Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Partisan Politics (Page 17 of 17)

Why You (Probably) Shouldn’t Run for Office

Into politics? Thinking about making a run for office? Let’s talk about this. The left needs serious discussions on whether and how to win power electorally.

I’ll get directly to the point. All things being equal, running for office is a bad idea. I’ll say a bit about why. Along the way, I’ll make some recommendations for what to do about this.

The background to this post is that there’s a special election for a vacant city council seat in Iowa City. I live in Iowa City, and I’ve spent some time evaluating whether running for office here might be a good use of time. The city council, in particular, appears like it might be an outlet one could use for positive results.

Despite the obvious localism, I’ll draw out broader implications.

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Trump, the Political Order, and Stephen Skowronek

Let’s start here: there’s something weird about the Trump presidency. He doesn’t seem to fit into a political order.

His supporters find it a good kind of weird: Trump is draining the swamp or shaking up the political establishment. His liberal opponents find it a bad kind of weird: Russian malfeasance and/or Jill Stein voters put Trump in office to wreak havoc on the American political system. The anti-capitalist left, as usual, has a variety of takes. I’ll set the leftist reaction aside for a future post.

What is it about Trump that’s so weird, then? What kind of outfit is Trump running here? Into what political order does Trump fit?

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Economic Anxiety and Trump’s Base

The New York Times recently reignited the debate on whether Trump’s base was motivated by something called ‘economic anxiety’ or something else. This something else is variably ‘racial anxiety,’ ‘status anxiety,’ or some other anxiety based on an identity term or sociological term.

The NYT cites status anxiety in the article linked above, while 538 argues for economic anxiety. Different conclusions, same framework.

I think the quick story here is that the social science research underlying these conclusions flows from many nice, tidy distinctions that can be studied empirically. These distinctions facilitate research, but may not map particularly well onto the actual world.

I’m looking at three questions in this post: Who in the world would do something as vile as vote for Trump, or, alternatively, who is most important to Trump’s base? Why would they do such a thing? And how does ‘economic anxiety’, or other forms of anxiety, fit into this picture?

I think we can approach these questions from a few angles.

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