#Farah Stockman

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

After three decades of increasingly steep losses in rural America, Democrats are finally beginning to grapple with an inconvenient truth: An enduring Democratic majority requires winning back some portion of persuadable rural working-class voters.

Both Republicans’ and Democrats’ neoliberal economic policies have been harmful—in some instances ruinous—to rural communities. The GOP, on the whole, has caused more economic pain—but it has also been the party that has acknowledged rural struggles and put the people who’ve been harmed at the center of their rhetoric. None more so than Donald Trump, who said, in 2016, “Every time you see a closed factory or a wiped out community in Ohio, it was essentially caused by the Clintons.”

Too many Democrats, meanwhile, have sounded either dismissive of or exasperated by rural people. In 2016, Chuck Schumer’s catastrophically cavalier strategy willfully sacrificed blue-collar rural voters in exchange (or so he’d hoped) for high-income suburbanites. As far as the Democratic establishment was concerned, non-college-educated rural voters should quit complaining and simply get a degree—ideally in coding—and join the knowledge economy. Such contempt for a large swath of America has resulted in the ongoing erosion of Democratic support among working-class white and non-white voters.

Joe Biden, more than any president in decades, has prioritized rural people with a remarkable set of pro-worker policies and major investments in rural economies and infrastructure. We believe that this record offers a foundation for Democrats at all levels to begin to win back working-class rural voters—while holding on to the party’s multiracial urban and suburban base.

In 2022, the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (which we cofounded) interviewed 50 Democratic candidates, from 25 states, who ran in rural districts between 2016 and 2020. Though they didn’t all win office, they all significantly overperformed the partisan lean of their district or state.

Our questions to them boiled down to, “What was your secret sauce?” From their answers, we identified several key ingredients: First and foremost, successful candidates were highly attuned to the concerns of their would-be constituents. Instead of running on a cookie-cutter national Democratic platform, they focused on the things voters in their district cared about most—kitchen-table matters like jobs and the economy, alongside ultra-local problems such as lousy roads, underfunded hospitals, and spotty Internet access.

Overperforming candidates also eschewed Beltway political consultants in favor of campaign staffers rooted in the community. This made for authentic campaigns with local flavor. Former Maine state senator Chloe Maxmin, for example, deployed homemade yard signs that were a folksy departure from the typically soulless campaign placards that litter the landscape.

Rural overperformers did something else that’s unpopular within the progressive left but widely appreciated by rural swing voters: They didn’t demonize Trump, no matter how richly he deserved it. And they didn’t try to scare or pressure persuadable voters into seeing the GOP or MAGA as an existential threat to democracy. Such rhetoric is music to the base’s ears but falls flat with key constituencies, most worryingly youth and Latinos.

Guillermo Lopez, a board member of the Hispanic Center Lehigh Valley in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had this to say about Democrats’ hyping the MAGA threat to democracy: “I actually think that harms the vote.… [The average person who] just puts their nose to the grindstone and goes to work, I don’t think that motivates them. I think it scares them and freezes them.”

We’re with Lopez. Time spent enumerating and labeling Trump’s voluminous misconduct is time that could have been spent connecting with voters on what they care about most. We reserve judgment as to whether sounding the alarm about MAGA fascism appeals to disaffected or undecided urban and suburban voters, but we’re reasonably confident that this message does little to help rural candidates.

The superiority of depolarizing rhetoric is corroborated by a wide body of academic and poll-tested research documented in our full report. At the end of the day, the rural Democrats able to chip away at Republican strongholds were the ones who knew how to meet voters where they already were—not where they wished they were at. This sounds like Politics 101, but it’s a principle all too often cast aside by candidates and campaign consultants who spend too much time tuned in to MSNBC pundits and not enough listening to their own voters.

Democrats running in this cycle should study the 2022 campaigns of Representatives Mary Peltola, who won in solidly red Alaska, and Marie Glusenkamp Perez, who won Washington State’s Third Congressional District, which had been in Republican hands for six terms. Peltola ran on “Fish, Family, Freedom” and in her current reelection campaign calls on Alaskans to say “to hell with politics” and “work together to protect our Alaska way of life.”

Glusenkamp Perez won her 2022 race in large part because of her credibility as co-owner of an auto repair shop and her laser-sharp focus on issues her constituents prioritized, like the “right to repair” farming and other equipment. While some on the left are angry that she doesn’t toe the Democratic party line on every issue, her record shows her to be the kind of left-leaning populist who can win in rural districts. The Democratic Party would be wise to embrace socially moderate, economically and stylistically populist candidates like Glusenkamp Perez and Peltola as part of its coalition.

In the spirit of cross-racial populist solidarity, top-performing rural candidates put work and workers at the center of their policy and rhetoric, proposing a “hand up” rather than a “handout.” For the great majority of rural people, self-reliance—the wherewithal to solve our own problems and meet our own needs—is central to our identity. We don’t know a single farmer, conservative or liberal, who doesn’t feel this way. As Colby College rural political scholars Nick Jacobs and Dan Shea put it, “What rural residents want to hear is this: ‘Make it possible for us to improve our communities ourselves.’”

Rural residents might be disproportionately dependent on some form of government transfer payment, but they don’t like it. Farah Stockman, author of American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, wrote, “Too often, those who champion the working class speak only of social safety nets, not the jobs that anchor a working person’s identity.” The key is in the delivery, ensuring that local communities can adapt and drive these investments rather than trying to implement ill-suited, top-down mandates.

The Biden administration’s aggressive anti-trust actions combined with rule changes favoring workers and organized labor are critical steps in giving non-college-educated working people agency. Its investments in rural infrastructure and manufacturing are essential as well.

Likewise, the Biden campaign’s decision to hire a rural coordinator bodes well. But that coordinator’s efficacy will be orders of magnitude greater if they hire a small army of locally rooted staff who know how to make a national campaign relevant and resonant for rural voters.

While Democrats will not “win” rural America in 2024, they can and must run up the margins with rural voters—a third of whom are considered persuadable—if they are to keep the presidency and control Congress and statehouses. Because it turns out the secret sauce isn’t that complicated: Find out what’s most important to persuadable rural people, and focus on that. That’s the only recipe worth cooking.

[stoweboyd]

Jennifer Harris

Bidenomics: The Queen Bee Is Jennifer Harris | Farah Stockman

As an adviser on international economic policy, Ms. Harris had a hand in everything from making the case for industrial policy to designing a new framework for trade. This time, she wasn’t a lonely voice. Numerous grantees or partners from the Hewlett initiative entered the administration as well: Heather Boushey, an expert on equitable growth, became a member of Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers; K. Sabeel Rahman, a scholar of antitrust law, became head of regulatory affairs; and his collaborator Lina Khan became chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

[xinguozhi]

新加坡式的威权制度比民主制度更好吗？

作者：纽约时报/Farah Stockman    译者：纽约时报中文网     2023-4-24 https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20230424/singapore-autocracy-democracy/ Associated…

[liberty1776]

I was surprised to see this in the New York Times on July 7, just before the NATO summit Biden hosted in D.C. It’s by Editorial Board member Farah Stockman: The Other Side of the ... Isaac, Munther Best Price: $14.06 Buy New $13.99 (as of 12:22 UTC - Details) What would Ike say now? Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, felt strongly that his mission was to get Europeans “back on their military feet” — not for American troops to become the permanent bodyguard for Brussels and Berlin. “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe … Continue reading →

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Biden Needed That U.A.W. Endorsement by Farah Stockman

By Farah Stockman He’s been trailing Trump in recent Michigan polls. Published: January 24, 2024 at 05:05PM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/puUoHTj via IFTTT

[chawsl]

OPINION

FARAH STOCKMAN

*He Made His Country Rich, but Something Has Gone Wrong With the System*

_April 12, 2023_

"But now, eight years after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore is at a crossroads. It’s being run by his eldest son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who leans heavily on his father’s legacy. Elections for the largely ceremonial post of president are expected in September and parliamentary elections are due by 2025. The prime minister’s potential successor has already been picked. But the ruling People’s Action Party has never looked so vulnerable.

Critics say Singapore is becoming more like a plutocracy, in which well-paid yes men with the right connections to the Lee family rise up the ranks. Today, Singapore is a place where forklift operators can face jail time for taking one-dollar bribes but executives from the Singaporean conglomerate Keppel — who paid millions in bribes, according to the U.S. Justice Department — got off with “stern warnings.” (Officials in Singapore have said that they didn’t have enough evidence to take the case to court.)

The trouble is that the system requires someone like Lee Kuan Yew at the top — strict and charismatic, as Michael Barr, author of “Singapore: A Modern History,” told me. “But no one who has that political skill would ever rise to the top today because that person would be regarded as a threat,” he said.

Perhaps the clearest sign that something in Singapore has gone wrong is the fact that Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son and one of his grandsons say they are now living in exile, fearful that they would be arrested if they ever returned.

“My uncle doesn’t want competing claims to legitimacy,” Lee Kuan Yew’s grandson Shengwu Li told me over a cup of tea in Cambridge, Mass. “Authoritarian systems don’t survive by taking chances. If they think there’s a 5 percent chance I’ll be a problem for them, they want that to be zero.”

The irony is that Mr. Li, a 38-year-old assistant professor of economics at Harvard who was just awarded a top honor in his field, doesn’t have political ambitions. Soft-spoken and cerebral, he says he’s happy working on his theorems in a place where nobody gives him special treatment because he’s related to Lee Kuan Yew. After 10 years studying at Oxford and Stanford, he got used to certain freedoms.

Lee Hsien Yang, Lee Kuan Yew’s youngest son, says he has been fighting to honor his father’s wish not to have a cult of personality built around the house. But he says his elder brother, the prime minister, wants to preserve the house as a national monument to bolster his own political legitimacy. Lee Hsien Yang spoke out publicly against his brother, only to get hit with an investigation. Eventually, he fled the country, like his son. It seems to be an example of what Kenneth Paul Tan, a Singaporean professor of cultural studies, calls the “politics of evermore sophisticated bullying.” At its core, the fight isn’t about a house or a will. It’s about the future of Singapore.

“The institutions in Singapore, whether it is the judiciary, the civil service, the army, the institutions of higher learning, have all gradually come under direct control in a way that stifles independent thinking and challenge,” Lee Hsien Yang told me. Lee Kuan Yew would solicit different views and occasionally change his mind, he said. “Today, the Singapore authorities no longer have people who would challenge the system to say, ‘Here’s my view. I don’t think you are doing the right thing.’ They are too well-paid.”

Lee Hsien Yang and his son Shengwu Li avoided politics for most of their lives, but since the feud over the house burst into public view, both have voiced sympathy for the political opposition, lending the legitimacy of that crucial family name. Yet their ability to help the opposition has been curtailed by the accusations against them. The episode has exposed the cracks in Singapore’s celebrated system. If Lee Kuan Yew’s son and grandson can feel compelled to flee, what can happen to ordinary people?

Political scientists weren’t sure that Singapore’s highly successful system would outlast Lee Kuan Yew. By the end of his life, even the great man himself spoke of preparing for the day when his party would lose power. That’s the thing about benevolent autocracies: They tend to expire. They either cease to be autocracies — as happened in South Korea and Chile — or they cease to be benevolent."

[recentlyheardcom]

Farah Stockman: This group has $100 million and a big goal: to fix America

Farah Stockman: This group has $100 million and a big goal: to fix America

In February 2020, in the midst of a vitriolic presidential election, an idealistic group of donors from across the ideological spectrum met to plan an ambitious new project. They called themselves the New Pluralists and pledged to spend a whopping $100 million over the next decade to fight polarization by funding face-to-face interactions among Americans across political, racial and religious…

[tomorrowusa]

[I]n a world where we like our gratification quick and we tend to lose track of and lose interest in things very, very rapidly, we better hunker down and realize that we’re going to be living with what happened today and what happens in the coming days for a long time. We’re going to be living with it in any number of ways. And if we tell ourselves anything different, we are being dangerously naïve.

Frank Bruni in a round table discussion at the New York Times on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (archived copy)

It was a civil, thought provoking discussion which featured opinion writers with rather different viewpoints. It’s not one of those political shouting matches designed to boost TV ratings or get clicks.

Farah Stockman made the point that Europe boosted Putin’s power and influence by foolishly becoming dependent on buying oil and natural gas from a crazed dictator. Putin used that revenue to build up his military. The invasion of Ukraine is a direct result of that. Europe needs to slam the bank door shut on Putin unless they want to see more atrocities like this.

When it comes to how we can punish Putin for doing this, we’re going to have to also go through some serious pain. Fifty percent of Germany’s natural gas comes from Russia, right? London has been rolling in Russian money for years now. So if Europe wants to stop Putin, we’re going to have to go cold turkey in ways that are really hard. And they’re going to be hard on Europeans, too. This is going to be a suck-it-up situation, where people are going to have to say, we are going to have to quit Putin. We’re going to have to quit the Russian gas and oil that we’re addicted to. And I just hope that we’re ready for that.

The invasion of Ukraine will have a more long term effect than the pandemic on international politics.

Putin’s militarism won’t go away just because we get tired of it; the Cold War is taking an encore. And Putin, like other dictators, won’t be placated by appeasement – he will just view that as weakness. He is a danger to democracy everywhere and to the security of Europe.

Looking at the broader picture, it is Western dependence on fossil fuels which made Putin powerful. An acceleration of the move to renewable energy sources is not just good for the environment and the economy – it is necessary for international security.

[bigtickhk]

American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears by Farah Stockman https://amzn.to/2XITvcW 

https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9781984801159

[anarchistcommunism]

Farah Stockman from the New York Times editorial board published an article claiming to be “The Truth About Today’s Anarchists.” It draws on the work of an amateur conspiracy theorist, a poorly researched report from a nonprofit including a former Republican state attorney general and a former NYPD chief, a couple interviews with politicians and reformers, decontextualized and misleading references to two of our own publications, and regurgitated right-wing talking points to argue that violent anarchists are somehow controlling the ongoing countrywide protests but don’t care about Black lives.

What follows is a detailed rebuttal of this dangerously irresponsible article. Fortunately, initial reactions on social media suggest that the reading public has largely seen through its distortions. Nonetheless, we want to take the opportunity to reply in full—because despite its absurdity, the article touches on critical issues that deserve to be addressed. This is an opportunity to set the record straight, to explain why many anarchists have participated in these protests, and to elaborate our vision for a freer world.

[contemplatingoutlander]

This column by Farah Stockman is very disturbing. If it had come from anywhere else, I would be much more skeptical. But a member of the editorial board of The New York Times isn’t going to present something this controversial that wasn’t well researched. 

First, I want to remind readers that militant white supremacists are still the biggest threat to our nation. However, it appears there actually is a threat from the left--but it ISN’T Black Lives Matter. 

It looks like there really are some well-organized anarchists who are taking advantage of the largely peaceful BLM protests to foster looting and violence. 

(Yes, I knew there were some anarchists, but I had no idea they were as organized as this article suggests. In fact, I assumed the idea of being “organized” would on some level be anathema to “anarchists.” Live and learn.) 

And this is what makes me angry. Because it seems to me that members (typically male) of two militant WHITE groups, from the RIGHT and from the LEFT blend in with the crowds at BLM protests and are the ones strategically inciting the looting and violence to achieve different political ends.

Yet, it is the largely peaceful BLM protesters who get blamed in the process.

And if that isn’t symbolic of the problems in our racist society right there, I don’t know what is. 

So it looks to me that Joe Biden’s stance is the correct one. Whereas Trump only calls out the violence on the left, Biden has called it out on both the left and the right. 

For instance, in a speech in Wilmington on August 20th Joe Biden said:

“I condemn the violence unequivocally, whether on the left or the right. I challenge Donald Trump to do the same.”

But from what I can tell, BLM shouldn’t be confused with these largely white violent extreme groups on the left and the right. 

[campaignoutsider]

Boston Herald Jumps the Snark

Boston Herald Jumps the Snark

Say, the Boston Herald didn’t like all that sarcasm Barack Obama threw at Mitt Romney in last night’s debate, did they? Start with Page One (via the Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages): Then the columnists got in on the action. Paging Howie Carr, paging Mr. One-Note Carr. Once they got beyond the boring foreign policy part of the foreign policy debate, they reverted to form. Obama was petulant and…

[fffartonceaweek]

The New York Times sucks shit ! 

.

  Thread : 

https://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1311497522209320960

.

AND 

THREAD:

https://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/1311783517022375941

.

also:

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1311560820757729280

.

[wazafam]

By BY FARAH STOCKMAN from Opinion in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opinion/china-us-competition.html?partner=IFTTT Competition with China could mean benefits for the United States, if we learn the right lessons of history. Competition Is Good — Even With China New York Times

[worklabournewsresearch]

What Killed the Blue-Collar Struggle for Social Justice

"One of the biggest takeaways from the experience was that some of the most consequential battles in the fight for social justice took place on factory floors, not college campuses. For many Americans without college degrees, who make up two-thirds of adults in the country, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement largely boiled down to one thing: access to well-paying factory jobs."

"In many ways, the decline in American manufacturing hit Black people the hardest. According to a 2018 study of the impact of manufacturing employment on Black and white Americans from 1960 through 2010, the decline in manufacturing contributed to a 12 percent overall increase in the racial wage gap for men. When you follow a dying factory up close, it’s easy to see how globalization left a growing group of people competing for a shrinking pool of good factory jobs. Affirmative action becomes more fraught as good jobs get scarce and disappear."

"...The fate of our democracy does not depend on them the way it hinges on voters like Shannon, Wally and John. The American experiment is unraveling. The only way to knit it back together is for decision makers in this country, nearly all of whom have college degrees, to reconnect with those of the working class, who make up a majority of voters."

The New York Times, October 7, 2021: "What Killed the Blue-Collar Struggle for Social Justice," by Farah Stockman

The New York Times, October 12, 2021: "When a Factory Relocates to Mexico, What Happens to Its American Workers?" by Richard Davies

Photo Source: Pop & Zebra. (2019). Construction Helmets [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/wp81DxKUd1E

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Jealous of Hamas, ISIS Makes a Comeback by Farah Stockman

By Farah Stockman It’s not a coincidence that the Shiite group is hitting Iranian targets, just when the Gaza war has the spotlight. Published: January 19, 2024 at 01:41PM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/U97q18d via IFTTT