I love this analysis, but to build on it: If the Democrats cannot operate without the blessing of the Capital class, then nothing will change. We need to raise taxes and build public, collective infrastructure (trains, social housing, health care, the usual liberal dreams). "Tax the rich" is an incredibly popular program (even among the temporarily embarrassed millionaires) but why won't "mainstream" Democrats run on it?
Have been using "TAX THE BASTARDS" as a signature theme for years now, but of course I am a nobody living in the backwoods of nowhere so who cares.
Recently have added "PACK THE COURT" and "REPUBLICANS RUIN EVERYTHING" to the three-word slogan stable. Maybe I should up my game and become a TikTok Influencer instead of a Reply Guy [insert anguished moan here].
Biden did indeed move away from Big Money toward true democracy, but precious few leaders in the Democratic party are in on that enterprise. Good messaging is critical, but until Democrats actually stand for average people (instead of favoring the capital class) and DELIVER on that message, they cannot beat the disinformation machine embraced by MAGA and the Republican party it has expropriated.
I can't think of a single Democratic presidential nominee who didn't run on raising taxes on the rich, their fair share, etc. I'd be curious if you can cite one who didn't say this was a part of their platform, threw it in their speeches, etc.
The catch is it doesn't produce as much revenue as broad consumption taxes in European countries do, which is the main difference between the US and European political economy of taxation. But Trump's tariffs and a Dem president after him might change that!
Not going to try and prove a negative, especially online lol, but look at how hard the party shut down Bernie Sanders, how the wealthy New Yorkers are trying to shut down Mamdani, how they've treated AOC... The idea that the Democratic Party writ large is a "tax the rich" party is laughable.
Your argument was that mainstream Democrats aren't running on tax the rich. You put forward this concrete negative, and I say actually all of them have said this going back to William Jennings Bryan. I recommend reading Michael Kazin's WHAT IT TOOK TO WIN for a history of Democrats.
Truly, "Read a book, hippie" is the best possible end to this thread. Rational facts and figures have won approximately zero votes over the past twenty years. But what Bernie, Mamdani, AOC (et al) have is PASSION, EMOTION, and FEELING. Some Dems might have said something about taxes, policies, etc, but they don't FIGHT for it. They don't use the bully pulpit -- and this also addresses the Biden comment above: What he did was great, but he didn't get out there and SELL IT. He didn't get on TV every damn day like Trump does and toot his own horn. He didn't shame the Republicans who voted against it and then claimed credit for it. He ran a playbook for 1970 and it worked as industrial policy and failed hard as politics. Again, Dems need to learn that they too can move the Overton window, if they want. After the past few elections, it's clear to most that's not what they want.
Two things that are frequently left out of there analyses are 1) the dems lost by very slim margins and the majority of people who voted were against Trump; 2) the billionaire controlled information environment is extremely hostile to the dems. The horrifically biased anti-Biden coverage (that’s the REAL cover up story) and Trump sanewashing presented staggeringly distorted portraits of the candidates. No matter WHAT the dem’s messaging might be, it will be twisted around to fit the view the system wants to portray.
The often-unacknowledged problem is that some in the media just can't bear to understand Republicans and their coalition as human causal agents. Some want to treat them as forces of nature, or landmines. However, I think that is a media production issue.
In addition to that production-side issue, what I think Henry is getting at is the attention-poor smartphone media landscape presents some almost pathological barriers for Democrats to get their messages received. Maybe it is not impossible, but a lot can get muddled in short-form media.
Yup. In the same vein, I think, is the fact that Tech now has the scale and control to dominate the on-line conversation, which shows up on everyone's little black mirror grafted to their hand, endlessly and continuously. In other words, if you have the money and control of the algorithm, you can just bury reasonable conversation in a see of 'dialogue', and you can unleash both trolls and bots to further it. It suggests what writers like Sarah Kendzior observes: that the sole purpose of the present political 'system' is to concentrate power into a form that a handful of self-entitled billionaires can control. Or, in other words, "...Mammon (aka 'Capital', aka 'Money') wants to put all persons into the service of things and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all creation."
As someone who spent a lifetime on the ground (growing up in NH), I lay the blame on Obama in 2008 (with Ezra's help of course) changing policy that limited the number of up-and-coming democrats invited to big fundraisers. The old policy allowed rubbing shoulders and teaching future politicians how to make their case with donors, allowed the party to see future politicians in action, enabled robust local networks to grow. Was it a kind of machine? Sure. You could call all this "back room" politics but did it work? Certainly yes and better than what we have. Obama has a lot to answer for and the lack of D bench I lay at his feet. Ezra's secret journo list was also part of the problem.
Didn't Obama also abandon / destroy his grassroots campaign organization after election? This could have generated continuous on-the-ground support for public opinion and pressure on lawmakers. Another case of Dems "responding" to the pubic, rather than trying to "lead" on these issues.
As someone who was on that list, I won't say more than that this is terriblywrong. I'm not sure exactly how and why Ezra has been retrofitted into the role of Democratic Party's Greatest Villain and Secret Evil Zelig Involved In Every Bad Thing, but it is very mistaken. How on earth do you think he "helped" Obama to limit the number of up-and-coming Democrats? Is there _any_ evidence to support this claim on beyond loose vibes and dislike? It's absolutely fine to disagree with his views, or specific things he has advocated for or against but the Machiavellian theories of his universal influence, say much more about the dire state that the Democratic party is in than they do anything to remediate it.
Oh I'm not disagreeing with your substantive point about Democratic strategy, which seems perfectly plausible; just on the apparent attribution to Ezra. For a different theory of what went wrong, it may be worth reading Adam Sheingate's book on the role of political consultants in the Democratic party, and seeing what resonates and what does not.
I know Adam; I read his book when it came out and I mentioned my time working for Berman/D'Agostino in CA, which the book doesn't cover. I did not mean to blame Ezra for the change in the ground game directly (I see how my parenthetical suggests that, for which I take the blame). But I do for the idea that "the media" can transcend and make less necessary a ground game. You should read about Bernan/D'Agostino if you don't know them. They had a ground game (from redistricting to potholders with candidates' names mailed to voter the week before Election Day) that was better than anyone. You'd see people show up at the polls with their potholders. All of this changed with Obama. I had this argument with Steve Teles yesterday who said my blame on the list was wrong. I disagreed with him too. https://igs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/berman_collection_document.pdf
I love the idea of more experimentation in government, but for that to work, there need to be working feedback mechanisms that communicate the results and impact of the experiment, which right now is completely lacking in most government agencies.
The challenge here is it would involve completely reshaping the way the bureaucracy works, and it would involve the Democrats abandoning their fetish for proceduralism.
It’s probably a caricature to say that the current structure of most government bureaucracies in the US is to centralize control and to diminish accountability, but it’s directionally accurate.
In order for experimentation to work, you need to delegate decision making much further down, often to the point of delivery for the service.
One example of how this model could work is currently being done with Drone units in Ukraine. Drone units are part of a gamified system where they are awarded points for achieving certain battlefield objectives (10 points for destroying a tank, 2 points for killing an infantryman etc.)
Command can adjust unit behavior by changing point values, and the points can be spent in a store to provision the unit.
That last part is radical, because it shifts procurement decisions from the central bureaucracy to the units who need it done. That feedback loop is incredible, because the unit can use their experience and objectives to choose their equipment.
The central bureaucracy still controls what goes into the store, but that is a lot less control then simply deciding who gets what.
You could easily adapt this concept to teaching and schools and customize it so that instead of one size fits all targets, you can introduce rewards based on baselines specific to the class, school, and district. And then if teachers had access to a market to get things they needed to better do their job, that would not only support the teachers, but also create a feedback loop to let administrators know what works and what doesn’t.
Good ideas! Another good idea that would promote experimentation was gifted to us by Timothy Snyder right after Trump‘s inauguration: a Democratic shadow cabinet, a rotating cast of Democratic politicians and policy experts who would generate cogent messages and analysis in opposition to Trump‘s horrible policies.
I imagined a 15 minute news hit in primetime every day or just before primetime, so the evening news would cover it. It seems like such an obviously good idea, so I’m fascinated to understand why we haven’t come anywhere close to it: I assume the problem is too many coalitions, as discussed above, but that’s why the membership rotates!
The message vacuum is, I think, one reason why the Dems are polling so abysmally now: people are angry and hungry: they need good ideas to be discussed, not just in social media, but in a focused and prominent place.
The challenge with that idea is that getting 15 minutes of prime time is basically irrelevant in the current information environment.
The goal is to reach low-information/low engagement voters, who are primarily getting information from an incredibly Balkanized set of sources primarily on YouTube and Podcasts, often on subjects unrelated to politics (eg Barstool sports).
Also, I’m not convinced that heavily triangulated responses from the gerontocracy running the Democratic Party will strike anyone as authentic
On the one hand, trying things is usually a good idea, but organizational attention is also valuable, and if I was thinking of ways to reform our politics, establishing a toothless performative shadow cabinet would be pretty low on my list of experiments to run.
Sorry to pick on the shadow cabinet idea because it is a common practice in parliamentary democracies, but it also reflects an intellectual blind spot that democrats have, which is focusing on messaging and signaling , rather than risk changing how things actually work.
The appeal of a shadow cabinet is it doesn’t really challenge any existing power structures, it’s a form of Kabuki political theater that can be a place where internal party fights can play out without actually threatening institutional change.
Even taking it as an experiment, what’s the feedback mechanism that would let the party know if a shadow cabinet or individual shadow-secretary is effective? Based on observed behavior of the party I think it’s pretty clear that such a mechanism doesn’t exist.
Exactly how the UK Parliamentary system is organized. There is an actual cabinet of the party in power, and a Shadow cabinet for the (main) party out of power. These individuals are the spokesmen to offer countervailing opinions on government policies. To be fair, this works well in a balanced media ecosystem, and would need a lot of tweaking in the current media landscape. The problem for the US is that it is "Not Invented Here," so it cannot be any good!
These are exciting new ideas that require a change in thinking. Humans are so bad at paradigm shifts that libertarians had to work hard for 50 years to convince voters that government is bad and capital as the bottom line is the only road to thriving. Messaging is critical, but a paradigm shift among Democrat Party leaders is even more fundamental. We have to DELIVER the goods.
With apologies for not listening to the conversation because everything I've ever seen/read of Klein's (up to and including excerpts of "Abundance") pisses me off so badly that I don't wanna subject myself to this.
But what they say and you write about Obama:
"And then given the reality of incremental victory, he was never sort of able to narrativize that.
[...]
Obama’s approach works for a while, because he builds on the audacity of hope, but he delivers disappointment rather than transformative change, because that is what the system allows."
sounds as if Obama tried to achieve the policies he promised, had to compromise heavily, and then didn't manage to communicate "I tried X, I achieved only Y for reasons but this is still a victory".
Yet from what I remember, the first part is not true. On Obamacare, and please correct me if I'm wrong, he didn't start with single payer or something close, but instead already with a heavily compromised version that was then weakened further in a fully expectedly doomed effort at bipartisan legislation. So the honest story would have been "I tried Y, which you didn't elect me for, in the hopes that Republicans vote for it, which they didn't do, and you got Z, which is marginally better than the status quo".
In the same way, if I remember correctly, that he promised acting boldly on reproductive rights, and once elected said that this wasn't a priority.
So maybe this is what you're aiming for when you talk about experimentation but Obama's problem was NOT that he didn't communicate his incremental successes but that he never even tried to match his campaign rhetoric.
And the current discussion in Democratic circles (and what you describe of the Klein conversation sounds rather similar) still doesn't seem to be "how do we attempt bold policies" but instead "how do we sell weak tea better".
It doesn't matter how good you are at communication if you don't have a fundamental outlook, a simple foundation for guiding thoughts. The Democrats CANNOT express a new view because they are intellectually hobbled by 50 years of free-market cheerleading which preaches there is no alternative. This video shows how to use both the market and non-market social organization to make a simple universal healthcare system:
This video is part of a series which teaches new first principles of social organization as the missing half of a better economics. It also teaches the principles of the market system better than anyone. Democratic candidates MUST learn how to speak in a positive way about both social AND market principles, in the SAME BREATH. This series shows how. They will win big and have a long political ascendancy.
"The Democrats CANNOT express a new view because they are intellectually hobbled by 50 years of free-market cheerleading which preaches there is no alternative." Amen!
BUT we can change this, and in 10 years the voting block will lean this way if we survive that long.
Depends on what you're trying to deliver. Trump delivers the crack for insecure, resentful people (racists, misogynists, bully wannabees) - and that's all he needs to do. Policies are just cover excuses for the dope deal that makes them feel superior to the evil liberals sneering at them. Thus Republican pushers can throw all sorts of subversive policy shit at the wall to see what sticks, i.e., what they can get away with. "Sure, he's criminal scum, but he's my dealer."
Complications, complications. One big part of the problem Democrats have in communicating is trying to break through the reichwing propaganda ecosystem - which has built up over decades into a juggernaut beast.
one of the reasons that the Democrat mainstream may be increasingly out of touch is that the filters that it deploys to understand the public may be increasingly out of sync with the mechanisms through which the public understands itself. Elected politicians rely on opinion polls, and are mostly members of the demographics that watch cable and network TV, rather than following influencer beefs, or diving headfirst into the endless feed of YouTube etc.
I think that this makes sense. You are right, this is a hard thing to prove in a proper social science way. I would add the way the Democratic leadership understands itself as a political public is strictly through beltway media and polls. It sees the other forms of media as auxiliary add ons or secondary channels for communication with voters and constituents. All this while the Democratic publics are being reconstituted and restructured using social media and other networks.
You should see Slotkins interview with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti at Breaking Points on YouTube to understand what’s the problem with Dems and new media. She was not prepared at all: https://youtu.be/AFrEJTFbSTc?si=3uzl0CldQY3e-zev
You should see Slotkins interview with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti at Breaking Points on YouTube to understand what’s the problem with Dems and new media. She was not prepared at all
How would FDR's policy achievements been viewed by voters subject to the daily and nightly barrage of disinformation from the Fox/Newsmax/Oann that managed to morph Joe Biden's massively successful investment, jobs, infrastructure, agriculture, climate, energy, economic juggernaut into "Biden Crime Family?" Obama won popular and electoral victories, twice, to face a solid wall in Mitch McConnell's Party Of No on the policy front. Obama delivered jobs growth in the longest historical sustained run in many decades, plus ACA, CFPB. Fox/Trump et al were still asking for his birth certificate in 2016. Trump rallied every single weekend of his first term. He lost to Joe Biden because he was unable to bury the Covid body count, economic fall-out from his tariff disaster, ( sadly forgotten by farmers and truckers etc when voting in 2024).
Props for the illustration pic, btw. Followed the breadcrumbs:
"One Third of a Nation"
O. Louis Guglielmi
American, born Egypt
1939
The title of this work references President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 inaugural address, in which he proclaimed, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." One Third of a Nation is also the title of Arthur Arent’s 1938 play, which emphasized the plight of the poor and was funded by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project. In this painting Guglielmi draws attention to the horrid living conditions during the Great Depression. The forms in the foreground resemble coffins and subsequently suggest a similar reading of the brick tenements behind them. The floral wreath adorning the building’s cornice reinforces this metaphor.
Read Cosma's review of Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2007-10.html#dewey-public). The analysis Dewey offers tracks this post very closely, once modernized in Shalizi's more modern language. Problem = the very definition of democratic politics comes down to elite efforts to prevent publics from realizing the best response to externalities. Sometimes, as in the Great Depression and WW2 the externalities sorta rub your face in the problems and literally force a reaction. Oth, this doesn't happen every day of the week and identifying the bad guys and the bad institutions isn't easy otherwise.
I think the very thing Shalizi calls for at the last of there review is what you are talking about here. Problem, part deux = experimental politics calls for a willingness of the publics to put up with it. FDR and the Little Flower didn't have a problem with that due so the aforementioned externalities. We'll have to see if the US can muster the schwerpunct to do something like that in the face of 4 years of Trump. I'd say the jury is out on that.
It's a long time since I have been able to distinguish the things that I think from the things that Cosma thinks, but I think the problem with Dewey is that he is very weak on power.
I think Dewey is talking about power all the way through The Public. If you mean that he's not specifically identifying the source of power, you are right; he doesn't do much on that. If you are talking about his analysis of the effects of power on democratic politics and how power works to distract mass publics from forming to address problems, boyo, are you wrong. The whole book is about that and the difficulties it causes. And it is very useful to think things through using Dewey's framework. Or, perhaps I should have said, that I found it useful to think about democracy his way.
Glad to hear that you and Shalizi agree about almost everything. Add me to the cult.
Thank You for invoking Brian Eno, his description of an adaptive organization. Maybe finally the time is ripe for this Republic.
Rosa Parks attended Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School (MLK Jr on the faculty), Highland School inspired by Scandinavian "Bildung" model from which their social democracies emerged. They effectively added the missing conversation. There's a proven participatory democracy model to do that; ongoing, randomly selected, wise democracy citizens council, conceived in the USA and a constitutional amendment in two states in Europe.. Time to bring our brilliant ideas back home.
One would think it would be easy to organize a coalition to oppose white supremacy. Then I remember the NAACP was unable to get a federal anti-lynching law passed over a 50 year period in which there were weekly lunching.
Of course, it would be very helpful to openly recognize you are in fact organizing a coalition to oppose white supremacy.
I love this analysis, but to build on it: If the Democrats cannot operate without the blessing of the Capital class, then nothing will change. We need to raise taxes and build public, collective infrastructure (trains, social housing, health care, the usual liberal dreams). "Tax the rich" is an incredibly popular program (even among the temporarily embarrassed millionaires) but why won't "mainstream" Democrats run on it?
Have been using "TAX THE BASTARDS" as a signature theme for years now, but of course I am a nobody living in the backwoods of nowhere so who cares.
Recently have added "PACK THE COURT" and "REPUBLICANS RUIN EVERYTHING" to the three-word slogan stable. Maybe I should up my game and become a TikTok Influencer instead of a Reply Guy [insert anguished moan here].
Biden did indeed move away from Big Money toward true democracy, but precious few leaders in the Democratic party are in on that enterprise. Good messaging is critical, but until Democrats actually stand for average people (instead of favoring the capital class) and DELIVER on that message, they cannot beat the disinformation machine embraced by MAGA and the Republican party it has expropriated.
Where were you when Joe Biden directed billions to airports, bridges, trains, buses, roads, schools, factories, etc?
I can't think of a single Democratic presidential nominee who didn't run on raising taxes on the rich, their fair share, etc. I'd be curious if you can cite one who didn't say this was a part of their platform, threw it in their speeches, etc.
The catch is it doesn't produce as much revenue as broad consumption taxes in European countries do, which is the main difference between the US and European political economy of taxation. But Trump's tariffs and a Dem president after him might change that!
Not going to try and prove a negative, especially online lol, but look at how hard the party shut down Bernie Sanders, how the wealthy New Yorkers are trying to shut down Mamdani, how they've treated AOC... The idea that the Democratic Party writ large is a "tax the rich" party is laughable.
Your argument was that mainstream Democrats aren't running on tax the rich. You put forward this concrete negative, and I say actually all of them have said this going back to William Jennings Bryan. I recommend reading Michael Kazin's WHAT IT TOOK TO WIN for a history of Democrats.
Truly, "Read a book, hippie" is the best possible end to this thread. Rational facts and figures have won approximately zero votes over the past twenty years. But what Bernie, Mamdani, AOC (et al) have is PASSION, EMOTION, and FEELING. Some Dems might have said something about taxes, policies, etc, but they don't FIGHT for it. They don't use the bully pulpit -- and this also addresses the Biden comment above: What he did was great, but he didn't get out there and SELL IT. He didn't get on TV every damn day like Trump does and toot his own horn. He didn't shame the Republicans who voted against it and then claimed credit for it. He ran a playbook for 1970 and it worked as industrial policy and failed hard as politics. Again, Dems need to learn that they too can move the Overton window, if they want. After the past few elections, it's clear to most that's not what they want.
Which is not to say they haven't made some nods to it in order to calm the animal spirits of the Left.
Two things that are frequently left out of there analyses are 1) the dems lost by very slim margins and the majority of people who voted were against Trump; 2) the billionaire controlled information environment is extremely hostile to the dems. The horrifically biased anti-Biden coverage (that’s the REAL cover up story) and Trump sanewashing presented staggeringly distorted portraits of the candidates. No matter WHAT the dem’s messaging might be, it will be twisted around to fit the view the system wants to portray.
The often-unacknowledged problem is that some in the media just can't bear to understand Republicans and their coalition as human causal agents. Some want to treat them as forces of nature, or landmines. However, I think that is a media production issue.
In addition to that production-side issue, what I think Henry is getting at is the attention-poor smartphone media landscape presents some almost pathological barriers for Democrats to get their messages received. Maybe it is not impossible, but a lot can get muddled in short-form media.
Yup. In the same vein, I think, is the fact that Tech now has the scale and control to dominate the on-line conversation, which shows up on everyone's little black mirror grafted to their hand, endlessly and continuously. In other words, if you have the money and control of the algorithm, you can just bury reasonable conversation in a see of 'dialogue', and you can unleash both trolls and bots to further it. It suggests what writers like Sarah Kendzior observes: that the sole purpose of the present political 'system' is to concentrate power into a form that a handful of self-entitled billionaires can control. Or, in other words, "...Mammon (aka 'Capital', aka 'Money') wants to put all persons into the service of things and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all creation."
Andy Crouch. “The Life We’re Looking For”. 2022
As someone who spent a lifetime on the ground (growing up in NH), I lay the blame on Obama in 2008 (with Ezra's help of course) changing policy that limited the number of up-and-coming democrats invited to big fundraisers. The old policy allowed rubbing shoulders and teaching future politicians how to make their case with donors, allowed the party to see future politicians in action, enabled robust local networks to grow. Was it a kind of machine? Sure. You could call all this "back room" politics but did it work? Certainly yes and better than what we have. Obama has a lot to answer for and the lack of D bench I lay at his feet. Ezra's secret journo list was also part of the problem.
Didn't Obama also abandon / destroy his grassroots campaign organization after election? This could have generated continuous on-the-ground support for public opinion and pressure on lawmakers. Another case of Dems "responding" to the pubic, rather than trying to "lead" on these issues.
Yes, Organizing For America. I was *so* disappointed by that decision. So much momentum and celebration, simply abandoned.
As someone who was on that list, I won't say more than that this is terriblywrong. I'm not sure exactly how and why Ezra has been retrofitted into the role of Democratic Party's Greatest Villain and Secret Evil Zelig Involved In Every Bad Thing, but it is very mistaken. How on earth do you think he "helped" Obama to limit the number of up-and-coming Democrats? Is there _any_ evidence to support this claim on beyond loose vibes and dislike? It's absolutely fine to disagree with his views, or specific things he has advocated for or against but the Machiavellian theories of his universal influence, say much more about the dire state that the Democratic party is in than they do anything to remediate it.
It didn’t help anyone and yet it happened. Ask any on the ground operative. And look at where we are
Oh I'm not disagreeing with your substantive point about Democratic strategy, which seems perfectly plausible; just on the apparent attribution to Ezra. For a different theory of what went wrong, it may be worth reading Adam Sheingate's book on the role of political consultants in the Democratic party, and seeing what resonates and what does not.
I know Adam; I read his book when it came out and I mentioned my time working for Berman/D'Agostino in CA, which the book doesn't cover. I did not mean to blame Ezra for the change in the ground game directly (I see how my parenthetical suggests that, for which I take the blame). But I do for the idea that "the media" can transcend and make less necessary a ground game. You should read about Bernan/D'Agostino if you don't know them. They had a ground game (from redistricting to potholders with candidates' names mailed to voter the week before Election Day) that was better than anyone. You'd see people show up at the polls with their potholders. All of this changed with Obama. I had this argument with Steve Teles yesterday who said my blame on the list was wrong. I disagreed with him too. https://igs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/berman_collection_document.pdf
I love the idea of more experimentation in government, but for that to work, there need to be working feedback mechanisms that communicate the results and impact of the experiment, which right now is completely lacking in most government agencies.
The challenge here is it would involve completely reshaping the way the bureaucracy works, and it would involve the Democrats abandoning their fetish for proceduralism.
It’s probably a caricature to say that the current structure of most government bureaucracies in the US is to centralize control and to diminish accountability, but it’s directionally accurate.
In order for experimentation to work, you need to delegate decision making much further down, often to the point of delivery for the service.
One example of how this model could work is currently being done with Drone units in Ukraine. Drone units are part of a gamified system where they are awarded points for achieving certain battlefield objectives (10 points for destroying a tank, 2 points for killing an infantryman etc.)
Command can adjust unit behavior by changing point values, and the points can be spent in a store to provision the unit.
That last part is radical, because it shifts procurement decisions from the central bureaucracy to the units who need it done. That feedback loop is incredible, because the unit can use their experience and objectives to choose their equipment.
The central bureaucracy still controls what goes into the store, but that is a lot less control then simply deciding who gets what.
You could easily adapt this concept to teaching and schools and customize it so that instead of one size fits all targets, you can introduce rewards based on baselines specific to the class, school, and district. And then if teachers had access to a market to get things they needed to better do their job, that would not only support the teachers, but also create a feedback loop to let administrators know what works and what doesn’t.
Good ideas! Another good idea that would promote experimentation was gifted to us by Timothy Snyder right after Trump‘s inauguration: a Democratic shadow cabinet, a rotating cast of Democratic politicians and policy experts who would generate cogent messages and analysis in opposition to Trump‘s horrible policies.
I imagined a 15 minute news hit in primetime every day or just before primetime, so the evening news would cover it. It seems like such an obviously good idea, so I’m fascinated to understand why we haven’t come anywhere close to it: I assume the problem is too many coalitions, as discussed above, but that’s why the membership rotates!
The message vacuum is, I think, one reason why the Dems are polling so abysmally now: people are angry and hungry: they need good ideas to be discussed, not just in social media, but in a focused and prominent place.
The challenge with that idea is that getting 15 minutes of prime time is basically irrelevant in the current information environment.
The goal is to reach low-information/low engagement voters, who are primarily getting information from an incredibly Balkanized set of sources primarily on YouTube and Podcasts, often on subjects unrelated to politics (eg Barstool sports).
Also, I’m not convinced that heavily triangulated responses from the gerontocracy running the Democratic Party will strike anyone as authentic
On the one hand, trying things is usually a good idea, but organizational attention is also valuable, and if I was thinking of ways to reform our politics, establishing a toothless performative shadow cabinet would be pretty low on my list of experiments to run.
Sorry to pick on the shadow cabinet idea because it is a common practice in parliamentary democracies, but it also reflects an intellectual blind spot that democrats have, which is focusing on messaging and signaling , rather than risk changing how things actually work.
The appeal of a shadow cabinet is it doesn’t really challenge any existing power structures, it’s a form of Kabuki political theater that can be a place where internal party fights can play out without actually threatening institutional change.
Even taking it as an experiment, what’s the feedback mechanism that would let the party know if a shadow cabinet or individual shadow-secretary is effective? Based on observed behavior of the party I think it’s pretty clear that such a mechanism doesn’t exist.
Exactly how the UK Parliamentary system is organized. There is an actual cabinet of the party in power, and a Shadow cabinet for the (main) party out of power. These individuals are the spokesmen to offer countervailing opinions on government policies. To be fair, this works well in a balanced media ecosystem, and would need a lot of tweaking in the current media landscape. The problem for the US is that it is "Not Invented Here," so it cannot be any good!
These are exciting new ideas that require a change in thinking. Humans are so bad at paradigm shifts that libertarians had to work hard for 50 years to convince voters that government is bad and capital as the bottom line is the only road to thriving. Messaging is critical, but a paradigm shift among Democrat Party leaders is even more fundamental. We have to DELIVER the goods.
With apologies for not listening to the conversation because everything I've ever seen/read of Klein's (up to and including excerpts of "Abundance") pisses me off so badly that I don't wanna subject myself to this.
But what they say and you write about Obama:
"And then given the reality of incremental victory, he was never sort of able to narrativize that.
[...]
Obama’s approach works for a while, because he builds on the audacity of hope, but he delivers disappointment rather than transformative change, because that is what the system allows."
sounds as if Obama tried to achieve the policies he promised, had to compromise heavily, and then didn't manage to communicate "I tried X, I achieved only Y for reasons but this is still a victory".
Yet from what I remember, the first part is not true. On Obamacare, and please correct me if I'm wrong, he didn't start with single payer or something close, but instead already with a heavily compromised version that was then weakened further in a fully expectedly doomed effort at bipartisan legislation. So the honest story would have been "I tried Y, which you didn't elect me for, in the hopes that Republicans vote for it, which they didn't do, and you got Z, which is marginally better than the status quo".
In the same way, if I remember correctly, that he promised acting boldly on reproductive rights, and once elected said that this wasn't a priority.
So maybe this is what you're aiming for when you talk about experimentation but Obama's problem was NOT that he didn't communicate his incremental successes but that he never even tried to match his campaign rhetoric.
And the current discussion in Democratic circles (and what you describe of the Klein conversation sounds rather similar) still doesn't seem to be "how do we attempt bold policies" but instead "how do we sell weak tea better".
It doesn't matter how good you are at communication if you don't have a fundamental outlook, a simple foundation for guiding thoughts. The Democrats CANNOT express a new view because they are intellectually hobbled by 50 years of free-market cheerleading which preaches there is no alternative. This video shows how to use both the market and non-market social organization to make a simple universal healthcare system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-3CSl7yo_I
This video is part of a series which teaches new first principles of social organization as the missing half of a better economics. It also teaches the principles of the market system better than anyone. Democratic candidates MUST learn how to speak in a positive way about both social AND market principles, in the SAME BREATH. This series shows how. They will win big and have a long political ascendancy.
"The Democrats CANNOT express a new view because they are intellectually hobbled by 50 years of free-market cheerleading which preaches there is no alternative." Amen!
BUT we can change this, and in 10 years the voting block will lean this way if we survive that long.
Depends on what you're trying to deliver. Trump delivers the crack for insecure, resentful people (racists, misogynists, bully wannabees) - and that's all he needs to do. Policies are just cover excuses for the dope deal that makes them feel superior to the evil liberals sneering at them. Thus Republican pushers can throw all sorts of subversive policy shit at the wall to see what sticks, i.e., what they can get away with. "Sure, he's criminal scum, but he's my dealer."
Complications, complications. One big part of the problem Democrats have in communicating is trying to break through the reichwing propaganda ecosystem - which has built up over decades into a juggernaut beast.
one of the reasons that the Democrat mainstream may be increasingly out of touch is that the filters that it deploys to understand the public may be increasingly out of sync with the mechanisms through which the public understands itself. Elected politicians rely on opinion polls, and are mostly members of the demographics that watch cable and network TV, rather than following influencer beefs, or diving headfirst into the endless feed of YouTube etc.
I think that this makes sense. You are right, this is a hard thing to prove in a proper social science way. I would add the way the Democratic leadership understands itself as a political public is strictly through beltway media and polls. It sees the other forms of media as auxiliary add ons or secondary channels for communication with voters and constituents. All this while the Democratic publics are being reconstituted and restructured using social media and other networks.
You should see Slotkins interview with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti at Breaking Points on YouTube to understand what’s the problem with Dems and new media. She was not prepared at all: https://youtu.be/AFrEJTFbSTc?si=3uzl0CldQY3e-zev
You should see Slotkins interview with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti at Breaking Points on YouTube to understand what’s the problem with Dems and new media. She was not prepared at all
How would FDR's policy achievements been viewed by voters subject to the daily and nightly barrage of disinformation from the Fox/Newsmax/Oann that managed to morph Joe Biden's massively successful investment, jobs, infrastructure, agriculture, climate, energy, economic juggernaut into "Biden Crime Family?" Obama won popular and electoral victories, twice, to face a solid wall in Mitch McConnell's Party Of No on the policy front. Obama delivered jobs growth in the longest historical sustained run in many decades, plus ACA, CFPB. Fox/Trump et al were still asking for his birth certificate in 2016. Trump rallied every single weekend of his first term. He lost to Joe Biden because he was unable to bury the Covid body count, economic fall-out from his tariff disaster, ( sadly forgotten by farmers and truckers etc when voting in 2024).
Props for the illustration pic, btw. Followed the breadcrumbs:
"One Third of a Nation"
O. Louis Guglielmi
American, born Egypt
1939
The title of this work references President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 inaugural address, in which he proclaimed, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." One Third of a Nation is also the title of Arthur Arent’s 1938 play, which emphasized the plight of the poor and was funded by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project. In this painting Guglielmi draws attention to the horrid living conditions during the Great Depression. The forms in the foreground resemble coffins and subsequently suggest a similar reading of the brick tenements behind them. The floral wreath adorning the building’s cornice reinforces this metaphor.
Henry,
Read Cosma's review of Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2007-10.html#dewey-public). The analysis Dewey offers tracks this post very closely, once modernized in Shalizi's more modern language. Problem = the very definition of democratic politics comes down to elite efforts to prevent publics from realizing the best response to externalities. Sometimes, as in the Great Depression and WW2 the externalities sorta rub your face in the problems and literally force a reaction. Oth, this doesn't happen every day of the week and identifying the bad guys and the bad institutions isn't easy otherwise.
I think the very thing Shalizi calls for at the last of there review is what you are talking about here. Problem, part deux = experimental politics calls for a willingness of the publics to put up with it. FDR and the Little Flower didn't have a problem with that due so the aforementioned externalities. We'll have to see if the US can muster the schwerpunct to do something like that in the face of 4 years of Trump. I'd say the jury is out on that.
It's a long time since I have been able to distinguish the things that I think from the things that Cosma thinks, but I think the problem with Dewey is that he is very weak on power.
Well … we'll have to agree to disagree on that.
I think Dewey is talking about power all the way through The Public. If you mean that he's not specifically identifying the source of power, you are right; he doesn't do much on that. If you are talking about his analysis of the effects of power on democratic politics and how power works to distract mass publics from forming to address problems, boyo, are you wrong. The whole book is about that and the difficulties it causes. And it is very useful to think things through using Dewey's framework. Or, perhaps I should have said, that I found it useful to think about democracy his way.
Glad to hear that you and Shalizi agree about almost everything. Add me to the cult.
more here https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zf5exvz1qvs1jjljqf51p/2014-Policy-and-Internet-Dewey.pdf?rlkey=vymb9130kzfx1489atoci2ctj&dl=0
Thank You for invoking Brian Eno, his description of an adaptive organization. Maybe finally the time is ripe for this Republic.
Rosa Parks attended Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School (MLK Jr on the faculty), Highland School inspired by Scandinavian "Bildung" model from which their social democracies emerged. They effectively added the missing conversation. There's a proven participatory democracy model to do that; ongoing, randomly selected, wise democracy citizens council, conceived in the USA and a constitutional amendment in two states in Europe.. Time to bring our brilliant ideas back home.
_______________________________
Center for Wise Democracy
https://www.wisedemocracy.org/
~•~
Adding the Missing Conversation
https://addingthemissingconversation.org/
One would think it would be easy to organize a coalition to oppose white supremacy. Then I remember the NAACP was unable to get a federal anti-lynching law passed over a 50 year period in which there were weekly lunching.
Of course, it would be very helpful to openly recognize you are in fact organizing a coalition to oppose white supremacy.