Zac Hill Profile picture
Jul 26 17 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Thinking about what’s behind the Democratic Party’s toilet-tier approval rating in the context of my own political evolution, the biggest driver IMV has been the catastrophic failure of the project of Systems Change (tm) coupled with a corresponding unwillingness to abandon it 🧵
The whole story in ~2010 on the left was the Piketty era acceleration of wealth polarization, which strongly encouraged a ‘worm at the core’ issue requiring fundamental directional change. 2003 Iraq and 2008 Crash Vibes massively encouraged this on a narrative level.
This was the climate within which the various systems-level diagnoses - race; climate; economy; foreign policy; political power - started to take hold.
This happened as traditional meaning-providing institutions reached a critical level of erosion, AND the social internet enabled/encouraged ‘accelerative’ content - creating a situation where totalizing claims/projects filled a meaning hole while also reliably farming engagement
The problem is that while these two vectors dramatically accelerated systems-revolutionary claims, many vectors of reality started pushing the other direction. Real incomes grew. Foreign policy became multipolar. Black/ Latin voters trended more R. Green tech became cheaper.
This created a fundamental problem:
>incremental positive change became a more and more useful actual outcome, but
>systems-revolutionary projects became a higher-traction political ‘pitch’ (from both politicians and “Groups”) - and a more salient felt need amongst voters
The reason all this matters is that it is IMV the central thing that explains the main inter-Democratic party conflict AND the main driver of Democratic party unpopularity. Why?
Voters see a party utterly consumed with Bigly Ideological Projects that feel deeply removed from what they are actually interested in - indeed, a huge thing they want to change culturally) is that these Bigly Ideological Projects feel normative and omnipresent and inescapable
Meanwhile, within the party, you have this tension between various Just Do Good Stuff factions and other factions that rightly believe Just Doing Good Stuff jeopardizes their particular Systems Change Project
This pervades so many conflicts:
>Environment: Don’t eat less meat personally because that distracts from Systems Change in the agriculture industry
>Environment: Don’t build more domestic energy because that distracts from Systems Change around reducing emissions
>Crime: Don’t encourage progressives to become police because that distracts from Systems Change around the carceral state
>Housing: Don’t focus on building more housing because that distracts from Systems Change about affordability and equity
There are a million examples - once you start to use this lens, you can go through every issue and see the phenomenon everywhere. The same core thing presents: “Solve Some Problem” in every issue area squares up against “But We Want Systems Change” in that issue area.
And that presents an existential threat to the faction whose entire animating purpose is to create Systems Change within that area - which is why you see so much high temperature intra-party conflict right now! There is a REAL struggle for REAL power based on REAL disagreement!
Every space presents different problems with different diagnostic criteria. My point is that the *actual diagnostics* matter - all of us need to ask ourselves whether our issue-spaces REALLY need Systems Change, or rather the basic forward-moving work of continuous improvement.
I bring up my own story because I don’t think this is straightforwardly ideological - in the ~2010 macro environment, IMV Systems Change (at a 40k ft level) had a more solid diagnostic case than it does now. But opinions may differ on this.
The key is that a) I think the electorate is very averse to out-of-touch seeming Bigly Ideological Projects (BIPs) and b) lots of stuff is amenable to effective, ambitious, thoughtful policy-entrepreneurial solutions, so c) we need be giga-confident in any BIP we bet on.
If we aren’t, I think we’ll actively move backwards on making progress around the foremost issues of our time, continuing to alienate voters while solidifying a completely unworkable epistemic climate within our coalition. This is a recipe for a generational period of losing. /🧵

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