There really aren’t that many advantages to being a political junky. You have to wait for years for anything significant to happen, and in the mean time you mostly just have to wade through years and years of inside baseball and getting wrapped up in issues of the day that are likely to be forgotten in a few weeks anyways.

But one of the few perks is recognizing when you’re being presented with a garbage argument, and then picking apart why it’s a garbage argument. Sometimes this easy. Sometimes, the defects are put right at the front of whatever it is you’re reading. Other times, the content is just so vacuous, shallow, and tediously written that it’s a joy to parody.

But other times, you see something that starts out seeming to make a lot of sense, but then halfway through they pull a bait and switch and start throwing out all kinds of horrible arguments. This sort of thing is the most frustrating, as there’s an obvious argument to be made that the authors starts to make, but then just completely fails to see it.

Here’s a quick list of some of the worst bait and switches from the last six months or so:

Democrats And The Working Class

The bait: Democrats need to do a better job of appealing to the working class…

By now we’re already familiar with this, type of article. You hear some variant of it every time Democrats lose an election. It easy to become frustrated by them, but really it bears repeating. Tepid support is regularly used as a canary in the coal mine as to the overall strength of the Democratic party and left wing politics in general for good reason. Pretty much any strategy that sees a convincing majority requires winning the working class by a substantial margin. This is especially true of working class people living in the rust belt or similar areas vital to any sort viable of national political strategy.

There really is no substitute. There aren’t enough well heeled socially progressive voters in cosmopolitan cities to deliver Democrats the wins they need in and of themselves. The idea that the well to do well off moderate suburbanites who would usually vote Republican would be turned off by Republican extremism has pretty consistently not panned out. Demographic changes aren’t going to do the job, both because they’re fairly easy to offset in the short term and because in the long term the voting patterns and allegiances of any demographic group is probably going to shift substantially (if voting patterns remained consistent across ethnic lines, age cohorts, etc., then Republican party would have become unviable decades ago).

More importantly, Democrats and the left need to do everything we can to win the working class because, fundamentally, that’s who we are as a party. We work to empower the common man and raise up the underclass to create a more just, accessible, and livable society. We can’t do any of that if we’re not reflecting the working class.

And there’s plenty of reason to argue that Democrats could do a better job in this respect. They haven’t done a great job protecting unions from Republican assaults, and when they’re in power promoting labor unions is too often treated as a low prior. It hasn’t pushed for labor protections in trade bills as strongly as it should. The party got caught up in trying to appear centrist through “welfare reform” and deregulation/privatization schemes that undermined economic security for millions. A large contingent of the party focuses on accommodating vested industrial or financial interests, and only allows it to go for half solutions. Too often it looks at the process of de-industrialization and the hollowing out of the middle class with aloofness. Even when it does act, the party can be accused of taking overly top down technocratic approach that quietly works the mechanism of government through piecemeal legislation and regulations than broad political transformation that captures the imagination and places the people themselves at the center of the process. And you could go on and on…

The switch: … who are invariably portrayed as the Republican base

But these articles don’t usually dwell on any of these issues. Instead, usually they just devolve into a critique of the Democratic policies on cultural grounds. Democrats lose working class voters because of the trappings of coastal cosmopolitan liberalism, which we’re told automatically alienates everyone in middle American.

And what are these working class middle Americans like? Basically, they’re Republicans. They’re inherently parochial to the point of xenophobia and tribalism. They’re religious and culturally conservative, unable to deal with or be a part of social changes. They’re patriotic to a point of unquestioning loyalty to the military or law enforcement, but they’re hostile to the government itself and its pointy headed bureaucrats and taxes and so forth. They probably work for some dirty industry, and therefor hate environmental regulations. Usually you’ll also see some other red state ephemera snuck into this image for good measure, like they drive pick-up trucks with Confederate flags or something.

There’s so much wrong with this image that it’s a little hard to know where to start. For one thing, there’s the fact that these write ups are usually writing about the white working class in particular, and usually aren’t interested in getting into non-white working class voters. That’s a huge blind spot considering that the failure of Democrats to turn out working African Americans in places like Detroit, Cleveland, or Philadelphia are usually as big of a factor in Democratic electoral loses in Democrat electoral loses in 2016 and elsewhere.

But even when focusing on the white working class, there’s a whole lot of mis-characterization going on. There’s sort of this bait and switch written into articles like this, where they seemingly start by talking about blue collar industrial union workers in rust belt cities who would usually vote Democratic, but what they conflating it with a lot of voting blocs that are pretty consistently Republican: managers, small business owners, rural voters, older voters who are actually pretty well off but entered the workforce before college degrees were a prerequisite to a middle class lifestyle, and who. The disaffection of the former group, and the enthusiasm of the latter is a factor, of course, but it’s cramming a lot of voters into pigeon-holes they don’t actually fit in. This is particularly the case when you factor in all the service sector employees who don’t fit into either of those categories.

This whole thing goes back almost to day one. For example, in the popular narrative of the election of 1980, Reagan was swept into office by “Reagan Democrats”, ethnic white industrial workers in the rustbelt who defected to support him en masse. In reality, Reagan only barely did better in the rust belt than Ford had, and the swing to Reagan in the region was actually much lower than the nation at large. Macomb County Michigan, the supposed epicenter of the “Reagan Democrat” phenomenon, is sort of a microcosm of what happens. Macomb county is, of course, largely industrial suburbs that are traditionally Democratic strongholds, but as anyone from the area knows it’s also a lot of affluent suburbs and rural(ish) townships where consistently Republicans dominate. Some voters in the former might have flipped to voting for Reagan and Trump, but for the most part they won Macomb county on the basis of turning out the part of the district that always voted Republican.

The main problem with all of this is that it misdiagnoses the issue, and papers over the question of what working class people actually want. Instead, it presents Republican populism as inherently appealing to working class voters, and liberal social mores as inherently alienating. In order to win in the Midwest, we’re told, Democrats need to spurn “San Francisco values”. At the same time, we’re assured places like Milwaukee, which was run by sewer socialists for half a century, could never be won over by the type of economic populism leftists are selling.

Donald Trump

The bait: Donald Trump’s position hasn’t exploded into a million fiery pieces yet…

We’ve all seen dozens of articles by this point that present the notion that, for all the day to day scandals rocking the administration, he, and Republicans, aren’t falling apart. Support in this or that constituency that went for Trump is still holding steady, particularly in the sort of competitive rust belt districts that are credited with electing him. Meanwhile, voters in those same districts appear unimpressed by Democratic talking points. Polls after the election say Trump likely would have won a rematch. Democrats have lost all the congressional special elections since Trump took office. And so on, and so forth. Meanwhile, the scandals that emerge from the Trump haven’t seemed to have gained a lot of traction. The Russian scandal pops up from time to time, then fades, lather, rinse, repeat. There also haven’t been any massive, self-evident disasters to turn voters against Trump and the Republican congress en masse yet (Puerto Rico is, of course, a horrendous disaster, but to a lot of voters it’s still seen as a distant thing).

There is a worthwhile take away from all this. We’ve often fallen victims to our own unrealistic expectations on the Trump Administration. Democrats tend to think that Trump and his behavior is so self-evidently awful that he’s going to alienate everyone. On this basis, Democrats have gotten to point of thinking they not only can, but should be winning races they’d usually lose by 10% or more, and very often the media plays in to this view.

Along with the expectation of inevitable voter backlash, A lot of people have been expecting the to just self-destruct on its own. Surely, one of these days, Trump is just going to up and quit. Surely some sort of bomb shell Russian revelation will unravel the whole administration in the span of days. Surely congressional Republicans are reaching a tipping point where they’ll go along with impeachment. Maybe the electoral college can be convinced to vote against Trump. Maybe congress will invoke the 25th amendment and declare Trump insane. And so on and so forth.

And then when none of this pans out, people get demoralized because they thought they should have. It’s worth remembering that, in most circumstances, these sorts of things don’t happen that way. It usually takes a while for the consequences of bad governance to produce obvious problems or register with voters. The Bush administration, for example, went for years before it’s incompetence finally caught up with it. On the other hand, scandals usually don’t metastasize to a point where they bring down administrations, and only rarely do large swathes of the population become invested in them. Even in the most serious scandals, impeachment is still a long shot. Similarly, it takes a lot to cause an intraparty split, and as much as it may cost them to hang with Trump, of course a lot of Republicans figure they’d lose more if they broke faith and tried to take him down. And that’s if they get that far in the first place, which is unlikely because the vast majority of them still agree with Trump on pretty much everything. It’s not surprising that we’re more than 9 months into the Trump Administration it’s still there.

Moreover, expecting some sort of silver bullet to come along and destroy the Trump Administration. Whether or not Trump blows himself up, Democrat’s still do need to be introspective about what they did to put themselves in their current position. Everyone still needs to do the actual leg work of presenting an appealing alternative, pressing for the things they believe in, winning people over, and mobilizing voters.

The switch: … therefor, Trump can do nothing to alienate his base or lose.

But buried in the implication that Donald Trump is essentially immune to his own ineptness because “the people” aren’t alienating by his awful policies or potentially illegal activities because they don’t care. As long as Trump is delivering coal miner jobs or whatever the silent, indefatigable majority will still support him.

To that end, it’s worth remembering that “Teflon Don” has an approval rating that hasn’t been above 40% since May. Republicans are still losing to Democrats in generic ballots by 9%. Democrats haven’t picked up any congressional seats, they have won a lot of more local races. Even in the elections they’ve lost, they’re still improving their margin dramatically. The point is, Trump and the Republicans are causing a backlash. The left is still doing exceptionally well, and is on track to dramatically tip the scales in its favor, both in 2018, 2020, and all the time in between.

To be sure, the relative tenacity of Trump support in places like the Midwest is an issue that Democrats and the left will need to work hard to overcome. But it’s worth remembering that Trump’s margin in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina were so low that it wouldn’t take a lot for him to lose them. Even if Trump keeps all his support in those places, if Democratic turnout increased slightly or the third party vote decreased, then Trump would lose. And, realistically speaking, Trump’s support in the places like Ohio will likely only last until the next recession, most likely in the next year or two, leads everyone to the conclusion that his economic promises were hollow.

And of course, if Trump really is implicated in massively illegal/illicit things through the Russia scandal, or any other scandal, then the politics of it really isn’t going to matter.

Mark Lilla’s Whole Identity Politics Thing

The bait: You shouldn’t just frame issues as affecting a narrow subset of people, you should emphasize things that appeal to people in general…

Mark Lilla’s column was picked up enthusiastically by Conservatives and self-proclaimed Centrists, who loved the argument for essentially being “the problem with liberal politics is the liberalism” and implying that the only way to win is to appeal to conservatives. The left roundly rejected Lilla’s argument, and many embraced the idea of identity politics he was railing, declaring that “all politics is identity politics” and so forth. The whole thing popped up again in August when Lilla published a book doubling down on his arguments, and commentators all doubled down on theirs.

Lilla’s argument is strongest when it’s phrased as a call for a broad, cross cutting messaging that emphasizes people’s commonalities/common stakes in things. This is an argument that should be made. It’s been pointed out that the Democratic party functions largely as a coalition of particular interest groups with their own particular of particular issues but a rather gaping hole in the middle in terms of unifying message. For its part, the leadership has often gotten into the head space of expecting shallow demographic appeals to be, in and of themselves, sufficiently to do the job. For example, a recent piece revealed that the DCCC sees their ideal candidate as a female, veteran, small business owners, as though it doesn’t matter what candidates actually believe as long as they check the right combination of boxes.

It’s just bad politics to start from the premise that only a subset of the population has a vested interested in a particular issue. If you run on that, then you’re relying on either generating and sustaining an extremely high level of political mobilization from a narrow band of the population, or you’re counting on a large sympathy vote from people with supposedly no stake in the matter (or worse, a negative stake). Even if you have a lot of such groups mutually supporting each other in sort of mutual self interest, it’s not going to be a particularly strong or consistent one.

To be sure, you can get a lot done through targeted appeals to a particular community or generating moral sympathy with a put upon minority. But the short comings of relying on those things exclusively is obvious. The natural default is you lose, while in the best case scenario you’re fighting an uphill battle.

If you want to build a sustainable majority, you should strive to convince as many people as possible that what’s in your interest is in their interest as well. Maybe that means appealing to their economic/physical self-interest. Maybe that means making an appeal to some deeply felt commonality in their principles or identities. There’s really no reason not to do that.

There’s plenty of history examples you can point to for this. The abolitionist movement only got so far pointing to the injustice of slavery and generating moral outrage at their plight, and they succeeded primarily because they were also able to present slavery as a threat to free labor and republican principles. The New Deal was sold largely through a frame of broad economic empowerment and reining in out of control corporate forces that a large cross section of the population could identify with. By contrast, the 19th century populist movement was hampered by the perception that it was strictly a party by farmers for farmers. The immigration politics of the gilded age or 1920s achieved heavy support among urban Catholics, but it didn’t add up to a particularly effective national strategy.

To use a more modern example, if you treat the issue of police brutality, mass incarceration, and the militarization of the police force as an exclusively racial issue (note, I’m not saying everyone does), you’d be ignoring a lot of other aspects of the problem that might appeal to broader set of people, e.g. anyone could get caught up in the system, it protects and enables horrible people and gives them control over life and death, it perpetuates a parasitic system of private prisons, and so on and so forth. For example, the fact that Joe Arpaio was largely interpreted through the media in terms of immigration meant that all the other horrifying things about the man.

The switch: … therefor all identity politics is counterproductive and you shouldn’t do it.

There’s a difference between saying that you shouldn’t rely on an argument exclusively, and saying you shouldn’t make an argument at all. Mobilizing particular demographic groups around issues that particularly affects them, and creating broad public sympathy for that group, can be very effective. If identity politics is carried to a point where everything has to be interpreted through the prism of the most put upon, de-legitimizing everything else, or where it devolves to a sort of shallow pandering, then yes, that will be alienating to people. But pointing out that systemic racism or sexism are huge problems and self-evidently wrong isn’t, in and of itself, the problem.

And, more generally speaking, working through the communities, cultural touchstones, and other things, i.e. the things people base their identities on, are still some of the most effective ways of generating political support on a tactical level. Really, the most obvious strategy is to have a sort of broad cross cutting ideological argument in conjunction with more particular identity based appeals.

The point is sort of highlighted by the aforementioned examples. While anti-slavery and the New Deal succeeded largely because they achieved a sort of broad based message, that doesn’t mean they abandoned identity politics. The anti-slavery movement didn’t stop talking about the plight of the slaves themselves. The Democratic party didn’t stop appealing to urban Catholics when they launched the new deal. And while Lilla like’s to point to the broad appeal ideals based appeals of Ronald Reagan, it’d be ridiculous to say the Republican party of the 80s wasn’t based to a large extent on its own set of identity politics (what with the Moral Majority and the continuation of the Southern Strategy and all).

The other switch: … therefor you need to compromise.

There’s also this weird turn Mark Lilla makes in his various articles, where after several paragraphs arguing for a strategy that appeals to a broad cross section of the population to build an electoral majority, he suddenly starts talking about compromise and the dangers of political purity, and various other familiar centrist talking points.

The argument doesn’t actually follow. One would think that the advantage of rhetorically framing issue in a way that appeals to a majority of people is that you don’t need to compromise or water down your goals. Why would you? You’ve gotten a majority of people to agree that you’d be doing what they want. You can enact your policies without having to worry about a backlash because if you do press the issue people will just support you for it more.

May this argument sort of makes sense if you imagine that what Lilla is referring is a message that’s so broad and generic that there are just no requisites to anything. But honestly, if that is your mentality towards campaigning, then the image you’ll leave with voters is “transparent shallowness”.