When Crazy Begets Crazy

Dear Reader (except those of you tarnishing folklore legacies), 

“You call this writing? If I puked in a fountain pen and mailed it to the monkey house, I’d get better scripts.”  

That’s what Roger Meyers Jr., the chairman of Itchy and Scratchy Studios in The Simpsons, says to one of his Harvard-educated staff writers. 

The kid starts to respond, “But sir, at Harvard they … ”

Meyers cuts him off. “Oh, at Harvard they taught you? Hit the streets, egghead! You should’ve majored in not getting fired.”

Here’s the whole scene, but you get the gist (though I will say that I often want to make Declan Garvey sing “Fair Harvard”). 

The left needs a lot more Roger Meyers Jr. types. 

I’ll back up. Amid all the post-mortems of the 2024 election, I’ve been shocked by how little David Shor’s name has come up. Some might recall that Shor was very controversial in progressive circles a while back. In 2020 he tweeted an academic study noting that riots can have unintended electoral consequences and that the 1968 riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. may have tipped the election to Richard Nixon that year. This reportedly got him fired from his job and un-personed by the left because people took it as a criticism of the Black Lives Matter protests (and riots). 

Shor’s cancellation was short-lived, though. He found new work and became a kind of unofficial guru for the Biden administration. But he remained controversial on the left for advocating something called “popularism.” This is the whacky idea that politicians should talk about popular stuff. As he told Politico, “Talk about popular things that people care about using simple language.” The idea isn’t that Democrats should simply embrace whatever is popular, but that if they have unpopular positions, they should probably talk about them less rather than try to persuade people to embrace them. 

The core of Shor’s critique of the Democratic Party is that it is full of very young, very urban, very educated, and very ideological people who like talking about edgy, transgressive, progressive stuff. And, Shor argued, “this is pushing [Democrats] to use overly ideological language, to not show enough messaging or policy restraint and, from a symbolic perspective, to use words that regular voters literally don’t understand—and I think that that’s a real problem.”

One of Shor’s best anecdotes is about the 2016 Clinton campaign. Shor’s staff—all young, smart, lefty types—loved Hillary Clinton’s “Mirrors” ad, which showed a montage of young women looking in the mirror with the audio of Donald Trump saying awful things about women in the background. The only problem? The ad made voters more likely to vote for Trump. Shor’s team dug deeper and found that 1 in 5 Clinton ads made voters more likely to vote for Trump than they would have been if they hadn’t seen them. To paraphrase the old joke about the bad sales guy, “Sure we’re losing voters with our ads, but we’ll make it up in volume!”

Given how much I’ve ranted about the stupidity of terms like “Latinx,” “birthing person,” etc. all of this should be pretty familiar to readers. 

It’s important to note that Shor isn’t some raging moderate. He’s a lefty. Here’s what Ezra Klein wrote in 2021 after a much-discussed conversation he had with Shor:

Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people we’ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,” he said. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.” The only way out of this, he said, is to “care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.”

I was surprised Shor’s name hasn’t come up more for a few reasons. First, the Biden White House embraced Shor (and, recall, Kamala Harris simply absorbed the Biden campaign). You’d think there would be more attacks (like this one) from the left saying, “Shor-ism has failed!” as well as more protests from the Shor-ites saying “Shor-ism wasn’t really tried!”

I can see arguments on both sides. Illegal immigration is unpopular. Biden didn’t talk about it much for most of his presidency—a very Shor-ist approach—and Harris talked about it sparingly and defensively. She also never bothered to come up with a response to Trump’s “She’s for they-them” ad. Was this partly because the issue is unpopular and popularism says you shouldn’t talk about unpopular things?

Second, I would have thought that someone would argue that Trump won by sort of following Shor’s advice. Trump talked about popular issues—or popular solutions to unpopular problems. He certainly uses simple words and clear language. 

Word magic.

But I don’t have dogs in any of these fights, and it’s not what I really want to talk about. I still respect Shor and think he has a lot of useful insights. But I’ve changed my mind about this whole debate. 

I used to think Schor was offering a clean break with George Lakoff, the last progressive guru who thought you could fix what’s wrong with Democrats or America by talking differently, such as by calling trial lawyers “public-protection attorneys.” Americans will be fine with high taxes, he argued, if you explain to them that “taxes are what you pay to be an American.” Call them “membership fees” and people will suddenly leap for their checkbooks to pay up. 

Popularism is an alternative strategy—and a better one—but it rests on the same assumptions. Instead of trying to wordsmith trial lawyers or taxes into popularity, just don’t talk about trial lawyers and taxes. But if Democrats raise taxes, voters are still going to notice, even if you don’t talk about it. And they’re really going to notice if the other party is shouting, “They raised your taxes!”

Both approaches rest on the idea that words matter a lot more than they do. This worldview comes from the exact place that produces the very young, very urban, very online, hyper-educated kids Schor thinks are pushing the party in a bad direction. He wants the same underlying policies as those kids—indeed, as a millennial, he’s basically one of them—but he’s more aware of how the way they talk annoys people than his fellow bubble-dwellers are. Good for him: The one-eyed man in the land of the blind is worth listening to. But what if the problem is with the land they all live in? 

Elite progressive culture is formed by elite campus culture. In that realm, words are magic. Texts are to be read—interrogated!—for the subtext and not, you know, the text. This academic critical approach is applied not just to literature and film but to institutions and society itself. The whole orientation is to look at the Constitution, business, American history, and popular culture like various creeks to be panned for nuggets of racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalistic exploitation, oppressor-oppressed narratives, inequality, etc. The closest some people can get to real public policy concerns is to investigate the carbon footprint of things, not the actual purpose of them. (Indeed, I often think global warming transports even many wonks into a kind of literary mode of magical realism, or a quasi-religious state where greenhouse gas emissions are ectoplasmic expressions of sin.)  

On college campuses, I sometimes like to ask really smart progressive kids if they have a criticism of, say, the police, prisons, or even the Electoral College that doesn’t have to do with race. I get crickets—or I get outrage over the fact that I am dismissing the importance of race. I’m not dismissing the importance of race, I’ll note. I’m just interested to see if you have anything else to say about these things other than race. 

The old phrase “if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail” doesn’t preclude the possibility that some problems are in fact nails, metaphorically speaking. Talking about racism is really important when there’s racism to talk about. But if you think racism is still the thing we should talk about when there is no racism, then you have little or nothing interesting or important to say about vast swaths of American life.

Here’s a concrete example. Less than two weeks before the election, the New York Times ran a piece headlined,  “The Policy Record Harris Isn’t Talking About.” It begins:

Paging through intelligence reports just weeks after she was sworn in as vice president, Kamala Harris was struck by the way two female foreign leaders were described. The reports used adjectives that, in her view, were rarely used to describe male leaders.

Ms. Harris, the first woman to hold her office, ordered up a review that scrutinized multiple years of briefing reports from various intelligence agencies, looking for possible gender bias.

The whole article is an amazing example of the perils of Shorism. The Times did not think it particularly troubling that Harris’ first instinct upon reading intelligence briefings was to interrogate the text for gender bias and demand a hermeneutic review of past intelligence reports for problematic pronouns and adjectives. What was noteworthy to the Times was that Harris wasn’t running on her lifelong commitment to precisely this kind of thing. 

Meanwhile, most normal people I know interpreted this story as a pristine example of why they didn’t trust Harris to be commander-in-chief. From the left’s perspective, the debate was over whether she should talk about her commitment to these things or keep it under wraps in order to get elected. The question of whether this was a monumental waste of time didn’t seem to occur to anyone.  

Again, that was the salience of the “they/them” ad. The “transphobia”—real or alleged—that it was appealing to was an afterthought. (Trump surely locked up the single-issue anti-trans vote a long time ago.) The real impact of the ad was to tell people suffering from high inflation and fearful of crime and an immigration crisis that Harris had other priorities. 

This is the problem in a nutshell with the left. Say what you will about Donald Trump—other than occasionally using race to call his enemies racist, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about this stuff. I don’t say that admiringly or critically. It’s just an obvious observation. 

If the country was a fraction as worked up about racism or transphobia—or for that matter climate change—as the “Fair Harvard” crowd is, they could talk about it all they like. They wouldn’t even need Lakoffian lingo. But the country is worried about other things. 

Which brings me around to Roger Myers Jr. I see him as a kind of stand-in for an old-style Democrat. 

Indeed, there was a time when the gravelly voiced, vaguely ethnic, cigar-chomping Meyers could have been a Democratic Party boss. Think of Chicago’s Richard J. Daley, who was chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party from 1953 until his death in 1976. He also held the lesser but ceremonially important position of mayor of Chicago from 1955 until 1976. I cannot confirm rumors that he continued to vote well into the 1980s. 

Daley is widely considered the last of the big city bosses. Daley liked and admired Lyndon Johnson and he supported the Great Society—a term Johnson actually unveiled for the first time at a fundraiser for Daley in Chicago.  

But Daley had some big problems with the Great Society as actually implemented. His biggest wasn’t that the whiz kids and Fair Harvard boys thought they were smarter than the politicians on the ground. (They might have been, but who cares?) His biggest complaint was that the Great Society social engineers bypassed the party machine and the mayor and gave funding directly to groups they thought best, including, according to Daley, street gangs. Whatever the truth of that, what was clear was that the federal government was monkey-wrenching Daley’s machine. 

I’m not a big fan of machines, nor a real fan of Daley’s, but one has to concede that Daley understood how to run a city. He worked his way around civil service laws by hiring everybody as a “temporary” worker, claiming they’d eventually get around to taking the civil service exam. They never did. Daley’s definition of “temporary” was until death or retirement. 

Sure, Daley was corrupt, but not super corrupt. He said of the endemic graft of the city council, “I let them take so much, but no more.” Daley built up Chicago:

Despite the conventional wisdom that political machines were hopelessly inefficient, Mayor Daley’s reliable provision of services and apparent ability to balance the city’s financial books led Chicago to be known as “the city that works.” The years of his mayoralty saw the opening of O’Hare International Airport, construction of the University of Illinois branch campus, expansion of the city’s interconnected expressway system from 53 to 506 miles, and a monumental building boom that revitalized the downtown Loop area—and created, courtesy of the Democratic machine, a wealth of contracts and jobs for the construction industry.

Daley was a real New Deal-style liberal, but he would have no use for Shorism or Lakoff-ism. He barely spoke American. He once declared he was proud to welcome the “poet lariat” of Chicago. He complained of his enemies, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.” He famously defended the Chicago police (which, we should concede did some indefensible things) by saying “Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all—the policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

But he knew how to get snow cleared. 

Again, I’m not trying to romanticize Daley, but I guarantee you a great many current residents of Chicago (or New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) would be far, far, happier to pay taxes for Daley-style government than to pay for what they have now—even if you convinced people that taxes are really just membership fees. 

I’ve long thought that Trump sees the presidency through the prism of local New York politics. He thinks he’s mayor of America. I don’t like it for all sorts of reasons I’ve spent the last decade writing about. But does anyone really doubt that the shift of working-class voters to Trump and the GOP can’t be at least partially explained by the burning desire for a Daley type in the White House? 

I’m running long, but I want to make two other points. First, I think the right has its own problems with bubble-think. Conspiratorial thinking about the Deep State, George Soros’ woke minions, and “wars” on masculinity, Christianity, and capitalism, aren’t an exact mirror of the left’s obsessions with institutional racism and related ideas. The left has had 70 years to work on them and bend institutions accordingly. But the right definitely has its own version of a Very Online Ideologue problem. They want Trump to be a right-wing culture war Joan of Arc every bit as much as the left craves one. Deferring to that crowd would, eventually, be as politically fraught as it has been for the left. The stuff the median voters who got Trump re-elected are nostalgic for isn’t the stuff Steve Bannon is nostalgic for. They’re nostalgic for the Daley-esque aspects of his first term. 

And that brings me to my second point. I won’t say it’s my goal, because that presupposes I have the power to make it happen. My hope, though, is for the Democratic Party to become a normal left-of-center party that is interested in having government work to solve real problems. By real problems, I mean the stuff that government is suited to address: well-run schools, snow removal, quality of life, health care, etc. I want the Republican Party to be a normal center-right party committed to the same thing: solving real problems.

Obviously, stripped of the boob-bait and nonsense, I’m going to be more in favor of center-right solutions than center-left ones. But the best way to find the best solutions is to have competition between two sane, normal, parties.

The lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t have one—for long—without the other. The hyperpartisans who read me have a very annoying tendency to assume that whenever I criticize Democrats it’s really to support Republicans—and vice versa. Criticize Harris, and I get “What about Trump!?” Criticize Trump and I get “What about Harris!?” I am willing to concede most of the things people are whattabouting about because I think both parties are a mess. When I wrote last week that Biden should be impeached for his pardon of Hunter, numerous people barked, “I’ll listen to you when you support impeaching Trump!” Well, I did. And I’d hardly be surprised if I ended up doing so again. The case against your crazy isn’t a case for my crazy—because I don’t like any of the craziness. 

I increasingly believe the best way to fix the Republican Party is to fix the Democratic Party and, again, vice versa. So long as one is crazy, the other one has permission from its side to be crazy too. I don’t have the power to fix anything, so I’ll just keep criticizing the problems and supporting the successes. If you don’t like it, don’t read me. 

Various & Sundry 

Canine Update: We had a bit of a crisis this morning. We ran out of the specific glop that Gracie demands in the morning. I tried to feed her from the stash of Chester-acceptable glop my wife stores. She would have nothing to do with it.  New shipments of the “good” stuff are en route, but I fear they won’t be here in time to prevent her from pooping in my sock drawer. Pippa meanwhile, is back to extorting belly rubs before she leaves the house—and bragging about it. She is also prepared for additional belly rubs at all other times. All Zoë wants to do—inside—is hang out. Outside, security is her business. What she will not tolerate, however, is breaches of protocol. Gracie likes to hang out too.

The Dispawtch 

Owner’s Name: Jon McKinney

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I came to The Dispatch four-ish years ago because I was a fan of David French. I can safely say that I have found my people at The Dispatch. I am a disillusioned former Republican who still skews right of center. I love that The Dispatch is interesting, intelligent, and fair.

Personal Details: Because of some comments I made in The Dispatch comment section, I was contacted by PBS Newshour and interviewed by Judy Woodruff. I was invited back for a town hall—making it two appearances on the program—because of one comment on a Dispatch story.

Pet’s Name: Charlie

Pet’s Breed: Corgi with a lot of other breeds mixed in.

Pet’s Age: 13

Gotcha Story: A few weeks after my wife and I got married, I was working weekends. On a Saturday she took her younger brothers to the Humane Society to donate dog food. I got a text mid-shift saying, “We have a dog, hope that’s ok.” I was mad that she adopted a dog without me, but Charlie is the best dog ever so I got over it pretty quickly.

Pet’s Likes: Snuggles, kids, squeaky toys, human food, walks, his dog door.

Pet’s Dislikes: Thunderstorms, fireworks, baths, cats, other dogs walking in front of his house.

Pet’s Proudest Moment: A chipmunk fell down our chimney. I tried to catch it but when I opened the fireplace doors it ran past me and into the house. The chipmunk decided to run into the other room where my wife was, who was unaware of the situation. It ran onto her feet and she screamed. Charlie, seeing his mom in danger, sprang into action and dispatched the vermin in a matter of seconds. His years of playing find the squeaker paid off.

Moment Someone (Wrongly) Said Pet Was a Bad Dog: I was trying to make friends with a new IT director at work who was very proud of his Corgis. I showed him a picture of mine, and he replied indignantly that Charlie was a mutt and not a purebred Corgi. He was a fan of Alex Jones and didn’t last long.

Do you have a quadruped you’d like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.

ICYMI

—Bye, bye, Biden

—No more buts!

—Petty disputes 

—We messed up

—Jonahetics 

—Vigilate valentine 

Now for the weird stuff …

—Catcher in the AI

—It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, the regular crowd shuffles in …

—Competitive edge 

—Excel-lent 

—Ratcism 

—Tiger czar 

—La, la, la, I can’t hear you!

—Fake fan

—Win an all-inclusive vacation to Maui with Jonah