I think for maybe a deeper historical, but also less materialist reading, you could say that as a political movement American Centrism, at least partially, can trace it's genesis back to those in the Union who were willing to sell out the newly freed slaves to end the Reconstruction in the Corrupt Bargain of 1877.
From that betrayal, you get the seeds that grew into the spiritual core of both the modern Republican party and the extreme centrist Dems. At least in my humble opinion. I mean it's also completely ignoring a lot of important shit including the Great Depression and stuff, but I feel like it's the same impulse.
You're hitting the nail on the head here. The centrists have no core policy values beyond simply wanting to win elections and by doing so winning power for their own elitist lot, and if facism lite is a part of that, we'll then they'll either adapt, or somehow find it useful for themselves. I'll not walk precincts or work phones for these clowns, let alone vote them. At a certain point a lesser evil is still evil.
At the CA Dem state convention last weekend, labor came out swinging against "abundance" (literally Lorena Gonzalez said "Fuck Abundance!" at the top of her labor caucus speech). I thought it was interesting, since Klein/Thompson go out of their way to note that labor is not the cause of the failure to build infrastructure/housing at scale, given that Europe and Japan also use union labor to build. The root of the issue, for labor in CA, is that reforms to CEQA will result in the loss of a tool to obtain project labor agreements, and CEQA reform is a cornerstone of the "abundance agenda" in CA.
I'll get out of the weeds for a moment. It seems to me that the "Abundance" need not be centrist. Taken to its logical conclusion, abundance is effective socialism. And that's the problem the centrists have. They don't actually want to make sure that everyone gets housing/education/healthcare/clean environment; they want to make sure they get it, along with the public financing that their private companies would get from delivering those services. If others get it too, well, that's peachy. But calling it socialism is too scary and divisive, so it gets watered down to a hand-waving "abundance" agenda that does not involve dialogue with politically entrenched/sophisticated actors like labor and environmental organizers.
In fairness to Gonzalez, some of Abundance's leading voices, like Yglesias, Noah Smith, Barro to a degree, and Liam Kerr, are critical of labor and unions.
I know. And I think their criticism is not rooted in any factual critique, but in a belief that any organization that creates a barrier to the smooth implementation of their brilliance must be inherently dangerous. Labor represents its own positions, just as other groups do, and cannot be expected to capitulate because other interest groups have identified them as a barrier.
I think they fail (we all fail) to understand a different between Labor's interests and Labor's positions. I almost always support Labor's interests even when I don't agree with their positions. The Abundance voices don't distinguish but they also don't care all that much about Labor's interests (i.e. union members, working people) so they misattribute positions as interests.
Hahaha! Fair. But have you ever heard them advocate for any of labor's goals? The generous reading is that they oppose "special interest" groups, but they eagerly advocate for certain interests over others and I can't recall them every advocating for working people. Happy to be enlightened but I haven't seen it yet.
In a lot of ways, Abundance can be seen as trying to recreate the urban growth machine of mid-century; labor was a key element and driver of that. Unions loved Robert Moses because he built!
Barro, a "former" Republican who worked for Grover Norquist doesn't like unions, Smith and Yglesias have both written about "the groups," and it's clear unions are what they are addressing when they keep bashing "special interests" - here's a Yglesias piece about transit and teachers unions:
And all four complained loudly about the dock workers' strike last year, along with their neoliberal fellow travelers.
Admittedly, I read a lot of all four writers, so I have a good idea of their worldview; Klein is ok but even he has written some stuff critical of trade unions - feel how ever you want about CEQA or housing it strikes me as curious when people attack labor from one side of their mouth and also say the dems need to do better with the working class (but instead of material interest for folks, they keep yelling about attacking trans people or whatever.)
Oh, I think the Democrats are extremely clear, forthright and even brutally honest in their program: Serve the billionaires even better than the Rethuglicans (but look nicer).
It's just one big, ugly corporate party: The Republocrats.
As a one-time co-chair of my county Democratic Party in rural southwest Wisconsin during the bait-n-switch years of Obummer, any hope or ideals I had about the party were evaporated in the reality of what the pro-war party was really about ... and for.
Our political system is dead, done, fried, ground up and the ashes tossed to the hurricanes of climate collapse. AI is warping, distorting, perverting and serving up our world in a way no one can trust or fully grasp.
When anyone looks at the world of American politics and society I'd urge them to watch the 2016 BBC documentary "HyperNormalization" to better understand what is really going on. I recently rewatched it and where I once saw it as a dire warning of what might be, I now see it for what it is -- a documentary of our world as it is now.
"A Sane Explanation For The Insanity The West Is Experiencing" ... Are we all insane now? No, but in a hypernormalized world, we are well on the way. A whole new path is needed. Nothing is as it was and nothing that worked before will work now."
Maddening. They keep talking, and talking, and talking, about what they SHOULD be doing, when what they HAVE been doing is exactly that. Mealy-mouthed compromise and capitulation and reaching out to the mythic Average Voter. It hasn't worked since the nineties, and they keep getting beat down, with a response of "Yes, but..." It's beyond parody at this point. Every single one of these asshole marketers (and that is ultimately what they are, marketers) keeps insisting that we go back to the dried up well and drink deep, then sputter through dried chafed lips, "We can do it better if we keep doubling down." Insanity. Inanity. Can a creative like Iannucci or Charlie Brooker be brought in to advise these clowns how to stop being so damn clownish!?
I haven't read Abundance. I'm 464 on the hold list, on 10 copies at our local library. From what I've heard and read, very simply put, its seems to be a criticism of government red tape, and the an analysis of the permit apocalypse that is evidently upon us. If the government would lighten up on the regs and allow us to build more, we might just get even more than we need. It all seems pretty simple, and very neo-liberal. Really, nothing needs changing, only tweaking. This is why Barro gets frustrated when someone brings up genocide. Hard to tweak genocide. These Third Way guys, these Centrist, are vacuous, soulless and honestly, when it comes down to it, immoral. It just about winning for them. They don't understand and/or realize that the "Old Way" is dying and needs to be dead.
Thanks for attending the revival jamboree for third way neoliberalism. I read Yglesias — seemingly the Bill Buckley of centrism — in hopes of one day hearing a substantive discussion of policy issues and the limits of market-based strategies to address them. We've been trying that for how many years? Fifty, more or less? And yet the problems are still very much with us. But let's not talk about the failure of incentive-based, market-based, tax-based policy strategies.
Perhaps we should actually try market-based, tax-based policy strategies. Our tax system is on of the most complex and inefficient systems in the world. Our ‘market-led’ policies are bedevilled by special interests of all hues, especially the plutocrats. And I’m guessing that the alternative to market-based policies are… presidential edicts? State control?
Have the argument about how to make market-based policies work better, how to have a fairer tax system, how to create sustainable growth. It’s hard work, but it’s better than the alternatives
Dean Baker reframes his consistent policy prescriptions (sans DC consultant polisci strategery) as abundance. These are solid policies that are more doable now thanks to MAGA’s radicalism:
Casually leaving that "Moderate Talent Pipeline" sign in there and not mentioning it is a baller move, but I have to point out the joke, because it's just so perfectly representative of why we're in this mess.
Their problem isn’t that they’re too focused on data, it’s that they badly misread it. They won’t read any political science work that might suggest that public opinion dynamics are complex and that winning entails more than a simplistic strategy of taking stances based on polling from the last election (i.e. pandering), because they’re either intellectually or (more likely) ideologically incapable of taking such work seriously. To the Welcomefest centrists, public opinion is easy to read and easy to react to, and the only obstacle to permanent success is the left. Their whole approach is frankly naive, stupid, and (for them) politically convenient
I mean like, Hamilton, a lot of what you use as raw material for your analysis is “data,” but data of a different kind. The popularist view of “REAL data” is very narrow and limited. Maybe I should write up something about this.
They're still talking about soccer moms. Bill Clinton pitched his campaigns to soccer moms in the 1990s. Now there are far fewer soccer moms because most of the moms have either had to get a job or can no longer afford to pay for their kids' soccer.
And centrists wonder why everyone else thinks they are irrelevant. Do I need to comment on the level of intelligence and awareness displayed?
The centrists basically block the left, which is why they get money. I think the Democratic Party is unreformable. We need a workers’ party, a socialist party. How has this benighted country never been able to achieve a multi-party system?
I would never vote for it but I absolutely support its establishment and growth. And a libertarian party. If there’s one single deepest root cause to this utter mess, it is that ‘this benighted country has never been able to achieve a multi-party system’. The last new major party was formed nearly two centuries ago!
Best bit is that Dems had a "be normal" candidate in Tim Walz and completely muzzled him.
I think for maybe a deeper historical, but also less materialist reading, you could say that as a political movement American Centrism, at least partially, can trace it's genesis back to those in the Union who were willing to sell out the newly freed slaves to end the Reconstruction in the Corrupt Bargain of 1877.
From that betrayal, you get the seeds that grew into the spiritual core of both the modern Republican party and the extreme centrist Dems. At least in my humble opinion. I mean it's also completely ignoring a lot of important shit including the Great Depression and stuff, but I feel like it's the same impulse.
That is a very good example of the centrist ethos, yes.
Another example are the great compromises that preceded the Civil War. Missouri Compromise, 1850, Popular sovereignty, etc.
Also, 3/5 of a man in the Constitution.
You're hitting the nail on the head here. The centrists have no core policy values beyond simply wanting to win elections and by doing so winning power for their own elitist lot, and if facism lite is a part of that, we'll then they'll either adapt, or somehow find it useful for themselves. I'll not walk precincts or work phones for these clowns, let alone vote them. At a certain point a lesser evil is still evil.
As someone working in DC with these guys - thank you for the chance to cackle at the moderate talent pipeline. The finest self own I've ever seen.
At the CA Dem state convention last weekend, labor came out swinging against "abundance" (literally Lorena Gonzalez said "Fuck Abundance!" at the top of her labor caucus speech). I thought it was interesting, since Klein/Thompson go out of their way to note that labor is not the cause of the failure to build infrastructure/housing at scale, given that Europe and Japan also use union labor to build. The root of the issue, for labor in CA, is that reforms to CEQA will result in the loss of a tool to obtain project labor agreements, and CEQA reform is a cornerstone of the "abundance agenda" in CA.
I'll get out of the weeds for a moment. It seems to me that the "Abundance" need not be centrist. Taken to its logical conclusion, abundance is effective socialism. And that's the problem the centrists have. They don't actually want to make sure that everyone gets housing/education/healthcare/clean environment; they want to make sure they get it, along with the public financing that their private companies would get from delivering those services. If others get it too, well, that's peachy. But calling it socialism is too scary and divisive, so it gets watered down to a hand-waving "abundance" agenda that does not involve dialogue with politically entrenched/sophisticated actors like labor and environmental organizers.
In fairness to Gonzalez, some of Abundance's leading voices, like Yglesias, Noah Smith, Barro to a degree, and Liam Kerr, are critical of labor and unions.
I know. And I think their criticism is not rooted in any factual critique, but in a belief that any organization that creates a barrier to the smooth implementation of their brilliance must be inherently dangerous. Labor represents its own positions, just as other groups do, and cannot be expected to capitulate because other interest groups have identified them as a barrier.
I think they fail (we all fail) to understand a different between Labor's interests and Labor's positions. I almost always support Labor's interests even when I don't agree with their positions. The Abundance voices don't distinguish but they also don't care all that much about Labor's interests (i.e. union members, working people) so they misattribute positions as interests.
Seems like the Yglesias/Smith/Barro/Kerr are critical of labor in California for opposing CEQA reform.
That's a pretty factual critique!
Hahaha! Fair. But have you ever heard them advocate for any of labor's goals? The generous reading is that they oppose "special interest" groups, but they eagerly advocate for certain interests over others and I can't recall them every advocating for working people. Happy to be enlightened but I haven't seen it yet.
I'm not doing anything comprehensive, but yeah some of those writers are on record supporting labor unions.
Here's Klein:
https://www.newsweek.com/ezra-klein-why-unions-are-worth-fighting-68581
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/opinion/climate-change-biden-building-investment.html
Yglesias:
https://slate.com/business/2013/08/40-years-of-union-busting-has-failed-america.html
In a lot of ways, Abundance can be seen as trying to recreate the urban growth machine of mid-century; labor was a key element and driver of that. Unions loved Robert Moses because he built!
Barro, a "former" Republican who worked for Grover Norquist doesn't like unions, Smith and Yglesias have both written about "the groups," and it's clear unions are what they are addressing when they keep bashing "special interests" - here's a Yglesias piece about transit and teachers unions:
https://substack.com/@matthewyglesias/p-156177166
And all four complained loudly about the dock workers' strike last year, along with their neoliberal fellow travelers.
Admittedly, I read a lot of all four writers, so I have a good idea of their worldview; Klein is ok but even he has written some stuff critical of trade unions - feel how ever you want about CEQA or housing it strikes me as curious when people attack labor from one side of their mouth and also say the dems need to do better with the working class (but instead of material interest for folks, they keep yelling about attacking trans people or whatever.)
Oh, I think the Democrats are extremely clear, forthright and even brutally honest in their program: Serve the billionaires even better than the Rethuglicans (but look nicer).
It's just one big, ugly corporate party: The Republocrats.
As a one-time co-chair of my county Democratic Party in rural southwest Wisconsin during the bait-n-switch years of Obummer, any hope or ideals I had about the party were evaporated in the reality of what the pro-war party was really about ... and for.
Our political system is dead, done, fried, ground up and the ashes tossed to the hurricanes of climate collapse. AI is warping, distorting, perverting and serving up our world in a way no one can trust or fully grasp.
When anyone looks at the world of American politics and society I'd urge them to watch the 2016 BBC documentary "HyperNormalization" to better understand what is really going on. I recently rewatched it and where I once saw it as a dire warning of what might be, I now see it for what it is -- a documentary of our world as it is now.
"A Sane Explanation For The Insanity The West Is Experiencing" ... Are we all insane now? No, but in a hypernormalized world, we are well on the way. A whole new path is needed. Nothing is as it was and nothing that worked before will work now."
https://mark192.substack.com/p/a-sane-explanation-for-the-insanity
Maddening. They keep talking, and talking, and talking, about what they SHOULD be doing, when what they HAVE been doing is exactly that. Mealy-mouthed compromise and capitulation and reaching out to the mythic Average Voter. It hasn't worked since the nineties, and they keep getting beat down, with a response of "Yes, but..." It's beyond parody at this point. Every single one of these asshole marketers (and that is ultimately what they are, marketers) keeps insisting that we go back to the dried up well and drink deep, then sputter through dried chafed lips, "We can do it better if we keep doubling down." Insanity. Inanity. Can a creative like Iannucci or Charlie Brooker be brought in to advise these clowns how to stop being so damn clownish!?
I haven't read Abundance. I'm 464 on the hold list, on 10 copies at our local library. From what I've heard and read, very simply put, its seems to be a criticism of government red tape, and the an analysis of the permit apocalypse that is evidently upon us. If the government would lighten up on the regs and allow us to build more, we might just get even more than we need. It all seems pretty simple, and very neo-liberal. Really, nothing needs changing, only tweaking. This is why Barro gets frustrated when someone brings up genocide. Hard to tweak genocide. These Third Way guys, these Centrist, are vacuous, soulless and honestly, when it comes down to it, immoral. It just about winning for them. They don't understand and/or realize that the "Old Way" is dying and needs to be dead.
Thanks for attending the revival jamboree for third way neoliberalism. I read Yglesias — seemingly the Bill Buckley of centrism — in hopes of one day hearing a substantive discussion of policy issues and the limits of market-based strategies to address them. We've been trying that for how many years? Fifty, more or less? And yet the problems are still very much with us. But let's not talk about the failure of incentive-based, market-based, tax-based policy strategies.
Perhaps we should actually try market-based, tax-based policy strategies. Our tax system is on of the most complex and inefficient systems in the world. Our ‘market-led’ policies are bedevilled by special interests of all hues, especially the plutocrats. And I’m guessing that the alternative to market-based policies are… presidential edicts? State control?
Have the argument about how to make market-based policies work better, how to have a fairer tax system, how to create sustainable growth. It’s hard work, but it’s better than the alternatives
Excellent piece.
Oh, Christ. Well I guess I'm done with herringbone blazers.
Dean Baker reframes his consistent policy prescriptions (sans DC consultant polisci strategery) as abundance. These are solid policies that are more doable now thanks to MAGA’s radicalism:
https://cepr.net/publications/my-abundance-agenda/
Casually leaving that "Moderate Talent Pipeline" sign in there and not mentioning it is a baller move, but I have to point out the joke, because it's just so perfectly representative of why we're in this mess.
Their problem isn’t that they’re too focused on data, it’s that they badly misread it. They won’t read any political science work that might suggest that public opinion dynamics are complex and that winning entails more than a simplistic strategy of taking stances based on polling from the last election (i.e. pandering), because they’re either intellectually or (more likely) ideologically incapable of taking such work seriously. To the Welcomefest centrists, public opinion is easy to read and easy to react to, and the only obstacle to permanent success is the left. Their whole approach is frankly naive, stupid, and (for them) politically convenient
They treat politics like it's a video game they are attempting to hack, something people who have never done politics in real life would do.
I mean like, Hamilton, a lot of what you use as raw material for your analysis is “data,” but data of a different kind. The popularist view of “REAL data” is very narrow and limited. Maybe I should write up something about this.
They're still talking about soccer moms. Bill Clinton pitched his campaigns to soccer moms in the 1990s. Now there are far fewer soccer moms because most of the moms have either had to get a job or can no longer afford to pay for their kids' soccer.
And centrists wonder why everyone else thinks they are irrelevant. Do I need to comment on the level of intelligence and awareness displayed?
538 (RIP) tore down this trope last year. https://abcnews.go.com/538/soccer-moms-swing-voters/story?id=110222666
The centrists basically block the left, which is why they get money. I think the Democratic Party is unreformable. We need a workers’ party, a socialist party. How has this benighted country never been able to achieve a multi-party system?
I would never vote for it but I absolutely support its establishment and growth. And a libertarian party. If there’s one single deepest root cause to this utter mess, it is that ‘this benighted country has never been able to achieve a multi-party system’. The last new major party was formed nearly two centuries ago!