Thread by @whstancil

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.

If you're someone who is doing pretty well and who society has treated pretty well, that's a reassuring thought: maybe things SHOULD change, but they CAN'T. It's soothing to believe that the range of outcomes is pretty much restricted to how things currently are.

Then Obama happened. And the Tea Party happened. And Bernie happened. And Trump happened. And the Squad happened.

And that consensus began to look pretty shaky. It began to look like the range of possible outcomes was much wider than previously believed.

So I don't think it should surprise anyone that after Biden's victory, there's been something of an effort to restore this consensus - to say, no, actually, the best candidates and politics are those that fit the mold from decades ago.

And you'll never guess what kind of person is most attracted to this idea - both as its proponents and as its audience. To some groups, the idea that the old consensus is correct just seems INTUITIVELY true and appealing.

Anyway, the basic problem with these theories is that they have to be hellishly complicated to get around the obvious recent evidence of politicians far outside the prior consensus - politicians that few thought could succeed - actually doing fine.

They require delving into a lot of statistical minutiae to argue, the predictions they make (support popular things to make your polls go up!) don't actually pan out, and they constantly require caveats and exceptions to not collapse completely.

But the idea that the ideal politician is still a kinda-boring, incrementalist, economics-focused white dude-ish type is also proving fairly irrepressible, because it is very appealing to people who are disproportionately powerful in politics and society.

Anyway, try as they might to prove otherwise, the lesson of 21st-century American politics still isn't "you can win elections by promising mild, means-tested benefits."

It's "the range of possible outcomes is much wider than any of us are able to predict."