Thread
.@DouthatNYT wants a rush to the center for both the Dems and the GOP. He wants Dems to go beyond @davidshor's "tactical" maneuver and wage earnest political war on wokedum. Is this a good idea? 1/ www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/opinion/democrats-republicans-majority.html?smid=tw-share 
I would think not. Not bc I don't buy that wokedum is v costly for dems — @sophiepinkhmmm can attest that I was unimpressed and worried about defund from the get go. I think open political warfare against woke dems would be equivalent of a civil war in the professional class. 2/ 
.@DouthatNYT: the logic of the "the perceived legitimacy of conservative governance" also applies within the democrats. Biden was at real risk of losing to progressives in general (who are not all woke, ofc). policytensor.com/2020/08/13/the-elegy-of-the-new-american-left/ 3/ 
And in the end, woke dems prevailed on urban streets and progressives authored Biden's ambitious agenda after the senate runoffs in GA. They also conquered the prestige media from their fortifications in the ivory tower. The Left lost the primary but won the argument. 4/ 
The reason it could do so have to do with the fact that, outside the family units, the principal site of professional class reproduction are the prestige schools (ht @DSMarkovits) that has steadily fallen to intellectuals radicalized in 1968. 5/ policytensor.com/2020/06/27/asymmetric-information-and-professional-class-reproduction/
So, Harvard's deliberate restructuring of American elites — the story is well told by Nicholas Lemann — perhaps inadvertently created a channel through which disciplinary innovations in academia would propagate through the professional class — Facebook's formula for growth. 6/
And there was little resistance in the professional class — dems to the last woman. Ofc, it did meet resistance at invisible class boundaries, where the anthropological terrain so to speak was less in tune with the ideology of the upper classes. 7/ 
Here they ran into the ideologies of not only the provincial middle class and the working class, who predominate in the gop coalition, but also @tmuzergues's post-hegemonic kingmakers — the suburban middle class. 8/
Geography encodes class information. The geographic inefficiency of the dem vote (urban=blue, rural=red, with the partisan front running through the suburbs) is due to the geography of class, whose relative populations vary considerably and systematically. 9/
The attraction of an alliance bw middle and working classes to contain the professional class is obvious — such an alliance can and has prevailed. However, the state is bigger than the government, and society is bigger than the state. 10/
In order to stabilize class relations, and indeed, to win elections, you need get buy in from important factions within the upper classes as well — the financial elites/Ultra-HNI and the professional elites. 11/ 
More generally, the US party system is bipolar. Both poles need to attract some portion of all classes with the exception of the underclass — whose principal external sites of reproduction are correctional facilities, the result of a bipartisan class war on the underclass. 12/ 
It is one thing to wage war on the underclass and quite another to wage war on one of the upper classes. With war waged against the professional class, you get Trump as a regime — the weakest president coupled with non-stop moral panics in the professional class. 13/
With war waged on the financial elites, as Sanders seemed to have promised, you start to test the boundaries of the civil oligarchy. The response function of those with the big checkbooks is hardly irrelevant to partisan calculations. 14/ 
In order to win American elections, you must abandon the idea of waging war on any of the classes: billionaires, professionals, middle and working classes. More narrowly-defined enemies must be found.
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A tidy solution for the dems has been extractive industries, the financial backbone of the gop, whose scapegoating has allowed "a unity of interests" to come together behind the Biden solution. 16/ policytensor.com/2020/11/02/notes-on-the-present-conjuncture-2-a-unity-of-interests/ 
Rene Girard's theory of the origin of religion and ritual posits that religion originated in rituals, which originated in sacrifice, which were reenactments of the murder of a scapegoat is the most interesting use of the obs that scapegoating is universal. 17/
So, you need an enemy. In Girard's theory, the main criterion for the selection of the scapegoat is that they must be relatively defenseless. The enemy cannot be more than a small minority that can be more or less easily contained like the oil lobby or the underclass. 18/
This is grim business. But that is not evidence against it being accurate. We must grapple with the world that exists out there. This is especially important now that we're in an extended period of instability, adverse macro conditions, and tense geopolitical relations. 19/
Anyway, sorry for the long-winded tweet storm. I just thought I should weigh in on this interesting question of political realism. 20/
I should probably write about the general theory of strategic minimalism.
