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There a really excellent conversation on @vox between @delong and @zackbeauchamp on what DeLong sees as the Democrats' necessary shift to the left. It deserves some thought. I don't mean by this what regular readers will have observed I often mean... vox.com/policy-and-pol…
2... which is something like, "this is wrong, and here's some thought on why it is wrong." I don't think @delong is wrong on the political dynamics at work, or how Democrats in national politics have misjudged them over the last quarter century.
3. Republicans, from top to bottom, have stuck to a disciplined and often zealous pursuit of electoral base mobilization and party unity -- in effect, giving veto power over legislative action to the GOP's most extreme elements, and to right-wing media.
4. Democrats have sometimes acted as if Republicans cared that a health care reform idea originated in a long-ago Heritage Foundation paper, in the face of a really massive amount of evidence that Republicans did not.
5. But that wasn't the only reason some "centrist," market-oriented Democratic policy ideas may need to be pushed to the background in favor of policy ideas favored by the party's left wing. Cap-and-trade, for example and very frankly, was always a little nuts on the merits.
6. A carbon tax, fine. Most of the substantive arguments against it can be addressed in one form or another, but the main arguments against it are political. We can't say that about cap-and-trade, a proposal borne of hubris on the part of people...
7...who thought they were smart enough to invent a market engaging many thousands of parties and within a few years make it work to achieve a policy goal. The odds are it would have crashed and burned amidst universal acrimony had the Democrats succeeded in 2010 in enacting it.
8. We can't blame some other Democratic policy errors on the Republicans, either. Financial services deregulation in the Clinton period, flying as blind as Republicans were during the subprime bubble, ignoring the foreclosure crisis, not pursuing haircuts for bondholders...
9...or criminal charges against Wall Street figures after the financial crisis, even salting the 2009 stimulus package with tax cuts: Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue shaped their policy preferences to the needs to people able to give them large amounts of money.
10. Corruption is pervasive in the Republican Party today; it is very close to its Prime Directive. It has not been absent among Democrats, either. "Market-oriented" has often had a meaning different than what @delong & @zackbeauchamp discuss today.
11. This will be a factor during the coming Presidential campaign. Some Democratic candidates are likely to continue the hyper-responsiveness to large donors that has kept the Party's large electioneering infrastructure funded. Others will object, & risk offending the donors.
12. Faulty policy ideas and policy ideas driven by deference to donors are not the only things that have gotten Democrats into trouble, independent of their relationship with Republicans. Foreign and national security affairs find the Party speaking with an uncertain voice.
13. The Obama administration, like all others, had a much freer hand in foreign than in domestic policy. What is its legacy today? Democrats can't say China's island-building in the South China Sea or the ill-fated surge in Afghanistan were forced upon it by Republicans.
14. Obama's misjudgment of the Arab Spring and his timidity toward Russian adventurism hang over the Democratic Party today. US engagement with China, the interminable wars against various terrorist groups, the structure of the American military, relations with Latin America...
15...all get much less thought from nationally prominent Democrats than these subjects need. The next Democratic President can buy some time and goodwill by undoing much of what Trump has done to America's international alliances and agreements. What comes after that?
16. To sum up: @delong is right about Democrats long history of misjudging a Republican Party that gradually ceased being serious about government, starting sometime in the 1990s. It's a history that explains some things, but not close to everything. [end]
