Why so many Democrats are running for the White House
Hello friends! In this newsletter I've got:
1) A note on how the enormous number of Dems seeking the presidency isn't just driven by candidates who delude themselves with big egos.
2) 7 thoughts on Game of Thrones, now that the show has concluded. Obviously there are spoilers.
3) What I'm reading.
Why are so many Democrats running for the White House?
There are now 23 candidates running for the Democratic nomination, and still more could join the fray. Why are unpopular mayors, obscure congressmen, self-help authors and businessmen pursuing long-shot bids when people like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders already have such prominent profiles in the 2020 race?
It's common to describe to describe these candidates as fueled by a deep narcissism that blinds them to their grim prospects. They overestimate their own charisma, and their thirst for power is leading them to jam their way into an already overly crowded race.
Undoubtedly, some 2020 contenders have unhealthy egos. But there are also plenty of other reasons that people are joining the race.
A key factor is the Trump effect, which is in fact two-fold. First there's the fact that Trump's initial victory in 2016 shattered conventions of electability. Trump was a true political outsider who was able to use his persona and rhetorical innovations to muscle through a crowded GOP race and go on to win the presidency. Many people look at Trump and think to themselves, "Well, if he can do it, surely I can as well."
The second part of the Trump effect is that the disastrous effects of his presidency have made the Democratic electorate particularly anxious for a solution. While it remains to be seen whether that nervous energy means doubling down on the establishment with a candidate like Joe Biden or gravitating toward a fresh face, a lot of candidates are wagering that the electorate is going to cast an unusually wide net while searching for who can get the job done.
Another draw for candidates is the democratic socialist rupture in the Democratic Party. The nascent socialist wing — whose most prominent members include Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib — is tiny but hugely influential in debates over messaging and policy in the party. In 2016 there were basically two lanes — Hillary Clinton and the outsider, taken up almost obligatorily by Bernie Sanders. Today there are many lanes between the old establishment frontrunner and Bernie, and a number of candidates also think they can act as a bridge between them by blending New Democratic orthodoxy with socialist ambition.
There's also the mass entry paradox. As the University of Virginia's Kyle Kondik told Vox, crowdedness can make candidates even more hopeful about their odds psychologically:
“It may be that the sheer number of candidates has the effect of enticing even more candidates to enter. With every additional entry, hypothetically that means that the share of the vote needed to win Iowa or New Hampshire goes down,” Kondik says. “It’s not hard for any of them to imagine winning a quarter of the vote in an early state, which may be all it requires to win.”
Remember, the Democratic Party awards delegates in every state proportionally. You have to hit a certain threshold — 15 percent — to win delegates, but, as Kondik notes, politicians who have won statewide elections or who became the mayor of America’s biggest city on a long-shot comeback can certainly talk themselves into believing their talents can get them to 15 percent. At worst, they could win some delegates and become a power player at an unlikely but conceivable brokered convention.
A lot of candidates are fantasizing about achieving what Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has experienced in recent months. His exceptional skill at retail politics, his media savvy, and widespread perception that he's highly "electable" has taken him from a quixotic campaigner to top tier candidate overnight.
Buttigieg's arc is at the heart of why a lot of white male candidates with no unique things to say to the electorate have entered the race. Buttigieg, Beto and others who hope to follow in their footsteps have no policy vision yet because what they're selling is themselves. Their value proposition does not center on how they'd improve America, but instead on their so-called electability. They promise, either explicitly or implicitly, to be able to charm the much-fetishized white, blue collar, Rust Belt voter with the way they look, talk, and carry themselves. They're banking on white identity politics above all else. In a way, this lowers the bar for entry for a certain set of candidates because they don't necessarily need to have exceptional records or visions for the future.
Lastly I'd say it's important to remember that some of these candidates aren't actually running for the White House. They're running for prestigious cabinet positions or vice president, or attempting to build fundraising relationships and reputations that can give them a head start for future runs for governor or senator, or hoping to ink book deals, join the punditocracy, or boost their speaking fees on the lecture circuit.
It'll be interesting to see how long the long-shots actually stay in the game.
7 thoughts on Game of Thrones
1) Game of Thrones began as a superb show. The imagined world was richly textured and coherent, the characters were compelling, the stories were non-linear, the ethics were complicated, and the acting was theatrical yet precise and underpinned by writing that shunned cliche. At its best I found it to be a delightful subversion of the predictable Manichean allegory represented by works like Lord of the Rings. The writing was uneven at various points, but it's clear that when the source material from the books ran out, the show really plummeted in quality. Ultimately, the showrunners seemed significantly dumber than the story they told.
2) One confounding variable regarding the decline of the show: It is much easier to start a story than to end it. In the case of Game of Thrones, this challenge is about five times more difficult since it tells so many stories and its world is so large. It was always going to be hard to land the plane when you try to impose a conventional narrative conclusion on a project that so often sought to defy it. It's clear that the priority for the showrunners in those final seasons was generating epic spectacle — while the battle scenes received blockbuster movie-sized budgets, it felt like the writers' room was allotted the budget of a Lifetime movie.
3) Despite all its shortcomings, I'd say the average episode of Game of Thrones was more illuminating about politics than every season of House of Cards combined, and that Daenerys' arc offers a deeper critique of the Iraq War than any major American movie made about the Iraq War.
4) I found the series finale to be much like the penultimate episode: So poorly written that it was appalling to anyone who has enjoyed the show at its peak, but in the broadest sense, the story and the themes explored were powerful and seemed in keeping with George R. R. Martin's vision. The worst bits in my opinion: the fact that Tyrion's speech was met with instantaneous consensus was nonsensical; the dragon's reaction to the death of Daenerys was unbelievably cheesy and heavy-handed; and Bran being made a king after being depicted as a wordless non-entity for a couple seasons was ... awkward. The fate of Daenerys and Jon Snow seemed a fitting tragedy for the tale, and the modest reform of having kings selected by an elite body of lords is probably the most optimistic outcome you could ever squeeze out of that universe. I also think it was quite evocative that most the characters in the final seasons seem unable to break free from their fundamental dispositions and that both the unraveling of the old order and the formation of the new one is fueled by that.
5) I think a big part of the Daenerys split on whether or not she pivoted before the massacre in King's Landing simply hinges on whether you actually approved of her political project in the first place. The writing is bad enough and ambiguous enough so that one can argue quite persuasively both ways —that her final massacre was not believable or that it was fairly believable. But setting aside her psychological development, I think that people primed to see her as an inspiring feminist icon were inclined to say that it didn't make sense, while those of us who from the start thought she was a hubristic imperialist and an orientalist white savior were unsurprised by it. In other words, there's a lot of motivated reasoning going on so people can affirm the general opinion of her they held earlier in the show.
6) I have observed the critical reception to Game of Thrones with a mix of amusement and frustration. I think the general consensus that the show went downhill in terms of its writing is of course right, and I endorse all mockery of the showrunners. While I don't buy the argument that Daenerys' arc is generally sexist, I do think there are plenty of anti-feminist things that happen on the show, and critiques of those are valuable. I haven't seen a lot of commentary about how orientalist the show is, but ... that should be obvious. But there have been a few lines of criticism that I find pretty ridiculous.
The first one of those is the conflation of a story arc with the author's personal political ideals. Of the finale, I've seen some people say that the outcome reflects a disdain for democracy and approval of elite rule. This should be on its face absurd: if anything, the finale almost ham-handedly makes the point that democracy would be the most just form of governance, but that the concept is both alien and undesirable to the assembled leaders. That makes sense in the scheme of the show, which is set in a medieval milieu run by autocrats and is loosely inspired by England’s 15th-century Wars of the Roses, a series of dynastic civil wars. It also makes sense because this show is not devoted to mapping out what the world should look like, but instead seeks to reckon with certain elements of what it has looked like. I've also seen a number of critics say that they'd be more forgiving of Daenerys's development had they not been made to believe she was a great leader up until the final season. Again, on what grounds are people deciding that a specific character or a story is a direct reflection of what an author really believes or what the viewer is meant to side with? (Again, for what it's worth, I always found Dany's messianic imperialism completely unappealing.)
7) A lot of the reaction to Game of Thrones has revealed to me an insane and disturbing culture of entitlement among fans. There's a lot of outrage over how certain things turned out. Over a million people have signed a petition demanding that HBO remake the final season of the show. I have read critics go on and on about what fans "deserve" from Game of Thrones in terms of character development and story arcs. It's also apparently a thing for fans to monitor George R. R. Martin's personal and creative life and get publicly angry if there's any sign that he isn't finishing the book series that they're desperately waiting to see conclude. (The author Neil Gaiman once famously notified a reader making such a complaint that "George R. R. Martin is 'not your bitch.'")
I think all of this is profoundly stupid. Fans don't deserve anything other than a right to consume something they've paid to consume. Other than that, they're owed nothing. If a show takes a turn that a fan doesn't like, the fan can critique it and/or stop watching the show. But they haven't been wronged. They haven't been deprived. They haven't been robbed. If hardcore fans with a warped view of the world dictated everything artists did, then artists would simply never end up making anything interesting. They'd be tethered to to one set of ideas and punished for taking risks or evolving or pursuing anything edgy.
The addiction these people have to these shows and their drive to grind down all of cultural life into comfort food or fantasies of self-liberation is very misguided. We don't need heroes everywhere. Stories don't have to make us feel good. We shouldn't require our art to tell us everything is always going to be okay. Because the reality is, it's not.
What I'm reading
Trump and top Republicans are distancing themselves from Alabama's abortion law.
The heartbeat bills get the science of fetal heartbeats all wrong.
Trump's advisers seem to want to go to war with Iran. He doesn't want to.
A New York Times reporter failing to understand how a presidential candidate could oppose US imperialism.
San Francisco bans facial recognition surveillance.
Negotiations between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition are going down in Norway.
Finland is winning the war on fake news.
'Climate grief': The growing emotional toll of climate change.
Jia Tolentino: Losing religion and finding ecstasy in Houston.
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