Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Partisan Politics (Page 1 of 18)

An AI-generated image of a frustrated working class digital worker sitting in front of a laptop.

Two Definitions of ‘Working Class’

March 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Just about everyone who tries to explain Kamala Harris’s loss loves talking about the working class. They point to Harris’s loss of the working-class vote as a starting point. And then they explain the decline of the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes as a decline in their support among workers in states like Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Of course, they draw very different conclusions from this starting point.

Bernie Sanders, for instance, explained Harris’s loss as a loss of support among black and Latino working-class voters. Others, more friendly to the professional classes, thought Harris alienated working-class voters by running too far to the left on social issues. But they shared a focus on loss of working-class votes in swing states.

At one level, that’s a fair enough starting point. Harris did lose the aforementioned states after Biden won them in 2020.

But the politicians and pundits glide through these debates without justifying how they define the term ‘working class.’ And it’s no mere academic debate.

How you define the word matters. A lot. Competing definitions put entirely different groups of people into the ‘working class.’ They thereby recommend very different strategies and tactics for bringing them back into the fold.

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A photo of a bust of Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Rethinking Public Office as an Epicurean

March 10, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’ve argued in a few ways that a good Epicurean – and certainly an Epicurean sage – wouldn’t seek public office or a career in politics.

For Epicureans out there, it shouldn’t be hard to tell why. Politics fills our lives with stress and drama. It leads to exactly the kind of anxiety and mental anguish Epicurus advised us to avoid.

But I recently read an interesting set of essays called Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition. In it, Jeffrey Fish plays devil’s advocate on behalf of Roman Epicurean politicians. To get there, Fish draws a distinction between desiring to participate in politics, on one hand, and reluctantly participating in politics because it’s the best choice, on the other.

In support, he also cites the work of Epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Philodemus’s work shows that Epicureans tolerated a wide range of professions among their practitioners. While the practice of philosophy and life among friends stood out as the Epicurean ideal, we find ourselves in many different life circumstances. Couldn’t even politicians practice Epicurean attention to tranquillity as an ideal?

Fish’s article didn’t exactly dislodge from me the view that the Epicurean shouldn’t seek out public office. But it does serve as an important corrective in some respects.

We shouldn’t be dogmatic in deciding, a priori which professions are OK and which aren’t. It’s entirely possible that a person finds themself in a situation where holding political office is the best way to promote tranquillity, both for themselves and for their friends and community. It’s also possible for even people who work in inadvisable professions to incorporate Epicurean insights into their lives.

On reading Fish’s article, I thought these were fair correctives. The Epicurean sage wouldn’t become a politician, but we can all benefit from incorporating Epicurean insights.

No matter our starting point.

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An artistic image of a man with his right hand raised and his left hand crossing fingers behind his back, intended to represent voter hypocrisy and Iowa City politics.

Voter Hypocrisy and Iowa City Politics

February 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

For this post, I’m going super local. If you don’t live in Iowa City, you’ll find the local context unfamiliar. But the themes probably feel common enough for you to draw connections to your own community.

With that as a disclaimer, let’s get down to it.

County Supervisor Rod Sullivan blogged twice about our upcoming city council race. His first attempt was ill-informed. Readers who use my two part test for criticizing a candidate’s social media posts would have to conclude that it fails at least the second part.

But that’s the last time I’ll mention his first attempt. That’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because Rod made a much more interesting and compelling second attempt to write about the race. That’s the post I’m using as a springboard here.

Like many others in Iowa City these days, Rod raised issues about what disqualifies a candidate from office. The topic has come up with regard to three candidates for office in the last year: Royceann Porter, Guillermo Morales, and Oliver Weilein.

I’ll introduce Rod’s argument, say a bit about why it’s such an appealing argument, and then I’ll lay out some of the problems in it. At the end of the day, there are huge differences between Weilein, on one hand, and Porter and Morales, on the other.

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An image that represents cyberbullying.

When is it OK to Criticize a Candidate for their Social Media Posts?

February 13, 2025 / / 0 Comments

City council elections in Iowa City bring out personal attacks. Sadly, it always happens, and it usually happens to everyone on the ballot.

Notably, the attacks take different forms, depending on the ideology of the candidate. Attacks against candidates further to the left are the most common. But they’re also the most likely to come wrapped in various pieties about ‘Iowa Nice’ or ‘civility.’ They often involve tsk-tsking someone for social media posts.

That takes us to our latest installment. Both candidates in our upcoming election face criticism for their social media posts. But only one candidate faces attacks couched in the language of ‘civility.’ Attacks against the other candidate have focused on policy (though those are often overdone, and at times confirm Godwin’s Law).

So, what happened?

A variety of right-leaning Democrats – including a duo of an unpopular former mayor and a feckless state legislator, among others – launched a vicious, manipulative campaign against a left leaning city council candidate over his social media accounts. And after the candidate in question trounced their preferred candidate in a primary, some of them re-upped the attacks with all the urgency of desperate upper middle class hand-wringing.

With this incident in mind, I’d like to ask the question of when this sort of thing is OK. When can we attack a candidate for their social media posts?

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A highway road sign for entry into the town of Preemption, Illinois.

Trump and the Politics of Perpetual Preemption

February 10, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Way back in 2018, not long after I began this blog, I posted about how Donald Trump – in the midst of his first presidency – fits into the established political order. I did so with the help of political scientist Stephen Skowronek. In the 1990s, he published the book The Politics Presidents Make to much acclaim.

Skowronek divided U.S. history into a series of political orders, with each president defined by their position with respect to the dominant order. Depending on political circumstances and their own politics, presidents use their power to create (reconstruct), defend and innovate (articulate), oppose (preempt), or fumble and destroy (disjoin) the dominant political order.

In the previous post, I read Trump as a disjunctive president. I thought he would mark the final death of the Reagan political order. Given his low popularity from 2016 to 2018, and his subsequent defeat in the 2020 election, I think that prediction turned out right.

But then he won in 2024 by about 2 million votes* (see note at bottom).

When a president fumbles the existing disorder and crashes and burns along with it, that isn’t supposed to happen! They’re supposed to be done with politics. Disjunctive presidents stand among our least popular in history.

So, what happened? How could Trump have come back from his disastrous 2020 result?

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