Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Partisan Politics (Page 2 of 18)

Election Predictions: 2024 Edition

I’m starting another round of election predictions with a bit of dread. Not because the election is a particularly uncertain one (though it is). And not because this election presents the possibility of another Trump administration (though it does).

Rather, my sense of dread comes from the fact that the left hardly has any skin in the game.

Democrats have long catered to moderate voters. But the Kamala Harris campaign really cranked this trend into overdrive. She campaigns to the right on issues like immigration. And she has wrapped her campaign around winning over so-called ‘Never Trump’ Republicans.

In other words, Harris campaigns with roughly the politics of a Bob Dole or Mitt Romney. Maybe she won’t govern that way if she wins – though she might. But the mere fact that she thinks she can get away with this shows the relative powerlessness of the political left in the U.S.

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The 2024 Election and U.S. Exceptionalism

In his account of the political rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, Guy Laron lays out a framework we could apply to the politics of many countries.

Laron describes how Netanyahu gradually fused together a coalition between business interests, religious fundamentalists, and disaffected working class people. He did so by using state power to tie these groups together under his leadership. For instance, he used the promise of housing and resources under a settler colonialist regime to tie ultra-Orthodox religious people to his political project.

Israel thereby stands out as but one example of a politics that has degenerated into a rivalry between technocratic liberalism (e.g., the Labor Party in Israel, Labour in the UK, the Socialists in France, and so on) on one hand and a xenophobic far right that occasionally represents the interests of a segment of the working class, on the other. We find many such examples.

But that’s not how things work in at least one country – the United States.

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Trump’s Victory Plan

Donald Trump has dominated news coverage in the U.S. for over 9 years. But in all that time, liberals and even leftists still haven’t learned much about how he operates. His politics remain a mystery to them, sparking widespread and ineffective reaction.

I made my first attempt at mapping Trump’s rhetoric way back in 2018. In that post, I said a few words about how Trump selects his topic and audience.

I’ll build on that post in this one. But this time our topic is how Trump uses hyperbole, unclear language, and provocative behavior to generate overreaction from his Democratic opponents.

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Jacobin Study, Part 3: Left Populism

In two previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2), I detailed studies sponsored by Jacobin magazine on working-class politics and the left. Among other things, the studies concluded that voters prefer a ‘progressive populist’ (and later, ‘left populism’) message to a ‘woke progressive’ message. Readers can review the links above.

In my discussion of those studies, I pointed out that while the electorate – especially working-class voters – prefer left populism, they’re not yet on board with many left policy ideas. We have an electorate open to us. But we haven’t yet reached it. And so our task should involve building a majority. Not simply assuming our majority is already out there.

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How Mandi Remington Won

I have to start by saying I’m very pleasantly surprised by the results of the county supervisor primary in Johnson County. The winners, of course, were Rod Sullivan, Lisa Green-Douglass, and Mandi Remington (in that order).

The first two names should surprise no one. They’re incumbents. Incumbents can lose in Johnson County Democratic primaries, in the sense that it’s a theoretical possibility. But it happens about as often as Iowa football scores more than 60 points in a game.

Indeed, the last couple of decades solidified what had already appeared by the 1980s: the Democratic Party runs Johnson County, in effect, as a one-party state. Democrats hold every partisan office in the county. Republicans haven’t won a partisan local election in four decades. And that’s not going to change soon. Just as Democrats stand little chance of taking power statewide, the local GOP is doomed.

This creates curious effects in local politics, where Democratic voters combine anger toward state government with complacency toward local government. They might get worked up about city politics from time to time – a city pool here or a zoning issue there – but they merrily vote for the person with the “D” next to their name in county races and call it a day.

So, that’s JC politics in a nutshell. Democrats always win. And Democratic incumbents almost always win, usually easily.

But then there’s that third name: Mandi Remington. She soundly defeated the third incumbent, Royceann Porter.

Let’s talk about why.

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