Political Strategy: Coalitions vs. Populism
Or how you can win elections while being unpopular (or senile).
In the Game of the Republic, strategies for gaining power have little to do with any actual policies. How you get elected and what you do when elected nominally have a relationship when it comes to re-election, but I think this matters more or less depending on the strategy a party or candidate is using to gain power. Remember that political strategy is superior to ideology, and in fact for one to be a good ruler one must first have power. Remember the lessons of Machiavelli.
Assuming general rule enforcement, there are two competing strategies being used in modern politics, particularly at the national level:
Coalition building, the current strategy of the Democrats
And
Populism, the current(ish) strategy of the Republicans.
Both parties used to favor populism, and every presidential election contained a “Race to the Middle” by both parties to get neutral or hesitant voters to swing their way, with the presumption that independent voters are “moderate” or somewhere in the middle of the stated political spectrum. What that political spectrum even is has changed a great deal, so talking about “liberal” vs. “conservative” ideologies is itself a discussion rooted in the past and only marginally relevant to contemporary political strategy in the USA. People vote according to ideology, but the old large ideologies about the role of the state no longer hold the parties together.
The reason for the shift in the democratic party is the shift in demographics to which our country has been subjected over the past few decades. Principles and visions for the state matter when it comes to persuading a largely homogenous group, but we are now a country with many ethnicities, many religious sentiments, and many desires for what the state ought to be or do. At a certain point, it becomes more strategically valuable to assemble support based on collecting the loyalty of ethnic and ideological minorities rather than going for broad popular appeal.
That is, you will gain a majority by capturing a majority of the balkanized voting base.
This shift with democrats happened roughly around the time of Barrack Obama and continues to this day. After getting narrowly beaten in the national presidential race twice by Republicans who loved welfare (the old center of liberal ideas of the state), a new strategy needed to be adopted. Coalition building may have been in the works a long time, but it became really optimal around 2008 when white Americans ceased to be a majority in places like California. Barrack Obama is in many ways the poster child of the strategy: a politically radical newcomer with no track record who ascended to the highest office because of what he represented ethnically. “Hope” and “change” were just slogans to get people to notice: he’s not white (technically not true; we’ve never had a non-white president).
The apparent blackness of Obama was his whole campaign. It was the means by which the coalition of all “people of color” and their “allies” were united under one umbrella, no matter how disparate their actual political stances and desires. This is why virtually all the political messaging after 2000 was about how bad white people were – the coalition has to be built through a common thread, and that thread is racial. Thus, there was a surprise for many white Americans when electing a black president didn’t cure racial resentment and, in fact, made it worse.
The absolute shock at the victory of Donald Trump in 2016 and the bald complaints about “populism” (a strategy that Democrats used for at least 100 years) were the Democrat party just tipping their hand regarding the strategy they did employ, which they thought was unbeatable given demographics. Hillary Clinton, though white, wasn’t a man (thus automatically capturing the female vote) and had the endorsement of Obama – it was a major strategic upset That Trump beat her with a platform appealing to the old majority.
As an aside, the unpopularity of Trump with GOP leadership is not a hatred of populism per se (which the Republicans have always used) but an objection to him not being part of the game. A new player shouldn’t just be able to step up to the table and win everything. The whole bit about “principles” shouldn’t fool anyone with a memory longer than about ten years. Republicans only have principles when it comes to losing while filling their bank accounts. Post 2008, I think most of them know they exist to put up a monetarily valuable losing fight. Trump, however, is in it to win. Dangerous.
The process of coalition-building involves, in terms of proposed policies, a hodge-podge of positions, each one suited to capture a particular demographic. The Democrats are pro-immigration so that Mexicans who don’t want to go home will vote for them (yes, immigrants vote—remember the maxim that unenforced rules don’t exist). They are anti-white and pro-welfare so that Black Americans will vote for them, despite immigration and the burden it places on labor and welfare systems negatively affecting Africans more than any other group. They are pro-scientism, so that atheist nerds will vote for them, pro-abortion to get the votes of women, etc.
This is also why the Democrats can successfully run on a policy platform where each individual point is massively unpopular and how they can win elections (even fairly) while their government in total has abysmal approval ratings. It’s about collecting minorities, not being popular in total with all policies. “Trans rights” affect a tiny minority, but the minority that cares about it will vote for you for life as long as you are willing to stand for dicks in the girls’ locker room and, just as importantly, the other special interests won’t abandon you just because they don’t like it.
Your platform doesn’t need to be particularly coherent; it just needs to hit the big topics for what amounts to a plurality. Propaganda, likewise, doesn’t (or perhaps can’t) interact with policy so much as identity. “I can’t breathe” has no real policy solution. Superimposing images of Trump and Hitler doesn’t encourage any particular policy besides the assassination of the man in question.
If it is any consolation, the Democrats are as bad as the Republicans when it comes to instituting policies, and the coalition strategy ensures you need to institute very few of them. The voters are captured and aren’t defecting to the populist side that publicly opposes their pet fetish or political issue. Remember that in the Game of the Republic, the point is to win; you can only be sure of policies being passed that will benefit the players in some way.
This, incidentally, is why the student loan crisis will not be solved except through some massive collapse: the politicians benefit from it. You pay lip service to it for a few votes, maybe forbear repayment, but canceling them out (bad for usurers) or solving them permanently (bad for universities) will always end up being “politically impossible.”
Contrast all this to the populist strategy. In this, rather than assembling disparate special interests into a block, seeks to find the optimal platform that appeals to the most people. It is more democratic in that sense but nearly as nonsensical as the other side. Policies are still ad-hoc, not derived from principles but strategic prudence. Propaganda is played more to bolster the base than to agitate them against a highly specific “other.”
If you are wondering why Republicans always seem so limp-wristed and spineless, it is because of their strategy. They can’t take a hard line on anything because that might cause them to be unpopular. Of course, the problem with the fear of being unpopular is that it doesn’t matter (and the Democrats know this). They are playing a mid-20th-century game in 2024.
Donald Trump is a populist in the traditional sense. He’s malleable. He doesn’t necessarily follow through but plays the game once in (still waiting on the wall). He is, however, a decent strategist and understood that in modern elections, winning is more about coalition building than being popular, and he won with a coalition – of states, not of the aggregate. He pushed a populist platform and used his propaganda to appeal to a plurality in the right number of states. This was the flaw in the Democrat strategy: collecting a plurality nationally doesn’t always translate to a plurality in every state because of distribution. California is easy to capture. Not so much with Florida.
Within the context of the Game of the Republic, this is why Democrats rail against the Electoral College and want to change it. They found a strategy that would win every time, but the rules need to be changed to ensure that outcome. Platitudes about “democracy” are nonsense – the entire strategy is anti-democratic because there is no demo, no one people to rule by majority or consensus. It’s a collection of tribes. Lest you think that the Democrats are sincere and aren’t playing the game, let me quote whoever is tweeting from Joe Biden’s X account now:
This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law.
Not the President of the United States.
Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
So today, I’m calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.
1. No more immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office
2. Term limits for Supreme Court justices
3. A binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court
Read more about how these actions would strengthen the guardrails of our democracy in the
@PostOpinions
link in bio and here: http://wapo.st/4c9ertE
These are proposals designed to target the other side by changing the rules of the game (which is itself part of the Game of the Republic). This gets close to proscribing the opposition (the goal of any player) by opening up a specific individual (Trump) to more persecution and money-draining lawfare while forcing a turnover of positions held by the opposition (the Supreme Court). There is no special political reason for either of these positions except that the current plays on the board are unfavorable, and thus, changing the rules is a better solution than playing on. The final goal is to simply outlaw the Republican party, or that failing, to rig the game so that no opposition can affect political outcomes. Players like the Democrats only respect the rules of the game in so much as they expect the rules to protect themselves. Rules that apply to the opposition but not to themselves are, therefore, ideal.
That brings us back to immigrants voting. Democrats oppose voting ID laws, etc., because those would mean there would be a way to enforce citizen voting. So long as that rule is unenforceable, it doesn’t exist, and they can import as many voters as they want and have no need to worry about places like California, both locally and nationally. However, immigration itself may not matter nationally because, as 2020 proves, you only need to control a few key areas where the rules can’t be enforced – you don’t have to control the whole board to win this way.
Drawing things to a close – which strategy will be most effective in the future? I have to believe it is the coalition. The USA is ethnically, religiously, and ideologically balkanized. Electoral success on a large scale will, therefore, involve playing to regional and ethnic interests rather than grandiose ideas about what the state ought to do and how it ought to be organized. “Principled” conservatism and liberalism are both dead to the extent that they have coherent visions. Liberalism succeeded, and conservatism failed via a thousand tiny victories, but the next political fight will likely be different, focusing on issues that no side can afford to have a totally principled and consistent stance on. It’ll be interesting, for sure.
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