From “‘Go on offense’: Inside Democrats’ strategy to try to undercut GOP investigations and protect Biden” By Lauren Fox, Alayna Treen and Jeremy Herb AT CNN Politics: “Congressional Democrats are betting that a coordinated offense is their best defense against the coming Republican investigative onslaught….Democrats on Capitol Hill, at the White House, in agencies and in outside political groups are gearing up to do battle with the Republican committee chairs probing all corners of the Biden administration as well as the Biden family’s financial dealings….The significant effort at the outset is a sign of the danger the GOP investigations and their subpoena power pose to Biden’s political prospects heading into his reelection. The stakes of knocking down the GOP probes have only grown over the past month as Biden is now grappling with a special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents found at his private residence and office….Even before the first subpoena or hearing, Democrats have enlisted polling firms and focus groups to try and undercut the coming investigations and protect Biden with the 2024 campaign approaching….Their plans include launching sustained attacks against the two Republicans expected to lead the most aggressive probes: Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is also leading the new so-called weaponization of government subcommittee with a wide investigative mandate. Meanwhile, outside groups are planning to bring the fight local and visit more than a dozen Biden-leaning congressional districts to go after vulnerable Republicans involved in the investigations.”

In their article, “Democrats Hold Trifecta Power in Over a Dozen States. Will They Actually Use It? Republicans have used legislative majorities at the state level to undermine their opposition, but the Democratic Party has often failed to fight back. This is a chance to change that” at In These Times, Mark Engler and Paul Engler write: “On January 11, Michigan’s 148 state legislators took their seats to begin a new session, with Democrats enjoying a historic reversal of fortune. As recently as 2018, Republicans led all branches of state government. This situation has now flipped with Democrats controlling the state’s House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, and the State Senate for the first time in nearly 40 years….Last year’s elections presented other bright spots for progressives as well: Democrats also hold new trifectas in Maryland, Massachusetts and Minnesota. In total, the party now fully controls governments in 17 states, with combined populations that account for 140 million Americans — compared to the 137 million people living in the 22 states controlled by Republicans. This represents enormous progress from just over four years ago, when, prior to the 2018 midterm elections, 26 of the 34 states with trifectas were under Republican control….Democratic leaders in Michigan and beyond are now in a position to pursue a strong governing agenda. The question is: Will they take advantage of the opportunity? More specifically, will they use their power to enact changes that increase democratic participation and build progressive power for the long term?….With the new trifectas in place, Democrats have an opportunity to eschew a neoliberal vision of winning by moving to the center and instead pursue a strategy that creates the kind of grassroots power which can pay dividends for years to come. Such an approach would include repealing ​“right to work” laws and pursuing reforms that expand labor rights, support social movement organizing and bolster democratic participation….“We got ALL the gavels,” Michigan state Sen. Polehanki stated when Michiganders voted Democrats into power. ​“Get ready for some cha-cha-cha-changes here in Michigan.” Or as Ken Whittaker, executive director of the progressive group Michigan United, told Politico, ​“The people are on offense.”

“Any Democrat who thinks the party’s better-than-expected November midterm-election outcome was an affirmation of President Biden and the Democratic Congress policies and accomplishments will have a rude awakening reading the just-released NBC News poll,”  Charlie Cook writes at The Cook Political Report. “Conversely, any Republicans seeking support for their agenda would be equally hard-pressed to find it in the poll….Americans continue to be deeply pessimistic about how things are going in the country. Just 23 percent of adults nationwide say the country was headed in the right direction, while 71 percent say it is on the wrong track. Richard Wirthlin, President Reagan’s pollster, used to call this question “the Dow Jones indicator of American politics.” In eight of the last nine NBC News polls since October 2021, the wrong-track number has been at 70 percent or more, the longest period of sustained pessimism in the 34-year history of the poll (formerly the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll) since its inception in 1989….This pessimism should not be surprising as many people see themselves straining financially. While economic data show that the rate of inflation in the U.S. is slowing down, the public hasn’t yet felt it in their own lives. When asked how their family’s income is doing compared with the cost of living, just about 1 in 20 see their incomes rising faster than the cost of living, about a quarter (28 percent) feel they are staying even, and almost two-thirds (64 percent) feel that they are falling behind. In politics, given the choice between reality and perception, it is always wiser to go with perception….Given this, it should not be a surprise that Biden’s job-approval ratings are poor. Biden’s overall rating sits at 45 percent (18 percent strongly approve and 27 percent somewhat approve), while 50 percent disapprove (10 percent somewhat disapprove and 40 percent strongly disapprove).”

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes, “Arguing over raising the debt limit is dumb. Arguing over how to make the economy grow for everyone is smart. President Biden hopes to use his State of the Union message on Tuesday to move the debate to the right question and make the case for the quiet revolution he has championed in our nation’s approach to future prosperity….Yes, Biden, the middle-of-the-road lover of compromise, consensus-building and comity, is a revolutionary — Ronald Reagan in reverse, if you will. He’s turning the nation away from the economic assumptions that took hold in the 1980s….The words we’ll hear on Tuesday about a move from “trickle-down” to “middle out” and “bottom up” economics are the sales pitch — but they are also a reasonably accurate description of policies that see robust government investments, worker rights and a green tech economy as the path to a new American century….Biden’s job Tuesday is to expose the contention that’s dominating the news right now as evasive shadow boxing — while bragging a bit about the record-breaking 12.1 million jobs created in the past two years. He can push Republicans (and the media) to talk not only about budget cuts and culture wars but also about whether the GOP’s agenda would do anything to solve immediate problems facing families or offer a plausible vision for long-term flourishing….The Biden blueprint, the outgoing director of the White House National Economic Council, Brian Deese, told me, involves “investing in high return areas of the economy like innovation and clean energy, reducing families’ costs in areas such as child care and elder care, and reducing the deficit by raising taxes on large corporations and the wealthiest.”

The following article is cross-posted from Simon Rosenberg’s blog at ndn.org:

Elena Schneider explains “How Democrats got sidetracked in their swing state of the future” at Politico, and writes:

“Republicans know that they have to win North Carolina in order to win a presidential race — there’s no other path for them. There are other paths for a Democrat to become president and not win North Carolina,” said [Roy] Cooper, who is now termed out of his governorship, in an interview with POLITICO.

Cooper argued that makes victories in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2022 possible, as North Carolina soaks up resources that could go elsewhere. But Cooper said he’s still making the argument “to the president on down” that North Carolina should chart the top of their priority list in 2024.

However, Schneider notes,

Yet interviews with nearly a dozen North Carolina Democratic elected officials and strategists yielded a range of problems, including a weak in-state party infrastructure, a series of less-than-inspiring federal candidates and not enough investment from national Democratic groups. Unlike a number of other Sun Belt states, growth has not been driven by one major city but by a patchwork of regionalized metro areas, all with different media markets, and North Carolina’s urban and non-white populations have not grown at the same lightning speed as cities like Atlanta or Phoenix.

“I wouldn’t say it’s the next domino that will make it blue, on a presidential level, forever in the way we see in Virginia, Arizona and even Georgia, where the demographics and population changes are truly driving this,” said Corey Platt, a Democratic strategist who served as the Democratic Governors Association’s political director. “It’s a purple state that’s center-right on economics and a bit more center-left on social issues, and so it takes the right Democrat or the right Republican to win, and federally, we haven’t been able to thread that needle.”

And then there is the problem of money. Schneider quotes former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who said that electoral victory in NC frequently “comes down to who has more money, and the stats show it….Both parties can be accused of misreading North Carolina, but I would be shocked if Democrats leave it uncontested,” McCrory said, who lost a Senate GOP primary bid in 2022. “North Carolina can swing back and forth.” Schneider continues,

It all has big implications for 2024, as Cooper drives to make it a top priority for a Biden reelection and state Attorney General Josh Stein launches bid to succeed Cooper in what could be the most expensive gubernatorial race next cycle. A potential redrawn congressional map later this year could also pad the GOP’s slim edge in the battle for the House next year, now that the state Supreme Court leans conservative.

The size of North Carolina’s swings back and forth has shrunk, meanwhile, into a smaller and smaller pool of truly independent voters, making the days of backing President George W. Bush by 12 points — even with then-Sen. John Edwards on the Democratic ticket — and Democratic Gov. Mike Easley by 13 points in 2004 feel like ancient history. Mirroring national trends, North Carolina’s urban-rural divide reveals a stark partisan split — an intractable problem for Democrats, as the state boasts the second largest rural population, behind just Texas.

When Democrats fail to turn out their core base in urban corridors, Republicans’ rural edge becomes insurmountable. In 2022, Democrats struggled with just that, despite a history-making candidate on the ballot in Cheri Beasley, a former state Supreme Court justice who is a Black woman. Instead, Democrats saw significant dropoff with young voters, urban voters and Black voters.

Statewide, African American turnout dropped by 6 points compared to 2018, another midterm year when there wasn’t a major statewide race atop the ticket. Voters over 60 made up a far larger share of the electorate  compared to millennials and Gen Z, while urban voters lagged behind the statewide turnout average, according to an analysis by Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College.

That turnout drop off, some Democrats argue, came down to cash. Republican outside groups significantly outspent their Democratic counterparts, giving now-Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) about a $50 million spending edge over Beasley. Republicans, meanwhile, note that Beasley outraised Budd in candidate cash by $24 million, which should’ve helped close some of that gap, since candidates get better rates on TV ads than outside groups.

“It’s almost impossible to overcome a $53 million outside spending gap that depresses votes for the Democratic candidate,” Cooper said. “I do think resources play a huge role and will play a huge role in 2024.”

It’s the “money is the mother’s milk of politics” argument, that has also been made to explain Democratic losses of strong, qualified candidates in senate races in Ohio and Florida in 2022. But NC, FL and OH have about half the percentage of eligible Black voters as Georgia, where Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock was re-elected. Yet racial demographics fail to explain why Democrats do so poorly in the state with the highest Black population percentage, Mississippi, where systemic black voter suppression is a Republican art form.

Schneider also writes that “Democratic Rep. Wiley Nickel still believes that what works in North Carolina is to reach into that middle”:

“There’s a vast group of voters in the middle, and they don’t want people on the far right and they don’t want people on the far left,” said Nickel, who won an evenly divided congressional seat against former President Donald Trump-endorsed Republican Bo Hines. “Anyone who watched our race knows that we were running against extremism in both parties and on the issues that mattered to most folks in the middle.”

Looking forward, perhaps the winning Democratic formula for NC and other states looks something like: energized Black turnout +more money +smarter persuasion = Victory. There is substantial room for improvement in all three factors.

You can thank us later for the hot flash in the title. But there are some important elections this year that merit attention and thoughtful analyses. Geoffrey Skelley has the skinny at FiveThirtyEight, and flags “a bevy of fascinating contests on the ballot this calendar year that will affect the lives of millions of Americans.” Skelley notes further,

“Three states will hold gubernatorial elections, four will decide the makeup of their state legislatures and two will vote for potentially critical seats on their supreme courts. Additionally, a host of large cities will cast ballots for mayor. With so much on the docket in 2023, we decided to take a look at the high-profile races you should be watching….Three southern, Republican-leaning places are voting for governor this year. However, Democrats currently control the governorships in Kentucky and Louisiana, while the GOP holds Mississippi via Gov. Tate Reeves. Republicans are hoping to flip the other two, as Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana is term-limited and Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky is likely to face a formidable Republican opponent. Victories in these gubernatorial races would give the GOP full control of state government — a “trifecta” — in Kentucky and Louisiana (and maintain it in Mississippi).

Now, Beshear does have a decent chance of bucking Kentucky’s red lean to win a second term. In the last quarter of 2022, Beshear’s 60 percent approval rating made him the most popular Democratic governor in the country, according to Morning Consult….But Beshear is far from a shoo-in considering Kentucky ranks as the reddest state in the country with a Democratic governor, based on the 2020 presidential vote. And an array of Republican candidates are champing at the bit to take him on.

Republicans have a clearer shot of capturing a Democratic-held governorship in Louisiana, where Edwards is leaving office after two terms….no major Democrat has yet entered. But that could soon change….Democrats will need some things to go their way if they want to replicate Edwards’s success.

In Mississippi, “Reeves could face both a serious primary challenge and just about the strongest potential candidate the Democrats could have in the general election. …But considering Reeves fended off a popular statewide-elected Democrat in 2019, it will still be a tall order for Democrats to win this race.

Looking at the state legislatures, Skelley writes:

Four states have elections for their state legislatures this year, with Louisiana and Mississippi holding them in tandem with their gubernatorial elections, and New Jersey and Virginia holding legislative midterms. The dominant party in three of those states — Republicans in Louisiana and Mississippi, Democrats in New Jersey — are likely to retain full control, though there’s a question of whether the GOP can hold onto or win veto-proof majorities in Louisiana and Mississippi, in case a Democrat manages to win either governorship.

Skelley notes that Virginia is ” one of the only states where each party controls one legislative chamber. And with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in office, the results will determine whether Republicans can capture full control of state government….Thanks to redistricting, Virginia’s elections will take place on new maps, which should produce a number of highly competitive races — although each party may have a slim edge in the chamber it already controls.¹ The November environment is difficult to know, but Democrats did claim a pivotal 2-point victory in a Jan. 10 special election for a Senate district that Youngkin had carried by 4 points, in a race that centered largely on the future of abortion rights in Virginia.

As for the state courts, Skelley reports:

….”two states — Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — also have elections for state supreme court in 2023″ and “12 of the nation’s 25 largest cities by population have mayoral elections this year. Most of these cities employ a “strong mayor” form of government — where the mayor is the city’s chief executive and can veto actions by the city council — so these elections could have major repercussions for millions of Americans….Chicago’s race is probably the headliner. There, Mayor Lori Lightfoot faces a difficult reelection battle amid high crime rates, and she has also faced potentially sexist criticism over her combative personal style.”

These are some of the important scheduled elections this year. Skelley has lots more to say about these races, and ballotpedia.org has more as well.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

This is the concluding part of a three part series. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

The election of Donald Trump threw the climate movement for a loop, as it did all movements on the left. Trump quickly repealed Obama’s  Climate Power Plan and withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement. As the planet, they believed, was burning, the country was now being run by a “climate denier”.

Rhetoric from climate activists became increasingly heated over the course of Trump’s term. Organizations emerged to harness the increasingly radical energy around the issue, particularly among the young. In 2017, the Sunrise Movement was formed, whose tagline is “We are the climate revolution”. The intent was to promote a rapid transition to renewables via a Green New Deal that would simultaneously accomplish this transition and turn the US into a social democratic paradise with great jobs and health care for everybody. They focused their energy on allying with politicians who would support that approach and pressuring others to do so. Famously, newly elected House representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the organization in a sit-in at Congressional offices, greatly elevating its profile.

Also in 2017, David Wallace-Wells’ highly influential New York magazine article, “The Uninhabitable Earth” (later a best-selling book) came out. Its title is clear enough but the subhead said:

Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

No one in liberal Democratic circles seemed even slightly fazed by the level of rhetoric.

While a number of climate scientists pointed out that Wallace-Wells departed in many places from established findings and deceptively focused on only the worst possible outcomes, the general effect of his work was to raise the profile of climate catastrophism among the general public. As Wallace-Wells repeatedly noted, no matter how much you think you know, it’s “worse than you think”. It was time to contemplate “the prospect of our own annihilation”.

In 2018, a young Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg (age 15), came to the attention of the world’s media. She stood outside the Swedish parliament every Friday with a sign demanding climate action (“school strike for climate”). The general tenor of her intervention and her many, many subsequent speeches and interviews as she became a media star was climate change needs massive action now and our political leaders are failing us. The hour is late and we’re on the verge of the apocalypse. In 2019 she gave a widely covered scolding to politicians at the UN that encapsulated her catastrophist stance, increasingly the conventional wisdom of the climate movement.

My message is that we’ll be watching you. This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight…..

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

This Vogtian jeremiad was greeted rapturously by the world’s press. But Thunberg was largely pushing on an open door. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had already been talking regularly talking about a “climate crisis” and “climate emergency”. The mainstream media were under pressure by organizations like Al Gore’s Climate Reality project, Greenpeace, and the Sunrise Movement to formally adopt the use of such language and align their perspective with that of the activists. Protests led by Extinction Rebellion took place outside the New York Times building to press the point resulting in 70 arrests.

The UK Guardian formally updated its style guide that year to favor “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown”. Guardian Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner noted: “The phrase ‘climate change’… sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.” The Guardian became a lead partner of, and 500+ other news organizations eventually joined, Covering Climate Now, an initiative founded in 2019 by the Columbia Journalism Review and left wing magazine The Nation to promote more and more aggressive coverage of the climate story because humanity has “just 12 years to slash heat-trapping emissions in half or else face catastrophic temperature rise and the record-breaking extreme weather it unleashes.”

This was really quite a significant development and helped shift the entire left of the political spectrum, including the Democratic party, toward the catastrophist view of climate change already held by activists. This view got reinforced endlessly since any unusual weather event was now ascribed by the media to climate change, any new study that suggested dire outcomes from climate change was uncritically covered and even the relatively restrained assessments of the IPCC reports were cherry-picked for the most alarming findings and scenarios. This was typically linked by commentators to the need to radically reduce the use of fossil fuels and immediately ramp up renewables.

Read more…

Daniel McGraw ponders “What Even Are the Suburbs Nowadays, Anyway? If you want to understand American politics, you need to understand how suburbia has changed in the last half-century” at The Bulwark. As McGraw writes,

The suburban voters in the 2024 election are thought to be key to who will be voted in as the next president, and some analysts are treating this large segment of the population as comparable to the national voter mix (40 R / 40 D / 20 independent), and not much differentiating between suburbs in different states and around different urban areas.

“Time for a reality check,” writes Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and well-respected political demographer and commentator. “Start with the demographic contours of the suburban vote. The idea seems to be that the suburbs are full of liberal, highly-educated voters who are likely to be permanent recruits to the anti-MAGA army. There are certainly some, but actually-existing suburban voters are quite different—and more complex—than this caricature.”

So what is suburbia really in 2023, how has it changed, and how should we think about it politically?

First, the old suburbs in the Northeast and Midwest (both of which regions are losing population) are nothing like the newer ones in the West and South.

Second, the hub-and-spoke model of central cities and suburbs that surround them has been blown apart in recent decades, especially in places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Atlanta.

And third, though the suburban demographics are very different nowadays, the issues that matter are still, as they always have been, at the top of the lists of what suburban voters care about: education, public safety, affordable housing, transportation, fair pay. What’s not up there, at least based on the polls: the Big Lie, climate change, gentrification, and voting changes. Which suggests that in the 2024 cycle, “What have you done for me lately?” political thinking will likely predominate over matters of ideological identity.

As for the political ramifications of the transformation of the ‘burbs, McGraw explains:

Moreover, the suburban population has changed quite a bit, becoming more racially diverse and educationally inclusive. According to William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who keeps an eye on the ever-changing suburbs, the suburban population is “more racially diverse than the rest of the country as a whole,” with suburbs in the South and the West being more racially diverse than those of the Midwest and Northeast suburbs. “Black flight” has overtaken white flight in these growth areas.

Frey’s data breakdown of the metro areas shows how this diversity of the suburban population might have a big influence on the 2024 election. The suburbanites in the old swing states’ metro areas are majority white: Philadelphia (68 percent white), Detroit (73 percent), and Milwaukee (83 percent). By contrast, the metro areas that will be the presidential kingmakers this time around are not so much: Atlanta (44 percent white), Las Vegas (34 percent), and Phoenix (60 percent). These are three of the fastest growing metro areas in the country.

If you want to win the Electoral College votes of Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona in 2024, you’ll have to win those three suburbs—after all, the Atlanta area has 56 percent of the entire Georgia population, Las Vegas is 72 percent of Nevada, and Phoenix is 67 percent of Arizona, and those metro areas tend to be about two-thirds suburban.

Phoenix is a good example. Maricopa County voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 54-44 in 2012, went for Donald Trump narrowly (46-44) in 2016, and gave Biden the win (50-48) in 2020. In the recent runoff Senate election in Georgia, Sen. Raphael Warnock won the eleven-county (mostly suburban) Atlanta metro area by about 500,000 votes. Republican candidate Herschel Walker won the rest of the state by 410,000. The voting math of suburban Atlanta is front and center.

McGraw adds, “The ability to tweak political messaging is hugely important, and in 2024, calibrating the message for the suburbs will be huge….So which party is better positioning itself for success in the suburbs in 2024?” Further,

Republicans are playing the “We won’t fund anything and we’ll investigate everyone” game. That never plays well in the long term.

As for the Democrats, going into 2024, the Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas metro areas will all be getting their share of the trillion-dollar infrastructure investment, pandemic relief, and economic stimulus cash cow that the Biden administration dropped. Those areas’ suburban voters are going to see shovel-ready projects begun, electric vehicle battery plants open, and chip and semiconductor manufacturing plants opening as well, as well as clean-energy job creation taking place. Already, the Biden administration is targeting such job creation in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Because in the end, the American people like to eat and buy clothes and drive their cars.

Democrats certainly hope that will help. Traditionally, however, Democrats have put more energy into publicizing what they say they are are going to do, rather than getting credit for the things they actually accomplish.  Much depends on how persuasively the Democrats ‘brand’ the shovel-ready, clean-energy and other job-creation projects after they are up and running.

Some observations from “If Democrats Want to Win 2024, They Need to Punch Back Hard” by Mark Green at The Nation:

While it’s obviously hard to predict what issues will dominate the next cycle, lessons from the midterms should inspire Democrats to get back on the offense as soon as early 2023, which the fractious speakership fight can only encourage.

For starters, that means tattooing a very unpopular Trump (plunging to only 31 percent favorability rating in the most recent Quinnipiac poll) on nearly all Republican nominees. He’s the product of their party. And whether he ends up running seriously or not, Trump has the potential to destroy the brand of the GOP for a generation—especially after the six currently sitting criminal grand juries conclude their work.

Failing to do so would be like ignoring the disgraced Nixon in 1974 because he was no longer “on the ballot.” Republican candidates who have been either complicit or silent during Trump’s carnage need to be held politically accountable for shredding the truth and the law. Herbert Hoover was a Democratic piñata for some 50 years; the Republicans ran against Jimmy Carter for 20. Trump should be radioactive at least as long.

Green notes further, “An effective response would not mean merely piling even more Trump scandals onto the existing mountain of them, which largely worsens scandal fatigue among weary voters and a cynical media. More urgent are memorable messages and vivid metaphors that tie together the thousands of separate lies and scandals that already add up to the singular truth that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to both Don and Ron.”

Will “pocketbook populism” combined with tougher attacks against the Republican’s contempt for democracy and economic policies favoring billionaires be enough to help Democrats gain ground in 2024? Green argues:

As lower inflation, more jobs, cleaner air, and lower drug prices take effect by the next election, some swing voters may take notice.

Can Democrats then run on both this pocketbook populism and an assault on GOP revanchism to create a “blue backlash”?  There’s a new cadre of congressional talent in place to make that case—such as the eloquent House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, constitutional lawyer Jamie Raskin, wunderkind AOC, and cable-guys Ted Lieu and Eric Swalwell—and keep Republicans on the ropes.

In this crucial interregnum before the transition of the 117th Congress to the 2024 general election, the test is who controls the narrative. Will it be the McCarthy-Greene regime asserting that “87,000 more IRS agents” is Big Brother? That cutting Social Security is essential even if it risks tanking the economy? That the Ethics Committee must be weakened? Or will it be the Jeffries-Raskin bloc responding that the 87,000 number is a Trump-level lie and a euphemism for what is in reality a “Billionaire’s Protection Act,” that failing to increase the debt limit will lead to a “Republican recession,” and that weakening the Ethics Committee is really just a Get-George-Santos-out-of-jail-free card?

Because if above-the-fray Democrats let them, Greene and Musk will be more than happy to flood the zone with their QAnon conspiracies and stochastic terrorism—after all, they are better at threatening violence than winning votes.

The genteel ‘above the fray’ strategy, combined though it was with some highly effective meddling in the adversary’s primaries, may have helped some Democrats in 2022. But 2024 is shaping up to be a brutal year for Democrats — if they don’t sharpen their attacks against Republicans.

From “White House turns talk of Medicare, Social Security cuts against GOP” by Alex Gangitano and Brett Samuels at The Hill:

The White House is turning the tables on House Republican lawmakers when it comes to conservative-led spending proposals that Democrats warn could mean cuts to crucial programs like Medicare and Social Security….The Biden administration is already building on a strategy it deployed during the midterm election season in which it highlighted talk from multiple GOP congressional lawmakers about how they plan to use their new House majority to consider cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

It’s also putting a spotlight on the possibility of military spending cuts by Republicans in an effort to balance federal spending and reduce the national debt….The Biden administration has made clear it won’t go along with such proposals, framing Republicans as the party that wants to defund the military and threaten social welfare programs.

“They are going to try to cut Social Security and Medicare. It could not be clearer,” White House chief of staff Ron Klain tweeted Monday, sharing a clip of Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) saying on Fox Business Network that major spending cuts would likely require changes to entitlement programs.

As Gangitano and Samuels note, “The Republican Study Committee’s fiscal 2023 model federal budget included increasing the Social Security eligibility age to reflect longevity. The committee argued that the adjustment would continue the gradual increase of the retirement age, noting that full retirement was raised to 67 in 2022.”

This is a really bad look for McCarthy and other Republican House leaders. “I can’t imagine a less persuasive case to the American people than, ‘Let me hollow out Medicare or I’ll set off an economic bomb that kills millions of jobs overnight,’” one Democratic strategist said.”

But the Republicans won’t be committing political suicide unless Democrats and the media insist they own it. It shouldn’t be hard. It’s up to Democrats – elected officials, party leaders and rank and file – to make sure young voters all across America understand that it is their health care and retirement that is on the GOP chopping block, and only one party is working to stop them.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

This is the first part of a three part series

The beginnings of the environment as an issue can be traced to the conservation movement of the late 19th and early 20th century associated with figures like Gifford Pinchot, head of the Forest Service under Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. They were Republicans but many Democrats also embraced the movement; Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916. And the New Deal in the 1930’s had a prominent place for conservation activities, most famously in the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) where young men were employed to improve forests and national parks. Trail systems and lodges from that era are still widely used today.

With varying degrees of strictness the conservation movement’s guiding principle was to insulate unspoiled parts of nature from development by market forces, thereby preserving them for healthy leisure and recreation. The movement, like all future iterations of the environmental movement, assumed an unending conflict between man and nature that required good people to take the side of nature.

As development proceeded over the course of the 20th century, the stresses on nature became ever larger and more obvious, leading to the emergence after World War II of an apocalyptic strain in the conservation movement. The argument gained traction that economic and population growth would, if unchecked, destroy the environment and lead to civilizational collapse. Accompanying that strain was a milder version of the idea that directly challenged the old conservation ethos: simply conserving what was left of nature was not enough. The reality of the interdependent natural world meant that man’s activities were having dire effects everywhere on the planet—where people lived and where they didn’t. These activities were upsetting a finely balanced system, resulting in the degradation of both nature, as conventionally understood, and people’s lives. Restoring and preserving that balance was what it meant to be an environmentalist.

This reformist environmentalism gained purchase during the 1950’s, associated with figures like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith who were trying to expand the remit of contemporary liberalism. Galbraith’s best-selling book, The Affluent Society, dwelt on the ways the mass consumer capitalism was good at meeting basic needs but very poor at producing a healthy society for its citizens. One of the symptoms of the latter failure was the increasing degradation of the environment through pollution of the air and water.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, picked up on Galbraith’s concern and vastly amplified it, posing the environmental problem in dire, life-threatening terms. It caught the popular imagination and created a national debate about the environment almost overnight. This was the birth of the modern environmental movement and its instantiation as a movement of the educated middle class, leaving behind the conservation movement’s upper class base.

The movement proved enormously effective as a reform movement. Carson’s book veered toward the apocalyptic, but the movement she inspired was laser-focused on practical reforms that would immediately reduce pollution and safeguard the environment. A raft of legislation in the Johnson administration followed like the Clean Air and Water Quality Acts and, in the Nixon administration, the creation of the Environmental Protection Act and the promulgation of the NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) standards. This legislation and subsequent action was directly responsible for a radical reduction in pollution of all kinds in the next decades.

But the apocalyptic strain of environmentalism, which saw industrial society as an imminent threat to human life and to the planet, was not eliminated by these reforming successes. Instead a closer relationship evolved between mainstream environmentalism and a radical view of the fundamental dangers of industrial society. The first manifestation of this was the anti-nuclear power movement which arose in the 1970’s and was turbo-charged by the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, Building on public fears of  nuclear meltdowns and radiation poisoning, the movement was successful in stopping the build-out of nuclear power in the United States.

In the 1990’s, as a scientific consensus emerged that greenhouse gases were steadily warming the earth, this movement was superseded by the climate movement. Here was clear proof that industrial society and human civilization were counterposed. Initially meliorist in orientation, the movement has become more radical as it has gathered strength. The quest to eliminate the possibility of dire scenarios has met the reality that industrial societies built on fossil fuels are likely to change only slowly, for both political and technical reasons.

This has promoted a sense that radical action to transform industrial society must be taken as fast as possible. That view has gained hegemony within the Democratic party infrastructure, supporting activist groups and associated cultural elites. Practical objections about the speed with which a “clean energy transition” can be pursued and concerns about effects on jobs and prices are now outweighed for most Democrats by the perceived urgency of the mission. That has set the Democrats apart from the working class voters they aspire to represent for whom these practical objections and concerns loom large. It has become a significant factor in the Great Divide that has opened between postindustrial metros and the rural areas, towns and small cities of middle America.

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