Is the democratic party under deliberate demolition?

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There's a place where there's discussion and then a place where people are sharing their coping mechanisms and how they get themselves through the day. When it's the later I sort of just smile and nod - there really isn't much else to do with it.

I would at least agree that Unity 2020 was really more of a publicity stunt to get a certain style of thinking launched out into the airwaves. It seems a stretch though to round up the whole dynamic and circular bin then again that's me and my level of familiarity with these guys - anyone else can feel free do do what feels right.

I guess my characterisation of “nerd politics” would be something like this:

- Nerd thinks they’ve got a good technocratic idea for changing the system (and because they’re a nerd, there’s a good chance they’re right)

- Nerd asks people to support them.

- Some nerds with similar interests support them.

- The nerd is convinced of the rightness of their ideas, so doesn’t dedicate the necessary energy to campaigning.

- The nerd is uninterested in developing a policy platform for bread and butter issues. Often they’ll consider this a strength as it means they won’t alienate people with their stances. It actually means they can’t attract anyone except some like-minded nerds.

- Particularly if they’re American, the nerd immediately campaigns for President without building up a base, and fails to consider institutional barriers like the Constitution and an obstructionist Senate.

I’ve already cited Lessig as one other example, but you could equally look at all of the “centrist pro-European” parties that sprung up in the U.K. between 2016 and 2019 (Renew, Volt, Advance, even Change UK) and groups like the Women’s Equality Party. You could maybe also add someone like Andrew Yang, but his strategy had at least part of a shot. And frankly the minor parties in the US all fall into this category too - no real campaigning or attempts to expand beyond a narrow ideological base.

And, sure, maybe the nerd in question is actually very smart. But being smart doesn’t win you elections. Campaigning on the issues people care about wins you elections.

TY, I can accept that model of nerd politics and it sounds fairly accurate in terms of some of the pitfalls that Bret's Unity 2020 hit.

It also reminds me of the issue of comfort zones. The job I work and, and while I've had to teach myself Angular and .Net Core / C#, I've also had to fight for my life uphill and it seemed like everyone around me was both okay letting things collapse and being blind to the realization that they were. Similarly I think some of these third parties can get stuck in comfort zones and fall into careerism. My guess would be that the Greens probably need someone outspoken and similar to Yang, like a Daniel Schmachtenberger, that actually would IMHO work well because the Greens if they want to be taken seriously as having solutions need complex systems people at the center of their policy making.

I did read a BusinessInsider article that beat up on Unity 2020, and it made some fair points. It does seem like it was a publicity stunt more than anything and really a gamble to get people thinking through a new vector because Bret was hoping to reach a broader audience than Dark Horse, The Portal, or Joe Rogan Experience with his concerns (he did that to some extent with his zoom meeting of something like nine or ten black American public intellectuals - and met plenty of disagreement from Glenn Loury on his interpretation of the social climate).

What I'm hoping for Bret is that he can get more conversations with evolutionary biologists, like David Sloan Wilson, who have similar ideas of putting our understandings of Darwinian game theory - encourage it's prosocial aspects and curb antisocial ones - into how we craft public policy. That's been a core political issue for me, it's part of how it's seemed to me like the social fabric has been unraveling ie. we've given predators free reign to shake up and rig the system in their favor. While economics are huge, especially if most people are barely getting by, I see the game theory issue as being one of the bigger causes underlying that and it's been a problem that we haven't had particularly helpful language for to date. Western religions of the past used words like 'evil' or 'worldliness' but but they're really hollow, content-independent labels and by the time someone starts trying to slap those labels on things as a band aid they're already in reaction mode and being defeated by the dynamics that they're failing to describe.

Democratic Whip James Clyburn: 'Defund the police' cost Democrats seats, hurt Black Lives Matter movement

Matt Taibbi on the working class drift.

I watched the first ten minutes which made it pretty clear the guest didn’t have much to contribute.

Firstly the continued definition of the working class as “rural whites without a college degree”. Like, jog on. If you’re concerned about the urban-rural divide then say that, but don’t keep flossing over the black working class in particular.

Then defining Biden as a candidate of the elite. Biden is a candidate of the black working class. That’s the story of his campaign. He squeezed out the rest of the field because he won the support of black voters, who in large parts of the country make up a majority or at least a large minority of Democratic primary voters.

And then saying that Biden ran on the same platform as Clinton? There were some pretty significant differences between the two. Biden adopted large parts of Bernie’s 2016 platform. He didn’t adopt any of the really crazy ideas Bernie ran on in 2020, but he still ran significantly to the left of Clinton. On unions, for example, Biden was much stronger in his rhetoric and emphasised that economic justice comes from strong unions, whereas for Clinton they were an afterthought rather than central to her policy. Or on healthcare, where Clinton stopped at expanding Medicaid but Biden wanted to add a public option that anyone could access. Clinton ran as a liberal, Biden ran as a leftist. That probably contributed to his weak performance with southern Latinos (who have good reason to be suspicious of socialism). Many have suggested that his strong performance relative to generic Democrats was because people wanted to reject Trump AND reject socialism.

I’m not convinced by the almost Maoist insistence that the rural white working class is full of people who would be sympathetic to socialism but because that’s not an option they vote for an “emerging fascist” instead. You head to rural Ohio or Florida and I suspect that sort of thing will play very badly. I know from my experience that the white working class in this country rejected Jeremy Corbyn, with seats that had voted for Labour for decades going to the Conservatives (while my urban yuppie seat flipped the other way). I don’t mean this as a slur, but the idea that the white working class would support socialism because it is in their interests seems like an ideological, Marxist view of the world rather than an evidence-based one. Don’t get me wrong, the evidence is pretty thin either way, but it seems for some people that it is an article of faith that rural whites think like them. Then you look at AOC (New York), Tlaib (Detroit), and Omar (Minneapolis) and they’re all representing urban, diverse, D+>20 districts. The socialists running in West Virginia got trounced.

I did think the presenter hit quite well upon some of these points and did a good job questioning the electoral viability of some of these ideas, but I was very unimpressed by the guest.

Yeah, I really don't think selling the rural working class socialism or even trying to sell them socialism dressed up as something else, to finally vote 'in their own interest', is a good way to think about it.

What the US needs, at a minimum, is much better circulation of HR and something more of a safety net that catches talent when it falls from some crumbling company or even field of employment and gets it back into circulation. We're going to need that as the ways in which people can make a living get increasingly volatile and where the gig economy at least has enough back up for the workers that it's not modern day serfdom. Maybe not necessarily more safety nets but at least more high quality springboards to optimize workforce participation as well as buying power. The reason you wouldn't want to sell the rural working class 'socialism' per say, aside from religious reasons, is that they're more often hands-on people who have an experiential lens on what it takes to make things work (ie. more trades adjacent) and have an ingrained sense of cooperation vs. defection, both of which someone working in a cubicle is likely to have much less of. The problem with socialism is it's defection dynamics and this is part of why getting the right system means striking the right kind of hybrid between an innovative private sector and fewer people living paycheck to paycheck.

One of the things that's been annoying is with the black unemployment figures it's hard to get a straight story as to whether they got better in the last for years, got worse, or stayed the same. Everyone tells the story that they want to be true. The only long-term graph I saw seems to suggest that black men got hit hard by the 2008-2010 and have been steadily recovering since but then caught a nearly equal spike from Covid, and from that graph it's very difficult to suggest that Trump did anything for or against that recovery through the end of 2019 other than not doing anything to stop it. There has been enough black men who've like Trump's contrarianism and who've felt alienated by the democratic party who've voted that way but I don't see strong evidence that it's been jobs other than perhaps to the degree that they've come to some of the same beliefs about social democracy and job loss that their rural counterparts have. That view, that socialism stifles jobs, not entirely wrong but I'd think it depends whose policies and how data-driven vs. feelings-and-votes-driven those policies are.