How I'd like Democrats to Change

A wishlist

As Matt Yglesias noted in his pre-election takes, it seems globally the case that post-Covid incumbent parties inevitably lose.¹ Voters hate inflation, and aren’t sophisticated enough to assess counterfactuals, or forward-looking economic policy for that matter (who could seriously think that tariffs are going to help bring down prices?). By contrast, too few seem to care very much about procedural niceties like “not trying to steal elections” and “not being blatantly corrupt”. Go figure.

Still, a big electoral loss is an opportunity for parties to rethink their priorities. Everyone’s motivated to argue that if only the party was more to my liking, it would have won! A priori, it seems unlikely that the people writing these takes have much in common with the low-information swing voters who decide elections. The general population is quite systematically biased against appreciating important truths in both cognitive/economic and moral domains, so we can’t generally expect that a more objectively meritorious platform would automatically yield greater electoral success.

A more sensible process may be to (i) think about what’s popular and unpopular with the general public, (ii) think about what’s what’s objectively important, and then (iii) consider how to most strategically merge the two so that the party is sufficiently popular to win more, while mostly compromising on less-important stuff, and still advancing its most important goals.

So, we want to jettison what’s unpopular and bad, compromise to some degree when what’s (very) popular diverges from what’s (moderately) good, and stick with some top priorities even at some (modest) cost to popularity. With that background framework in mind, here’s how I’d like to see the Democratic party (and elite/progressive culture more generally) change: