Oh, you think that was idiosyncratic, discursive, even meandering? Say hello to my little friend, "Immanuel Kant". Perhaps I really mean something like "Pierre Menard, author of the Critique of Pure Reason", but I don't think so; I think Kant got there in 1787. Paraphrased with a few strategic substitutions:
"It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the [data]; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these [data] a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in [data analysis] if we assume that the [data] must conform to our cognition."
Runaway inequalty since Reaganomics, but enabled by corporate-friendly neoliberal Dems, is the antithesis of moderation. Socialist rhetoric may or may not play in Peoria, but Bernie's, AOC's, and Mamdani's programs to improve the lives of working families are overwhelmingly popular just about everywhere.
Likewise, the divide and rule strategy of highlighting wedge issues to split the non-wealthy majority can be neutralized in most of the country by good old moderate live-and-let-live liberalism, then pivoting back to kitchen table issues.
Strong progressive candidates can win by pointing out that the common people are struggling and insecure because the 1% has been taking the lion's share of economic growth for decades (there is data: https://prospect.org/2025/12/03/79-trillion-heist-worker-pay/ ). As the notorious Willie Sutton explained when asked why he robbed banks, "that's where the money is".
I just watched the Danish movie Druk (Another Round) in which four high school teachers experiment with maintaining a constant blood alcohol level to boost creativity and confidence, with interesting results. It’s a great movie. I have also spent a lot of time reading about capitalism and the conclusion of a lot of the experts I’ve been reading is pluralism and discipline. Try lots of experiments and toss out what doesn’t work. I think it was Eric Lonergon and Mark Blyth (the books are all running together) who suggested this formula should be applied to politics. A lot of the suffering that resulted from neoliberalism, along with the development and prosperity, is the way it was insensitive to the impact it had on local communities and the assumption that overall growth would somehow magically compensate and repair broken local communities. Different communities really do have different requirements. My own experience with local community groups is that they often contain people with very different politics that come together out of shared interests. Friendships are formed around the shared interests and in the process there is the opportunity to work toward shared goals. The local search and rescue group included a spectrum from lefties to metal heads to gun right activists. One of the chief joys of these organizations are the characters you get to meet. The metal heads, who do look a bit threatening, are absolute sweethearts who swear like sailors. Great post. I think you are on the right track.
Metrics leading businesses astray. BevMo! was an excellent, "big box" beverage store, with a wide variety of brands in many beverage categories - spirits, wines, sodas, etc. Prices were generally low. Then GoPuff bought them. A recent visit suggests that GoPuff has determined the most profitable lines to carry and severely reduced or eliminated many brands that were once carried. It is now a pale shadow of what BevMo! was. It may cater to some median drinker population, but has lost my business as there is little point in going to teh store as my favorite brands are no longer stocked.
This reminds me of an accountant friend who bought a wine merchant's on a small Caribbean island. Applying his accounting skills, he eliminated carrying expensive wines that were rarely sold and were just capital tied up in slow-moving inventory. The store went bust a few years later, as it was no longer the store that restaurants wanted to order from, as they couldn't buy those expensive wines that were always on the wine lists to indicate quality and for the extravagant customer to buy to impress companions. Perhaps a good example of simple metrics losing the "big picture" of wine purchasing.
Britain is an interesting case in this regard. Like teh US, it is an FPTP system. The 2 major parties - Tories and labour vie for the voters. Like the US, the Labour party has drifted to the center, arguably now center-right. While Labour won in 2024 in a "landslide", they had teh lowest voter turnout. Worse, their policies are so different from the traditional Labour party that voter enthusiasm has turned away from them, with their leader, Sir Keir Starmer, polling lower than Trump. Yikes!
But other parties are now in contention. Reform UK, a right-wing party, is polling far higher than teh Tories, forcing teh Tories to drift towards their perception of the median RW voter. This isn't working, and a number of their MPs has defected to Reform. Similarly, the Green party has adopted policies more similar to the traditional labour Party and are polling ahead of Labour.
As in the US, it looks like voters are bimodal, polarizing towards their extremes. Running towards the global middle just searches for a few actual centrist voters. while the bulk of the voters wants a party that is either LW or RW.
In the US, the popularity of progressive (LW) legislators in the Democratic Party argues that a similar bimodal distribution holds here, too. There are the hard-core MAGA voters supporting Trump, who then uses those voters as a weapon to corral supine GOP politicians. Like Labour (starting with Blair's more centrist "New Labour"), Democrats have drifted to teh center as "corporate Democrats", as inequality has strengthened the wealthy donor class' hold on policy. The population wants more LW policies. But there is no comparable viable LW party in teh US, so the Democrats cannot get enough enthusiastic voters to vote for them.. As a result, LW voters are forced to vote D as a protest vote against Trump and his fascist policies. However, they do not offer policies to vote for them, and indeed, will not enact laws that LW voters actually want, as has been made clear by long term-studies of voter demands vs legislation enacted. As the Republican Party has become, de facto, a true far-RW party (let's call a spade a spade - a fascist party), and the Democrats remain a centrist party, there is no national party to represent the LW, which Britain's political parties demonstrate a desire for. Democrats need to move leftwards, but that means offering policies that actually benefit the bulk of the non-wealthy US population.
I noticed you are too polite to mention that the Republican party has rejected the Median Voter Theory for some dedades now and done rather well in terms of results. I have my own issues with the Median Voter model being built from interpretation of polling data, but the fact that there is a sucessful party that completely rejects it should be some sort of wake-up call, let alone that the sucessful party has loudly and repeatedly announced its desire to eliminate the Median Voter completely. Chasing the votes of people who can't vote seems counter-productive.
Not so much later in the election year, but always in non-election years. the message and education of voters: Democrats are concerned with the economy and that it needs to benefit everyone, service workers through the 1%. Medical care needs to be ensured by government. Business need to do well so that workers have jobs. Our infrastructure needs to be updated, always. We need to value every demographic in the country and ensure they have the chance to do well. Then EMPHASIZE, doing all of this means we never can do all of it. Governing effectively is hard. Tweets don't get the job done.
All for experimentation. That was the genius of FDR policies. But wonder if this is the best way to think about the problem. Maybe assessing what the public sees as the problems to be fixed, some obvious -- housing, healthcare, prices affordability, education decline, preparing for AI and other emerging tech, and not least, deepening inequality with the idea of equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.. Then figure out how to best frame and package that agenda to voters via experimentation.
U.S. two party system reinforces the unidimensional view of politics. How does “median voter theory “ apply in multi-party systems like Germany. Perhaps relevant in face of AfD surge…
This is wonderful, and I look forward to sharing it with people. I think the central point about the value of experimentation is well put. I have some small quibbles with some of the ways that you frame things (in my experience "moderate" politicians are often weirder than your summary would suggest. Obviously Fetterman is a frequently frustrating example and, locally, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is not just following the polls. She clearly has an internal sense of what feels right to her; which I don't always agree with).
However, since you mentioned Ezra Klein, I will mention this quote from him which I think about from time to time and which fits very well with what you're saying.
I remember when I was starting out ... I remember I was a young writing fellow at the American Prospect and talking to members of Congress and I think in some way I thought they all had access to some information network where they all knew what was actually going on. And I would call them and I was 22 and they'd be like, "Well, what have you heard?" I'm like, "What have I heard? I'm calling you."
Really quickly I began to realize they didn't know. They were reading roll call and looking for hints in the Washington Post. There wasn't some centralized information source that the people in power like picked up the phone and got the real scoop. They were working off of very little. Right now with the Democratic party and the state it's in -- I would say this in the most serious possible way and without ego for any of us here or any of you -- no one is coming to save us. They don't have a plan.
There's not some master strategy. I've asked if somebody over there knows what's going on. The answer was no. And so we're going to have to -- all of us and people far outside of this room -- like people out there doing the no kings protest, people in think tanks, people like everywhere at every level like we are going to have to build something that can contest this and win. . . . I find the moment like very very very scary and all you can do is your best. So like I'm a journalist. I enjoy being a journalist. I have no other skills and so like I will do my best. That's what I can do.
Like newspapers, politics is made up of small subgroups of subscribers. What Bezos did was like a person chopping off his left arm because it is not used as frequently as the right. He might find like the leftless man that wiping one's ass is an important activity.
Back in the day, parties could talk out of both sides of their mouths, like saying different things in the South, West East and North to attract votes. Much harder to N'ger N'ger N'ger now.
The Democratic Party ran two vaginas - one brown, and lost. I don't need polls to figure that one out.
I just don't see the point, since nobody will accept the results of experiments if they don't like the implications, and you can always just blame the media.
As an example, what would convince you if it a mistake for red/purple state senators not to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh?
Oh, you think that was idiosyncratic, discursive, even meandering? Say hello to my little friend, "Immanuel Kant". Perhaps I really mean something like "Pierre Menard, author of the Critique of Pure Reason", but I don't think so; I think Kant got there in 1787. Paraphrased with a few strategic substitutions:
"It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the [data]; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these [data] a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in [data analysis] if we assume that the [data] must conform to our cognition."
Runaway inequalty since Reaganomics, but enabled by corporate-friendly neoliberal Dems, is the antithesis of moderation. Socialist rhetoric may or may not play in Peoria, but Bernie's, AOC's, and Mamdani's programs to improve the lives of working families are overwhelmingly popular just about everywhere.
Likewise, the divide and rule strategy of highlighting wedge issues to split the non-wealthy majority can be neutralized in most of the country by good old moderate live-and-let-live liberalism, then pivoting back to kitchen table issues.
Strong progressive candidates can win by pointing out that the common people are struggling and insecure because the 1% has been taking the lion's share of economic growth for decades (there is data: https://prospect.org/2025/12/03/79-trillion-heist-worker-pay/ ). As the notorious Willie Sutton explained when asked why he robbed banks, "that's where the money is".
I just watched the Danish movie Druk (Another Round) in which four high school teachers experiment with maintaining a constant blood alcohol level to boost creativity and confidence, with interesting results. It’s a great movie. I have also spent a lot of time reading about capitalism and the conclusion of a lot of the experts I’ve been reading is pluralism and discipline. Try lots of experiments and toss out what doesn’t work. I think it was Eric Lonergon and Mark Blyth (the books are all running together) who suggested this formula should be applied to politics. A lot of the suffering that resulted from neoliberalism, along with the development and prosperity, is the way it was insensitive to the impact it had on local communities and the assumption that overall growth would somehow magically compensate and repair broken local communities. Different communities really do have different requirements. My own experience with local community groups is that they often contain people with very different politics that come together out of shared interests. Friendships are formed around the shared interests and in the process there is the opportunity to work toward shared goals. The local search and rescue group included a spectrum from lefties to metal heads to gun right activists. One of the chief joys of these organizations are the characters you get to meet. The metal heads, who do look a bit threatening, are absolute sweethearts who swear like sailors. Great post. I think you are on the right track.
Metrics leading businesses astray. BevMo! was an excellent, "big box" beverage store, with a wide variety of brands in many beverage categories - spirits, wines, sodas, etc. Prices were generally low. Then GoPuff bought them. A recent visit suggests that GoPuff has determined the most profitable lines to carry and severely reduced or eliminated many brands that were once carried. It is now a pale shadow of what BevMo! was. It may cater to some median drinker population, but has lost my business as there is little point in going to teh store as my favorite brands are no longer stocked.
This reminds me of an accountant friend who bought a wine merchant's on a small Caribbean island. Applying his accounting skills, he eliminated carrying expensive wines that were rarely sold and were just capital tied up in slow-moving inventory. The store went bust a few years later, as it was no longer the store that restaurants wanted to order from, as they couldn't buy those expensive wines that were always on the wine lists to indicate quality and for the extravagant customer to buy to impress companions. Perhaps a good example of simple metrics losing the "big picture" of wine purchasing.
Britain is an interesting case in this regard. Like teh US, it is an FPTP system. The 2 major parties - Tories and labour vie for the voters. Like the US, the Labour party has drifted to the center, arguably now center-right. While Labour won in 2024 in a "landslide", they had teh lowest voter turnout. Worse, their policies are so different from the traditional Labour party that voter enthusiasm has turned away from them, with their leader, Sir Keir Starmer, polling lower than Trump. Yikes!
But other parties are now in contention. Reform UK, a right-wing party, is polling far higher than teh Tories, forcing teh Tories to drift towards their perception of the median RW voter. This isn't working, and a number of their MPs has defected to Reform. Similarly, the Green party has adopted policies more similar to the traditional labour Party and are polling ahead of Labour.
As in the US, it looks like voters are bimodal, polarizing towards their extremes. Running towards the global middle just searches for a few actual centrist voters. while the bulk of the voters wants a party that is either LW or RW.
In the US, the popularity of progressive (LW) legislators in the Democratic Party argues that a similar bimodal distribution holds here, too. There are the hard-core MAGA voters supporting Trump, who then uses those voters as a weapon to corral supine GOP politicians. Like Labour (starting with Blair's more centrist "New Labour"), Democrats have drifted to teh center as "corporate Democrats", as inequality has strengthened the wealthy donor class' hold on policy. The population wants more LW policies. But there is no comparable viable LW party in teh US, so the Democrats cannot get enough enthusiastic voters to vote for them.. As a result, LW voters are forced to vote D as a protest vote against Trump and his fascist policies. However, they do not offer policies to vote for them, and indeed, will not enact laws that LW voters actually want, as has been made clear by long term-studies of voter demands vs legislation enacted. As the Republican Party has become, de facto, a true far-RW party (let's call a spade a spade - a fascist party), and the Democrats remain a centrist party, there is no national party to represent the LW, which Britain's political parties demonstrate a desire for. Democrats need to move leftwards, but that means offering policies that actually benefit the bulk of the non-wealthy US population.
I noticed you are too polite to mention that the Republican party has rejected the Median Voter Theory for some dedades now and done rather well in terms of results. I have my own issues with the Median Voter model being built from interpretation of polling data, but the fact that there is a sucessful party that completely rejects it should be some sort of wake-up call, let alone that the sucessful party has loudly and repeatedly announced its desire to eliminate the Median Voter completely. Chasing the votes of people who can't vote seems counter-productive.
Not so much later in the election year, but always in non-election years. the message and education of voters: Democrats are concerned with the economy and that it needs to benefit everyone, service workers through the 1%. Medical care needs to be ensured by government. Business need to do well so that workers have jobs. Our infrastructure needs to be updated, always. We need to value every demographic in the country and ensure they have the chance to do well. Then EMPHASIZE, doing all of this means we never can do all of it. Governing effectively is hard. Tweets don't get the job done.
All for experimentation. That was the genius of FDR policies. But wonder if this is the best way to think about the problem. Maybe assessing what the public sees as the problems to be fixed, some obvious -- housing, healthcare, prices affordability, education decline, preparing for AI and other emerging tech, and not least, deepening inequality with the idea of equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.. Then figure out how to best frame and package that agenda to voters via experimentation.
U.S. two party system reinforces the unidimensional view of politics. How does “median voter theory “ apply in multi-party systems like Germany. Perhaps relevant in face of AfD surge…
The end of articles is often where the best information is consigned to.
This is wonderful, and I look forward to sharing it with people. I think the central point about the value of experimentation is well put. I have some small quibbles with some of the ways that you frame things (in my experience "moderate" politicians are often weirder than your summary would suggest. Obviously Fetterman is a frequently frustrating example and, locally, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is not just following the polls. She clearly has an internal sense of what feels right to her; which I don't always agree with).
However, since you mentioned Ezra Klein, I will mention this quote from him which I think about from time to time and which fits very well with what you're saying.
--------------------------- block quote -----------------
I remember when I was starting out ... I remember I was a young writing fellow at the American Prospect and talking to members of Congress and I think in some way I thought they all had access to some information network where they all knew what was actually going on. And I would call them and I was 22 and they'd be like, "Well, what have you heard?" I'm like, "What have I heard? I'm calling you."
Really quickly I began to realize they didn't know. They were reading roll call and looking for hints in the Washington Post. There wasn't some centralized information source that the people in power like picked up the phone and got the real scoop. They were working off of very little. Right now with the Democratic party and the state it's in -- I would say this in the most serious possible way and without ego for any of us here or any of you -- no one is coming to save us. They don't have a plan.
There's not some master strategy. I've asked if somebody over there knows what's going on. The answer was no. And so we're going to have to -- all of us and people far outside of this room -- like people out there doing the no kings protest, people in think tanks, people like everywhere at every level like we are going to have to build something that can contest this and win. . . . I find the moment like very very very scary and all you can do is your best. So like I'm a journalist. I enjoy being a journalist. I have no other skills and so like I will do my best. That's what I can do.
Like newspapers, politics is made up of small subgroups of subscribers. What Bezos did was like a person chopping off his left arm because it is not used as frequently as the right. He might find like the leftless man that wiping one's ass is an important activity.
Back in the day, parties could talk out of both sides of their mouths, like saying different things in the South, West East and North to attract votes. Much harder to N'ger N'ger N'ger now.
The Democratic Party ran two vaginas - one brown, and lost. I don't need polls to figure that one out.
You are a genius! Anybody listening from the DNC???
I just don't see the point, since nobody will accept the results of experiments if they don't like the implications, and you can always just blame the media.
As an example, what would convince you if it a mistake for red/purple state senators not to vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh?