Don't mistake Democratic partisan orthodoxy for a "coherent" philosophy

In a two-party system, the party coalitions are full of contradictions — and the Democrats' are becoming more obvious.

Greetings from Las Vegas, where best-laid plans to publish several newsletters per week sometimes go astray. I wanted to thank the many Silver Bulletin readers who donated to GiveDirectly. In addition to those of you who contributed directly, I also promised to give 50 percent of Gross Annualized Revenues generated by the prior two newsletter posts. That 50 percent share wound up working out to … $27,196.50! I wasn’t expecting numbers like that — which are highly atypical outside of an election peak or NCAA tournament season. So thank you so much! The deadline has passed for the 50/50 share, but the fundraising drive that some of us Substackers put together is on through the end of the year, and of course I’d still encourage you to donate.

News consumption reinforces partisan but not ideological consistency

A couple of things I read this week triggered one of my pet peeves, and I figure it’s worth a newsletter post — but the first point of context is slightly awkward. Specifically, it concerns the political views of Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in a dramatic targeted killing in Manhattan last week. Mangione’s Twitter profile is still active and shows him following a number of centrist and “rationalist” figures, in addition to some anti-establishment types like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As John Ganz writes, Mangione is a pretty identifiable set of political commitments: center or center-right, mildly anti-establishment, and very Podcast Bro. I'm not sure I want to spend any more time on Mangione’s politics or his motivations than I have to, although I understand people's dark fascination with him. Still, I’ve seen a lot of expressions like this from the New York Times’s Max Fisher:

I’m not exactly disputing Fisher’s take here, I suppose — we both agree that Mangione is an identifiable Type of Guy who consumes a particular type of news and opinion programming.

Still, you often see a person’s political views referred to as “incoherent” — often with the implication that they’re misinformed — if they don’t line up neatly with one of the two major parties. Here's another example from Jon Favreau at Pod Save America (yes, we've been talking about Pod Save a lot lately):

Most interactions with voters aren’t as satisfying as you hope, and some are just bizarre. When I was conducting focus groups for a podcast I host called The Wilderness, a Latino voter in Vegas told me that his two favorite political leaders were Governor Ron DeSantis and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because they were both “outsiders” who were willing to “take on the establishment.” An older Milwaukee voter said that he had voted for Barack Obama and then Donald Trump because “they both felt like change.” A young Black man in Atlanta said that because of crime and inflation, he regretted his vote for Joe Biden, and that “at least Trump is an honest liar.”

The show would sometimes get harsh reviews from Democrats, whose reactions to these focus groups I’d charitably describe as frustrated disbelief: “Infuriating.” “Depressing.” “Couldn’t listen.” “Why didn’t you correct them?” “How did you not just walk out?”

I understand why people would feel this way. Well, I understand why people like us would feel this way. If you care enough about politics to read The Atlantic or listen to Pod Save America or scroll through an infinite feed of strangers’ opinions, you mostly encounter broadly cohesive political identities. Even if we don’t agree with the views of leftists or liberals or Never Trumpers or MAGA Republicans, we understand them (or at least we think we do). The people whose views we don’t understand tend to be the people who simply don’t follow politics that closely.

Favreau uses a similar term to Fisher: the views of the swing voters he encounters do not seem “cohesive.” But it doesn’t seem that hard to understand them on an intuitive level. In a time of perpetual dissatisfaction with the status quo, both Obama and Trump were indeed “change candidates.” Both AOC and DeSantis have branded themselves as opponents of a corrupt establishment. Biden’s lies, like his promise not to pardon his son Hunter, are less numerous than Trump's, but they also can seem more hypocritical because of the way that Democrats tend to claim to occupy the moral highground.

Favreau might be right that there's an inverse correlation between holding such views and consuming political news, but I think he's drawing the wrong inferences. Pod Save America might be more nuanced about it than certain alternatives, but it still has a more-or-less explicit goal of rooting for Democrats. So if you listen to the show, you'll learn what Democratic orthodoxy is on the issues, even if the hosts sometimes disagree with it.

You'll learn the same orthodoxies by reading the New York Times, where Fisher works.¹ That's a more complicated case: I'd argue that the Times is ultimately not a partisan outlet, but it knows its audience and that it overwhelmingly votes for Democrats. The Times is sort of trying to be a highbrow non-denominational progressive church for readers ranging from the “far” left to the non-Trumpist center-right, i.e. exactly the territory the Democratic Party also targets for its votes.

Partisan orthodoxy is not a coherent ideological construct, however. “Partisan”, as I’m using it here, means loyalty to a cause and more specifically to a political party.²

In fact, I’d argue that if anything, the opposite is true. In a two-party system, the major parties almost by definition have incoherent views for two reasons. First, they’re compressing a complex world into a single Democratic vs. Republican dimension. There’s a lot of information loss. And second, the job of political parties (unlike newspapers) is to win elections and pass their agendas. (When an outlet like the Times highlights these contradictions, partisans who want it to be an instrument of the Democratic Party tend to get really angry at it.) In a two-party system — it’s not like America has, say, a prominent Green Party or the Christian Democrats or the Scottish Nationalists — that requires all sorts of coalition-building and compromising, and sometimes tolerating a lot of contradictions.

I’m focusing here on the Democratic Party coalition because I know it better and because it’s not like Republicans under Donald Trump even pretend to offer a philosophically coherent version of conservatism or anything else — rather, GOP politics are mostly vibes- and grievance-driven (though much of Democratic politics is, too) and explicitly transactional. Trump will backtrack from longstanding GOP commitments like to the anti-abortion movement if he thinks it can help him to win, and is probably smart to do so.

I’d also argue, though, that the current Democratic Party agenda is full of more contradictions than usual, and this is part of why it lost the election last month. Voters at different ends of the news consumption spectrum tend to find it dissatisfying. On the one hand, there are those so-called “low-information voters” who don't read enough news to know what the partisan cues are in the first place. On the other hand, there are some very high-information voters — like Guys Who Write Substacks or people who subscribe to them — who may even have read some political philosophy and recognize the distinction I'm getting at between partisanship and ideological or moral consistency.

The 6 dimensions of the Democratic coalition

I’m going to compare some slightly unlike things here. The first three are relatively coherent ideologies that get smooshed together into the Democratic coalition in the two-party system. The fourth is the socioeconomic position of progressive and Democratic Party elites. And the fifth and sixth are elements of party politics itself — the party’s tactics to maintain coalitions to win elections and pass policy, and how these can further preclude it from having an ideologically coherent program.

First, there is the traditional labor-left base of the Democratic Party, associated with promoting the interests of the working class through redistributive economic programs, labor unions, curbs on corporate excesses, and perhaps creating some sense of solidarity among the multiethnic working class. This part of the coalition appeared to be amid a revival in the mid-2010s between Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016.

But it’s now in a great deal of trouble. To most Americans, Democrats are now primarily associated with “cultural” issues, not economic ones or working-class interests, other than maybe health care. White working-class voters fled Democrats in 2016, and Asian and Latino ones — and, to a lesser extent, Black voters — did so in 2024.

Second, there is liberalism, a term I use in a highly specific way that is not synonymous with other terms like “left” or “progressive”:

The essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative” by the Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand how liberalism was traditionally defined in the Enlightenment political tradition and how the term came to be used in a rather different way in the United States. To simplify: liberalism is a political philosophy that’s centered around individual rights, equality, the rule of law, democracy, and free-market economics. There are many flavors of liberalism that emphasize these components in different ratios, running from more libertarian variants to others that see a much larger role for government.

Liberalism, as defined in this way and as the term is used in Europe, is closer to being an ideology of the center than the left. But liberals and leftists can often find common cause. Because liberals usually support some economic redistribution — they are not strict libertarians — there’s often a negotiation to be had. Both groups are skeptical of entrenched power, albeit for different reasons. Both tend to support free speech and individual rights. In the United States, both movements are fairly secular and support the separation of church and state. And neither are fans of Trump, who kept the left-liberal coalition united for most of the period from 2016 — even Hillary Clinton at least won the popular vote — through 2022.

Third, there is “social-justice leftism” or “wokeness.” Over the course of writing Silver Bulletin, I’ve become less shy about using the “w-word.” True, the term has become increasingly pejorative and is now rarely used by members of the in-group. But it’s naive to pretend there’s nothing there or nothing distinct about wokeness. As Musa al-Gharbi points out in “We Have Never Been Woke” — I’ve skipped nearly all of the recent wokeness books, but gave this one a try because of al-Gharbi’s excellent Substack — all words escape easy definition if you zoom the lens too far in or too far out. But “wokeness” clearly involves a distinctive set of ideological and philosophical commitments that constitute a recognizable area of political vector space. The ChatGPT definition gets us most of the way there:

"Wokeness" refers to heightened awareness and sensitivity to social injustices, particularly issues related to race, gender, and inequality. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing and addressing systemic oppression and discrimination.

However, wokeness clashes with those other two left-leaning philosophical traditions in some obvious ways. It views identity characteristics — especially race, gender, and sexual identity — as central to the struggle of the oppressed as opposed to class solidarity being central, as in the labor-left tradition. Notably, some of the harshest critiques of the Times’s 1619 Project, a high-water mark for mainstream affirmation of wokeness, came not from the center but literally from socialists.

Meanwhile, wokeness is in various ways illiberal: censorious and scolding, often opposed to free speech, and tending to privilege the views of academic experts who have “done the reading” above the common person’s or the invisible hand of the market.

Fourth, there is the socioeconomic context of what I call the Village. As al-Gharbi emphasizes, elites within the Democratic coalition — including all three tribes I described above — are “winners.” They have a lot of cultural capital, controlling what I call the “means of moral production.” It is hard for them not to be defenders of “the establishment” when the institutions they run, like elite universities (e.g. Harvard) and the center-left media (e.g. the NYT) are essentially writing the first draft of history as the educated classes are expected to read it. Some members of the Village are quite economically successful, and others less so — an adjunct professor at an obscure college isn’t making a lot of money. But the Village also captures a lot of “public intellectuals” who lead comfortable lives, not to mention the wealthy donor classes that give to the Democratic Party and university endowments.

This pro-establishment tilt introduces many contradictions in the Democratic coalition. The labor leftists and the social justice leftists both have profound critiques of the status quo — often explicitly framed as “systematic” ones. Liberals tend to be more simpatico with the establishment: the Western order is still basically a liberal order. Still, while a subspecies of technocratic liberals are champions of the “expert class,” others are more skeptical of it, seeing it as error-prone and subject to its own set of cognitive biases.

“Riverian” types, like venture capitalists and hedge fund managers — the other half of the dichotomy I discuss in my book — are also “symbolic capitalists” in al-Gharbi’s formulation, doing “nonmanual work associated with the production and manipulation of data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structure and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations, and so forth.” Both Riverians and Villagers are elites — the 1 percent. So the recent sorting of some River types out of the Democratic Party coalition and into the GOP is interesting, depriving the Village of some of its very wealthiest members like Elon Musk, and shifting its vibes away from STEM toward the humanities.

In principle, this might give the Democratic coalition more opportunity to pursue a populist framework by railing against corporate elites. But this is difficult when institutions like Harvard — one of the most inegalitarian institutions in the world — still play such a prominent role in its thinking. Moreover, humanities types tend to “code” as elite and upper-class (perhaps more so than the engineer types who, like Musk, can have more middlebrow taste). There is in some sense a literal language barrier between Democratic Party elites and the voters they’re trying to reach; trying to arrive at persuasive messages by algorithm only works so well.

Fifth, there is the Democratic Party itself. People often confuse partisan political positions with ideological ones. “The polls are skewed against Biden” is a partisan view but not one with any particular ideological valence. “We should raise taxes on the rich” is an ideological view, meanwhile, one that is historically associated with the Democratic Party.

Partisanship is often a unifying force for any political coalition. Competing in elections is invigorating, and winning them is fun. There are lots of political hobbyists who have at most one or two firm ideological commitments and then fill in the rest to go along with the “team,” especially in election years. Because these partisan hobbyists consume a lot of news, they know what the orthodoxies are and may follow them on nearly every issue.

Still, partisanship sometimes creates contradictions of its own. Political parties place a high premium on self-preservation. The Democratic Party seeks to protect itself from potential rivals by, for instance, knocking third parties off the ballot even though this is undemocratic. Like the Republican Party, it tends to protect its incumbents when new district boundaries are drawn, even when this doesn’t maximize its expected value in terms of the number of seats.

Partisans are also sometimes expected to defend hypocritical positions, like Biden’s pardon of his son. And sometimes, what seem like ideological commitments prove to be partisan ones. The Democratic Party has put notably less emphasis on voting rights over the past couple of years, now that marginal voters who are less likely to turn out also tend to favor Trump.

Sixth, there are interest groups, a.k.a. “the groups” or, more pejoratively, “special interest groups.” These are narrowcast organizations of voters or corporate interests who have a transactional relationship with the parties: they provide money and votes, and in exchange, the parties are expected to deliver policy or ideological victories.

Sometimes, the groups are compatible with the parties' broader ideological goals but take them to a greater extreme. Pro-immigration groups purporting to represent Hispanic or “LatinX” voters don’t actually match the political preferences of typical Hispanic voters, for instance. But they can also create additional dimensions for conflict and further inconsistencies in the party platforms.³ For instance:

• Environmental groups like the Sierra Club oppose nuclear power even though it could be part of a transition away from fossil fuels;

• Police unions, which often hinder criminal justice reform, nevertheless frequently endorse the Democratic Party;

• Trial lawyers and “Big Law” firms also tend to be in league with the Democratic Party even though they clearly meet the definition of wealthy corporate interests;

• Until very recently, likewise, Silicon Valley contributed overwhelmingly to Democrats, when they are some of the most powerful elites of all. This alliance is now very much broken for a number of reasons that I discuss in the book, ranging from Silicon Valley’s distaste for wokeness to aggressive antitrust actions by the FTC.

COVID as case study of partisanship trumping philosophical consistency

To see how these contradictions play out in practice, consider Democratic Party and Republican Party orthodoxy under COVID. In the very early days of the pandemic, it wasn’t clear how the party coalitions would align around the issue. There are some psychological traits that you might think might make conservatives more hawkish on COVID, as they had been on previous disease outbreaks like Ebola. And it was Trump who introduced “15 Days to Stop the Spread”.

But quickly — and not unreasonably — the Trump White House developed a reputation for being both too lax on COVID and ham-handed in its response. And especially in an election year, the issue soon became extremely polarized along partisan lines — I would argue more polarized than any issue since I began covering politics.

This masked the fact that the hawkish response Democrats called for — lockdowns and remote learning, masks, social distancing and vaccine mandates — often seemed to contradict the Democratic coalition's other interests:

• School closures impacted the provision of public education, something that almost all ideological groups within the coalition usually endorse;

• Business closures and closures of public goods like museums had a much bigger impact on urban areas, even though the Democratic coalition is overwhelmingly urban;

• Lockdowns were much harder on disadvantaged groups, as “essential workers” delivered FedEx packages and pad Thai to the laptop classes;

• Learning loss likewise had much more of an impact on poor and minority students;

• The COVID response undermined personal freedom in unprecedented ways, something the liberals in the Democratic coalition care about a lot;

• Vaccine mandates had a bigger impact on Black Americans, who have less trust in the medical system and higher vaccine hesitancy;

• And once Biden became president, continued reluctance to fully reopen the economy stymied the recovery.

If you were to point out the sometimes obvious hypocrisies (such as around the George Floyd protests), though, you’d get pilloried — as I experienced personally, even though I thought I was remaining true to my values when others were abandoning them. And I’d argue that was no coincidence. The greater the philosophical inconsistencies, the more enforcement you need to keep the partisan coalition in line. But don’t mistake partisanship for a morally consistent philosophy.

1. I also used to work for the Times and sometimes freelance for it.

2. As is embedded in its etymology.

3. Although, arguably the recent tendency is in the opposite direction, with “the groups” having become more ideologically consistent with rest of the Democratic Party coalition in an “everything bagel” universe where they are expected to sign on with other parts of the party agenda — for instance, the Service Employees International Union (SEUI) issuing policy statements on Gaza. But at the same time, they may be becoming less effective at delivering votes and representing the interests of the workers they claim to represent.