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Did you watch the post-election interview that Bob Brady gave? (I think this is it: YouTube link) If you thought that 30M votes were going to be stuffed at the last minute, I think the interview reveals a very plausible explanation for why they weren't.
Now, I am not saying that Miss Collins was wrong. But I am saying that watching the interview gave me the strong (and perhaps wrong) vibe that what happened is that Team Kamala was full of noobs and didn't pony up and play with the city machines and as a result the city machines sent a Clear Message about what happened when you go off-script by simply not coughing up votes for Kamala.
Of course, that's not necessarily a conspiracy along the lines of the CIA controlling voting machines via satellite or something. There are shades of conspiratorial interpretations here, ranging from the sinister and illegal "the machines didn't stuff the ballots because the Presidential campaign didn't release cash to them" to the dodgy-but-legal "the machines didn't bother to get out because they weren't adequately compensated by the Presidential campaign for staff time" to the relatively benign "Kamala failed to coordinate with the boots on the ground and as a result they were disorganized." I don't see the need to say any of the more conspiratorial interpretations are correct, but it seems worth at least acknowledging the possibility that city machines are capable of large-scale voter fraud.
But whichever of these explanations is true, it's worth watching the interview because I think it reveals a lot more about how politics and power works than sitting around theorizing about how a shadowy three-letter-organization has ironclad control over our elections.
That suggests that big city Democratic machines are in fact entirely ambivalent about the Democratic Party and progressive politics and only care about getting paid, which again would be a strong point against the “…burgers?” argument on the right that suggests these people Really Do Care a lot about this stuff for reasons that go way beyond financial incentives.
There are different factions on the left, and big city political machines just want to grill at taxpayer expense. They’re not radical activists.
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So, firstly, even people who Really Do Care are unlikely to do their jobs for free. If Kamala comes out and tells her chief-of-staff "sorry but we aren't going to pay you to do your job anymore" and she quits it's not really a dunk to say "wow it seems like the Democrats don't care about social justice and only care about getting paid." Probably they care about both.
But secondly, it does not surprise me that an Irish-Italian Philadelphian born in 1945 is ambivalent about certain aspects of current progressive politics. I doubt he is ambivalent about the Democratic Party; he almost certainly has an intense loyalty to his in-group. But I suspect for Brady and other old-school Democrats (e.g. James Carville) current progressive fixations are tripping them up from doing the real work which, if I had to guess, is winning elections and then using those elections to achieve old-school patronage-style wins in the FDR mold that benefit your allies but also large groups of people – think improving the healthcare or welfare systems, infrastructure improvement, etc. Not to suggest that they don't care about abortion or women's rights or things like that, but for a guy born around the end of World War Two the new gender stuff might not be their top priority.
I think there's a generational (and also different-parts-of-the-coalition) thing here, and if I am recalling the context of the original "...burgers?" comic, the suggestion is that the "...burgers?" people are elite media types that are going to be pushing their agendas with other people's money. I don't think the Bob Bradys of the world were ever really that sort of person, and I think the political world is big enough for both. Currently the GOP coalition is (to overgeneralize) a fusion of Silicon Valley tech elites who care about meritocracy and evangelical true believers who care about abortion – if you find that e.g. Elon Musk cares more about money than pro-life causes it is wrong to suggest that Republicans writ large don't care about the issue of abortion. Similarly, if Bob Brady and his city machine just care about money (which I actually do not think!), it does not mean that there aren't True Believers out there who care much less about the financial incentives.
I agree with what you're saying here, but I'm not sure what you're getting at in your initial post. I had the interview on in the background as I was getting ready for work, and it came across more as whining than anything else. He said that they never involved him in the process and the campaign just did their own thing. He also said that the local Democratic committee did what they could. Yeah, I grant that it's a political mistake not to at least talk to the chair of the committee in the biggest city in an important battleground state,but it's hard for me to imagine what he could have actually done. Was there something he wanted to do but needed to coordinate with the campaign? Did he want to offer his sage advice?
If your contention is that the reason Harris lost Pennsylvania is because her campaign didn't play ball with local party leaders and they punished her by not rigging the vote, a look at the actual numbers makes it pretty clear that it isn't the case. Kamala Harris got about 35,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did, and Trump got about 10,000 more than in 2020. If that difference is solely attributed to ballot box stuffing, it suggests that Brady can manufacture somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 votes. Except Trump lost by 80,000 votes in 2020, and won by 120,000 in 2024. A machine like this could have accounted for, at most, 20% of the difference, if we're as charitable as possible and assume he didn't max out his fraud capabilities in 2020.
Other counties don't help us either. The only other county that can be alleged to have a Democratic Machine akin to Philadelphia's is Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), and Harris and Trump both got about the same number of votes there as they did in 2020. And that's if you take the naive view that there's some monolithic machine because Democrats have won every election since the 1930s. If you were actually paying attention you'd know that the Allegheny County Democratic Committee wasn't exactly a model of functionality heading into 2020, and that the progressive wing of the party had taken over city and county government plus key state and US rep positions. In other words, the people in charge in 2024 were not the same as in 2020, and the new people couldn't credibly be said to be part of any machine. Outside of Philadelphia and Allegheny, you're looking at counties that are either too small or too Republican to have machines. In any event, the most votes you're talking about is a few thousand, and in some places Kamala actually got more votes than Biden.
I think I was trying to answer OP's question – "what's the cope for Trump winning" – with a more sophisticated steelman than "the CIA fell asleep at the hacker remote control button." Now, I never "doomed about the 2024 election" on here – you can go back and look at my posts, I don't think I talked much about it at all, but it's a sort of interesting intellectual exercise to think about, even if I don't personally feel the need to cope.
I would need more evidence than a single interview to contend this (although I will admit that it certainly sprang to mind watching the interview!) I also think that even without any "rigging" the local party machine can make a big difference! Of course, Brady says that he did in fact do his darndest to win the election for Kamala regardless of how poorly he and his team were treated.
I definitely think the Kamala campaign could have used his sage advice. My recollection of the interview was that he says he wanted to coordinate with her campaign, and although the details are a bit unclear I get the impression that it was in resource allocation, probably related to GOTV efforts, and maybe messaging. Now, my assumption is that political machines work on a patronage model (where they receive funding from their patrons for GOTV which they then pass down to their clients and so forth) and Brady's interview – which, as you say, has some whining – sounds to me like what someone would say if they weren't receiving expected allocation of funding from on high. (Of course it is very much in Brady's interests for people to think that he has magical powers to GOTV if they just treat him with enough deference and supply him with adequate funding).
First off, let me say that I really appreciate you bringing the numbers here.
Secondly – yes, and why do you think that was? I definitely think some of it was that voting was easier in 2020. But if you're a political machine, you should be aiming to at least match last year's performance, and they didn't. However, I do think there are non-conspiratorial interpretations for this, though. Besides COVID, it's also true that the city's population is declining – they probably lost upwards of 50,000 people between elections. 2024's voter turnout still didn't match 2020's, but it was very close. All of this – I agree – is consistent with Brady attempting to (and failing) bring home the bacon for Kamala (and again we don't even need to believe in any fraud for this to be the case).
On the other hand, if I don my tinfoil cap and grant the machine 1) very good fraud capabilities, and 2) a decent idea of what the other side's total turnout is going to be, then what I see is that the machine puts in just enough fraud to guarantee a win and for some reason didn't do it here – in Philadelphia they could have turned 70% of the voters instead of 65% and it might only have raised eyebrows in the usual places while bringing in, what, an extra 50,000 votes? That would have gotten them nearly halfway to the win they needed in the state.
TO BE CLEAR, I am not saying I believe this. I'm engaging with the OP – he asked what the cope is for the Trump win, and I'm suggesting one possible cope is that the Kamala campaign failed to play ball with the county campaigns and they reciprocated by failing to bring home the bacon (which frankly seems plausible even if you assume zero fraud). On balance I am inclined to believe that 1) Brady is telling the truth about poor coordination by Team Kamala, and 2) this hurt their GOTV, and 3) Brady would have preferred Biden was the nominee. I think you make a decent case that as much as Brady might prefer for everyone to think otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to tip the balance here (unless you grant the machine really good fraud capability - and from what I've seen actual cases of voter fraud where people have been caught have been box-stuffing, not "I am generating arbitrarily large numbers out of thin air.")
Well, my first question is – do we know that the machine doesn't lend support to county parties outside of its geographic boundaries? My second question is – did you catch the part where Brady suggests that Kamala's failure to coordinate wasn't just with his city, but was nationwide? Obviously PA itself wasn't the deciding factor here in the election, although it was important. Brady's suggesting a nationwide systemic failure to engage with local political machines. That seems to me like something that could be significant – but maybe not enough to tip the balance.
This is a very funny use of charitable, 10/10.
I certainly cop to not paying attention – I don't live in PA, for one thing, so I defer to your superior knowledge of the place or attention-paying skills. In fact, the sausage of political campaigning is fairly opaque to me, so I appreciate being told when I am wrong.
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Senior Dem and non-profit managers being shocked that their interns actually believe all that stuff has been a running theme for the last decade now. And the city machines are the least vulnerable to activist takeover tactics that originated in colleges and are optimized to take over the college-like environments of modern corps and ngos.
I can see an existential battle between the philly turnout machine boss and the 26yo kamela advisor who, like? hit up Beyonce on tiktok? and ofc she's down with the struggle against like fascism and stuff? and sure she'll help us turn out the youth vote?
So now you really are going back to the oft-mocked “it’s just kids on campuses” argument? I mean this seems clearly contradictory. The truth is that the “establishment” or whatever word you want to use for it was not sufficiently threatened by Trump to do everything to prevent him from winning again, the same way they didn’t actually do everything to stop FDR from winning.
You're talking to a different person. But yes, my blackpill take is that they need someone to take the fall for the coming recession, like your pt4 in another post.
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