Concerning those Polls

So, um. There's no real way to sugarcoat it: the polls right now look bad. We're mostly into the general election now; Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton is the basically-also-presumptive Democratic nominee. This match-up has been polled extensively since last summer, when it (to be more precise, the Trump side of it) first became plausible. And Clinton has led in the polls, constantly. At the worst of her email scandal last August, this got down to maybe a 1-point lead, but then it got bigger and for most of 2016 it's been pretty substantial. In late March Hillary was up by more than 10 point, on average. As recently as mid-April it was still around 9%.

Now it's 2%. This is, um, scary. The only thing that's made Trump's victory in the Republican primary anything other than utterly terrifying has been the thought that, of course, he's not going to win. Right now, if you look at the polls... yikes. It doesn't look especially slam-dunk that he's not going to win. And the question is what to make of this.

Obviously, given my nature, I'm going to say that we shouldn't worry too much, not commensurate with how bad it would be if we were entering this election with only a +2% advantage anyway. And I do think that's right. Equally obvious, though, is the fact that we should be somewhat worried, and that something about this current wave of bad polls is telling us that there is maybe more of a chance that things go the wrong way than we thought.

But the key to understanding what the polls are saying right now, I think, is that they're saying a different thing from a month ago. And from two months ago, and three, and four. That means we need to ask, what's changed? And there's a clear answer: Trump has wrapped up his nomination fight, while Clinton hasn't. And the Democratic side is getting nasty. We can see this in the polls, too. Bernie's hypothetical lead over Trump grew wider at about the same time Hillary's did, earlier in 2016, suggesting that that shift was caused by something about Trump (i.e., he got less popular). But right now, Bernie's lead hasn't budged. That tells me that the current shift is nothing to do with Trump, it's to do with Hillary. Note also that since mid-April, when it was Clinton 49%, Trump 40%, Trump's gone up just over 1%, while Clinton has dropped by nearly 6%. Again, this looks like a Clinton phenomenon, not a Trump phenomenon.

But I don't recall the last month as being a particularly bad one for Clinton. No new scandals, no major missteps. The latest rumor about the email thing is that she's been fully vindicated, though a formal announcement has yet to be made. Nothing's really been going on that would suggest Hillary's become that much more toxic a candidate... in the eyes of a disinterested observer, maybe. Not in the eyes of a Bernie supporter. And there's the rub: it seems basically certain that what's going on right now is that an awful lot of Bernie supporters aren't saying they'll vote for Hillary in the general election. (Nate Silver makes the same point in a series of tweets.)

So we basically know why the polls look like they do. The thing Hillary's people keep saying about how she's fighting two campaigns right now is correct. Trump has wrapped up the Republican side, and has gotten a bit of a boost from consolidating his party. More importantly, Hillary hasn't wrapped up her side yet, and the Democrats are if anything splintering a bit as our race draws to a close. So that's the big question of the election right now: once Hillary actually wins, and Bernie drops out, do his supporters go back to saying they'll all vote for her? Can he get them to do that? If so, then we're back to a baseline of Clinton +6% or +8% or maybe even +10%, and the election looks fairly comfortable, especially since I expect the campaign to wear well for her and ill for Trump. If not, then there's potentially a lot more danger.

I would really like to think that this is just a temporary phenomenon. Something similar happened to Obama back in 2008, when McCain had wrapped up the nomination but Hillary was still hanging on, and that too passed. And, hey--Trump got a boost when he wrapped up his nomination! And Republicans have way more reason to not support him than Democrats do to not support Hillary. Waaaaay more. You see prominent conservative pundits talking about how bad Trump is and thinking of running a third-party candidate or whatever. Bernie Sanders keeps repeating how much better than the Republicans Hillary is. It would just be bizarre if this election ends up with a Republican Party unified around Trump but a Democratic Party that can't unify around Hillary Clinton, one of its leading figures for damn near three decades now. So I remain skeptical that that's what's going to happen. Probably another month from now, the polls will start looking more like they should, and the best course of action until then is not to panic.

But I can't deny that the way the whole Sanders campaign is going right now has me pretty legitimately worried. I think he's done some real damage, and I think he's going to need to work real hard to repair it when the time comes. He'd bloody well better.

Shut Up, Bernie

So, last week Bernie Sanders said some things. Things like this:

But the bottom line is that when only half of the American people have participated in the political process, when some of the larger states in this country, people in those states have not yet been able to voice their opinion on who should be the Democratic nominee, I think it's absurd for anybody to suggest that those people not have a right to cast a vote. 

And like this:

We think if we come into the convention in July in Philadelphia, having won a whole lot of delegates, having a whole lot of momentum behind us, and most importantly perhaps being the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump, we think that some of these super delegates who have now supported Hillary Clinton can come over to us. Rachel, in almost every poll, not every poll, but almost every national matchup poll between Sanders and Trump, Clinton and Trump, we do better than Hillary Clinton and sometimes by large numbers. We get a lot more of the independent vote than she gets. And, frankly and very honestly, I think I am a stronger candidate to defeat Trump than Secretary Clinton is and I think many secretary -- many of the super delegates understand that.

 Okay, so, a few thoughts.

A Reality Check on the Democratic Primary

It's Tuesday. Specifically, it's Tuesday, March 15th, the Ides of March, and a key turning point in both presidential primaries. But who cares about the Republicans; this post is about the Democrats. One week ago, on Tuesday, March 8th (a.k.a. International Women's Day), the soon-to-be first female President suffered a really shocking defeat in Michigan, where polls had her up by over 20 points. Bernie ended up winning, just barely, by about 1.5%. It was shocking, and made us reconsider everything we thought we knew about how the race is going. Today (well, tomorrow, really, since it's only just barely Tuesday as I'm writing this), five big states will vote, the first and last time that will happen. It's Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida. And we'll see whether Michigan was a harbinger of things to come, in terms of polling error, or whether things will be basically back to normal. If the latter, we're looking at big Clinton wins in Florida and North Carolina, the last Southern states to vote, a more modest Clinton win in Ohio, a close race in Missouri, and... god knows what's going on in Illinois.

But it's worth taking stock of how things are going, because... they're going really well for Hillary. You can see how well using the FiveThirtyEight delegate targets. In almost every state, Hillary's meeting or beating her targets. And while Bernie does have a few states where he's beat his targets, they're tiny little victories. He netted one delegate versus his target in Oklahoma and Maine, two apiece in Vermont (by shutting Hillary out) and Colorado, and by five in Kansas. That's his biggest win. In Michigan, his great victory only amounted to holding Hillary to her targets. Meanwhile, Hillary has seven wins bigger than Bernie's biggest, in South Carolina (+7), Georgia (+9), Alabama (+9), Mississippi (+9), Virginia (+10), Tennessee (+11), and Texas (+22). Indeed, Tennessee all by itself is enough to cancel out all five of Bernie's wins. Put it all together and she's 88 delegates ahead of her targets, which means he's 88 delegates behind his targets. He doesn't just need to win going forward. He needs to win big. He needs to win big states by big margins. He needs to beat his targets by big margins in big states. And those targets include winning New York. Hillary's from New York.

And all this, having not delivered a single win of the sort he needs.

Here's another fact about tomorrow: it marks the half-way point of the campaign. 2006 delegates will have been awarded after tomorrow, with only 1946 to come (plus a handful here or there from non-state primaries). So after tomorrow, Bernie will need to win by the same margin he's lost by to date. Let's assume he manages to hold Hillary even in delegates. And let's also say he manages to hold her even in delegates between California and New York. All of that is generous to Bernie, I think. The 538 targets would have Hillary winning 723 of the 1413 delegates at stake in those seven states, and that has Bernie narrowly winning New York. So that would leave Bernie 223 delegates behind (as he is right now), with 1224 delegates left to be awarded. He'd need to win 724 of those delegates, or nearly 60%. Take Pennsylvania and New Jersey out of the mix, the two biggest states, where a combined delegate split also looks pretty generous for Bernie, and you're talking about only 909 delegates left. He'd need to win 557 of those. Here are the states where Bernie's won more than 60% of the delegates: Kansas and Vermont. That's his home state, and one other state. (EDIT: whoops, I forgot Maine. There's also Maine.)

If he can't win big tomorrow, bigger than it looks like he should, and if he can't win big in the four biggest states that will remain after tomorrow, his task is to win everywhere else as thoroughly as he won Kansas. (And Maine!)

That really doesn't seem very plausible. And that means that, 24 hours from now, it might start looking pretty much impossible for him to win. Unless we get another Michigan.

Congratulations to Bernie Sanders on his First Good State Result!

Woohoo! He finally beat the 538 benchmarks in a state! And it'll almost certainly be two of them by night's end. His shocking 10-point victory in Oklahoma was six points ahead of his +4% benchmark, and he looks on pace to win Colorado by about six surplus points as well, with a 17-point win.

That is officially the end of the good news for Bernie Sanders tonight. Well, okay, a 73-point win in Vermont ain't bad, even if it falls short of the +83% benchmark. But his ~15-point win in Minnesota will fall short of a +21% benchmark. Meanwhile he's failing to win two states he should've won: Massachusetts, which he should've won by about 11% and will instead lose by 2% (which I think is brutal for his campaign), and Tennessee. Oh, Tennessee. 538 thinks it should've been a very competitive state. It had other ideas, joining its Southern neighbors in giving Hillary a landslide win at +37%. Taken all by itself that would imply a 39-point national lead for Hillary. Obviously that's ridiculous, but these benchmarks are just approximations and the real results would vary a little. Which is to say, the massive surplus in Tennessee for Clinton makes up for Bernie's good results in Colorado and Oklahoma.

And then we get to the rest of the South, where he was projected to lose big but actually lost bigger. In the current approximations of the final results, he's 16 points behind his benchmark in Georgia, 20 points behind in Texas, 24 points behind in Arkansas, and 28 points behind in Alabama.

Add it all together and Hillary's running about 15 points ahead of the benchmarks in the states that voted tonight. Add in the four early states and it's... still 15%. We're getting a fairly consistent view of the race, not so much state to state but when you add it all up. Sanders has run a great campaign, and his five state wins so far really are amazing given where he came from. But he's not there yet, and at this point, with the battle-lines hardening ever more, it really doesn't look like he can get there.

And even if he does, he'll need to make up for the big wins Hillary's already banked. Which looks basically impossible given the proportional delegate allocation.

Within a few weeks it's gonna start looking like Bernie shouldn't really be in the race anymore.

On Liberals, Politics, and even Democracy Itself

This is partly inspired by the Democratic primary, and an attempt to understand what's behind the Sanders phenomenon, but it's also inspired more generally by just a loose complex of phenomena over the past few years. Here's my basic idea: over the past few generations, America has been engaged in a rather massive culture war. Beginning in about the 1960s, a bunch of people came along who radically disagreed with mainstream, relatively conservative social norms and political beliefs. And these cultural liberals have been winning, spectacularly so. We've reached the point where many, if not all, of the new liberal views are pretty damn mainstream, such that people who violate them are broadly perceived as deviant (e.g. a Mr. Trump). But, quite rightly, we're not resting on our laurels. Nor are we accepting the current, relatively liberal mainstream views on those issues as sacred gospel. Rather, they're works in progress, and of late, particularly in the internet age, a ton of energy has gone into the development of the new progressive norms. The broad principles are increasingly being translated into a fairly comprehensive code of conduct, which aspires to a kind of perfection. For just about any question of "how should I behave toward other people," there's a right answer out there, which you should follow. The older, more conservative norms also prescribed such a code of conduct, although there is one major difference: the new liberal paradigm, more or less tautologically, gives far greater space for individual autonomy. There are a lot of rules that say, basically, "do whatever you want so long as you're respecting what others want." That last part requires a lot of elaboration, though, and it's been getting a lot of elaboration. All of this is great, and it proceeds within a more-or-less agreed-upon analytical framework. Then it's just a matter of proselytizing for the basic worldview that says you should follow these rules, of spreading the message that it's not okay to violate them. It's a work in progress, obviously, but we're working on it.

Like I said, that's all great. And the way that this enterprise aspires, basically, to Perfection, in a certain way, is great. For the first time we have a chance to implement widespread social norms based on genuinely liberal values, and so we have this opportunity to really think about how to get them Right in a way that's kind of new. But the thing is, then you get to politics. And the trouble with politics is that not everyone agrees with you. And I feel like on some level, the focus on developing liberal norms of righteous conduct, and on condemning those who don't follow them, has a bit of a tendency to distract from the fact that the people who disagree with us are within their rights to do so. Specifically they're within their political rights to do so. Their beliefs are wrongful ones, and as a matter of morality they ought to change them, but they do not lose their rights as democratic citizens because of those wrongful beliefs. The point here is not just that we, as liberals, have to be cognizant of the fact that democratic politics is hard and we won't get everything we want. It's that on some level, we shouldn't. Not so long as the things we want are unpopular with the American people. Because the American people really do have the right to make these decisions for themselves, even if they will make their decisions badly.

Now, to be clear, that last point doesn't apply to everything. I'm a big believer in democracy, but more specifically I'm a big believer in liberal democracy, and in constitutionally limited government. And we happen to have a Constitution that, I think, really does protect a lot of liberal values when properly read. That is to say, it really does restrain the political choice of the people in ways that are pleasing to modern social liberals. At the very least it's perfectly legitimate to argue, as to much of the agenda of modern social liberalism, that the issue has been constitutionalized and is not the subject of ongoing political choice anymore. Gay rights are a great example of that: it's absolutely right for us to say that we should win on that issue even if most Americans are against us. "Equal" really does mean equal. But constitutionalism only gets you so far. It's just not plausible that every single item on your agenda will be constitutionalized, and moreover, it would be bad if that were so, because democratic political choice is important and no constitution should lock in a country's entire political program.

I think the specific impetus for this post was actually when I saw some article about how Hillary Clinton's effort to present herself as the candidate of the modern Democratic Party's identity-politics coalition of oppressed groups is unconvincing because, in order for those various movements to be truly "intersectional," I believe was how they put it, they also need to be radically anti-corporate and what-have-you. My reaction to which was, okay, so what are you going to do if you find yourself in a country where "we shouldn't discriminate against women, or racial minorities, or LGBTQ&c. people" commands widespread support but "we should adopt radically anti-corporate economic policies" doesn't? Because the thing is, not only won't you be able to enact your whole "intersectional" program in such a world, there's a very real sense in which you shouldn't be able to, either. Now, again, it may well be wrongful of the public not to support your position on this. But their wrongness doesn't give you a right to govern them against their will.

This ties into something Barney Frank recently said in a column critiquing Bernie's campaign: "What troubles me and many of my former colleagues—among the most liberal members—is the belief that nothing short of this [Sanders's agenda] is worth fighting for." You have to figure out what's worth fighting for that you can plausibly get a democratic mandate for. But it goes further. In a democracy there's a need to accept that sometimes you lose, and that it's legitimate for the other side to enact its policies when that's the will of the people. Again, this is not always the case, and the modern conservative movement is quite generous in its willingness to have its bad-on-the-merits policies also be unconstitutional. But there's always got to be a large area where it's legitimate for the other side to win, and you have to be sort of graceful about that, because otherwise you start attacking democracy itself. This really isn't something we have to deal with in the project of creating liberal social norms; indeed, it's important that those norms be as uncompromised and as near to perfect as possible. But it's important not to lose sight of it in the political realm, not just as a matter of pragmatism but as a matter of principle.

There's Not a Single State Where Polling (or Voting) Suggests Sanders is Leading

FiveThirtyEight just rolled out a new version of the projections I discussed in this piece. It incorporates several new demographic factors, including an urban/rural split. One interesting thing about it is that, if the race is tied, Hillary will be winning about fifteen states, out of fifty: this implies that her support is more strongly concentrated into a few big states where she has major advantages, where Sanders has more modest advantages across a larger number of smaller states. Or to put it another way, in order to win, Sanders really needs to feel like he's winning.

And... boy does this ever not look like a race where Sanders is winning. The first three states now look way better for Hillary: instead of implying national leads of 6, 7, and 2 points respectively, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada now imply leads of 19, 10, and 5. Meanwhile, they also put the current 538 polling averages into their latest chart, and... whaddaya know, Sanders is currently beating his benchmarks in a whopping zero states. You've got some states, like South Carolina, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Texas, and North Carolina, that don't look all that different from a tied race; Hillary's beating those benchmarks by single digits. But then you've got, jeez. Sanders ought to be winning Tennessee, narrowly; he's losing it by 25 points. Similarly in Michigan, where he's 20 points behind his benchmark. And then looking a little further down the calendar, you've got more states Sanders ought to be winning, or maybe even winning big, like Utah and Wisconsin. You've got big states he's got to win, like Pennsylvania and California. Hillary's leading them all: by eight, two, twenty-two, and thirteen, respectively. There just isn't a single real bright spot for Sanders in the state polling we have right now. Overall, taking a rough average of all these future states, it looks like a Clinton +13 race right now. That's very similar to the numbers implied by the first three states that have voted, which were maybe consistent with a +11 race overall.

And this, by the way, makes me skeptical of the polls we're seeing showing more like a +5 Clinton race nationally, or the one that had Sanders leading for what is I believe the first time ever. If that's so, there has to be somewhere in this nation where he's doing better than you might expect given a tied race. But those national polls that are more optimistic for Sanders, that's basically where the single most optimistic individual state data-points for him are at. And that makes it tough to view them as anything other than outliers, or perhaps pollsters whose weighting algorithms are off.

But, we shall see.

Where We're At in the Democratic Primary

A few days ago, FiveThirtyEight published a very useful piece that essentially laid out the landscape for the 2016 Democratic primary. They used some polling data, fundraising, demographics, and Facebook popularity to figure out how we can expect each state to vote if Hillary is leading by twelve points, and alternately how we would expect them to vote if she's fallen into a tie with Bernie--i.e., the first projection shifted over by twelve points, plus or minus rounding errors. And what this lets us do is convert individual state results into an estimate of how the race stands nationally, both with actual results and with polls.

So, for example, they show Nevada as a pro-Hillary state, one that should go to her by about 3 points even if the race is tied. If in fact Nevada ends up as basically a tie tomorrow (and we have very little idea what will happen there; there have only been three polls, all low-quality ones, in recent weeks), that's a fantastic result for Bernie. Even if it comes out as Hillary +6%, the most pro-Hillary of the three recent polls, that's a very good result for him. Conversely, Hillary's got something like a 25-point lead in the South Carolina polling average, which would be even better than the +23% win they project for her with a national 12-point lead. It's to be expected that different states will give different signals, because these projections are by no means perfect. (It's like extrapolating election night results on the assumption of uniform swing: it's a good approximation but never quite holds.) Indeed it kind of looks like a decent guess for Nevada is the national-tie scenario, while a decent guess for South Carolina is the Clinton lead scenario.

One interesting thing, though, is that the two states that have voted so far both say the same thing about the race. Iowa was a tie, falling almost precisely between the two projections (+7% for Hillary if she's up big, +6% for Bernie if it's a tie). Meanwhile, though Sanders won big in New Hampshire, by 22%, he didn't win as big as he should have if the race is a tie, which would've been 29%. Both states, therefore, imply a Clinton lead of roughly 6 or 7 points nationwide. Which confirms my feeling that those results were decent for Clinton, even though they looked pretty lousy. To be sure it's remarkably that Sanders is within 6 or 7 points nationally, but that's still a pace that has Hillary winning. If that pace holds, we should see Hillary winning by nearly 10 points in Nevada and by 16 or 17 in South Carolina; more likely we'll see a similar average result between those two states but highly disparate individual signals.

In any case, it's just something to keep an eye on, as a guide to interpreting each state's results.

The Deeper Problem With the Sanders Campaign "Voodoo"

There's been a big controversy of late over an economic analysis, originally performed by an independent economist but repeatedly endorsed by members of the Sanders campaign itself, purporting to show that Bernie Sanders's economic plan would great an essentially unprecedented economic paradise, featuring among other things 5% annual growth over the next decade. It's basically just the latest in a sequence of fights between the Sanders campaign and the liberal wonk community, in which the wonks keep saying that Bernie isn't being totally honest about the costs of some of his proposals and in return Sanders sympathizers, basically, accuse said wonks of being corporate shills or whatever. There's plenty to say about this, and why it would be a bad thing if the Democrats adopted the Republicans' willingness to say empirically absurd things and then just have all their supporters pretend that they're true.*

But there's one thing about this that I haven't seen said, possibly because most of the commenters have been coming at the issue from the perspective of the policy wonks. My idea is more of a political theory one: it's not a good thing when you feel the need to lie to the public about your agenda. It means that on some level you know that your agenda, on a full and honest accounting, is unpopular. That's why the Republicans do so much of it! They're committed to advancing a policy agenda that would not really be very popular, so they have to lie about it, and while they're at it they have to suppress lots of voters and such. To be sure, the Sanders campaign is only taking its very first steps down a path the Republicans sprinted all the way down long ago. But it's not a good path to tread even a little bit.

Because it also betrays a kind of contempt for democracy. You could, of course, say, well, yes, we're lying about this plan because it's unpopular, but it should be popular, it's wrong of the people not to support it. Maybe it'll even be better for them than the policies they support. And so, really, what we're doing will make the world the best place it can be. And, sure. That might be a good argument, from a certain perspective. Just, not from the perspective of democratic self-governance. The whole concept of democracy is that the people get to decide these things for themselves. And it is surely a noble quest to educate the people, to make popular what should be popular. Nor am I saying that politicians have a moral responsibility to follow the weathervane of public opinion in all things; I'm actually a pretty big believer in the "trustee" model of representation, as opposed to the "delegate" one.

But you do have to be honest. Honest about what you'll do and about what you've done. If you're right that your policies are better, then once you implement them they'll presumably prove, at least in the fullness of time, to be popular. (See, e.g., ObamaCare.) But if you sell the people on policies by concealing their costs or exaggerating their rewards in some absurd fashion, then when the results are worse than you promised you'll spark a backlash. And beyond that, you just can't have a meaningful democracy on any other basis. If the choice ultimately belongs to the people, rather than to some benign counsel of Those Who Know Better, then the people need to be told, honestly, what their choice is.

We're the Democratic Party. We should believe in democracy, not just pragmatically but philosophically. We should believe in the people's right to decide their own fate, and that means their right to choose wrongly. (There are of course exceptions, as provided by the Constitution, but that's not really about the kind of economic policy choices Sanders is talking about.) We shouldn't seek to force our legislative program on the American people through force or trickery. I don't think the Sanders campaign really disputes this, so they should try to live up to these ideals a little more fully.





*Here's a relatively sympathetic take on what the Sanders people are doing here. There was a process that began sometime, I dunno, in the 1960s or thereabouts, wherein the American left started incorporating the advice of mainstream economic theory, and thereby moderating, from a certain perspective, its policy proposals. It's why you see things like liberal support for carbon taxes or whatever: there's a pretty broad consensus, or there has been, around finding the most effective and efficient economic tools for the promotion of liberal values. It's hardly been absolute, and in some cases it's gone in the opposite direction: liberals kept supporting the minimum wage for decades when standard economics said it was a bad idea, and then, lo and behold, more recent economic research suggests that maybe the liberals aren't wrong. Whaddaya know. But there's been a pretty strong commitment of late to using policies which have empirical support for their effectiveness.

The worry, though, and it's an eminently reasonable one, is that liberals have actually absorbed not just the practical and strategic suggestions of mainstream economics but also some of the underlying values and goals, which are in many cases really not all that liberal. And it's admirable for the Sanders campaign to want to roll back that tendency, the tendency to get assimilated into the Yay Capitalism mindset. The problem is, though, that they sort of seem to be conflating the two trends--again, understandably, since I think they probably were conflated in their origins. They're not the same thing, though, and we ought properly roll back one of them and not the other.

Bernie and Thomas and Alex

Thomas Jefferson, that is, and Alexander Hamilton. (With whom I'm currently a bit obsessed, having seen Hamilton on Broadway this past weekend.)

Because, you see, I'm pretty sure Bernie Sanders would be on Team Jefferson. And... Team Jefferson is wrong. Thomas Jefferson was wrong, about, like, most things. Not everything: I like much of what he has to say about religion, and he was on the right side of the "is it okay to be an opposition party?" thing. Essentially everything he thought about the Constitution was wrong, though, as was his notion that America should be all rural and agrarian and stuff. Oh, and the whole "holding slaves" thing. True, he had relatively anti-slavery principles, but he also had lots and lots of slaves. His whole humble, man-of-the-people thing was basically a lie; he was an artistocrat. Hamilton was, as the first song from Hamilton so powerfully illustrates, the "bastard, orphan" who "gr[e]w up to be a hero and a scholar." Oh, and who opposed slavery. But no, he's the monarchist and the elitist, apparently.

Now the point isn't that Sanders likes all of these things about Jefferson. He certainly disagrees with at least the slavery thing, and he's probably not a strict constructionist. But I'm sure he loves Jefferson's whole egalitarian shtick, despite its being basically a lie, and he probably has at least some sympathy for the rural/agrarian thing.

Oh, and then there's the Bank. The First Bank of the United States, championed by Hamilton and opposed by Jefferson. I'd be shocked if Sanders isn't on Jefferson's side there (on policy if not on the constitutional issue). Which... is bad. It also puts him in the company of Andrew Jackson, whom liberals have recently had the decency to recognize as a slave-owning, native-slaughtering, paranoid villain, not a populist hero.

And this actually ties into the thing that maybe bothers me the most about the prospect of Bernie Sanders becoming President: he's against the Wall Street bailout of 2008. Indeed, he doesn't even seem to know that the American taxpayer made money out of the bailout, because we got paid back more than we paid out in the first place. (Bernie keeps using the line that "America bailed out Wall St., now it's time for Wall St. to bail out America" in describing his proposed speculation tax.) And again, this is wrong. Really, really wrong. If Sanders had been President, and had vetoed the law (which he voted against in the Senate), we actually would've had another depression. It would've done enormous damage to the world economy. But, you know, it was a bailout, to the banks. The big banks at that. And banks are bad, especially the big ones--as Jefferson and Jackson knew.

I find this legitimately troubling. Either he's being disingenuous here or he really doesn't understand some things about how the economy works. And I really would worry that, if some similar sort of financial crisis came up, he might not be willing to do what had to be done to prevent collapse, even if it didn't really sit comfortably with his general ideology.

Now, perhaps the most favorable part of the Jefferson comparison is that when push came to shove, and Jefferson had an opportunity to radically change America's destiny forever, but he had to violate his constitutional principles in order to do so, he did it. That's the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which a Jeffersonian strict constructionist would've thought unconstitutional. So maybe if push came to shove, Sanders would listen to the advice of mainstream economics and do what was necessary. But... maybe? He might actually not do that; at the very least I'd like for someone to interrogate him a bit more about this.

Until they do, his resemblance to Jefferson is a little bit troubling.

The Sanders Campaign Is Becoming A Problem

When Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for President, I thought, okay, this could do some good. Put some more aggressively left-wing issues on the agenda, help move the party, and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, in a more liberal direction, expand the Overton window, etc. But there's always been a lurking danger that it would become something else, that it would start stoking liberal dissatisfaction with the Democrats and with Hillary, in a way that would imperil our chances of holding the White House.

Well, I'm increasingly feeling like his campaign is turning into that more dangerous version. And this "HillarySoProgressive" thing is perhaps the most extreme example of it. This all started when Bernie and Hillary got into a Twitter war yesterday that started with Sanders (or his campaign staff, not actually sure which) saying that "You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive," and then proceeded to rattle off various un-progressive things Hillary's done: raising money from Wall St., taking a long time before coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone pipeline, and supporting the Iraq war. Hillary (or her staff, probably) shot back, with various progressive things Hillary has done, and with repeatedly pointing out Sanders' less-than-pure history on gun control. Now various Sanders supporters have started this HillarySoProgressive hashtag basically mocking the idea that she's any sort of liberal. (Seriously, does no one say "liberal" anymore?) The tweets this Vox discussion of the tag references bring up, in total, the fact that Clinton takes donations from Wall St., the fact that she has, from time to time, been seen in the company of Wall St. executives, that she does not support reinstating Glass-Steagall, and her 2004 opposition to gay marriage. Oh, and also a fake Clinton/Gore '92 bumper sticker design featuring the Confederate flag.

The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe all of this is "disgusting." And not just because of the Tea Party-esque obsession with absolute purity (while, of course, excusing their own candidate's extreme lack of purity on the gun control issue), the strict and exclusive concept of the "progressive" movement, the suggestion that anyone who doesn't agree with them on every single issue is the enemy. It's all of that, too, of course; some of this stuff almost feels like it has an "are you now, or have you ever been, a capitalist?" feel to it.

But also, like... these are remarkably petty things to excommunicate someone from your movement over, aren't they? Bernie's remarks about how she took her time coming out against TPP and Keystone feel particularly silly, to me. I actually know several very left-wing people who thought both of those issues were in fact somewhat complicated, and that the case against each was overstated. And even beside that, like, since when is taking your time to think something over a grievous sin? Is it that one must not only have the right positions but also take all of them quickly enough, or you're out of the movement? That's insane, isn't it?

As of course is this persistent accusation of massive corruption on Hillary's part, which of course is never explicitly stated as such, because that would be "going negative" and "dirty politics," but that's what it is.

Add it all up and I feel like this campaign is becoming so toxic that it's running a real risk of doing serious damage to the Democratic Party and to the liberal cause going forward. It's essentially becoming a larger-scale version of Nader 2000, which, like, do the people supporting Bernie remember how that went? Do they remember George Bush? Have they inspected Marco Rubio's platform? As Matt Yglesias said the other day, it's basically the platform for those who think the problem with the Bush Administration is that we should've tried bigger tax cuts and more wars. In the face of this, do you really want to set up a Spanish Inquisition to root out every last little trace of heresy within the progressive movement?

I'm still hopeful that this can end well, but I'm increasingly unsure that it will. Sanders himself seems to have been bitten by the ambition bug, maybe for the first time in his life, and he's got a lot of work ahead of him repairing the damage he's been causing. When he loses, and he will lose, he better take a page out of Hillary's playbook and give her one hell of a ringing endorsement.

Bernie Sanders, Continued

Just a brief follow-up to my last post about Bernie Sanders. I suggested there that you need to take on forces like white supremacy and the patriarchy before you can have the kinds of economic reforms Sanders wants to have. That's not quite right; it's not really a strict chronological thing. Which is good, because the fight against white supremacy, the fight against patriarchy: these aren't really fights you win. They're fights you fight, forever if need be. If we can't have progress until those fights are won, well, we'll all be dead before we have any progress. And of course we had things like the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank without vanquishing racism or whatever.

But I do think it's important to understand the fight, and to understand that these seemingly economic fights are also the fight against these various more cultural forms of oppression. And it just occurs to me--indeed, this is the impetus for this post--that not understanding this is what leads an awful lot of Democrats, apparently Sanders among them, to be just dumbfounded as to why poor white people vote Republican. Don't they know it's against their own interests?!? Well, no, maybe because they have a different conception of those interests. This is the Southern Strategy, and it's hardly the fraud Democrats often like to make it out as when we recognize that white Southerns really, really care (many of them, at least) about white supremacy, at least in its relatively more genteel modern forms. Our instinct is to just keep repeating how much better off they'll be economically under our policies, and I think that's probably a big mistake.

I don't know exactly how you fight this fight when you understand it better. Maybe you just recognize that the opposing side is in a long-term demographic decline and content yourself with beating them. I have a feeling this country won't really become the America that it's supposed to be until we actually manage to do something about the whole "white people are awful" thing, though, even if there stop being enough terrible white people to form a viable political party. In any event the demographic decline doesn't really address the sex equality stuff. What I do know, or at least what I believe, is that you can't fight it at all if you don't understand it, and you'll find yourself losing other fights you really just can't fathom why you didn't win.

On the Hyde Amendment, Single-Payer, Bernie Sanders, and Socialism

Hillary Clinton recently called for repealing the Hyde Amendment, the federal law which prohibits federal funds from being spent on abortion. That is, among other things, surprisingly radical for a candidate most known for her cautious, calculating, pragmatic manner. It's also interesting because Bernie Sanders, the generally more radical candidate opposing her, has not, to the best of anyone's knowledge, come out in favor of repealing the Hyde Amendment. Which is funny, when you think about it, because Sanders is thoroughly pro-choice, and of course is most notorious these days for his proposed single-payer health care system. In which the federal government would pay for all the health care.

But if the Hyde Amendment is still around, then that won't include abortion.

At best this would lead to a market for supplemental abortion insurance, or just to women paying for abortion out of pocket. That's the at-best scenario, and it's pretty much a nightmare from a reproductive rights perspective. The worst-case scenario would be if private insurance, and maybe even private out-of-pocket purchase of medical treatment, were actually outlawed, which would effectively outlaw abortion itself. (That would almost certainly be unconstitutional under current doctrine, certainly as to abortion and maybe more generally.)

So, the first thing to say about all this is that someone needs to ask Bernie Sanders about the Hyde Amendment. Like, yesterday. But that's not really the crux of the issue: he'll almost certainly say he supports repealing it. He assuredly does support it on the merits, and there's no great political loss to admitting it.

The deeper issue, I think, is what it says about him that he didn't think of this when he was drafting his proposal. Because, it's a big issue. In a single-payer system, every aspect of medical treatment is subject to intense politicization, and this is a country where that could get seriously problematic, very fast. This is actually one of the virtues of the liberal-capitalist order: it's very good at letting people decide what they want for themselves, and having there be people willing to give it to them (so long as they can afford it--aye, there's the rub), even if other people aren't too happy about that. Single-payer, even if it allowed private insurance around the margins, would complicate that happy "live and let live (if you're not poor)" picture a lot. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth doing; that "if you're not poor" part is a really big problem. But it's not just a fantasy issue. It's a genuine cost to achieving an awful lot of good, and Sanders shows no sign of recognizing that it must be paid. This is for me the big issue with the fact that, at certain points in the past, he wanted to let the states administer the new single-payer system. Really, Bernie Sanders? An awful lot of states would make decisions about what should and should not be covered that you would really not like. He's backed off that position for now, but the lack of attention to the analogous issues at the federal level, e.g. the Hyde Amendment, doesn't give me a ton of confidence that he understands the real problem here, or has good ideas for what to do about it.

And then of course there's just the fact that the politicization of medicine would add an entirely different dimension to the fight. Paul Krugman has been talking a bunch lately about how it's tough to get a single-payer system from where we are because it really would impose losses on a bunch of important stakeholders. Well, once you remember that the Hyde Amendment exists we've got a whole other fight on our hands. There's been controversy in recent years about requiring employers to provide insurance that covers contraceptives. Imagine the explosion that would ensue if we proposed to have the federal government cover the full cost of abortions for everyone. Which is not to say that we shouldn't do it! We should, in an ideal world. This is a fight that deserves to be won. That's slightly different, though, from saying that it would be won, or even that the victory would be worth the fight.* 

More to the point, perhaps, is that Sanders does not seem to anticipate that fight, or the others like it that would surely come. And this has me thinking about a recent Ta-Nehesi Coates article and its discussion of the view that Sanders and his ideological comrades have toward racial justice issues:

"[Sanders sees] black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.

This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible."

My feeling about this is that it's almost the other way around. It's not that adopting socialism would make racism and its effects disappear. It's that racism itself, as a separate and distinct ideology, is a big part of what's stopping us from being more socialistic. There was some research, which I could probably dig up if I wanted to spend a bit of time on it, trying to figure out why, descriptively, causally, why the United States has such a meager welfare system. Ultimately the study concluded that it's all about race, or more specifically racism: American whites don't have solidarity with black people, and therefore resent having their wealth redistributed to black people in a way that middle-class Germans don't resent having their wealth given to poorer Germans. (Interestingly we can see a related phenomenon playing out in the European Union right now; it turns out the Germans and the French don't have that much solidarity with the Greeks after all, and therefore experience a similar resentment and a reluctance to support the much-poorer people of Greece.)

And similarly with issues of sex and gender. There's a lot about the social democratic agenda that is deeply threatening to the patriarchy, there really is. Just as there is with white supremacy. Someone like Sanders is right about that. But he seems to assume that this means we should focus our energy on attacking Capital (capitalized for sinister emphasis, of course), and that when we defeat it, all those identity-politics fights will take care of themselves. But I feel like if you don't appreciate the independent power of the patriarchy, of white supremacy, in American political life, then you won't appreciate the true nature of the struggle to make America better. And you'll lose. Because you'll rush headlong at the one enemy you're focused on and let yourself be surrounded by the other armies in their coalition. Better to attack each of those allies--whose support Capital needs but to whose defense Capital cannot necessarily come--in turn, and then leave the main enemy weakened and alone. But defeating white supremacy, defeating the patriarchy, that's a massive undertaking. It'll take years, decades really. Maybe generations. And it's not a fight that Bernie Sanders seems to see himself as fighting. Hillary Clinton does, if in an incremental way (though her opposition to the Hyde Amendment is impressively bold).

And that, I guess, is the socialist case for voting Hillary.



*Perhaps my favorite part of that fight would be the inevitable court case arguing that covering abortion in the single-payer system violated religious freedom. Because the logic there is damn near identical to the similar claims being made about mandated private insurance in a case like Hobby Lobby, but if we move it to the context of a government program then it becomes obviously absurd. There's no right to have the government not spend its money on things you disapprove of for religious reasons; that's absurd. We can tax you, and once we tax you it's not your money anymore. (The one exception is that we can't spend it actually supporting religious institutions you don't support, per the Establishment Clause.)

On Hillary Clinton, Wall Street, and 9/11

So, in what might have been the single most memorable moment of the debate (other than that time when I was genuinely shocked to hear that Sanders actually wants to let the states run his single-payer health care program, like, actually), Bernie Sanders impugned Hillary Clinton's integrity over her donations from Wall Street (despite his protestations that he did no such thing) and then Hillary responded by invoking 9/11. It was pretty cringe-worthy. In no way is this post meant to deny that. What this post is meant to do, however, is suggest that Hillary has at least a very plausible argument for why those campaign contributions shouldn't be held against her the way Sanders wants them to be.

Let's start with getting at what Hillary was actually trying to say, or at least the coherent argument behind her (again, admittedly) facepalm-level 9/11 framing. The donations from Wall Street are on the record, and they almost entirely date from her tenure as Senator from New York. Sanders' hypothesis is that the bankers gave her this money because they know that, no matter how tough she might talk on financial regulation, she won't actually do it. Hillary's suggestion to the contrary is that these were essentially donations of gratitude for her service to the state and city in the wake of 9/11. That's... that's very plausible, right? Especially bearing in mind that when we say "Wall Street donations," we don't just mean donations from the corporations themselves, or even from their executives. Donations from any of their employees count for this purpose. And it sounds pretty plausible to me to think that a lot of Wall Street bankers might have donated to any and every politician who played a meaningful role in the 9/11 rebuilding efforts. It might not be true that that's what motivated the donations, but it's a valid and on-point argument to make.

And really, she didn't even need to get that specific. She was a Senator from New York! I have a feeling that anyone in that position is going to get a lot of donations from Wall Street. I'm sure Chuck Schumer has a long trail of such donations to his name. You donate even to candidates who are relatively speaking not on your side, especially because New York is a solid blue state with little hope of electing Republicans to the Senate. And, sure, you're probably hoping for some measure of access and influence, but, contra what the moderator said, candidates aren't actually indebted to their donors. Again, it's genuinely possible that Hillary went around to various Wall Street potential contributors and said, give me some money and I'll keep an eye out for your interests going forward. That would be bad! But it's also genuinely possible that a bunch of Wall Street bankers gave her money just because she was the only game in town, and she didn't outright reject their donations.

This sort of ties in with another dimension of this whole thing. She was Senator from New York. All the financial types from Wall Street were among her constituents. There are many valid theories of representation on which it would have been proper for her to promote Wall Street's interests, insofar as they were New York's interests, as against the rest of the country. This would have to be within reason, of course; politicians shouldn't support the interests of every scumbag who happens to live in their jurisdiction. But we don't think there's anything weird about Senators from Iowa promoting corn interests or whatever. It's natural, if slightly unsavory.

The question is whether this works for or against Hillary. And that depends, I think, on whether we think that a person who has once favored a certain interest because they represented that region will always be beholden to that interest, even if they now represent a broader constituency. I tend to think the answer here is "no." Kirsten Gillibrand, Hillary's successor in the Senate, is an interesting example. She used to be a Representative from a reasonably conservative district in upstate New York, and her record in the House was reasonably moderate. That led people to be concerned that she wouldn't be as liberal as a Democratic Senator from New York ought to be. But in fact, she's been great! Because now she's not representing a constituency that requires her to be more moderate. By analogy, even if Hillary did take Wall Street contributions, and aye, even if she did take relatively pro-Wall Street stances when she was Senator from New York, that doesn't mean she would do so as President, representing the whole nation.

Now, Sanders and his supporters could try to argue it the other way. That, a candidate's once having been willing to pander to a local interest, we should always view them with suspicion on that issue. But I really don't think he wants to open up that can of worms. Because he's confessed, more or less candidly, that his relatively moderate record on guns was largely a pander to his rural Vermont constituents. Which would look an awful lot like Hillary's purported record on financial regulation--if we grant the assumption that Hillary has been soft on financial regulation historically. If we get into playing this game, it's just not at all clear that Sanders is categorically more pure than Clinton. And that's not even getting into all the companies whose employees he's received donations from over the years, a list which is less than wholly devoid of what we might think of as villains. The sum totals are a lot lower 'cause he represented Vermont, which has about as many people in it as like a city block in Manhattan, but the logic would seem to apply reasonably well.

There's also an additional level as concerns Hillary: she's a lawyer. She went to Yale Law School. (Woohoo!) She knows a lot of people in the world of law, which has a lot of overlap with the world of finance. A lot of these people probably gave to her campaign because they know her, and (perhaps unlike their bosses or the corporate entities for which they work) they honestly don't care that much about the public policy dimensions of politics.

The bottom line is that there are an awful lot of genuinely good reasons to think that Clinton's past Wall Street donations do not mean that she will be in any way beholden to the financial industry if she becomes President. Again, it might in fact be the case that she would be beholden to them. But there are good reasons for thinking otherwise, and it's basically a matter of contestable fact. And while, again, I agree that her invocation of 9/11 was extremely poorly done, there was an argument at the heart of those remarks, one that fits into the basic pattern of the more general arguments for why we shouldn't be troubled by her donations. So yes, it's totally fair game to call her out for her heavy-handed, Giuliani-esque flag-wrapping, but it's wrong to pivot from that to simply assuming that she is in fact vaguely corrupt in the was Sanders was insinuating.