2009 – 2010 for support. I believe it was a missed opportunity and Obama fundamentally over believed his 2008 victory size as support and not throw the bums out with the Financial Crisis. (In general I thought Obama was an introvert and struggled with that during his Presidency.)
In the case of Trump, it might be wise for him to accept his 2% loss in the popular vote and understand he might have to work with Democrats to protect his popularity. Also think of the odd stat, that 2/3 of the US GDP comes from counties that HRC so Democrats are not all Chavez leftest! I know Trump supporters can state it is all California voters stuff but we are part of the nation was much as Texas or Ohio. (And I do believe there is Dog Whistling on certain ‘California’ voters as well here.)
Again Trump high unfavorables is not just a media creation!
I’d say so. I had to stop listening to Obama. Other people don’t seem to hear it, but he was our first Troll-in-chief.
But to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe there is zero common ground between Democrats and Republicans. If that is so, then why would they ever work together? It is just trolling and power plays from here on out.
Well, Trump did run as a deal-maker and this is his opportunity to prove it. And Trump also won on some fairly Left positions with no changes to Medicare and Social Security. In terms of free trade, he ran like Richard Gerhardt from the 1980s! I remember he claimed to have a much better healthcare system with lower cost and better coverage so this is his opportunity to promote that. Finally, Trump ran as the dovish candidate against hawkish HRC. In reality, I believed if Trump quieted down and promoted some right center policies, his approvals would go to 60%. However, he remains completely interested in his base.
Given I got tired of Obama’s propensity to lecture, I am not surprised conservatives went a little crazy on it.
The left’s strategy is demographic replacement. It doesn’t plan to win hearts and minds, it just plans to wait out the clock. It will only change if its forced to change, and you have to take away demographics as a fallback option to do so.
That’s why the one thing they are willing to go to the mat over is immigration and identity politics. That’s the core of the entire long term strategy. They could lose every independent and still win on the backs of their identity groups, so long as they keep making more of them.
I enjoy this blog for its economic insight, but recently I do not believe it has been living up to its motto. As a squishy center-left Democrat with a bunch of friends across the spectrum, I had literally zero friends and acquaintances to the left of me who ever thought kindly of Hugo Chavez. I’m sure there are plenty of silly academics and theoreticians who thought kindly of him, and I’m sure you could find a public figure or three who cozied up to him. But normal people never trucked to his populism or his socialism. This is similar to most of my friends to the right, none of whom are particularly enamored of Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, or other similar neo-reactionaries.
Elections have consequences, but no one in my circle seems to be freaking out about guns, abortion, gays, etc. I think most of us on the left are opposed to Trump’s style and what we perceive is an unnecessary tail risk. The freak-out in my circle is mostly about the risk of trade wars and a trend towards authoritarianism (voting rights etc.) that appears to have momentum among Western democracies. Maybe this’ll just be henny-penny-the-sky-is-falling stuff, maybe not. But to the extent there’s a freakout by non-professional agitators (e.g. the vast majority of Clinton voters), that’s why.
So unless the subtitle of this blog is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, I’d cool it on the moralizing tone. There’s just too much risk of being the pot calling the kettle black, and it’s way too early to say whether Trump’s style will wear well with independents or lead to decisions that keep the “popular” in populism.
When we limit ourselves to “our circle,” it’s rather easy to dodge a reasonable question as to whether the American left writ large has been handling the outcome of this election rather poorly compared to last ones. One might ask, as the author and Arnold did, whether the over reaction begets precisely the kind of election outcome we did.
But hey, at least it wasn’t your circle’s fault.
I think you maybe don’t remember Chavez under Bush.
I can’t speak for your circle but the lefter media is apoplectic that Trump is going to do stuff like take away Hobby Lobby’s employees’ free birth control. They aren’t just sad about losing, and a difference of opinion, they can’t even believe reasonable people could disagree. Their Overton window needs an adjustment.
No, this is about mobilizing the base, and it can be effective. Now it would have made more sense earlier, but as useless or counterproductive as it looks even to the center, it can have a positive impact.
1. Stop saying it is un-AmeRican to vet refugees that have lots of reasons to hate America.
2. Keep saying we can’t have a border and that will get you a wall.
3. Stop saying diversity is our strength therefore we have to have the majority of immigrants be illegald from Mexico, Central, and South America.
4. Stop assuming everyone agrees that foreign policy should be just a branch of welfare.
5. Start saying nice things about anything good Trump does.
6. Make a list of agreeable actionables and meet with Trump on them.
Has Trump even said anything bad about democrats? I read he may have said the party is a shambles bit that is just an observation.
He was a democrat until recently.
His objectives are centrist.
Republicans don’t like him.
He is compelled to get things done and says he likes to negotiate.
Therefore, I think he is primed to work with Democrats on common cause. But if your framing keeps being that everything he wants is what you don’t that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The essence of the Democrats is identity politics. Their long run goal is to become a one party state through demographic replacement. Trumps measures threaten that ultimate goal.
It’s not about taxes. It’s not about social policy. It’s not about laws and legislation. It’s all about power. Power comes from votes. Minorities represent cheap, compliant, plentiful votes.
Democrats have their eye on the ultimate prize. They can sacrifice anything and everything else, so long as one day Texas turns blue.
I hope you are right!
Andrew, why would you hope that asdf is right?
Even with complete demographic replacement, that doesn’t threaten the two party system. The two political parties will continue to find issues that large fractions of the electorate care about, and if they don’t they will simply be replaced by another political party that will do so. That includes internal replacement, as the Republican party was just basically internally overthrown.
Exactly.