They’re planning to severely restrict it Friday: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-vaccine-label-change-alpha

There was a moment, around this time last year, when it felt like things might turn out OK for the Democrats. The party had a new nominee for president, Kamala Harris, and she was saying a lot of the right things. At a time when voters were clearly upset about affordability, Harris started off her campaign with talk of cracking down on price gouging, and other policies to rein in corporate corruption. By late summer, some journalists were asking questions such as, “The Populist Mantle Is Harris’s for the Taking: But Does She Want It?”

Alas, to our daily horror, she didn’t want that mantle. Her campaign pivoted away from economic populism and embraced the corporate-friendly centrism of Harris’s closest advisers. This shift was clear in her policy moves, like watering down her price-gouging crackdown and walking back proposals to tax the rich following pressure from her biggest donors, as well as in her rhetoric, as she curtailed earlier messaging on taking on corporate elites and went all in on a bipartisan theme of defending democracy. In October, Harris campaigned more often with Republican Liz Cheney than any other surrogate, and had more appearances with billionaire Mark Cuban than United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.

And then she lost. She significantly underperformed with working-class voters compared to Joe Biden in 2020, and became the first Democratic presidential nominee in decades to receive more support from Americans in the top third of the income bracket than those in the bottom two-thirds. That is why there has been broad agreement—even David Brooks is in this camp—that if Democrats want to defeat MAGA Republicans, they need to stop embracing anodyne, corporate-approved messaging and start giving people something to vote for. If you don’t believe it, compare the current approval rating of the Democratic Party (-32) with that of Bernie Sanders (+11). That’s a 43-point difference.

Unfortunately, many members of the Democratic establishment remain firmly opposed to this hard-learned principle. The antipathy toward populism has been most apparent lately in the New York City mayoral race, where Zohran Mamdani remains unendorsed by leading Democrats despite winning the party’s nomination and facing off against two Democrats (who turned independent for the general election) who are now collaborating with Trump. But it’s in relation to the party’s top campaign apparatuses—the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—that this refusal to learn the lessons of 2024 could be most catastrophic to the party’s prospects in next year’s midterm elections.

Because again and again, in must-win House and Senate races, rather than embracing candidates that are proving their capacity to spark grassroots Democratic enthusiasm and tap into the populist ferment of the American public, establishment leaders are working to tilt the scales in favor of exactly the kind of uninspiring corporatists that dug the party’s current hole.

We’re seeing this play out very clearly in the Senate race in Michigan. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders, is a full-throated progressive populist (and an occasional TNR contributor). State Senator Mallory McMorrow is running as a D.C. outsider. Both are charismatic communicators and strong grassroots fundraisers; despite refusing to take corporate PAC money, they raised $1.8 million and $2.1 million, respectively, in the last quarter.

So naturally the Democratic establishment is pushing hard for a third candidate, with reports that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, are privately encouraging donors to line up behind Congresswoman Haley Stevens.

Stevens is not charismatic in person. She is not an effective communicator online; her social media posts regularly get single-digit engagement. She’s not a strong fundraiser; she raised less than either McMorrow or El-Sayed, with just $1.3 million in new contributions last quarter, despite being the only candidate in the race taking money from corporations. And she’s taking a lot of it, with hundreds of thousands of dollars from nearly 100 different corporate PACs representing Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, the American Bankers Association); fossil fuels (Dupont, Dow, the American Chemistry Council); insurance (UnitedHealth, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield), utilities (Cox, Verizon, DTE); Big Tech (Google, Microsoft); retailers (Walmart, Home Depot); Big Sugar; and many, many others.

Unlike McMorrow and El-Sayed, who both oppose weapons shipments to Israel, Stevens is firmly in the pocket of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: She raised more money from AIPAC than she did in small-dollar unitemized contributions. This would be an electoral albatross in any state, given Americans’ nearly two-to-one opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But in Michigan, the state with the largest number of Arab American voters, who famously abandoned Democrats in the last election, choosing Stevens is an even riskier bet. And yet, that’s exactly the bet that Democrats like Schumer and Gillibrand are seemingly making.

Similar stories are playing out in the battle for the House. A prime example is California’s 22nd district, currently represented by GOP Congressman David Valadao, one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the country. This is a heavily Latino district that swung to Trump after Biden won it by 13 points in 2020. And Randy Villegas, who launched a campaign against Valadao earlier this year, would seem to be a perfect fit for it. A working-class educator and local elected official, Villegas is the son of Mexican immigrants, and speaks compellingly about the issues his community faces. Though he “hesitates to put any labels” (like progressive or leftist) on himself, he is clearly running as an economic populist. “I think we need to have candidates who are willing to say that they’re going to stand up against corporate greed, that they are going to stand against corruption in government, and that they are going to stand against billionaires that are controlling the strings right now,” he said in April. And he’s demonstrated his viability, raising a quarter of a million dollars in the last quarter without taking any corporate PAC money.

So how did the DCCC respond to Villegas’s momentum? By convincing State Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains—arguably California’s most conservative Democratic legislator, whose blatant shilling for the fossil fuel industry earned her the moniker “Big Oil Bains”—to get in the race. Bains announced her candidacy in mid-July, several months after the San Joaquin Valley Sun reported that the DCCC and some California House Democrats were recruiting her.

On paper, Bains has some strengths. In particular, she is a medical doctor, which provides a useful framing device for criticizing Valadao’s vote for the health care cuts in Trump’s murderous budget bill. But in a working-class district like CA-22, Bain’s record of protecting corporate profits over regular people could be a serious liability. She was the only California Democrat to vote “no” on a bill to curb price gouging in the oil industry. The Big Oil lobbying group Western States Petroleum Association, which opposed the bill, rewarded Bains with a max-out contribution a couple months after the vote. Bains was also the only Democrat to vote against a bill to hold oil companies accountable for finished oil wells they refuse to plug, and to vote against allocating $1.5 billion for wildfire prevention—just five months before wildfires would devastate Southern California. In a district with huge numbers of renters, she voted against increased protections for tenants.

So in a race that will be defined by whether Democrats can effectively attack the incumbent for raising costs on his working-class Latino constituents by voting for the Trump budget bill’s corporate handouts, the Democratic establishment is stepping in to block a working-class Latino candidate perfectly suited to making that case in favor of the California Democrat with perhaps the most obvious record of voting to let corporations raise costs on regular people.

This critique isn’t about ideology. It’s about winning. Like Harris and her advisers, the historically unpopular leaders of the Democratic Party are operating off a failed model that prioritizes a candidate’s approval by corporate interests over their ability to channel the populist frustrations being expressed by Americans across the political spectrum. By refusing to absorb the lessons of 2024, this establishment is now imperiling Democrats’ chances in 2026—and thereby threatening to condemn all of us to at least two more years of unchecked authoritarian rule.

One common explanation for why children spend so much of their free time on screens goes like this: Smartphones and social-media platforms are addicting them. Kids stare at their devices and socialize online instead of in person because that’s what tech has trained them to want.

But this misses a key part of the story. The three of us collaborated with the Harris Poll to survey a group of Americans whose perspectives don’t often show up in national data: children. What they told us offers a comprehensive picture of how American childhood is changing—and, more important, how to make it better.

In March, the Harris Poll surveyed more than 500 children ages 8 to 12 across the United States, who were assured that their answers would remain private. They offered unmistakable evidence that the phone-based childhood is in full force. A majority reported having smartphones, and about half of the 10-to-12-year-olds said that most or all of their friends use social media.

This digital technology has given kids access to virtual worlds, where they’re allowed to roam far more freely than in the real one. About 75 percent of kids ages 9 to 12 regularly play the online game Roblox, where they can interact with friends and even strangers. But most of the children in our survey said that they aren’t allowed to be out in public at all without an adult. Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have gone down a grocery-store aisle alone; more than a quarter aren’t allowed to play unsupervised even in their own front yard.

[Jonathan Haidt: End the phone-based childhood now]

Yet these are exactly the kinds of freedoms that kids told us they long for. We asked them to pick their favorite way to spend time with friends: unstructured play, such as shooting hoops and exploring their neighborhood; participating in activities organized by adults, such as playing Little League and doing ballet; or socializing online. There was a clear winner.

Children want to meet up in person, no screens or supervision. But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.

Since the 1980s, parents have grown more and more afraid that unsupervised time will expose their kids to physical or emotional harm. In another recent Harris Poll, we asked parents what they thought would happen if two 10-year-olds played in a local park without adults around. Sixty percent thought the children would likely get injured. Half thought they would likely get abducted.

These intuitions don’t even begin to resemble reality. According to Warwick Cairns, the author of How to Live Dangerously, kidnapping in the United States is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger. Parents know their neighborhoods best, of course, and should assess them carefully. But the tendency to overestimate risk comes with its own danger. Without real-world freedom, children don’t get the chance to develop competence, confidence, and the ability to solve everyday problems. Indeed, independence and unsupervised play are associated with positive mental-health outcomes.

Still, parents spend more time supervising their kids than parents did in the 1960s, even though they now work more and have fewer children. Across all income levels, families have come to believe that organized activities are the key to kids’ safety and success. So sandlot games gave way to travel baseball. Cartwheels at the park gave way to competitive cheer teams. Kids have been strapped into the back seat of their lives—dropped off, picked up, and overhelped. As their independence has dwindled, their anxiety and depression have spiked. And they aren’t the only ones suffering. In 2023, the surgeon general cited intensive caregiving as one reason today’s parents are more stressed than ever.

[From the February 2025 Issue: The anti-social century]

Kids will always have more spare hours than adults can supervise—a gap that devices now fill. “Go outside” has been quietly replaced with “Go online.” The internet is one of the only escape hatches from childhoods grown anxious, small, and sad. We certainly don’t blame parents for this. The social norms, communities, infrastructure, and institutions that once facilitated free play have eroded. Telling children to go outside doesn’t work so well when no one else’s kids are there.

That’s why we’re so glad that groups around the country are experimenting with ways to rebuild American childhood, rooting it in freedom, responsibility, and friendship. In Piedmont, California, a network of parents started dropping their kids off at the park every Friday to play unsupervised. Sometimes the kids argue or get bored—which is good. Learning to handle boredom and conflict is an essential part of child development. Elsewhere, churches, libraries, and schools are creating screen-free “play clubs.” To ease the transition away from screens and supervision, the Outside Play Lab at the University of British Columbia developed a free online tool that helps parents figure out how to give their kids more outdoor time, and why they should.

More than a thousand schools nationwide have begun using a free program from Let Grow, a nonprofit that two of us—Lenore and Jon—helped found to foster children’s independence. K–12 students in the program get a monthly homework assignment: Do something new on your own, with your parents’ permission but without their help. Kids use the prompt to run errands, climb trees, cook meals. Some finally learn how to tie their own shoes. Here’s what one fourth grader with intellectual disabilities wrote—in her own words and spelling:

This is my fist let it gow project. I went shoping by myself. I handle it wheel but the ceckout was a lit hard but it was fun to do. I leand that I am brave and can go shop by myself. I loved my porject.

Other hopeful signs are emerging. The New Jersey–based Balance Project is helping 50 communities reduce screen time and restore free play for kids, employing the “four new norms” that Jon lays out in The Anxious Generation. This summer, Newburyport, Massachusetts, is handing out prizes each week to kids who try something new on their own. (Let Grow has a tool kit for other communities that want to do the same.) The Boy Scouts—now rebranded as Scouting America, and open to all young people—is finally growing again. We could go on.

What we see in the data and from the stories parents send us is both simple and poignant: Kids being raised on screens long for real freedom. It’s like they’re homesick for a world they’ve never known.

Granting them more freedom may feel uncomfortable at first. But if parents want their kids to put down their phones, they need to open the front door. Nearly three-quarters of the children in our survey agreed with the statement “I would spend less time online if there were more friends in my neighborhood to play with in person.”

[Stephanie H. Murray: What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street]

If nothing changes, Silicon Valley will keep supplying kids with ever more sophisticated AI “friends” that are always available and will cater to a child’s every whim. But AI will never fulfill children’s deepest desires. Even this generation of digital natives still longs for what most of their parents had: time with friends, in person, without adults.

Today’s kids want to spend their childhood in the real world. Let’s give it back to them.

I’m as delighted as the next guy that the MAGA cult is tearing itself apart over an Epstein client list that probably doesn’t exist. But only about half of all Republicans identify as MAGA, and within the entire voting population it’s more like 20 percent. The Trump constituency that interests me is his working-class supporters, of which MAGA is but a subset. Now, some fresh research suggests this critical group of voters is more liberal than you think.

A new report by the nonprofit Center for Working Class Politics, published today in Jacobin, suggests that about 20 percent of working-class voters who supported Donald Trump in 2020 support left-leaning economic policies such as imposing a millionaire tax, raising the $7.25 hourly minimum wage, and increasing spending on Social Security and public schools. Indeed, working class voters overall hold some economic views that are further left than the Brahmin left that’s forever despairing of the proletariat’s reactionary politics. “While these economically progressive Trump voters hardly represent a MAGA majority,” the authors write, “they represent a meaningful slice of the electorate (5 percent) that could easily tip elections in key working-class-heavy swing states” in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

Looking at American political history over the past decade, it’s tempting to conclude that the electorate—and especially the working class that represents 57 percent of it, according to 2024 exit polls—has gotten more conservative. (I’m defining “working class” here conventionally as those who lack a college degree.) After all, this country elected Trump president twice. But according to the Center for Working Class Politics survey, when you compare political attitudes during the period from 1990 through 2007 and the period from 2008 to 2022, you find that working-class Americans moved leftward on economic and social issues, with the biggest leftward shift since 2007 on immigration and civil rights—Trump’s two biggest bugbears. (The survey defines “working class” as those lacking a college degree but also excludes any who are situated in the top one-third of the income distribution.)

The reason nobody noticed the working class’s leftward shift was that it was dwarfed by a much bigger leftward shift among middle- and upper-class Americans. Thus, relative to these groups, a leftward shift by the working class registers as a growing gap, with the working class ever-more conservative than the middle and upper classes. Paradoxically, “the same working-class coalition that elected Obama is now likely even more progressive than it was eighteen years ago.” But it’s also more alienated from the college graduates whose views have changed more rapidly, and who dominate the Democratic Party more than they did in 2008. The biggest gap, unsurprisingly, is on immigration, with “social norms” (i.e. wokeism) coming in second.

What does this mean in practice? On the one hand, you’ve got a working class that can’t stand being lectured to on social issues by the Brahmin left. But on the other hand, that lecturing is changing minds. More than 75 percent of working-class people think gay couples ought to be permitted to adopt, and 56 percent think there’s too much anti-trans discrimination. It’s quite possible that the Brahmin left’s perceived condescension so infuriates the working class that it pulls the lever for Trump—and that the Brahmin left’s arguments nonetheless persuade the working class to be more tolerant of gender difference. But that wouldn’t be true across the board. The gap between the working class and the middle and upper classes on guns, for instance, is unchanged (though the working class has always been more favorably disposed toward gun control than is generally supposed).

On economic issues, the survey divides “predistribution” from “redistribution.” Predistribution concerns ways to make the economy more egalitarian, while redistribution concerns ways to even things up after the economy botches the job. Protections for union organizers, a higher minimum wage, trade protections, and government job creation are predistributive. Income taxes, welfare, government-funded health insurance, and Social Security are redistributive. The working class is more favorably disposed than the middle or upper classes toward predistribution and less favorably disposed toward redistribution. But it’s strongly supportive of both.

On predistribution, the working class has always stood further left than the middle and upper classes. That gap has been shrinking since 2008, not because the working class is changing its view but rather because the middle and upper classes are catching up. On matters like the value of union organizing, it’s the proletariat that has been lecturing to the Brahmin left, and the message is starting to get across. The dynamic is similar with redistribution, except that in this instance the middle and upper classes not only caught up with the working class but surpassed it in supporting, for instance, higher taxes on the wealthy and more government spending on health care.

The working class, meanwhile, more strongly supports Medicare and Social Security. On welfare, the survey found, working-class attitudes were all over the map, depending on how the question was posed: 82.1 percent agreed we spend too little on the poor, but only about half said the government should help the poor—and when the question included the word “welfare,” support dropped as low as 24 percent. That helps explain why Republicans imposed a job requirement on Medicaid recipients; it makes them look like recipients of welfare, when in fact they’re recipients of health care services that even the rich can’t usually afford to pay for out of pocket.

To woo Trump’s working-class voters, obviously, the trick for Democrats is to base an appeal on economic issues. But the survey suggests a substantial portion of that theoretically gettable 20 percent of Trump voters isn’t actually gettable because it’s too socially conservative. Weeding out that group, the survey finds, conservatively, that about 10 percent of working-class Trump voters are gettable. That translates into 2.5 percent of all voters, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it “exceeds the margin by which Harris lost both the national popular vote as well as several key swing states.”

What does that mean in practice? Don’t canvass in gun clubs. Emphasize predistribution policies over redistribution policies. Predistribution is actually more “radical,” in that it requires the government to reshape the economy rather than clean up after its mess, as redistribution does. Also, emphasize universal programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare, over means-tested programs like cash welfare and food stamps.

Medicaid occupies a gray zone in between, which helps explain why voters strongly support it but haven’t yet objected to the new work requirement (because they haven’t yet figured out that it’s a strategy to shrink enrollment). That naïve view of the work requirement will, I think, change well before the requirement takes effect (after the 2026 midterms). Above all, avoid divisive social issues. The working class is moving in a more broad-minded direction, but it’s moving more slowly, and it doesn’t want to be nagged. In the meantime, the Brahmin left should continue to follow the working class’s lead on pocketbook issues, because that’s how Democrats win.

anais-ninja-bitch:

runcibility:

depsidase:

[waving] Hi, hello, it’s me, the old gen-x'er on your dash! How’s it going kids? [bad, it’s going bad, I know, sorry for asking]. Let me tell you a personal story of how I watched exactly this play out in my social circles.

Anecdotally, my fellow cohort of gen-x'ers were convinced this was going to be the solution, the ticket, the fucking way. Inevitably, all we had to do was outlive these old mayonnaise white devils, because that’s where the racism was societally stored - like a big racism appendix that would get removed someday.

We thought we knew what was up because we were cool white kids who listened to Public Enemy. And because we thought we were largely inoculated against racism, it was just a long cool slide into the Clinton years and we’d be set.

So we didn’t question shit like South Park. We didn’t question shitheads like ‘ironic’ (at the time) racists like Weev in our IRC channel. We had zero fucking awareness of how racism shifted, because the only examples of racism we were ever taught either wore a white robe & burned crosses, or sig-heil’d and lived in misery. We shamefully thought racism = southern*, and since we were alt-goth kids living on the west coast, we were fucking sorted out and safe.

It wasn’t on our radar. We weren’t ready. We hadn’t listened to anyone, because we thought we’d learned enough to not be a problem, and wasn’t that enough?

We didn’t clock or understand the way racist language shifted into a new economic handwringing. We fell into stupid rhetorical traps that snuck racism into concerns about unhoused people and substance abuse. We refused to recognize and realize our own inherent racist attitudes because of the sunk cost fallacy of wanting to believe we really didn’t have to do anything other than be cool and wait it out.

I watched some people absolutely lose their shit when called out on this and flounce directly into the arms of right wing philosophy (always some variation on “left wing politics has gone too far!” when it’s pointed out how they’re upholding inequality with a cherished attitude or anecdote they’ve leaned on for years to prop up the mythology of their self-worth).

No one was ready to realize they weren’t good just by being alternative. And some of them cracked apart.

Racism has a full time advertising budget ready to repackage and rebadge it minute to minute, and you always have to do the work. It never ever fucking stops. And making sure you’re always doing the work has the very valuable side-benefit of keeping you in touch with yourself and what you’re about.

You gotta do the work. It never stops.

*-this fucking haunts me so much.

oh, this gets a reblog