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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a crisis of ineffectiveness in Center-Left institutions

They are too deliberative, and take excessive time including voices of every stakeholder. So you don't just go do the "obvious thing". You cater to trying to listen to every voice in an effort to be as inclusive as possible. Committee after committee and an obsession with process. You can spend years placating NIMBYs and people living with their own alternate reality.

Meanwhile real people are suffering from lack of action.

This level of ineffectiveness just enables authoritarianism ("at least they get something done") and gets people to seek the private industry for their solutions.

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SF, Dallas, and Houston all have Democratic leadership that could be described as center left? (For America. To an outsider, America has two conservative parties)

The unhoused are 'stakeholders' too actually, so I'd describe Cali's problem as listening too much to wealthy/powerful stakeholders, while ignoring those most impacted. Who can forget Newsom's camp-destroying photo-op and forced bussing the undesirables out of town to prevent people from seeing 'crime' aka 'poverty'.

These institutions are not log-jammed by accident. "You cater to trying to listen to every voice" Reader, they only listen to their friends and donors, this is the problem. These 'listening sessions' you are told are 'stopping progress' exist to placate legitimate concerns. Blaming unions is also fun, I heard that a lot back in Cali, no matter the issue, no matter the union, from the wealthiest people.

Politicians that seem to do almost nothing are preferred by the donor class. Bog standard Democrats have more smoke for Zohran (the sincere housing and affordability guy) than they have for their 'Republican colleagues' in this era. That should tell you everything you need to know.

"This level of ineffectiveness just enables authoritarianism ("at least they get something done") and gets people to seek the private industry for their solutions."

EXACTLY. THIS IS INTENTIONAL. PUBLIC COST, PRIVATE PROFIT IS THE GOAL. A WELFARE STATE FOR BUSINESSES, NOT PEOPLE.

100%. Class solidarity is extremely strong amongst the wealthy.

Then why are the wealthy supporting left candidates, while working class supporting Trump.

This is a really toxic dynamic, and I don’t understand it.

That's what the previous poster was getting at - moderate left cantidates are not bad for the wealthy. Very status quo.

As for the working class, they don't feel represented, and the strongman shift is a predictable and toxic dynamic.

Because Trump, for all the problems and crimes, represents _action_. I hate what he has done to this country and the government, this administration is nothing but cronyism and self-enrichment the whole way down. But, it does show a different standard of action.

The wealthy are supporting candidates who offer lip service to leftist policies and then do nothing to cut through basic red tape and court challenges. The "leftist" candidates that the rich support run on building more housing, and then let the rezoning take 15 years in committee.

Here, in Seattle, Bruce Harrell would be a perfect example. He ran on transit, policing reform, and housing, and in the time he has been in office he has accomplished - nothing. No majors action has been attempted, and even minor reforms have been stuck in endless committees for this whole time. But he was happy to intervene to move a major transit station to a place less convenient for commuters and more convenient for his donors.

The next candidate the democrats put up for president is probably going to be pretty uninspiring, and talk a lot about a return to norms. But that's exactly what is wrong with the party.

The next Democrat that runs for president should be promising massive reform - if Kash Patel can fire an FBI agent for having a pride flag on their desk 3 years ago then the next guy running the FBI should be firing any agent that has ever used a slur or received a substantiated complaint about use of force or violating civil rights. If Trump can yank funding from cities for no reason, then the next Democrat in office should be cutting funding from any city with a housing shortage that doesn't enact zoning reform.

In short - wealthy donors love Democrats who talk big but wring their hands about using the power they are given. Because that keeps the system exactly the way the wealthy want it.

Most of the things you’re describing he “can’t” do, but his party won’t impeach him and the Supreme Court is complacent if not intentionally incompetent.

You can bet, with 100% certainty, the standard will change for a democratic president. There’s a reason half the shit he’s doing is being decided on the SCOTUS shadow docket and it’s because they want to be able to tell a Democrat no for doing the same thing in the future.

The court isn't complacent, the conservative justices know exactly what they're doing. They are operating under the belief that once a president from the other party gets elected again, they will still have the old rules to fall back on.

But the ultimate truth of power is that the bounds are whatever you can get away with. Both the republicans in congress and the supreme court are burning every shred of legitimacy they have left in letting Trump get away with his crimes. I am certain the standard will suddenly change when a democrat gets elected again, but the court has set itself up for a perfect "now let him enforce it" moment.

Student loan forgiveness gets blocked by the courts but the administration is allowed to block funds allocated by congress with no push back? Well, that's the new standard. I certainly won't complain much if the next democrat in office starts doing the same thing. If the republicans didn't want the president to have that power, they should do something about it.

>The wealthy are supporting candidates who offer lip service to leftist policies and then do nothing to cut through basic red tape and court challenges. The "leftist" candidates that the rich support run on building more housing, and then let the rezoning take 15 years in committee.

The wealthy don't want more than lip service because "doing things" from any political position because that would imperil the status quo in which they are wealthy.

You see the same do-nothing behavior from the "swamp" republicans who serve the same moneyed interests.

The highly educated (which correlates with being wealthy) support Left candidates, while the K-12 educated (which correlates with being working class) support Trump.

But it's questionable whether a class reversal still appears in the data once you control for educational polarization.

Lmfao which billionaires are supporting which leftists?

The answer is none.

2024 election map of New York City: https://projects.thecity.nyc/election-results-voter-turnout-...

Manhattan isn't supporting Trump. Staten Island is.

Manhattan isn't a person neither is Staten Island.

How does this show who billionaires voted for?

No leftists were running in that election. Let's see how Zohran's map looks

The wealthy aren't supporting left candidates. They are supporting Democratic candidates. These Democratic candidates fully believe in capitalism and support the same things that the wealthy support.

Some in the working-class support Trump for cultural issues since no one supports their economic issues.

It's quite easy to understand when you stop looking at what the politicians tell the rubes and see what they actually do.

Those on the left also quite often suffer from letting perfect be the enemy of good. I've had a few friends over the years who would seem to prefer nothing be done rather than make incremental progress. I.e., how people will be critical of a carbon tax to help reduce emissions simply because it's not good enough, even if its a step in the right direction. We've seen it with health care as well. It's "medicare for all or bust."

I appreciate the sentiment of wanting the right/perfect solution, but the perfect solution doesn't happen all at once. Often times a compromise is needed in order to help people right now, not hypothetically in the future. Sometimes that means you end up being less inclusive, but so be it if shit gets done.

This is something that Barack Obama used to complain about. Incremental progress is progress.

Talking from personal experience, it applies also. Perfectionists like me are often deadlocked into not releasing something until it's perfectly executed, caters to every use case, takes every edge case into account, etc. My late cofounder spent (too much) time training me otherwise, that small incremental changes will compound into larger ones in a big enough timescale, and that it's more effective to simply get started than deliberate ages over it.

Definitely. Right now they’re “cancelling” Bill Burr because he went and did a show in Saudi Arabia. One of the left’s staunchest allies for years and one of the few males on the left that young boys can actually identify with and he’s in the trashcan for doing a show with the Saudis. It’s bonkers.

If anyone is not cancelable it Bill Burr. Cancel culture is pretty defanged at the moment.

Now we get US Government and POTUS backed cancel culture in the form of lawfare / weaponized partisan govt agencies instead.

Action by the state cannot be cancel culture by definition, that's just sparkling repression.

I'm not "left", but I liked Bill Burr even though he's fairly uneducated and populist.

That's because Bill Burr is a hypocrite for it. He complains about billionaires and the rich, complains about not enough free speech (but Saudi stipulation was censorship about royals and religion), and complains about other people doing exactly what he did[0] (still sleazy if he says he'd do it too). He acts like he's Carlin, rants about other people's $ but he's really only about his own $ too.

People thought he held sincere ethics and would speak on them. They're disappointed he's just another greedy rich guy he was complaining to everyone about.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/comedy/comments/1nt1umd/comment/ngq...

I'm a leftist who has been a Bill Burr fan, and who is wildly disappointed he did a show in Saudi Arabia because of the naked hypocrisy of it.

Listen to his own past comments (starting at 30 seconds in):

https://youtu.be/1Jp4Ce8yStA?si=wThUQtlRJo07Qn1Y&t=30

He did exactly what past him was (rightfully) calling someone else out for. So, yeah, I think its fair game to call him out for it.

Voicing your displeasure that someone did something is not "cancelling" them (whatever that even means anymore).

Don’t kid yourself, you are effectively “canceling” them in an environment where the federal government is already making it hard for them to express their views. The left needs to have more of a long term view rather than just pulling down all the people standing up for them at the slightest deviation from what is expected. Soon there won’t be anyone left and the other team is chomping at the bit to eat you up.

‘Effectively canceling?’ Is Bill Burr silenced somehow?

Ironically, he is being silenced - the contracts he signed in order to perform prohibit badmouthing the Saudi regime and its policies

>Those on the left also quite often suffer from letting perfect be the enemy of good.

Exactly, its because they are idealist. Its also not hard to follow this observation over to Europe, pretty much the epicenter of idealism on earth, and then look around. Oh yeah, much more liberal than the US, with countless examples of idealism throughout. One of the current such examples is how Europe sees Putin, and how the East sees him.

The antidote to the idealism are individuals with confidence, and of course testosterone. Elements which when put in a pot with the aforementioned mix violently. You need people saying, well, this is good enough, and if its not I'll come up with something that'll fix it, when that happens.

As usual, a mix of both is needed.

I disagree. These half ass solutions come from parties with vested interests and effectively amount to inaction while taking the wind out of the sales of any real action. Carbon tax (the kind with credits and offsets) is a license to pollute. A direct tax on carbon would actually force them to change which would be bad for the economy so we can't have that. Compromise (listening to NIMBYS and lobbyists) is exactly what not to do. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

This is basically the entire theme of "Abundance" by Klein and Thompson, for those looking for a longer read on this.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...

thank you, i'll grab this!

Another recent book along the same lines would be "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back" by Marc Dunkelman:

"When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back."

-- https://www.niskanencenter.org/why-nothing-works-with-marc-d...

Abundance is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way neoliberalism with a new coat of paint. The answer to all questions is 'bust unions and environmental groups'. We've been here before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley

All the Reaganite conservative institutions (https://www.abundancedc.org/speakers) that are leery of fascism, but love business back this 'program'.

We need a new 'New Deal', that rebuilds what was broken during these last 90 years. We need the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Perkins of this era.

"Frances Perkins was not just the architect of SSA: she also proposed and implemented many of the foundational labor and safety laws1 still relied upon by the American working class. We can also thank her for the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, workplace safety, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief, a revitalized federal employment service, and universal health insurance. Well, except the last. We are still working on the last. "

She got everything she wanted done as Labor Sec. Except for universal healthcare. And it was a great loss for everything living American every year since.

Somebody hasn't read the book, just knee jerk reactions to it.

Is this guilt by association? eg The roster of that Abundance Festival?

I've read the book. Ditto the criticisms. Heard the interviews.

My "abundance" take away is a rejection of neoliberalism, austerity, Hayek, etc. That it's akin to Green New Deal, Build Back Better, etc.

Am I wrong?

We need 3.5m (?) new homes, mass transit, upgraded grid, 4Tw (?) of additional renewable energy generation (plus their batteries).

Right?

I don't care how it gets done. I don't care what labels (pejoratives) are used. I don't care who profits.

I just demand it gets done, sooner than later.

You could call it guilt by association, sure! But critically, the funders and speakers and membership that build a movement give life and shape to what that movement becomes. Not caring about 'means' only 'ends' or who profits strikes me as appallingly naive. You tell me, can these people build the houses you so desire?

From this page https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/who-is-behind-the-growin...: compare your words: "take away is a rejection of neoliberalism"

to the following descriptions: "Mercatus Center, but without the libertarian brand that limits that think tank’s outreach to the left." "The group is currently headed by Julius Krein, the founder of pro-Trump publications The Journal Of American Greatness and its successor, American Affairs"

"gone so far as to posit that AI is the only possible solution to climate change and that it should be powered even by fossil fuel sources." "PI is a subsidiary of the The Third Way Foundation, and it proudly proclaims itself as the “intellectual birthplace of the New Democrat and ‘Third Way’ movements.”

"Chamber of Progress also used to be funded by Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious FTX, Blockchain.com, Zillow, Twitter, and the investment firm behind WeWork, SoftBank. The group has launched a “Abundance & Affordability” project, is listed among Inclusive Abundance’s “Abundance Landscape,” and its employees are vocal in their support of the agenda."

"Manhattan employs conservative provocateur and Ron DeSantis ally Chris Rufo—the progenitor of the debate over “Critical Race Theory”"

"Stand Together’s Chairman and CEO, Brian Hooks, is also the President of the Charles Koch Foundation and previously served as the executive director and COO of the Mercatus Center"

one of the most prominent groups opposing the Obama administration’s two key domestic policy goals: health care reform and cap and trade

The philanthropy has funded “pension reform” work by right wing groups, school privatization efforts, Bari Weiss’ anti-woke university, the Niskanen Center, and sponsored both the 2024 abundance conference and the 2025 conference.

Do I need to go on? These people will decide what "Abundance 'progressiveism'" actually looks like if it continues forward.

They are not hiding the fact they are actually conservatives with new labels. They will republican even more if they are given voting positions.

Do you think these people are on your side? Its all oil and techoncratic billionaires top to bottom.

"Do you think these people are on your side?"

Who is on your side? People who made it all but impossible to renew and improve basic civilizational infrastructure (housing, roads, railways, electric grid, power plants etc.) by introducing so many demands that the system slowly ground to a halt?

Nope. They may say that they are on your side, they may even think that they are on your side, but this is a classical case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. If someone makes it all but impossible to build new things by elevating chronic naysayers and various special interests into a vetocracy, they are not on your side.

You don't have to trust the abundance movement, but they still have a valid point. In the last 10-15 years, there is a growing awareness all across the West that we have painted ourselves into a corner by heaping too many regulations on further development of cities and land and introducing too many chokepoints where any project can be stalled in courts. This not only makes our living standards worse, but also increasingly leaves us vulnerable to various authoritarian regimes - not just in the sense of raw industrial power, but also propaganda.

If you are a progressive, try to swing your preferred politicians towards more permissiveness, too. This situation badly needs correction and if the progressive part of the spectrum gets stuck on its de facto preference of NIMBYism - for any reasons, be it "everything bagel" demands or the sort of visceral distrust towards other political players that you yourself exhibit quite nicely - they are done for.

Regular people don't want to spend several years fighting a paper war with fifty implacable stakeholders in order to build a block of flats. This is just madness. If someone imposed that system on another country by force, we would consider it an act of war comparable to a naval blockade. Why precisely are we doing this to ourselves?

Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear. Too many people have interest in vetoing everything. It is time to learn this bitter lesson and move on. Maybe you could be the person who makes the change in the progressive circles - try talking to the people you trust about this.

I feel ya.

> Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear.

I don't think we need to go that far. :)

It's been long known the NEPA, CEPA, and other safeguards, were fully captured by bad faith actors and in much need of reform. Like closing legal exploits used to thwart any and all development, as you well know.

It's been kind of amazing how quickly YIMBYism has spun up and matured into a scrappy effective advocacy group(s). And we're starting to see progress, payoff, real results.

The recent CEPA reforms are already yielding positive results. eg By short-circuiting environmental reviews for redeveloping properties that are already in built-up areas. Real common sense "well, duh" type reforms.

There's no shortage of needful common sense reforms. I'm now confident these reform efforts will now accelerate. State-by-state, since federal action is currently closed off.

The biggly "abundance"-esque type challenges I worry about are structural and financial. Reforming public utilities, tackling regulatory capture, investment, green banks, industrial policy, etc.

In a nutshell, I want everything promised in the Green New Deal, times at least 4. (Which does account for inclusion, empowerment, environmental justice, and so forth.)

No, I do not.

I also know that policy and legislation cannot be moved forward without them. Realpolitik.

Further, there may be an opportunity to mix-up the current coalitions. Checkout the "Montana Housing Miracle". NIMBY vs YIMBY is old vs young, not right vs left. With the reactionary nativists crashing the economy (again), the business members of the current ruling coalition are getting grumpy. Let's drive a wedge between the trogs and the merely greedy. Again, Realpolitik.

I also demand some kind of plan or strategy to address lack of housing and climate crisis. From experience, advocacy is easier than opposition. If not Abundance, then what's the plan?

Lastly, we are completely out of time. Land use and housing are the biggest (missing) components of any USA strategy for addressing climate crisis. I, the most left-wing person you're ever likely to meet, no longer have the luxury of partisanship. So I don't care how the things we need get built.

If we survive until 2050 (and beyond), our kids (and grandkids) can carry on the revolution.

Wow, deregulation and austerity, what a fresh perspective on the economy!

This abundance "movement" has absolutely nothing new to offer, it is simply a rebranding of neoliberalism. It's easy to spot too, just look at who backs the movement: the same old establishment democrats and their wealthy donors. The same people who have entranched the democratic party into this technocratic blob of ineffectiveness and societal erosion. In particular, it is financially backed by, among others, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. This should raise some red flags.

Also, I personally like winning. This abundance movement has exactly zero electoral hype. American voters don't care about it at all. Meanwhile, populist leftists like Mamdani are able to generate momentum for the left for the first time in decades. That Klein, Thompson and the billionaires behind them are so harshly criticizing them should raise additional red flags.

The writer of this article (Dave) publicly dislikes Derek Thompson and keeps criticizing Matt Ygelasis for his austerity fetish, along with praising Mamdani

Your argument boils down to "people already said some things like this in the past" (ok, and?) and "some people I don't like agree with part of it", which is very weak and doesn't address anything in substance.

You know, you can still want to be able to build housing without having to wait 1 year for permitting or not want to live in a place where making a basic train track is basically impossible because of the number of stakeholders that have to come to a consensus and still vote for Mamdani. You are allowed to have non black and white opinions.

You can even have 1% of the things you think are good in common with Peter Thiel, and that won't immediately turn you into a far right psychopath.

You can even, hear me out, be for less regulation on specific areas where there has been a massive lack of supply but not for "deregulating the economy" in it's entirety!

Housing can either be an investment vehicle or affordable, but not both at the same time. The abundance crowd remains willfully blind to this obvious reality, and is why they will fail. They promise to make housing affordable while receiving millions from people who became rich off of housing not being affordable. It fundamentally can't deliver on its promise, because it is completely compromised from the start.

I perceive abundance as a big grift to keep the populist left out of the democratic party, which is something they spend a lot of energy doing. How else could you explain this obsession of the abundance crowd for shooting down any populist policy or messaging?

alas, in southern California 1 year for permitting would be a miracle.

my family has been in construction for 3 generations, and 2 years is now considered normal. plus we have to seal up everything for energy efficiency, then have to remove and add more venting for the next round of inspectors who want to ensure air quality. We stopped building in Sun City because of the $17K tax per unit to fund schools even though it's a 55+ senior community. Currently it's about $115K per house in permitting fees in rural Riverside county. Makes it difficult

How do you get “austerity” from a movement arguing that far more things should be built?

"How do you get austerity from neoliberalism, a movement that argues that more wealth should trickle down?".

The abundance folks constantly fight the populist left on government spending. Their proposed plan for "having more things built" is to deregulate the housing market and pray that somehow, the massive land owners, who de facto control the political life of this country and have had their way for a century won't fight it.

Absolutely ridiculous claim sorry.

They want SME's running regulations.

Look you can read between whatever lines you want, but Klein specifically calls out the left getting out of their own way. That even when the left tries to do far left top-down socialism, that the regulations and special interests groups prevent them from capitalizing on their own successes.

So even if you come back with something like price controls and government building more housing, you run into the same problems, and you say something like “fuck norms, ignore the neo-libs / conservatives, housing for the people!”

Congratulations, you’ve advocated for deregulation.

Mamdani just seems like a typical nepo baby that had some ideas in college he wants to try out because he skipped history class.

I don't think Dave associates himself with the abundance movement

for as long as the left has not been about the working class and been about university educated white collar government workers this has been true though. It may have been true prior to that too i just dont have living memory to back it up. There is something about being removed from the reality of how the metaphorical sausage is made that turns the left from having some valid concerns but usually wrong ideas on how to address them into actively incomptent civilization destroyers. I would love to know why.

When you go back to The New Deal, its absolutely the case that the Dem coalition was much more effective at delivery. To some extent because FDR acted very aggressively with executive action.

My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition. It would be far more effective in a number of ways... with broader appeal.

It’s a different coalition now though. The FDR Democrats were labor focused. Then the 60s happened. The New Left student movements reoriented away from labor and towards racial/gender/sexual equality, and Kennedy signed the Civil Rights Act. Southern whites opposed this and you had George Wallace pop up, splitting the Democrats, and then Nixon swooped in with the Southern Strategy. The Democrats needed a new coalition and they went with disadvantaged racial/gender/sexual groups instead of labor.

The transition didn’t really finish until Clinton and the New Democrats though. Campaign money and TV ads got to be really important in Presidential politics, and to get that money, Democrats had to appeal to rich people, so they got rid of most of the labor aspects of the platform. Clinton signed NAFTA and MFN for China. Now there were two pro-business parties that served different identity groups. Ironically the last gasp of labor was the billionaire Ross Perot in 92 and 96 who ran on an anti-NAFTA platform. The only way he could do this credibly was to use his own money to buy TV time.

Kennedy did not sign the Civil Rights Act, Kennedy was dead. He wanted it, but it never got any support until after his assassination. It was LBJ who got bipartisan support for the bill. After it passed and LBJ used federal powers to force southern states to stop being so racist, many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.

The democrats did not leave their labor base. The Democrats have never stopped pushing labor rights and unions and similar.

The voters who were pissed with being forced to desegregate left the democrat party. Turns out there were a lot of people who thought it was more important to be able to be racist than unionized.

I don't know why you believe billionaire Ross Perot, Texas businessman and prominent supporter of the war on drugs, who told Larry King that we should "cut medicare and social security for those who """don't need it""" " is "pro labor" ffs. He's the same kind of "we should run the country like a business" populist as Reagan and Trump, and just as wrong. He was literally a big supporter of Reagan as Reagan dismantled Unions and union rights!

NAFTA did not send your job to China, business executives did. Business executives like Ross Perot, who made his money selling computing services to the US government, and didn't really do much else before or since.

Even if NAFTA had been completely blocked, average Americans would still have been screwed from Reagan's changes to the country. Underpaid workers in other countries are not getting all the money, surely you recognize that right? The money never even leaves the country.

You're right about the Civil Rights act, I had misremembered. However Kennedy met with MLK and proposed the Civil Rights act.

Blaming "business executives" is unhelpful as an explanation because "business executives" is not a static group. Business executives who moved their manufacturing to China or Mexico made their businesses more profitable or at least preserved their profits, because they saved a ton of money. Business executives who kept manufacturing in the U.S. generally were outcompeted and they were either replaced, their businesses shrunk, or they were forced to reorient towards higher end, smaller markets.

NAFTA, MFN/PNTR for China, and then WTO membership for China is what created this situation. This was a total disaster for American labor. All of the things that Perot warned about with the "giant sucking sound" were exactly what happened.

Underpaid workers in other countries most certainly did get a lot of that money. Have you seen what has happened to wages in coastal China over the past 25 years? Most of that money comes from exports, and a large portion of those are to the U.S.

Perot's other policies don't necessarily track as "pro-labor." My point was just that the two biggest things that negatively affected American labor in the past 40 years were passed under Clinton. Interestingly, the vestiges of the labor-oriented Democratic party were still there in Congress, and large majorities of Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA and PNTR for China. On NAFTA, this result wouldn't even be possible today due to the "majority of the majority" way that the House is run.

> many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.

In this case, "many" is at most 2.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators... Thurmond was the only US senator who switched parties in the 60s. Harry Byrd (from Virginia, not Robert from West Virginia) stopped caucusing with Dems in 1970.

No other US senators switched parties until 94.

Before Thurmond, the previous switch was by Morse (Oregon) who went from Republican to Democrat in 53-55.

The same seems to be true of the House of Representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_represen... .

Pretty much every prominent Dem segregationist only left office when he retired.

That's why the "first Republican elected since Reconstruction" events didn't start until the mid 70s and didn't really get going until the mid 80s.

Now come on, man. There's no explaining the decline of organized labor in the Democratic Party without the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

Probably so. I don't know enough about the politics at that time though.

The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate. He wasn't authoritarian, he was operating with the clearest mandate America had until Reagan (not that I agree with the mandate Reagan was handed and followed through on)

The reason he was able to threaten the Supreme Court with packing is that it was a credible threat.

The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it. Several prominent (terrible human beings) Dixiecrats screamed about "Democrat authoritarianism" for (checks notes) forcing southern states to stop being racist as fuck, and the south has been thoroughly republican voters since. Don't worry though, Strom Thurmund insists he wasn't a racist, he is just against being forced to allow black people to get the same legal treatment as white people.

A bunch of racists aren't willing to support welfare and public investment if black people get it. How do you form a coalition between them and black people?

These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans, and they do not care about the rest.

FDR had this support because Americans rallied behind the New Deal because 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. That's the pain it took before America was willing to do socialism-lite.

If you want democrat policy, you need to elect them. Simple as.

> These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans

I really want to know when this was because all the men (white or not) who worked the mills and the mines in my memory were effectively functional alcoholics because life sucked so much.

Its anemoia - nostalgia for a time you didn't live through.

They don't want the actual 50s, they want an illusion of what they saw on TV shows depicting white, wealthy, suburbia.

> The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate.

FDR directly embedded his staff in Congress and told them what they were going to do, and vigorously attacked anyone who got in the way of his agenda by any means necessary, including using the FBI and IRS against them, denying them federal funds, etc. He also was very effective at bullying the press - look at what went on with radio licenses. He even (via the Black Committee and FCC) conducted mass surveillance on his political enemies.

FDR did have a lot of support in Congress but brutally punishing people is what made him effective. He was certainly one of the most authoritarian Presidents in American history and we should probably thank our lucky stars he was a good one.

> The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it.

Odd, that the working class stayed with the Democrats for half a century after your claimed divergence.

It is true that progressive politics played a major role in the shift in the 2010s. But neither is that equivalent to the CRA, nor does it answer the question of why the working class reoriented around stupid bullshit. That latter, deeper issue has to do with the governing and professional classes of the US, which have shifted toward symbolic and procedural issues over broad material wellbeing, mostly because symbolic shit doesn't adversely affect professional classes' pocketbooks that much.

There is also the matter that the American political leadership managed to maintain some level of economic prosperity for the white working class in the intervening decades. Now that is collapsing, and the old narratives have returned.

The white working class and professional managerial class are in fact largely aligned in their zero sum assessments of the current situation. They differ principally on the nature of the solutions. No one on the left has the courage to acknowledge this, much less attack it.

>My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition

They need to run the goddamn country.

Whether it's liberal white women with their whole foods and Starbucks or conservative men with their 100k pickup trucks the morals and political whims of "people rich enough to not get fairly instantly screwed if they make bad decisions" have been a disaster for this country.

It hasn't always been that way. The US political left did used to focus more on working-class issues. They only really lost the plot in the early 2000s when they started navel gazing on performative ideology and luxury beliefs, leading to an inversion in some of the voting blocks for the two major political parties.

More importantly what that did was split the working class. Even in this very thread there's people referring to the "working class" as if they also aren't in it.

If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.

If we want solidarity again we need to dispel the notion of working class meaning poor, blue collar workers. We've been pitted against ourselves, our divide shouldn't be left v. right it should be ALL working class against the ultra-rich.

>If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.

The petty bourgeoisie is a thing, and if you receive stock-grants as part of your pay-package, you're in it. You own real-estate in an expensive city where your property is an appreciating asset? You're in it.

> "If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class."

TIL that CEOs and other C-level executives (ones hired from the outside by the board, not founders) are working class. It's a definition that is clearly too broad to be useful.

It’s universities. I’ve seen this myself - universities are the heart and souls of the American left. It used to be the labor hall.

The universities could have continued in their socially productive capacity if their leadership realized their obligations should take precedence over career advancement. Instead, they chose to embrace cost disease. The reactionary right remains committed to finishing off whatever remains.

A local school system near me was facing some financial issues a number of years ago.

The superintendent noted that there were dozens and dozens of individual social programs that the school system managed. Many extending well beyond education and even testing the bounds of what might be called social work.

While they all (on the surface) operated on the idea that if students got these services they would be more effective in school ... it wasn't clear for most of them if that was even the case / being measured.

The superintendent noted that the only thing they could be sure of was that if they touched anyone of them, they were sure to be someone's baby and they'd face a backlash.

Personally, I'd like to see a more "fail fast" type system for a lot of social programs. Run it, see what happens ... then make the call if it goes any further. But that would mean people would have to start up programs fast, and shut them down fast. Both are not easy.

>it wasn't clear for most of them if that was even the case / being measured.

If the programs were doing what they claimed they'd be measuring that and using the numbers as further justification. The fact that they're not speaks volumes.

Most of these programs are funded by government organizations so any measurement rules come form there, if there are any. It's less a choice than it is something (like much of the program) dictated.

> Personally, I'd like to see a more "fail fast" type system for a lot of social programs. Run it, see what happens ... then make the call if it goes any further. But that would mean people would have to start up programs fast, and shut them down fast. Both are not easy.

My partner does exactly this with healthcare in BC. They spin up a project to trial, say, allowing nurses to prescribe methadone directly, or even for patients just to get it directly. They measure costs, patient outcomes, etc etc. After a set time get patient, doctor and nurse feedback.

Looks good? Great, roll it out to the whole province and hurry up about it.

They’re running 50+ of them continuously. Constant improvement is awesome.

Things like this is what DOGE should have been. What a wasted opportunity.

Yes, but given who was running DOGE it was never going to work.

This is an interesting thought. I also wonder if Houston is "helped" by the fact that they're a blue city in a red state... that kind of ideological conflict of governance requires unique and localized solutions. Whereas SF is blue city in a blue state, so it creates a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation.

I think it also just creates a lack of "urgency" problem. I live in a blue city in a red state. Constituents expect results because we can't rely on our state gov. Local officials know this. There's more competition from more progressive candidates too locally which is helpful in keeping liberal officials more focused on results instead of the game of politics.

Idk, I think it's different for every city. But I think the point I'm trying to make is that having some kind of political constraints in governance seems to typically be a good thing for the sake of getting some shit done.

Actually I think I'm just stating an obvious point now given the glaring ineffectiveness of our two party political system...

It probably does make it easier to make drastic changes as described to consolidate data sharing etc when they ultimate authority is likely the city/county instead of the state. The state level agencies will have their own policies, systems and goals/approaches that might not suite the individual cities so the programs remain separated and fragmented.

The article itself makes this point more than once.

From time to time, we see response here that doing X is dumb because it is not a perfect solve. It's very common in discussions about solving pollution or energy use. Don't bother using EVs as we're still burning coal. Don't recycle because so much trash is everywhere else. These people are suggesting doing nothing until the perfect solve is available. Perfect will never happen. Instead make as many things better where you can while you can.

I am not left, right, center. I am not even American. I am mostly curious why this is seem in center-left but (as I understood) not expected from the right?

I am supposing that and endless stack of problems to solve is always good for any politician. There is always room to blame something/someone and propose something else of there is a problem.

From outside, the discussions over immigrants in the United States seems to shadow deeper discussions on how to fix the rest. It seems to blame the outside world for the lack of internal competitivity while not recognising any of the obvious problems. For example, it is not a matter of preferirng public or private healthcare like here in Europe. It is a matter of getting what makes more sense. Same for environment, trading, taxes, etc.

The cities in Texas are run by Democrats

Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea. The issue is the centre-left voters keep asking these institutions to take on more power, channel more funds and veto more projects [0]. I don't see how else they expect large centralised bodies to play out. I'm not sure if the US left even has a collective theory of how to fight institutional rot apart from stuffing institutions with leftists and assuming they do they right thing. Expecting good results from that strategy requires a certain naivete to the sort of people who seek power in government.

[0] Not just them, the centre right also seems to love the idea based on what I've read. Not the brightest crowd.

Isn’t China even more centralized? They complete infrastructure projects in years not decades.

I dunno, is it? In what sense are you comparing the centralisation of the two countries?

The US is pretty centralised. Around 40% of its spending is via the government and of the balance a lot of the decision making is controlled by the government.

China isn't centralized when it comes to boots on the ground policy implementation. The regional governments are extremely important. They direct subsidies and issue loans and have massive balance sheets and their own banks, they decide production capacity and things like factory output targets, they even decide which industries they specialize in, like EVs vs solar panels, etc.

Of course there is a framework from the CCP, and if red lines are crossed the big stick comes out and people are made an example of, but the regionals run the society. Including things like the social safety net. That's all regional and it's different between different regions.

There's a fairly large gap between how China works internally and how the west sees China.

For a more concrete example, the recent Third Plenum planning session was the typical communist style decade long roadmap with loud bullet points and achievement targets. Then there is a multi-month-long gap, all of the politicians go home, they work out how to achieve the goals between themselves, and they present their plans for approval. It's actually not as top down as you would think.

As you may sense, there is a sort of competition at play. If the committee is looking to consolidate key sectors like electric vehicles and increase industrial profits, the leaders who implement this guidance the best that get the acclaim. Likewise, if the central government is doing something like de-risking the regional banks, you so not want to be the region with the problems. Good luck in your career and climbing the ladder if so...

This power play dynamic is also strategically used to play different factions against themselves in a multifaceted way that is sometimes obvious but often has quiet subterfuge, in typical Chinese fashion.

They are mostly stem types in charge though.

> Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea.

True if you can identify the correct stakeholders and those stakeholders are aligned to the goal.

It becomes unhelpful when the list of stakeholders is so long and disconnected from the goal that listening to stakeholders becomes an endless cycle of meetings and talking about the problem instead of doing anything about it.

In my local experience, initiatives related to homelessness and drug addiction treatment attract a lot of people who like the idea of being involved because it advances their career or sounds good on their resume, but many of them are unqualified to be involved and think the role will involve a lot of delegation and deciding where to send money to other groups, not actually doing any of the work directly.

Basically, a lot of people who want to be in charge and claim leadership but who also don’t want to actually do the hard work.

I think the center-left deliberately prefers not to get things done. Centrists are usually people treated well by the status quo and would rather find any excuse to keep things the way they are than acquiesce to the left or meaningfully challenge the right

While I’m not specifically arguing against your conclusion, there are a few narratives that to me point unfortunately to a systemic cause.

One is the book why nations fail, which among other causes points to circumstance and initial conditions. There was an interesting freakonomics podcast interviewing the mayor of, I think it was Dallas, and why Dallas was so successful, and the problem with California isnt sort of generic leftness but the specific organization of power structures that supports Nimbyism in a way that Texas doesn’t.

Plus the irony the EPA was formed by Nixon and the modern California environmental act was formed by Reagan?

The conspiracy theorist in me might suggest that in fact some of the environmental protections are explicitly right leaning to prevent progress.

[..]

"Provide more assistance"

My point is that I'm not sure we need more assistance. TBH we need better, more efficient assistance. We spend a lot on deliberation, not enough on delivery.

A lot of this is due to leadership gaps IMO. Center-left leaders (ie Schumer) look weak because they excessively triangulate every stakeholder. Instead leaders need to act as true leaders, which means being a touch less collaborative / trying to triangulate. And more focused on some top-down, cut through red-tape, have a vision, persuade people etc.

(Then, arguably if people saw the system working well, they might want to award it with more money.)

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