but if you are openly instrumental about what and how you choose to speak, that instrumentalism is what you will project, untrustworthiness. of course you want to be appealing and not divide your own coalition. 1/
the art, though, is to find a way to be that is appealing that people understand as reflecting stable commitments they can understand, share, or condemn. if you are protean, a schmoo (dating myself) your “messaging” is meaningless, unworthy even of evaluating. /fin
there should always be lots of discussion of the issues! a party can win an advantage from less swingy voters that way. 1/
but in a two party system where the other side can copy, issues contestation will leave us at 50% ± some bias. a bias can help, but the deciders will be people orthogonal to the parties’ main issues. 2/
and if your mode of issues politicking alienates these orthogonal deciders, it’s likely to more than undo the small bias you can realistically hope to pick up from issues politicking. 3/
this is why “popularism” is such a terrible idea. of course you should try to adopt and message popular ideas. Trump does a massive u-turn on abortion, would have lost if he hadn’t. 4/
but the trick is you have to reconcile your strategic chameleonings with projecting some center of principle, of a stable core, that people can affiliate with. it’s a thing you do carefully, at the margins, and do a lot of work to justify and reconcile with your core identity. 5/
making chameleonings openly the heart of public process is just self-sabotage in the name of consultant-branded science. /fin
people who style themselves political realists have such unrealistic views about how swing voters behave. it's not the issues, or at least not the issues our two parties elevate as objects of political contestation. it's a sense of affiliation, or of shared resentments, or just personal respect.
eventually all prompts just generate an image of a crab.
why are they referred to as “scare quotes”? who is supposed to be scared?
“only in America!”
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it feels like the new york times is looking for opinion writers who can, in the most indirect way possible, buttress a perspective that might be summarized, “selling out is not so bad.”
i feel like maybe it’s a little bit better to post one’s conspiracy theories ex ante than ex post so i’ll say i worry this would be a good occasion for a false-flag reichstag fire. hopefully this is as stupid as it sounds.
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do you think the internal dysfunctions of US state governments (blue or red) mean they can’t put together decent media operations? the idea isn’t for the media organizations to cheerlead every blemish of their funders’ status quo. 1/
Voice of America was funded and organized by a Federal government shot through with lobbying and graft. Do you think it was much better than CA or MD’s governments are? Still did profoundly important work, and was an important source of quality journalism. /fin
don’t be alarmed. just put a tariff on it.
🥴
if you find a rip in your jeans, just put a tariff on it and it will be fine.
Committed R voters yes. They know they benefit from all the flaws in the system, and will try to keep it. But everyone else — including independents who strongly lean R when they have to choose between D and R — hates this system. And committed R voters aren’t numerous enough to preserve it.
the electorate in the US fucking hates the two-party system, but understands that voting for 3rd parties is idiocy under the present system, mostly doesn’t understand that all it wld take is an act of Congress to change that, make a multiparty system where 3rd-party votes are not wasted or spoilers.
with a little bit of public education (about what’s possible, the public already wants the thing, doesn’t know how easily they could have it), electoral reform would have landslide popularity.
That’s why its up to democrats to blow the electoral system up. They could make themselves very popular, capture even deep-R leaning independents, if they promise electoral + other reforms that would enable free entry of new parties, fair competition in single-winner elections, PR for legislatures.
i don’t really sleep anymore, but it’s okay now that our diffusion models can do our dreaming for us.
so corrupt. he has a tremendous personal interest in the domestic vanity industry. arguably he is the largest domestic producer.
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racism is really boring.
“is not!”
tbf perhaps i’m credulous or overly generous, but i’ll choose to believe without evidence that he learned something, that for some decades now he’d have understood that direction was a mistake.