Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
In a recent issue focused on the U.S. constitution – not the best issue topic, but I digress – Jacobin published an interesting discussion between Anand Gopal and Ben Burgis on sortition.
For those not hip to fancy terms, ‘sortition’ refers to government by lot. It’s the random selection of public officials among regular citizens. It’s associated mainly with ancient Athens, notably the period around the time of the trial and execution of Socrates.
As a college student over 20 years ago, it was fashionable to identify as a person who voted ‘based on issues’ rather than based on party.
You probably know the idea. You didn’t just vote for a candidate because they ran as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green. Rather, you looked carefully at their platform and voted for the person who ticked the right boxes.
Admittedly, we weren’t as clever as we thought. For leftists, the idea was to talk tough to Democrats. We said to them that we had certain issues we prioritized – health care, and so on – and we’d abandon the Democrats if they weren’t willing to fight for those issues. We announced our intention to vote for Ralph Nader – or an appropriate Nader equivalent – if Democrats failed to get with the program.
In practice, though, leftists rarely carried out the threat. Democrats repeatedly shunned universal health care. Most leftists continued voting for them anyway.
No doubt people at other points on the political map ran their own version of this. Centrists looked to candidate platforms to ward off ‘extremists.’ And right-wingers wanted to see the greatest hits of their own policy goals, lest they vote for some obscure right-wing third party. They didn’t carry out the threat, either, though they seemed to have more success at pushing their own views on party leaders.
Jon Green easily won his June primary election. But JC Dems have mixed feelings about it.
Facing multiple challengers, he pulled out 49% of the popular vote, finishing nearly 20% higher than the second place candidate. And he won 13 of 14 precincts, losing the 14th by only three votes. This looks curiously similar to Green’s last election in 2022. In that one, he faced a spirited primary challenge from a Democratic Party insider.
But there’s something curious about Green’s appeal to the electorate. Consistently, he’s more popular with independents and in the general election than with the loudest and most active members of his own party.
That’s worth thinking about.
A few weeks before the primary, I made the following post on Facebook: Democrats should carefully reflect on why they don’t like Jon Green. I suspect the answer to that question says a lot about why most Iowans dislike their party and why their party, as presently constituted, has no long-term electoral viability in Iowa.
In re-posting here, I wanted to raise the challenge for a broader audience. JC Dems should think about why they don’t like Jon Green. And they should think about what this says about their prospects of building a party that can compete in electoral cycles that aren’t nationwide blue waves (i.e., most of them).
In 2025, we uncovered reasons for optimism about the potential for local government to drive leftist political change. Zohran Mamdani’s election in NYC, in particular, brought together a promising electoral coalition: leftists, young people, working class people across racial lines, the economically and politically disaffected, and progressives of all racial groups.
We even saw a local version in Iowa City. Electorally, Oliver Weilein won a city council special election, becoming likely the furthest left candidate ever elected to city office anywhere in the state of Iowa. But it’s not just about Weilein’s election. We also see potential in moves toward social democracy in our policy discussions. From fare free transit to permanent supportive housing, public debate shifted to approaches friendlier to leftist goals.
It did so against the backdrop of far right advance at the state and federal levels.
These are good things. But there’s a tension in that, or so I’ll argue. I want to balance the good with a note of caution. The shifts in local government remain partial, incomplete, and subject to sharp limits. While affirming the optimism many of us rightly feel, I’ll say a word in this post about those limits.
Politicos from all over the Democratic Party have been declaring for the last year that a woman can’t win the presidency. Even Michelle Obama made the claim!
What’s up with that?
Let me start by saying the claim is obvious baloney. But once we’ve established the utter foolishness of the claim, we have to figure out what to do. Why do people keep making claims this like?
I’m going to provide an error theory to explain it. We’ll begin from the point that the claim centers on certain professional class liberal anxieties.
And it says more about them than it says about the world.
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