We’re looking at turnout rates unseen either in 60 yrs or a century. Under daunting circumstances, millions have mobilized in new and old ways. The work people have put in has been staggering. And if you zoom out to take in the whole Trump presidency…
…you see an ongoing historic civic flourishing in politics. The Women’s March & rolling demonstrations in 2017. The organizing behind the record-setting 2018 midterms. The emergence of the socialist left in electoral and Dem programmatic politics. The BLM protests this summer…
These are distinct efforts with varying goals and plenty of robust conflict between and amongst them. But they’re also all the broadly progressive work of Americans exercising old civic muscles to build a better country. It’s inspiring and I’m very grateful.
In perilous times, I do think it’s worth stopping to note the relative health and vitality of progressive politics in the contemporary U.S.—certainly in the context of recent political history. I mean this both in terms of activist forces and potential in the mass electorate.
Whether today's outcome brings a reprieve or further catastrophe, that vitality is going to mean everything as the work goes on and the cause endures. /end
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1. A typically great piece that also links to this recent deep-dive by @dylanmatt on the poli sci literature on canvassing and gotv: vox.com/21366036/canva…
2. One piece of background context to pieces like these is that a cohort of young progressive data people, of whom @davidshor is a leading example, have for a few years now been promulgating the notion that door-knocking is a lib indulgence and inefficient vote-getter.
3. Their arguments had begun to influence the thinking of journalists in their orbit but hadn't quite coalesced as a new public-facing #Take to counter the narrative of an Obama-'08-birthed renaissance of Dem field ops. Then God decided to launch a natural experiment via Covid.
I’m trying to enjoy my sabbatical this semester but Dan Crenshaw keeps forcing me to relive the one set of Intro to American Politics discussions that invariably gets me genuinely and unprofessionally aggravated.
As a sidenote, part of the multidimensional aggravating-ness of these discussions is that these people aren't even mounting this (horrible) defense on behalf of the right institution.
The EC does give a somewhat disproportionate voice to small state residents, but by far the most significant driver of distortion and of pop-vote/EC mismatches is the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes everywhere except for ME and NE.
That prompts me to offer a claim about a deep asymmetry in democratic politics: Though the dangers of extremism and the value of parties as temporizers are common to all political persuasions, they are not shared equally among them.
Since con parties tend to both represent dominant social groups AND ally w/ econ elites who may have reason to fear majoritarian politics, their susceptibility to extremist influence shld usually pose more potent, system-destabilizing threats (ethnonationalism, authoritarianism).
. I have a more specific point, undeniably motivated by some “presentist” concerns.
2. Does the rise-of-the-right lit really “take the extreme right as representative of conservatism,” as Kabaservice charges? This work, first motivated by dissatisfaction w/ how postwar libs like Bell & Hofstadter pathologized the right, if anything went too far the other way.
3. It had a tendency to internalize too much of the movement’s own self-mythology, in which a Buckleyite mainstream decisively drew boundaries and kept the ship steering down the fusionist true path.