Former prosecutor, church-going, mom of 4 with SEVERAL floral dresses, and my views line up with yours exactly. It just seems like common, humanist sense. I bet we’re legions….in fact I’m counting on it, because I really fucking love America.
One thing I think the Harris campaign got right that Democrats should keep doing was making flag waiving patriotism part of its image. "Loving America" is not a position that should be surrendered to the right. Instead of calling America "stolen land", we should be talking about how we want everyone to thrive in our shared home.
I’m convinced that leftist candidates could become dramatically more popular without changing anything policy wise if they were just unambiguously patriotic.
Ds decided in 2001 to just totally shoot ourselves in the foot by making fun of patriotic insignia just after a national tragedy. "Sean Hannity is wearing a flag pin, what a dope," we said, with all the snark John Stewart could muster. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Ugh I don't recall anyone making fun of someone for simply wearing a pin, but I do recall liberals pointing out what a performative empty gesture it was.
It’s basically the beliefs of the median women’s march participant, as leftists annoyed about insufficiently communist political action at the time accurately surmised
The biggest problem facing us is that it doesn’t go viral bc of rage!
Midwestern, church-going former prosecutor, married, dad of 4, and I feel exactly the same! And yes we are legion … It’s gonna take some time and it will probably get worse before it gets better, but I refuse to give up on America.
A lot of the commentary calling CHH a Republican is unhinged and too online. The current Republican president is a criminal who has been divorced twice. Meanwhile, no Democratic president has ever been divorced. The prototypical resistance Democrat is educated and married. People are basing their baseline of what a Democrat is based on the type of person who couldn't get hired at Jezebel. If you're basing your worldview based on random losers you see online, you may be a loser.
Very, very memorably (because I don’t tend to remember every dumb comment on every blog and website): someone posted on Jezebel that she was having marital problems, and her solution to this was to have “an emotional affair” with some random guy and now she can’t understand why her husband wants a divorce and custody…WAAAH why do bad things keep happening to me.
About half of that discourses is Bluesky-style, while the other half is conservatives on Substack seemingly surprised any liberal could be happily married.
Everything is vibes now. It's like why (online) there's an idea that Dems hate trans folk despite being one of the most trans friendly parties in the the western world.
It’s SO freaking annoying that every damn thing is down to “vibes” now. As well as the Omnicause.
So they think American Democrats are anti-trans? Well, I have news for them. One of my longest-term dearest friends is an American living in England, and, well…let’s just say a lot of otherwise “nice libs” hate trans folk with a passion there.
The US Democrats are actually more *socially* liberal, or at least AS socially liberal, as most left or center-left European parties. The line between Democrats and Labour (in the UK) is tiny. What is different, at least as how I have been reading it: 1) the European continent has a contingent of socially-conservative and economically-liberal parties that America does not. There was one outlier party in, IIRC, Luxembourg, which was off the charts in both directions! But Luxembourg is a tiny country and probably pretty homogenous, so there is fertile soil for being very economically liberal but socially constrained; you aren’t dealing with a lot of people or a great diversity. 2) The Republicans in the US are far to the right of most “mainstream” European right-wing parties (though that may be changing). Our Democrats are NOT “Center Right in Europe” at least among the mainstream. Our *Republicans* are far right. We lack a center, which European countries by and large do not.
So 57% of the population is just overtaken by bourgeoise false consciousness? Why are they moving from states dominated by the blue model to states run by the GOP?
Yeah I'm not talking about that but ok bad faith away my guy.
I'm saying that a lot is not about actual stances for a party or candidate but the vibes toward them. The "leopards eating faces" meme came from a woman voting for a party that explicitly said in their policy stances to want to do away with the policy stance she said was most important to her.
If you don't like the Dem policy position that's fine. But I see folk who say they'll vote for a pro LGBT candidate who supports expanding health care access but rail against Dems, who have been working for healthcare since the 90's and are pro LGBT, I can only attribute that to vibes. I shall leave it there but please do comment some smug bullshit in reply.
I am not arguing in bad faith, merely trying to understand why everyone in this comment section thinks that the platform CHH laid out is both a mainstream Dem position, and universally acceptable to all right thinking people, when that is clearly not the case.
I don't see CHH saying this is universally acceptable or even representative of the Democratic Party as a whole? She just said these are *her* politics and why *she* is a Democrat and not a Republican. They are also my politics and my reasons, for what it's worth.
My theory is that it’s close to 100% just because of “population density”. Housing costs are lower in more rural states, so people move there. As more people move there, housing costs will go up, and then people will stop moving there. And - maybe - those now more populous states will become more liberal over time. We’ll see!
Radical leftist got dems to support “dumb”positions then not vote for them. Libs are less crazy but their more mild beliefs causes the party to be in a weird holding pattern over certain issues. CHH used the example where leftists see Kamala as too conservative & a cop while everyone else saw her as too liberal. Gavin Newsome is getting for homeless people: Obama says he is doing too little, leftists say he is evil for personal destroying an encampment.
Also the party is just anti-Trump without a clear vision
I wish there was a way for Democratic candidates to confront the loud mouth online leftist Omnicause crowd, and ask to see proof that 1) they voted in the past couple of elections 2) for Democrats, and not third parties and then 3) only take them seriously if they can prove they actually vote for actual Democrats and don’t think online slacktivism is equivalent to voting.
because trump is objectively obnoxious and terrible in many aspects. I am saying that, despite the many assertions to the contrary in these comments, the dems do not provide a viable, sane alternative to the vast middle.
Because the Dems have alienated their base, who are sick of the party's constant, predictable failure to fight Trump and the ascendant fascist movement he leads.
I am responding to the assumption that the democratic party actually represents sane center leftism: affordable housing, healthcare, and public quality of life.
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, generally were that. Kamala was perhaps ambiguous in that regard. I am a bit concerned about the outgrowth of SF/portland socialism, but am far from convinced that it holds sway behind say, what Mamdani could amount to
I contend that Joe Biden and Clinton are, perhaps, at the center of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic party has swung wildly to the left to the point where MattyY or Noah Smith style center leftism holds no sway in the actual results the state and local parties produce. I am using the national poll numbers to show that, despite trump's clear awfulness and the general fecklessness of the GOP, the Dem brand is insanely unpopular.
I’m a leftist but whenever I think about exactly *why* I wouldn’t vote Republican, it really comes to Trump first. I am never going to support someone who wants to dismantle democracy, and he’s made it very clear he’ll try to do that.
There are a whole host of other issues that would prevent me from voting Republican, but it doesn’t even get there because the dictator thing is a non-starter.
Even if Trump agreed with all my views I couldn't support him. It goes beyond politics. Such a patently selfish, cruel, megalomaniac should not have access to one of the largest nuclear arsenals on the planet, nor the country's law enforcement apparatus. From January 6, to the rape allegations, to the lying about Haitians eating cats, to whatever the hell the Rob Reiner tweet was, it has been incredibly frustrating watching millions of people convince themselves to lower their most basic standards of human decency so that he can get his bone-spurred legs over them.
Funny enough, I know conservatives who just can’t vote Republican until he’s out of the picture for this exact reason. I don’t think they would vote Democrat either but I think for now they just sit out elections or vote third-party.
That would be something like me although I wouldn't per se think of myself as a Cap conservative (more like a not-whackadoodle semi-libertarian in an old school New England R tradition).
But I can't abide by Trump (but then I was in transactions in NYC in the 90s andwe alll knew what a fucking scumbag lowlife Queens wanna be faker he is)
Or they hold their noses if and when the alternative is worse.
I would have voted for Condoleza Rice, only she’s too smart to want to be POTUS. I voted for Nikki Haley in the primary. I would vote for Marco Rubio, now that he’s getting executive branch experience.
I gotta say, it's made me appreciate a conservative point of view. Will I be conservative like that? Probably not. But I can appreciate consistency and a real world view that's not just fealty to a king-figure and "it makes the libs upset".
I have my disagreements with him, but I especially like Jonah Goldberg's attitude and we do have some common ground, like "TV cameras in Congress were a mistake" and "it matters to say what you mean and mean what you say."
In addition to not being beholden to Trump, it's also incredibly refreshing to hear from conservatives who don't hate cities. This is normal in other countries, but for some reason being conservative in the US seems to have gotten associated in the popular imagination with wanting to stay as far away from other people as possible. I wish American discourse had more people like Jonah, who profess their love for big cities and care for their wellbeing without sticking to left-of-center shibboleths. Those kinds of lifestyle preferences never should have been polarized in that way.
I really hate that lifestyle preferences got polarized, too! I think whether one wants to live in a city vs. a suburb vs. an exurb should not be politically “coded” but a matter of personal taste. There are conservatives who want to walk everywhere and pop into cafes at random, and there are liberals who want an acre of land for goats and chickens. Coding a lifestyle preference, which should be personal, into something political, just drives resentment (and polarization) and stereotypes.
I think the preferences are mostly genuine. Having a pickup truck as your main vehicle when there’s no practical reason for it is total culture-war bullshit though.
I've voted L, R, and D. Depended on the candidate and the office. But never again, and it doesn't boil down to policy as much as authoritarianism and elections. Do I like feeling forced to vote D? No, but I blame the Rs for turning their party into simply the political arm of an insurgency. (And I worry that Ds are not exactly emerging as the party of liberalism, either. I fear Ds with ambition hoping to hold onto Trump's expansion of presidential power "but for good.")
As for resistlibs, you can make fun (please do) but there's very few things they predicted about Trump that he didn't eventually do, usually after 1-2 years of respectable libs saying oh no, he wouldn't go that far.
I think of myself as center-left, but as I've gotten older I've definitely drifted rightward. To the point where I now wonder whether I might have voted for, say, GHWB (in 88 at least). But I will never vote for a Republican now.
I wasn't able to vote in 88 or 92, but I suspect I would have voted for him. I also suspect I would have voted for him in the 1980 primary. And regardless of how I'd have voted, I think he did a remarkable job in winning the peace. But that's because more than right or left, I'm a globalist.
I was 6 when GHWB left office, so my views are all hindsight. I think he was an excellent foreign policy president, but couldn't overcome a double dip recession and was just way less charismatic than Bill Clinton.
It takes guts to write something like this, because now, people will be forever referring back to this article, saying “but wait, doesn’t that contradict what you wrote in ‘Why I’m Not A Republican’?”.
I do think some of the reasons you are “Republican-coded” are silly nonsense where Republicans decide that something completely normal and bipartisan like marriage or eating meat or liking your family somehow belongs to them.
Part of this is the nutpicking ecosystem, though, which exists on both sides but is more weaponized from the right. You can always find some fruit loop on TikTok or BlueSky who thinks that Valentine's Day is white supremacy or sex with men is emotional slavery or whatever, just like you can always find some moron on X or TruthSocial saying Jewish pedophile cabals control the weather, but the right wing is better at projecting the crazies on the left onto the entire party rather than contextualizing them as an unimportant fringe of lunatics in an online pigsty.
All this, and also, the asymmetry is that the "Jewish pedophile cabal" guy most likely still voted for Trump, while the "Valentine's Day is white supremacy" person thinks Kamala is an evil centrist shill/genocide apologist, so they wrote in Malcolm X or stayed home.
They get the people who will hold their noses and vote; we get the stomping-footed overgrown children who won’t vote at ALL or will write in MICKEY MOUSE, there, THAT’LL show Kamala the Kop!
and then the shocked Pikachu and the blaming Democrats for somehow not being “good enough” when Trump won. 😤
Except that actually is happening in reality. Just look at marriage and divorce rates of red states vs. blue states. People have agency over what weirdos make up their media diet of the other side.
It's reminiscent of conservative commentary complaining that Obama has a stable loving marriage, but doesn't spend all of his time yelling at single mothers.
The problem is that liberals seem to have a very hard time preaching what they practice.
Take for example, the very simple success sequence.
1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a job
3. Get Married THEN have kids (and stay married)
If you do all that there is a 97% change of avoiding poverty.
That should be a really simple message we are teaching kids in school, especially the type of kids most likely to end up in poverty, but again, liberals seem to have a really hard time preaching what they are practicing.
In their rush to not judge people they are making the people who's lives they claim to want to help worse.
You'll have to cite mainstream liberals discouraging people from graduating high school, getting a job and starting a family. I know this is a new byline among a certain conservative cohort on here but it's completely fantastical. Who do you think staff inner city high schools, job counseling centers and maternal health/family planning clinics?
Lolwut? I thought the whole problem with liberals is that they're too scoldy and preachy and holier-than-thou and stuff! Now you want us to preach *more*?
I'll say this again. I am a liberal in a rural sea of red, and I can think of no better way to become ostracized from my neighbors than to preach what I practice(d)
1) Drive the speed limit
2) Conserve energy
3) Exercise and maintain a healthy weight
4) Eat lots of veggies and a minimum of processed foods
5) Use tractors/ATVs only for work, walk around your property whenever possible
6) Don't buy a lot of plastic crap for your kids, let them be creative
7) Don't smoke
8) Don't have more kids than you can afford
9) Don't have more pets than you can afford
10) Make sure your kids get up early enough to get on the school bus instead of driving them to school and creating a polluting traffic jam (and entitled kids)
11) Don't waste your time and money on trips to Disney
12) You don't need that expensive truck unless you are actually USING it for something that you can't do with a car or minivan (snowplowing, trade work, hauling)
But, even if I wanted to preach it, exactly how would I do it? How exactly do you tell someone any of this stuff unless your relationship is on a very firm foundation? Confront random folks in the grocery store?
I have told one of my neighbors that I worry when he smokes, because I know his granddaughter adores him and it would devastate her to see him get lung cancer. And we're on friendly terms. But other than that, I keep my mouth shut.
As a former teacher, I don't know how random liberals in the school system are supposed teach students that it's good to be married before having kids. Which teachers are supposed to teach it? Math teachers? "Hey kids, before we talk about isosceles triangles, can we talk about having babies?" I do actually believe it's good to be married before having kids, but I was not hired to share these opinions with my students.
You could lobby for sex ed/health curricula that emphasizes marriage before having kids. I'm not sure how much good that would do, but that would make more sense than expecting teachers to just work it into their lesson plans. I also think it's a problem for the kids who are coming from single parent homes, because you are essentially telling the kids that their parents screwed up. And I don't think that schools should be in the business of telling kids that. Are we going to give kids the message that their parent should have stayed with an abusive ex? An ex who was abusive TO THEM? A good friend of mine left her husband because she saw the effect of his anger on their sons. They don't want to be around him.
I think you are coming from a place of caring but I don't see how it actually gets implemented.
BTW, I would also get ostracized for preaching to my liberal friends
1) Don't send your kids to private school
2) Don't move to Europe, we need you here!
Anyway. I think it's best to listen to people, and give opinions when asked. Or when the relationship is strong enough. The rest of the time, it's best to keep one's mouth shut.
There's a lot of kids growing up so messed up that they can't regulate themselves and focus enough to hold any kind of job. They are coming from families with addiction and untreated mental illness and no good examples. Those kids will need a huge amount of social support in order to make it in to the middle class (along with the advice). And they may still end up poor if they help their families out financially. Just heard a heartbreaking story about this in my community. Young man got himself a job—crappy, but a job-and is supporting ten freeloading family members who have drug and mental health issues, including half a dozen kids.
This is kind of Matt Yglesias' Common Sense Democrat Manifesto, but written for normal people.
My dad has always been a "lower my marginal income tax, damn the consequences" kind of Republican, which I didn't agree with, but at least understood. Still cannot understand my evangelical christian relatives looking at Trump and saying, "That's great!" I mean, Dems twisted themselves into a pretzel (in some cases) keeping greasy old Bill Clinton in the tent, but then seemed to take a lesson from it and kicked John Edwards right to the moon, and it was fine. If Republicans can't just vote for better Republicans, I'm not sure what the future has in store for us all.
I think a lot of this is downstream of two things.
1. Only a tiny fraction of people vote in primaries.
2. A lot of moderates have left the parties.
So you have a huge swath of normie voters not voting in primaries then bitching come November about the lack of choices. Well look in the fricken mirror.
I think I may actually agree with everything you said here. Maybe I can nitpick some parts but otherwise, I think you and I are very closely aligned on politics.
Which is why I can’t fathom how anyone could confuse you with a Republican. It would have to be either a Republican who thinks everyone left of center is Karl Marx, or a Marxist who thinks that anyone to the right of Mamdani is Ronald Reagan.
I consider myself a standard progressive. I want universal healthcare, I’m very socially left wing, but I part with other progressives when it comes to Gaza and Israel. I agree that Israel’s gone too far, but I don’t think it’s as simple as progressives make it seem because Hamas did start it.
As far as politicians go, I tend to prefer progressives over moderates. I’m a big fan of Mamdani for example, and I want 2028 to be AOC’s year.
I would not call myself a Marxist because I don’t agree with communism, and because I simply don’t care about economics enough to have a firm opinion about that. If you tried to explain Keynesian economics to me and why you think they’re better or worse than Chicago School, I would do what Homer did when Flanders tried to explain the difference between apple juice and apple cider.
Side note, but it kinda bugs me when people distinguish between liberals and leftists because a leftist, by definition, is anyone left of center, which American liberals definitely are. So I’d prefer it if the narrative was liberals vs progressives.
Several of my lib friends are a steady steam of Palestinian advocacy or convictions of limitless state support for the "oppressed" at the expense of "billionaires". How are they so oblivious to the deep unrelatability of such a tunnel vision approach to such matters? It's like an active choice that trade-offs don't matter.
I think the problem, even if you set antisemitism aside, is that a lot of leftist have this unfortunate habit of instinctively siding with whomever they perceive as the underdog, regardless of who’s right.
So they see Israel “illegally” occupying the region and fighting a war against a weaker enemy, and they automatically see Israel as the bad guy without understanding the nuance.
Russia bombards Ukraine into oblivion, in the most cruel ways imaginable, simply for existing and exercising sovereignty: *I sleep*
As extension of modern human civilization-duration conflict, Iran-aligned Hamas launches brutal, murderous campaign against Israelis, inflicting heavy casualties. Israel responds with its own brutal, murderous response: *Real shit*
The whataboutism with Ukraine is not very helpful for this discussion (in part because many progressives are openly supportive of Ukraine).
Hamas launched brutal attacks, it is true. This is not a simple conflict, also true. However, to imply that this is not something that has been ongoing since the establishment of the modern Israeli state is untrue. Also, to imply that "Iran-backed Hamas" has anything close to the resources of Israel is untrue as well.
Like I said, I agree it's complicated. But it feels like those who disagree that Gaza is the site of a genocide simply do not want to reckon with all the truths.
My take on this is that Hamas is indeed terrible (so are their Iranian backers) but the US government is not funding Hamas' military. What I actually want is to remove Israel's seeming blank check to do whatever they want with US support, not necessarily to remove Israel.
The problem is that, without US support, Israel might not be able to continue existing. And ensuring that they continue to exist is both the morally right thing to do and advantageous to our interests.
But I agree that they should not have a blank check to do what they want. And the fact that they need us should mean that we have the leverage to keep them in line.
If I had been the Democratic nominee in 2024, my stance would have been that I won’t support Israel anymore until Netanyahu steps down and allows himself to be prosecuted for war crimes. Once that happens, I will work closely with his successor to win the war while keeping civilian casualties to a minimum.
I'm not sure I buy that Israel would be wiped out without US support. They certainly have beaten back plenty of challenges in the past; I think they are capable enough on their own.
But yeah, if they want that support then Netanyahu shouldn't be doing things like throwing in entirely with the Republicans and pissing off all the left-wing voters in America. Most rank-and-file Democrats don't see a benefit to helping Israel and I can't blame them.
I understand why Israel's existence is advantageous to US interests, but why do you state that "ensuring that they continue to exist is both the morally right thing to do"?
I know lots of people who believe this, but they believe it because they are Evangelical Christians who think that the existence of Israel is necessary for the second coming of Christ. (And Republicans, obviously.)
Why would anyone else believe that a foreign state existing is a moral imperative?
Where it gets weird, is when your more radicalized and outspoken allies, advance the (obviously reprehensible) killing of Palestinan kids - with what seems like a whiff of opportunism, in advance of a more opaque anti-western motive.
As I note elsewhere in this post - many of these people are decidedly quite lackadaisical to Ukrainian suffering. I interpret this as being because Ukraine is an increasingly westernized culture, which is the real demon here.
So the energy is spent messaging on Gaza suffering (who could defend child death???), in service of (what in my opinion) is an ulterior motive which has truly radicalizing effect *in favor of those progressives' opposition*
Oh yeah, I am baffled by the supposed "leftist" people who are anti-Ukraine. If Israel is prosecuting an unjust war, then Putin is even moreso. Your principles need to be based on something more than "America Bad."
Completely agree. I posted a picture of a support Ukraine poster in Poland (I visited 3 years ago) on my Twitter and got cancelled by Hamas supporting leftists for the final time. It made me realize how anti-west their attitude is.
I think Im also similar to CHH but in the details I think Im different than you. I dont know how to label myself but I think I may say "moderate progressive" or "America loving, freedom loving progressive." I think I have a lot more faith in free markets than a lot of progressives rho, while still believing in an expansive safety net and wealth taxes and the like.
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
This is mostly common-sense “puppies are cute and chocolate is yummy” stuff here that nobody reasonably should quibble with much — in my opinion!
Look, I am 60, wear dresses mostly, have hair even longer than yours, bake my own bread, absolutely adored my SAHM years, am happily married, etc etc — but I’m a bit to the left of you. I’m probably judgier than you in that I refuse to associate with anyone who supports Trump, ICE and the existential harm being done to our country.
A hearty high-five on the economic inequality stuff — that’s my entire subject and because I’m writing from the bottom of the K, I always appreciate the backup from those writing from the top.
We’d be centrists, not libs, in much of Europe. My husband, a citizen of the Netherlands, denied being liberal when he first moved here. But here, he’s ragingly liberal! His views didn’t change.
Incidentally, when we talk to people all over the political spectrum, MOST of us want the same things — we just disagree with the right path to them.
Every single time I get to visit Europe (which we couldn’t afford for years and now we can’t do safely thanks to MAGA) I think the same thing: “We could have nice things, too, if there were not always a Republican objecting to every good thing.”
It’s impossible to spend time in Europe, talking to real Europeans living average lives, seeing how they live, and not feel extremely jealous of their healthcare, time off, better-quality food, better childcare, better work-life balance etc etc.
Anyway, I look forward to reading the rest of the comments now.
I think whether we would be more left or right in Europe would probably have more to do with our beliefs on immigration! And I guess I got into that via ice, but I’m probably pretty left of center on that. Strong vetting to prevent previous violent criminals from entering the country, but very very for highly skilled immigrants and other people who are fleeing political violence.
If I’d moved to the Netherlands, I’d be welcomed but would be required to take free Dutch lessons which honestly seems quite reasonable. Here, Republicans get mad if people don’t learn English but would bristle at the notion of paying for language and culture classes. The Democrats might object to anyone being “indoctrinated” by being forced to learn the language and culture.
Yeah, I do think part of immigration should be some degree of assimilation. And many immigrants are excited to learn English and be part of America’s culture (and it’s a melting pot, so why not?) I agree that having sequestered immigrants populations that don’t interact with the broader populace is probably not great, here or anywhere. But my view is, if you want to be an American and you’re an honest working person who wants to find a job and raise a family, join the fun and bring your culture along!
The language thing seems like such a framing issue. Right: "Force immigrants to take language and American culture class." Left: "Free education for immigrants to develop language and job skills."
I'm on the Matt Yglesias "One Billion Americans" train, for my part. This country is too empty! I want immigration that is cheap, easy, orderly, and legal, and I'm perfectly fine with attaching a few conditions like language classes. I'd like to think I practice what I preach, too, because I learned Japanese before moving to Japan and tried to more or less live as a normal member of society while I was there. The US is a more pluralistic society, sure, but that doesn't mean it's some special case that isn't allowed to have common customs for public life.
I want to save space for nature. Already, the deer have nowhere to live. They are right in town. Around the world, so many species are endangered because we have encroached. I would like to see the world population decline slowly. But I’d like to welcome people who want to live here — I see no logical reason to restrict people to living only wherever their mother happened to be when she gave birth. Let people live where they want to live as long as they’re contributing positively.
I think the deer would be far better off if more people lived in cities, instead of in greenfield subdivisions cut from the surrounding forest. Correcting the assumption that more people inherently means a nest of single-family homes with yards sprawling over the countryside is at the core of my personal political project. Will it succeed? I don't know, but just to put it on the table. I'm bothered that so many of America's cities are so devoid of people that even basic everyday retail isn't sustainable... my ideal is bustling cities surrounded by undisturbed nature, but instead we're stuck in a dysfunctional low-density soup. It seems you need lots of people for density to pencil out, though, hence...
But you can’t have everyone in cities because some people need to work on farms and in factories, and those people also require infrastructure around them to live. Farmers need goods and services, too! I agree suburban sprawl is a negative.
I like cities but have never lived in a really large one.
I follow your writing, and I think you live in a much more politically mixed area, which I’m guessing CHH doesn’t. My mom is a normie liberal (and until recently apolitical except voting) and lives in a Republican-dominated rural area in a very blue state, and it’s very painful and hard for her to see her neighbors and community cheer on literal fascism. It’s much easier to be compassionate toward the worst republicans when you don’t have to live in community with them.
This made me laugh…I think your great contribution to modern online dialogue is being a normal person who struggles admits to make friends. Which is all of us at various times, we are just too embarrassed to admit it. Different but similar, I remember telling a coworker that I was doing online dating and she immediately perked up and was like OK. You’re normal. I’m going to do it too. I didn’t know many normal people doing it, this was years ago, I’ll admit it’s way more normal to do now!
I live in a ruby-red, gritty, working class small town in central Illinois. Red area in a blue state. We are really only blue because of Chicago. I am surrounded by trumpers although I have plenty of lib friends here. No area is 100 percent.
That’s my main issue with leftists. They go on about genocide Joe & Killer Kamala but can’t see that Trump is worse. From their antifa perspective, idk how they don’t hate maga more.
I really don’t think that at all, based on many trips to Europe and not just of the touristy type. I base my judgment on time spent staying in European homes and deep discussions with European people. And, of course, being married to a European.
The fact that Democrats long to turn USA into Europe, when I think it is worse, is, I think a tidy description of the difference between you/CHH and a never Trump Republican.
I do not long to live in Europe and it’s why people like me don’t like the Democratic Party (stuck with it as the only alternative to Trump right now as we may be—crappy place to be!).
Do you object to high-quality and affordable healthcare, high-quality food, worker protections, work-life balance, reliable public transportation or what? These are the things I want. Yes, sure, there are downsides! But I’m very envious of the lives lived by the people I know in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium.
I remember a friend visiting the Netherlands and sending me pictures of a cat museum! I could live anywhere - ok, in the next lifetime, I feel like I’m too old to move and leave my support system - that preferred cats to dogs, lol! Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by fanatic dog people. (Who won’t leash them, which is what gets up my nose.)
And that had bicycle infrastructure that made it *safe* to ride a bike - I know the Netherlands has that! (Here, I’m just not going to risk my safety. I don’t have someone who will provide tender, loving, long-term nursing care if I get severely injured by being doored or sideswiped.)
I’ve lived in the US all my life and to me it’s “home,” so I don’t know how I’d adjust to uprooting, but I think most people do regard where they live as “home,” and it’s also easier to up stakes and move and adjust cultures when you are younger, or at least have a spouse or other built-in support system.
Except people in the US are on average WAY richer than in Europe.
For example, let's compare Germany with GDP per capita $56k with the US at $85k. That's 54% higher, which is freaken huge. And you can see that in things like access to what we consider basics in America (air conditioning)
The U.S. is not a rich country. It is a poor country that has some very rich people in it.
Yeah, $85K sounds great — to those who actually earn that much. Most of us will never come close. I’ve never even approached that number, and I work very hard. My worries would be over if I could earn that!
Keep in mind that the actual stat is $54,791 a year as of this month. And that is for people with full-time jobs. Millions of people cannot get such a job, and make do with part-time jobs and gig work. They live on far less income. I am one of those people — when the newspaper industry imploded, it took me down with it.
Have you ever been to Europe? They almost never need air conditioning (although with climate change, that is shifting a bit). My European husband initially laughed at Americans and their air conditioning … and then he moved here and understood why we have it.
Everyone I have met in Europe, including really low-income people on assistance, has a good life. The same is not true of Americans.
When I married my Dutch husband, I will had minor children, so I couldn’t have moved them abroad away from their father, my ex. So my Dutch husband came here. Had we been able to live in the Netherlands, I know my life would be better and easier.
Eh? From what I see job for job US pay is the highest or almost the highest in the world. It's just that the US is also the highest population developed country in the world. So everything is more, including the number of unemployed and underemployed people.
We talk about it, but I don’t know what kind of job my husband could get at 62. I assume I’m not employable at all, of course! I can’t get hired even in the U.S. and I don’t speak other languages.
We are afraid we wouldn’t be able to re-launch or to own a house.
And ultimately, we can’t handle possibly never seeing the kids and grandkids again.
We would love to relocate if we would be able to afford travel, though.
On the topic of not being able to get hired - they raise the retirement age, they complain about the “burden” on young people for having to support the elderly population, but then won’t hire anyone over 50 who is willing, able, and qualified to work? Make it make sense!
Exactly! I did everything you’re supposed to do. Even consulted with a resume expert. I understand how to apply. I had to give up and freelance to get some money coming in.
"And even J.D. Vance once called Trump “America’s Hitler,” although if you look at his Twitter mutuals, he might have meant it as a compliment." - LOL, got 'em!
A lot of people end up surprised to learn I am also not a Republican or anywhere on the right, probably because I spend a lot of time openly (and often pretty harshly) criticizing the left, so I guess it's no surprise that people were also so shocked to hear that I voted for Harris. At the same time, tf did they think I was going to do? Abandon all values I have had for basically my entire politically conscious life because the woke left annoys me? No, thank you, covid overreach and annoying woke people did not change my opinions about healthcare and the social safety net like they seem to have for so many others, because that would be extremely ridiculous!
People criticize what they’re most familiar with. I think I have a knee jerk reaction to the Bluesky types who genuinely think I’m a fascist, although I acknowledge actual fascists are much worse.
I don’t think #2 was even remotely necessary. I understand why CHH did it - she kind of gets it from both sides, but hmm, I think it’s fairly well known that most Dem relationships are not, like, polycules.
Republicans want you to be a Republican because they like you and recognize how normie you are and the fact that a normie person they like is a Democrat causes an unbelievable amount of cognitive dissonance because all Democrats are evil baby killing globalist pedophiles. So the only other option is that you're just misinformed or naive, and I'd guess you probably get that a lot from right wing accounts too.
Well said, regarding authoritarianism/democracy and immigration enforcement. I often struggle to cut through the blizzard of nonsense around Trump and summarize why he really is a bad president - and those two points are near the top.
I have a clear idea of CHH as an old school slightly left of center Democrat. Which is insanely provocative these days!
I couldn't place myself on the US political spectrum if you held a gun to my head. What do you call someone who believes that crime and disorder are terrible, wants more police on the street, wants universal health care, parental leave for all, and clean, fast public transportation?
Ultimately, I also don't want a president with personality - the next president could be an adding machine for all I care. I want them to operate in the background and out of my sight.
Just realized I used the term "adding machine" which no one on here will remember unless they were listening hard to their grandparents do their taxes.
Not supporting the "Abundance" deregulatory agenda shouldn't be confused with being pro-scarcity or whatnot. I agree with the YIMBY/upzoning stuff, but by and large it seems fairly obvious to me that the goal of "Abundance" is to rebrand the Larry Summers wing of the party, pro-corporate anti-regulation neoliberalism, after it has fallen far out of favor with the Dem base.
If I had to choose a label for myself, it would be something like "social democrat" or a "Brandeisian." You could think of my philosophy as focused on avoiding concentration of wealth and power and the harmful effects that come from that. Anti-monopoly, pro-consumer, that sort of thing. Elizabeth Warren is probably the most prominent neo-Brandeisian politician.
I used to live in Japan, for years I was more absorbed in its politics than those of the US, and I was always basically comfortable within the LDP tent, even though they're the mainstream "conservative" party and in the US I'm a Democrat. When it came to American politics, I used to joke about "where are my Big Government Conservatives?" People who embrace tradition without imposing it on everyone, who care about the functioning of society above all else, which includes provision of public services as well as the maintenance of public order (because these things are inseparable).
The popular American concept of "conservative" somewhere along the line developed a weird antisocial cynicism, which assumes government can't do anything right, sharing space with other people is abhorrent, strangers are never to be trusted, and the only reasonable way to live is as far apart from society as your means allow, in an isolated defensive crouch with your family. Part of that is a reaction to the US's very real crime problem, but I can never align myself with the "conservative" side of American politics so long as this is its prevailing ethos. If we really care about disorder, we need to try to fix it, not just move away from it and jeer people who can't or won't do the same.
They don't exist. The European/US tradition of classical liberalism means that conservatives you describe don't exist in the US in any meaningful number. Most who move there from elsewhere end up as reluctant democrats.
She's a good writer, she's funny, and a keen social observer of precisely the prime demographic of internet commenters. CHH's politics are incredibly normal.
Guilty as charged, guilty as charged, don’t follow Jeff Maurer. CHH does seem to be a magnet for normie libs! (And we STILL have not found out if anyone has seen CHH and MattY in a room at the same time!)
I love CHH’s takes on a wide range of topics and how she writes with vulnerability. She’s not a glossy “TikTok Mom,” she admits to having trouble making friends, having OCD, worrying about the subway, dressing over the top sometimes…she seems human, and fun. Not curated.
I suspect most people are still like that, but the nature of media (whether social or traditional) is that it needs to grab our attention by being interesting, so it's over-represented by the views of the most "interesting" people, rather than the more normal and boring majority.
This really is the overwhelming majority of Democrats, and it speaks to how cooked right-wingers are that they think the most hysterical DSA member is going to be president.
But I think one reason why people keep wondering if CHH is a closet right-winger is because of how much more right-wing content she reads. I mean, most of us get our view of the right-wing exclusively from left/liberal publications. We would simply have no way of knowing about a fight between two third-tier right-wing influencers, for example, nor would we feel anything personally at stake over who prevails. CHH writes as though she knows exactly what specific factions of the right-wing will backlash against her content, and that she actually feels the stakes in intra-right-wing culture wars. Most of the time you only get that by reading "for right-wingers by right-wingers" content.
So I can see why people would think "it's giving Richard Hanania or Bari Weiss" but really "it's giving Jeremiah Johnson or Jane Coaston". That is to say - by being our liberal on-the-ground-reporter for right-wing ecosystem, CHH is doing us all a great public service. I could barely tell you which right-winger is a Christian antisemitic conspiracy theorist, a neocon hawk, a white supremacist isolationist, a fascist oligarch, an asshole libertarian, a conservative traditionalist, or an antisocial AI accelerationist. But it's actually incredibly important to understand which of these groups will take over the Republican party when they band up to attack us again in 2026 and 2028. It's not relevant to our vote in 2026 or 2028, but especially if you are an alarmist lib we will want to know how to defend ourselves.
It's at least honest of you to admit that you have no idea what your fellow countrymen believe outside of the skewed, bad faith filter of whatever leftist influencers and publications you read.
I mean, yes and no. I am exaggerating a little bit for effect but I actually try quite hard to understand conservatives.
I have a good intuitive sense of what a normie conservative believes - I have conservative family members for instance. And I also know what outward facing "right-wing intellectuals" have to say. But I don't intuitively understand a fired-up groyper or a diehard MAGA voter, who really feel a lot of grievance and fear.
You see I actually used to be a Republican, but I was a John McCain Republican. And so I was alienated by the Tea Party movement and even more alienated by the MAGA movement. I kept expecting - thinking back to the kind of Republican I was - that the GOP would be disgusted by and ultimately reject everything Trump stood for. I thought that I could reach out to other Republicans and appeal to our common values, but what I thought I knew about Republicans actually worked against me. When I was a Republican, I dismissed libs who called GWB racist, what I didn't expect was to find the Republicans who were just proudly racist.
And I like every other good lib I breathlessly read the profiles of Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, Stephen Miller and Jordan Peterson. I listened to the IDW podcasts. But those people really didn't have the answers either. Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, and Nick Fuentes are closer to the mark, but even that presents the most politically active, already online version of the GOP voter (and they don't all represent the same things). I didn't predict Trump, I don't know how to predict Vance, Rubio, Musk, or others.
I am kind of obsessive about trying to understand right-wingers, and genuinely want to understand the power dynamics. But they are an alien species to me. And the media diet they consume is just completely toxic to my palate.
I was born to a military family in a poor but racially diverse part of Virginia and moved to Illinois far Western suburbs of Chicago. I work in a STEM-dominated white-collar profession with lots of international coworkers.
Most of the conservatives I know are from Virginia, but Virginia is one of the few states that had more enthusiasm for Romney or Bush than Trump. These are people who view both parties unfavorably right now, they are not authentic MAGA proponents. They hate crime and they support Ukraine. They hate taxes but they like public service.
Now I am far enough in the suburbs of Illinois and know enough people from rural Iowa and Wisconsin, that I do actually know people who voted for Trump or who know someone who did. They mostly include religious pro-lifers and some relatively apolitical people concerned about the economy. I had one neighbor who was excessively concerned about "The Black Panthers" looting her house when there was a relatively tame BLM protest happening in our area.
But you know there is a modest Hispanic and Asian population in my neighborhood, and I see Trump signs but I never actually met anyone who has any problems with that population. It never occurred to me be upset about a predominantly Hispanic landscaping crew or a Korean grocery store or a diligent coworker who is from South India. Like I guess someone could feel afraid or resentful just to see a brown person nearby, but in my gut that feels so fake to me - like come on, I come from a way more diverse area with a lot higher crime rate.
And my own career has taken me from far outside of academia to the highest circles of academia, without encountering any kind of Jewish antagonism or even encountering a lot of Jewish people whatsoever. I just can't imagine getting fired up about that either. What kind of person gets angry about "The Jews" online but can't point to a single real-life way an actual Jewish person has actually harmed them in a way that any other white person wouldn't. I mean you can't, "liberal Jews" and "white libs" act almost exactly the same.
Right and my neighborhood is 25% Hispanic and like 40-60% Trump. Mostly in the "apolitical concerned about the economy" category I imagine, given the swing-iness of this demographic.
But the 20-30% of the country that is "strongly approve" of Trump and/or backed him in the 2016 GOP presidential primary? I simply, don't know any of those people in real-life.
Only as conversations with friends about their family members. Or what I read about right-wingers online, and that I only know if I go looking for it.
I had that one friend from college who was a 2015 Rubio stan, and who went hardcore MAGA after the election, at a time in which all my other friends were knitting pink hats. I kept up with him for years, and talking to him for hours, trying to have a positive influence for him. I still could not understand his perspective and I didn't get the sense he was very interested in much of what I had to say. We lost touch around the time he started getting into "race science". I could count him as a MAGA supporter I know, but truthly I have never solved the mystery of what happened to the person I did know.
I did mistakenly overstate the level of trump’s margin of victory. It still doesn’t change the fact that the democrats are even less popular than he is. It’s amazing the amount of rage pointing that out provokes.
What I think fuels a lot of the left's problems is poorly-thought out negative polarization. conservatives are more amped about law enforcement than we are, so DEFUND THE POLICE becomes a thing. Conservatives are more into overt displays of patriotism, so calling the US "Turtle Island" and land acknowledgments become a thing. If you let negative polarization just take over your brain, you can talk yourself into some ideas that are incredibly alienating to most people, and which aren't necessary for building a better, fairer world that those of us with left-of-center views should be trying to make.
I also don't see why being a cisgender, straight, monogamous, married person needs to enter into this. I'm that way. That's one right way to be, it's not "THE" right way to be. I don't feel like I need to feel embarrassment or guilt about that, but I also do not feel like that mode of existence should be imposed in any way on someone if it's just not who they are. You should get the same level of human dignity regardless. This should be the liberal position, not hand-wringing heterofatalism.
"Owning the cons" is an underrated driver for far-left politics, and just as the rise in outright bigotry on the right was buoyed by social justice culture of the 2010s, the rise in interest in far-left politics was a direct result of Republicans calling Obama a socialist and their insanity in the Trump era.
Because the Democrats aren’t the far-left, and what I meant by “owning the cons” is taking and demanding that people take maximalist left stances on culture war issues out of spite against MAGA. If anything, maximalist left-wing cultural stances hurt poor non-white urban residents more than anyone else. But honestly the same is true of owning the libs - those stances have typically hurt MAGA’s own base the most.
You're right but even knowing that you're right it's so hard to let go. Some part of me will always be 12 years old seeing the worst people I know drape themselves in the flag and get psyched about bombing the A-rabs in Iraq. Seeing all the American flag-themed decorations for the 250th anniversary of the country takes me back to that moment, even though I know it's irrational, I really do love my country, and we're 20 years removed from that context.
I mean, Harris and Hillary Clinton both tried that. One thing that Trump has shown is that there is a lot more tolerance for a president saying "America kinda sucks" than at least I had thought.
Former prosecutor, church-going, mom of 4 with SEVERAL floral dresses, and my views line up with yours exactly. It just seems like common, humanist sense. I bet we’re legions….in fact I’m counting on it, because I really fucking love America.
Love this ❤️❤️❤️❤️
One thing I think the Harris campaign got right that Democrats should keep doing was making flag waiving patriotism part of its image. "Loving America" is not a position that should be surrendered to the right. Instead of calling America "stolen land", we should be talking about how we want everyone to thrive in our shared home.
I’m convinced that leftist candidates could become dramatically more popular without changing anything policy wise if they were just unambiguously patriotic.
Ds decided in 2001 to just totally shoot ourselves in the foot by making fun of patriotic insignia just after a national tragedy. "Sean Hannity is wearing a flag pin, what a dope," we said, with all the snark John Stewart could muster. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I will say that “freedom fries” was risible. However, your large point stands.
Ugh I don't recall anyone making fun of someone for simply wearing a pin, but I do recall liberals pointing out what a performative empty gesture it was.
There are some things liberals can throw stones over. Performative empty gestures are not one of then
I never claimed one side had a monopoly on that.
Church-going mom of 4 with SEVERAL floral dresses - that would be an excellent name for a Substack!
Especially if I also squeezed in “democrat”
It’s basically the beliefs of the median women’s march participant, as leftists annoyed about insufficiently communist political action at the time accurately surmised
The biggest problem facing us is that it doesn’t go viral bc of rage!
Midwestern, church-going former prosecutor, married, dad of 4, and I feel exactly the same! And yes we are legion … It’s gonna take some time and it will probably get worse before it gets better, but I refuse to give up on America.
But how many floral dresses do you own?
😂
Since when are floral dresses politically coded?! Let’s please not pretend that’s a thing.
A lot of the commentary calling CHH a Republican is unhinged and too online. The current Republican president is a criminal who has been divorced twice. Meanwhile, no Democratic president has ever been divorced. The prototypical resistance Democrat is educated and married. People are basing their baseline of what a Democrat is based on the type of person who couldn't get hired at Jezebel. If you're basing your worldview based on random losers you see online, you may be a loser.
“couldn’t get hired at Jezebel” 😂
Brilliant, right?
In the current economy, is *anyone* getting hired at Jezebel?
Very, very memorably (because I don’t tend to remember every dumb comment on every blog and website): someone posted on Jezebel that she was having marital problems, and her solution to this was to have “an emotional affair” with some random guy and now she can’t understand why her husband wants a divorce and custody…WAAAH why do bad things keep happening to me.
blueskyism.
About half of that discourses is Bluesky-style, while the other half is conservatives on Substack seemingly surprised any liberal could be happily married.
Internet Drama Llamas all around. Just different flavors. Have personally gotten sick of both sets, righty and lefty internet drama llamas
I am curious why you think the Dems have a -21 approval rating, despite their sane, popular beliefs?
Everything is vibes now. It's like why (online) there's an idea that Dems hate trans folk despite being one of the most trans friendly parties in the the western world.
It’s SO freaking annoying that every damn thing is down to “vibes” now. As well as the Omnicause.
So they think American Democrats are anti-trans? Well, I have news for them. One of my longest-term dearest friends is an American living in England, and, well…let’s just say a lot of otherwise “nice libs” hate trans folk with a passion there.
The US Democrats are actually more *socially* liberal, or at least AS socially liberal, as most left or center-left European parties. The line between Democrats and Labour (in the UK) is tiny. What is different, at least as how I have been reading it: 1) the European continent has a contingent of socially-conservative and economically-liberal parties that America does not. There was one outlier party in, IIRC, Luxembourg, which was off the charts in both directions! But Luxembourg is a tiny country and probably pretty homogenous, so there is fertile soil for being very economically liberal but socially constrained; you aren’t dealing with a lot of people or a great diversity. 2) The Republicans in the US are far to the right of most “mainstream” European right-wing parties (though that may be changing). Our Democrats are NOT “Center Right in Europe” at least among the mainstream. Our *Republicans* are far right. We lack a center, which European countries by and large do not.
So 57% of the population is just overtaken by bourgeoise false consciousness? Why are they moving from states dominated by the blue model to states run by the GOP?
Yeah I'm not talking about that but ok bad faith away my guy.
I'm saying that a lot is not about actual stances for a party or candidate but the vibes toward them. The "leopards eating faces" meme came from a woman voting for a party that explicitly said in their policy stances to want to do away with the policy stance she said was most important to her.
If you don't like the Dem policy position that's fine. But I see folk who say they'll vote for a pro LGBT candidate who supports expanding health care access but rail against Dems, who have been working for healthcare since the 90's and are pro LGBT, I can only attribute that to vibes. I shall leave it there but please do comment some smug bullshit in reply.
I am not arguing in bad faith, merely trying to understand why everyone in this comment section thinks that the platform CHH laid out is both a mainstream Dem position, and universally acceptable to all right thinking people, when that is clearly not the case.
I don't see CHH saying this is universally acceptable or even representative of the Democratic Party as a whole? She just said these are *her* politics and why *she* is a Democrat and not a Republican. They are also my politics and my reasons, for what it's worth.
“not arguing in bad faith”
My theory is that it’s close to 100% just because of “population density”. Housing costs are lower in more rural states, so people move there. As more people move there, housing costs will go up, and then people will stop moving there. And - maybe - those now more populous states will become more liberal over time. We’ll see!
Rent is actually going down in most of the places the blue state refugees are moving to because we actually allow people to build houses.
https://x.com/rcolvile/status/2027351487513309401?s=46
Radical leftist got dems to support “dumb”positions then not vote for them. Libs are less crazy but their more mild beliefs causes the party to be in a weird holding pattern over certain issues. CHH used the example where leftists see Kamala as too conservative & a cop while everyone else saw her as too liberal. Gavin Newsome is getting for homeless people: Obama says he is doing too little, leftists say he is evil for personal destroying an encampment.
Also the party is just anti-Trump without a clear vision
I wish there was a way for Democratic candidates to confront the loud mouth online leftist Omnicause crowd, and ask to see proof that 1) they voted in the past couple of elections 2) for Democrats, and not third parties and then 3) only take them seriously if they can prove they actually vote for actual Democrats and don’t think online slacktivism is equivalent to voting.
Believing sane and popular things does not necessarily translate to passing policies which effect real positive change
It's amazing then that most polls put them in the same ballpark as the GOP when it comes to issues.
A lot of Democrats are mad at their own party for losing to Trump again.
Why are Democrats leading by 6-7 points in the GCB? Why is Trump the most unpopular POTUS in the modern era this early in his second term?
because trump is objectively obnoxious and terrible in many aspects. I am saying that, despite the many assertions to the contrary in these comments, the dems do not provide a viable, sane alternative to the vast middle.
Because the Dems have alienated their base, who are sick of the party's constant, predictable failure to fight Trump and the ascendant fascist movement he leads.
What are you actually responding to?
I am responding to the assumption that the democratic party actually represents sane center leftism: affordable housing, healthcare, and public quality of life.
it depends on jurisdiction, candidates, etc.
Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, generally were that. Kamala was perhaps ambiguous in that regard. I am a bit concerned about the outgrowth of SF/portland socialism, but am far from convinced that it holds sway behind say, what Mamdani could amount to
I contend that Joe Biden and Clinton are, perhaps, at the center of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic party has swung wildly to the left to the point where MattyY or Noah Smith style center leftism holds no sway in the actual results the state and local parties produce. I am using the national poll numbers to show that, despite trump's clear awfulness and the general fecklessness of the GOP, the Dem brand is insanely unpopular.
If you want to go off on your own tangent, that's fine, but it's not really relevant to what I was talking about.
I probably should have put it in the main thread. I apologize.
I’m a leftist but whenever I think about exactly *why* I wouldn’t vote Republican, it really comes to Trump first. I am never going to support someone who wants to dismantle democracy, and he’s made it very clear he’ll try to do that.
There are a whole host of other issues that would prevent me from voting Republican, but it doesn’t even get there because the dictator thing is a non-starter.
Even if Trump agreed with all my views I couldn't support him. It goes beyond politics. Such a patently selfish, cruel, megalomaniac should not have access to one of the largest nuclear arsenals on the planet, nor the country's law enforcement apparatus. From January 6, to the rape allegations, to the lying about Haitians eating cats, to whatever the hell the Rob Reiner tweet was, it has been incredibly frustrating watching millions of people convince themselves to lower their most basic standards of human decency so that he can get his bone-spurred legs over them.
Funny enough, I know conservatives who just can’t vote Republican until he’s out of the picture for this exact reason. I don’t think they would vote Democrat either but I think for now they just sit out elections or vote third-party.
It’s really bad when both parties get captured by their loony factions.
That would be something like me although I wouldn't per se think of myself as a Cap conservative (more like a not-whackadoodle semi-libertarian in an old school New England R tradition).
But I can't abide by Trump (but then I was in transactions in NYC in the 90s andwe alll knew what a fucking scumbag lowlife Queens wanna be faker he is)
Or they hold their noses if and when the alternative is worse.
I would have voted for Condoleza Rice, only she’s too smart to want to be POTUS. I voted for Nikki Haley in the primary. I would vote for Marco Rubio, now that he’s getting executive branch experience.
I didn’t want that empty pantsuit as POTUS.
I gotta say, it's made me appreciate a conservative point of view. Will I be conservative like that? Probably not. But I can appreciate consistency and a real world view that's not just fealty to a king-figure and "it makes the libs upset".
I have my disagreements with him, but I especially like Jonah Goldberg's attitude and we do have some common ground, like "TV cameras in Congress were a mistake" and "it matters to say what you mean and mean what you say."
In addition to not being beholden to Trump, it's also incredibly refreshing to hear from conservatives who don't hate cities. This is normal in other countries, but for some reason being conservative in the US seems to have gotten associated in the popular imagination with wanting to stay as far away from other people as possible. I wish American discourse had more people like Jonah, who profess their love for big cities and care for their wellbeing without sticking to left-of-center shibboleths. Those kinds of lifestyle preferences never should have been polarized in that way.
I really hate that lifestyle preferences got polarized, too! I think whether one wants to live in a city vs. a suburb vs. an exurb should not be politically “coded” but a matter of personal taste. There are conservatives who want to walk everywhere and pop into cafes at random, and there are liberals who want an acre of land for goats and chickens. Coding a lifestyle preference, which should be personal, into something political, just drives resentment (and polarization) and stereotypes.
I think the preferences are mostly genuine. Having a pickup truck as your main vehicle when there’s no practical reason for it is total culture-war bullshit though.
I've voted L, R, and D. Depended on the candidate and the office. But never again, and it doesn't boil down to policy as much as authoritarianism and elections. Do I like feeling forced to vote D? No, but I blame the Rs for turning their party into simply the political arm of an insurgency. (And I worry that Ds are not exactly emerging as the party of liberalism, either. I fear Ds with ambition hoping to hold onto Trump's expansion of presidential power "but for good.")
As for resistlibs, you can make fun (please do) but there's very few things they predicted about Trump that he didn't eventually do, usually after 1-2 years of respectable libs saying oh no, he wouldn't go that far.
I think of myself as center-left, but as I've gotten older I've definitely drifted rightward. To the point where I now wonder whether I might have voted for, say, GHWB (in 88 at least). But I will never vote for a Republican now.
I wasn't able to vote in 88 or 92, but I suspect I would have voted for him. I also suspect I would have voted for him in the 1980 primary. And regardless of how I'd have voted, I think he did a remarkable job in winning the peace. But that's because more than right or left, I'm a globalist.
I was 6 when GHWB left office, so my views are all hindsight. I think he was an excellent foreign policy president, but couldn't overcome a double dip recession and was just way less charismatic than Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton will feel your pain.
IF you let him, he will also feel...other stuff.
It takes guts to write something like this, because now, people will be forever referring back to this article, saying “but wait, doesn’t that contradict what you wrote in ‘Why I’m Not A Republican’?”.
I do think some of the reasons you are “Republican-coded” are silly nonsense where Republicans decide that something completely normal and bipartisan like marriage or eating meat or liking your family somehow belongs to them.
I want to underline that bit about Republicans claiming normal, common, average things as theirs.
Part of this is the nutpicking ecosystem, though, which exists on both sides but is more weaponized from the right. You can always find some fruit loop on TikTok or BlueSky who thinks that Valentine's Day is white supremacy or sex with men is emotional slavery or whatever, just like you can always find some moron on X or TruthSocial saying Jewish pedophile cabals control the weather, but the right wing is better at projecting the crazies on the left onto the entire party rather than contextualizing them as an unimportant fringe of lunatics in an online pigsty.
All this, and also, the asymmetry is that the "Jewish pedophile cabal" guy most likely still voted for Trump, while the "Valentine's Day is white supremacy" person thinks Kamala is an evil centrist shill/genocide apologist, so they wrote in Malcolm X or stayed home.
They get the people who will hold their noses and vote; we get the stomping-footed overgrown children who won’t vote at ALL or will write in MICKEY MOUSE, there, THAT’LL show Kamala the Kop!
and then the shocked Pikachu and the blaming Democrats for somehow not being “good enough” when Trump won. 😤
Except that actually is happening in reality. Just look at marriage and divorce rates of red states vs. blue states. People have agency over what weirdos make up their media diet of the other side.
Yeah I just took issue with someone in these comments ceding that wearing floral print dresses is Republican-coded. Like, what?!
we absolutely cannot just let the chuds have whatever random nice things come up on a given tuesday. cooties politics is bullshit politics
Cooties Politics. I’m going to borrow that.
It's reminiscent of conservative commentary complaining that Obama has a stable loving marriage, but doesn't spend all of his time yelling at single mothers.
The problem is that liberals seem to have a very hard time preaching what they practice.
Take for example, the very simple success sequence.
1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a job
3. Get Married THEN have kids (and stay married)
If you do all that there is a 97% change of avoiding poverty.
That should be a really simple message we are teaching kids in school, especially the type of kids most likely to end up in poverty, but again, liberals seem to have a really hard time preaching what they are practicing.
In their rush to not judge people they are making the people who's lives they claim to want to help worse.
You'll have to cite mainstream liberals discouraging people from graduating high school, getting a job and starting a family. I know this is a new byline among a certain conservative cohort on here but it's completely fantastical. Who do you think staff inner city high schools, job counseling centers and maternal health/family planning clinics?
I didn't say discouraged, I said don't promote.
Liberals should preach what they practice
Lolwut? I thought the whole problem with liberals is that they're too scoldy and preachy and holier-than-thou and stuff! Now you want us to preach *more*?
I think the current problem is more calling everybody a racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe etc for all policy differences.
I'll say this again. I am a liberal in a rural sea of red, and I can think of no better way to become ostracized from my neighbors than to preach what I practice(d)
1) Drive the speed limit
2) Conserve energy
3) Exercise and maintain a healthy weight
4) Eat lots of veggies and a minimum of processed foods
5) Use tractors/ATVs only for work, walk around your property whenever possible
6) Don't buy a lot of plastic crap for your kids, let them be creative
7) Don't smoke
8) Don't have more kids than you can afford
9) Don't have more pets than you can afford
10) Make sure your kids get up early enough to get on the school bus instead of driving them to school and creating a polluting traffic jam (and entitled kids)
11) Don't waste your time and money on trips to Disney
12) You don't need that expensive truck unless you are actually USING it for something that you can't do with a car or minivan (snowplowing, trade work, hauling)
But, even if I wanted to preach it, exactly how would I do it? How exactly do you tell someone any of this stuff unless your relationship is on a very firm foundation? Confront random folks in the grocery store?
I have told one of my neighbors that I worry when he smokes, because I know his granddaughter adores him and it would devastate her to see him get lung cancer. And we're on friendly terms. But other than that, I keep my mouth shut.
As a former teacher, I don't know how random liberals in the school system are supposed teach students that it's good to be married before having kids. Which teachers are supposed to teach it? Math teachers? "Hey kids, before we talk about isosceles triangles, can we talk about having babies?" I do actually believe it's good to be married before having kids, but I was not hired to share these opinions with my students.
You could lobby for sex ed/health curricula that emphasizes marriage before having kids. I'm not sure how much good that would do, but that would make more sense than expecting teachers to just work it into their lesson plans. I also think it's a problem for the kids who are coming from single parent homes, because you are essentially telling the kids that their parents screwed up. And I don't think that schools should be in the business of telling kids that. Are we going to give kids the message that their parent should have stayed with an abusive ex? An ex who was abusive TO THEM? A good friend of mine left her husband because she saw the effect of his anger on their sons. They don't want to be around him.
I think you are coming from a place of caring but I don't see how it actually gets implemented.
BTW, I would also get ostracized for preaching to my liberal friends
1) Don't send your kids to private school
2) Don't move to Europe, we need you here!
Anyway. I think it's best to listen to people, and give opinions when asked. Or when the relationship is strong enough. The rest of the time, it's best to keep one's mouth shut.
Haha, I just posted a comment saying pretty much the same thing you’re saying in #12, but I love your post all around!
Obviously context matters, when and where matters. For students I would start hitting this message home around middle school.
Something like don't want to be poor, follow these three easy steps.
And yeah, that message could be taken as some people in their life messed up. That's probably true as well.
We are to afraid to say that sometimes, a bit of shame is good.
Yeah, I don’t know, we’ve been trying to shame the Trumpers for 10 years, and here we are.
Plus you can’t shame anyone into getting married if no one even wants to date them (or they haven’t found anyone they care to date).
There's a lot of kids growing up so messed up that they can't regulate themselves and focus enough to hold any kind of job. They are coming from families with addiction and untreated mental illness and no good examples. Those kids will need a huge amount of social support in order to make it in to the middle class (along with the advice). And they may still end up poor if they help their families out financially. Just heard a heartbreaking story about this in my community. Young man got himself a job—crappy, but a job-and is supporting ten freeloading family members who have drug and mental health issues, including half a dozen kids.
To me, this whole line of dialogue was just looking for something to complain about with Obama. It was just whiners whining.
But somehow libs got the Super Bowl & football in the national divorce
Part of that is the diversity of the players, but that doesn’t fully account for it.
This is kind of Matt Yglesias' Common Sense Democrat Manifesto, but written for normal people.
My dad has always been a "lower my marginal income tax, damn the consequences" kind of Republican, which I didn't agree with, but at least understood. Still cannot understand my evangelical christian relatives looking at Trump and saying, "That's great!" I mean, Dems twisted themselves into a pretzel (in some cases) keeping greasy old Bill Clinton in the tent, but then seemed to take a lesson from it and kicked John Edwards right to the moon, and it was fine. If Republicans can't just vote for better Republicans, I'm not sure what the future has in store for us all.
CHH once described herself as “Matt Yglesias with a great ass” on this very Substack, so that checks out 🤣
I think a lot of this is downstream of two things.
1. Only a tiny fraction of people vote in primaries.
2. A lot of moderates have left the parties.
So you have a huge swath of normie voters not voting in primaries then bitching come November about the lack of choices. Well look in the fricken mirror.
I think I may actually agree with everything you said here. Maybe I can nitpick some parts but otherwise, I think you and I are very closely aligned on politics.
Which is why I can’t fathom how anyone could confuse you with a Republican. It would have to be either a Republican who thinks everyone left of center is Karl Marx, or a Marxist who thinks that anyone to the right of Mamdani is Ronald Reagan.
How do you identify yourself politically? “Liberal”? Or something more specific?
I consider myself a standard progressive. I want universal healthcare, I’m very socially left wing, but I part with other progressives when it comes to Gaza and Israel. I agree that Israel’s gone too far, but I don’t think it’s as simple as progressives make it seem because Hamas did start it.
As far as politicians go, I tend to prefer progressives over moderates. I’m a big fan of Mamdani for example, and I want 2028 to be AOC’s year.
I would not call myself a Marxist because I don’t agree with communism, and because I simply don’t care about economics enough to have a firm opinion about that. If you tried to explain Keynesian economics to me and why you think they’re better or worse than Chicago School, I would do what Homer did when Flanders tried to explain the difference between apple juice and apple cider.
Side note, but it kinda bugs me when people distinguish between liberals and leftists because a leftist, by definition, is anyone left of center, which American liberals definitely are. So I’d prefer it if the narrative was liberals vs progressives.
"Hamas did start it" - Hamas did not exist in 1948, just saying.
^^^^ How is this not the majority position?
Several of my lib friends are a steady steam of Palestinian advocacy or convictions of limitless state support for the "oppressed" at the expense of "billionaires". How are they so oblivious to the deep unrelatability of such a tunnel vision approach to such matters? It's like an active choice that trade-offs don't matter.
I think the problem, even if you set antisemitism aside, is that a lot of leftist have this unfortunate habit of instinctively siding with whomever they perceive as the underdog, regardless of who’s right.
So they see Israel “illegally” occupying the region and fighting a war against a weaker enemy, and they automatically see Israel as the bad guy without understanding the nuance.
(Shaq meme, for progressives)
Russia bombards Ukraine into oblivion, in the most cruel ways imaginable, simply for existing and exercising sovereignty: *I sleep*
As extension of modern human civilization-duration conflict, Iran-aligned Hamas launches brutal, murderous campaign against Israelis, inflicting heavy casualties. Israel responds with its own brutal, murderous response: *Real shit*
The whataboutism with Ukraine is not very helpful for this discussion (in part because many progressives are openly supportive of Ukraine).
Hamas launched brutal attacks, it is true. This is not a simple conflict, also true. However, to imply that this is not something that has been ongoing since the establishment of the modern Israeli state is untrue. Also, to imply that "Iran-backed Hamas" has anything close to the resources of Israel is untrue as well.
Like I said, I agree it's complicated. But it feels like those who disagree that Gaza is the site of a genocide simply do not want to reckon with all the truths.
My take on this is that Hamas is indeed terrible (so are their Iranian backers) but the US government is not funding Hamas' military. What I actually want is to remove Israel's seeming blank check to do whatever they want with US support, not necessarily to remove Israel.
The problem is that, without US support, Israel might not be able to continue existing. And ensuring that they continue to exist is both the morally right thing to do and advantageous to our interests.
But I agree that they should not have a blank check to do what they want. And the fact that they need us should mean that we have the leverage to keep them in line.
If I had been the Democratic nominee in 2024, my stance would have been that I won’t support Israel anymore until Netanyahu steps down and allows himself to be prosecuted for war crimes. Once that happens, I will work closely with his successor to win the war while keeping civilian casualties to a minimum.
I'm not sure I buy that Israel would be wiped out without US support. They certainly have beaten back plenty of challenges in the past; I think they are capable enough on their own.
But yeah, if they want that support then Netanyahu shouldn't be doing things like throwing in entirely with the Republicans and pissing off all the left-wing voters in America. Most rank-and-file Democrats don't see a benefit to helping Israel and I can't blame them.
I understand why Israel's existence is advantageous to US interests, but why do you state that "ensuring that they continue to exist is both the morally right thing to do"?
I know lots of people who believe this, but they believe it because they are Evangelical Christians who think that the existence of Israel is necessary for the second coming of Christ. (And Republicans, obviously.)
Why would anyone else believe that a foreign state existing is a moral imperative?
Which is a defensible opinion!
Where it gets weird, is when your more radicalized and outspoken allies, advance the (obviously reprehensible) killing of Palestinan kids - with what seems like a whiff of opportunism, in advance of a more opaque anti-western motive.
As I note elsewhere in this post - many of these people are decidedly quite lackadaisical to Ukrainian suffering. I interpret this as being because Ukraine is an increasingly westernized culture, which is the real demon here.
So the energy is spent messaging on Gaza suffering (who could defend child death???), in service of (what in my opinion) is an ulterior motive which has truly radicalizing effect *in favor of those progressives' opposition*
Oh yeah, I am baffled by the supposed "leftist" people who are anti-Ukraine. If Israel is prosecuting an unjust war, then Putin is even moreso. Your principles need to be based on something more than "America Bad."
Completely agree. I posted a picture of a support Ukraine poster in Poland (I visited 3 years ago) on my Twitter and got cancelled by Hamas supporting leftists for the final time. It made me realize how anti-west their attitude is.
I think Im also similar to CHH but in the details I think Im different than you. I dont know how to label myself but I think I may say "moderate progressive" or "America loving, freedom loving progressive." I think I have a lot more faith in free markets than a lot of progressives rho, while still believing in an expansive safety net and wealth taxes and the like.
Monty Python wrote that in 1979 and the entire satire remains 100% accurate about how left-wing political infighting works.
Reminds me of this Emo Phillips joke:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
This is mostly common-sense “puppies are cute and chocolate is yummy” stuff here that nobody reasonably should quibble with much — in my opinion!
Look, I am 60, wear dresses mostly, have hair even longer than yours, bake my own bread, absolutely adored my SAHM years, am happily married, etc etc — but I’m a bit to the left of you. I’m probably judgier than you in that I refuse to associate with anyone who supports Trump, ICE and the existential harm being done to our country.
A hearty high-five on the economic inequality stuff — that’s my entire subject and because I’m writing from the bottom of the K, I always appreciate the backup from those writing from the top.
We’d be centrists, not libs, in much of Europe. My husband, a citizen of the Netherlands, denied being liberal when he first moved here. But here, he’s ragingly liberal! His views didn’t change.
Incidentally, when we talk to people all over the political spectrum, MOST of us want the same things — we just disagree with the right path to them.
Every single time I get to visit Europe (which we couldn’t afford for years and now we can’t do safely thanks to MAGA) I think the same thing: “We could have nice things, too, if there were not always a Republican objecting to every good thing.”
It’s impossible to spend time in Europe, talking to real Europeans living average lives, seeing how they live, and not feel extremely jealous of their healthcare, time off, better-quality food, better childcare, better work-life balance etc etc.
Anyway, I look forward to reading the rest of the comments now.
I think whether we would be more left or right in Europe would probably have more to do with our beliefs on immigration! And I guess I got into that via ice, but I’m probably pretty left of center on that. Strong vetting to prevent previous violent criminals from entering the country, but very very for highly skilled immigrants and other people who are fleeing political violence.
If I’d moved to the Netherlands, I’d be welcomed but would be required to take free Dutch lessons which honestly seems quite reasonable. Here, Republicans get mad if people don’t learn English but would bristle at the notion of paying for language and culture classes. The Democrats might object to anyone being “indoctrinated” by being forced to learn the language and culture.
Yeah, I do think part of immigration should be some degree of assimilation. And many immigrants are excited to learn English and be part of America’s culture (and it’s a melting pot, so why not?) I agree that having sequestered immigrants populations that don’t interact with the broader populace is probably not great, here or anywhere. But my view is, if you want to be an American and you’re an honest working person who wants to find a job and raise a family, join the fun and bring your culture along!
The language thing seems like such a framing issue. Right: "Force immigrants to take language and American culture class." Left: "Free education for immigrants to develop language and job skills."
It does highlight very fundamental differences in approach.
I'm on the Matt Yglesias "One Billion Americans" train, for my part. This country is too empty! I want immigration that is cheap, easy, orderly, and legal, and I'm perfectly fine with attaching a few conditions like language classes. I'd like to think I practice what I preach, too, because I learned Japanese before moving to Japan and tried to more or less live as a normal member of society while I was there. The US is a more pluralistic society, sure, but that doesn't mean it's some special case that isn't allowed to have common customs for public life.
I want to save space for nature. Already, the deer have nowhere to live. They are right in town. Around the world, so many species are endangered because we have encroached. I would like to see the world population decline slowly. But I’d like to welcome people who want to live here — I see no logical reason to restrict people to living only wherever their mother happened to be when she gave birth. Let people live where they want to live as long as they’re contributing positively.
I think the deer would be far better off if more people lived in cities, instead of in greenfield subdivisions cut from the surrounding forest. Correcting the assumption that more people inherently means a nest of single-family homes with yards sprawling over the countryside is at the core of my personal political project. Will it succeed? I don't know, but just to put it on the table. I'm bothered that so many of America's cities are so devoid of people that even basic everyday retail isn't sustainable... my ideal is bustling cities surrounded by undisturbed nature, but instead we're stuck in a dysfunctional low-density soup. It seems you need lots of people for density to pencil out, though, hence...
But you can’t have everyone in cities because some people need to work on farms and in factories, and those people also require infrastructure around them to live. Farmers need goods and services, too! I agree suburban sprawl is a negative.
I like cities but have never lived in a really large one.
I follow your writing, and I think you live in a much more politically mixed area, which I’m guessing CHH doesn’t. My mom is a normie liberal (and until recently apolitical except voting) and lives in a Republican-dominated rural area in a very blue state, and it’s very painful and hard for her to see her neighbors and community cheer on literal fascism. It’s much easier to be compassionate toward the worst republicans when you don’t have to live in community with them.
Yeah, the “worst” conservatives I know still think ICE has gone too far. Granted I just don’t know that many people because I’m a loser lol
This made me laugh…I think your great contribution to modern online dialogue is being a normal person who struggles admits to make friends. Which is all of us at various times, we are just too embarrassed to admit it. Different but similar, I remember telling a coworker that I was doing online dating and she immediately perked up and was like OK. You’re normal. I’m going to do it too. I didn’t know many normal people doing it, this was years ago, I’ll admit it’s way more normal to do now!
I live in a ruby-red, gritty, working class small town in central Illinois. Red area in a blue state. We are really only blue because of Chicago. I am surrounded by trumpers although I have plenty of lib friends here. No area is 100 percent.
That’s my main issue with leftists. They go on about genocide Joe & Killer Kamala but can’t see that Trump is worse. From their antifa perspective, idk how they don’t hate maga more.
Normal Rockwell GIF: I think America, for all its flaws, is better than Europe, and don’t want to become Europe (with all *its* flaws).
I really don’t think that at all, based on many trips to Europe and not just of the touristy type. I base my judgment on time spent staying in European homes and deep discussions with European people. And, of course, being married to a European.
I didn’t think you did.
The fact that Democrats long to turn USA into Europe, when I think it is worse, is, I think a tidy description of the difference between you/CHH and a never Trump Republican.
I do not long to live in Europe and it’s why people like me don’t like the Democratic Party (stuck with it as the only alternative to Trump right now as we may be—crappy place to be!).
Do you object to high-quality and affordable healthcare, high-quality food, worker protections, work-life balance, reliable public transportation or what? These are the things I want. Yes, sure, there are downsides! But I’m very envious of the lives lived by the people I know in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Belgium.
I remember a friend visiting the Netherlands and sending me pictures of a cat museum! I could live anywhere - ok, in the next lifetime, I feel like I’m too old to move and leave my support system - that preferred cats to dogs, lol! Sometimes I feel like I’m surrounded by fanatic dog people. (Who won’t leash them, which is what gets up my nose.)
And that had bicycle infrastructure that made it *safe* to ride a bike - I know the Netherlands has that! (Here, I’m just not going to risk my safety. I don’t have someone who will provide tender, loving, long-term nursing care if I get severely injured by being doored or sideswiped.)
I’ve lived in the US all my life and to me it’s “home,” so I don’t know how I’d adjust to uprooting, but I think most people do regard where they live as “home,” and it’s also easier to up stakes and move and adjust cultures when you are younger, or at least have a spouse or other built-in support system.
There’s pros and cons to everything.
Except people in the US are on average WAY richer than in Europe.
For example, let's compare Germany with GDP per capita $56k with the US at $85k. That's 54% higher, which is freaken huge. And you can see that in things like access to what we consider basics in America (air conditioning)
Let me inform you.
The U.S. is not a rich country. It is a poor country that has some very rich people in it.
Yeah, $85K sounds great — to those who actually earn that much. Most of us will never come close. I’ve never even approached that number, and I work very hard. My worries would be over if I could earn that!
Keep in mind that the actual stat is $54,791 a year as of this month. And that is for people with full-time jobs. Millions of people cannot get such a job, and make do with part-time jobs and gig work. They live on far less income. I am one of those people — when the newspaper industry imploded, it took me down with it.
Have you ever been to Europe? They almost never need air conditioning (although with climate change, that is shifting a bit). My European husband initially laughed at Americans and their air conditioning … and then he moved here and understood why we have it.
Everyone I have met in Europe, including really low-income people on assistance, has a good life. The same is not true of Americans.
When I married my Dutch husband, I will had minor children, so I couldn’t have moved them abroad away from their father, my ex. So my Dutch husband came here. Had we been able to live in the Netherlands, I know my life would be better and easier.
Eh? From what I see job for job US pay is the highest or almost the highest in the world. It's just that the US is also the highest population developed country in the world. So everything is more, including the number of unemployed and underemployed people.
You could consider moving now. I moved to Berlin three years ago. I’m 55.
We talk about it, but I don’t know what kind of job my husband could get at 62. I assume I’m not employable at all, of course! I can’t get hired even in the U.S. and I don’t speak other languages.
We are afraid we wouldn’t be able to re-launch or to own a house.
And ultimately, we can’t handle possibly never seeing the kids and grandkids again.
We would love to relocate if we would be able to afford travel, though.
On the topic of not being able to get hired - they raise the retirement age, they complain about the “burden” on young people for having to support the elderly population, but then won’t hire anyone over 50 who is willing, able, and qualified to work? Make it make sense!
Exactly! I did everything you’re supposed to do. Even consulted with a resume expert. I understand how to apply. I had to give up and freelance to get some money coming in.
"And even J.D. Vance once called Trump “America’s Hitler,” although if you look at his Twitter mutuals, he might have meant it as a compliment." - LOL, got 'em!
A lot of people end up surprised to learn I am also not a Republican or anywhere on the right, probably because I spend a lot of time openly (and often pretty harshly) criticizing the left, so I guess it's no surprise that people were also so shocked to hear that I voted for Harris. At the same time, tf did they think I was going to do? Abandon all values I have had for basically my entire politically conscious life because the woke left annoys me? No, thank you, covid overreach and annoying woke people did not change my opinions about healthcare and the social safety net like they seem to have for so many others, because that would be extremely ridiculous!
People criticize what they’re most familiar with. I think I have a knee jerk reaction to the Bluesky types who genuinely think I’m a fascist, although I acknowledge actual fascists are much worse.
That
1) articles likes these are always "why I'm not a Republican" and not "why I'm a Democrat" and
2) That "I know I'm in a heterosexual monogamous marriage and like safe streets, but I'm still a Democrat" needs to be said at all
is such a damning indictment of the political leadership of the Democrats. Just be loud, proud normal liberals! It's very popular!
I don’t think #2 was even remotely necessary. I understand why CHH did it - she kind of gets it from both sides, but hmm, I think it’s fairly well known that most Dem relationships are not, like, polycules.
I think it’s mostly a byproduct of primaries?
Republicans want you to be a Republican because they like you and recognize how normie you are and the fact that a normie person they like is a Democrat causes an unbelievable amount of cognitive dissonance because all Democrats are evil baby killing globalist pedophiles. So the only other option is that you're just misinformed or naive, and I'd guess you probably get that a lot from right wing accounts too.
Well said, regarding authoritarianism/democracy and immigration enforcement. I often struggle to cut through the blizzard of nonsense around Trump and summarize why he really is a bad president - and those two points are near the top.
I have a clear idea of CHH as an old school slightly left of center Democrat. Which is insanely provocative these days!
I couldn't place myself on the US political spectrum if you held a gun to my head. What do you call someone who believes that crime and disorder are terrible, wants more police on the street, wants universal health care, parental leave for all, and clean, fast public transportation?
Ultimately, I also don't want a president with personality - the next president could be an adding machine for all I care. I want them to operate in the background and out of my sight.
Those people are usually called Democrats.
"Abundance lib"
Ezra Klein's granny I guess lol
Just realized I used the term "adding machine" which no one on here will remember unless they were listening hard to their grandparents do their taxes.
Or, um, our parents doing their taxes.
I like to think of myself as an abundance lib, and I don’t know what anti-abundance people call themselves - scarcity lefties?
Not supporting the "Abundance" deregulatory agenda shouldn't be confused with being pro-scarcity or whatnot. I agree with the YIMBY/upzoning stuff, but by and large it seems fairly obvious to me that the goal of "Abundance" is to rebrand the Larry Summers wing of the party, pro-corporate anti-regulation neoliberalism, after it has fallen far out of favor with the Dem base.
If I had to choose a label for myself, it would be something like "social democrat" or a "Brandeisian." You could think of my philosophy as focused on avoiding concentration of wealth and power and the harmful effects that come from that. Anti-monopoly, pro-consumer, that sort of thing. Elizabeth Warren is probably the most prominent neo-Brandeisian politician.
I used to live in Japan, for years I was more absorbed in its politics than those of the US, and I was always basically comfortable within the LDP tent, even though they're the mainstream "conservative" party and in the US I'm a Democrat. When it came to American politics, I used to joke about "where are my Big Government Conservatives?" People who embrace tradition without imposing it on everyone, who care about the functioning of society above all else, which includes provision of public services as well as the maintenance of public order (because these things are inseparable).
The popular American concept of "conservative" somewhere along the line developed a weird antisocial cynicism, which assumes government can't do anything right, sharing space with other people is abhorrent, strangers are never to be trusted, and the only reasonable way to live is as far apart from society as your means allow, in an isolated defensive crouch with your family. Part of that is a reaction to the US's very real crime problem, but I can never align myself with the "conservative" side of American politics so long as this is its prevailing ethos. If we really care about disorder, we need to try to fix it, not just move away from it and jeer people who can't or won't do the same.
They don't exist. The European/US tradition of classical liberalism means that conservatives you describe don't exist in the US in any meaningful number. Most who move there from elsewhere end up as reluctant democrats.
Genuine, non-snarky inquiry: what’s insanely provocative about being an old school slightly left of center democrat?
I think it seems provocative because the loudest voices online tend to be the extremes and CHH gets it from both ends (and not in the polycule way!)
She certainly gets a lot of comments on her posts! Something is pulling us all here and compelling us to respond to her.
Of course, it could just be writing talent, making the ordinary extraordinary and all that.
She's a good writer, she's funny, and a keen social observer of precisely the prime demographic of internet commenters. CHH's politics are incredibly normal.
They are, but they aren't often the stuff of which Substacks are made.
Although some popular Substacks are made up of normie takes. I see the same commenters following Matt Y, Noah Smith, and some over with Jeff Maurer.
Guilty as charged, guilty as charged, don’t follow Jeff Maurer. CHH does seem to be a magnet for normie libs! (And we STILL have not found out if anyone has seen CHH and MattY in a room at the same time!)
I love CHH’s takes on a wide range of topics and how she writes with vulnerability. She’s not a glossy “TikTok Mom,” she admits to having trouble making friends, having OCD, worrying about the subway, dressing over the top sometimes…she seems human, and fun. Not curated.
I suspect most people are still like that, but the nature of media (whether social or traditional) is that it needs to grab our attention by being interesting, so it's over-represented by the views of the most "interesting" people, rather than the more normal and boring majority.
This really is the overwhelming majority of Democrats, and it speaks to how cooked right-wingers are that they think the most hysterical DSA member is going to be president.
But I think one reason why people keep wondering if CHH is a closet right-winger is because of how much more right-wing content she reads. I mean, most of us get our view of the right-wing exclusively from left/liberal publications. We would simply have no way of knowing about a fight between two third-tier right-wing influencers, for example, nor would we feel anything personally at stake over who prevails. CHH writes as though she knows exactly what specific factions of the right-wing will backlash against her content, and that she actually feels the stakes in intra-right-wing culture wars. Most of the time you only get that by reading "for right-wingers by right-wingers" content.
So I can see why people would think "it's giving Richard Hanania or Bari Weiss" but really "it's giving Jeremiah Johnson or Jane Coaston". That is to say - by being our liberal on-the-ground-reporter for right-wing ecosystem, CHH is doing us all a great public service. I could barely tell you which right-winger is a Christian antisemitic conspiracy theorist, a neocon hawk, a white supremacist isolationist, a fascist oligarch, an asshole libertarian, a conservative traditionalist, or an antisocial AI accelerationist. But it's actually incredibly important to understand which of these groups will take over the Republican party when they band up to attack us again in 2026 and 2028. It's not relevant to our vote in 2026 or 2028, but especially if you are an alarmist lib we will want to know how to defend ourselves.
I am in fact friends with both Jeremiah and Jane- and love their work!! They both aligned with me politically in basically every way.
It's at least honest of you to admit that you have no idea what your fellow countrymen believe outside of the skewed, bad faith filter of whatever leftist influencers and publications you read.
I mean, yes and no. I am exaggerating a little bit for effect but I actually try quite hard to understand conservatives.
I have a good intuitive sense of what a normie conservative believes - I have conservative family members for instance. And I also know what outward facing "right-wing intellectuals" have to say. But I don't intuitively understand a fired-up groyper or a diehard MAGA voter, who really feel a lot of grievance and fear.
You see I actually used to be a Republican, but I was a John McCain Republican. And so I was alienated by the Tea Party movement and even more alienated by the MAGA movement. I kept expecting - thinking back to the kind of Republican I was - that the GOP would be disgusted by and ultimately reject everything Trump stood for. I thought that I could reach out to other Republicans and appeal to our common values, but what I thought I knew about Republicans actually worked against me. When I was a Republican, I dismissed libs who called GWB racist, what I didn't expect was to find the Republicans who were just proudly racist.
And I like every other good lib I breathlessly read the profiles of Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, Stephen Miller and Jordan Peterson. I listened to the IDW podcasts. But those people really didn't have the answers either. Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, and Nick Fuentes are closer to the mark, but even that presents the most politically active, already online version of the GOP voter (and they don't all represent the same things). I didn't predict Trump, I don't know how to predict Vance, Rubio, Musk, or others.
I am kind of obsessive about trying to understand right-wingers, and genuinely want to understand the power dynamics. But they are an alien species to me. And the media diet they consume is just completely toxic to my palate.
52% of the country voted for trump. I seriously doubt that that many people are totally incomprehensible to you. Where do you live?
I was born to a military family in a poor but racially diverse part of Virginia and moved to Illinois far Western suburbs of Chicago. I work in a STEM-dominated white-collar profession with lots of international coworkers.
Most of the conservatives I know are from Virginia, but Virginia is one of the few states that had more enthusiasm for Romney or Bush than Trump. These are people who view both parties unfavorably right now, they are not authentic MAGA proponents. They hate crime and they support Ukraine. They hate taxes but they like public service.
Now I am far enough in the suburbs of Illinois and know enough people from rural Iowa and Wisconsin, that I do actually know people who voted for Trump or who know someone who did. They mostly include religious pro-lifers and some relatively apolitical people concerned about the economy. I had one neighbor who was excessively concerned about "The Black Panthers" looting her house when there was a relatively tame BLM protest happening in our area.
But you know there is a modest Hispanic and Asian population in my neighborhood, and I see Trump signs but I never actually met anyone who has any problems with that population. It never occurred to me be upset about a predominantly Hispanic landscaping crew or a Korean grocery store or a diligent coworker who is from South India. Like I guess someone could feel afraid or resentful just to see a brown person nearby, but in my gut that feels so fake to me - like come on, I come from a way more diverse area with a lot higher crime rate.
And my own career has taken me from far outside of academia to the highest circles of academia, without encountering any kind of Jewish antagonism or even encountering a lot of Jewish people whatsoever. I just can't imagine getting fired up about that either. What kind of person gets angry about "The Jews" online but can't point to a single real-life way an actual Jewish person has actually harmed them in a way that any other white person wouldn't. I mean you can't, "liberal Jews" and "white libs" act almost exactly the same.
Tons of Hispanics actually voted for trump.
Right and my neighborhood is 25% Hispanic and like 40-60% Trump. Mostly in the "apolitical concerned about the economy" category I imagine, given the swing-iness of this demographic.
But the 20-30% of the country that is "strongly approve" of Trump and/or backed him in the 2016 GOP presidential primary? I simply, don't know any of those people in real-life.
Only as conversations with friends about their family members. Or what I read about right-wingers online, and that I only know if I go looking for it.
I had that one friend from college who was a 2015 Rubio stan, and who went hardcore MAGA after the election, at a time in which all my other friends were knitting pink hats. I kept up with him for years, and talking to him for hours, trying to have a positive influence for him. I still could not understand his perspective and I didn't get the sense he was very interested in much of what I had to say. We lost touch around the time he started getting into "race science". I could count him as a MAGA supporter I know, but truthly I have never solved the mystery of what happened to the person I did know.
Where do you come up with this bullshit? Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote. But only 60% of Americans vote! That's a lot less than 52%...
I did mistakenly overstate the level of trump’s margin of victory. It still doesn’t change the fact that the democrats are even less popular than he is. It’s amazing the amount of rage pointing that out provokes.
What I think fuels a lot of the left's problems is poorly-thought out negative polarization. conservatives are more amped about law enforcement than we are, so DEFUND THE POLICE becomes a thing. Conservatives are more into overt displays of patriotism, so calling the US "Turtle Island" and land acknowledgments become a thing. If you let negative polarization just take over your brain, you can talk yourself into some ideas that are incredibly alienating to most people, and which aren't necessary for building a better, fairer world that those of us with left-of-center views should be trying to make.
I also don't see why being a cisgender, straight, monogamous, married person needs to enter into this. I'm that way. That's one right way to be, it's not "THE" right way to be. I don't feel like I need to feel embarrassment or guilt about that, but I also do not feel like that mode of existence should be imposed in any way on someone if it's just not who they are. You should get the same level of human dignity regardless. This should be the liberal position, not hand-wringing heterofatalism.
"Owning the cons" is an underrated driver for far-left politics, and just as the rise in outright bigotry on the right was buoyed by social justice culture of the 2010s, the rise in interest in far-left politics was a direct result of Republicans calling Obama a socialist and their insanity in the Trump era.
“We want to hurt people who disagree with us” is official policy only for one party, and it ain’t the Democrats.
Did you sleep through the whole woke movement?
Don't remember all the attempts to fire people for unpolitically correct views?
I remember a lot of those around September 2025.
Trump administration’s version of DEI: Douchebag, Extremist, Idiot
Because the Democrats aren’t the far-left, and what I meant by “owning the cons” is taking and demanding that people take maximalist left stances on culture war issues out of spite against MAGA. If anything, maximalist left-wing cultural stances hurt poor non-white urban residents more than anyone else. But honestly the same is true of owning the libs - those stances have typically hurt MAGA’s own base the most.
How about the _unofficial_ policy?
When I say I want everyone to have access to affordable healthcare and housing, “everyone” includes Trumpers. Even the Nazis. Everyone!
At Soviet levels of quality?
Except for the Nomenklatura. They went to special clinics, or to the West.
You're right but even knowing that you're right it's so hard to let go. Some part of me will always be 12 years old seeing the worst people I know drape themselves in the flag and get psyched about bombing the A-rabs in Iraq. Seeing all the American flag-themed decorations for the 250th anniversary of the country takes me back to that moment, even though I know it's irrational, I really do love my country, and we're 20 years removed from that context.
I think the right has left the flag on the table. We should steal it.
I mean, Harris and Hillary Clinton both tried that. One thing that Trump has shown is that there is a lot more tolerance for a president saying "America kinda sucks" than at least I had thought.