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Governments require popular buy-in ("power") to function. Democracy is the idea that popular majorities confer such obvious power that it's pointless to oppose them. Republicanism is the idea that influential minority groups still need to be catered to.
The democratic party (as its name implies) typically follows a strategy of gathering together majorities and advocating for increasing their power. But the republican party has effectively made use of the complement strategy-- finding the most powerful minorities available and adhering them together. And the republican party's strategy has proven dominant, because it's harder to distribute power than it is to prevent the redistribution of power. Democrats have had to fold, over and over again, to moderates like Manchin and Sinema. That infuriated and demoralized the democratic base. Meanwhile, Democrats not only got blamed for government shutdowns, they got blamed for compromising to end government shutdowns.
So the lesson is: if you have one side that promises to do things, and one side that promises to not do things, the latter faction is structurally advantaged. The only way to change the equilibrium is for the democrats to realign-- to drop some of their most vulnerable constituents and attract some of their least vulnerable opponents. I think the most effective way to do that would be to give up on social security. It's already beginning to fail, and no one under thirty expects to receive it. Meanwhile, it's catnip for the social-economic liberals on the republican side... the people who want to have sex, do drugs, and dodge taxes.
Plus, in an accelerationist sense, social security saps popular impetus for a UBI in the same way that medicare/medicaid sap the will for universal healthcare.
Plus, in an accelerationist sense, social security saps popular impetus for a UBI in the same way that medicare/medicaid sap the will for universal healthcare.
The only way that America will get either of those things will be in the name of of bailing out the Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.
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Progressivism is unpopular; a very tiny percentage of voters thought democrats were too far to the right.
An American UBI will almost certainly be executed through tax credits, and tax credit expansion is extremely popular and likely bipartisan.
I had this same mental model of the world, and then harris lost. Without changing how I personally feel about progressivism, I now have to concede that the left-populists were right about the electorate.
It's worth remembering that the last democrat with any sort of popular movement was Yang, and he's also strongly populist-progressive (though not so much left-progressive.)
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The Democrats could also be described as making use of this tactic; prior to Trump, one could describe the two parties as rival coalitions: one made up of different ethnic minorities and college-educated whites, the other a weird mashup of business libertarians, religious fundamentalists, and ethnically-concerned right-wingers.
One could argue, watching from another screen, that Manchin and Sinema were the last stalwarts keeping the Dem party from completely sabotaging itself and going full-lefty.
This is from your other reply, but I'll comment on it here:
Is the idea of "old = conservative" a given? I think a lot of your ideal vision rests a lot on this, among other things.
I think Phosphorus was getting at something when they claimed that you aren't describing reality, because it sounds like how you interpret politics and what you want out of politics are very weird and at odds with how things have tended to play out.
Yes, to some extent-- both parties use a variety of electoral strategies, I'm just describing a tactic the democratic coalition relies on more.
I can and did argue that. I'm a neoliberal, not a leftist. But 2024 proved me wrong-- evidently the democratic base really did want left-populists, and us "return to normalcy" folks were basically wrong.
Yes. Not every old person is a religious conservative-- but old people are intrinsically more resistant to change. Culture isn't just what people think about the gays... it's how people want their cities laid out, how business owners treat their employees, and what segments of the population are given disproportionate amounts of respect. And over the total spectrum of subjects, the old people in my party are basically as bad as the old people outside of it-- they still want to drive cars, destroy the environment, prevent dense construction, and extract transfer payments from the young.
I won't claim that the democratic party will abandon old people. I just think they should.
I don't think I have much more to say, other than I think that your "Eat the Old" idea is more of an aid to the "Eat the Rich" populist types than you might realize.
I don't mind if we eat the rich too, I just think it's infeasible. Slave revolutions basically never work-- you have to have some sort of elite buy-in.
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