Yeah, this was an odd write-up. I found this section particularly baffling.

It’s true that Democrats need to energize their base voters, but our analysis suggests that they’re unlikely to do so successfully through a strategy of blanket progressive appeals to an ideologically diverse base. Instead, Democrats need to persuade nonvoters with a clear and credible message about how the party plans to improve the economic lives of working people.

Now, credible eliminates the means-tested-to-death programs the Dems love so much, right out of the gate. This, much as the author seems loath to say it, leaves you with progressive ideas, or Republican/conservative ideas. Presumably, folks who cared enough to register as Democrats don’t like the conservative ideas, so we can fairly safely discard them as a winning move to get those voters out. Raising the minimum wage, universal healthcare, building more housing and/or implementing schemes to help people afford current housing, expanding benefits like WIC and EBT, free and universal university education, or taxing the rich and corporations to fund these sorts of programs are all clear, credible and progressive stances that would help working people.

It doesn’t get much more simple than, “I make minimum wage. They say they will make minimum wage a bigger number, so I will get more money.” or “My check would be bigger if I didn’t have to pay insurance premiums, and I could spend it on other stuff if my insurance actually reliably covered most medical expenses without me having to cough up $2500-$6000 a year out of pocket first.”

I’d also like to send out a special “Fuck you” to everyone who signed off on changing the position representing nonvoting Democrats and those who voted, depending on whether the nonvoters were more or less likely to respond in a certain way compared to those who voted in this section.

The second thing to notice about the demographics of Democratic nonvoters: They were overwhelmingly working class and relatively economically precarious. Democratic nonvoters were nearly twice as likely (60 percent vs. 32 percent) to have a household income of less than $50,000 per year, they were nearly three times less likely to hold a four-year college degree (47 percent vs. 17 percent), twice as likely to be gig workers (31 percent vs. 15 percent), and only half as likely to be union members (27 percent vs. 14 percent). Further, nonvoting Democrats were more than twice as likely as voting Democrats to report feeling the economy is worse now than a year ago (46 percent vs. 22 percent) or that their incomes had recently decreased. And, perhaps not surprisingly given their economic precarity, Democratic nonvoters were substantially more likely than voters to support increased state welfare spending (61 percent vs. 52 percent).

There’s the pretty clear and obvious reasons of self-enrichment and looking out for national/regional interests in terms of geopolitical, strategic and economic advantages to be gained by having a friendly power in the region, but it seems like there’s also a sunk cost they keep piling on in having to avoid confronting how wrong they’ve been.

Virulent pro-Zionism and intolerance of questioning this seems to me to come in large part from a western sense of guilt and shame over having allowed the Holocaust to happen while western powers sat on the sidelines for way too long, and they have collectively overcompensated on this front since the end of WWII, blindly doing anything to say “We’re going to support the Jewish people going forward.” Doubling down on this now means that they can continue to convince themselves that this was the correct, morally justified choice, while withdrawing this unwavering support would mean they would eventually have to confront the question, “At what point did the Israelis and the Zionist project become evil?” Unfortunately for them, seriously grappling with this question would ultimately require admitting that this isn’t some recent development, but has been the case going back all the way to the very foundation of Israel, if not earlier. Without exceptional skills to manage this, admitting that the western powers have been materially aiding a genocide against one group of Semitic peoples to assuage their own guilt over having stood by to the point that the Nazis were able to advance an absolutely disgusting amount in their own revolting genocide against of the Jewish people (amongst many other groups in Europe), which almost no politician is willing to consider.

“So, to make up for how we enabled the Nazis and collectively screwed millions of Jews, we’ve been supporting a Zionist project that has been carrying out international propaganda and genocide for almost 80 years, to such great success in their propaganda efforts that Goebbels would be taking notes from it,” is a hard pill to swallow. Instead of facing the facts, they double down on this and keep their heads in the sand when it comes to the horrors of the Zionist state and its aims.

I would imagine it reads rather differently to different people. Rich guys reading Forbes probably think it’s a great dunk on China. Meanwhile, I’m reading it thinking, “Shit, I could get behind this. Just wish I lived somewhere that it didn’t mean I would be homeless in less than a year if I tried it.”