With Reformicons like this, no wonder the Reactobots always win

I haven’t had any time of late to blog, though I am hoping to get to Tanenhaus’s article. I think the big problem with these reform conservatives is something I tried to get at in the conclusion of my book, but which I’d like to develop further. Like the neoliberals of the 1970s — I’m talking about the people Randall Rothenberg profiled in his book; it included people like Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, and others — today’s reform conservative is responding to failures of policy and changing demographic trends, which they view as threatening their home base: in this case, the Republican Party. From the point of conservatism, considered as a changing political ideology and philosophy, that’s a very weak point to begin from. It’s not the spur to public reason that thinkers from Burke to Hayek recognized as the lifeblood of conservatism. So that’s why you get this kind of bloodless policy talk, which doesn’t in the end really break all that much from what we had before.

There’s a simple reason conservatism is so bankrupt: it needn’t be anything but bankrupt. Some of its basic principles have triumphed, as you yourself have pointed out in your work on Zombie Economics, so why tinker with a good thing? The long-term prospect of electoral defeat b/c of changing demographic trends doesn’t exactly focus the imagination in the way that the French Revolution, abolition, the labor movement, or feminism in the 60s did. Until we see a comparable social movement from the left as these, we’re not going to see much of a new conservatism. From their perspective, if it ain’t broken — and by it, we mean the security of the social order, with all of its inegalitarian largesse — don’t fix it. Indeed, it would be strange for there to be an efflorescence of genuinely vital and genuinely new conservative thinking amid a social order like ours, which is so profoundly inegalitarian. And with liberals and left so seemingly unable — or desirous — of doing anything serious about it.

I posted something about Levin five years ago. Apparently back then I was still finding something interesting between the words. Maybe Belle can tell us what she thinks about his take on Aristotle.

It also looks unlikely, from the paragraph I quoted (the site’s now paywalled, I think), that the Yuval Levin who wrote it would be going on to found a seriously intellectual magazine. But maybe he no longer believes that “practical wisdom [whatever he thinks that means] matters at least as much as formal education.” Palin lost, after all. He also doesn’t seem like the Nietzschean anti-populist Corey made him out to be. Or the Straussian going on about the modernist lowering of our sights . . . though, well, Straussanism. Or maybe Sarah Palin temporarily pulled him (like Bill Kristol) out of their proper orbig. Cherchez la femme and all that.

Bobo likes it, so it must be good, right??
———-
On September 7, 2009, David Brooks of the New York Times reviewed the first issue. He wrote that “The Public Interest closed in 2005”, leaving “a gaping hole. Fortunately, a new quarterly magazine called National Affairs is starting up today to continue the work.” Brooks continued by noting that the magazine occupied “the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.” “In a world of fever swamp politics and arid, overly specialized expertise,” Brooks wrote in his closing, “National Affairs arrives at just the right time.”
———-
Hahaha!
~

Cargo cult perhaps not the right metaphor. Potemkin village?

There’s always going to be a market for conservative intellectuals, because greedy people want a moral justification for greed. It’s not going to be a big market, though, because most of their conservative allies are not like them. Just like the rich, they want to be told that the world threatens them, that they’re being persecuted, and that they’re inherently better than the rest of us, but those who aren’t rich have to be given different reasons why this is so. Both parts of the coalition crave validation, but they’re not a single audience.

The ideas and idea-mongers mentioned in the Tanenhaus article serve up an instructive rehash of the conservatives’ big problems. Since Clinton the centrist Democrats are willing to enact, and to claim credit for, many of the same conservative policies. And now, at the very same time, the GOP is having an internecine war between its mainstream power-brokers and the Tea Party, who are its most reliable voters.

Thus as soon as the Democrats say of a policy, “Oh, that might be a good idea,” the Republicans have turned against it, to define themselves electorally. This has frustrated the Obama Administration but it is in the long-term a huge Democratic advantage. And in the future the Dems have the advantage demographically and also intellectually because the free market has been hurting people, and governmental solutions will become more tolerable to the public as long as the Dems can defuse the debt and inflation fears of the public, which is predominantly hard-money orientated.

Most of this stuff is mentioned by Tanenhaus in his own way, but he does not draw the obvious conclusion, i.e. that the GOP is historically finished. Instead he skips to the hope that it can re-run Reagan, i.e. benefit from another circumstantial boost such as the election of Reagan, who installed rightwing wonkies in D.C. and gave them axes to start chopping, and then claimed success.

Of course, the Republicans might get a re-taste of this if they retake the Senate in November, because they can send Obama lots of stuff they think will hurt the Dems. More likely Obama can triangulate like Clinton and take credit for the stuff he likes, and use the rest as a teaching moment for the Dem base and 2016. So the Republican Party will not easily escape its current precarious condition, which is the direct consequence of Reagan’s domestic legacy of callous psychology and fantasy economics.

Thus when Corey Robin writes above, “There’s a simple reason conservatism is so bankrupt: it needn’t be anything but bankrupt,” I think it should read, “it CANNOT be anything but bankrupt.” It’s true that the U.S. liberal left is intellectually lazy, and that the public understands very little that is not emotional, and so conservatism has been able to predominate since Reagan by running on mere gas fumes. But conservatism has run into an intellectual cul de sac of historic proportions. It cannot depend on the Reaganic alchemical formulary in the future, and our increasing inegalitarianism is hardly a fait accompli.

Not much of a reform idea. I do wonder what will happen if the Republicans lose in 2016. Will they pull a Clinton/Blair? I don’t think the Tea Party will go with it seeing as they are running regularly in primaries.

James M. at No More Mister Nice Blog commented on this recently:

The lesson is that when Republicans win the presidency, they really win the presidency — they just go out there and govern as they see fit — and when they lose the presidency, they work every possible lever to make sure Democrats don’t govern.

So the lesson they’ve learned from the four victories of Clinton and Obama, and Al Gore’s popular vote win, is that a Democratic win isn’t a win if Republicans say it’s not a win.

The Republicans have a lot of levers to work. They’ve got House districts drawn just the way they want them in much of the country. They have the filibuster in the Senate. They have Fox News and talk radio to rally angry white America. They have years of experience intimidating the mainstream media with allegations of liberal bias. They won seven out of ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004, so their judges, most of whom walk in ideological lockstep, can undermine any legislation at the local, state, or national level that right-wingers don’t like. Their voters vote, which makes it relatively easy for them to take over state legislatures and governorships in off-year elections, even in states that regularly vote for Democratic presidential candidates.

http://nomoremister.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/republicans-learned-lesson-from-bill.html

Making Love to Statuesque Women: a Leftist Roadmap to Incremental Reform in the Modern Era, by B.Jim.

Bruce Wilder @ 14

“The trouble with being a weak conservative party that liberals and progressive vote for, and which enacts a conservative agenda…”

But Obama rescinded the George Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy and enacted tax hikes within Obamacare, not a conservative agenda. Then there’s the Supreme Court and Federal Reserve Bank.

Conservativsm’s strategy for getting its ideas enacted at the policy level is mostly twofold: voter disenfranchisement over supposed fraud, etc., and the rollback of campaign legislation so that money buys more votes. “Reformers” appealing to the middle and lower classes with new ideas has little to do with it.

However if the Supreme Court becomes a 5-4 Democratic court; if the Senate starts pushing back on the filibuster as they did over appoinments this past year; if Yellen turns out to be a Democratic Fed Chair much different than Greenspan as her emphasis on “macroprudential” policies suggests she might be – the test will be if she allows real wages to rise – then conservatives will be faced with the fact that elections do have consequences.

Then they might make a token effort appealing to voters with new ideas a la Clinton/Blair and allow the Overton Window to be pushed to left as Clinton/Blair allowed it to move to the right. Then the Tea Party/white southern base might split and form a third party.

Conservatism has successfully enacted its policies on the economic front for 40 years. They don’t work, i.e. don’t serve the base. So the Tea Party double downs and demanding more purity (no debt ceiling, kill the Ex-Im bank, boot Cantor) Plus culturally the U.S. and wider world is moving away from them (gay marriage, legalized marijuana, Communist Pope)

Those conservatives seeking electoral success like John Boehner are caught in a bind. If they moderate they lose the base, but they need the bases votes to win elections.

@ Sancho

“They have years of experience intimidating the mainstream media with allegations of liberal bias. They won seven out of ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004”

I do wonder if 9/11 helped extend the conservative’s reign with its distracting focus on fear, foreigners, terrorism and war. Likewise the end of the Cold War seemed to somewhat vindicate conservatism’s ideas about how central planning is bad and Amurica is the best. But that’s fading from memory as Piketty demonstrates.

What was curious for me was Megyn Kelly on Fox News dressing down Cheney recently about how he was all wrong about Iraq. Part of conservatism’s base may have lost patience with going along with the leadership’s foreign adventures in nation building.

“…and also intellectually, because the free market has been hurting people.”

This simply demands that we attempt a re-definition of ‘hurt’, and, if necessary, ‘people’.

Constants are constant. Variables vary.

Why did Tanenhaus fall for it? Partly he went looking for a narrative — there really can’t be no Republican policy analysis, right? – and he found it. Then there’s a wingnut sector version of Say’s Law at work. There was no obvious market in Republican politics for policy analysis. But with some expensive educations (Princeton, Chicago), connections, and grant money, they’ve supplied the policy analysis and a few Senators looking for product differentiation from Ted Cruz (Lee, Rubio) have demanded it. Which brings up one of the gaps that Tanenhaus should have picked up — there’s no evidence of any state-level traction for this stuff, unlike the early 90s Democratic version of this phenomenon when the policy analysis was tied to state-level examples like Bill Clinton. But the current crop of Republican governors is 100 percent bought in to the national Republican agenda — Obamacare nullification, unfunded tax cuts, guns-for-all, and “voter fraud” and could not care less about policy journals.

@25 P O”Neill

What about the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare? That didn’t come up in the Tanenhous piece.

Bruce Wilder #28: “I do not understand this enthusiasm for speculating that a Democratic Party controlled by corrupt centrist neoliberals may achieve dominance over a Republican Party in danger of takeover by crazed reactionaries.”

You appear to mistake tactical analysis for enthusiasm. You may begin to understand the difference between them, if the GOP takes the Senate and ensures a longer future for SCOTUS rulings like the ones last week, and removes the 2017 provision in Obamacare that allows the formation of state single payers. Is it Perfection, or Nothing? My only question is, what can be more “quiescent, impotent”?

This is a genre the Sunday NYT specializes in. They find some politician or a denizen of a “think tank”, dress the person or persons up as intellectuals, and write about how brilliant they are (really wowed them at Princeton,or whatever) and how “ideas” are being promoted, all the while avoiding any more than the faintest trace of substantive discussion. Usually the person being written about comes across as the hero–a critic or two may be quoted, but it’s just to give the impression of balance. The lack of substance in the article itself is key–the genre is really a form of celebrity journalism and is intended to make the reader imagine a world where philosophically minded idealists are hashing out the great issues of the day. If they got substantive, it would become one of those boring substance articles. It’s more entertaining to write about alleged wonks than to actually engage in writing wonkishly. (That word “wonk” is another giveaway–I picked it up from articles of this sort, because I don’t think I ever see it used anywhere else.)

I think they do this every couple of months or so. I don’t have any other examples, because none of these articles leave any lasting impression, but I took one look at the title of this one and immediately knew what to expect.

Lee A. Arnold: You appear to mistake tactical analysis for enthusiasm.

You appear to mistake tactical analysis for enthusiasm.

When I was a kid my local Major League Baseball franchise (the Detroit Tigers of the American League) was in contention, and I would eagerly read the daily sports columns in the Detroit Free Press, which often concerned various scenarios by which my beloved Tigers could emerge in possession of the pennant: if the Twins lost one in their series against the Orioles, and the Red Sox dropped another against the hated (but blessedly lousy-that-year) Yankees, . . . . It was exciting in 1967, when they tied for second place with the Twins, one game behind the Red Sox, and exciting again when they led the league most of the 1968 season with McLain’s 31 game season, and won the Series behind Lolich’s three game streak. Good times.

It was probably lost on my teenage brain that the players were professionals engaged in a child’s game of no particular consequence or significance. Still, even today, I imagine that the typical professional baseball player has a good deal more integrity than the average politician.

I do sense echoes of my teenage enthusiasm, my desire to hope for my heroes, in your “tactical analysis”. Your analysis seems to shade, at times, into partisan rooting cheering. You often seem to me to be intent on finding a path out of the darkness, a path that sometimes seems to depend on naïveté about the integrity of politicians or on an expectation of a spontaneous popular reaction unmediated by Media manipulators.

I believe, as I’m sure you recognize as well, that American politics, at a strategic level, is governed on behalf of a plutocracy of corporate business interests. What I think is often missing from your “tactical analysis” is a full appreciation of the constraints imposed to create that strategic context, in which the Parties are components of a single system and dependent on one another, like two professional wrestlers, pulling their punches, exaggerating their groans, and coordinating their grappling both to entertain and avoid getting hurt. You want to project trend lines into the future without connecting them to the Democratic Party of 2007-10, which wilfully continued the conservative governance of the previous Administration on many — most, I’d say — dimensions of policy, in defiance of the wave of popular discontent with the outcomes. Maybe next time will be different — it’s always a little different, I guess — but you don’t always take much responsibility for arguing out how or why it will be as different as you hope; the hope is given as its own justification, just as a Free Press sports columnist might offer it on behalf of the home town heroes.

“And yet with its stodgy prose, its absence of invective and red meat for the angry right, its microscopic circulation (6,000 subscribers, though some articles reach as many as 100,000 digital readers) and its one blogger who provides links to academic writings, National Affairs has become the citadel of reform conservatism.”

Who as perched this media outlet at the citadel of reform conservatism? Not much of an audience for this kind of thing, it seems. Seems the conservative audience is much more entranced with invective and hatred than with ideas.

I grew up surrounded by Chicagoland Reaganites (white, college educated people who saw gov’t as intrusive, unneeded and a problem to rein in. (Please note: I am talking ChicagoLAND, not Chicago, which has not seen a serious GOP candidate in more than half a century.)

I now live among the Southern “ethnics” who adore all things Republican, even if it hurts them at the pocketbook.

The only ideas I see coming from GOP are to obstruct anything Obama does and to prop up Christianity as THE right to be protected by our laws. The GOP ideology gives us loud, noisy men yammering about Creationism and faith-based initiatives and prayer in school.

There is also a terrible thread of racism running through everything they do. The accomplishments of Obama, if a white Republican, would be lauded and celebrated till kingdom come. But since he’s not a white Republican, he’s bashed and loathed and now, apparently, will be the subject of Boehner’s vague and stupid lawsuit. But America seems entranced with this version of stupid. Have no idea why.

America seems entranced with this version of stupid. Have no idea why.

uh, follow the money? usually works for me.

To Bruce Wilder: “America seems entranced with this version of stupid. Have no idea why. uh, follow the money? usually works for me.”

I have no idea why those without money are entranced with GOP policies that do nothing for them. I understand why Duke Energy, Halliburton, etc. love the GOP. But the little guys, that’s the puzzle.

To MPA Victoria: “We strongly support a woman’s right to choose to devote her life to her family and children.”

I wish Texas would secede and get it over with. WHO is preventing a woman from choosing to devote her life to her family? And why do they have the idea that a working mother is not devoted to her family? I can’t stand that smarmy bunch!

More not mire.

Damn ipad….

Roger Gathman #41: “from 68 until now.”

Chicago ’68, I think that is right.

A provision in Obamacare allows states to introduce single payer in 2017, something Romneycare did not do.

43 – I myself have a different theory. Until recently a conservative working class voter could vote as a sort of moral luxury for the guy who said he’d privatize social security and lower taxes. That voter would know that privatizing social security wasn’t going to happen – the people he didn’t vote for, the Dems or more centrist Republicans, weren’t going to do it. But he might get lower taxes out of the deal. Thus, you get to feel like you’ve really shown them, and you pay no price – you get a reward. This sets up a classic Pavlovian situation.The bell keeps ringing, and you get your treat. Gradually, though, as things worsen, economically, so that you really need your taxes lowered because you haven’t had any real wage rise in decades, you might begin to associate that lousy context with other things they guy you vote for says. Maybe you aren’t going to get your social security anyway (the folk wisdom of the right).

It is hard to counter this with a politics that promises not to privatize social security – and that’s about all. No treat, just the promise of no further pain. The Pavlovian effect, here, is that this voter expects disappointment and votes for less disappointment, at best.
This is not good. When the party that used to give out treats – social security, medicare, etc. – starts to agree with the idea that we can’t bow to ‘special interests’, they are on the downward path. Especially when the context is no longer the kind of emphemeral prosperity of the Clinton years.

44 — Privatizing Social Security almost DID happen. Remember that in 2006 the Dems were about to go along with George W. Bush in privatizing Social Security — privatization policy was studied in the Clinton White House. What happened was that, at the prompting of a growing outcry from the internet that they were all going to get their asses voted out of office, the Congressional Dems realized that their best option was to flatly refuse to privatize. The Senate Republicans realized they didn’t have the votes, and Bush dropped six months of personal effort giving “town hall meetings” in less than a week.

I made this video at that time, and on another URL it was seen by about 50,000 people in a week. (Sorry about the ad, I can’t scrub it tonight). Read all the comments under it:

“Main Street Muse #38: “I have no idea why those without money are entranced with GOP policies that do nothing for them. …the little guys, that’s the puzzle.””

It isn’t puzzling at all. The Democratic Party has taken on an increasingly anti-religious stance, and many of these people find religion very important. See for example: Hobby Lobby. Instead of trying to quietly find a way to make a religious workaround of exceptions or ways to get contraception to women without involving their religious employers, the Obama administration decided to make it a culture war case.

You’re fine to think they’re wrong. But it isn’t a mystery.

Another comment in moderation and I don’t know why. Was it any of these words?
tax advisors
loophole
freeload
freeloaders
pushback
suck money

“Main Street Muse #38: “I have no idea why those without money are entranced with GOP policies that do nothing for them. …the little guys, that’s the puzzle.””

It isn’t puzzling at all. The Democratic Party has taken on an increasingly anti-religious stance, and many of these people find religion very important. See for example: Hobby Lobby.

That’s an important point.

Also, doesn’t it stand to reason that the more of our resources the government sucks up, the less is left for everybody else? Obviously government spending is bad. Somebody has to pay for it, namely the taxpayers. If the taxpayers don’t have to pay right now, it’s our children and grandchildren who’ll have to pay — we’re mortgaging their future.

If the government would just stop spending so much there would be more left for the rest of us.

Except for the military, of course. We have to have a strong military. Plus it’s almost the only way a poor boy can get a decent living. A law degree isn’t worth much unless you have the connections to get into a good practice. An MD is OK but nurses and orderlies don’t get paid much at all. But if you can get into the military — they don’t take just anybody — then you can make a decent living and it’s practically the only way to get a college degree without going deeply in debt. You have to put up with military life and with living in foreign countries where people want to kill you, but for a lot of guys it’s the main chance. We need the military, but the rest of it is a waste.

So, are these ideas wrong? If somebody believed them but then he thought he should make sure, do tests, is there any way he could falsify them if they are in fact false?

Sebastian: “It isn’t puzzling at all. The Democratic Party has taken on an increasingly anti-religious stance, and many of these people find religion very important. See for example: Hobby Lobby. Instead of trying to quietly find a way to make a religious workaround of exceptions or ways to get contraception to women without involving their religious employers, the Obama administration decided to make it a culture war case.”

Where ‘anti-religious’ means ‘less power for certain selected believers to f@ck over others’. Which, I agree with you, is a real reason. These guys want to lord it over others, and resent a decrease in their power.

Bruce Wilder #52: “…it is no solution at all to close one’s eyes to the steps taken by one party…”

Nobody here is doing that. The system and its parties are as given. We don’t have the luxury of waiting around for God to give us a new pair of legs.

I think the problem is quite different. I think that you have joined the current crisis to a holistic thesis, and decided something like: it is now impossible to walk on legs to get to the doctor.

“Where ‘anti-religious’ means ‘less power for certain selected believers to f@ck over others’. ”

Look. I’ m a gay survivor of an aggressively Baptist style church and have abandoned Christianity entirely, sorry Mom. But trying to frame the Democratic Party mode as merely areligious is just silly. Especially at both the leadership levels and the intellectual underpinning levels it feels the need to attack religion in all sorts of ways. You of course justify it by sentences like the above. But the problem is that is is a classic conjugation: my intellectually rigorous regulation, his potentially problematic intrusion, religion’s obviously unjustified power to f@ck people over.

Well, the politicization of religion is not only costing the Dems – it is well on the way to destroying the evangelicals. In spite of their tendency to do skewed lobbying to show how powerful they are, all smart evangelicals know that their congregations are way down and in particular, they have lost the young. When the Southern Baptist church decided to ally with its traditional enemy, the Roman Catholic Church, about sex, it did bring the church into the Republican orbit for a while (oddly enough, while the only religious president of the twentieth century – Jimmy Carter – was president). But the price of this supposedly great move is now showing itself.
I would say that religion, here, is a cover word for certain religious views about women and sex. Religion certainly doesn’t cover the Gospel about mone, alcohol and peace. This, in the early twentieth century, was what religion meant when it entered politics – at least among the evangelicals, who inclined more to populism and bimetallism.

In my opinion, the dems are winning the youth vote partly because they didn’t form an alliance with an old and ailing evangelical movement. The churches that are succeeding, nowadays, are either non-political megachurches concentrating on the gospel of success or small back to Jesus churches.

ps – relative to this discussion is, I think, the article about the neo-cons and Hillary Clinton in the NYT yesterday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/are-neocons-getting-ready-to-ally-with-hillary-clinton.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

I’m not as worried about this as I perhaps should be, since Clinton’s term of office, supposing that she is elected president, is going to be another four years of subnormal growth, so I don’t think she will be able to sell the more “robust” foreign policy. Eventually, slowly but surely, the near trillion a year on war – defense, plus security, plus the energy department, plus who knows what – is going to start puzzling people. Atrios long ago made the point that the snickers in the commentariat every time a poll shows the populace favors cutting foreign aid (why it is 1 percent of the total spending, or something like that – those morons!) is driven by the fact that foreign aid, to the hoi polloi, includes many, many costs that are tucked into the defense department budget. The strict definition of foreign aid used by the journalists is sort of a sham.

The megachurch gospel of success doesn’t appear very non-political to me.

I was surprised by the usually astute barbara ehrenreich, who wrote a very snobby bit about megachurches in Bright-sided. In reality, many megachurches are, for one thing, integrated. Even in the south. This might not sound like much if you are not a churchgoer, but it is definitely pretty amazing in that context. Sure, these churches are inspirational and about how God wants you to make it – but they often have very large welfare programs for their members. This is a NYT story about the Houston church that Barbara Ehrenreich did her hit piece on: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/us/vacation-bible-school-spins-pop-culture.html?_r=1
Here’s a sociologically fascinating graf:

“This month, his brainchild drew nearly 10,500 children between kindergarten and fifth grade, and every one attended free of charge. Two-thirds of them do not even belong to Second Baptist, and somewhere between one-third and half come from single-parent homes, a particular target of Mr. Young’s ministry. After the Bible school session ended, each child’s parent received a hand-delivered thank-you letter, homemade cookie and invitation to church.”

Those single mothers aren’t going there to be denounced in the pulpit, that is for sure. These are no longer the forums of the old Reagan revolution.
I don’t see these as particularly centers of a new populism, since the church – like the political establishment – simply accepts the new plutocratic order. But I do think that there is a fullscale retreat from politicized religion that is leaving the old moral majority types behind.

“The churches that are succeeding, nowadays, are either non-political megachurches concentrating on the gospel of success or small back to Jesus churches.”

Except for the Catholic church in the U.S. which is growing as a result of a rising and highly religious Latino population.

I’ve always found it interesting that surveys of Latino views tend to map reasonably well with Republican views yet the Republican’s have done everything imaginable to alienate this bloc and they tend to lean Democrat in most states.

Sebastian H @49: “It isn’t puzzling at all. The Democratic Party has taken on an increasingly anti-religious stance, and many of these people find religion very important. See for example: Hobby Lobby.”

Making provisions for insurance companies to provide what the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecology call “the most effective reversible birth control available” is not “anti-religious.” Birth control, contrary to popular opinion, is not simply a tool of the sex-crazed femi-nazi. It’s used by couples to plan and control the size of their families. I cannot stand the idea that “religion” means women’s only function is as a semen-collecting uterus.

TJ: Latino views tend to map reasonably well with Republican views yet the Republican’s have done everything imaginable to alienate this bloc and they tend to lean Democrat in most states

The Democratic Party’s decrepit identity politics invents an Hispanic voting bloc (that doesn’t actually exist) and the Republican Party’s tribal politics attacks it, and the Democratic Party’s tribal politics replies in kind.

There’s a lot of regional variation. Where the economic oppression of a desperately poor racial minority is built into the local economy, the Republican v Democratic politics takes a pretty predictable shape: that applies to Hispanics in New Mexico and in southwest Texas along the Rio Grande in the same way it applies to African-Americans in the black belt of the Deep South or Native Americans on the reservations of Arizona or the Dakotas. As the Democrats have abandoned populism and social welfare liberalism, some of those voters have become discouraged and disinterested, but the Republicans give them no where to turn to. But, elsewhere the dynamics are quite different.

The naive left of the Democratic Party seems to think that Hispanics will uniformly be sympathetic to Democratic positions on immigration, and take offense at Republican expressions of hostility. And, they are right about taking offense at Republican expressions of racialist hostility. Obama’s election heightened the optimism of Hispanics about being able to make it in America, and the glow from that has complemented the repulsion factor to make the Hispanics a big, and seemingly reliable Democratic voting bloc.

Obama has taken a pretty tough line on illegal immigration; it would be interesting to know the inside calculation. (Anecdotally, from my personal acquaintance in L.A., Hispanics can be pretty hostile to illegal immigration.) Professional Republican operatives have noted that a large part of the Hispanic vote is persuadable, and have their eye on it: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, George P Bush . . . a cast is ready, and they won’t be voted off the island!

BW@73
I think I agree with you in some areas and maybe less in some others. I agree there is no such thing as a national hispanic or Latino voting bloc. It tends to be regional and to the extent its numbers move elections this is more a state phenomenon than a national one. Florida can be one thing, Arizona something else, California a third.

Where I may differ is I do see the possibility of their voting power becoming a more national force and if that happened, it wouldn’t surprise me if the vector of that bloc was through the influence of one or more religious persons. Its often underappreciated the degree to which religious leaders have motivated the formation and mobilization of the african american vote. When or whether the Latino population finds their own version of Dr. King remains to be seen.

Trader Joe: “I’ve always found it interesting that surveys of Latino views tend to map reasonably well with Republican views yet the Republican’s have done everything imaginable to alienate this bloc and they tend to lean Democrat in most states.”

They don’t. IIRC, Hispanics tend to favor a larger role for government. And of course, Republican views are the Hispanics are The Other.

” I agree there is no such thing as a national hispanic or Latino voting bloc. It tends to be regional and to the extent its numbers move elections this is more a state phenomenon than a national one. Florida can be one thing, Arizona something else, California a third.”

There are no national elections. The executive & legislative branches are elected at the state level or below; so Florida & California matter a lot, as does Texas & a number of other populous states. The Hispanic vote in those states matters a lot, and it won’t go for Republicans. If that’s not a ‘voting block’, I don’t know what is.

“Taking all existing coverage expansions together, we estimate that 20 million Americans have gained coverage as of May 1 under the ACA .

We do not know yet exactly how many of these people were previously uninsured, but it seems certain that many were. Recent national surveys seem to confirm this presumption. The CBO projects that the law will decrease the number of uninsured people by 12 million this year and by 26 million by 2017. Early polling data from Gallup, RAND, and the Urban Institute indicate that the number of uninsured people may have already declined by 5 million to 9 million and that the proportion of U.S. adults lacking insurance has fallen from 18% in the third quarter of 2013 to 13.4% in May 2014.

However, these surveys may underestimate total gains, since some were fielded before the late March enrollment surge and do not include children. With continuing enrollment through individual marketplaces, Medicaid, and SHOP, the numbers of Americans gaining insurance for the first time — or insurance that is better in quality or more affordable than their previous policy — will total in the many tens of millions.”

Looks like Obamacare is working…

I’m not sure what you mean by deference to black churches. I can’t immediately think of any issue where the Democrats exhibit any change in votes on any religious issue or topic because of black churches. Democrats are thrilled of course that Republicans have alienated black voters so completely that Democrats don’t have to do anything in particular to get the black vote–but I’m pretty sure that isn’t ‘deferential’. What issue do you think Mainstream Democrats would be different on if only it weren’t for the influence of black churches and non-republican Protestants?

The Republicans fail to appeal to blacks, Hispanics and Asians because they’re mostly white racists and don’t bother hiding it.

This is bad for us because Democrats don’t need to be very good, they only need to be better than that.

We would be better off with a multi-party system. I propose we change the voting to acceptance voting, or IRV. As it is, if one major party gets 49% of the vote and the other gets 51%, that’s only a little different from one getting 49%, the other getting 48%, and a third party getting 3%. When you vote for a third party you throw away your chance to vote against the worst of the top two. But if it was one party gets 49%, the other gets 51%, and the third and fourth parties get 35% and 28%, then the extra parties start looking like real threats. If too many people get disgusted by the major parties they’ll stop voting for them and somebody else will win.

With acceptance voting you vote for as many choices as you want. The one that gets the most votes wins.

With IRV you vote for your first choice and second choice etc, and the later votes only count after the earlier votes lose. People argue about which is better but they’re both good.

But existing politicians won’t want to change the rules because they won under the old rules and don’t know whether they’d win the new way.

I suggest as an earlier step we try to change the rules for voting in primaries, for either and both parties. As it is, sometimes the candidate who wins the nomination has only a fraction of the party organizers willing to work for him, sometimes a small fraction. He then loses the election, which is a problem for the party. But with acceptance voting, candidates who don’t get broad support won’t win. The guy who’s everybody’s second choice will win instead. You’ll tend to wind up with a candidate who is near the center-of-mass of the party.

Maybe if politicians see it working inside their own party, they’ll be more willing to see it happen for the government.

Or possibly people will be ready to try it after the revolution. It’s worth spreading the idea, in either case.

I think it is pretty much impossible to have a wonky publication that is “unleavened by illustration”. Plots are the foundation of numerate communication.

An entire publication that leads the reader through a “forced march…of statistics” without plots? That is just plain stupid. The people running the publication don’t even have the barest prerequisite of statistical education such that they’re aware that they’re doing it completely wrong.