I prefer a starting assumption that people aren't stupid, ignorant, or incompetent.
So why haven't Democrats already done it? Do they, at the state and grassroots level, think they already have institutions and organizations in place that they prefer not get competition?
They achieve striking victories in state/local elections by pandering to the interests of people with a lot of money. And to people who vote every time, regardless of whether it's a presidential year. It's not very complicated.
Robert Reich famously said that Hilary Clinton would be a good president for the existing political system, but that Bernie Sanders would have a better chance of building, "the political system we need."
Related to 2: It's backward to think of electing a president to build a political system. Reich should know better.
But boy does that kind of work suck. I'dhave to go to meetings with all the people I spent years mocking on the local blogs and hope that nobody noticed my initials were "MH".
Hypothetical: If building a new progressive political establishment in the US required spending 30 hours per week in meetings with the Crooked Timber commentariat (no booze provided. Bad coffee only), would you be willing to make the sacrifice?
No, but I don't think it would be that bad.
So why haven't Democrats already done it?
Like many things I assume the answer is, "historical reasons." With thinking about institution building people are always faced with the choice between, "can this work be done within an existing institution, even if it is imperfect for the task, or does it require something new." Both approaches have their limitations, and I suspect that it results have a cyclical quality. Based on the article it sounds like conservatives created a number of new institutions in the 70s which are currently close to peak power.
I would guess that, on the liberal side, there was historically more energy within unions or academia both of which are fairly weak at the moment. The article also says, "Liberal networks suffer from duplication, lack of coordination" and "various left-liberal competitors have never gotten beyond competing for (insufficient) grants from unions, center-left foundations, and wealthy donors. Few of those liberal funders ever stuck with cross-state projects for long, given the preference of liberals in the United States for national initiatives" I think that's a slightly unkind characterization, but basically accurate.
It's not very complicated.
I'm surprised to hear you say that (at least to the extent it reads as sarcastic), I think of you as somebody on the side of, "local political institutions matter."
Reich should know better.
True, but I do have some sympathy for the fact that engaging in any sort of political activism risks looking foolish, and that he seems comfortable with that.
I did listen to this interview on Democracy Now with Reich and Chris Hedges and it is remarkable how many time Reich says, essentially, "I agree with the issues that Hedges is highlighting but . . . the way he's talking about politics is crazy."
Also, I'm not sure the OP contains a link to the article.
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On the general subject of politics, yesterday I mentioned that I'd listened to Clinton's recent press conference and been impressed with here. Today I saw this article which is infuriating. That seems to go beyond just negative coverage to, "if I hadn't listened to the event myself, and just read the article I would have a completely misleading impression of what happened."
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It would be great if we had, say, a CBPP-analogue in every state. Not sure how to put the funding together though.
Have there been any ads urging the Senate to move forward on the Supreme Court nomination? You'd hear about it constantly if the Republicans were being blocked, except the Democrats wouldn't block.
6 Do the meetings have to include kidney stones and ze k?
15 is me who probably should have munged those.
Proper hydration can avoid most kidney stones.
Clearly Republican groups both have more money, since they are supported by both corporations and rich people instead of just rich people, and also Republican rich people have more incentive to get involved in US politics because it's a way to make themselves richer. While if you're getting involved in politics for idealistic reasons, you might as well try to help out the suffering people of foreign lands instead of the grumpy and unphotogenic suffering people we have here. And idealists can also spend millions of dollars accomplishing absolutely nothing, like that Tom Steyer guy you read about in magazines more and then.
To be fair, self-interested rich people can also waste millions. Case in point, the Jeb Bush campaign.
I'm not really that idealist. I have enough to be self-interested.
The most important thing local institutions do is pester people who already agree with us to get out and vote. Lots of times, though, they just won't do it. I find the constant drumbeat of 'there's no difference between the parties'* which has not ever been even remotely true in my lifetime, to be particularly unhelpful in this effort.
Developing candidates is another thing I suppose, but that still ends up in the same place.
I realize that there are places with machines. The choice there is either taking over the machine from within, or building a rival machine. I have a friend who had great success in NYC in the 80s with the latter.
*The variant 'the Dems are just as bad' is as effective. Look you don't even have to come to the meetings. Just quit pounding the fucking drum.
I would really prefer not to be blowing everything up because somebody wants to see if they can make things perfect or whatever.
On the other hand, I had a pretty uplifting chat with a fellow Dem officer at the farmers market this morning: if Johnson breaks 8% or so here, which isn't impossible, Clinton could conceivably win. Even 3% for Johnson would tip us, if she does as well as Obama in 2008.
One of the depressing aspects of Parks & Rec was in the election cycles when they portrayed their local elections as the focus of intense public and media attention at a level even state politics doesn't enjoy in real life, much less city.
Blowing everything up is the stupidest idea ever. It's always pure underpants-gnomery.
24: But a few people really do care, greatly and absurdly. I remember when my dad made a decision that pissed off a few locals, they called the radio and yelled about how could he be right when he couldn't even keep his lawn nice. They didn't get what they wanted, because what they wanted was illegal, but I had to water the fucking lawn twice a week instead of once. Fuckers.
Robert Moses:
1) Always had a plan ready to go, shovel-ready projects whenever funds became available, had a big planning staff and used it.
2) Was very smart about drafting legislation.
3) Built a patronage machine that included every special interest in NYC.
4) Got shit done.
Just saying.
had a big planning staff and used it
IYKWIMAITYD.
He often took staffers with him in the 'office' in the back of his limo.
Now imagine Robert Moses wanting to build affordable housing in integrated communities.
Exactly. Correct if I'm wrong, but I think LBJ and FDR were dirty as all hell. Machine politicians who did shit.
I don't understand the absence of an ALEC on the left. Are the left-leaning think tanks focused primarily on federal legislation? Why?
There is one, it just isn't very prominent so far. It has a weird name that I forget.
33: it is mentioned in the linked article.
No one reads the articles. This is the problem with institution building on the left.
32: Less money to throw around, for a big, big start.
Oh, from NickS's 9:
Few of those liberal funders ever stuck with cross-state projects for long, given the preference of liberals in the United States for national initiatives
Baffling. I understand the average voter not noticing off-year elections and local politics, but not those who do this professionally and those who fund them.
38: The ALEC model seems pretty cheap. Drafting one generic bill and sending it to 50 state legislatures can't be much more expensive than drafting one bill and sending it to Congress.
Right, the point isn't the drafting, it's the getting sponsors and a majority to pass the bill. The focus on bills and think tanks is, in my view, really the wrong end of the telescope. There's no shortage whatsoever of good bill writing talent on the Dem side in any state.
The average voter isn't "not noticing" off-year elections. There are signs everywhere, and if they voted in the previous presidential election, and have ever done anything at all to indicate a partisan preference, people are knocking on their doors and calling them on their damn phones.
Unregistered voters are obviously an issue, and it's one we wrestle with. Sure, there are a bunch of advocacy organizations trying to register people, but, obviously, even a small increase in voters can be a big deal in lots of places.
31 isn't how I meant 30. I think Moses' success was not unrelated to what he was pushing for.
Sure, there are a bunch of advocacy organizations trying to register people, but, obviously, even a small increase in voters can be a big deal in lots of places.
But are those advocacy organizations getting the support they need from the top? Democrats allowed ACORN to be brought down by a douche-bag in a pimp suit. Republicans would never have left their people out to dry like that.
They let Cruz get brought down by a douche bag in a slightly more tasteful suit.
Yeah, there's little that can be done about our toxic media, which is how ACORN got beat down. All next week, we'll have Clinton falling apart and Dems in disarray stories as the convention bounce recedes and the race reverts to +3 or 4.
41: Nobody ever knocks on my door or calls. I have a Vonage phone over cable and not a regular landline.
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OT: Does anyone have suggestions for podcasts to listen to while on the elliptical at the gym?
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You're registered to vote at your address, though. Maybe no one is assured enough of your vote to think it's worth getting you out. Or they're so assured of wining, they don't need you. This wouldn't be the case is vast stretches of the country.
50: non-
51: But I hear about other people getting called. I do get mailings. The Governor's council race was contested one year, and I got something in the mail.
All next week, we'll have Clinton falling apart and Dems in disarray stories as the convention bounce recedes and the race reverts to +3 or 4.
I realize that the convention bounce will recede, but revert to +3 or 4? I don't want to believe this (though I fear your prediction may prove correct). Trump has now added Japan and the Japanese to his list of people, peoples, nation-states and various other entities to be casually (brutishly, stupidly) insulted and demeaned, without provocation. Who in the name of God is still supporting this evil clown?!
Off to watch cute puppy videos...
42: Good point, but the machine was built around spending money, and I figure money could corral intetests behind a left agenda. I take it the key difference between Ds and Rs is support for public spending, so Ds should have a structural advantage there.
47, 53: seems like the way to bet - so far the polling has been basically "Generic D" vs. "Generic R" despite everything.
54 No, they're both for public spending. One party wants to spend money on people who don't have any money, and the other wants to spend it on people who are already rich. I don't see why you would think the former would have a structural advantage over the latter.
53 The sad truth of it is that hordes of people love their anger and resentment fix
(I thought I hit send on this two hours ago. Oh well . . . )
Anger and resentment are great. Just mix up the targets a bit more.
49, 52.1 Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time for BBC Radio 4 gets mentioned quite a bit in this context but for good reason. So if you haven't listened to it yet definitely do so.
And oh, hey! does anyone else here actually personally know any Trump voters?
I do! They're the parents of a friend of my son, and they live about two or three towns over from us, in Soprano-land (North Caldwell, NJ). They don't live in a Tony-style McMansion, to be sure; but they live in a very nice house, with AC and flat-screen TVs and a huge backyard, and they are NOT poor, not hopeless and helpless, not Appalachian-impoverished or anything like that: they live well above the American middle-class standard. I guess they are angry and stupid about immigration, and just full of all sorts of free-floating anxiety and resentment, which the Donald has tapped into.
Their son, poor kid (and he really is a good kid), is embarrassed by his parents' Trumpism.
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I can't remember the last time I tasted water as foul as the tap water at this hotel. Rusty swamp water? Rotten poison?
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Remind me tomorrow, after you've left the place, and I'll put up the link that explains it.
59 AIHMHB, my parents and one of my brothers and his girlfriend.
I find it very distressing.
Probably not as distressing as finding out that the water tank of the hotel you are staying in has a corpse in it.
But what if the dead person was planning on voting for Trump?
That depends, is the hotel in a swing state?
The dead person was a Canadian woman in California. Doubly doesn't matter for the election.
Trump has now added Japan and the Japanese
That's it, Trump has gone too far...wait, I'd would rather be waterboarded than vote or talk or listen to Repubs.
And oh, hey! does anyone else here actually personally know any Trump voters?
I have Western relatives who are armed at all times, and sleep with a pistol under their pillow. Although urban, they are probably to the right of those Oregon wingnuts. Moved to the far west from Mississippi, because Miss was going all to hell.
I have absolutely no contact with them, but they are probably writing in Zombie Jeff Davis, but could vote for Trump, if he could get more racist.
I'm pretty sure water shouldn't really have a "taste." I'm thinking "rotten corpse of a dead animal," or maybe just "no environmental regulations that anyone will actually enforce, and the local reservoir is a murky, muddy swampland."
I'm pretty sure plenty of people I know back home are going to vote Trump. I never ask and have started doing that thing on Facebook where you never see what they post but you don't disenfriend them. And, I have a cousin who was at the Republican convention who had a post about how the convention reassured her about Trump. I didn't unfollow her because she just did that one political thing and doesn't have daily slur on Clinton.
59: Just my one Navajo friend that I've mentioned a couple of times, that I know of, but I'm sure I know plenty of other Trump voters who aren't as vocal.
I have no idea how you live your life such that you become a Republican convention delegate, but only mentioning it on Facebook once is sufficient restraint that I can manage to deal with it. Of the family members that I see often enough to give a shit about, the last Republican left the party last year, before Trump.
Nobody let heebie read
this story until tomorrow. Good night.
I hadn't heard of that case before, but it seems a lot has never been explained.
I think we posted about it here, didn't we?
This reddit comment gives a good feel for the importance of institution. Anecdata, obviously, but really lends itself to easy extrapolation. I can easily imagine that this was widespread in the Sanders campaign (TLDR: they were badly organized and squandered resources ineffectively).
58: In our Time and Start the Week are already on my list. I also like the Food Programme. That's definitely the kind of thing I like. Any French or German language things at a 10th grade level?
Gross water mystery solved, although I can't tell on my phone when this article written: http://www.newschannel6now.com/story/18986053/hard-to-drink
Both the coffee and OJ in the breakfast room are undrinkable.
My poor neighbors are moving to Texas this week. Should I warn them to pack water?
Those lakes are below 50% of capacity?
MOREOVER, THERE IS NO BATHROOM AND THERE IS NO SINK.
As might be expected, I know and am closely related to Trumpists.
The extent of their Clinton-derangement is astonishing, endlessly reinforced by their media choices, although to be fair not refuted by mainstream media whenever they encounter that if they allow themselves to.
Their foreboding, approaching panic about the reign of terror Hillary will institute matches and exceeds anything on our side with respect to Trump.
85: Yeah, same here. And the Clinton derangement is indeed high grade and completely baffling. They seem to believe that the woman is a comic book villain with superpowers.
I have one relative (by marriage) who is a Trump supporter. I have seen a few Trump signs around town, and at least one person at my office has a Trump sticker on his/her/its car. Not trying overly hard to find out who it is.
Trump supporters in MA don't tend to be all that outspoken. He won the primary, with 300,000+ votes. I think we are in Pauline Kael territory.
32: I don't understand the absence of an ALEC on the left. Are the left-leaning think tanks focused primarily on federal legislation?
As noted, the linked Vox article points to SiX (State Innovation Exchange) founded in 2014 as a merger of previous orgs.
There's also one ALICE (Progressives States Network and the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange, quite a mouthful). Dunno whether this one became SiX or what.
One difference between them and ALEC seems to be that the liberal versions don't ask state legislators to become members -- though maybe this has changed in the last couple of years -- and, of course, ALEC has a bazillion corporate members. Coke, Pepsi, on and on.*
It's difficult to see -- as 56.1 points out -- what advantage there might be for big money to join a liberal version of ALEC.
* After the Trayvon Martin killing and some other events I don't recall, a number of corporations ditched (or threatened to ditch) ALEC: their interest is not ideological but monetary. They weren't interested in supporting Stand Your Ground laws and so on. ALEC subsequently allegedly spun off or flatly dumped its more ideological agenda in an attempt at reassurance. Allegedly.
Here for a list of defections. It seems that when Eric Schmidt of Google threw a shit-fit about ALEC's climate change denialism, a bunch of sponsors also made noise about defecting. Maybe some came back after the supposed ALEC spin-off/restructuring. That's too much detail for my mood at the moment.
I'm sure many of my coworkers are trump supporters, but I've been careful to avoid all political discussion at work since the 2000 election. Luckily my family are all liberal democrats. And since I don't have any friends that's not a problem either. There's just my crazy auto mechanic -- when I told him I work for a law firm, his first question was if we ever had to deal with sharia law.
Shorter me: there's no particular advantage for massive corporate entities to join a liberal version of ALEC. That I can think of. That would be asking them to sign on to an ideological agenda, and they don't care about that in the broad picture.
Someone should argue against me on this.
Step one: Travel back in time to 1974
Step two: Convince labor unions to do something to let them continue to be the opposing political/organizing force to Big Business, instead of being destroyed
Convince labor unions to do something
I'm pretty sure Right to Work laws in numerous states are ALEC products.
Step one: shame state legislators who are ALEC members into dropping their membership.
The above link titled "Here" provides a link to such state legislators. Scroll down for your state.
I note that in my own state of Maryland, all the ALEC members are Republicans. Pretty sure that's not true in all states: Dems represent as well.
For what it's worth, underfunding of staff in Congressional offices is Newt Gingrich's brainchild. Relevant passage, lengthy!
A quick refresher: In 1995, after winning a majority in the House for the first time in forty years, one of the first things the new Republican House leadership did was gut Congress's workforce. They cut the "professional staff" (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the "legislative support staff" (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker's office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research. (The Republicans who took over the Senate in 1995 were less draconian, cutting committee staff by about 16 percent and leaving the committee system largely in place.) Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.
Now, that's on a federal level. Something similar has happened in states, I believe, leading to the frankly necessary reliance of state legislators on outside lobbyists and ALEC-type ... pushers ... to tell them what to do.
So, Step two: pressure on both the federal and state levels to restore legislative funding so that these representatives aren't operating in a state of stupidity.
Repeal term limits too. Or at least significantly increase. (California recently did this but I'm not sure the voters realized it was what they were voting for.)
Terms limits haven't particularly been on my radar. You mean for governors and/or presidents? Legislators - do they have term limits? I didn't think so.
Lots of states have legislature term limits.
Wikipedia says fifteen states currently have them and six others had them but then either repealed them or the state supreme court ruled them unconstitutional. So never a majority of states.
OT: The American Association of Woodturners is deceptively named.
Convince labor unions to do something to let them continue to be the opposing political/organizing force to Big Business, instead of being destroyed
According to Open Secrets, labor unions are 18 of the all time top 50 (and 7 of the all time top 11) organizational donors to federal elections. 20 of the top 50 (and 2 of the top 11) are businesses/related orgs that lean or are strongly Repub (related orgs broadly defined to include anything remotely business-y like the dentists who probably haven't had much skin in the labor vs. business game). The election cycles from 2008 to 2014 show unions and Rep leaning businesses/related orgs pretty evenly split on a year-to-year basis with the exception of 2012 (23-16 business). The 2016 cycle is a significant outlier (28-10 business) but, of course, we ain't done yet and there may be tactical reasons why those numbers are currently the way they are.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?cycle=ALL
18 out of 50 is more than I thought. But corporations also generate super-rich executives who also personally donate huge amounts to help corporations.
The list at the link goes to 100 and stopping at 50 seems like a way to generate a useful sounding but useless number, given the names on the rest of the list. But I've only eyeballed it, not counted myself.
103.1: Not clear what you're saying unions should be doing?
In fairness, 92.2 wasn't that clear either.
The time travel part made perfect sense, though.
People should work on being perfectly clear, like me and also time travel.
110.2: Is it necessary to work on liking you to actually like you, or does it merely improve the experience? Also, how would one go about doing that? Is it more or less likely to be successful if one knows you?
Don't know. I thought ghee Olympics set a minimum age for gymnastics. This girl looks like a third grader.
Which could explain how come she fucked up the landing.
The ghee Olympics: where perfect clarity is achieved (of butter).
The uneven bars are still parallel. That naming sucks.
Moby Hick, delivering the Olympic gymnastics commentary you didn't know you needed.
It would admittedly be more fun if the alignment of the bars was randomised so that gymnasts didn't know what they'd be dealing with until they got out there, but I feel the coaches would probably protest.
Even more fun if ghee were applied to the equipment at random.
Randomising the Olympics more generally sounds like fun. "Welcome to the Olympic Stadium in Rio, where the athletes are lining up for the first heat of the Men's 2d100 Metres!"
BdL on FB: "I think every Olympic event should include a normal person trying to compete just so we can fully appreciate how superhuman the athletes are."
The IOC just aren't trying, are they?
95: I remember the elimination of OTA vividly, as it's where I wanted to work when I graduated. I think the right got a bug up it's ass about OTA due to their being not particularly enthusiastic about SDI, quite apart from their agenda to gut government.
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Germany won the first round of field hockey with the team of Butt-Fuchs. That is all.
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123 Butt-Fuchs FTW!
It's so hot here the cold water is almost too hot to take a shower in comfortably. And by comfortably I mean without getting burned.
It's 66 degrees F here. But warming fast.
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Found the perfect sex grotto for the next Unfoggedcon (scroll down for the pic and description of Xanadu).
124: Barry, my brother in so many ways. Here I've got a window from midnight to about 6 AM, and even then it's never colder than tepid. I get water for coffee straight from the faucet.
Low 70s, mostly sunny here in eastern PA. The Gulf sounds awful.
It was cool enough this morning that Selah freaked out and insisted on a coat, though that may have been because she was eating a popsicle. Should be back to 90 by the time I'm ready to haul boxes, I'm sure.
As for the weather, Saturday it was in the high 90s and humid, Sunday it was in the mid-to-high 80s and not too humid. So of course Saturday we went to two different events in our neighborhood and went out to dinner at a restaurant a good hike from the bus stop, while we only left the house for 20 minutes on Sunday to pick up litter around our corner. Because we're smart.
As for why the left seems to prefer national initiatives rather than state-level work, I have two ex recto theories:
1. The legacy of the New Deal and Great Society. They worked, they're still popular (overall, in the case of individual programs even if most people wouldn't recognize those phrases or they've been slandered too much by right-wing hacks), they were/are cornerstones of the left-liberal legacy in America, and they were national and couldn't have been state-level stuff. A national approach isn't the best approach to several problems and it's led to path-dependency, but it worked so well those times, they/we keep trying to repeat them.
2. The south. It's hard to worry too much about a few percentage points of disparate funding of schools in middle-class and lower-middle-class schools neighborhoods when there's actual apartheid a few states away. Obviously this isn't relevant to people settled in their homes looking for a way to give back to their own community. But when teens and twentysomethings are discovering causes to be passionate about, or when well-off liberal-minded people are looking for causes that demand money but not much time, trying to fix institutional racism is a neverending battle.
Also make all state legislatures full-time. If a state isn't big enough to have a full time legislature with full-time senators/reps and support staff, the state should be folded into a neighboring one. Plus no block-grants.
I wonder if the people pointing out the legislative staff slashing don't answer the "why no liberal ALEC" question. If lefties usually ran to change things for the better, and they had adequate staff to draft laws to make things better, why would you need to study other states and cities to copy?
If they assumed adequate financing of staff, they were probably shocked when republicans were willing to make their own jobs harder by cutting staff... and 20 years behind building a parallel infrastructure to do what their staffs had always done.
Finally, the man who can stop Trump. It's never too late. Except when it's three months before the election and you aren't on a single ballot.
134: "Created with NationBuilder." Cool, I didn't realize there was off-the-shelf software for political campaign websites.
134. Yeah, I was going to ask who the fuck is that twit. Can he get onto any ballots at this stage? Even in theory?
I have no idea. I read about him in Slate, so I assume he's useless.
There's a car in my neighborhood I drive by all the time that has a "I Don't Believe the Liberal Media" bumper sticker. At some point during primary season, a Ben Carson sticker appeared. Now there's a Gary Johnson sticker. If Trump has lost this guy, he must be in serious trouble.
139. Evan's website is cleverly designed so that you can't read what he stands for before you sign up to support him (I'm assuming you can after you do, but that's only an assumption).
The fact of signing up, sight unseen, is sufficient proof of being a protest voter, and thus indifferent to policy. Admirably elegant, really.
He's a household name in the U.S. You international types are so parochial.
Apparently, via BuzzFeed, Evan is a Mormon and you can get on the ballot in Utah with just 1,000 signatures. So, in addition to the possibility that he's deluded, you could also consider that he's objectively pro-Clinton.