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My guess is that GND activists are right (politically) about the Overton Window stuff — wanting big, bold sweeping initiatives instead of incrementalism. But that they’re wrong (politically) about the strategy of lumping environmental policy along with a grab bag of other left-ish policy positions, instead of being more targeted.

But I have no idea. It’s just my priors, and they’re fairly weak priors.

I actually think one of the better arguments for swinging for the fences in terms of the GND is that because the Senate is so resistant to change, you need some kind of paradigm shift

A paradigm shift where even action that seems incremental is actually quite bold, just because the goalposts have shifted so much.

natesilver: I think the shift would just be a generational one. There’s a *lot* of evidence that people under about age 40 are willing to consider left-wing worldviews that a previous generation might have considered too radical.People under age 40 have also lived with two really unpopular Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (along with one semi-popular Democratic one). So I think there’s a decent chance that policy in the U.S. shifts significantly to the left as those young people grow older and gain influence and power.

natesilver: I’m not on the fence so much as I just have no f’ing clue. I guess the heuristic is “what we tried before didn’t work, so let’s try something new”, which I suppose on some level I agree with

Like, maybe the GND isn’t any more likely to succeed than incrementalism, but when it *does* succeed, there’s a much bigger payoff.

natesilver: That even goes a little bit to whether you think climate change is a linear or nonlinear problem. If you think we’re all fucked unless there’s a massive paradigm shift, then you take whatever chance of a paradigm shift you can get, even if you also risk a backlash. If you think climate change harms are more adaptable and/or uncertain and/or solvable by technology and/or with international agreement, maybe you want a more incremental approach.

The GND shouldn’t be taken as a stand-in for the overall debate about incrementalism vs. the big swing. You could very easily think that an incremental approach works for health care but is a disaster for the environment, for instance.

I want you to step back and look at our republic through the eyes of a 21 year old who lives in a median American city and who wasn’t educated about our infallible nation by the new Patriotic Common Core Curriculum.

They were born in 1999. Two of the three presidents in their lifetime were elected by minority vote. The only one who was twice elected with a majority vote was denied the opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice based on some quite shaky arcana and phony rule-making that they think was largely political bullshit

The president they know the best has a complete disregard for the law or political norms, received about 3 million fewer votes than his opponent, had the help of a foreign enemy, was impeached for soliciting illicit foreign help again and not removed from office. After all that, he did exactly the thing that his party said the black president who had actually received a majority vote couldn’t do in an election year.

Pretty much every person this 21 year old knows is looking for a job in one of the dynamic largely democratic cities where all the growth is in the country but most of these enclaves have minimal national political power and their vote is irrelevant. In the Senate, the Republicans hold a majority of the seats representing states that make up a minority of the country

Nate Silver tells them that for Joe Biden to be assured to win the electoral college he needs to win the popular vote by about 5 points. 5 points!

So, I recognize things are cyclical and there are hypothetical political realignments that could benefit the Democrats. And, yes, I recognize and support our system of checks and balances. But we need to balance that structure against a body politic that believes they are represented or else they are either going to restructure it or burn the whole thing down. 

as a general matter at the time I believed 2015 was probably the best or one of the best years in human history and that 2035 would probably be even better. 

I found that everyone else pretty much landed in the same place. Whether it was the increasing view that we have lost the rope on the climate catastrophe, or that our political system was faltering, or that some of our biggest tech innovators are actually doing more harm to society than good, or that the country poised to supplant us in global dominance is an evil and repressive regime or some combination of it all… There was just this sense that something has shifted, that we have crossed a threshold and maybe our best days are actually behind us.

I was thinking about your comments on The Next Level about the conservative movement.  I know you're still trying to figure out "what happened" because I've also been trying to figure out what happened and how I didn't see it.

I am not sure how much "fault" there is, but I think a big problem was that a large part of the conservative base thought that [conservative elites] were dog whistling when we were on the level.

Conservatives three decades ago talked about Western Civilization and Great Books.  In retrospect, it's amazing to me to think that people really thought the conservative base was interested in things like Aristotle or Shakespeare or Beethoven.  (I was very naive.) 

We talked about “markets” and the wisdom of the masses—and then a plague hits and people scoff at basic safety measures.

We said “personal responsibility”—and they heard that African Americans were poor because they deserved it.

If I had to do it over again, I am not sure I would have figured out the problem any faster.  I would not have imagined that so many people were faking it.  It wasn't an intellectual error so much as being a poor judge of character. 

Which is funny—because we conservatives thought we had such a hard-headed view of human nature.

But all along it turned out that we were deeply sentimental in wanting to believe that “like-minded” people cared about the same things we did, for the same reasons.