We talked
last year about David Shor, the US progressive data scientist who was fired during the BLM demonstrations for a tweet that cited research showing that historically violent protests have tended to damage Democrats electorally. Despite that, Shor’s career has since boomed; he’s now one of the most in-demand political analysts in the US and he has a simple but (surprisingly?) controversial message for Democrats:
talk about popular things and shut up about unpopular things! Without that, he thinks, the party is electorally doomed. Ezra Klein has an excellent long profile
here.
Why’s this controversial? Primarily because the policy positions about which (some) party activists are most passionate are precisely those that are most unpopular with the electorate. “Defund the police” is Shor’s favourite example. What’s complicated is that even popular policies can backfire if voters infer from them something they dislike about who you are. Here’s Shor on climate change:
“Very liberal white people care way more about climate change than anyone else… So when you talk about climate change, you sound like a weird, very liberal white person.”
This doesn’t play well in West Virginia (
see Adam Tooze for more on this)
This matters even if you care nothing for the fortunes of the US Democratic Party, because it’s at the heart of an important question about how to make change happen. Should activists try to take over a political party (at risk of being in thrall to its electoral needs) or attempt to influence from the outside (at risk of never obtaining the levers of power needed to effect the change they seek)? On this, I highly recommend
this interview with David Schlozman, a political scientist who studies party takeovers. Whatever you think of “popularism” it strikes me that if you want to change the world, you need a grounded theory of how change happens; few do.