[api]

I don't agree with how it's being done -- it makes Biden's Afghanistan exit look well planned and executed -- but the trade stuff is one of the few areas where I have some overlap with MAGA. My preferred approach would be more careful, gradual, selective, and, well, well-executed, but it's very clear that blanket free trade with no standards and no reciprocity has hollowed out the country.

I mean... if we are going to have the EPA and environmental standards, then it stands to reason that we must tax imports from countries that do not. Otherwise we are just moving the pollution elsewhere while burning even more fuel to ship products here. Right? It kind of shows that a lot of environmentalism is just NIMBY-motivated. It's fine if we trash other peoples' back yards. But a lot of our big environmental problems are global, so not only is this hypocrisy but it doesn't work.

It's good that we have workers' rights and OSHA, but the same logic applies. Otherwise we are just exploiting workers elsewhere.

On a somewhat tangent... I find it kind of disturbing that the one area where I have some agreement with MAGA is the least popular and most roundly criticized MAGA policy, and the one most likely to result in an electoral defeat.

Most of the other stuff in MAGA -- isolationism, a love for strongman rule (at home and elsewhere), authoritarianism, cults of personality, misogyny, racism, etc. -- is stuff that I find horrific, but the only thing people really care about is short term economic outcomes.

[matthewdgreen]

The Biden administration spent a lot of time and money trying to bring back manufacturing to US shores, including loads of funding in the IRA for industries like renewable energy and batteries and the CHIPS act for semiconductors. They also used tariffs to protect a number of US industries, but they did it intelligently and in a targeted manner.

Being “in favor of some trade restrictions and reindustrialization” does not mean you’re taking a MAGA position. It means you just haven’t been paying much attention to policy, and so you’re basing your ideas of the political options on superficial crap. The result of uninformed citizenry is stuff like what’s happening right now, with the markets going into free fall.

[api]

I agreed with that, though not entirely with how it was done, but they didn't take credit for it. Very few people even knew it was happening.

Objectively I don't think Biden was a bad president, and no I didn't vote for Trump.

They also never took a principled stand on it. Biden and Harris never said "the trade policy of Reagan and Clinton was a mistake and we are reversing it." If Harris had said that, she would have flipped Michigan and Wisconsin and maybe Ohio. With one sentence. Throw in "the Iraq war was a mistake, and while I support Ukraine we need to make sure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past" and she might have flipped a few more.

If that's at all what Harris thinks, then the Democratic Party has an enormous communication problem. They don't know how to connect and they don't claim their wins. They sound like their whole communication agenda is set by consultants and PR people, because it is, and when people hear that they dismiss it as bullshit because everything consultants and PR people say is bullshit. That communication style is a huge contrarian indicator. When people hear a press release they tune out.

The right has learned how to talk to people. Or rather, they've un-learned the communication playbook of the latter half of the 20th century. That's why they're winning.

I knew Harris was going to lose when she skipped Rogan for SNL. I'm not a big Rogan fan (he's gone way downhill since his early years) but he's how you reach people today. Nobody cares about SNL.

I think a good first step would be to start listening to people like AOC -- not necessarily about all her policy views but about how she communicates. She communicates like a 21st century politician, not like someone from 1980.

[surgical_fire]

> The Democratic Party has an enormous communication problem. They don't know how to connect.

I am not from the US, but I perceive the same problem in my country of residence (and in other countries I know people from).

The main issue I see is that politics became a sort of entertainment. So a more serious politician (the adults in the room, so to say), communicate in a fairly dry, and even careful tone. And that happens because politics is supposed to be a dry and boring subject.

Budgets, policies, et cetera and so forth, all those are dministrative administrative, not something to be decided with emotions.

But that doesn't lend itself well to communication. So what people pay attention to is the far right buffon yelling about white replacement or such bullshit.

[api]

It's part politics-as-entertainment and part the fact that the whole late 20th century PR flunkie style of communication was never popular. People never liked it. Now that the Internet has blown up the old media that used that style, people don't tolerate it anymore.