Opinion | What Democrats Need to Do Now - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...aga-trump-vance-democrats.html
Democratic party dynamism MAGA class struggle struggle class security 2024 platform culture politics policy
shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 24
- No Cached
-
Over the last eight years, think tankers, activists and politicians have developed MAGA into a worldview, a worldview that now transcends Donald Trump.
-
It has its roots in Andrew Jackson-style populism, but it is updated and more comprehensive. It is the worldview that represents one version of working-class interests and offers working-class voters respect.
-
J.D. Vance is the embodiment and one of the developers of this worldview — with his suspicion of corporate power, foreign entanglements, free trade, cultural elites and high rates of immigration.
- ...30 more annotations...
-
MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.
-
If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.
-
In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators.
-
the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.
-
we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common futur
-
“the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”
-
Americans have a zeal for continual self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone.”
-
Americans can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like Vladimir Putin at bay.
-
Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.
-
MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.”
-
MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.
-
MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside
-
MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics.
-
The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness.
-
If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century
-
My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from the psychologist John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.
-
MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.
-
Americans can’t be secure if the border is in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a sense that the government has things under control.
-
Americans can’t be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that Democrats largely built are so important.
-
offer people a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete
-
champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.
-
If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric — elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business
-
They need to stand up to protectionism, not join the stampede.
-
Democrats need to take on their teachers’ unions and commit to dynamism in the field of education.
-
Democrats need to throttle back the regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled innovation.
-
tap back into the more traditional American aspiration: We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can create a fluid, mobile society.
-
The economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less
-
Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and dynamism.”
-
t aspiration is not like a brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that can be fed or dampened
-
“The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”