Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, December 10, 2025
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4 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
Yesterday I promised (threatened?) to write about my team, the Democrats, and I want to discuss briefly where I think the party is, and where it needs to go.
The core of the party, the Chuck Schumer party, still thinks it’s the 1960s and 70s and we’re all marching for Civil Rights and passing legislation that will do good things for minorities, including the female minority with its bare 51% of the population.
The progressive wing of the party, centered not in Congress but on social media, is already nostalgic for the 2010’s when they were inventing grievances and crying about microaggressions, all centered around the idea of identity politics. Their weapon of choice wasn’t legislation or marches, their tool was shame – the dreaded cancel culture.
Identity politics was, in a word, stupid. In a country where 60% of the population is white, minorites, some quite tiny in numbers, are not going to win that contest. Openly trashing the 60% was, in two words, fucking stupid.
Now, let me be clear. If someone breaks into your house and steals all your stuff: that’s the bad guy. But if you left your windows open and your door unlocked: you’re the dumbass. On just about every issue, progressives were the dumbasses and they’ve lost all their stuff.
Our future is not about the walking dead, the cobwebbed septua and octogenarians of the Schumer party. And it’s not about the dumbasses of identity politics. Because, as Bob Dylan wrote, the order is rapidly fadin’ and also the times they are a-changin’.
AI is coming, and it will accelerate another disruptive technology, bio-engineering. The steam engine changed the world. Airplanes and cars changed the world. The internet and the iPhone changed the world and we’re still not able to manage that revolution. Technology defines the playing field. Homo sapiens is about to experience a set of dramatic changes, and nowhere on that near-future landscape do zombie speeches to C-Span cameras, or chanting and sign-waving crowds, or social media scolds play a major role.
Now, do I know how to cope with what’s coming? Nope. I am not Nostradamus. But I know what’s obsolete. Had I been on the beach at Kitty Hawk watching the Wright Brothers I would not have been able to predict 747s or F-35s, but I would have known it was time for a major rethink. You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.
Our future as a party cannot be about great-grandmother amending the next omnibus bill, and it cannot be about inventing the next grievance. We are dinosaurs noticing a funny light in the sky. It’s adapt-or-die time. We need a party that is loose enough, fast enough, smart enough to at least manage not to be swept away in the coming tidal wave.
How exactly to adapt? Not sure, not at all. But I am quite certain that the past is done, and we need to be able to convince voters that we believe in the future, that we intend not just to survive it but profit from it. We need to find ways to make the future work so that we are not just serfs on lands owned by our tech overlords. We need leaders who are smart, flexible, principled, and facing forward not back.
Perhaps the single biggest obstacle to this is us: Democrats. The change in perspective has to start with us. The divisions are now between two irrelevant, outdated party factions. We cannot be about servicing this or that special interest. We cannot be about this or that identity group. We have to focus on the future. We have to insist on weaning ourselves off Big Money. We have to reject the narrow focus on ‘getting ours.’ We cannot be the party of ‘restoration’ after Trump is gone. He’s the past, we have to be the future.
We can’t stop the tidal wave, but if we are smart, and agile, and keep our balance, eyes wide open, we can surf it.
TL;DR: fuck Chuck Schumer and Ilhan Omar, too, they are both relics of the past and the next stage of civilization is already here.
The Florida headline of the day- South Florida Postal Service employees participated in $600,000 credit card theft operation, feds say
@Michael Reynolds:
The problem is not that the times they are a-changin’/the future is now (or however you want to put it), the problem is that people aren’t going to jail.
Trump? Should be in jail.
Musk? Jail.
John Roberts? Jail.
Hegseth? Jail.
Miller? Jail.
Etc., etc
And I fully realize that (especially) Roberts did not do a single illegal thing. And that is exactly the problem. The real scandal is what’s legal.
If corruption has zero consequences, society becomes corrupt. Nothing to do with AI or social media, just a tale as old as time.
Qualified immunity should have been the canary in the coal mine. But it wasn’t because, for the most part, only “those” people got shot.
If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be almost funny that the legacy of slavery is now impacting the white middle classes, too.
@drj:
Do you think voters give a single fuck about putting Pete Hegseth in jail? Do you think a Blue Revenge message is going to woo anyone to our side?
People are far more scared for the future than they are upset about the past. We have to move past letting Trump set the agenda and dictate the action. People can’t afford rent. They can’t afford health care. And they are at least dimly aware that AI is coming for their jobs. Three years from now there won’t be a single human driving for Uber. And all the people who were urged to get into coding because it was the future? Their jobs are on the block as well.
Our billionaire tech overlords are working feverishly to obsolete vast swathes of the human race. Fight the coming threat, not the last war.