For years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Tom Edsall, the one-time Washington Post reporter and author who now writes a weekly column about politics for the Times. The love/hate has a temporal dimension. When I was first getting interested in politics as a teen and young adult I was very taken with Edsall’s books. They were very smart and opened my thinking to new ways to approach political questions, particularly how to think about political economy. In recent years he almost always drives me to distraction. I can’t tell you whether he’s changed or I have or, more likely, we’re just no longer in sync. In the 21st century, Edsall seems always to approach big questions with the idea that regardless of the situation it must be a disaster for the Democratic Party.
In any case, I was reading his latest column, which ends up raising some interesting questions about the politics of liberalism and freedom, building off a column by Noah Smith. Edsall starts with a premise that I think is clearly true. Over the last fifteen years or so, many of the more active Democrats (“strong Democrats,” they’re called in this piece) have moved significantly to the left not only of the median voter but even of the median Democrat on issues tied to sexuality, immigration, race, etc. It’s worth noting that being to the left of the median voter doesn’t mean you’re wrong. And it goes without saying — though it remains curiously unsaid in these discussions — that the same is true of party activists on the right. Still, that can create electoral challenges that need to be managed. That’s what the whole Jentleson/Favreau conversation about “saying no” is about.
I want to add a quick addendum to today’s Backchannel about Democrats saying “no” to interest groups. This comes out of an exchange I had with TPM Reader CC. She argued a number of reasons that she sees gay marriage and trans rights as substantively quite different from each other. (For context, in her email she notes that she is “a lesbian who benefitted from the marriage equality movement.”) I actually agreed with most of her points. So let me make my argument a bit more specific and clear. I’m not arguing the two issues are substantively the same. I’m observing the general point that in 2003/2004 marriage equality was clearly opposed by a majority of Americans. The argument being put forward now is that Democrats shouldn’t be getting behind any position or issue that a majority of voters oppose. It’s fair to look back 20 years and consider how that framework would apply in that case.
Let me return to something I wrote about yesterday and said I’d return to: Adam Jentleson’s piece in the Times on whether the Democratic Party can learn to say no to interest groups that often demand assent to various positions and commitments that are either obscure or toxic to a majority of voters. Trans rights aren’t the only issue Jentleson was talking about. But the larger debate clearly revolves around the ad the Trump campaign ran against Kamala Harris saying she supported tax payer-funded sex change operations/gender affirming care for prisoners. This was a question Harris checked “yes” to on an ACLU candidate questionnaire in 2019 as part of her 2020 run for the presidential nomination. There is at least the perception among some that it played a non-trivial role in turning the campaign against her
As a general matter I agree with Jentleson’s point. Not specifically about trans rights issues, but more generally. The goal of parties and campaigns is first to win elections.
But I can’t say that without noting some recent history.
Here’s a morsel of news that shows you how far we’ve come over the last eight years. Donald Trump made a heavy play for the crypto world in the last campaign, promising to be a “crypto president” and courting donors in that space. He’s now in talks to buy (through the parent company of Truth Social) the crypto trading firm Bakkt. This comes after he already founded his own new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Bakkt was formerly led by former appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who was later defeated by Sen. Raphael Warnock. This was when Loeffler was an executive at Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of The New York Stock Exchange. Loeffler’s husband Jeff Sprecher is ICE’s CEO. Both Loeffler and Sprecher remain major backers and financial supporters of Donald Trump.
Due to scheduling conflicts, the newest episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast will be released Thursday. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next week just in time for Thanksgiving!
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Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) announced in a Thursday X post that he is pulling himself out of consideration to be attorney general in the incoming Trump administration after spending Wednesday in meetings with Senate Republicans.
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