Sailing Due North Through the Seas of Post-Election Hyperbole

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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.

So far, so good.