You Know Iâd really like to believe this but it keeps getting disproved with every election
Unlikely. The south hasnât changed since the 1850âs and the mid west is essentially brain dead.
The Dems will win more elections, but the left will have little to do with that.
While I liked this interview,
They do not have any faith that the Democrats share their values and are going to deliver a better life for them and their kids, and I think Hillary Clinton was a very efficient bearer of that meme.
whatâs irritating me is that as we go further along, Trump supporters beliefs are just a little bit more than economic ones.
The words race, racism, or racist do not appear even once in this âanalysisâ.
Hillary would never have nominated the mentally ill Gorsuch. Thatâs enough for me.
weird thatâŚ
Especially since the first words out of Hillaryâs mouth were entirely in line with Texeiraâs idea of reforming capitalism: remember her, âI want to save capitalism from itselfâ line?
ââŚmust read.â
Really Josh??
Itâs weird how Clinton is becoming more n more like Cassandra.
Meh. There are some interesting points made in this interview â and I think Judis did a pretty good job of challenging some of Teixeiraâs key assumptions â but overall I was disappointed in that I find Teixeiraâs deterministic optimism pretty unconvincing, and sort of pointless. If itâs fated that we win eventually, well, thatâs great, but what good does it do us to believe that, other than making people on the left feel a little better about the currently lousy state of affairs? To be fair, I havenât read the book, so perhaps this interview fails to capture the essential points. But if it did capture them, and this is itâŚmeh.
It does seem to me that, stripped down, Teixeiraâs argument is that things will ultimately go well because they must. Voters who ought to be sympathetic to left politics will finally figure out thatâs their only way forward. Democrats and the left will discover new ways to organize and bring together identity and economic politics because itâs the only way for them to succeed. So therefore they will. I donât see much actual evidence for these propositions. In contrast, I see plenty of evidence for Judisâs observation that many societies through history have failed to overcome the obstacles of structure, resources, social division, and self-interest that stand in the way of reform and progress.
Interesting interview. Teixeira is way too optimistic though. In the long run things do tend to get better over time but we will continue to struggle to make the changes we need because our population is willfully ignorant. I mean⌠Iâve mentioned in discussions before when someone was attacking Clinton from the left that perhaps they should find out her positions. I hardly think asking someone to read a super-short cliff-notes version of a Presidential candidates policies is asking too much. However every time I suggested that people attacked me and said it shouldnât be incumbent on people to inform themselves. We sort of see it across the board. People hate Obamacare but now like the ACA which they used to hate. Nothing changed but some people learned what was in the ACA. They would have liked it from the beginning if they had done any basic research (like read a single article about it). I am not that optimistic about change because both sides demand immediate change but then donât continue to support their side in every election. Unless we can fix the citizens I think that an excess of hope is silly.
Teixeira suffers from the same delusion as most economists: he thinks people are rational. People and systems are not rational; we see that in the rise of the bullying class of the right. They do things that are not rational (give away groundwater, encourage pollution, allow the infrastructure to deteriorate, eliminate national monuments, etc.) not because they think these things are good, but because they piss off people they donât like. I see no signs of that getting better, and as the conservatives more tightly rig the system, thereâs really no opportunity for it to get better.
The right never takes breaks, which is why the left gains grounds in bursts (when people wake up long enough to vote) only to lose ground as the right steadily chips away at that ground over time. The left needs institutions behind it like the right has and be ready to stick to it.
Disagree. I have lived in the South (East Texas mostly) since 1946, and it is massively changed. Mostly for the better. But the core racism is the essence of the power the wealthy use to manipulate the politics here, and it will not change until the politics creates a serious progressive inheritance tax stacked onto a sharply progressive income tax.
Oh, and bring the damned oil companies under control both here and worldwide. There is a close relationship between oil companies and authoritarian governments worldwide.
I donât think Ruy Teixeira has ever focused the negative social consequences of oil companies who gained power by fueling the war machines during the Twentieth Century - also well-known as the Century of War.
The oil companies also exacerbate the existing racism or religious violence in order increase their social power. Donât ever forget that oil companies depend on using the local government to control the population that sits on top of the oil they need to extract from under the earth.
Cotton was the original commodity that created the authoritarian regimes, then after WW I it has been oil.
Obamaâs election was a huge validation (or apparent validation) of Texieraâs hypothesis, and Trumpâs election, narrow and dirty as it was, has been interpreted as proof that the Emerging Majority thing was just an accident of history. I think we have to factor in the standard 8-year fatigue that depresses the turnout of the party that holds the presidency and revs up the opposition, along with the insane backlash politics that attended our first black president. If the Dems can win in 2018 and 2020 with their newly revved up Obama Coalition and de-rig elections and congressional districts in an enduring way (maybe even go for big reforms like proportional representation, if they win it all in 2020), the future looks bright. Apart from locked-in environmental devastation and whatever destabilization Trump, Ryan and McConnell can wreak on the world order over four yearsâŚ
Judis avoided the best question which is why the Teixeira & Judis thesis (from now 16 years ago) hasnât materialized.
Speaking of " the right "âŚ
please permit me to go OT right here and say that, imho, a REAL âmust readâ is Joshâs take on the structure and delicious dilemma at FuxSnooze
âHear, hearâ !