Wednesday, July 24, 2024

1964, 1968, 1972, and a bit of 1980

What follows is a grossly oversimplified mental model based on flawed and arguably past their sale date historical analogies. I'm giving you a lot to criticize, but consistent with the maxim that all models are wrong but some are useful, I found this very useful for organizing my thoughts. I'll go even further and say I think it is true in the advisory sentence: when it tells you to do something, you should probably do it.

1964 was a very good election for the Democrats. 1968 was a bad one and 1972 was a disaster (at least with respect to the presidency). In the broadest sense, how can we characterize 64 versus 68/72?

Skipping a lot of back story, 1964 had a unified Democratic party spend the campaign aggressively attacking an ideologically extreme Republican as dangerous and erratic.

1968 had a divided Democratic Party largely focused on internal squabbles. 1972 took this to the next level, passing over the candidate who actually got the most primary votes for the one who had headed the committee that rewrote the nominating rules.

Like I said, this leaves a lot out, but if we take the analogy at this very high level I think it gets to the gist of what Democrats want and why they feel so angry with and disconnected from much, perhaps most of the elite mainstream media. The response to Kamala Harris clearly suggests they want 2024 to be another 1964, one where a united party concentrates all of its attention, energy, and resources attacking and unfit candidate and his wildly unpopular positions.

By comparison, viewed using this framework, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic have been actively lobbying for what looks a great deal like a combination of 1968 and 1972 with a little bit of 1980 thrown in. Ezra Klein is still whining over the lack of a Eugene McCarthy or a Ted Kennedy this time around.

It is almost impossible to take the arguments of the 68/72 crowd at face value. After months of complaining that Biden was too old and would leave the party divided, now they have a young candidate implicitly chosen by primary voters and currently backed by the near universal support of a reenergized party, and it's driving them crazy. 

Why are they so upset over getting what they claimed to want? I've heard cynics suggest that the editorial boards of papers like the New York Times secretly want Trump to win because he's good for the news business, or because they tend to represent the social class that will benefit from his tax policies, or because they secretly agree with parts of his philosophy. While there is some merit to the first two and perhaps just a little to the third, I don't think that's it. 

I believe they don't want Trump to win, but more importantly, they don't want him to lose in a way that makes them look bad and feel foolish. It is nearly impossible to overstate how invested institutions like the New York Times become in their narratives and how far they will go to defend them. Over the past four years, the standard narratives have been that Trump's support would evaporate once he actually lost an election, that Dobbs would not play a significant role in any upcoming elections, that DeSantis had a virtual lock on the Republican nomination, that JD Vance was the principled conservative and political talent we needed to counter Trump, and that Kamala Harris was an extremely weak politician who could not possibly unite the Democratic Party. Compared to the pain of owning up to all their mistakes, four more years of Trump doesn't seem that bad to these people.









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