Thread by @mattsheffield

🧵 It's really stunning how many people who claimed Democrats should "reach out to rural people" really just meant "be Paul Ryan."

Tim Walz is everything these pundits pretended to want. What they actually wanted was a conservative Democratic party.

In all the countless safaris to Ohio diners that David Brooks and other conservatives-who-call-themselves-centrists made, they notably avoided talking to Clinton or Biden supporters to ever ask them: How do you think the Dems could've won your area?

It's more than a little ironic for me to complain about his as a former Republican, but the inconvenient truth is that there are way too many conservatives who gave up on their own party and are trying to turn Democrats into the party they once controlled.

Unlike most the former Never Trumpers who flooded into center-left spaces, I actually left the right wing before Trump, because I realized that DC Republicans had allowed a monstrously radical Christian nationalist movement to overrun the GOP at every level.

I changed my views.

The Republican party as currently constituted is no place for conservatives. It is a reactionary authoritarian party. And instead of fighting the radical right within their own party, conservatives have been trying to make Democrats into the conservative party

This cycle of conservatives flooding into the Democratic Party and demanding that it accommodate them has been the tail end of a cycle that's repeated multiple times as reactionaries have sequentially seized more power over the Republican Party beginning in 1964.

In the 1980s, there were the "Atari Democrats," many of whom were ex-Republicans who gave up fighting in their party. In the 1990s, there were the neoliberals like former "Goldwater Girl" Hillary Clinton. Cable punditry and tony op-ed pages were overrun with them as well.

Fast forward to today and Democrats are being hounded constantly by useless eaters like David Brooks or Bret Stephens, commentators who represent no one and who have never been right about anything, to take their utterly useless advice.

The conservatives bearing bad advice have had important allies like Rahm Emanuel, lifelong Democrats who benefit from a politics of the status quo. They also had no constituency, but they managed to keep power for a long time by faking a tension between social & economic justice.

There is no such conflict, and in fact, helping other people against bigotry and oligarchy helps you be protected as well.

Instead of doing Howard Dean's 50-state strategy of explaining progressive change, Emanuel's Democrats created a "just in time" strategy of centrism.

As in supply chains, a just in time strategy is optimized for only the present moment. This is why Hillary Clinton didn't campaign in Wisconsin or bother to maintain generational Democratic ties to rural America. It wasn't "necessary" according to her experts.

Just in time strategies are brittle and not resilient. They break and fall under pressure. This is why Democrats lost in 2016 and have been stuck at center field ever since.

JIT politics is based on the "median voter theory," the idea that elections are decided by unaligned voters. But this fact has been misinterpreted to mean that unaligned voters are the sort of libertarianish white people who write for the Atlantic or NYT.

The best proof that unaligned voters aren't centrist libertarians is the Republican Party itself, which under Trump completely abandoned almost all effort to appeal to them in 2016 and still won.

The public favors progressive Democrats' views on most issues.

But why do Republicans get many of their votes anyway? Because Republicans lie about their views. They pretend to be "populist."

I can give you a bunch of articles like this dataforprogress.org/blog/2020/12/3…

Tim Walz deserves enormous credit for the super effective "weird" attack line against Trump and his cronies, but it wouldn't have worked without the flood the zone PR strategy by the Joe Biden campaign to attack Project 2025. Trump has run scared of it for weeks.

The most effective attack on a Republican is to tell the public what they actually believe and want to accomplish.

Trump picking JD Vance, the lab-grown clone of the vampiric Peter Thiel is one of the biggest blunders in modern political history.

Kamala Harris's pick of Tim Walz needs to represent a new Democratic politics of full inclusion. She's done amazing at blazing a trail while also wanting everyone to have a part in the story, through her good humor & openness, a benefit of her non-Beltway background.

Tim Walz's cheerful and intelligent masculinity is breaking the right wing. They've spent decades propagating the lie that White men are an endangered species among Democrats, just like Christians supposedly are.

Black Democrats always saw that second lie. Walz exposes the first

This was the lesson that Democrats should have taken from Obama-Biden in 2008. A progressivism that includes everyone intellectually and rhetorically will be received overwhelmingly by voters.

We can do this!

/end

PS: I've gotta give credit to @Mr_Electrico, @bluegal, and @digby56 for their rock-ribbed opposition to conservatives trying to skew the Democrats to the right. I'm curious what they'll think of my case against the intraparty conservatives!

@Mr_Electrico @bluegal @digby56 I'll be working this thread into an article so please follow if you'd like more.

For a preview, I'm going to be discussing some of the Political Typology work by the Pew Research Center which you can read here pewresearch.org/politics/2021/…

For a related piece, please see this earlier essay on why lying and false rebranding is so critical to radical Republicans plus.flux.community/p/the-intellec…