This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you want something else in the same vein, but even worse, check out Dave Winfield's book Dropping the Ball, where he goes through a laundry lsit of things wrong with professional baseball, from steroids, to unhealthy ballpark food, to high school baseball players getting worse girlfriends than football and basketball players, and then proceeds to blame it on nobody at all, saying that everyone in the game from Bud Selig on down is doing a great job. Anyway, to address your points:
You could have made that argument in 2016, when the superdelegate field was stacked against him, but they changed the rules in 2020 specifically for that reason, ran a competitive field, and he still lost. Anyway, Sanders did not win the first three primaries; he won one primary and two caucuses, and in Iowa and New Hampshire the totals were close enough that he was still behind in the delegate count. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but caucus states always seem to give outsiders a better chance, likely because of the low turnout compared to primaries. And while Biden did abysmally in the first two contests, he finished second in the Nevada caucuses. It made no sense for him to drop out at this point, as his star was rising and he had been consistently leading polls in South Carolina by a wide margin. And he ends up crushing it in South Carolina, moving into the lead in one fell swoop. Mayor Pete, meanwhile, has been trending downward, and it's pretty clear he has no purchase with black voters. It made no sense for him to stay in for Super Tuesday so he could get walloped in the South. It made no sense for Klobuchar to stay in at this point, either, as her campaign never really picked up speed. Had they both stayed in the race, I doubt it would have made much of a difference. Klobuchar wasn't winning any more delegates. Pete may have peeled some off in 5 of the 15 states that were contested on Super Tuesday, plus a few in California and Texas because there are so many of them, but winning anything was unlikely, and he would have bowed out immediately afterwards anyways. Pete was an outsider who debated well and overperformed in early states with low delegate counts. He was never expected to challenge for the nomination, and if it wasn't for a couple of fluke performances in heavily white areas nobody would be talking about any kind of Bernie screwjob. Sanders went head to head with Biden and lost, that's all there is to it.
It's identity politics, but not something you can blame them for. Nominees have a history of picking running mates for reasons not entirely related to their qualifications for the office (of which there really aren't any). Bush picked Quayle to shore up his support in the Bible Belt. Trump picked Pence for the same reason. W picked Cheney to counter suspicions that he was a lightweight. Kerry picked Edwards to shore up support among conservative Democrats. Obama picked Biden to compensate for his lack of experience. McCain picked Palin because unexpectedly picking a woman might have provided the miracle his campaign needed to win that race (which backfired, but nonetheless; also see Mondale picking Ferraro). And now we come to 2020, and the Democrats are running an elderly white man in the era of peak woke, four years after they lost a race in part because their candidate wasn't perceived as progressive enough, months after winning a campaign in which the nominee's biggest rival was a self-described socialist. They can be forgiven for wanting to shore up the progressive wing by running a woman of color with progressive tendencies, but not so progressive as to be at odds with the platform. I agree that they should have known at the time that vice president would have been a more important office than it normally is, but I don't see this as a huge blunder. You try to win the election you're running now, not the election you might be running four years from now.
Sure, but what else was he supposed to run on? His record? Biden's best chance was to keep the coalition that won him the presidency in 2020, and the best way of doing that was by reminding them of all the bullshit they'd be dealing with if Trump won again. The Democrats warned that something similar to this was going to happen, and Trump managed to exceed even the wildest expectations of Democrats, with talk of a third term, shipping people to Salvadoran prisons, talk of invading Canada, talk of firing Jerome Powell, the Epstein business, DOGE, tariffs, and countless more examples to name. His approval rating dropped like a rock upon taking office, and he's net unfavorable in every category. That there are people out there who are surprised by any of this boggles the mind. The biggest mistake they made was that once Kamala was the nominee, they didn't roll out a whole new agenda. She could have been sold as the way forward for Democrats, but in the end there was nothing but a few lukewarm proposals that didn't get any serious traction. You can blame that on the tight schedule, but I would have thought that by September they would have had a clear policy platform that was different enough from Biden's that Kamal could call it her own.
No, they can't. Because they didn't just run "a woman of color with progressive tendencies."
They ran Kamala Harris. Who was the worst candidate in the history of American Presidential races since WW2 (pre-WW2 Presidential stuff is really a completely different dynamic. It's kind of funny it almost parallels the deadball / liveball demarcation for baseball).
The "meta" of what @FiveHourMarathon wrote can be summarized as Democrats Often Neglect Reality (DONR PARTY). They professional politicos simply ignore the obvious. Not always, necessarily, in favor of something else (i.e. identity politics) but just because acknowledging a harsh reality is often jarring and uncomfortable.
Kamala Harris was bad as a candidate. Her interviews were atrocious. Her stump speeches were too volatile - she'd be doing well in one part of one speech but then nosedive in another part. Her "unrehearsed" interactions with her own voters/fans were awkward and seem bizarrely staged even for American politics. She had an awful laugh (which is something you can modify). This is America in 2024. Social media is understood. In fact, it's a cornerstone of mass communication, including politics. Beyond that, the "5 second clip" has been happening since the 2000s. You either have to be psychopathically on-the-ball sharp 24/7 (and this is why I still think Newsome is in the mix for 2028) or you have to develop a brand wherein gaffes and flubs are kind of part of the deal - this is what Trump has been doing ever since his first word salad speech in 2016.
How in the hell do you run Kamala Harris knowing all of these things? She's a dumpster fire of a candidate. But when you Just Say No (I LOVE YOU, NANCY) to reality ... anything can happen.
Harris running can be laid at Biden's feet, because he insisted on a second term and then had to be dragged out and knifed in the back by the party in order to dislodge him, by which time there really wasn't anyone else they could run, never mind that the funding by donors had all been earmarked for the Biden/Harris campaign and there was a real fear they'd have to pay it all back if they went with a primary.
The party didn't do itself any favours by then acting the opposite of the 'open, transparent, democratic' process by making her a fait accompli candidate before any race could start, but they were - to be fair to them - really hobbled by their own past bad decisions in humouring Biden (mostly for the "who the hell else do we have? and who else can beat Trump?" considerations).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was saying this loudly and from the beginning. She basically had a classic "fork in the road": do I stay the course and hope that Trump is too unpopular to win, letting me win by default, or do I try to do something notable to make me stand out, and run a more traditional campaign? She took the first road, and I was screaming the whole time that it was the wrong one.
In fact, the sloooooow roll-out of a nearly non-existent policy platform was excruciating to watch. Did you know I asked my (liberal, news-reading) family about if they could name 3 policy proposals Harris had? They could name ONE. ONE policy! In a major election! That's insane! They should be the demographic most knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, my mom phone banked for Obama twice and they are both white college-educated liberals (since ~2005). I'm a self-admitted news junkie, and I could only name three!
After reading "Original Sin", the impression I get is (1) she was really beholden to Biden and his supporters, e.g. a lot of his ex-staff or people connected to him ran her campaign, so she could not afford to piss off any Biden loyalists in the party and (2) she's indecisive: she takes a long time to make decisions, doesn't handle input from others well, and is constantly second-guessing decisions. See the Call Her Daddy appearance where she or her campaign were so terrified by the prospect of not being in complete control of the outcome, they picked this instead of an appearance on Joe Rogan. And she didn't even go on the podcast! Instead they spent campaign funds on "we'll mock up the studio in a hotel room, fly you out, and you feed her pre-screened questions where she gives prepared answers" for something that was essentially preaching to the choir: Harris already had the young white liberal college-educated female podcast audience as voters, she didn't need to chase after them.
So if she decided to strike out on her own, that would leave her wide open for "so why didn't you do any of this when you were VP? why weren't you speaking out and disagreeing with those policies?" and she just hasn't the flexibility to handle that sort of questioning without being prepared fifty ways from Sunday with soundbites from focus groups.
Hence the lack of any actual policies - the need not to be openly in dissent from the Biden administration, the need not to state anything definite that would piss off any of the million little splinter groups that would go for her throat online, and being hobbled by the 2019 run where she did tack too far to the left (and then left herself wide open on "yes I would use government money to pay for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants who are criminals locked up in jail", for instance).
I feel like (1) is partly a consequence of necessity: you have a major deadline, and so it doesn't make much sense to do a major re-org. Though of course staffing decisions at the top matter. Which brings us to (2), and I think that's probably very, very true. I remember reading even way before, during her own primary campaign, about how chaotic her organizational and decision skills were. That is, she'd constantly change her mind after listening to a few advisors outside the actual structure (such as her more-talented sister), and that chain-of-command was always super up in the air, and that made for constant inefficiency and poor messaging. So ultimately, yeah, I agree that it's fundamentally a Kamala issue, and she never really was going to take road #2, the road less traveled.
So to be clear, I think when people say that she was in an unwinnable situation, they are super wrong. The logic for what she actually chose was pretty attractive, but we shouldn't mix up the attractiveness of a choice with its actual truth. As someone who closely follows political polling and focus-grouping, Road #2 is what an advisor would recommend to you, almost every time, even if the political establishment as a whole would recommend road #1, the play-it-safe road. You actually can still do a roll-out of Kamala-specific policies even with a Biden-staffed crowd! Yes, Democrats writ large would moan and complain a lot, because that's their nature, but the actual core political machinery is usually still pretty good at following marching orders. She (or more specifically, a better-organized, more decisive version of her) could totally have pulled it off.
Still, again, she was chosen for being loyal, and a marginal GOTV help, and being loyal somewhat runs counter to ambitious competence. I do wonder if her selection, designed to bolster Biden rather than to be a protégé of any kind, was an early sign that Biden didn't actually intend to step down after one term, in retrospect...
She should have taken the second option, but I think it's a case of "there is no there there"*, Harris just did not have policies of her own (on a national scale at least). So a mix of being pushed not to change horses in mid-stream (don't drop Biden's policies) and not genuinely having anything to replace them (as mentioned by others, very very late in her campaign before her campaign page put up any tangible polices, unlike Hillary who had pages upon pages of policies for all sizes and all comers).
Was it unwinnable? Hard to say: we've seen that as Harris ran her campaign (and her staffers who really should have their feet held to the fire over this - that podcast has way too much whining over 'we had no time, it was so unfair Trump's campaign had all that money and time, things just happened and there was nothing we could have done') it wasn't winnable. She did get handed the rough end of the stick with Biden's campaign collapsing too late to do anything to prepare a better one of her own, and her failed run in 2019 left way too many hostages to fortune. But she did go on to make unforced errors, and her campaign staff for social media ran a terrible campaign, just awful.
*Ironically, a remark about Oakland by Gertrude Stein who grew up there and later returned to visit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, before the election I asked my liberal Guardian reader uncle about what Kamala stood for and what made her so promising a candidate, and he said "well, I think she'll do a lot to protect women's reproductive rights".
That was it. More abortions. Nothing on healthcare, housing, education, law and order etc. Just abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
More options
Context Copy link
Which policy could they name? And which are the three?
IIRC they both said she wanted more green energy stuff generally (power generation, that is), which I counted. My mom also said... "something about housing? I don't really know and can't remember" which I didn't count because it was too vague. She was right though, that was one I named, the first-time homebuyer credit. I also could name the expanded child and childcare tax credit, and her vague gestures at tightening the borer. After thinking about it a little longer, I think I was able to remember some plan to negotiate Medicare drug prices, but Trump also had some similar-sounding version of the same plan, so I wasn't sure if that counted - or if the border tightening counted either, since she was basically forced into it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link