Brandon Magner

Labor historians: does anyone have a copy (or know which archive DOES have a copy) of Wyndham Mortimer’s FBI file?

One upside to living through this saga: it’s difficult to describe how invigorated federal sector unions have become due to stunts like these, from officers on down to the most flimsy of paper members. There is an energy coursing through locals that I imagine is similar to a plant-closing fight.

True, the governors are doing better, and they have more strategic oppositional positions to work from than those in Washington. Unfortunately they can’t attract as much national attention for the same reasons.

The backlash to this administration is inevitable, it will result in a huge opportunity in 2028, but so far I have seen party actors do nothing but commiserate on podcasts, exchange navel-gazing op-eds, do quick cable hits. No one but Bernie is putting themselves out there as a steward of change.

This is what happened with the GOP and Trump post-2012. All of the talent in the party’s “loaded bench” for 2016 got leveled. But the problem remains for Democrats that the most popular person it its orbit is 83, had a heart attack the last time he ran, and has a brand built outside of the party.

So many actors in the Democratic Party appear to be waiting for diagnoses to emerge from the internal autopsy that so badly needs to happen post-2024. But the party is more likely to be transformed by a few ambitious pols seizing platforms and media attention than incisive NYT or Atlantic op-eds.

I am personally not a Bernie dead-ender in my politics, but it is extremely concerning to me that no one in the Democratic Party has thought to do a cross-country tour rallying against the administration’s economic policies except for an 83-year-old with a recent history of heart problems.

Is Walter Reuther going to make an appearance in that Ezra Klein book?

Homeschoolers should have to pay double property taxes to offset the cost of regular kids having to explain everything to them later

Paul Sabin wrote a great book on this. A lot of it is rooted in the left activist turn against the government in the 1960s and 70s (much of it deserved) without creating a substitute model of good governance, which softened the turf for Reaganism www.paulsabin.com/books/public...

Do believe that Sanders has lost that part of his brain?

I didn’t say you said that, but I think that’s how it’s going to look if progressives just per se reject any messaging for two years that even facially agrees government can work better for the public than it currently does. Bernie can call Elon and DOGE a fraud and it won’t accomplish anything.

I don’t think they will, and I don’t think Sanders thinks they will, either. DOGE’s legitimacy or non-legitimacy will also not depend on whether progressives concern-troll its priorities. But the wise strategy here is probably not to flatly defend everything about the government as is.

I enjoy my unionized public-sector job plenty, thanks.

Khanna’s ploy is too earnest, but there absolutely is bloat and inefficiency in the government that the left should be attempting to improve. As usual, Sanders understands that denying obvious truths which are widely believed by the public gets the left nowhere.

(Speaking here as a civil servant.)

WWC voters became very racist in the 2010s, I guess (but not in the 1960s?)

It legitimately terrifies me that there is likely a critical mass of elected and consultant Dems who agree with this “diagnosis.”

How do we get people like this to understand that people’s work matters to them and massively impacts their socialization?

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This article by @nelsonlichtenstein.bsky.social is a useful early mile marker on the UAW’s southern organizing campaign: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

On one hand: hell yes, please run, this is the kind of candidate that general election voters need to see as getting a fair shake in the Dem coalition.

On the other hand: his day job is really important and I don’t trust Dem primary voters to give him that fair shake.

Yes, it would have been gratifying to hear top campaign staff admit Harris was a bad candidate and the sitting president essentially doomed the party, but that isn’t going to happen no matter what questions you ask them.

I think the reaction to the Pod Save America interview with the Kamala brain trust is a bit overblown—they are right on most of the fundamentals of the race and the underdog position they were in—but it serves as a useful encapsulation of why the party’s 2028 candidate needs to be an outsider.

I like the energy behind the Shawn Fain 2028 talk but worry people are overestimating the appeal of labor leaders to the general public in this era.

That also seems to be a colossal waste of Fain’s time.

Yeah I have zero tolerance for the culture war version of these takes (clear out the homeless/tighten criminal codes) and am more interested in the basic economic realities. People will flock to Fresno and Sacramento if they can afford it regardless of what items are locked up in a San Francisco CVS

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Big Blue Three (California, Illinois, and New York) need to be intensely prioritizing how to make their cost-of-living more affordable.

A really striking aspect of growing up on the Illinois-Wisconsin border is seeing how cynical and pessimistic most Illinoisans are towards their own state compared to how prideful and defensive Wisconsinites are towards theirs.

Even the weather excuses are tired. People are fleeing Illinois for Indiana (a cold state) and Wisconsin (a colder state). I live in Indiana now and grew up on the Illinois-Wisconsin border. These states are identical in day-to-day geography, weather, and quality of life. Something must be done.

California is particularly egregious. There are no weather excuses. People are begging to live (or stay) there but can’t. They are choosing to move to red states instead. This mass-migration is disastrous for the electoral college and broader popular sentiment of blue state governance.

I don’t meant to give people like Yglesias any credit, as many of these post-mortem takes are just left-baiting, but it seems genuinely disastrous that California and New York are hemorrhaging voters to Florida and Texas and we should be doing everything possible to fix blue state population loss.

If you are a lawyer who is interested in this sort of thing, please stop what you are doing and read this brief from Elizabeth Prelogar: www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23.... If there is anyone else in the profession who writes this well, I have not encountered that person.

The general lack of any public speculation about Secretary of Labor candidates so far is interesting.