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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   27678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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A joy to see another grendel-khan California housing update. As an excuse to reply, I present another Noah Smith blog anti-anti-Abundance post. Located via Hanania dunk. At the end, Smith presents some polling results:

But a recent poll suggests that although there’s lots of interest in the abundance idea, the message is still less appealing than populist red meat. Although you might think a poll by some pressure group calling itself “Demand Progress” might be biased toward populist causes, I found the wording in the questions the wording in the questions to be reasonably fair

If we take Demand Progress at face value (probably shouldn't), then the results suggest the largest plurality of Dems make the policy as presented a net negative for electoral reasons. I don't think this justifies Hanania dunk farming but the second result via Smith's blog might. If lefty progressives can successfully frame a false dichotomy that presents Dems a choice between Abundance and the moral clarity of anti-corporate sentiment, then the winner should be clear. There's a whole lot of equity in anti-greed memes even among moderate Dems.

The worse stuff gets the less sensitive people are going to be to this kind of framing. Which already seems to be the growing reality. However, Republican coding the policies is not an empty threat to the movement. I'm not sure what it's like in the local politics, but* does seem that's why so much of the discourse online remains focused on meta questions about the discourse. Popularity and electoral risk will determine how diluted the agenda gets before making it into policy and how much of the dysfunctional machine can be protected. An unthinkable, unlikely, but most entertaining outcome of this conflict would be Abundance Dems giving up on the party. Instead, we'll get the more likely, boring outcome of progressive pouting.

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