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Will Stancil Profile picture
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5 Oct, 6 tweets, 2 min read
It rules that we spent all summer and all of Biden’s momentum negotiating this goosed-up roads bill, literally for no reason except to be “bipartisan,” only to have the GOP withdraw its support and make it nearly as partisan as the reconciliation bill axios.com/us-chamber-pul…
There are basically two theories for why the Democratic Party sucks. One is that the leaders are smart and cunning and know what to do, but are continually derailed by activists and fringe ideologues.

But I think the better one is that the leaders are just… really bad at this?
I’m not sure “structural flaws” can be blamed for Dems deciding to bisect their agenda in a fruitless, months-long, clearly doomed quest for bipartisanship
The GOP faces the “structural” barrier of having a much smaller coalition with many fewer voters but still doesn’t make the stupid mistake of letting the opposition rope-a-dope them for months with evaporating promises of cooperation and comity
“Sure, the same set of Dem leaders have presided for decades mostly defined by disappointment and failure, but I know they’re not making major mistakes - any other set of leaders would have failed EVEN HARDER” is an alarmingly widespread view
For most institutions, we understand it’s important to hold leaders accountable for mistakes, even if there are root causes of those mistakes. We understand buck-passing is bad. But in Dem politics, many people seem to feel their job is to EXPLAIN AWAY leadership mistakes.

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More from @whstancil

Will Stancil Profile picture
7 Oct
I guess ultimately one thing that bugs me about the current political discourse goes beyond specific ideas and people and is really about something more fundamental, which is the idea that it makes sense to rely very heavily on data and statistics as prediction tools in politics
It seems to me that reliance on data, especially left-of-center, has produced a lot of artificial certainty about "correct" political decisions, and created the impression we can predict effects of decisions with precision - but in reality, such predictions often fail completely
It makes sense that data tools come up short! You're talking about complex systems of tens of millions of actors all affecting each other, often in ways that are ill understood. Like predicting the stock market, but vastly more potential outputs. The tools aren't up to snuff
Read 11 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
6 Oct
So there used to be a pretty broad consensus about what kind of politician and politics could win an election: white guy, moderate-ish, sort of boring, incrementalist, sticks to economics, sticks to policy, DEFINITELY avoids any questions challenging race or gender hierarchies.
And a certain kind of person - affluent, successful, usually white, usually male - was pretty comfortable with that consensus. It's less that they always agreed with the candidates in question, although they often did, but that it generally validated their lives and worldview.
For them, this consensus bolstered a sense of regularity in politics, that things were basically as they should be. It bolstered the sense that people talking about deep unfairness in the system or recommending radical changes were, if not incorrect, being deeply unrealistic.
Read 11 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
22 Sep
Is there any stretch of congressional maneuvering in modern history as inept as the Democrats over the past six months?
"Hm, let's set aside our entire agenda and spend six months trying to get the GOP to strike a deal with us, despite them opposed every single thing we did for 12 years"
"Okay, what if we put all the easy stuff in our agenda in one bill and then watered it down a bunch to get GOP votes, and then put all the bigger stuff in another bill, I'm sure that won't backfire"
Read 6 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
22 Sep
like half of our politics can be summed up as "people born at the top of society desperately trying to avoid the psychic distress of having to wonder if their privileges are unearned"
a lot of people seem to live inside carefully-maintained bubbles in which the comforts and conveniences of their day-to-day lives are regarded as fair and deserved. narratives that suggest that similarly deserving people have been deprived of those privileges threaten the bubble
injustice and unfairness that are geographically or historically distant are less threatening - most people can admit the universe was unfair in other times or places. but they freak out if they're asked to admit that the unfairness extends to the here and now, to their own lives
Read 5 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
21 Sep
Trump: the Vice President can declare a new presidential election winner, why not

Democrats: if the filibuster rule says we all have to burn alive, so must it be

this contrast explains like 90% of America’s current political crisis
if you had to explain US politics to space aliens their first question would be why the smaller party gets to constantly attempt to write new rules to favor itself while the larger party has to endlessly labor under the least favorable interpretation of existing rules
People are responding to this arguing that it's good that Dems follow the rules and we shouldn't emulate the GOP's Calvinball tactics, and that's kind of true, the problem is that you can't do it unilaterally
Read 4 tweets
Will Stancil Profile picture
20 Sep
At some point the ~80 million Americans worried sick about extremely real, extremely urgent, very long-standing, and enormously threatening problems facing the country are going to need an answer that's not "Ha, you don't understand how DC works, stop living in fantasyland"
I know that if you're ensconced in some comfortable sinecure where everyone treats you as an important expert, it's very satisfying to explain all the reasons nothing can change and nothing can get fixed. But the problems are real and eventually, something WILL give
The thing that gives out can be "Parliamentary traditions less than 30 years old" or it can be "The centuries-old constitutional system of the United States," but there is no pathway in which we just maintain the late 20th century status quo forever and everything is hunky dory
Read 4 tweets

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