and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.

Aren't most US conservatives practising Christians? I'd have though they'd be down with that sort of thing.

The title is correct. Drum's sour gut reaction to progressivism has increased markedly for whatever reason and his filter for meaningful arguments has thinned in favor of riling people up. Unfollowed some time ago.

1: Critical Race Theory makes us believe we are inherently sinners because of stuff that happened long before we were born! So un-Christian.

This entry keeps getting longer and longer as I think of more complaints I want to add. I should probably have put that last one in the comments.

I usually feel like I'm entitled to modify the post until the first comment appears, and after that I have to put an "update" note.

I started up reading him more regularly during the pandemic and I should probably drop off again.

Also I dropped off FB about 6 months ago, and I actually got a lot of my non-mainstream news from former commenters over there, and so I should probably start checking back in more often. But the FB algorithms became increasingly creaky and I'm just seeing an enormous amount of "groups" posts and other boring shit, and the site isn't working well for me on my old ipad, and it's pleasant to be off of it.

The biggest glaring "error" Drum makes (among several) is starting his comparison at 2000. Why, the GOP has hardly moved right at all, if you don't take into account 1980-2000 when Reagan and then Gingrich and then Fox News utterly transformed the party. Fucking liberals.

Yes. People are called socialist for supporting tax rates lower than Reagan wanted.

And also the general re-sorting of Southern Democrats over to the Republican party. "Democrats used to be more conservative when they contained Republicans who were still mad at Lincoln!"

Here's an example where the majority of Iowans are against their new "you can't teach about racism critical race theory in public schools" law.

It's opposed by 76% of Democrats, 58% of independents, and 36% of Republicans. Since 36 is closer to 50 than 76 is, this example, by Drum's standards, shows the increasingly monolithic nature of Democrats and explains why liberals are to blame for the culture wars, even though Democrats are more in tune with the majority and, as best we can tell from this poll, non-partisan opinion.

10 was me.

I was thinking about posting on this, because whatever you think about the broad argument atmospherically (largely crap) I think he's specifically misreading the poll he's relying on. He's responding to it as if it somehow measured distance from centrism in terms of policies, but I think that's wrong -- it didn't look at a spectrum of policies at all. It's a complicated weird poll, but let me try to walk through it.

The poll took a bunch of issues, and for each identified two positions, a D position and an R position: there are no more or less radical positions, just one on the D side and one on the R side. And then it asked voters, for each issue, what do you agree with? The trend he's pointing to is that over time D voters get more consistently D on all issues, and D voters are more consistently D than R voters are R -- lots of R voters hold some D positions.

This does not look like D extremism to me. This looks like a poll showing that D policy positions have broad appeal to the majority of voters, appealing to all D voters and at least some R voters. That's D moderation, not D extremism.

And this interpretation of the poll makes sense to me: the D and R parties could just as easily be described as the sane and crazy parties, and there are a lot more people who are uniformly sane on all issues than ones who are crazy on all issues. R voters tend to be ones who are very very attached to the insane R position on a few issues, and even if they're in contact with reality on the other issues they're committed to voting on the crazy ones.

The Drum piece was awful for the reasons described in the OP and elsewhere, but I want to talk about the nugget of truth in it. There is a long history of social progress precipitating a harsh backlash -- from abolishing slavery to tolerance for transgenderism. Susan Faludi wrote an excellent book about the application of this to feminism.

I haven't read much Shor, but I think Drum oversimplifies. Shor's point is not that we should abandon Latin immigrants (for example) but that this isn't the part of the message that is easily sold to swing voters. It shouldn't be emphasized by politicians, Shor says.

And (contra Drum) Democrats largely follow Shor's advice. Obama, with his finger in the wind, took forever to recognize the necessity of gay marriage. How could "defund the police" be any less endorsed by the Democratic Party? I'll tell you how: By having Democrats denounce those who protest police lawlessness. Maybe the Dems could promise to have more protesters beaten.

If Fox News defines you politically, then you're screwed no matter what you do. And that fact that Fox dictates the agenda on these matters indicates how screwed up the media-at-large is.

There is a long history of social progress precipitating a harsh backlash

This for sure. And it's underdiagnosed. People take it as evidence that the progress itself has flaws or is being done wrong, instead of holding responsible the perpetrators of the backlash.

Thanks for posting this; I was tempted to complain here when I read it.

I still like Drum, and find him worth reading, but I agree that post was bad trolling.

I think he's right to say that something is happening among Democrats, which is worth talking about, but he does not do a good job of identifying or clarifying the issue.

I thought Holbo's comments are good.

Again, Kevin Drum brings the half-truth, I would say. But no time today to work that out. But think how culture shift is not culture war. It's also important to think about how some moderate positions paradoxically become very radical over time.

Consider the following evolution of attitudes.
1) Gays are horrible so we should treat them horribly.
2) Gays are medium bad so we should treat them medium bad.
3) Gays are fine yet we should be allowed to treat them a little bit bad.

There is an obvious sense in which 3) is the most moderate position, hence the one LGBTQ folks should prefer to be in, of the three. But there is also a sense in which it is the most radical, in a 'who holds the whip hand' sense. It pulls back the mask back as 1) & 2) did not.

Conservatives have retreated on several fronts to various versions of 3) and the look is not good. But conservatives are like 'what, we are being way more moderate than we used to be.'

Yeah, I hate to call it a nugget of truth in the Drum post, because the Drum post is I think fundamentally a mess.

But there's something to Shor's arguments, e.g., in the NYC mayoral election. There are a lot of minority middle class voters who are voting fairly right wing within the spectrum of Democratic voters. And that was an election where the further left candidates were vocally sympathetic to police abolition, and it did hurt them with voters. I'm not sure at all how to handle this strategically, but there's something there to think about.

More Holbo (which is less insightful, but trying to clarify what's actually happening)

Having said Kevin Drum is wrong yesterday let me say that Matthew Yglesias is right today, making the same point - the half of the point that is right. 1/

Drum is wrong, on several levels, that Dems are 'to blame' for the culture wars. But it's true Biden may point the way in terms of not getting sucked into them. The R strategy is, literally, to lose the culture war and thereby win the political war. That's their shot. 2/

D's need to not get suckered into trying to stop R's by winning the culture war, thereby giving them their one shot. This does not mean giving ground, substantively, on policy. It means picking symbolic battles wisely. 3/

Better: it means efficient division of labor as to who fights symbolic battles. For the R's, not aiming to win majorities, it makes sense that their leader is a culture warrior madman. For the D's, aiming for 50+4, it makes sense if their Prez is non-salient like that. 4/

It seems like this approach necessarily drains energy from progressive causes. But I don't even think that's true. For the D party it makes more sense to muster 'cultural' progressive energy around the margins of the party, rather than at its Big Tent center. 5/

The ideal situation for D's is R's fight 'the squad' while Biden does what he can. For R's, this is non-ideal, very rope-a-dope. They can't get a head shot. And progressives do fine this way. Progressive issues get symbolic attention and policy goes about as well as it might. 6/

He takes reactive positions among less-informed liberal voters as givens never to be changed - viz. the disgust reaction to homeless people.

I stopped reading Twitter or news while I'm on vacation, did they figure out who won?

He takes reactive positions among less-informed liberal voters as givens never to be changed - viz. the disgust reaction to homeless people.

If you feel that way, then certainly stop reading him.

That's not how I read him; I get, "you can't just wish away or ignore these reactions" (and, side note, that example is an interesting one for me because there was a large homeless encampment three blocks from my house -- visible from my porch) for about six months during the pandemic (several months as an encampment, and then moved to temporary shelter in a school a similar distance from my house). It was interesting because I found myself arguing with both people who just wanted the homeless to not exist so they didn't have to think about them and leftists who wanted to pretend that there was no reason why the police should be intervening when there were inevitable disturbances).

I was reading people complaining about how Drum and Yglesias are practically right-wingers now, so I went and read a bunch of their recent writing. They're both exactly what they always were -- orthodox liberals with contrarian streaks. For example, if you read through Drum's blog, he has a bunch of posts making fun of the Republicans panicking over critical race theory, plus a few other "the numbers show the liberals are wrong" posts, the kind of posts he wrote back in the 2000s.

21: I might be overinfluenced by the dogmatic way he put it on Twitter (which is of course partly what Twitter encourages).

17.2: The shellacking the police union candidate took in heavily minority precincts in the Philly DA race I think means this argument is slightly more complicated than a lot of people make it out to be, although I think you're mostly right. But Adams, who is definitely culturally pro-police (and pro-stop-and-frisk) also had a salient reputation as a critic of the police unions for being racist (although his criticism was specifically around the ways that hurt non-white police). Like, his positioning is not that of Generic Cop, but specifically Black Cop.

22: I hate saying this about Drum, because I have found him informative for ages. But I think he's gotten slower/sloppier intellectually, and on him that pulls him to the right -- his "liberals are wrong about X" posts used to be correct or at least thought-provoking, and now they tend to be flat wrong. He wouldn't have misunderstood the poll in his post so badly ten years ago.

25: I think that's right. I still don't have any problem reading him. He is often wrong about topics that interest me and that I wouldn't otherwise come into contact with.

Both 22 and 25 are correct; I still think of Drum as clearly on the left, but he's doing more "cranky old man grumbling" than he uses to.

I think we had a similar discussion a couple months ago and someone said that he's an old white guy from OC so of course he's going to have conservative tendencies even if he has baseline liberal positions. My rule of thumb is when he has a post with the phrase "knock it off" he's being cranky old man.

20: Everyone who stopped reading Twitter.

20: You mean the NYC mayoral primary? Still up in the air.

My guy Alvin Bragg clinched the nomination for Manhattan DA, though, so that's nice.

This doesn't seem worth arguing about, except as a way to avoid arguing about remedies for the awkwardnesses of the Democratic coalition of elderly machine politicians, angry, indebted, underemployed graduate students and not as many people of color as we think because Latinx people are gradually, gradually trickling away.

The framing in the Drum piece is so absurd it is difficult to know where to begin.

The culture war is an elite-driven phenomenon within both parties.

The rhetorical basis for the culture war originates on the right with right-wing media outlets headquartered mostly in Los Angeles, New York, and DC. Steve Bannon, Tomi Lahren, Ben Shapiro, and their likes are all thoroughly cosmopolitan creatures. They and their financial backers have one central political priority: keep taxes low. Generally speaking, they feel some degree of disgust at the increasing racial diversity of their cities and the increasing tolerance for LGTBQ people, but nowhere near enough to move out of Los Angeles; if any of them had to live in, say, Tyler, Texas around the sorts of common folks that they romanticize in their rhetoric, they would hang themselves within a week. Primarily, they know that tax cuts for the rich are broadly unpopular; culture war stuff is a way to shore up the numbers for a party with a broadly unpopular agenda. Personally, though, none of this stuff matters that much to them. A curious piece of trivia is that Heather Sue Mercer, whose family successfully sued Duke University because they would not let her play kicker on the men's football team, is the daughter of Robert Mercer, who financed the lawsuit.

On the right, the basis is similar, but is driven by revulsion for the heartland targets of this rhetoric. In outlets like the New York Times, the move is to forfeit the game by conceding the right's central point that "common" people (usually lower-class whites) really are exactly as disgusting and racist and stupid as the right believes. It would be easy to present a counternarrative to the emergence of confederate flags in West Virginia -- if there is a heritage West Virginians and White Appalachians ought to be proud of it is that of refusing to join the Confederacy. Instead we get things like the 1619 project and Robin DiAngelo, both of which superficially speak the language of liberalism and social justice, but ultimately concede to the right's framing. This is also elite-driven. Here, the interest is in presenting injustices past and present as broadly distributed throughout a sinful populace rather than, well, elite-driven. This is both flattering to and convenient for the wealthiest Democratic donors -- who would have been Rockefeller Republicans 50 years ago. It is flattering because it distracts from any questions about the moral legitimacy of their own wealth. It is convenient because, by essentially forfeiting this game to the right, they can ensure that the South and much of the Midwest remains much more socioeconomically feudalistic than their own states, which keeps their taxes low and is viewed as good for their investments. If Democrats won too many majorities this would be difficult. This is far from conspiratorial, the wealthiest and most influential Democrats always see a silver lining in Republican victories and will explicitly tell the newspapers so (Jaimie Dimon did). Mnuchin and Cohn were lifelong Democrats before serving in the Trump administration and were exactly the sorts of people who one would have expected to see on the shortlist for the Clinton administration, though Mnuchin ended up being probably a better and more effective Treasury Secretary than anyone who served in the Clinton or Obama administrations.

Wait, what? Every single 'culture wars' thing has been drummed up to ensure the white Christians vote in midterm elections. Bathroom bills. (two times ago) Transgender girls and sports. (this time) Worries that kids are being taught whatever the right thinks critical race theory is. (next) It's as much as a script at this point as putting out that the Democratic nominee for President is mentally compromised following a secret stroke.

I feel like ctrl+f "abortion" should return more results. Pro-choice activists have been fighting a mostly defensive war for longer than I've been alive.

Critical Race Theory makes us believe we are inherently sinners because of stuff that happened long before we were born! So un-Christian.

It's amusing that the two most popular frameworks in the West for analyzing inheritance of across generations are Christianity and capitalism, yet the party that most associates itself with both shuns from using either analysis. We Americans inherit the bounty of our forebears' successes, but not the moral debts they incurred in the process. So many wretched ideas follow from there.

34: Off the cuff, it is un-Christian.* Christianity promises forgiveness, not guilt. By any recognisably Christian standard the crimes of our forebears demand forgiveness; but the price of forgiveness is repentance, and we cannot repent for our forebears. I think it wholly possible in good faith to deny inter-generational guilt, and to balk at its performance by others.
None of this of course is to say that all, or even any, on the right are in fact demurring in good faith; nor to deny that we ourselves are, if Christian, bound to pursue broadly progressive politics, and are guilty if we fail to do so.
*"It" being CRT as presented in the quote, not CRT itself.

||
But I didn't come here that boring shit. What happens if you drop a burning lithium battery on a solar panel? Asking for my bro.
|>

If the solar panel is charging the burning battery, maybe a perpetual motion machine.

36: Big Minh will appear behind you.

It's worth keeping in mind that there's nothing "forebearers" about much of this stuff.

33 is so obviously correct it's surprising to me when folk don't realize it.

33 is so obviously correct it's surprising to me when folk don't realize it.

Yes, 33 is correct, but it's also not the only thing that's going on in the culture or the culture wars.

I remember a comment from David French that one reason why politics tends to make people angry these days is that people are really aware of the battles that they're losing, but don't think much about the battles that they're winning -- because that just seems like the world functioning the way that it should.

To take a completely trivial example, I was just listening to this review of "W.A.P." which mentions in passing that the criticisms of the song by Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro made it more popular -- if it was pissing them off it must be doing something right.

I think that's what John Holbo is talking about when he says, "The R strategy is, literally, to lose the culture war and thereby win the political war. That's their shot." The criticisms of "W.A.P." are bullshit, and I don't think there's any legitimate culture way to fight over it -- but it does reflect the changing cultural landscape (he says that the radio edit it, "so redacted you'd think they're rapping state secrets.")

Those changes aren't a victory for progressivism, but they do reflect a broad liberal (and secular) success.

When David Roberts writes

I've always had a sense that there are two Americas. There's the one I love: diverse, buzzing w/ energy, filled with creativity & entrepreneurial zeal, cranking out new art & science, forever sloughing off the restraints of tradition.

And there's the other one, the one built on white guys enjoying power based on exploiting others' labor: reactionary, dull, resentful, violent, suspicious of erudition or novelty, locked in a zero-sum worldview, bent above all on continued domination.

That is absolutely a culture war statement -- and one that I'm very sympathetic to. That isn't what Kevin Drum is writing about, and I think Drum fails to locate the core of the argument that he's trying to make, but I don't think it's accurate to say that the culture war is _only_ something that conservatives do (even if it's easy to recognize the predictability and emptiness of so many of the conservative moves).

The metaphor is unhelpful because the struggle is asymmetrical in so many ways. Our legislature has banned transkids from school sports outside their birth gender. The people trying to broaden opportunities are not primarily motivated by sticking it to the conservatives -- the primary goal is to help the kids. On the other side, the people who want to ban them don't care much about the kids, but their primary goal to to perform their general anger at people like you and me. They don't care it the ban gets struck down by the courts -- in fact, that's even better, because they get off on being 'oppressed' in a way that does not involve any actual harm.

This is generally the case in the 'war' -- one side wants to expand rights of oppressed people, the other wants to fight back, despite very low personal stakes. The status quo case is oppression. Arguing that 'the liberals' are starting it means accepting oppression of the other as the neutral default. So, no, contrarian bullshit is, once again, as nearly always, just bullshit.

39: By forebears I was trying to be very generic: present day Americans who are descended from willing immigrants are to varying degrees beneficiaries of the crimes of earlier Americans (who may or may not be their ancestors). We didn't choose it, but we benefit from it. Even those of us whose immigrant ancestors only went to the north, or only came after the war. That seems obvious and I won't belabor it any further. (Or if it isn't obvious, I'm sure I won't convince anyone.)

35: I'll admit that I'm coming at this from how I poorly remember a Christian education presenting original sin. It seems like it should be an easy analogy to other kinds of inherited taintedness* or ancestral sin like when the benefits of living in a post-slavery/genocide society continue to accrue unequally: through no fault of your own, you've acquired an associated state (calling the state of original sin a sin is a misnomer) that requires correction/amelioration. Recompense? I suppose that's a non-Christian concept, and you're right that guilt/repentance isn't quite the right framework. But I'll stop with the boring shit.

* This should be "taint" but damned if I'm giving Moby the satisfaction.

we cannot repent for our forebears. I think it wholly possible in good faith to deny inter-generational guilt, and to balk at its performance by others

I think this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Of course we can repent the acts of our forebears, especially when we are participants in a system when their faults continue to redound to (some of) our (collective) benefit.

Personal guilt is always going to be complicated: what does the descendant of Holocaust survivors owe the descendants of enslaved people? But we're not islands entire of ourselves -- we're part of a continent. Any person's oppression diminishes all of us. Don't whine about people ringing the fucking bell.

This is generally the case in the 'war' -- one side wants to expand rights of oppressed people, the other wants to fight back, despite very low personal stakes. The status quo case is oppression.

That's where I think the David French comment I mentioned is more interesting/insightful than Drum's framing. Trying to expand the rights of oppressed people is the right thing to do, but it is still doing _something_ (and I don't think we disagree on this). I don't know if the "culture war" metaphor is the best one to use, but I do think it's a mistake to say that conservatives are the only ones doing anything.

43.1: I meant that much of the problem is ongoing and can't be blamed on dead people.

46: Oh, gotcha, agreed.

Charley has it right in 42

Of course we can repent the acts of our forebears

But Kevin Drum wants to know: Is that position a political winner?

And of course, that's the wrong question. If anyone, anywhere is discussing these issues non-stupidly, then it becomes a political position that is advocated at the highest levels of liberalism/Communism/Bidenism. It's Critical Race Theory, and it's a threat to America to even reflect on the possibility.

45 If you live in Southern California and you think a Virginia school letting a transkid use a particular bathroom is making war on you, (a) you're an asshole and (b) whining that 'they started it' should just be greeted with derisive laughter.

I can probably count the times I've read Drum in the last 15 years on my hands. He's entirely too accepting of bad faith. IMO. life's just too short to waste even procrastination time on interpreters and justifiers of bad faith.

Kevin Drum doesn't write for Mother Jones anymore, I think that explains a lot about his writing lately, he doesn't have that constraint. He's about 7 years into a cancer diagnosis with an average survival time of 4 or 5 years. The main worry here is that he might be trolling you all?
Kevin, you keep doing your thing, long may you run.

45: the bathroom bills, I think, are the best example of how these issues get invented. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the status quo has always been "use the bathroom that matches your gender presentation" (ain't never had to show papers or parts) and kids who needed other accomodations worked it out quietly* Then the Coalition for Moral Order decides this is better than railing about the gays or partial birth abortions or what have you, and now we have bills designed to solve non problems to get Karen McSnoot to vote for the children, except that these idiot bills are now going to hurt actual trans kids. So there's pushback and now it's somehow the left's fault because the only truth of the past twenty years up to and including a fucking insurrection is that nothing is ever the fault of the so called party of personal responsibility.

*I mean, imperfectly so. But the right makes it sounds like a trans invasion when most trans kids IME are trying to navigate that world without drawing attention.

45: the bathroom bills, I think, are the best example of how these issues get invented. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the status quo has always been "use the bathroom that matches your gender presentation" (ain't never had to show papers or parts) and kids who needed other accomodations worked it out quietly* Then the Coalition for Moral Order decides this is better than railing about the gays or partial birth abortions or what have you, and now we have bills designed to solve non problems to get Karen McSnoot to vote for the children, except that these idiot bills are now going to hurt actual trans kids. So there's pushback and now it's somehow the left's fault because the only truth of the past twenty years up to and including a fucking insurrection is that nothing is ever the fault of the so called party of personal responsibility.

*I mean, imperfectly so. But the right makes it sounds like a trans invasion when most trans kids IME are trying to navigate that world without drawing attention.

(ain't never had to show papers or parts)

The whole thing is a horror show waiting to happen when some guy wants someone to prove their gender to his satisfaction.

50 / 52: I think I'm being unclear. My position, broadly speaking is:

1) Drum does a poor job clarifying what actually constitutes the culture war.
2) Nevertheless, I think it's a mistake to only think of the culture war as something bad.
3) When John Holbo talks about Rs losing the culture war he's describing something real.
4) I don't intuitively think of anti-oppression as a culture war activity, but on some level it is, and I think it's worth celebrating the victories, not only thinking of them as common sense. They do represent a position on contested cultural ground.

The bathroom bills are absolutely a shameless way to gin up controversy for the sake of political gain. That said, my impression is that a generation ago many kids did not use the bathroom of their preferred gender because they didn't think that was an option -- they didn't think they had a choice. So I would strongly criticize the bathroom bills and also say that the reason an increasing number of transgender HS students feel like they can be open about that is because many people have fought for that to be an option.

54: likely the argument that scuttled Utah's version of the bathroom bill.

The law might have helped Chuck Berry's defense attorneys.

Speaking of one thing that somewhat irks me about bathroom policy. There's a building I go to that has two bathrooms on each floor which require a key. It used to be a men's bathroom and a women's bathroom. I've never been in the men's bathrooms, but my understanding is that each men's bathroom has a stall and a urinal and can accommodate two people. The women's bathrooms are for one person. They've been changed to gender neutral bathrooms. The upshot is that a disparity in bathroom access has increased and womenll are now more likely to need to wait. The original design was pretty terrible to begin with, especially considering the fact that, on average, women take more time in the bathroom.

Corey Robin argues in "The Reactionary Mind" that the right has been all about authoritarianism and dominance in civil society and private life for centuries. Does he seem more prescient now?

55: The left engages in culture wars in order to obtain policy outcomes. The right engages primarily in order to obtain electoral outcomes, also to signal and enforce ideological boundaries for its cohort.

Of course, they'd be happy to obtain policy wins, especially if those wins make their opponents miserable, but the important thing isn't winning the war, but fighting it.

55: The left engages in culture wars in order to obtain policy outcomes. The right engages primarily in order to obtain electoral outcomes, also to signal and enforce ideological boundaries for its cohort.

Of course, they'd be happy to obtain policy wins, especially if those wins make their opponents miserable, but the important thing isn't winning the war, but fighting it.

The right used to engage in culture wars by highlighting cultural heights of western civilization. Now they just point to Ted Nugent and grab their balls.

The right has gotten much dumber. A couple of days ago I accidentally stumbled across some conservative gloating that Hume had gotten cancelled at the University of Edinburgh. The article itself was by someone who had actually read Hume and had detailed views on him, but the comments were full of morons fulminating against the Jews. Being a conservative intellectual these days is like being Gargamel trapped in the land of the Smurfs, except the Smurfs are your only friends.

The Smurfs were his only friends.

Thanks LB for digging into the underlying poll. Something seemed off when I read it but I just moved on. In general Drum (and many others) implicitly assume Murc's law: Only democrats have agency.

Everyone else is just a salt-of-the-earth authentic person trying to live the good life and doing as they were righteously raised but continually being made to feel bad about themselves due to the unholy artifice of the urban elite.

60 Acknowledging the existence of transkids is not waging war. Finding ways to meet their needs is not waging war.

I'll grant that war was waged on the legal restrictions surrounding termination of pregnancies in the 1960s and early 1970s. This war was won in 1973. Since then, the right has continually picked one fight after another. A woman who terminates a pregnancy is not waging war on some political faction. A woman jumping through all the hoops to terminate an advanced pregnancy -- as at least one of our number has had to do -- is not waging war on conservatives, and both-sidesing it as if they are is wrong and offensive.

Whether he's a good friend back depends on how you weigh Smurfette against various attempts at murder.

Drum's sweeping generalities are infuriating. Also true that Democrats need to come up with both better messaging and also better policies about crime. "Defund the police" is not a winning phrase.

I believe that people in marginal neighborhoods want better policing, not less of the same-- certainly public gunshot detecting microphones and public cameras are popular. That doesn't mean no cops, also doesn't mean more billy clubs and more coverups.

Widespead mental health and drug treatment and making it harder to buy a gun than a car maybe.

I thought this was a pretty well-written take on the tension between rising crime and kneejerk responses to police brutality:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/progressives-dont-need-to-downplay-rising-homicides.html

Drum's sweeping generalities are infuriating. Also true that Democrats need to come up with both better messaging and also better policies about crime. "Defund the police" is not a winning phrase.

I believe that people in marginal neighborhoods want better policing, not less of the same-- certainly public gunshot detecting microphones and public cameras are popular. That doesn't mean no cops, also doesn't mean more billy clubs and more coverups.

Widespead mental health and drug treatment and making it harder to buy a gun than a car maybe.

I thought this was a pretty well-written take on the tension between rising crime and kneejerk responses to police brutality:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/progressives-dont-need-to-downplay-rising-homicides.html

lw

58: That would piss me off. "We are so inclusive that our two new genders are 'Men' and 'Other'!", essentially.

58: That would piss me off. "We are so inclusive that our two new genders are 'Men' and 'Other'!", essentially.

Goddammit.

"Defund the police" is not a winning phrase.

I remember when ACT UP was regarded as beyond the pale -- and for good reason. Now the liberal consensus seems to be that the organization was a huge success. Purported nuts and extremists sometimes end up on the right side of history. An important consideration seems to be whether the nuts and extremists are, in an objective sense, sane moderates in a crazy world. Even if we accept -- as we do not -- the consensus view of the time that civil rights marchers were seeking too much, too soon, our modern police sure look a lot like the ones on the Edmund Pettus bridge. Maybe in the end the corrupt cops win -- I lack confidence in the arc of the moral universe -- but I'm not going to mock people who are constructively and intelligently engaging with the problem.

58: Why on earth did they not just make all the bathrooms gender neutral? Facepalm.

74: Saying that "defund the police" isn't a winning phrase does not amount to mocking the activists who popularized it. We can have reasoned conversations about what demands and what slogans are the most appropriate right now, while acknowledging that we may be mistaken.

Debates about the right slogan or policy tend to ignore the fact that the right wing has hundreds of millions of dollars to spend redefining and attacking whatever phrase is gaining currency. The implicit idea that there is a magic combination of words that expresses an achievable policy goal succinctly and popularly and will be immune to these attacks seems naive at best.

Anyway, abolish the police.

77 Some right wing attacks work among the vast number of low engagement folks, and some don't. It is worth trying to find a formula that works with those people, even in the face of right wing attacks on everything.

It looked like the Edmund Pettis-like cops were going to be on the short end, but then some geniuses thought that setting fires in Portland would help that along. Despite the wishes of the organizations spearheading the movement there. That Middle America would choose Pettis cops over Portland radicals might be seen by some as illustrative of the fundamental moral bankruptcy of our culture -- and they're right -- but the fact is that improvements that are in fact material to actual people are possible, even in a morally bankrupt system. But you have to play for them, rather than for the fantasy of burn it down and see what emerges.

I am entirely comfortable with anti-arson advocacy -- and I think part of the benefit of "defund" the police is that it is more palatable than the obvious substitutes: "burn down" and "fuck."

Defund/fuck/burn?

Obviously none of us here set policy-- but for Dems to win, they can't ignore the real rise in crime since 2019. Voters whose support they need in order to win care about it. Minneapolis (maybe other places?) tried much less policing, at least from what I read, that didn't work well.

Ignore is one thing, but we should note that 2020 was a very weird year, and not hare off after policy solutions for an issue that might not look urgent when things come back to normal. Even the murder rate is only up to a level that was historically low the last time we hit it, not that long ago.

It is my considered opinion that the increase in murder tracks pretty well with the increase in gun sales and there's really not much more to say about the crime stats. Property crimes were probably up a little? In a year in which how many millions of people lost their jobs and social networks? This is my surprised face.

It's not worth engaging on this issue. It's, in fact, very much worth pushing back on the manufactured narrative that Crime! Is! A! Crisis!

83.2 Yes!

Yep.

83: Sadly, you don't get to dictate what people hear about or think.

It's not worth engaging on this issue. It's, in fact, very much worth pushing back on the manufactured narrative that Crime! Is! A! Crisis!

I'm in partial agreement with this. I think it's worth pushing back on "Crime! Is! A! Crisis!" But I also think it's worth engaging with the issue. What criteria would you look at to judge whether it's worth engaging? Consider the thread that Witt posted in the other thread, is that worth engaging with? https://twitter.com/blackgirlwaves/status/1412057291336060933

For myself, I'm inclined to think it's worth paying attention to crime statistics over the second half of this year, and tracking what the evidence actually says.

87 was me.

I want to elaborate a bit on 83.2 in response to this:

Obviously none of us here set policy-- but for Dems to win, they can't ignore the real rise in crime since 2019.

Let's imagine a counterfactual here: Suppose a Democratic president and vice president, along with a significant majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress, outright rejected "defund the police," as did the entire population of big-city Democratic mayors. Suppose further that they all straightforwardly expressed sensitivity to concerns about crime and enforcement, and support for legitimate policing.

Let's get really wild here and propose that the vice president is a former prosecutor who is routinely -- and accurately -- portrayed as paying her political dues by taking an unnecessarily "tough on crime" stance -- a stance that is completely compatible with the president's long legislative history and, for that matter, the history of the Democratic Party.

Even in such a wild scenario, I think lw would still fret about the Democratic tendency to ignore the rise in crime. Everyone understands that decency and modern US policing are incompatible, and if you support decency, everybody correctly assumes you are opposed to opposed to modern policing. It's a problem, but one that I don't want to be solved by Democrats renouncing decency. This kind of strategic political thinking led many Democrats to disgrace themselves by supporting the Iraq War, among other things.

Walt identifies the central issue:

Sadly, you don't get to dictate what people hear about or think.

The people who dictate what people hear about or think must be obeyed -- not just by the people who, in lw's words, "set policy," but by the rest of us, too.

Spike pithily explained my skepticism about this principle in a nearby thread.

89: What the fuck? Is ignoring PR a point of pride with you? "Sure, we didn't achieve any policy wins, but we struck a really provocative pose that annoyed people, so it was worth it." Is that the goal?

Gender neutral toilets are a straight loss for women, for the reasons laid out by Bostonian girl, although these are not immediately obvious to the men who tend to make those decisions.

To clarify: simply declaring existing toilets gender-neutral is a straight loss for women. I can imagine a policy where you built all the toilets women need and then added enough for the people who prefer gender-neutral, which would not disadvantage anyone except the people who paid for it.

Similarly, it is possible to imagine -- and I lived in, as a child, for a while -- cultures in which adult nudity in front of children of the opposite sex is not a big thing, but contemporary America is not such a culture. So telling women they should just shut up and put up with having dicks in there is not only a certain vote loser but morally wrong.

Of course this issue will be fanned and exploited by the bad buys. That's how democracies work. It's not an argument that there isn't a problem.

89: And I'm not arguing with Democratic politicians, whose response isn't terrible. I'm arguing with you and gensym, who want to replace the Democratic message with either "abolish the police", or "the default position should be no police".

I don't think that's right. Look at 89 again -- he's not saying that Democratic politicians are fucking up by being law-enforcement happy, he's saying that they're already law-enforcement happy enough. They don't need to join in the hair-on-fire crime-wave discourse, because that inflates the problem more than (a) it warrants practically and (b) is politically good for Democrats, but he's not lobbying for Biden to come out in favor of police abolition.

91, 92: Bostoniangirl wasn't complaining about gender neutral toilets generally, she was complaining about a decision that converted women's toilets only to gender neutral, leaving men's toilets still single-gender. That's not a concern about exposure to dicks, necessarily, it's noting that a situation where all facilities are open to men and only some are open to women is unequal.

The best way to do it is to have the sinks in the center, and separate the halves of the bathroom, one half labelled Urinals and the other half labelled Stalls.

Occasionally people do change clothes in bathrooms, but making more than just one single larger handicapped available would generally help with that. Same with parents who are using the bathroom with small children. But now we're in the realm of pure utopia.

Thomas Moore didn't cover pooping because he knew you could add it later when the technology was there.

According to the sign on my office's building, it is Class A space. But the men's room has permanently stained toilet seats and no ventilation at all besides the door. It does have a built-in ashtray by the urinal. It was built in 1996.

In fact, maybe the genders should be renamed Stalls and Urinals. It almost sounds like horses and unicorns. Then traditional men can sheepishly explain that they're non-binary, depending on their needs at the moment.

The building and, presumably, the ashtray too.

1996 is pretty late to be building ashtrays indoors. That's so thoughtful of them.

98: An ashtray in 1996! That's wild.

The no-smoking-indoors flip was really sudden, and not that long before 1996 -- I'd expect ashtrays everywhere in 1986, maybe even in 1990.

Pittsburgh still has smoking bars, or did before covid. I'm not sure why they stopped for covid or if it's permanent.

95: We're not disagreeing. If all the existing toilets in a building are deemed gender-neutral, damn few women will use the ones with urinals in them, but many man will use the ones with seats. The net result is a loss of toilets for women to use. But that is the way that conversion to "gender neutrality" seems to happen most often.

You can argue that women should man up and just ignore the men pissing at urinals, but I don't see why they should, and in any case they won't.

This is distinct from the changing room argument.

Passing laws about this stuff is bad, gesture politics. But so is simply slapping gender-neutral notices on all the toilets in a building.

Yeah I remember smoking sections on planes when my brother and I would fly unaccompanied to my grandparents in FL, which had to be around the mid 80s. Another culture war victory for the liberals!

Certainly nobody was smoking in my office in 1996. But I was still in Ohio.

It's not too expensive to convert urinals to narrow stalls. Most urinals have dividers between them already that gets you partway there.

The dividers make it harder to look at other people's genitals, which is the main hobby for the rural and suburban white middle class.

But only when peeing or defecating. Otherwise, it would be inappropriate.

In the urinals?

If Baltimore is the canary in the coalmine I think it is liberals better start engaging like yesterday. Murder there jumped 50 percent from 2014 to 2015 and it never went away. 2021 is on track to be the sixth year in a row at the new rate. New York "progressively" disbanded it's proactive anti crime unit. A year ago the black Brooklyn Borough President called for it's return and the city ignored him. He's now likely going to be mayor.

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/07/13/new-york-city-shootings-nypd-anti-crime-unit-eric-adams-tony-herbert/

Pooping in the urinals is fine, but most people don't have the ability.

A couple places in Scandinavia, they have unisex bathrooms that are stalls that run floor-to-ceiling surrounding a shared washing area. It always felt vaguely transgressive to wash my hands at a sink next to a strange woman doing the same.

In nursery schools, the toilet is generally just partially tucked behind a low bookshelf. And in Home Depot, they're just available out on the main floor.

If Baltimore is the canary in the coal mine (and whyever would it be?) the right-wingers better start engaging like yesterday. Police clear, I'm sorry, what percentage of murder investigations was it again?

As I said earlier in this thread - the murder rate appears to be basically a function of the number of guns being sold and the number of guns available. Gun sales went through the roof over the past year and change. Other crime stats don't seem to have meaningfully shifted, so the conversation shouldn't be about "crime" but rather "guns". I'm _happy_ to have that conversation.

A rational response to this would be to do something to curb easy access to guns, but since we can't act rationally on that front... what, we're going go to hire more cops to fail to clear more murders? Cool, cool, cool.

Yes, I am a hot head on this and many other fronts. No, I don't think Biden or the Democrats would be well served to adopt my maximalist stance on abolition at this point, but we're never going to make any progress if there *aren't* voices like mine in the public arena forthrightly calling for abolition. That Overton window isn't going to move itself.

115: The one thing I remember about the nursery room is that parents aren't allowed to use that toilet.

106 I guess that's right. There was a war on smoking, and whether you want to call reintroduction of the wolf to Yellowstone a war on elk, or elk hunters, that's how the hunters take it.

My son wants to introduce coywolves locally.

Or maybe he thinks it's going to happen naturally. Anyway, we need a predator that can bring down a deer and operate in an urban area.

I saw some nature footage of coywolves that was incredibly charming. Motionless, they looked just like wolves, all noble and stalwart. And then as soon as they started moving, all the body-language was slinking coyote.

Is ignoring PR a point of pride with you?

This is the opposite of my point. The PR narrative -- that Biden/Harris and the Democrats are dodgy on the subject of support for law enforcement -- has to be confronted and defeated, not accepted and amplified. (Gensym says as much in 83.last.)

Because a key part of the Democratic constituency is concerned about police violence, tolerance for that concern is part of the Dem program -- that's not a Fox News lie. That tolerance is inevitably going to be painted as being pro-crime by the people who, in your words, "dictate what people hear about or think."

So admittedly, the PR war is being fought against people who are largely dictating the terms, but surrender isn't a viable option. You acknowledge that you are basically satisfied that Democratic politicians have squared that circle (as am I), but that's not enough for you. Per 93, randos on eclectic webmagazines also have to fall in line. I lack confidence in my theory of change, but I do believe that change starts with someone, somewhere acknowledging the need for change.

To the extent that Republicans win the PR war, they do so by fighting that war. Dems are handicapped here -- there's no way they could spin insurrection as a bit of a faux pas by over-eager patriots. Nonetheless, Republican success is a function of engagement, not surrender. Dems must fight somewhere, and while I am not myself a defund the police guy, I am not offended by their existence. And I think they pull the conversation in a useful direction.

Violent crime is lower than during the crack epidemic, yes, but noticeably worse in a bunch of places than say 2015. Some of it is really visible, probably a consequence of bored unemployed kids. People care about crime in and near their neighborhoods, including middle-class black and hispanic people who might or might not vote for democrats. Declaring it a non-issue is a choice, sure, but again, Minneapolis apparently has recently tried less enforcement, then reversed. That seems to me like a warning for Democrats.
Other hugely relevant quality of life issues which are unfortunately connected from the perspective of people living near problems, are overdoses (more of these than suicides and murders combined, synthetic opioids are new) and mental health support. These latter should be winning issues for Democrats to raise. It seems to me, with even a light glaze of realism, crime, (a lot of which is connected to social problems), could be either winning or competitive politically also. Maybe hammering home that too many guns are the problem is a good path (sounds good to me), maybe something else is-- but some reality-based attempt to address the linked and complex issues is better than no attempt, maybe there's a way to do it that would draw reasonable cops from the woodwork.

More realistic dialogue than "no problem here" and "defund the police" seems like a starting point though. Certainly ddon't need to keep talking about here, this is basically recreation, but even here, skipping it differs in my eyes from actively stating that it's a non-issue.

116. Broadly agreed that too many guns is true and is a point to make politically. WRT recent increase in crime and gun sales, wouldn't that affect suicide rate also? Most likely victim of a gun is still the owner. US suicide rate hasn't changed much. Have any professionals addressed the question? Maybe access to especially lax gun sellers is what matters. Part of the problem is NRA-mandated shitty reporting.

Thinking it's entirely because of the increase of guns is motivated reasoning. The number of guns in the US has monotonically increased for years, while the murder rate spiked more recently. There were other big waves of gun buying (when Obama was elected, for example) without increases in the murder rate. The only way it's a plausible explanation is if your goal is to reverse engineer your policy preferences (in this case, for gun control) from events. It's like that old dsquared post, "9/11 proved me right about everything".

The Overton window isn't magic. Everybody is trying the same strategy -- white supremacists as well as tankies -- but it's not like the window has spread wide enough to admit everyone. The right endlessly nutpicks, so they are always on the lookout for people saying things like "abolish the police". That's how they ginned up critical race theory -- they find some nut that says white people are devils and then claim "this is what Democrats believe". If the Overton window really worked that well, you would find a surprisingly large number of Fox News viewers that think "hmm, maybe white people are devils".

Thinking it's a broad based crime wave rather than something peculiar and probably pandemic related with murders is also motivated reasoning, though. Whatever one might say about underreporting of property crime in terms of absolute rates, it usually tracks up and down in sync with murders. This last year it didn't, which suggests that even if it's not guns, it's something specific to this last year.

I just read 89.

Even in such a wild scenario, I think lw would still fret about the Democratic tendency to ignore the rise in crime.

I would not fret with a 60-40 D majority in the senate, or a majority of more than 10 seats, this following a criminally incompetent R as president. It's now 3 seats with 4 vacant. As I wrote, I have reasons to be kind of worried about support from constituents who democrats need in order to win elections. 2022 is next year. I don't know motives beyond what's written here, don't know why you feel that you know mine.

122: We adopt extreme rhetoric about ourselves to promote modest goals. Conservatives adopt moderate rhetoric about themselves, and paint liberals as extremists, in order to promote extreme goals. (That's how the estate tax, which has got to be the fairest tax in the history of the universe, becomes the "death tax".) Which one works better? Which side is better at PR? I would claim that it's the conservatives, but maybe I'm wrong.

But as you say, this is a backwater on the Internet, so what's the function of "no more police" here on Unfogged? Do you really think that we should try that experiment? Maybe you do -- I think gensym would. If you sincerely mean it, then that's a lunatic idea. Every place has police. Social democracies have police.

But I assume you don't really mean it, and its function is emotive. It's disappointing that progress has been slow, and that it may soon stop. It's frustrating, that there was a window of opportunity as of last summer, and it might be closing. It's satisfying to say "no more police", in the way that ACAB is satisfying. It's meant to be taken seriously, but not literally, like the Bard said.

125: I think it is pandemic-related, and that it will be gone by next summer. But we should think about what to do if it's not.

Strong agree with 128. The parsimonious explanation of any changes in the last year is that they're largely pandemic driven in some way, even though the exact mechanism may be weird and complicated. (I'm tempted to suggest that this is about supply-chain disruption in drug trafficing, given how fucked all other supply-chains were in the last year. But that's just me making things up.) But there's some reasons to think that might not be it (for example that some cities were seeing upticks before the pandemic), and so we should be thinking about good things to do in case it's not a fluke. First and foremost, we could collect crime stats in faster and better ways so that we can know relatively quickly whether this wave is going away or not.

(I think it's highly implausible that there's a secret violent crime boost that's somehow hidden from the statistics all over the country, but what is quite possible is that there's a secular increase in violent crime which is masked by a pandemic-caused decrease in the kinds of violent crime that require victims being out of the house.)

Pandemic related but only in the U.S and limited to poor brown and black people.

Re smoking in offices, I was in law school in 1988 and got a summer job at a large North Carolina firm, which has a no no sloking rule. There was an ashtray on every desk. At orientation we were told that the ashtray must be in plain sight on every desk, don't hide it in a drawer. Also smoking was permitted in all offices, including yours, whether you smoke or not. Senior partners did sometimes walk the halls and drop in on folks while lit. Visible ashtrays were required to stay in the good graces of the firm's largest client, RJI Reynolds, which was fighting office smoking bans all over the world in this period. The firm may have been doing lobbying work on the issue also, not ultimately with much success.

Murder rates are way up this year in Mexico.

Oops, I was misreading the data for Mexico. Seeing contradictory things, but it looks like they're about even there from last year, but with sharp increases in several states bordering the US.

127: I think you're pretty close to understanding me here. I like the poetry of "defund the police," and I like the threat contained therein. As a slogan, it communicates that indiscriminate abuse of citizens on camera is a political problem for people who want police organizations to have money. Beyond eclectic webmagazines, I'm generally pleased with the place that slogan occupies in society. It is a phrase that, as you say, I take seriously but not literally, and I think I'm not alone in that.

I disagree when you say that "death tax" is an example of moderate rhetoric. It's nutty and extreme -- nobody ever paid a tax for dying; people are taxed for inheriting. But there's a poetry in the phrase that transcends the literal meaning.

134.2: The people that call it a "death tax" are the people that oppose it. They make themselves appear sane compared to the nutty liberals that support a tax for dying.

I don't know about state taxes, but the federal limit for estate taxes is comically high.

"Our election victory in 2020 was razor thin even though (a) the economy sucked, (b) we were in the middle of a pandemic, (c) voters had had four years to see just what Donald Trump was really like, and (d) our candidate was bland, amiable, white, male Joe Biden."

Yeah, Biden thumped Trump by a margin of more than 7 million votes and overcame an outright attempt by the fascist far right to steal the election, in circumstances where he couldn't use normal GOTV tools like door-to-door canvassing and his opponent was aggressively sabotaging the postal service to try to sabotage mail-in voting. Drum has just lost it.

It's worth pointing out that Covid kept Biden from earlier voter registration drives and such, but there was a great deal of GOTV, including door to door canvassing, in key states.

I've heard that Pennsylvania canvassers were particularly charismatic and effective.

I think it was obnoxious in its persistence, but I guess it works.