Michael, if you've never seen the movie Death of Stalin, I highly recommend it. Steve Buscemi is hilarious as a young Khrushchev. It's fiction, but still captures the late Stalinist era of Politburo backstabbing perfectly.
In my opinion, Obama was the fulcrum that enabled the Progressive wing to assume dominance.
I voted for Obama in 2008. I was optimistic that he would bridge the gap between white and black America. He was living proof that *no* level of attainment was denied due to race, as had once been the case.
But Obama legitimized and ennobled resentment. I'm still not sure whether he, himself, bore animus to the establishment--which was largely white, though in slow transition--or he simply saw the electoral potential of de-unifying the electorate and making a new coalition of malcontents looking for an external solution to their personal problems, which he encouraged them to express in deeply aggrieved terms.
So I did not vote for him in 2012, seeing him as dangerously divisive. It was as if he was the irresponsible bachelor uncle, who, on an extended visit, encourages the children to demand unwarranted goodies and privileges.
There was clearly a big pivot towards the Left among Democrats during the Obama administration. It is very unclear to me how much of it was caused by Obama personally versus other factors. I will be writing more about the topic in future articles.
Yeah, I was a stay-at-home-mom living in lower middle class economics at the time and struggling, so unfortunately I didn’t really realize how much, and what, was happening but I didn’t get the (vague) impression that Obama really intended ill will. I could see even then he was rubbish at foreign affairs, but some presidents are better at one or the other (although I was surprised at just how bad he was at foreign affairs), however since 2020 I have been able to read and research more and I’m astounded at how bad things got in the political realm. And the social realm. I actually had a (racist) black woman tell me a few months ago that she actually wants segregation back again, but for “her people”- to protect them from white people, because she “hasn’t seen so much racism in her lifetime as she has now.” (Image wanting Jim Crow back, for white people, in order to “protect” black people!!) The world has gone “nuts” and set itself on fire again. However, I noticed before others did, even way back before 2010, that we were repeating the interwar years between WWI & WWII. And I have read and researched and I see all the negative effects of the 1960’s (there were plenty of good things that came from the ‘60’s generation, but they act like their generation was the Midas generation and they aren’t.) The communist and socialist parts of that generation & ideas have been terrible! We haven’t taught the lessons of the “Cold War” (actually I believe that should be called WWIII) very well and so people with those aims in mind have captured the intellectuals. They, more than Obama (🤷♀️) pursued the insidious self-pity and resentment “oppression matrix.” Without recognizing and acknowledging this philosophy, we won’t get out of it. I sincerely hope for a successful moderate 3rd party that does better than either extremes in either existing party.
They just have to find somebody that wasn’t into politics and didn’t have a twitter account before 2024.
There is clearly some desire for a moderate (or at least passing for moderate) candidate on the left. Harris is tried to pretend to be one, and in a sense was (she clearly has no principles beyond where the wind is blowing). But when you’ve got interviews and tweets from 2020 on record you can never run away from that.
I’m sure there is some young person out there capable of shooting the shit with Rogan for three hours.
Michael, have you heard of George Friedman, of Geopolitical Futures? I was curious if you had read his book The Storm Before the Calm, about a coming convergence of political and social cycles around the 2028 timeframe. It seems somewhat relevant to this posting. I did not find it via my search at your Ratchet of Technology book review site.
George's friend, John Mauldin (an investment analyst and advisor) is also coming out with his own book on a similar theme of a collapse around 2028 that we "muddle through" and then good things [mostly technological] happen on the "other side". He is also now promoting an initiative called The Rational Optimist Society [https://www.rationaloptimistsociety.com ], which will probably focus more on economic and technological advances than political or social ones, but is trying to ameliorate a doom and gloom outlook. I understand they now have at least 15,000 people signed up for their alerts/ newsletters.
To answer the original question: I strongly suspect that Biden is going to be an enduring symbol of failure. History won't be kind to him. His legacy will contain elements of LBJ, Carter, McGovern, and Mondale, all rolled into one. Maybe a little of Woodrow Wilson as well.
In the end, he stood for nothing except defeating Trump, which he failed at miserably and sabotaged his own party's chances. The left will ultimately despise him for 2024, while the right and center will despise him for running as a centrist and yet letting leftist forces run wild in his Administration, without really ever acknowledging them or running on a platform of enabling them. His foreign policy will be remembered as a complete failure, though people of different political stripes will focus on different hobbyhorses, blaming him for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, for the Ukraine War (from several different angles), for Gaza, or for letting the Houthis shut down the Red Sea.
But I don't know. There's a lot to criticize about the Democratic Party, but the same goes for Republicans. I think the most likely single scenario is that both parties remain in a degenerate state for at least a few more election cycles, that both coalitions will remain highly negative, held together only by the obvious multitude of failures of the other side.
The shape of the post-Trump Republican Party is really hard to predict. There's a good case that it represents a completely ineffective coalition, that it loses most of Trump's recent gains among the working class (who were drawn by his personal brand) while retaining most of his losses among the educated classes (who remain disgusted by the stink of MAGA). I'd say there's a reasonably good chance that a Democrat that just talks like 2020 Biden can win a sweeping victory in 2028, even with a hard-left record, just by playing not to lose. Such an election probably ends up looking a lot like Obama's victory over McCain in 2008.
I largely agree with you, except for the two sentences. I think Biden is the last candidate who can viably use that “pretend to be a moderate” strategy and get elected president. Hence the “end of an era” narrative in this article.
I don’t see Democrats achieving electoral results on the federal level like 2008 without a fundamental change in their ideological views. And I do not see them being willing to change without losing 3 straight presidential elections.
But a lot will ride on what happens in the next 15 months.
I agree fully that Trump's next 15 months are crucial.
I didn't really address your main point on Kamala at the time, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the main thrust, that Democratic primary voters will increasingly favor Kamala-like candidates. The one Kamala-like primary candidate that we did see -- Kamala herself -- did awful in the actual primaries. She secured the VP slot because of behind-the-scenes politicking and turned that into the Presidential nomination with yet more behind-the-scenes politicking.
When you look at candidate quality objectively, aside from the top of the 2024 ticket, the Democrats are generally doing better right now, at least in terms of appealing to voters. I recently saw a list (wish I could find it) of the Congressional candidates nationally that showed the strongest outperformance relative to the Presidential race. They were nearly all Democrats.
The Republicans ought to have a significantly larger advantage in the Senate right now, and probably a larger one in the House (I just don't know the specific close races there), if only they had nominated fewer absolute clowns to contest those races.
It's easy to position yourself as a moderate to a lot of voters if your opponent is clownish enough and you are visibly less so, regardless of how radical your policies (which you never talk about) are. And by the thermostatic nature of politics, people will eventually grow tired of the Republican brand of clownishness and give the other side another try.
It might still be too early to know for sure [aka "really hard to predict"], but Vance seems poised to balance his working class upbringing with his Ivy League, VC, and other successes to keep many working class and educated class folks oriented to support him after Trump.
Perhaps I remain too immersed in conservative news sources, etc., and get my exposures to the Leftists' positions via that bias, but I think the woke/DEI aspects of the Dem party are now on the decline, even if that decline is slower than some of us would like. With that in prospect, the core remaining issue will be the economy and level of actual or perceived "progress" among both major parties [hence the value of this Substack]. We don't really know yet just how the national debt situation and the advances in AI will play out for either / any classes in terms of income, jobs, social positioning, etc.
I like Vance, he's the first politician that I've ever felt I could relate to. We're similar in age and probably culturally very similar. I too spent my childhood summers among the Scots-Irish and my school year in suburbia (though not in a broken home).
But also, I'm weird, and so far, in the one election he's been in, he underperformed basically every other Ohio Republican. I don't think there's any real indication that he would be very successful at winning a Presidential election.
I'll compare to Scott Walker and Ron DeSantis. Very common for Republicans to have noteworthy accomplishments and to be seen as the next big thing, but don't have the "it factor" to generate wins-above-replacement in national politics.
As for Woke, I think it's had a setback, but it's still a powerful force, especially among young women.
We're in a culturally conservative moment, but within the context of a greater culturally leftist supercycle, so hard to say how long the moment will last before cultural leftism makes new gains. One obvious clock that's ticking: the median voter will be a Millennial in ~10-15 years, and it's hard not to imagine the rise of the Millennials and Zoomers, and the fading of Boomers and Gen X, coinciding with a new leftist moment.
Michael, if you've never seen the movie Death of Stalin, I highly recommend it. Steve Buscemi is hilarious as a young Khrushchev. It's fiction, but still captures the late Stalinist era of Politburo backstabbing perfectly.
Thanks for the tip. Yes, I have seen the movie. It portrays the period very well. I never thought that I would enjoy a comedy about Josef Stalin.
Kind of like “Springtime for Hitler and Germany!”
In my opinion, Obama was the fulcrum that enabled the Progressive wing to assume dominance.
I voted for Obama in 2008. I was optimistic that he would bridge the gap between white and black America. He was living proof that *no* level of attainment was denied due to race, as had once been the case.
But Obama legitimized and ennobled resentment. I'm still not sure whether he, himself, bore animus to the establishment--which was largely white, though in slow transition--or he simply saw the electoral potential of de-unifying the electorate and making a new coalition of malcontents looking for an external solution to their personal problems, which he encouraged them to express in deeply aggrieved terms.
So I did not vote for him in 2012, seeing him as dangerously divisive. It was as if he was the irresponsible bachelor uncle, who, on an extended visit, encourages the children to demand unwarranted goodies and privileges.
Then leaves...
Thanks for the comment.
There was clearly a big pivot towards the Left among Democrats during the Obama administration. It is very unclear to me how much of it was caused by Obama personally versus other factors. I will be writing more about the topic in future articles.
Yeah, I was a stay-at-home-mom living in lower middle class economics at the time and struggling, so unfortunately I didn’t really realize how much, and what, was happening but I didn’t get the (vague) impression that Obama really intended ill will. I could see even then he was rubbish at foreign affairs, but some presidents are better at one or the other (although I was surprised at just how bad he was at foreign affairs), however since 2020 I have been able to read and research more and I’m astounded at how bad things got in the political realm. And the social realm. I actually had a (racist) black woman tell me a few months ago that she actually wants segregation back again, but for “her people”- to protect them from white people, because she “hasn’t seen so much racism in her lifetime as she has now.” (Image wanting Jim Crow back, for white people, in order to “protect” black people!!) The world has gone “nuts” and set itself on fire again. However, I noticed before others did, even way back before 2010, that we were repeating the interwar years between WWI & WWII. And I have read and researched and I see all the negative effects of the 1960’s (there were plenty of good things that came from the ‘60’s generation, but they act like their generation was the Midas generation and they aren’t.) The communist and socialist parts of that generation & ideas have been terrible! We haven’t taught the lessons of the “Cold War” (actually I believe that should be called WWIII) very well and so people with those aims in mind have captured the intellectuals. They, more than Obama (🤷♀️) pursued the insidious self-pity and resentment “oppression matrix.” Without recognizing and acknowledging this philosophy, we won’t get out of it. I sincerely hope for a successful moderate 3rd party that does better than either extremes in either existing party.
"... from the ‘60’s generation, but they act like their generation was the Midas generation ..."
Well, whether communist or noncommunist in the 60's, the Boomers are now in their Golden Years so now are the Midas generation! :-)
They just have to find somebody that wasn’t into politics and didn’t have a twitter account before 2024.
There is clearly some desire for a moderate (or at least passing for moderate) candidate on the left. Harris is tried to pretend to be one, and in a sense was (she clearly has no principles beyond where the wind is blowing). But when you’ve got interviews and tweets from 2020 on record you can never run away from that.
I’m sure there is some young person out there capable of shooting the shit with Rogan for three hours.
Michael, have you heard of George Friedman, of Geopolitical Futures? I was curious if you had read his book The Storm Before the Calm, about a coming convergence of political and social cycles around the 2028 timeframe. It seems somewhat relevant to this posting. I did not find it via my search at your Ratchet of Technology book review site.
George's friend, John Mauldin (an investment analyst and advisor) is also coming out with his own book on a similar theme of a collapse around 2028 that we "muddle through" and then good things [mostly technological] happen on the "other side". He is also now promoting an initiative called The Rational Optimist Society [https://www.rationaloptimistsociety.com ], which will probably focus more on economic and technological advances than political or social ones, but is trying to ameliorate a doom and gloom outlook. I understand they now have at least 15,000 people signed up for their alerts/ newsletters.
No, this all news to me.
To answer the original question: I strongly suspect that Biden is going to be an enduring symbol of failure. History won't be kind to him. His legacy will contain elements of LBJ, Carter, McGovern, and Mondale, all rolled into one. Maybe a little of Woodrow Wilson as well.
In the end, he stood for nothing except defeating Trump, which he failed at miserably and sabotaged his own party's chances. The left will ultimately despise him for 2024, while the right and center will despise him for running as a centrist and yet letting leftist forces run wild in his Administration, without really ever acknowledging them or running on a platform of enabling them. His foreign policy will be remembered as a complete failure, though people of different political stripes will focus on different hobbyhorses, blaming him for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, for the Ukraine War (from several different angles), for Gaza, or for letting the Houthis shut down the Red Sea.
But I don't know. There's a lot to criticize about the Democratic Party, but the same goes for Republicans. I think the most likely single scenario is that both parties remain in a degenerate state for at least a few more election cycles, that both coalitions will remain highly negative, held together only by the obvious multitude of failures of the other side.
The shape of the post-Trump Republican Party is really hard to predict. There's a good case that it represents a completely ineffective coalition, that it loses most of Trump's recent gains among the working class (who were drawn by his personal brand) while retaining most of his losses among the educated classes (who remain disgusted by the stink of MAGA). I'd say there's a reasonably good chance that a Democrat that just talks like 2020 Biden can win a sweeping victory in 2028, even with a hard-left record, just by playing not to lose. Such an election probably ends up looking a lot like Obama's victory over McCain in 2008.
Thanks for the comment.
I largely agree with you, except for the two sentences. I think Biden is the last candidate who can viably use that “pretend to be a moderate” strategy and get elected president. Hence the “end of an era” narrative in this article.
I explain why here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/kamala-harris-is-the-future-of-the
I don’t see Democrats achieving electoral results on the federal level like 2008 without a fundamental change in their ideological views. And I do not see them being willing to change without losing 3 straight presidential elections.
But a lot will ride on what happens in the next 15 months.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/priorities-for-the-second-trump-administration
I agree fully that Trump's next 15 months are crucial.
I didn't really address your main point on Kamala at the time, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the main thrust, that Democratic primary voters will increasingly favor Kamala-like candidates. The one Kamala-like primary candidate that we did see -- Kamala herself -- did awful in the actual primaries. She secured the VP slot because of behind-the-scenes politicking and turned that into the Presidential nomination with yet more behind-the-scenes politicking.
When you look at candidate quality objectively, aside from the top of the 2024 ticket, the Democrats are generally doing better right now, at least in terms of appealing to voters. I recently saw a list (wish I could find it) of the Congressional candidates nationally that showed the strongest outperformance relative to the Presidential race. They were nearly all Democrats.
The Republicans ought to have a significantly larger advantage in the Senate right now, and probably a larger one in the House (I just don't know the specific close races there), if only they had nominated fewer absolute clowns to contest those races.
It's easy to position yourself as a moderate to a lot of voters if your opponent is clownish enough and you are visibly less so, regardless of how radical your policies (which you never talk about) are. And by the thermostatic nature of politics, people will eventually grow tired of the Republican brand of clownishness and give the other side another try.
It might still be too early to know for sure [aka "really hard to predict"], but Vance seems poised to balance his working class upbringing with his Ivy League, VC, and other successes to keep many working class and educated class folks oriented to support him after Trump.
Perhaps I remain too immersed in conservative news sources, etc., and get my exposures to the Leftists' positions via that bias, but I think the woke/DEI aspects of the Dem party are now on the decline, even if that decline is slower than some of us would like. With that in prospect, the core remaining issue will be the economy and level of actual or perceived "progress" among both major parties [hence the value of this Substack]. We don't really know yet just how the national debt situation and the advances in AI will play out for either / any classes in terms of income, jobs, social positioning, etc.
I like Vance, he's the first politician that I've ever felt I could relate to. We're similar in age and probably culturally very similar. I too spent my childhood summers among the Scots-Irish and my school year in suburbia (though not in a broken home).
But also, I'm weird, and so far, in the one election he's been in, he underperformed basically every other Ohio Republican. I don't think there's any real indication that he would be very successful at winning a Presidential election.
I'll compare to Scott Walker and Ron DeSantis. Very common for Republicans to have noteworthy accomplishments and to be seen as the next big thing, but don't have the "it factor" to generate wins-above-replacement in national politics.
As for Woke, I think it's had a setback, but it's still a powerful force, especially among young women.
We're in a culturally conservative moment, but within the context of a greater culturally leftist supercycle, so hard to say how long the moment will last before cultural leftism makes new gains. One obvious clock that's ticking: the median voter will be a Millennial in ~10-15 years, and it's hard not to imagine the rise of the Millennials and Zoomers, and the fading of Boomers and Gen X, coinciding with a new leftist moment.