The oldest argument in the electoral book goes like this: We must appeal to swing voters in order to win, because elections are decided by swing voters.
I would say that the swing voter views are entirely consistent and sane and it’s the higher level ideologues that are inconsistent and weird. Left wingers who are pro worker and pro unlimited immigration are entirely inconsistent.
Taxing people who earn more than but not at your level can be dismissed as hypocrisy only if you assume the swing voter is likely to be rich, but he’s probably median income, so it’s just a matter it taxing higher earners.
Jailing people who are “taking the piss” makes sense. Rehabilitation and treating prisoners well is fine but if it doesn’t work - for serial offenders - it’s time to get tough.
Arguably most labour movements post war were socialist and often illiberal. Or for sure, non liberals voted for them, certainly by today’s standards. Catholics for instance, largely preferring Labour.
The inconsistency was with the higher level ideologies - thatcher who wanted the state out of your pocket but in your bedroom.
Yeah I was with him for the first half of the article but not when he said “well the cultural left is just correct on everything so we can compromise”.
The job of a politician is to separate good political information from bad. There is always going to be some contradictions on the body politic you’ve got to mold into actual policy with trade offs. It’s stilly to throw up one’s hands and go “what that person tells the pollster isn’t a think tank policy brief so they just need to be re-educated to my ideology”.
Look, I can give you a country that is “culturally right but economically left while being a successful capitalist economy”. Singapore. They have universal healthcare. The government owns all the land and everyone lives in public housing. They also have relatively low taxes and don’t have a welfare dependent class.
They also execute people for drugs and cane people for vandalism.
LKY managed to balance listening to public feedback, educating the public, and focusing on policy instead of obsession with polls.
The OPs fault is that he just thinks people who don’t agree with him are ignorant. “If only they knew immigrants!” Bro people that deal with immigrants (not as their maids and servants) are a lot more likely to understand the costs than ideologues.
Sure, but welfare isn't that popular anywhere. Social Insurance is popular, and people try to use that to smuggle in welfare, because its easy to slip welfare into a social insurance program. Hence the kind of "contradictory" sentiments that the public expresses on the matter.
The difference between Social Insurance and Welfare is the degree to which the payments and distributions follow Insurance principles (NPV of claims roughly equivalent to premiums) rather then being naked ongoing transfers, some lasting generations.
So Singapore can provide Universal Health Insurance as a form of Social Insurance, but it also has high deductibles, forces even the poor to save significantly from their income to pay for it, polices vices to public health, and regulates public hospitals to keep costs down. A welfare version of this would be like the US Medicaid system where you have to be poor to get it and pay nothing ever.
Indeed, I don't disagree with much of the substance of what you say. I'm just very dubious about describing Singapore as economically left. It's only left if you consider small government economically right, which most right wingers would pay lip service to. But most actually existing right wingers just hate taxes and social spending, rather than having any real commitment to small government. That's why I actually think Singapore is economically right wing in that specific sense, while having the flexibility to use big government in areas where the private sector does not work so well.
But if you compare Singapore to its alternate world twin, Hong Kong, then yes, it'd be economically left - and better off for it.
Small vs Big Government has a lot of components. You could call Singapore "Big Government" for owning all the land or you could call it "Small Government" because people have 99 year leases. Government is a relatively small % of GDP but they have a much stricter laws in some areas. Etc Etc.
I'm generally of the opinion that "right wing" encompasses more then laissez faire but "economically right wing" means laissez faire in the American context.
I believe the desire for social insurance in areas where private markets can't solve the underwriting problem (like long term health insurance) is so strong that any smart statemen would try to solve the problem in the least disruptive way possible. If they just leave the problem unaddressed someone with a worse solution will come along and attain the political power to implement it.
I think we only disagree on classifications re. Singapore.
Re. structuring social insurance, I think doing it in this way is one way you could implement things that would appeal to most actually existing right wing people. As you say, welfare is not usually popular on the right, but structuring it as insurance with premiums is less likely to bother them as much. Right wing elites would probably fume about it, but most people aren’t that purist about their ideology.
Time to turn Rotterdam and Hamburg into countries. Just to have some other nation with exciting high GDP numbers to project something into. Or maybe just my hometown (it's some small German town with car factories and an unusual high number of people living in suburbs that are not legally part of the city, inflating GDP per capita numbers for the city itself. ) Just don't try to prove anything based on Singapore.
I think this article illustrates how silly the political compass is as a way to understand real people's political ideology. The chart turns what is a fairly nuanced position into "swing voters are tankies" by quite literally flattening it. Which shouldn't be surprising, because it was originally created by radical right-libertarians in service of their ideological project.
I go through a more specific analysis of what's going in the article. The swing voters don't accept all """economically left""" or """socially right""" positions because ultimately the root causes aren't best understood in those but instead generosity and fear of exploitation, but as a way of introducing the basic thesis and the overall pattern of issue polling data I think it's fine.
>> "Political education, then, is a big part of the solution."
I've long thought education was the only solution. The problem is that those who need it most need it most because they devalue it so and don't want to be educated (because it would force them to adjust their worldview). So, the real problem seems to be getting people to value education.
Being aware of the political realities and making accommodations for them isn't crazy. You don't have to go all the way to betray your principles or make policies that are popular but bad, but you also don't have to emphasise them in ways that alienate others either. That's MY's message, and you're probably not fairly representing his views. His stuff is about centrism to win elections, but he's often encouraged them in precisely those ways - economically left and socially right, not the centrism that you're criticising.
For example, on land use reform, which he's for, his advice is to pitch it as getting the government off your back to righties, rather than pitching it as racial justice (which it is in the US, but that's just not going to appeal to conservatives). A lot of his point is about normie framing of issues to get progressive policies passed.
"I grant we should make a point of disavowing some of the sillier stuff one sometimes sees coming out of identitarianism, which I suppose could be seen as a concession to this view. but I think wokeness is relatively politically minor in its actual importance. and even making a huge deal out of disavowing it would be a mistake- drawing attention to it. We should lead by example and talk about other things instead. We should parry the rights attacks on “wokeness” by pointing out their own little theological absurdities"
I think this is just the Yglesias position on moderation. I think you're strawmanning him a bit to say he naively chases some mythical centre ground. E.g. he is very clearly pro immigration, and seems unwilling to sacrifice it to "move to the centre", even if that would be a more popular stance.
ah! now you are being more realistic about voting. people want opposites, and candidates who can stand boldly apart from the status quo. Everyone I know who voted for Trump in '16 couldn't make up their minds between him and Sanders until Hilary was chosen. Every one I know who voted for Hilary was for Sanders and then voted reluctantly.
This non-pundit tried to explain this to the dem convention in '84 (the last one they let me attend.) Mondale was my man but I knew he was seen as too establishment in a contest with Reagan. Reagan was anti-establishment (not true , but perceived) and Jackson would have made a better showing. Reagan however turned Mondale into a failed Jimmy Carter, and the voters of the Midwest have voted against themselves and impoverished themselves by continually voting Republican. They voted Carter in '68, then as Reagan destroyed unions, their factories shut down, they've voted Republican ever since. People have no idea how their votes effect them.
In the 60's everyone went mad for Eugene McCarthy for his anti-war stance, not even aware he was the first America to widely promote Ayn Rand's economic ideas.
Voters have no how to vote, but they are always drawn to the more radical because the status quo has never benefited them.
People have no idea how to vote for people and often vote for people against their interest. But the nevertheless know the issues they believe in. Witness Ohio turning out strongly in opposition to a referendum to maintain abortion and voting for Vance who strongly opposes it.
And polls are not very good at predicting anything. They couldn't predict coke drinkers not wanting coke to taste like Pepsi though polls said 80 percent of soda drinkers preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi. Ninety percent of the respondents said they wanted a smokeless cigarette and no one bought Premier. I wouldn't rely on polling too much. Gallup polls said no one watched Star Trek, they gave it three and the numbers dropped to zilch the third year. The network got more letters to put it back on then the polls said had watched the whole show in all three years combined.
Polls are the most meaningless manner of predicting outcomes ever conceived of.
"But even if you were only concerned with winning I still think moderating on these matters would be a mistake. In the long run, ‘economically left, culturally right” formations are rarely stable- probably because while they make electoral sense they don’t make sense at the level of ideas- especially when one is well informed about how public policy works in practice."
You were doing great until here. Just that new wave right wing parties haven't cracked the code completely in the western world doesn't mean it isn't cracked. After winning it once with your magic formula, do the following:
1- Take control of media using every tool in the box. Those vary between sending an unexpected huge tax bill to bankrupt and take them into government control to giving credits from government banks to your pals so they go ahead and buy them or whatever. In 4-5 years you can take over more than half of mainstream media. Half of the remaining would be handled in the next 4-5 year window.
2- Solve the benefits problem by giving to so many so that giving to the undeserving becomes the norm thus not a problem, and benefits get watered down so much that the undeserving getting them mostly stops being a problem for other people. You will want to have around 25% of the population on benefits one type or the other. Have subjective criteria in there so even if not completely, they mostly go to your voters. You're aiming for the poor and uneducated as your voters.
3- After taking over the businesses you like to your cronies or from people that will oppose you, be as business friendly as you can be. Even if there are some forms of tax to the 0.01%, just erase their debts every couple of years. Your coalition would be the poorest 50% plus the richest 0.01%.
4- Find inventive tax or tariff schemes to screw over the middle class while not touching your coalition. For example, the income tax bracket should skyrocket just after the median wage so anybody who's not in the poorest 50% should be paying enormous taxes. This extends to their expenditures. Identify things that the poorest 50% don't buy or can't afford, and the 0,01% don't care about. Tax and/or tariff them mercilessly.
This will take you until the productivity penalty you're imposing the country bankrupts it and you can no longer feed the 50%. Luckily this would take around 30 years so you'll be fine.
At the cost of sounding like a pundit, but I think another important tool the left is oft leaving on the table in the fight against paranoia is framing.
Immigrants are the perfect example: in which universe, except the one conveniently entered when talking about immigration and literally nothing else, does the phrasing "taking a job" make any sense? People perform jobs, usually servicing others and creating value for everybody. This is most clear-cut when immigrants open businesses (their job has been literally created by themselves), but applies more broadly. Highlighting the contributions immigrants make and many take for granted, while talking about them contributing, could help restoring sanity in a discourse that right now is walking on its head.
I would say that the swing voter views are entirely consistent and sane and it’s the higher level ideologues that are inconsistent and weird. Left wingers who are pro worker and pro unlimited immigration are entirely inconsistent.
Taxing people who earn more than but not at your level can be dismissed as hypocrisy only if you assume the swing voter is likely to be rich, but he’s probably median income, so it’s just a matter it taxing higher earners.
Jailing people who are “taking the piss” makes sense. Rehabilitation and treating prisoners well is fine but if it doesn’t work - for serial offenders - it’s time to get tough.
Arguably most labour movements post war were socialist and often illiberal. Or for sure, non liberals voted for them, certainly by today’s standards. Catholics for instance, largely preferring Labour.
The inconsistency was with the higher level ideologies - thatcher who wanted the state out of your pocket but in your bedroom.
Yeah I was with him for the first half of the article but not when he said “well the cultural left is just correct on everything so we can compromise”.
The job of a politician is to separate good political information from bad. There is always going to be some contradictions on the body politic you’ve got to mold into actual policy with trade offs. It’s stilly to throw up one’s hands and go “what that person tells the pollster isn’t a think tank policy brief so they just need to be re-educated to my ideology”.
Look, I can give you a country that is “culturally right but economically left while being a successful capitalist economy”. Singapore. They have universal healthcare. The government owns all the land and everyone lives in public housing. They also have relatively low taxes and don’t have a welfare dependent class.
They also execute people for drugs and cane people for vandalism.
LKY managed to balance listening to public feedback, educating the public, and focusing on policy instead of obsession with polls.
The OPs fault is that he just thinks people who don’t agree with him are ignorant. “If only they knew immigrants!” Bro people that deal with immigrants (not as their maids and servants) are a lot more likely to understand the costs than ideologues.
Singapore is economically left in the sense of having a big government presence, as opposed to laissez faire. They are very very anti welfare though.
Sure, but welfare isn't that popular anywhere. Social Insurance is popular, and people try to use that to smuggle in welfare, because its easy to slip welfare into a social insurance program. Hence the kind of "contradictory" sentiments that the public expresses on the matter.
The difference between Social Insurance and Welfare is the degree to which the payments and distributions follow Insurance principles (NPV of claims roughly equivalent to premiums) rather then being naked ongoing transfers, some lasting generations.
So Singapore can provide Universal Health Insurance as a form of Social Insurance, but it also has high deductibles, forces even the poor to save significantly from their income to pay for it, polices vices to public health, and regulates public hospitals to keep costs down. A welfare version of this would be like the US Medicaid system where you have to be poor to get it and pay nothing ever.
Indeed, I don't disagree with much of the substance of what you say. I'm just very dubious about describing Singapore as economically left. It's only left if you consider small government economically right, which most right wingers would pay lip service to. But most actually existing right wingers just hate taxes and social spending, rather than having any real commitment to small government. That's why I actually think Singapore is economically right wing in that specific sense, while having the flexibility to use big government in areas where the private sector does not work so well.
But if you compare Singapore to its alternate world twin, Hong Kong, then yes, it'd be economically left - and better off for it.
Right Wing = laissez Faire
Singapore isn't laissez Faire.
Small vs Big Government has a lot of components. You could call Singapore "Big Government" for owning all the land or you could call it "Small Government" because people have 99 year leases. Government is a relatively small % of GDP but they have a much stricter laws in some areas. Etc Etc.
I'm generally of the opinion that "right wing" encompasses more then laissez faire but "economically right wing" means laissez faire in the American context.
I believe the desire for social insurance in areas where private markets can't solve the underwriting problem (like long term health insurance) is so strong that any smart statemen would try to solve the problem in the least disruptive way possible. If they just leave the problem unaddressed someone with a worse solution will come along and attain the political power to implement it.
I think we only disagree on classifications re. Singapore.
Re. structuring social insurance, I think doing it in this way is one way you could implement things that would appeal to most actually existing right wing people. As you say, welfare is not usually popular on the right, but structuring it as insurance with premiums is less likely to bother them as much. Right wing elites would probably fume about it, but most people aren’t that purist about their ideology.
Time to turn Rotterdam and Hamburg into countries. Just to have some other nation with exciting high GDP numbers to project something into. Or maybe just my hometown (it's some small German town with car factories and an unusual high number of people living in suburbs that are not legally part of the city, inflating GDP per capita numbers for the city itself. ) Just don't try to prove anything based on Singapore.
I think this article illustrates how silly the political compass is as a way to understand real people's political ideology. The chart turns what is a fairly nuanced position into "swing voters are tankies" by quite literally flattening it. Which shouldn't be surprising, because it was originally created by radical right-libertarians in service of their ideological project.
I go through a more specific analysis of what's going in the article. The swing voters don't accept all """economically left""" or """socially right""" positions because ultimately the root causes aren't best understood in those but instead generosity and fear of exploitation, but as a way of introducing the basic thesis and the overall pattern of issue polling data I think it's fine.
Oh I am not arguing your actual position, but pointing out the use of the political compass chart undermines it.
>> "Political education, then, is a big part of the solution."
I've long thought education was the only solution. The problem is that those who need it most need it most because they devalue it so and don't want to be educated (because it would force them to adjust their worldview). So, the real problem seems to be getting people to value education.
Being aware of the political realities and making accommodations for them isn't crazy. You don't have to go all the way to betray your principles or make policies that are popular but bad, but you also don't have to emphasise them in ways that alienate others either. That's MY's message, and you're probably not fairly representing his views. His stuff is about centrism to win elections, but he's often encouraged them in precisely those ways - economically left and socially right, not the centrism that you're criticising.
For example, on land use reform, which he's for, his advice is to pitch it as getting the government off your back to righties, rather than pitching it as racial justice (which it is in the US, but that's just not going to appeal to conservatives). A lot of his point is about normie framing of issues to get progressive policies passed.
"I grant we should make a point of disavowing some of the sillier stuff one sometimes sees coming out of identitarianism, which I suppose could be seen as a concession to this view. but I think wokeness is relatively politically minor in its actual importance. and even making a huge deal out of disavowing it would be a mistake- drawing attention to it. We should lead by example and talk about other things instead. We should parry the rights attacks on “wokeness” by pointing out their own little theological absurdities"
I think this is just the Yglesias position on moderation. I think you're strawmanning him a bit to say he naively chases some mythical centre ground. E.g. he is very clearly pro immigration, and seems unwilling to sacrifice it to "move to the centre", even if that would be a more popular stance.
ah! now you are being more realistic about voting. people want opposites, and candidates who can stand boldly apart from the status quo. Everyone I know who voted for Trump in '16 couldn't make up their minds between him and Sanders until Hilary was chosen. Every one I know who voted for Hilary was for Sanders and then voted reluctantly.
This non-pundit tried to explain this to the dem convention in '84 (the last one they let me attend.) Mondale was my man but I knew he was seen as too establishment in a contest with Reagan. Reagan was anti-establishment (not true , but perceived) and Jackson would have made a better showing. Reagan however turned Mondale into a failed Jimmy Carter, and the voters of the Midwest have voted against themselves and impoverished themselves by continually voting Republican. They voted Carter in '68, then as Reagan destroyed unions, their factories shut down, they've voted Republican ever since. People have no idea how their votes effect them.
In the 60's everyone went mad for Eugene McCarthy for his anti-war stance, not even aware he was the first America to widely promote Ayn Rand's economic ideas.
Voters have no how to vote, but they are always drawn to the more radical because the status quo has never benefited them.
People have no idea how to vote for people and often vote for people against their interest. But the nevertheless know the issues they believe in. Witness Ohio turning out strongly in opposition to a referendum to maintain abortion and voting for Vance who strongly opposes it.
And polls are not very good at predicting anything. They couldn't predict coke drinkers not wanting coke to taste like Pepsi though polls said 80 percent of soda drinkers preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi. Ninety percent of the respondents said they wanted a smokeless cigarette and no one bought Premier. I wouldn't rely on polling too much. Gallup polls said no one watched Star Trek, they gave it three and the numbers dropped to zilch the third year. The network got more letters to put it back on then the polls said had watched the whole show in all three years combined.
Polls are the most meaningless manner of predicting outcomes ever conceived of.
"But even if you were only concerned with winning I still think moderating on these matters would be a mistake. In the long run, ‘economically left, culturally right” formations are rarely stable- probably because while they make electoral sense they don’t make sense at the level of ideas- especially when one is well informed about how public policy works in practice."
You were doing great until here. Just that new wave right wing parties haven't cracked the code completely in the western world doesn't mean it isn't cracked. After winning it once with your magic formula, do the following:
1- Take control of media using every tool in the box. Those vary between sending an unexpected huge tax bill to bankrupt and take them into government control to giving credits from government banks to your pals so they go ahead and buy them or whatever. In 4-5 years you can take over more than half of mainstream media. Half of the remaining would be handled in the next 4-5 year window.
2- Solve the benefits problem by giving to so many so that giving to the undeserving becomes the norm thus not a problem, and benefits get watered down so much that the undeserving getting them mostly stops being a problem for other people. You will want to have around 25% of the population on benefits one type or the other. Have subjective criteria in there so even if not completely, they mostly go to your voters. You're aiming for the poor and uneducated as your voters.
3- After taking over the businesses you like to your cronies or from people that will oppose you, be as business friendly as you can be. Even if there are some forms of tax to the 0.01%, just erase their debts every couple of years. Your coalition would be the poorest 50% plus the richest 0.01%.
4- Find inventive tax or tariff schemes to screw over the middle class while not touching your coalition. For example, the income tax bracket should skyrocket just after the median wage so anybody who's not in the poorest 50% should be paying enormous taxes. This extends to their expenditures. Identify things that the poorest 50% don't buy or can't afford, and the 0,01% don't care about. Tax and/or tariff them mercilessly.
This will take you until the productivity penalty you're imposing the country bankrupts it and you can no longer feed the 50%. Luckily this would take around 30 years so you'll be fine.
Also making some similar points about “centrism” vs “average voters”: https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-political-compass-part-1-left-and-right/
At the cost of sounding like a pundit, but I think another important tool the left is oft leaving on the table in the fight against paranoia is framing.
Immigrants are the perfect example: in which universe, except the one conveniently entered when talking about immigration and literally nothing else, does the phrasing "taking a job" make any sense? People perform jobs, usually servicing others and creating value for everybody. This is most clear-cut when immigrants open businesses (their job has been literally created by themselves), but applies more broadly. Highlighting the contributions immigrants make and many take for granted, while talking about them contributing, could help restoring sanity in a discourse that right now is walking on its head.