Category: Electoral Politics Page 5 of 30

Watching “left wing” reactions to the Speaker’s election in the US House was instructive. Too many people were appalled when I pointed out that the left, the “Squad” specifically, could have done the same thing to get concessions in 2024.

If you were appalled at the idea then you are not a member of the left in any useful way.

(That statement and this post will occasion another torrent of abuse in the comments for me to throw into spam, and laugh about. If you think that after 30 years online, most of it moderating comments, you can insult me in a way I haven’t heard before, you are a fool as well as a piece of human garbage.)

You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.

Usually when a House member tries to vote in a way that the party leadership doesn’t like, they are threatened with the cut off of money or votes.

Right wing Republicans have power because they can deliver votes and money. Right wing Republicans who chose to get concessions in exchange for the votes in the House Speaker election (which is an entirely democratic thing to do an in line with what the founders intended) have their own, largely small money, donor networks. They don’t need the Republican money machine. Furthermore their voters expect them to act on their stated beliefs.

The difference with the Squad is instructive. They claim to have left wing beliefs, but won’t vote them when it matter. Either they are scared of the threats made by leadership, or they don’t really believe their beliefs, or they know their supporters don’t really believe and won’t hold them to account. If you won’t do something when you have the power to do it, you don’t really believe in it.

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This, by the way, is why the Netroots movement failed. For a while we had influence and were a rising power in the Democratic power.

Why? Because we could raise money from sources Democrats couldn’t; we could deliver votes and we threatened incumbents with primaries.

The Netroots lost because Obama figured out how to bypass us to get the money and votes without us and our primary threat proved weak.

The radical right has succeeded to a large extent because the institutional Republican party has not been able to bypass them and their primary threat is real. They stand a good chance of winning many primary challenges and they will make an incumbent’s life miserable if crossed.

The voters are loyal to their beliefs and, while not perfect, do have an expectation that their representatives will represent those beliefs. You may laugh at them for supporting even Trump, say, but if so you’ve missed the point: Trump gave them what they wanted most, control of the Supreme Court and an end to Roe vs. Wade. Those of you old enough will remember when Bush Jr. was forced to back down on his preferred Supreme Court nominee because she was too moderate and nominate someone acceptable to the pro-life movement.

No political movement has power if its “supporters”” do not actually vote their beliefs; donate based on their beliefs; volunteer based on their beliefs and hold their elected and un-elected representatives responsible when they violate those beliefs. (This doesn’t mean you expect reps to be perfect, but on whatever matters most — say abortion for right wingers — you hold them accountable.)

If you can be peeled off because of appeals to lesser evildom or some-such, you make your movement weak and your beliefs are worthless. Without solidarity and accountability there can be no movement which matters.

I don’t agree with radical Republicans about almost anything (except that the world and America would better off if the US interfered a lot less in other counties business). They are, essentially, my ideological enemies, though so are mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

But they have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.

(There’s some conflation in this article between Republican groups, that’s unavoidable. But basically the bleeding edge, wherever it is, has been winning internal Republican party battles for about 50 years. The left edge has been losing those battles and that’s why America has become an authoritarian dumpster fire with soaring inequality which is in possible terminal collapse.)

We’ll talk a little more about real belief and the use of power soon.

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The Republican House Speaker Votes Show Progressive’s Disbelief In Their Own Legitimacy

By Ian Welsh

On January 6, 2023

26 Comments

So, 4 days, 13 votes as of this writing. A small band of right wing House members are holding candidates hostage.

To win the bloc of rebels thwarting his rise, McCarthy was apparently prepared to agree to conditions that he had not been previously willing to accept. That includes reinstating a rule that would allow a single lawmaker to force a vote to remove the speaker, effectively placing himself at the mercy of his detractors who could trigger a vote at any point.

McCarthy and his allies hope the concessions and several other commitments will be enough to persuade enough holdouts to drop their objections and end the stalemate that has clouded the opening days of their new majority.

In 2020 Democrats had a House margin of 9 members. Five members, committed to vote as a bloc, could have held Pelosi or any other candidate to ransom until they got what they wanted.

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You have power if you’re willing to use it. The “Squad” is a joke because when they have leverage, they don’t use it. They don’t really believe in their own ideology: they don’t think they have the right to force other Democrats to govern better.

Republican right wingers, as much as I disagree with them, know how to use power. They don’t believe they are illegitimate.

Until left-wingers get over the idea that exercising power is bad, they will remain meaningless, and politics in most of the developed world will continue its 50 odd year swing to the right.

Podcast Interview On US Politics and the Midterms

By Ian Welsh

On December 7, 2022

6 Comments

I sat down with Chris Oestereich for a fairly long interview. He’s split it into three parts.

I recently sat down with @ianwelsh for the @WPCollaborative podcast. Part 1 of our discussion focused on the US elections and the state of US politics in general. https://t.co/b7oMVRaRWR

— costrike (@costrike) December 7, 2022

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“Trump Did More for Me than Biden Ever Did”

By Ian Welsh

On December 14, 2021

25 Comments

So, read this recently:

We got $1800 under Trump, additional unemployment, temporarily ended student loan payments and an eviction moratorium.

Biden promised $2000 and only gave $1400, ended additional unemployment, eviction moratorium ended and in Feb student loan payments will restart.

— Black in the Empire (@blackintheempir) December 14, 2021

Makes the point pretty clearly, I’d say. Even people I know who hate Trump admit he did more for them than any other President of their life. People who got the additional unemployment, in particular, often had the longest good period of their lives — where they didn’t have to work and had enough money.

Whatever you think of the policy, Trump gave people money or helped with their student loans, and Biden is taking money away from them and leaving them vulnerable to eviction.

I can’t see how there is any way, absent some big surprises, that the Democrats don’t get wiped out in 2022, and it won’t just be “off years, we lose.”

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The problem is that Republicans now feel more populist than Democrats; they appear more willing to just give money or help. It may be true that Republicans and a couple Democratic senators de-railed a lot of the good Biden wanted to do, but that doesn’t matter on the ground. If Biden can’t do good things or doesn’t want to (the truth is both), who cares? The end result is the same if your student loans re-start, your unemployment checks stop, and you get evicted.

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Not only isn’t Biden FDR, he isn’t even going to look as helpful as Trump.

The Next US President

By Ian Welsh

On February 27, 2021

36 Comments

Back in 2010, looking at Obama’s actions in his first term, I predicted the next president after him would be a “right wing populist.” (Scare quotes in original.)

Biden appears to have given up on the $15 minimum wage. He’s cut the promised $2,000 check to 1,400 and said that he’s OK with means testing it. He opened a new “children’s detention center” (aka: kids in cages.) He doesn’t want to forgive student loans, something he could do entirely on his own authority.

Now Obama did make 8 years, since he was very smooth, but he lost seats, including c.1K state level seats, then the US got Trump in 2016. Electorally, the only wings Obama had after 08, were for himself.

In 2024, Republicans are likely to be able to say, and be telling the truth, that “Trump gave you more money than Biden.” Trump himself may run, and stand a good chance of winning. If it’s Hawley, he’ll have the Trump base and be able to accurately say he fought for $15 and larger Covid relief checks.

But Democrats, again, are refusing to make a positive case for electing them. They refuse to do big, obviously good things for the majority of Americans, so the argument will be “we’re better than /them/.”

Works, till it doesn’t. Running on fear generally loses to running on Hope. Obama ran on Hope in 2008, but Dems since then have run on “we aren’t Republicans.”

People prefer hope to fear when voting.

So my bet is that the next President of the US will be a Republican “right wing populist.” The only possible antidote would be someone like AOC getting the nod. She has problems, but she can run a campaign of hope. However, it’s clear that the Democrats will do everything up to an including cheating to avoid a progressive as Presidential candidate, and I strongly suspect that Democratic apparatchniks, like their UK Labour compatriots, would actively work against a progressive presidential candidate, preferring a Republican win.

Hope everyone’s looking forward to Trump again, or Trump 2.0.

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Biden Is Determined To Lose Congress In 2022

By Ian Welsh

On February 1, 2021

89 Comments

One thing I admire about Biden is his principles. He’s spent his life hurting little people, and something as minor as holding Congress isn’t going to make him change his ways now. Make a promise, win an election, break your promise in the most weasely and public way possible.

I’m talking about $2,000 checks. There is no question this is what Democrats promised if Georgia elected two Democratic Senators.

And Biden promised this specifically:

A day before Georgians head to the polls to decide control of the Senate, President-elect Joe Biden sought to cast the election as a choice between immediate stimulus relief or months of gridlock, promising that victory by Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff would mean $2,000 stimulus checks would be sent out “immediately.”

After Georgia did, indeed, give Biden two Democratic Senators and control of the Senaate. Biden walked this back to $1,400 — saying that the previous stimulus bill had already paid $600. Now he’s been saying that perhaps the checks should be means tested, so only some people will get $1,400 checks.

This is all weaseling. It is recognized as such by ordinary people. Biden is proving that he simply can’t be trusted to do what he says, when he makes a clear promise.

Now perhaps the bill can’t pass: perhaps. But you still do it: you bring and simple up and down bill with only the checks and make people vote for and against it. Odds are some Republicans will vote for it (Hawley, for one) so you can lose a Democrat or two.

Failure to do this will be remembered. People thought they were going to get $2k, they aren’t going to get it, and they will hold a grudge on this. No ordinary person will trust a word Biden says from this point on.

Nor should they.

Billionaires, on the other hand, will find he remains a good friend.

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How Will Biden Rule Now That Democrats Control Congress?

By Ian Welsh

On January 6, 2021

46 Comments

So, Democrats have bare majorities in both the House and Senate, and they have the White House. They don’t have the Supreme Court.

Because the margin is so low, the people who will rule are those willing to cross the aisle to work with Republicans. Pelosi is fairly good at enforcing discipline, but Schumer is not, so we’re back into an era where right-wing Democrats will have a veto on a lot of legislation, as will the Supreme Court.

Because Biden is conservative in the psychological sense, he is unlikely to pack the Supreme Court unless they cross him in a big way, but because of the time-lag between when legislation is passed and when the Supreme Court strikes down the parts it doesn’t like, it’s unlikely he’ll have the emotional impetus to tackle the Supreme Court before the 2022 elections.

There is good news. $2,000 checks have become Democratic consensus, and they’re likely to pass. I do expect Biden to be more competent administratively, since while lazy, he will hire people who are at least capable of getting out of bureaucrats’ way and letting them do their jobs. (We’re not talking actual competence in most cases, remember how the Obama administration couldn’t handle the Obamacare roll-out. But at least they shouldn’t be throwing mail sorting machines into the garbage and so on. Little deliberate sabotage.)

The Biden environmental team is the one group that activists seem actually happy about. I’m still leery on this, given the Obama/Biden record on fracking and Biden’s statements about the issue, but I think if there’s one area that is likely to be better than one would expect given Biden’s record it’s environmental issues.

This is buttressed by the fact that the House rules waive Pay-Go for two areas: Covid and the environment. AOC and the Squad have claimed credit, but I think the real credit goes to Biden; these are the two areas he seems serious about and Pelosi does usually cooperate with Democratic Presidential agendas.

I would think this won’t mean anything too radical, but we can expect that parks and reserves will be protected and expanded, pollution rules likewise, and endangered species lists taken seriously. Serious subsidies for renewable energy seem likely. It is possible we may get a green rollout across the federal civil service, which is a bigger deal than it seems, as it covers a lot of buildings and vehicles and it helps set up a domestic market for green firms if handled properly.

Biden’s other priority seems to be Covid. I don’t know how serious or competent he will be, but the current rollout of vaccines has been pathetic. A proper mobilization, if necessary using the military and the National Guard, would make a big difference. It’s clear that the US isn’t going to get past Covid without mass vaccination, as US states won’t do proper lockdown, track and trace, or provide proper support to people who stay home.

The issue here is whether Biden and Pelosi will provide enough economic stimulus and support to create a good economy so that Democrats keep the Senate and House in 2022. If they run as much as possible through the Covid and environmental pay-go exception, then the answer may be yes, but the insane opposition from centrist economists and wonks to the $2,000 check shows that means-testing and economic throttling is still Democratic party orthodoxy. They just don’t believe in giving everyone money, bullying the Fed into keeping interest rates low, and letting the economy roar.
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If they give into the neoliberal tendencies of these apparatchniks, Biden will lose the House and probably the Senate in 2022, get impeached, and be a lame duck from 2023 on.

There’s reason to believe this is what they’ll do, simply because they still insisted on putting in the pay-go restrictions. Why have them at all, unless you really believe in them and want to use them to throttle spending on anything you don’t want (like Medicare for all)? By attaching that rule, Democrats have indicated that they’re not really interesting large programs which will have a huge economic effect and ensure they retain control of the House and Senate.

I hope Biden is a good President, and better than I expect. Realistically, he’ll be awful in a lot of ways, especially in foreign affairs and civil liberties. We can hope that he’s good on the environment, handles Covid better than Trump, and runs an economy that doesn’t suck.

But I suspect he won’t have the guts to do what is necessary. He won’t forgive 50K in student debt, for example. He’s not a radical, he’s been one of the key implementers of neoliberalism over the last 50 years, and he’s unlikely to go hard against its orthodoxy. He’s willing to act on environmental issues because neoliberalism is finally coming around to realizing they should do something about that. That “something” is won’t be enough, and they plan on making the peons pay for it instead of rich people, but it’s “something.”

Otherwise, Biden is still a means-testing neoliberal who thinks that if someone is poor they deserve to be poor, and that the rich are rich because they deserve to be rich.

So he’s likely to not do enough, and become a lame duck in 2023.

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