Manu Raju, Lauren Fox and Melanie Zanona report “House Democrats weigh risky strategy: Whether to save McCarthy” at CNN Politics, and write: “While no decisions have been made, some of the party’s moderates are privately signaling they’d be willing to cut a deal to help McCarthy stave off a right-wing revolt – as long as the speaker meets their own demands….Publicly, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has not weighed in on how he’d want his members to manage a challenge to McCarthy’s speakership, saying it’s hypothetical at this point. But privately, Jeffries has counseled his members to keep their powder dry, according to multiple sources, a recognition it’s better for Democrats to keep their options open as the government funding fight plays outs.…“If somehow Democrats are asked to be helpful, it’s not just going to have to be out of the kindness of our hearts,” Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan, told CNN. “If Kevin can’t govern with just his part – which clearly he can’t – and he wants to have a conversation with us about how to do that, we are going to have a policy conversation.”….members who spoke to CNN made clear that any Democratic help would come at a cost. And their asking price for saving his speakership, Democratic members say, is a bipartisan deal to avoid a shutdown – a route McCarthy is not yet prepared to take, as Republicans are still trying to find consensus on a GOP plan to fund the government.” Um, Kevin, beggars can’t be choosers. “It’s a complicated dance for Democrats, who don’t want to be seen as saving McCarthy – especially after he just launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden – and could open them up to backlash on the left. But some Democrats also fear the potential alternative: a government shutdown and the prospect of an even more right-wing lawmaker ascending to the speakership if McCarthy is ousted – or the House being paralyzed with no candidate able to win 218 votes to be elected speaker.”

In “Is American Polarization a Reality or a Political Strategy?,” Carl Smith interviews Rachel Kleinfeld at governing.com and shares some of her comments in response to his questions: “Carnegie has just published a paper from [Rachel] Kleinfeld, Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says. It offers a detailed view of research on polarization, and what has been learned about the interplay between public attitudes, politics and political violence….“Americans are not as ideologically polarized as they believe themselves to be,” she finds, but emotions are being polarized for political purposes, leading to new levels of threats against state and local officials. “That makes it even more pertinent to get a handle on what’s going on and what we can do about it,” Kleinfeld says….”Party leaders have been selecting more extreme candidates for some time now — Democrats by maybe two to one and Republicans by a 13 to one margin, according to one study. Party leadership is playing a big role in how extreme our candidates are getting ideologically….Some of us are looking at things like getting rid of primaries and having ranked-choice voting, the way they’ve done it in Alaska, to create incentives for people to run in a less extreme way. Other academics are looking at things like proportional representation to try to get extremes out of politics….Threats are getting severe enough that they are deterring people from taking elected and appointed jobs, especially things like school board and city council, the grass roots that we need to function. We can’t run a democracy if good people don’t run for office.”

From “The GOP’s arsonists lost on the shutdown, but they’re not going away” by WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr.: “If anyone doubts which party is extreme and which favors bipartisan accord, the roll call on McCarthy’s resolution provided a resounding data point. Even as their party’s speaker sought the two-thirds majority he needed in this last-minute process, only 126 Republicans voted with him; 90 voted no. Among Democrats, the vote was 209-1….None of which bodes well for the next 45 days, and not just because some way must be found to finance aid to Ukraine, left out of the resolution. Democrats remain angry that McCarthy broke the deal he reached with Biden earlier this year during debt ceiling negotiations. That deal, too, was passed with more Democratic than Republican votes. McCarthy effectively rewrote the deal on Saturday, saying he viewed those numbers as a ceiling and would seek further cuts. The country could face this crisis again….“There will not be a lot of Democrats eager to rescue a guy who broke his deal with Biden and is currently trying to impeach him,” [Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim] Himes said in an interview. But if McCarthy were willing to share power with Democrats, they “might be open to negotiating” to contain the far right….“We’re the party that fights chaos,” he added….It’s notable that Biden gave his democracy speech in Arizona in honor of the late Sen. John McCain, a Republican who always defended the idea of putting country over party — and who was hated by Trump. Biden spoke of the danger posed by those who would “shut down the government” and “burn the place down.”….On Saturday, enough House Republicans joined their party colleagues in the Senate and Democrats to keep the arsonists at bay. Given Trump’s hold on the party, alas, there are few signs that this will become a habit.”

Disagree if you must, but Paul Rosenberg has an eloquent scold for some progressive Democrats in his article, “Leftists, save yourselves! It’s a bad moment for nihilistic self-indulgence; The far-left bromance with RFK Jr. is only helping Trump. Remember how left-wing purity worked out in the 1930s?” at Salon. As Rosenberg writes, “There’s a vast range of legitimate political choices leftists can make, to be clear. I think it’s generally a bad idea for folks on the left to attack one another over strategic differences. We need strategic and ideological diversity, and we need to welcome and engage profound disagreements — that’s healthy. But it’s simply bad faith to call yourself a “leftist” while, in practical terms, you’re working to sabotage decades of hard-won, partial progress and allow fascists to win….Of course Biden is no leftist, and his party remains largely terrified of the left. But there’s more space for real progressives in the Democratic Party than there has been for decades. More to the point, it’s the only vehicle we have to get certain things done: That’s why Bernie Sanders has caucused with the Democrats throughout his career in the House and Senate, while remaining an independent….I’m completely fine with people who devote 99% of their political energy attacking Democrats from the left on climate, prison abolition, militarism, class politics, you name it. But set aside that crucial 1%, because sometimes (indeed, pretty often) you need to vote for Democrats in order to keep Republicans out of office and create space for all the other battles we need to fight. That’s my minimum standard for the non-suicidal left. Almost everything else is up for grabs….My first rule of thumb is not to echo right-wing tropes or draw on their deeper narratives or worldviews. It’s tempting to take advantage of supposedly popular images, ideas or themes, but we need to be hyper-vigilant about not empowering the right, particularly when the right’s counter-mobilization against social progress has gained so much strength on its own.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

As the 2024 election approaches, Democrats have a three-point plan for their challenging quest to re-elect Joe Biden, take back the House, and defend their razor-thin Senate majority. The first two points one might characterize as the Democrats’ version of the culture war: (1) relentless attacks on Republicans’ association with abortion restrictionism, usually portrayed as a GOP drive to ban the procedure entirely; and (2) equally relentless attacks on the Republicans as destroyers of democracy, from Trump’s and his supporters’ “election denialism” to “MAGA” movement rhetoric and legislation said to be subverting democracy across the country.

The theory is that these attacks will neutralize and then some Republican messages on crime, immigration, race, gender and schools, where Democrats are easily associated with genuinely unpopular positions. The 2022 elections and special elections since are believed to provide a precedent for this approach. But then we have the third prong of the Democratic strategy: a bold attempt to sell Democrats’ stewardship of the economy as “Bidenomics.”

On one level, this can only be described as chutzpah. A massive tranche of poll findings uniformly find the public extremely unhappy with the state of the economy. In a particularly brutal recent poll from Washington Post/ABC News, Biden receives a dreadful 30 percent approval rating on handling the economy. It’s instructive to break this down by working class (noncollege) vs. college educated. Working-class respondents give Biden a 24 percent approval rating on the economy, way below the comparatively respectable 43 percent rating among the more upscale college educated group. Since Bidenomics has been explicity pitched as a way to build working-class enthusiasm for Biden’s candidacy, this signals a rather big problem with the strategy.

Similarly, the Post poll finds a mere 25 percent characterizing the national economy positively (excellent or good), with just half as many (19 percent) feeling that way among the working class as among the college educated (38 percent). And a rock-bottom 14 percent of working-class respondents say their personal financial situation is better now than when Biden took office, compared to 50 percent who say they are actually worse off.

The second wave of The Liberal Patriot/YouGov (TLP/YouGov) 2024 presidential election project was completed in early September, including interviews with more than 3000 registered voters. These new data flesh out how and why Bidenomics has been such a flop with voters. Start with the issue of inflation. As we noted in our post yesterday, voters overwhelmingly feel that inflation is “still a very serious problem that is not improving,” with working-class voters particularly likely (68 percent) to feel that way.

These sentiments baffle Democrats who note that the rate of inflation has actually been falling and that unemployment is super-low. So why aren’t people, particularly workers, happy? It’s very simple as liberal economist James K. Galbraith has noted:

Unlike unemployment, inflation does affect everyone. But what matters to working people is not the monthly or yearly price change taken alone. What matters is the effect on purchasing power and living standards over time. Whether these are rising or falling depends on the relationship of prices to wages. When wage growth exceeds price increases, times are generally good. When it doesn’t, they aren’t.

It is here that Biden has a problem. During his presidency, living standards have not risen. From early 2021 to mid-2023, prices have increased more than wages, implying that real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages and real weekly earnings have fallen, on average. Not by much, but they have fallen. Worse, the average figure probably masks a larger fall, in real terms, for families that started out below the average. And given how income distributions work, there are always many more families earning less than the average than there are who earn more.

In other words, it is the trajectory of workers’ living standards, not  misinformation or media framing, that explains why they see the economy of the Biden administration in such jaundiced terms. And why they tend to think Trump actually did a better job managing the economy. In the new TLP/YouGov poll, working-class voters prefer Trump’s economic management as president by 20 points (55 percent to 35 percent), again contrasting with the college educated who prefer Biden’s performance by 9 points (51percent to 42 percent).

Given all this, it should not be surprising that the very term the Democrats are seeking to popularize—”Bidenomics”—is not striking a responsive chord. On the contrary, the lack of enthusiasm is deafening. In the TLP/YouGov survey, a mere 28 percent of working-class voters are willing to say they support Bidenomics, just 29 percent think Bidenomics will help their family financially, and scarcely more (32 percent) believe Bidenomics will help the overall economy.

Interestingly, Bidenomics support lags significantly behind support for specific legislative measures passed by the Biden administration, especially the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Since these were unaided questions—that is, no descriptions of the bills were given, just the names—voters may partially have been reacting to things they already feel positively about like “inflation reduction,” “bipartisan,” and “infrastructure,” rather than the content of the bills themselves. But that in itself is a clue to what voters are looking for. The term “Bidenomics,” on the other hand, with its absolutely inevitable association with economic conditions voters, especially working-class voters, detest seems perfectly designed to annoy voters, rather than win them over.

A new NBC poll shows Republicans currently favored over Democrats on handling the economy by an astounding 21 points, the largest lead Republicans have had on this measure since 1991. That tells you about how well the Bidenomics messaging campaign is working so far. The Democrats would be wise to try a different approach—one that doesn’t rely on telling voters they should be happy when they are not.

The federal government is going to shut down this weekend, barring some miracle. And Democrats really need to make sure Americans know exactly who insisted on this avoidable crisis. It’s the House GOP, as I explained at New York.

If you are bewildered by the inability of Congress to head off a government shutdown beginning this weekend, don’t feel poorly informed: Some of the Capitol’s top wizards are throwing up their hands as well, as the Washington Post reports:

“’We are truly heading for the first-ever shutdown about nothing,’ said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Strain has started referring to the current GOP House-led impasse as “the ‘Seinfeld’ shutdown,” a reference to the popular sitcom widely known as ‘a show about nothing.’ ‘The weirdest thing about it is that the Republicans don’t have any demands. What do they want? What is it that they’re going to shut the government down for? We simply don’t know.’”

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Many House Republicans, led by a band of right-wing hard-liners, want to impose their fiscal and policy views on the nation despite the GOP’s narrow majority in the House. Their chief asset, beyond fanaticism, is that the federal government can’t remain open past the end of the fiscal year without the concurrence of the House, and they don’t really mind an extended government shutdown, if only to preen and posture. They are being encouraged in this wildly irresponsible position by their leader and likely 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump.

But the hard-liners’ real motive, it seems, is to use the dysfunction they’ve caused in the House to get rid of Speaker Kevin McCarthy for being dysfunctional. The not-so-hidden plan hatched by Florida congressman Matt Gaetz is to thwart every effort by McCarthy to move forward with spending plans for the next fiscal year and then defenestrate him via a motion to vacate the chair, which just five Republicans can pass any time they wish (with the complicity of Democrats). Indeed, the Post reports the rebels are casting about for a replacement Speaker right now:

“A contingent of far-right House Republicans is plotting an attempt to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker as early as next week, a move that would throw the chamber into further disarray in the middle of a potential government shutdown, according to four people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.”

McCarthy’s tormenters would like to have a successor lined up who will presumably be even less inclined to compromise with Democrats than the current Speaker. And that’s saying a lot, since McCarthy has already bowed to the Gaetz demand that House Republicans reject even the idea of a continuing resolution — the stopgap spending measures used to forestall or end government shutdowns in the past — and instead plod through individual appropriations bills loaded with provisions no Democrat would ever accept (e.g., deep domestic spending cuts, draconian border policies, anti-Ukraine measures, and abortion restrictions). It’s a recipe for a long shutdown, but it’s clear if McCarthy moves a muscle toward negotiating with Democrats (who have already passed a CR in the Senate), then kaboom! Here comes the motion to vacate.

Some observers think getting rid of McCarthy is an end in itself for the hard-liners — particularly Gaetz, who has a long-standing grudge against the Californian and opposed his original selection as Speaker to the bitter end — no matter what he does or doesn’t do. In theory, House Democrats could save McCarthy by lending a few “no” votes to him if the motion to vacate hits the floor, but they’ve made it clear the price for saving him would be high, including abandonment of the GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry.

So strictly speaking, the impending shutdown isn’t “about nothing”; it’s about internal far-right factional politics that very few of the people about to be affected by the shutdown care about at all. Understandably, most Democrats from President Biden on down are focusing their efforts on making sure the public knows this isn’t about “big government” or “politicians” or “partisan polarization,” but about one party’s extremism and cannibalistic infighting. For now, there’s little anyone outside the GOP fever swamps can do about it other than watch the carnage.

President Biden’s participation in a UAW picket line stands in stark relief to Trump’s shameful record of opposing worker rights at nearly every opportunity. The Communication Workers of America share the particulars in “Trump’s AntiWorker Record,” cross-posted here:

“At every turn Donald Trump and his appointees have made increasing the power of corporations over working people their top priority. The list of the damage done to working people by the Trump Administration is long, and growing every day. Here are a few examples.

Trump has encouraged freeloaders, made it more difficult to enforce collective bargaining agreements, silenced workers and restricted the freedom to join unions:

• Trump has packed the courts with anti-labor judges who have made the entire public sector “right to work for less” in an attempt to financially weaken unions by increasing the number of freeloaders.¹
• Trump has stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who side with employers in contract disputes and support companies who delay and stall union elections, misclassify workers to take away their freedom to join a union, and silence workers.²
• Trump has made it easier for employers to fire or penalize workers who speak up for better pay and working conditions or exercise the right to strike.³
• Trump promised to veto the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, historic legislation that will reverse decades of legislation meant to crush private sector unions and shift power away from CEOs to workers.⁴

Trump has restricted overtime pay, opposed wage increases, and gutted health and safety protections:

• Trump changed the rules about who qualifies for overtime pay, making more than 8 million workers ineligible and costing them over $1 billion per year in lost wages.⁵
• Trump has reduced the number of OSHA inspectors so that there are now fewer than at any time in history, and weakened penalties for companies that fail to report violations.⁶
• Trump threatened to veto legislation that would raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour.⁷
• Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Eugene Scalia, is an anti-worker, union-busting corporate lawyer who aggressively defended Cablevision’s decision to fire 22 workers when they tried to win a contract with CWA.⁸

Trump has helped insurers reduce coverage and made it easier for pharmaceutical companies to inflate drug prices:

• Trump supports an ongoing lawsuit that would eliminate protections that ensure that health insurers can’t discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.⁹
• Trump threatened to veto legislation to reduce prescription drug costs, even though last year the prices of over 3,000 drugs increased by an average of 10.5%.¹⁰
• Trump’s made protecting the profits of pharmaceutical companies a priority in NAFTA renegotiations.¹¹
• Trump’s proposed FY2021 budget would cut funding for Medicare.¹²

Trump has encouraged outsourcing and offshoring:

• Instead of supporting CWA’s bipartisan legislation to help save call center jobs, Trump pushed for a corporate tax cut bill that gives companies a 50% tax break on their foreign profits – making it financially rewarding for them to move our jobs overseas.¹³
• On two separate occasions, a group of Senators wrote Trump asking him to issue an executive order preventing federal contracts from going to companies that send call center jobs overseas, and CWA President Chris Shelton even asked him to do so during an in person during a meeting in the Oval Office. He never responded.¹⁴
• Trump has broken his campaign promise to take on companies that move good jobs overseas—instead, he’s given over $115 billion in federal contracts to companies that are offshoring jobs.¹⁵

Trump failed to prepare the nation for the COVID-19 pandemic, opposes hazard pay for essential workers, and has given employers a free pass to lower safety standards:

• Trump has failed to secure enough Personal Protective Equipment for essential workers during the COVID-19 crisis and has weakened protections for workers who are concerned about working in unsafe environments.¹⁶
• Trump refused to use the Defense Production Act to get our IUE-CWA manufacturing members back to work producing ventilators or PPE and instead used it to force meatpacking plants to open despite thousands of workers getting infected on the job in unsafe working conditions.¹⁷
• Trump promised to veto the Heroes Act, which would give essential workers premium “hazard” pay and expand paid leave and unemployment insurance for those impacted by the Coronavirus.¹⁸
• Trump has opposed providing aid to help state and local governments continue providing services and keep workers on payroll—he suggested instead that it might make sense to allow states to declare bankruptcy.¹⁹
• Trump’s OSHA has lowered standards meant to protect workers from getting sick at work and given employers a free pass if they fail to follow even those minimal requirements.²⁰

Notes

1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1466_2b3j.pdf
2. https://www.epi.org/blog/by-overturning-specialty-healthcare-the-nlrb-has-made-it-harder-for-workers-to-organize, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/13/progressives-blast-new-nlrb-union-elections-rule-betrays-workers-it-meant-protect, https://www.nelp.org/news-releases/joint-employer-rule-trump-nlrb-sides-corporations, https://www.epi.org/publication/unprecedented-the-trump-nlrbs-attack-on-workers-rights
3. https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d4582cc8e3e, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/companies-get-ok-to-ban-work-email-for-use-in-union-organizing
4. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/SAP_HR-2474.pdf
5. https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2019-06-12%20Trump%20Administration%20Overtime%20Rule%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf
6. https://www.nelp.org/news-releases/workplace-fatalities-rising-trump-osha-enforcement-declines, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/29/18197346/trump-labor-electronic-injury-reporting-rule
7. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/SAP_HR-582.pdf
8. https://cwa-union.org/news/cwa-members-are-ready-fight-for-workers-rights-against-new-trump-labor-secretary-scalia
9. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/06/trump-supreme-court-obamacare-240366
10. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/SAP_HR-3.pdf, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drug-prices-in-2019-are-surging-with-hikes-at-5-times-inflation
11. https://www.citizen.org/article/fact-sheet-big-pharma-rigged-the-revised-nafta-to-keep-drug-prices-high
12. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/us/politics/medicare-trump.html
13. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/396288-the-gop-tax-bill-rewards-offshoring-heres-what-we-can-do
14. https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/senate-democrats-letter-trump-action-against-call-center-offshoring, https://thinkprogress.org/democrats-call-on-trump-to-address-offshoring-jobs-16599e1e81b6
15. http://goodjobsnation.org/trumps-state-of-the-union-185000-jobs-lost
16. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/4/21208122/ppe-distribution-trump-administration-states, https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Guidance%20Before%20Reopening%204-29-2020%20-%20FINAL%20cardin.pdf, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/14/cdc-guidance-reopening-coronavirus-259565
17. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74w7m/general-electric-workers-ask-trump-to-force-their-company-to-make-ventilators, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/28/trump-meat-plants-dpa
18. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SAP_H.R.-6800.pdf
19. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-mcconnell-gop-states-declare-bankruptcy-coronavirus-aid-2020-4
20. https://www.rollcall.com/2020/05/21/afl-cio-labor-department-spar-over-workplace-safety-amid-covid-19“

 

If like me you are cursed with the determination to follow the ins and outs of congressional procedures and party tactics, you might be interested in my item at New York looking ahead to the price Democrats will demand if Kevin McCarthy comes to them for help after engineering an avoidable government shutdown.

For weeks, it’s been clear that the extremist grip on the House Republican conference is making it nearly impossible for Congress to avoid a government shutdown before the money runs out on October 1. And now the situation is getting steadily worse. Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s nemesis, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, has now convinced a critical mass of his House GOP colleagues to reject any stopgap spending measure (known as continuing resolutions, or CRs, in congressional jargon), even one crafted to right-wing specifications. McCarthy, who cannot get the votes to pass a CR (particularly after Donald Trump urged Republicans to defund the government), is going along with the Gaetz strategy. The idea is to let the government shut down and remain shut down until Congress has enacted all 12 single-subject appropriations bills. Last time that happened was in 1996. As Politico Playbook reports, we’re potentially looking at a very long stalemate.

“The premise of the Gaetz plan is to kill what he calls governing by CR. It assumes a government shutdown is inevitable. And instead of using a hard-right CR as the House’s opening move in negotiations with the Senate, the (lengthy) floor debates on the House GOP-crafted appropriations bills will serve that purpose.”

With House Republicans miles apart from Democrats (and even some Senate Republicans) on spending levels in a wide array of areas, negotiating and then enacting all these individual appropriations bills would take ages. Absent a CR, the federal government could remain shuttered for an unprecedented period of time.

Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Senate is moving toward enactment of a CR, which in the normal course of events the House would consider in frenzied late-night sessions just prior to the deadline for avoiding a shutdown. The Gaetz plan means rejecting this overture; if McCarthy even thinks about negotiating to get Democrat votes to pass a CR (just as he did, to the fury of conservative hard-liners, in enacting a debt-limit measure in May), Gaetz will spring a motion to vacate the chair and McCarthy would almost surely lose his gavel, assuming Democrats join Gaetz and other hard-liners in defenestrating the Californian.

But might House Democrats save McCarthy’s bacon and at the same time prevent or end a government shutdown by voting against a motion to vacate the chair? It’s a tantalizing possibility that must have occurred to the tormented McCarthy, for whom kowtowing to Gaetz must be agonizing. But in an interview with Politico, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark made it clear Democrats would demand a high price for any McCarthy rescue effort. The concessions they want would begin with the Speaker returning to the spending-level deal he cut with Joe Biden before the debt-limit vote, which under right-wing pressure he has abandoned in favor of much deeper domestic spending cuts:

“We respected the deal that the president made with Speaker McCarthy. And they signed that deal. And 314 of us voted — in an almost equal bipartisan fashion — to support it. And the ink was barely dry when Kevin McCarthy was back trying to placate the extremists in his conference. And he is just telling the American people what matters is him retaining his speakership and they don’t. And so when people come and say, Are Democrats going to help?, it is beyond frustrating.”

But that’s not all Democrats want.

“We want to get disaster aid out. We want to continue our support for Ukraine. And we want them to end this sham of an impeachment inquiry.”

Kaboom.

If McCarthy can only keep his gavel with Democrats’ help, and abandoning the Biden impeachment inquiry he was forced to undertake is part of the deal, he will alienate the MAGA wing of his conference and his party until the end of time.

McCarthy has regularly shown he is above all a survivor devoted to his own ambitions. But in the current crisis over federal spending, he is really caught in a vise between totally craven surrender to the most irresponsible of his troops or earning their eternal enmity.

Perhaps public reaction to a completely pointless government shutdown that may damage a fragile economy will get McCarthy out of his jam and enable the bipartisan deal that looks so unlikely now. But it probably won’t happen for quite some time. “Nonessential” federal workers and those who rely on the services they provide should hunker down for a long wait.

New York Times opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall sent out a nine-pack of questions to “political operatives, pollsters and political scientists” and shares some of the responses he received. First some of his observations: “Why should Democrats be worrying?…From 2016 to 2023, according to Morning Consult, the share of voters saying that the Democratic Party “cares about me” fell to 41 percent from 43 percent while rising for the Republican Party to 39 percent from 30 percent; the share saying the Democrats “care about the middle class” fell to 46 percent from 47 percent while rising to 42 percent from 33 percent for the Republican Party….What’s more, the percentage of voters saying the Democratic Party is “too liberal” rose to 47 percent from 40 percent from 2020 to 2023 while the percentage saying the Republican Party was “too conservative” remained constant at 38 percent….Why should Republicans be worrying?….Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice, responded to my question about MAGA turnout by email: “Turnout among MAGA supporters may be less important than how many MAGA voters there are in the 2024 election and in which states they are.”….One of the most distinctive demographic characteristics of self-identified MAGA voters, Stein pointed out, “is their age: Over half (56 percent) were over the age of 65 as of 2020. By 2024, the proportion of MAGA voters over 70 will be greater than 50 percent and will put these voters in the likely category of voters leaving the electorate, dying, ill and unable to vote.”

Drilling down on demographic change, Edsall writes: “Because of these trends, Stein continued, “it may be the case that the absolute number and share of the electorate that are MAGA voters is diluted in 2024 by their own exit from the electorate and the entry of new and younger and non-MAGA voters.”…Along similar lines, Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, argued by email that generational change will be a key factor in the elections….From 2020 to 2024, “about 13 million adult citizens will have died,” and “these lost voters favored Trump in 2020 by a substantial margin. My rough estimate is that removing these voters from the electorate will increase Biden’s national popular vote margin by about 1.2 million votes.”….The aging of the electorate works to the advantage of Biden and his fellow Democrats. So, too, does what is happening with younger voters at the other end of the age distribution. Here, Democrats have an ace in the hole: the strong liberal and Democratic convictions of voters ages 18 to 42, whose share of the electorate is steadily growing.” And the issues embraced by surging younger voters favor Democrats. As Edsall notes, ”

Don’t forget Gen Z. They are on fire. Unlike you and me, who dove under our school desks in nuclear attack drills but never experienced a nuclear attack, this generation spent their entire school lives doing mass shooting drills and witnessing a mass shooting at a school in the news regularly.

Young voters, Trippi continued, “are not going to vote G.O.P., and they are going to vote. Dobbs, climate, homophobia, gun violence are all driving this generation away from the G.O.P. — in much the same way that Dems lost the younger generation during the Reagan years.”

Edsall notes lots of anxiety about potential 3rd party effects: “Paul Begala, a Democratic political operative and CNN contributor, wrote by email:

Please allow me to start with what to me is the most critical variable in the 2024 presidential election: Will Dr. Cornel West’s Green Party candidacy swing the election to Donald Trump? If I were working for the Biden-Harris ticket, that’s what would keep me up at night.

In Begala’s opinion, “Dr. West has more charisma, better communications skills and greater potential appeal than Dr. Jill Stein did in 2016. If, in fact, he is able to garner even 2 to 5 percent, that could doom Biden and the country.”….And that, Begala continued, does not “even take into account a potential centrist candidacy under the No Labels banner. Biden won moderates by a 30-point margin (64 to 34), and 38 percent of all voters described themselves as moderate in 2020. If No Labels were to field a viable, centrist candidate, that, too, would doom Biden.” Also, “Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed, arguing that third-party candidates are a “huge issue”:

The role of No Labels and, secondarily, of Cornel West: They could be genuine spoilers here. And that is their goal. Harlan Crow and other right-wing billionaires did not give big bucks to No Labels to create more moderate politics and outcomes.

Edsall sees media coverage as a potential wild card of considerable consequence. “One source of uncertainty is the media, which can and often does play a key role in setting the campaign agenda. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Trump is a prime example….In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard conducted a study, summarized in “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” It found that reporting on Clinton was dominated “by coverage of alleged improprieties associated with the Clinton Foundation and emails.”….According to the study, the press, television and online media devoted more space and time to Clinton’s emails than it did to the combined coverage of Trump’s taxes, his comments about women, his failed “university,” his foundation and his campaign’s dealings with Russia….In the run-up to 2024, it is unlikely the media could inflict much more damage on Trump, given that the extensive coverage of the 91 felony counts against him has not seemed to affect his favorable or unfavorable rating….Biden, in contrast, has much more to gain or lose from media coverage. Will it focus on his age or his legislative and policy achievements? On inflation and consumer costs or economic growth and high employment rates? On questions about his ability to complete a second term or the threats to democracy posed by the ascendant right wing of the Republican Party?”

From “Biden campaign is ramping up its strategy to win over Latino voters” by Allie Raffa at msnbcnews.com:

President Biden’s re-election campaign is ramping up its strategy this week to try to win over Latino voters, with plans to use Wednesday’s Republican primary debate in California as a backdrop for new efforts to gain support from a critical constituency, according to two senior campaign officials.

The campaign’s broader strategy includes tailored ads for Latino voters in battleground states using narrators with accents from their countries or regions of origin; messaging on television and digital platforms that are popular with Latinos; and standing up an early effort to counter misinformation aimed at Latino voters, which Democratic officials believe eroded some support for Biden among Latinos in 2020.

Raffa notes, further,

“The campaign’s new playbook comes as polling shows that enthusiasm among Latino voters is lagging. A new NBC News pollreleased this week found 51% of Latinos have a high interest in the election, compared with 73% of white voters. Overall, Latinos currently have a lower interest in the 2024 election than at this same point in past election cycles….One event, they said, will specifically focus on Latino men, whose support for Biden trails that of Latina women. A poll released Monday by Univision, a co-sponsor of the GOP debate, found that Biden leads Trump among Latino men 54% to 38%, while among Latina women his lead is much wider — 61% to 25%.”

….Biden has struggled to get his economic message to resonate with the majority of Americans, including Latinos, according to the new NBC News poll, which also showed Biden ahead of Trump among Latino voters by 51% to 39%….In the Univision poll, inflation and cost of living ranks first among the concerns of registered Latino voters. And they don’t see either party as having a clear plan to deal with those issues, 27% believing Biden does, and 22% believing Republicans do, according to the poll.

Raffa adds, “Shoring up Latino support, and voter turnout, could make the difference for Biden in key states in what’s expected to be a tight race, particularly if it’s a rematch between Biden and Republican front-runner, former President Donald Trump. While Biden overwhelmingly won among Latino voters in 2020, that year Trump gained more of their support than in the 2016 election.”

In addition, “Latinos were flooded with misinformation during the 2020 and 2022 elections. Some of the most powerful GOP campaign ads in those election cycles featured clips of Democratic candidates talking about progressive policies to try to link Democratic candidates to socialism and encourage Latinos who fled socialism in their home countries to vote Republican.”

Also, “Misinformation is still a massive problem that Republicans will continue to weaponize,” said Cardona. “Democrats have gotten much better at tracking the problem and responding in a timely manner, something we did not do enough of in 2020.”

In “Working-Class Joe,” Robert Kuttner warns at American Prospect: “Biden’s several public-investment laws serve as a full-employment act for the building trades, extending into much of the next decade. In Biden’s TV ads, how about a real-life construction worker, and a real-life autoworker, telling what Biden has done for them and why they support him. How about a stressed parent telling how much difference the Child Tax Credit made in their lives, and why a vote for Biden and a Democratic Congress is a vote to restore and extend it….“Our House, Senate, and state legislative candidates are significantly outperforming Biden and make every branch competitive in 2024,” pollster Stan Greenberg told me. “The polling in the battleground states shows him running significantly better than 2020. Critically, he can run stronger if he stops talking about their accomplishments and makes the election a future choice with the Republicans, on the very same issues he has been speaking about.”….Getting this right is urgent. The most recent Washington Post/ABC poll, if accurate, suggests the risk of a catastrophe in 2024 for Democrats. Not only is Biden’s approval rating down to 37 percent favorable and 56 percent unfavorable. His rating on the economy is even worse, 30 percent positive to 64 percent negative….The Post poll is something of an outlier. It shows Biden trailing Trump by ten points while other polls show the race as a dead heat. And it shows Trump as more popular now than when he left office. It even shows that more voters hold Democrats than Republicans responsible for the budget impasse….But even if the Post poll overstates these trends because of sample error, there is a useful warning here. The Trump years are remembered by many voters as better than the Biden years—no inflation, low interest rates, no war in Ukraine, no pandemic until 2020. This is grossly unfair, but life is unfair; and Trump will work to maximize this perception.”

“Trump is weaker among independents than Republicans in primary polls,” Geoffrey Skelley notes at Five ThirtyEight: ” Primary polling suggests that Trump is not performing as well among Republican-leaning independents and unaffiliated voters who plan to vote in the GOP nomination race as he is among self-identified Republicans. And past Republican presidential primaries have demonstrated that independent voters can make up a significant chunk of the electorate in early voting states and, if their preferences differ markedly from Republicans, can influence outcomes….To be clear, Trump usually leads among independent voters in primary polls — just by smaller margins than he does among self-identified Republicans. In what may be an obvious point, his large advantage among Republicans matters a great deal considering far more Republicans will vote in the GOP contest than independents (or Democrats, for that matter). During the competitive periods of the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primaries, around 70 to 75 percent of primary and caucus voters identified as Republican, according to ABC News’s aggregate exit poll data, while about 20 to 25 percent identified as independent or something else (5 percent or fewer identified as Democrats). But if the Republican race does tighten in the next few months, the preferences of independent voters could matter, particularly in New Hampshire, which has one of the largest blocs of unaffiliated voters of any state in the country….Throughout the campaign, we’ve seen Trump perform better among Republicans than among GOP-leaning independents in primary polls. For instance, a May 2023 Quinnipiac University poll found Trump attracting 60 percent among Republicans, but just 46 percent among Republican-leaning independents. Earlier this month, Quinnipiac found Trump pulling in 67 percent of Republicans, compared with 47 percent of GOP leaners. And across national surveys conducted since Aug. 1 with available crosstab data, we usually saw a meaningful gap in support for Trump between Republicans and independents….We’re also seeing the split between Republicans and independents in state-level polling, too, which is important because parties don’t use a nationalprimary to determine their nominees. Instead, they employ a sequential, state-by-state process in which the places that vote first influence — sometimes more, sometimes less — the elections that follow. So if the race becomes more competitive than it is right now, independents who cast a ballot in the GOP primary could influence the outcome, especially in independent-rich New Hampshire.”

From “Democrats Are on a Winning Streak That Could Transform Our Politics” by John Nichols at The Nation: “In the past few days, Democrats have secured majority control of the Pennsylvania House and moved within one seat of ending Republican control of the New Hampshire House. Those wins are not aberrations. They are the latest measures of a nationwide blue wave that has seen Democrats outperform expectations in 24 of 30 special elections for open state legislative seats this year. Legislative contests that were once considered local or regional races are being nationalized, as concerns about abortion rights and voting rights—two issues that are up for grabs in statehouses—are putting Republican candidates in a perilous position….in recent years, Democrats have begun to pay more attention to down-ballot races. At the same time, as the GOP has lurched toward right-wing extremism, Republicans have struggled to defend positions that a lot of voters find indefensible….That’s changing the game for Republicans, who are suddenly on a serious losing streak….On average, according to a fresh assessment by the data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight, Democrats are finishing 11 points better than the historic voting patterns of their districts would have predicted. That doesn’t mean that they are winning every race; sometimes, they are merely closing the gap in heavily Republican districts. But in other cases, Democrats are flipping Republican seats and raising the prospect that they will take control of legislative chambers that are currently controlled by the GOP….What’s going on? Why, at a point when Democrats are fretting about President Joe Biden’s weak poll numbers and about the prospect of losing the Senate in 2024 contests that are weighted against them, are the party’s candidates doing so well in state legislative races?….GOP candidates find themselves in far more precarious positions than casual observations of Biden’s low approval ratings might suggest….The polls may be concerning, but actual election results are not just looking good for the party. They’re looking excellent.”

Walter Shapiro has encouraging words for Democrats in”Yes, the Polls Are Bad for Biden. But Republicans Still Have It Much Worse” at The New Republic, including: “The Republican Party is fast becoming the political version of the 1962 Mets. On every front, they are booting easy double-play ground balls and missing bases with Marvelous Marv–like abandon. From embodying chaos theory in the House to genuflecting before the Great God Trump in the presidential race, Republicans can’t get a handle on how to play the game of politics. They have forgotten that it’s all about winning elections, not catering to the self-indulgent fantasies of the party’s right-wing base….let me advance a contrarian notion that isn’t quite a prediction: Maybe the willful self-destructiveness of the Republican Party will finally catch up with them. Sooner or later, American politics will give us an old-fashioned blowout election. And while I don’t minimize potential Democratic problems such as Biden’s age, dwindling enthusiasm among Black and Hispanic voters, and stubborn skepticism of the president’s economic record, a case can be made that the handicappers and railbirds are underestimating the consequences of the GOP’s embrace of funeral-pyre politics….Not only is a government shutdown virtually inevitable on October 1, but there is also scant evidence that the House Republicans can claim that they tried to do anything to avert it….Since 1995, the GOP has triggered three major federal work stoppages, all of which ended with a full-scale Republican retreat and dismal poll numbers. This time around, the House Freedom Caucus rebels don’t even have an articulate set of demands, just primal rage. They are barely even paying lip service to past justifications of shutdowns, namely the need to rein in federal spending….For a political party that has made a fetish out of portraying the Democrats as weak on national security, the Republicans will be hard-pressed to shout, “Support the troops,” when a government shutdown means that two million military personnel will receive delayed paychecks….Republicans are likely to bet the presidency on the nutcase notion that swing voters will be attracted to the spectacle of the former president in the dock.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Back in 2019, Nancy Pelosi seemed unenthusiastic about a Green New Deal, referring to it as “the green dream or whatever they call it.” But a funny thing happened between then and now. The Democrats wound up embracing the basic idea and instantiated a scaled-down version of it in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Lately, there’s been rough sledding for the IRA and its priorities, as the UAW has called a nationwide strike not only for better pay and benefits but also to protesthow the IRA’s electric vehicle (EV) component is being implemented. UAW workers are far from convinced a rapid transition to electric vehicles is really going to benefit them. They’ve got a point given that manufacturers are rushing to build facilities in non-union states and that EV production needs fewer workers overall than production of traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) cars.

It’s worth reviewing how Democrats have managed, in a sense, to paint themselves into a corner on energy-related issues. Cast your mind back to 2017, a couple of years before Nancy Pelosi derisively referred to the Green New Deal as “the green dream or whatever.” That was the year the Sunrise Movement was formed, with the tagline “We are the climate revolution.” The basic idea was that the globe was teetering of the verge of apocalypse, especially in the wake of Trump’s election, and that the Democrats’ incrementalist “all-of-the-above” approach from the Obama years was completely bankrupt. Showing the extent to which this brand of catastrophist climate politics was winning support, the group was initially funded by the Sierra Club, an old-line environmental organization that traditionally advocated for gradual reform and steered clear of radical organizations.

Sunrise crystallized the sense among radical climate activists that time was running out and it was necessary to ratchet up pressure and tactics, including direct action and civil disobedience, to force a rapid transition to clean energy. Enough, said Sunrise cofounder Varshini Prakash, with “pathetic incrementalism.” The group advocated for a Green New Deal—a term previously used by columnist Thomas Friedman, the U.S. Green Party, and even Bernie Sanders in 2016—that would completely transform the economy in the process of attaining carbon neutrality by 2030. The goal of their aggressive tactics, said Prakash, was to “make it politically impossible for a Democratic lawmaker to vote no on the Green New Deal.”

Initially they focused their energy on allying with politicians who would support that approach and, through that, pressuring others to do so. They hit the jackpot when newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) joined the organization in a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office in November 2018, greatly elevating its profile. Riding the wave of publicity from this sit-in, Sunrise and allies pushed incoming members of Congress to support the formation of a Congressional Select Committee specifically on the Green New Deal. They got forty congressional sponsors to sign on including Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). The idea failed but publicity kept building.

In December, Sunrise staged another larger sit-in at Pelosi and Steny Hoyer’s offices, resulting in 143 arrests. Over three hundred local elected officials from forty states issued a letter endorsing a Green New Deal. In January, over six hundred environmental and progressive organizations, including Sunrise and 350.org, did likewise. In the groups’ letter, they urged a Green New Deal that would end all fossil fuel usage, including natural gas. They explicitly rejected the use of nuclear or CCS to achieve emission objectives. The transition was to be to 100 percent renewables.

In February 2019, Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) formally introduced a congressional resolution advocating a Green New Deal. This Green New Deal proposal was everything the radicals at Sunrise could have wished for and more. The proposal affirmed that the United States must become net zero on carbon emissions by 2030 through a dramatic and far-reaching transformation of every aspect of the economy. And far from entailing sacrifice, this economic transformation would provide full employment in high-wage jobs, accompanied by universal high-quality health care and housing. It would end all oppression of indigenous people, “communities of color,” migrant communities, and other “frontline and vulnerable communities.” Who could ask for anything more?

The full employment aspect of the proposal was key to making it politically palatable. It countered the obvious objection that eliminating fossil fuels so quickly and disrupting the economy might result in job loss and lower wages. The proposal asserted that, on the contrary, there would be more jobs and they would all be high-wage. No trade-offs at all would be necessary.

The proposal generated enormous publicity and was injected into the mainstream of Democratic Party discourse. Six senators who would become contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination endorsed it: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Sanders would go on to release a $16.3 trillion Green New Deal plan of his own during his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Of course, none of these hopefuls garnered the Democratic nomination; Joe Biden did. However, while Biden declined to specifically endorse and use the Green New Deal language, he did put forward his own ambitious climate plan that was essentially a softer version of the Green New Deal proposals. And once in office he has very much pursued his plan, resulting in the aforementioned IRA.

It is fair to say that Biden and the entire Democratic Party have more or less embraced the following catechism:

Climate change is not a danger that is gradually occurring, but an imminent crisis that is already upon us in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet if immediate, drastic action is not taken. That action must include the immediate replacement of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by renewables, wind and solar, which are cheap and can be introduced right now if sufficient resources are devoted to doing so, and which, unlike nuclear power, are safe. Not only that, the immediate replacement of fossil fuels by renewables will make energy cheaper and provide high wage jobs.

People resist rapidly eliminating fossil fuels only because of propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Any of the problems with renewables that are being cited, such as their intermittency and reliability, are being solved. This means that as we use more renewables and cut out fossil fuels, political support for the transition to clean energy should go up because of the benefits to consumers and workers.

Pretty much every sentence in this catechism is, if not outright false, highly questionable. But the catechism is not to be questioned among good Democrats, least of all Biden himself. A recent New York Times article detailed his aggressive climate plans for a second term, featuring heavy regulation of steel and cement plants, factories and oil refineries. That will no doubt endear him to workers in those industries, just has he has endeared himself to America’s autoworkers.

But hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. As Biden put it in the Times article:

The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20 — 10 years. That’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.

More frightening than nuclear war, eh? I guess that means we can’t worry about trivial things like workers’ jobs in high-paying industries.

The fact is that the working class did not really sign up for the rapid green transition envisioned by Biden and most Democrats. Therefore, when their jobs or living standards are collateral damage in the push toward “Net Zero”, they are unlikely to cut the Democrats much slack on what is, after all, not their project or even a top priority for them.

As the Times article noted:

While 54 percent of adults polled by Pew said climate change was a major threat to the country’s well-being, respondents ranked it 17th out of 21 national issues in a January survey. “Even for Democrats, who say it’s important, it’s not the top issue,” said Alec Tyson, a researcher who helped conduct the survey.

Workers are more oriented toward a gradual, “all-of-the-above” approach to transitioning the energy system than to the frantic push for renewables and electric vehicles (not to mention heat pumps, electric stoves, etc.) that characterizes Green New Deal-type thinking. In a recent survey conducted by YouGov for The Liberal Patriot, just a quarter of working-class (noncollege) voters embraced the Democrats’ current approach, emphasizing ending the use of fossil fuels and rapidly adopting renewables. This was actually less than the number (29 percent) that flat-out supported production of fossil fuels and opposed green energy projects. The dominant position by far was an all-of-the above approach that called for cheap, abundant energy from many sources, including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear, favored by 46 percent of voters.

Supporters of (as Nancy Pelosi would put it) “the green dream or whatever” have convinced themselves that their approach would involve no real trade-offs and make everyone happy and better off. Workers, to put mildly, don’t see it that way. The UAW strike is just the latest manifestation of that hard political reality. There will likely be many more if the Democrats do not revise their approach to energy issues so it aligns more with the priorities of working-class voters and less with those of today’s climate activists.

Some insights from “‘A Perfect Storm for the Ambitious, Extreme Ideologue’” by New York Times opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall:

“Five political scientists — Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra and Sean J. Westwood — have constructed a definition of affective polarization:

While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party. Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines. This phenomenon of animosity between the parties is known as affective polarization.

In their examination of affective polarization in advanced democracies, Boxell, Gentzkow and Shapiro tracked patterns in 12 countries over the 40 years from 1980 to 2020 and found that

The U.S. exhibited the largest increase in affective polarization over this period. In five other countries — Switzerland, France, Denmark, Canada, and New Zealand — polarization also rose, but to a lesser extent. In six other countries — Japan, Australia, Britain, Norway, Sweden, and Germany — polarization fell.

In 1978, they write, “the average (American) partisan rated in-party members 27.4 points higher than out-party members”; by 2020, the difference had doubled, to 56.3 points.

The authors stress that they are measuring the rate of increase in the levels of polarization, as opposed to comparing absolute levels of polarization in different countries.

“In the case of affective polarization, Edsall notes, “the authors collected “data on trends in economic, media, demographic and political factors that may be related to” partisan animosity and found that “trends in measures of inequality, openness to trade, the share getting news online, and the fraction foreign-born are either negatively or weakly associated with trends in affective polarization….Conversely, “trends in the number of 24-hour news channels, the nonwhite share, partisan sorting, and elite polarization are positively associated with trends in affective polarization. The association is strongest for the nonwhite share and elite polarization.”

Edsall shares a point made by Dartmouth professor Sean Westwood: “This subservience to party, in Westwood’s view, is driven by “activists on both sides of the aisle who have reframed political conflict as a battle over moral truth and not a conflict over issue positions. If you disagree with the other party’s stance on an issue, you are not just wrong, but amoral.” We don’t negotiate well in American politics; we just bellow at each other.

The phenomenon has gotten much worse in recent years, although it is not really all that new. Readers with a long memory may remember the Saturday Night Live ‘Point/Counterpoint’ skits with Dan Akroyd’s Jack Kilpatrick and Jane Curtin’s Shana Alexander, in which every liberal-conservative policy disagreement is paired with increasingly harsh personal insults. Or go back much further and check out the mud-slinging in the 1796 presidential election.

Edsall quotes NYU historian Steven Hahn: “A confluence of developments over the last several decades has led to polarization among parties and many voters. These include: the stagnation of wages and salaries for the white middle and working class since the 1970s; the process of deindustrialization and the weakening of the labor movement; the recognition that white people will become a numerical minority by the middle of the 21st century, and the related belief that people of color have become the political clients of the Democratic Party (a party which has until very recently abandoned social democratic ambitions and instead also cultivated segments of the college-educated upper middle class).”

Lots of fodder for argument there. But I would say amen to Hahn’s points about wage stagnation, deindustrialization and the weakening of the labor movement. Pair that with stratospheric tuition costs which make a mockery of the idea that one’s kids will have better living standards, and you have a ‘perfect storm’ for working class discontent, as well as “the ambitious, extreme ideologue.” Another amen for Jefferson Cowie’s observation that “In most social and political indicators of advanced industrial nations, the United States is an outlier in terms of inequality and the attendant negative social and political outcomes.”

Edsall also discusses the possibility that the two party system divides Americans into rigid ideological camps, while the multiparty democracies of other nations may reduce affective polarization. In these nations, there may be more of a “let’s split the difference, create a coalition and move on” attitude toward policy disagreements and governing. Check out the Danish TV series “Borgen” on Netflix for a few clues as to how this works.

Edsall has more to say about the causes of our deepening divisions. Anyone interested in getting a better understanding of the ‘affective polarization’ that has exacerbated America’s problems should give Edsall’s essay a thoughtful read.