The end result is of course populism. Each election cycle gets us closer to the policy positions of the Republicans being "Immigrants are bad" and Democrats being "Billionaires are bad".
We know where populism leads, and we've seen it for decades in south america. In a few decades, we will get to choose between the populist far left and the populist far right. Policy will get crazier and crazier and measurable societal outcomes will stagnate and perhaps go backwards.
This will continue as long as social media is the primary form of entertainment in the US.
Please, can you even hear yourself?
Government and economics is complicated, so it's not that crazy to suggest that your average person doesn't understand it very well. The medical analog of economic populism is antivax and free birth content. Super popular online, but leads to bad outcomes.
Those damn plebs just have no idea what's best for them.
So yes, we need experts to play a substantial role in running things.
Perhaps even more importantly: it's not solely about what's best for every individual. You know what would be best for me? If the government gave me a free giant SUV that gets 4mpg fuel economy, and also let me drive as fast as I wanted while also subsidizing 90% of my fuel costs. Also it should drive itself so I can sleep while driving.
Sometimes we need to consider what's best for society and the planet, too.
You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...
Totally random people could draft new laws on climate (at least, they were told this). They met with lobbyists, both pro-oil and pro-climate for two weekends, experts on three other weekends, once in a conference-style where very generic stuff is said, two other in focus groups with more specific expertises, depending on the subject the focus group is on.
Experts were real experts though, with multiple publications and PhDs (or in some cases, engineering degrees, especially during the conference week), and tried to only talk on their subject matter.
In around 8 weekend, the 150 random people made ?148? law propositions, helped by lawyers, and most experts agree that they were both good and reasonable. What's interesting is that most of the 150 people said that before really learning about the subject, they would never have made this kind of propositions.
All that to say: experts don't have to run things, and imho, they should not. They should however have an advisory role to the random people drafting new laws.
Unfortunately, ignoring the public sphere and pretending that professionals are above such things is why we're now stuck with someone like Robert Kennedy Jr running HHS. This guy grew enough of a following and movement to reach a position of power and influence and he was barely challenged by experts all along the way.
RFK jr running HHS is the wave of the future. Unfortunately, we will continue to have non-experts who generate high engagement content running policy decisions more and more in the future.
> The end result is of course populism. Each election cycle gets us closer to the policy positions of the Republicans being "Immigrants are bad" and Democrats being "Billionaires are bad".
Except immigrants have nothing to do with how bad things are going, while billionaires (and what they represent) are effectively the architects of this situation. "Billionaires are bad" is an oversimplified, but ultimately correct analysis of the issues of our time.
FDR basically saved the country from fascism with his "robber barons are bad" campaign. I deplore the fall into populism just as much as the next guy, but this is what the situation calls for. Social networks only play a minor part in all of this. Material conditions are degrading, and unrest will only grow until they start improving.
This country's governance has been subservient to capital, basically forever, and unchecked private power is now eating it from the inside. This is what must be fixed if this republic is to have any future, and the populist left is the only band of the political spectrum that at least acknowledges the issue.
That would actually be a major improvement over what we have. Right now public policy decisions seem to get hashed out by nutjob activists on social media, not "average people."
Also the "research[ers and] experts" need to own up to their own responsibility for this situation. Right now we live in a populist moment because they got caught up in their own ideology and group-think, which created an opening for someone like Donald Trump. They should have seen the problems he used to build his support, and came up with effective solutions for them.
I think this is really the core dispute, and I'd encourage the author to take it more seriously. Does the Democratic coalition work without pro-corporate liberals on board? How many people would jump ship if you excommunicated Reed Hastings and Ezra Klein, and which are the Republican voters who would be swayed to replace (and hopefully more-than-replace) them? Without good answers to these questions, there's a very real risk of creating an energized, passionate, anti-corporate Democratic party which simply does not have any path to 270 electoral votes.
"Chuck Schumer still imagines America as it was in 1980", in the author's words. But what this means is that Chuck Schumer remembers an era where California was a Republican stronghold, a poorly constructed Democratic coalition led to three consecutive Republican landslides, and they hung on in Congress only by maintaining the loyalty of legacy segregationists. He knows that it can happen again.
By people do you mean voters or donors?
I suspect that approximately zero voters would care.
> which are the Republican voters who would be swayed to replace (and hopefully more-than-replace) them?
This is a false dichotomy. At this point, Republicans cannot be swayed by anything. Trump just said that Rob Reiner was murdered because of "Trump Derangement Syndrome". It's impossible for him to lose his loyal followers, no matter what he does or anyone else does.
Both major political parties are extremely unpopular among nonpartisans. They plug their noses and vote, if they vote at all. In the 2024 Presidential election, 37% of eligible voters voted for neither, mostly for nothing, whereas only 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump. Swing voters and nonvoters are not necessarily "moderate". That's a myth. They're nonpartisan, which is not to say that they're "between" the two parties. Many of them hardly even pay attention to politics. There's a lot of room to appeal to people who are disaffected with the system.
The most popular politician in the US is Bernie Sanders. And the reason is that he's the most popular politician among political independents. He's not the most popular politician among Democrats (which is why he lost the Democratic nomination), and obviously he's not the most popular politician among Republicans, but across the whole spectrum, he's more popular than anyone else.
It's also important to note that it wasn't until after the Reagan Presidency (and arguably due to its policies) that the ultra-wealthy came to monopolize most increases in personal income, so populism itself wouldn't have been as popular in the 1980s as it is now, as economic disparity has grown unabated in the decades since.
I doubt anyone's polled this specific question, but I would encourage you to calibrate against voter support for, say, capitalism. Guess how many Americans support capitalism, look up the polled number, and see if it surprises you. Perhaps no voters would care about a personal vendetta against one or two specific people, but a lot of voters would care if Democrats took the position that capitalism is bad and we've got to fight it.
> This is a false dichotomy. At this point, Republicans cannot be swayed by anything. Trump just said that Rob Reiner was murdered because of "Trump Derangement Syndrome". It's impossible for him to lose his loyal followers, no matter what he does or anyone else does.
This is, again, an analysis that doesn't make much sense when you recognize that coalitions are not static. A number of Trump voters voted for Obama in 2008, felt for some reason or another that they had to "plug their noses and vote" for Trump, and will end up voting for whoever the next Democratic president is. One of the key reasons Sanders is relatively popular among non-Democrats is that he gets this and messages accordingly; his argument is never that some large group of voters is bad or unreachable, always that they've been tricked.
I personally think anyone who could ever vote for Trump is a terrible person, and would never be willing to solicit or rely on their support for anything, but that's why I'm not a politician.
Guess how many Americans support Medicare For All, look up the polled number, and see if it surprises you.
None of the populist Democrats that I'm aware of have run on abolishing capitalism, not even self-described socialist Bernie Sanders. Not Mamdani either. It's just a question of how much of a role we allow the government in the capitalist system, how much regulation, and how many public services. Nobody thinks that the US is a socialist or communist country because we have the US Postal Service, for example, or a public military. Socialized medicine would not make the US non-capitalist either, any more than it does it Canada or Europe.
> A number of Trump voters voted for Obama in 2008
Yes, but they're obviously not Republicans! They're swing voters. Thus, what I said in your quotation of me does not apply to them. In 2020, Biden won swing voters, whereas in 2024, Trump won swing voters. They swing from one side to the other. They're not partisan, not loyal to a party or a person. This was my point: you can't move Republicans, but you can move independents, and there are actually a lot of independents.
In one year of "governing", Trump has already lost many independents. He's much more unpopular now than he was on election day. The ones who remain supportive are the loyalists.
ploden•2h ago
criddell•2h ago
c-linkage•1h ago
And if you work for a living, you don't have money.
MaxfordAndSons•2h ago
barbazoo•2h ago
vunderba•1h ago
vkou•2h ago
Will be a one-party system.
Because there is no legal pathway[1] towards solving the conditions that create the two party system, but there are many illegal offramps that will get rid of one of those parties.
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[1] There are way too many obstacles, and the bar for consensus is too high to legally have these reforms. The bar is much lower for having them illegally - all you need is a single-party trifecta - lead by the kinds of people who'd start a coup rather than relinquish power.
TulliusCicero•1h ago
Portland's new city council setup, with four districts and three representatives each based on ranked choice voting, is a step in that direction.
nickthegreek•2h ago
websiteapi•1h ago