John, this is a thoughtful piece, and I agree with your core concern that Democrats lack a coherent framework people can see and trust.
One thing I’d add is that political philosophy alone isn’t enough. Governing parties also need a way to think about how systems actually work when they’re functioning well. Two thinkers who helped me with that, outside of politics, are David Hanna and W. Edwards Deming.
Hanna’s point is straightforward but demanding: systems only work when their objectives are clear, legitimate, and accepted by the people they affect. If Democrats believe in an interventionist government, then they have to be especially disciplined about objectives, not just good intentions, but goals people can understand and recognize as reasonable.
Deming adds another lens that I think cuts across ideology. He taught that rework is a signal that something upstream in the system isn’t working. In that sense, large or growing social welfare spending can be read not as a moral failure or success, but as evidence that other systems (work, housing, education, healthcare) aren’t doing what they should.
A current example is the ongoing fight in Congress over additional healthcare subsidies. Regardless of where one comes down, the very persistence of this debate is a form of rework. It tells us something important about the broader healthcare system and about the structure of Obamacare, that continues to require downstream fixes. Yet the debate is almost always framed as a moral one, when at root it is a system design problem.
Many people react negatively to what feels like endless rework. They may not use that language, but they sense the system isn’t fixing root problems. Until Democrats get better at recognizing what rework is telling them, and then redesigning systems to reduce it, they’re going to continue to struggle with legitimacy across a broad part of the electorate.
Rawls provides a strong moral framework. Hanna and Deming help explain how to make any framework actually work in practice.
Deming is someone I had in mind as well! The New Economics (and Out of the Crisis) are excellent books for anyone trying to plot a sensible course for the American left.
Another thinker I'll add is Karl Popper. The Open Society and It's Enemies is really, really poignant today. The left's Brahmin Caste is not a new phenomenon, and he traces it's psychological and intellectual roots all the way back to ancient Athens, showing how narcissistic zero sum thinkers have always been aiming for the levers of power on both the left and the right by presenting themselves as great intellectual prophets who can see the course of history ahead of us.
One neat similarity between Popper and Deming is their disdain for our grades based education system. From Popper's perspective, getting answers wrong is a necessary part of developing scientific theories, and it's ridiculous that our education system punishes it, since it instead rewards people who simply uncritically fill their mind with the facts presented. Deming made somewhat similar remarks: that it's a great crime how we sort people into executives, plant managers, and front line workers based on statistical measurements (grades) of adolescents that don't stem from any theory that would indicate what, precisely, even should be measured. In fact, Deming's notion that theory should precede observation in general is very Popperian. An empiricist puts up process control charts first thing, a critical rationalist would begin with a theory that guides the decision of what to measure. In that way, I think of Deming as a critical rationalist, although he stayed out of philosophy departments altogether.
I'd also argue that Popper's worldview offers a way to look at Rawls' theoretical points in a very accessible way—Rawls' writing is so burdened by a commitment to objectivity that it reads like Chidi from The Good Place. His difference principle can be restated in Popper's terms that I believe are less prone to being misinterpreted as pure socialism: inequalities tend to produce winners who are overrepresented in "history" books, but they must always benefit the good people who make all the real progress happen through their sweat and toil, and who never make the history books.
Likewise, I think Rawls offers an immune system for Popper's piecemeal social engineering that can defend it against the very elite capture for which Popper's enemies of the open society are always waging campaigns. Rawls was very astute to note that economic and social capital are both sources of inequality, which is why reading Theory of Justice was so eye opening (for me, at least): the elites on the left actively disguise their incredible social capital by nominal identitarian solidarity with disadvantaged minorities. Those minorities are then expected to gratefully receive economic scraps from leftist policies under conditions where they're never given a seat at the "smart kids" table. This is exactly the kind of scam that Rawls' Theory of Justice can expose quite effectively.
Thanks, This is really helpful. I don’t actually know Popper, and I don’t come to this from political philosophy. Deming is the framework I know well, and that’s what I’m drawing from.
What you’re describing in Popper sounds very aligned with Deming’s way of thinking, especially the emphasis on theory preceding measurement, learning through error, and skepticism of elite certainty(even though I haven’t read him). If anything, this gives me a reason to.
Where I’m personally focused is less on the philosophical backbone and more on the operational one. Regardless of the philosophy behind a system, I think we still need a way to tell whether it’s actually working and learning over time.
For me, rework is one of the clearest signals. It doesn’t tell us what the right policy should be, but it does tell us when a system is repeatedly compensating downstream instead of correcting upstream design. That’s where legitimacy starts to erode, independent of ideology.
So I see philosophy as important guardrails. My interest is in the feedback signals that tell us, in practice, whether those guardrails are holding.
I hear your focus on the feedback signals. I see the Democratic Party as being at a real crossroads. Either it becomes a place where good ideas stand a chance at winning, or it continues backsliding into a mere tribe. To me, the most important signal I want to see is the Democratic Party rejecting bad ideas.
Take Mamdani's plan to eliminate gifted and talented programs. It's a great microcosm of the dichotomy between Rawls as understood by people who glance at the wikipedia summary versus Rawls as understood by his readers. Someone who argues "hey, G&T programs perpetuate unjust disparity that can be recognized from the original position" is making it clear that they haven't actually spent time actually *in* the original position. Kids don't choose to be gifted and talented, and forcing them to sit through the same remedial (to them) classes as everyone else is a 13 year prison sentence. Someone who has really studied Rawls, when presented with Mamdani's policy, would instinctually imagine the hypothetical scenario of the veil of ignorance lifting and discovering they'd be the ones stuck in an education system that now oppresses them.
And there are many other such cases of liberals lapsing in this regard. Trans sports issues, Israel/Palestine, immigration, and many more come to mind—they're all failures of liberals to really apply the veil of ignorance in order to study the problem impartially. Liberals need to return to *grappling* with complexity instead of clinging to reductive thought-terminating cliches, and I think that means we need to reconcile our positions with our philosophical tradition.
This isn't meant as push back, it's more of a "yes, and."
"Another thinker I'll add is Karl Popper. The Open Society and It's Enemies is really, really poignant today. "
Popper represents liberalism and the modern Democratic Party represents leftism. Popper's Open Society was very similar to his view of falsifiability - we all need to be open to the idea that our deepest beliefs may be wrong and should actively seek to falsify them.
In contrast to Popper is Herbert Marcuse, whose One Dimensional Man was the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s. He had another book called "Repressive Tolerance." That was the Enlightenment vision of debate in the public square. By elevating conservative beliefs to being worthy to discuss and debate, the Enlightenment actually fostered the repression it was meant to stop. He instead championed what he called "Liberating Tolerance", which is what we presently see in the modern left, where conservatives and dissenters are shamed, scorned, fired from their jobs, socially ostracized and (arguably) arrested. Thus only truly liberating beliefs are granted the privilege of being discussed publicly.
The left and the right have always had illiberals in their midst. I think it's fairer to say that left leaning liberals have ceded the left to authoritarians, and that the Democratic Party's trajectory now reflects that defeat. Nothing illustrates this more sharply to me than rolling out #NoKings during a moment when the Democratic Party is less popular than the would-be monarch they're protesting.
A very provocative comment, KDBD. I want to push back a bit -- but I'll stipulate first that I don't know what I'm talking about: I haven't read your authors and I've forgotten what I once knew about the workings of the ACA.
The point I want to make is that while reworking may be a symptom of poor systems design I think it can also be aa much or more a symptom of changing contexts. This is especially true of the complexity of the systems task is so great that a successful political solution at any point must, practically speaking, involve compromises that reflect competing political goals and do not objectively strengthen the system.
When the ACA passed I thought the program was deeply flawed, but I celebrated because after sixty years of failed Democratic proposals it seemed a miracle to have succeeded to that degree. The consequences of that win were an inevitable backlash (because the politics had framed a compromise as entirely partisan and doctrinaire) and primary focus on the defects, the former making it impossible to address the latter without destroying the program. I think the simple fact that the ACA still exists after a disastrous start and constant political attack is a sign that it was pretty well designed given the context.
From this downstream-looking perspective, successful legislation almost always embeds its own dysfunctional elements, but those who draft it disagree on what those will be; implementation may reveal answers, but political principles and electoral opportunities will distort their interpretation.
Looking upstream at the sources of dysfunction (you mention housing, education, etc.) makes absolute sense to me, but all those elements too are subject to political irrationality. Moreover, in a society of the size and complexity we live in it seems unrealistic to think that legislative engineers possess the data or knowledge that would allow large-scale redesign without major unintended consequences feeding further political resistance, validated by design failures. This doesn't mean identifying upstream dysfunction isn't critical; it means that all legislative work will ultimately involve technical design flaws in even well drafted proposals along with flaws added in the political process.
Bottom line to a long, uninformed comment: I think the framework your comment lays out is valid but that current practice probably is a lot more like the practical outcome of trying to adopt it than your comment suggests. Endless rework may be endemic to complex states, whether functional or dysfunctional. Right now, I think those at the political center tend to accept that notion and the further one goes towards the extremes the more it is viewed a failure to adopt ideologically pure designs that promise engineered perfection and are at high risk for dysfunction on a much greater scale.
This is a thoughtful pushback, and I agree with a lot of it. In large, complex systems, especially ones shaped by political compromise and changing contexts, some amount of rework is inevitable. I’m not arguing for engineered perfection or one-and-done legislation.
Where I think the distinction matters is between rework as learning and rework as commitment. When a system repeatedly relies on downstream fixes without going back to its original objectives and design, rework stops being transitional and quietly becomes the operating model.
The ACA is a good example. I agree that its survival under sustained political attack says something real about its design given the constraints at the time. But the continued cycle of subsidy fights and affordability patches is also telling us something diagnostic: certain upstream choices are still producing the same downstream stress. The issue isn’t that compromise happened, but that redesign rarely follows.
My concern isn’t ideological purity or technocratic control. It’s legitimacy. When people experience the same fixes year after year, they figure out that something more fundamental isn’t working. A functional system isn’t one with no rework, it’s one where rework trends downward over time instead of becoming permanent.
In that sense, rework isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a feedback signal. Ignoring it doesn’t make the system more realistic, it just shifts the cost elsewhere, usually into public trust.
I'm in sympathy with the basic argument but I think we do have a basic difference. I think the fundamental thing that isn't working with healthcare policy is political and that is not under the power of one political party to address without the cooperation of the other.
Yesterday the NY Times posted a video discussion among centrist senators and ex-senators, Jeff Flake among them. Flake's position on the ACA was that the Democrats had pushed it through along party lines and they should have allowed for more discussion to improve it. I've always liked Flake and he was there (in the House) and I wasn't. But my memory is that, following McConnell's lead, the GOP dug in to resist the ACA on party lines explicitly in order to weaken Obama and regain the White House, despite the fact that the ACA was engineered to bring in GOP votes (and provide cover for essential Blue Dog Dems). I think it was a deeply flawed but roughly optimal outcome for that moment.
In my judgment, there has not been a single moment since where it would have been possible to negotiate a rework that reflected learning, and that the Democratic strategy has seemed like "commitment" because a commitment to preserving most of what it got in 2010 is the learned lesson about optimal rework in the present context.
The simplest (but perhaps least likely) way to weaken the push for ideological purity among some Democratic elements is to achieve an opening to good-faith negotiation on re-optimizing healthcare legislation in a context of substantive "liberal/conservative" dialogue with a shared goal of better health outcomes and broad affordability. Unrealistic ideological commitment is generally a product of the closure of pragmatic alternatives. (That last sentence is not a reflection of anything I actually know, but I think it sounds pretty good!)
I don’t disagree that political closure made good-faith renegotiation effectively impossible. My point is slightly different: once a system’s stability depends on renegotiation, and that renegotiation is structurally infeasible, the system itself has to be understood as non-robust. In the ACA case, when mandate enforcement was removed by the Supreme Court, the system required redesign to remain stable, but it had already been built in that meaningful renegotiation would be extraordinarily difficult. That mismatch is what produced instability and ongoing rework. From a systems perspective, the issue isn’t blame or missed opportunities, it’s that the system depended on a corrective process it could not realistically execute.
“Work done to correct, compensate for, or work around a system that is not producing the intended outcome the first time.”
So any legislative fixes would count. But all the internal actions which either individuals have to go through or the people who are working the system have to go through that are repetitive and not adding value also counts.
Here is a general way of thinking about it. A system has inputs, goes through a transformation and delivers outputs. Rework is created in three ways
1) branches off the main transformation setting steps that loops back to it and does not create value
2)adjustments that happen constantly to a step within the transformation because something isn’t working the way it should
3) rework in the entire system because it is not working this
I want to emphasize as Deming did that rework happens because of the design of the system not because people are lazy or incompetent. This is critically important when doing system design as it keeps the emphasis on the system which is the only way to fix it
Today's GOP just happens to be nearer to the center of a political continuum that has pulled center-Left, courtesy of self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists and very Left-leaning 80/20 policy pronouncements more mocked than serious.
The Democratic Left in its 20s during the campus radical protests and urban unrest late 1960s and early 1970s are -- at least those who have not crossed over to the other side -- today's geriatric retirees, older but hardly wiser; of shallow thought and even weaker energy.
A political void, to be sure, and precious little "free stuff" to fill it with for free.
The thinkers who guide the Democratic Party now are all leftists who have rejected the Enlightenment principles of individual rights, reason, and impartiality in favor of subjective experience and group-based rights. The group-based rights feeds into modern identity politics, where the goal is to take group of people and pass laws that benefit them at the expense of the general public. E.g. DEI, rapists in women's prisons, open borders and so on.
- Herbert Marcuse, the most influential Critical Theorist of the Frankfurt School, whose One Dimensional Man became the Bible of the New Left back in the late 1960s. It's an unfalsifiable argument that the Enlightenment created oppression in the guise of freedom. True freedom comes from "liberalizing tolerance" which means silencing conservatives and group-based rights for oppressed groups to replace Enlightenment impartiality. (I am sympathetic to the core claim that modern life as made us "one dimensional", but only Christianity can make us the richly flourishing individuals, not more of the same drug that flattened in the first place).
- Dereck Bell, who extended the Critical Theory of Marcuse into Critical Race Theory, which has rewritten the truth of American history into a parable of slavery. See also, the 1619 Project, which is downstream of his work. We see the apotheosis of Bell's work in Ibram X Kendi's argument that we need a new constitutional amendment that creates an unelected group with totalitarian powers of both legislation and enforcement down to the municipal level to act for anti-racism.
- Judith Butler, a postmodernist who believes that some women have penises and that these men belong in women's locker rooms where they can see women and underage girls changing, and expose themselves to them.
But its the Republicans who have gone crazy, right?
You write that the Dems turning back to Rawls would mean no more culture wars and no more identity politics.
I would argue that these features of the party are somewhat essential to the type of party the Ds have become. Rather than planting a flag and inviting people to come and join if you believe in “What we stand for,” Dems search out blocks of voters with specific interests who seem under represented. They bolt them onto the party by supporting their cause.
The natural result is infighting over who leads and who follows - who gets their cause to the top of the agenda. Or, weirdly, you get this new disturbing hierarchy of oppression ordering and the intersectional idea of the omni-cause.
Abandoning this “bolt-on-a-group-by-supporting-their-agenda” coalition in favor of an over arching general philosophy would undermine how the coalition operates. Lots of people want to pull away from the groups and be a more cohesive party. But what would the Ds be without those groups at this point?
Today, being on the political left too often means dismantling.
Progressivism directs its focus toward police brutality on behalf of the Black community, solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, the fight against anti-trans legislation, immigration injustices affecting undocumented migrants, and the defense of reproductive rights for women. The rallying cries are powerful: Black Lives Matter. Ceasefire Now. Abolish ICE. My Body, My Choice. Defund the Police. These are declarations of urgent moral witness.
But these chants also reveal a movement where the politics of harm reduction has completely overshadowed the politics of aspiration. What does this political movement actually stand for? Oppression is extremely powerful agonist, but if oppression itself becomes your primary framework for explaining the world, you lack a coherent framework.
I firmly believe there is an important place in public policy for those who are focusing on policy that takes the edge off the hardships of life that impact many people. As the daughter of parents who filed for bankruptcy, I know that bad things can and do happen to good people.
The Democrat party has been tarred with the fact that too often their policy makes the problem worse. You need to look no further than the war on poverty. We still have poverty and now
We have way too many broken families.
According to ChatGPT-
"In the early years of the U.S. War on Poverty (mid-1960s), many public housing and welfare programs discouraged or prohibited fathers from living with their families..."
Number one priority should be to look at the unintended consequences likely to develop.
Number two. Become intolerant of corruption. That is supported by at least 80% of the voters. Not to offend anyone, but too many officials are on the take. Look no further than the elected officials refusing to make it illegal for officials' to invest with non-public information.
Number three, understand that in a democratic society, policy only needs to satisfy 51% of the voters. Keep or create policy like you are playing with fire.
You need to look no further than our public education. If we ever get single payer healthcare, a lot of people, millions of people will be more unhappy than they are now. (A predictable unintended consequence)
I would argue that the progressive project by design is unaccountable. Systems within a liberal framework and not a progressive framework have course corrections and reform built into them. But when it comes to progressivism - Marxism - socialism, that is their goal, not really systems that work or reflecting back on what didn't work and correcting it. There's no accountability, no corrections, there's just more funding and more funding to grow a bigger beast that will further consume all the systems in its trail.
So I would argue that the Democrats' problem is progressivism. And there's no coming back from that. What they have to do is abandon the progressive project in order to come back to a system that involves pluralism, reason, debate, and reform. But I don't see that happening anytime soon. So I could never vote for progressive anything anymore and I won't.
I agree that leftism in America was built on the philosophical foundation of Rawls et al. Today’s leftists have strayed far from that basis. Why? Because their ideas didn’t work.
In general we have followed leftist prescriptions for how to solve societal problems, nowhere more so than in cities run by Democrats for decades. As the failures mounted, leftists turned to ideas like structural racism to explain away their failures, and turned to identity politics as the solution.
Returning to the original foundations of failure will only make matters worse. It’s time to examine the underlying premises that led to this devastation.
No more identity politics?! Oh, bless your heart! Who will vote for that? Opportunity these days lies in spinning people up and monetizing attention rather actually solving problems. (Makes me think of John Cleese's ex leper in "Life of Brian". " I was doing just fine begging for alms, until this fellow Jesus came along and cured me. Now what will I do?")
Our political system has evolved to be one giant victim/industrial complex, filled with action groups pushing agendas claiming to work to erase the unfair advantage of "those people". Aren't we all victims? And, as for nondiscrimination, discrimination is exactly what DEI groups want. Preferential treatment of certain groups, to right historic wrongs, is discrimination. You can argue that diverse schools and workplaces are a good thing (I remember seeing a report that, if academic performance was the only criterion, California's elite state colleges would be 65% Asian) but single sex bathrooms and sports teams are inherently discriminatory, as is deciding who is a man or woman. Humans are not the same and any attempt to sort them is, by definition discrimination.
In a system where far too many districts and states are safe for one party or the other, contestants in party primaries vie sharply to outdo each other in radicalism, purity and fealty to whichever god king or interest groups they have to appease in order to win the primary and coast through the general election.
What people on the left and right forget is that, while the New Deal may have prevented a complete economic meltdown and communist revolution and civil war in this country, it didn't solve the depression. World War Two did, leaving the US as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the free world. The economic nirvana that lasted from 1945 to 1973 was an anomaly, resulting from an almost complete lack of competition. Young men could drop out of high school and get union-protected jobs in the plant and work their way up to being paid middle class wages for menial work. Management could afford to offer sweet deals to the unions, because their only competition was other manufacturers, who had similar deals with the same unions.
Meanwhile, our international competitors were getting their acts together, and producing products that were better than ours, just not suited to our taste. All it took was the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 to expose the fragility of our economy. Ever since then, our economy has been on a downward trending rollercoaster, with inequality increasing as we revert to the historic mean, which is to have a small elite group and a large proportion of struggling underclass. Attempts to goose the economy by tax cuts and stimulus often worked, at least.temporarily, but left the government a trillion dollars deeper in debt each time.
There's lots of things we can do to stimulate US manufacturing, mostly involving common sense promotion of a stable business environment with as few regulations as possible, (tariffs, especially of basic inputs, such as steel, aluminum,.lumber and copper are entirely counterproductive) but very little we can do to promote affordability without wrecking havoc on much of the economy. The more money people make, the more things will cost, unless we find a magic source of cheap stuff, as happened when so much of our manufacturing went to China. Reshoring our manufacturing will only make things more expensive, unless some miracle of automation occurs. Kicking out illegal immigrants will not make groceries or housing or insurance any cheaper.
The basic rule of economics is that improvements are hard, incremental and subject to setbacks, destruction is easy and often politically expedient and seemingly a good idea at the time.
One thing your comment surfaced for me is that 1945 to early 1970s wasn’t just “better times,” but a different system configuration, labor, capital, and policy were more tightly coupled in ways that later came apart. That helps explain why post-1970s outcomes feel so different even when headline growth looks strong.
I wish the Democrats would drop the term 'abundance.' After the last presidential election, to me it screams 'we're weak, we have no policies whatsoever and we have no clue why so many people don't like us.'
An excellent piece here, as always! It resonates a lot with something I wrote a couple of months ago in an effort to explore the same idea. Who is the "Leader" of this party any more? Why are they still talking about things nobody really cares about? I'd be interested in your thoughts. This is in no way an effort to bring notariety to something I've written, but just genuinely looking for feedback: https://medium.com/@jmuclax21/what-is-americas-goal-right-now-813bf973956c
Reading many of the comments here, I also feel a trend of over-intellectualizing the solution. Why does it have to have some commonly-accepted label in political terms? Couldn't it just be, "Stop talking about things the majority of the country does not care about, and talk about what they DO care about? Stop talking about Trump. For the love of God, stop talking about him."
We don't need leaders that quote "Thinkers" from centuries ago. Again, nobody outside of elite, highly-educated circles even uses the term "Thinkers", and that's part of the problem.
I believe I found a reasonable solution while I was writing-- the obvious flaw of it being that in the process of putting into practice what I'm advising, a large swath of Democrats today would find themselves in an identity crisis that would require some reconciling. But frankly that's ok, some HARD work needs to be done IMO, and great things come from hard work.
The lazy way out is to adopt some "thinker's" framework that was written in an entirely different time and world, and try to apply that-- as opposed to simply responding the obvious signals our society is giving, lay out solutions in wording that everyone understands, and then ignore the Party line when it doesn't serve those solutions. The Parties themselves do not care one iota about people in general-- they care about Winning, "Beating the Republicans", and preserving thin electoral margins every 2 years that are the results of not having a leader strong enough to stand up to Party "Leaders" and tell them "NO" when they want their candidates to tow the line.
John, this is a thoughtful piece, and I agree with your core concern that Democrats lack a coherent framework people can see and trust.
One thing I’d add is that political philosophy alone isn’t enough. Governing parties also need a way to think about how systems actually work when they’re functioning well. Two thinkers who helped me with that, outside of politics, are David Hanna and W. Edwards Deming.
Hanna’s point is straightforward but demanding: systems only work when their objectives are clear, legitimate, and accepted by the people they affect. If Democrats believe in an interventionist government, then they have to be especially disciplined about objectives, not just good intentions, but goals people can understand and recognize as reasonable.
Deming adds another lens that I think cuts across ideology. He taught that rework is a signal that something upstream in the system isn’t working. In that sense, large or growing social welfare spending can be read not as a moral failure or success, but as evidence that other systems (work, housing, education, healthcare) aren’t doing what they should.
A current example is the ongoing fight in Congress over additional healthcare subsidies. Regardless of where one comes down, the very persistence of this debate is a form of rework. It tells us something important about the broader healthcare system and about the structure of Obamacare, that continues to require downstream fixes. Yet the debate is almost always framed as a moral one, when at root it is a system design problem.
Many people react negatively to what feels like endless rework. They may not use that language, but they sense the system isn’t fixing root problems. Until Democrats get better at recognizing what rework is telling them, and then redesigning systems to reduce it, they’re going to continue to struggle with legitimacy across a broad part of the electorate.
Rawls provides a strong moral framework. Hanna and Deming help explain how to make any framework actually work in practice.
Excellent, thanks. Will read with interest.
Deming is someone I had in mind as well! The New Economics (and Out of the Crisis) are excellent books for anyone trying to plot a sensible course for the American left.
Another thinker I'll add is Karl Popper. The Open Society and It's Enemies is really, really poignant today. The left's Brahmin Caste is not a new phenomenon, and he traces it's psychological and intellectual roots all the way back to ancient Athens, showing how narcissistic zero sum thinkers have always been aiming for the levers of power on both the left and the right by presenting themselves as great intellectual prophets who can see the course of history ahead of us.
One neat similarity between Popper and Deming is their disdain for our grades based education system. From Popper's perspective, getting answers wrong is a necessary part of developing scientific theories, and it's ridiculous that our education system punishes it, since it instead rewards people who simply uncritically fill their mind with the facts presented. Deming made somewhat similar remarks: that it's a great crime how we sort people into executives, plant managers, and front line workers based on statistical measurements (grades) of adolescents that don't stem from any theory that would indicate what, precisely, even should be measured. In fact, Deming's notion that theory should precede observation in general is very Popperian. An empiricist puts up process control charts first thing, a critical rationalist would begin with a theory that guides the decision of what to measure. In that way, I think of Deming as a critical rationalist, although he stayed out of philosophy departments altogether.
I'd also argue that Popper's worldview offers a way to look at Rawls' theoretical points in a very accessible way—Rawls' writing is so burdened by a commitment to objectivity that it reads like Chidi from The Good Place. His difference principle can be restated in Popper's terms that I believe are less prone to being misinterpreted as pure socialism: inequalities tend to produce winners who are overrepresented in "history" books, but they must always benefit the good people who make all the real progress happen through their sweat and toil, and who never make the history books.
Likewise, I think Rawls offers an immune system for Popper's piecemeal social engineering that can defend it against the very elite capture for which Popper's enemies of the open society are always waging campaigns. Rawls was very astute to note that economic and social capital are both sources of inequality, which is why reading Theory of Justice was so eye opening (for me, at least): the elites on the left actively disguise their incredible social capital by nominal identitarian solidarity with disadvantaged minorities. Those minorities are then expected to gratefully receive economic scraps from leftist policies under conditions where they're never given a seat at the "smart kids" table. This is exactly the kind of scam that Rawls' Theory of Justice can expose quite effectively.
Thanks, This is really helpful. I don’t actually know Popper, and I don’t come to this from political philosophy. Deming is the framework I know well, and that’s what I’m drawing from.
What you’re describing in Popper sounds very aligned with Deming’s way of thinking, especially the emphasis on theory preceding measurement, learning through error, and skepticism of elite certainty(even though I haven’t read him). If anything, this gives me a reason to.
Where I’m personally focused is less on the philosophical backbone and more on the operational one. Regardless of the philosophy behind a system, I think we still need a way to tell whether it’s actually working and learning over time.
For me, rework is one of the clearest signals. It doesn’t tell us what the right policy should be, but it does tell us when a system is repeatedly compensating downstream instead of correcting upstream design. That’s where legitimacy starts to erode, independent of ideology.
So I see philosophy as important guardrails. My interest is in the feedback signals that tell us, in practice, whether those guardrails are holding.
Yeah I can see that.
I hear your focus on the feedback signals. I see the Democratic Party as being at a real crossroads. Either it becomes a place where good ideas stand a chance at winning, or it continues backsliding into a mere tribe. To me, the most important signal I want to see is the Democratic Party rejecting bad ideas.
Take Mamdani's plan to eliminate gifted and talented programs. It's a great microcosm of the dichotomy between Rawls as understood by people who glance at the wikipedia summary versus Rawls as understood by his readers. Someone who argues "hey, G&T programs perpetuate unjust disparity that can be recognized from the original position" is making it clear that they haven't actually spent time actually *in* the original position. Kids don't choose to be gifted and talented, and forcing them to sit through the same remedial (to them) classes as everyone else is a 13 year prison sentence. Someone who has really studied Rawls, when presented with Mamdani's policy, would instinctually imagine the hypothetical scenario of the veil of ignorance lifting and discovering they'd be the ones stuck in an education system that now oppresses them.
And there are many other such cases of liberals lapsing in this regard. Trans sports issues, Israel/Palestine, immigration, and many more come to mind—they're all failures of liberals to really apply the veil of ignorance in order to study the problem impartially. Liberals need to return to *grappling* with complexity instead of clinging to reductive thought-terminating cliches, and I think that means we need to reconcile our positions with our philosophical tradition.
This isn't meant as push back, it's more of a "yes, and."
"Another thinker I'll add is Karl Popper. The Open Society and It's Enemies is really, really poignant today. "
Popper represents liberalism and the modern Democratic Party represents leftism. Popper's Open Society was very similar to his view of falsifiability - we all need to be open to the idea that our deepest beliefs may be wrong and should actively seek to falsify them.
In contrast to Popper is Herbert Marcuse, whose One Dimensional Man was the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s. He had another book called "Repressive Tolerance." That was the Enlightenment vision of debate in the public square. By elevating conservative beliefs to being worthy to discuss and debate, the Enlightenment actually fostered the repression it was meant to stop. He instead championed what he called "Liberating Tolerance", which is what we presently see in the modern left, where conservatives and dissenters are shamed, scorned, fired from their jobs, socially ostracized and (arguably) arrested. Thus only truly liberating beliefs are granted the privilege of being discussed publicly.
The left and the right have always had illiberals in their midst. I think it's fairer to say that left leaning liberals have ceded the left to authoritarians, and that the Democratic Party's trajectory now reflects that defeat. Nothing illustrates this more sharply to me than rolling out #NoKings during a moment when the Democratic Party is less popular than the would-be monarch they're protesting.
A very provocative comment, KDBD. I want to push back a bit -- but I'll stipulate first that I don't know what I'm talking about: I haven't read your authors and I've forgotten what I once knew about the workings of the ACA.
The point I want to make is that while reworking may be a symptom of poor systems design I think it can also be aa much or more a symptom of changing contexts. This is especially true of the complexity of the systems task is so great that a successful political solution at any point must, practically speaking, involve compromises that reflect competing political goals and do not objectively strengthen the system.
When the ACA passed I thought the program was deeply flawed, but I celebrated because after sixty years of failed Democratic proposals it seemed a miracle to have succeeded to that degree. The consequences of that win were an inevitable backlash (because the politics had framed a compromise as entirely partisan and doctrinaire) and primary focus on the defects, the former making it impossible to address the latter without destroying the program. I think the simple fact that the ACA still exists after a disastrous start and constant political attack is a sign that it was pretty well designed given the context.
From this downstream-looking perspective, successful legislation almost always embeds its own dysfunctional elements, but those who draft it disagree on what those will be; implementation may reveal answers, but political principles and electoral opportunities will distort their interpretation.
Looking upstream at the sources of dysfunction (you mention housing, education, etc.) makes absolute sense to me, but all those elements too are subject to political irrationality. Moreover, in a society of the size and complexity we live in it seems unrealistic to think that legislative engineers possess the data or knowledge that would allow large-scale redesign without major unintended consequences feeding further political resistance, validated by design failures. This doesn't mean identifying upstream dysfunction isn't critical; it means that all legislative work will ultimately involve technical design flaws in even well drafted proposals along with flaws added in the political process.
Bottom line to a long, uninformed comment: I think the framework your comment lays out is valid but that current practice probably is a lot more like the practical outcome of trying to adopt it than your comment suggests. Endless rework may be endemic to complex states, whether functional or dysfunctional. Right now, I think those at the political center tend to accept that notion and the further one goes towards the extremes the more it is viewed a failure to adopt ideologically pure designs that promise engineered perfection and are at high risk for dysfunction on a much greater scale.
This is a thoughtful pushback, and I agree with a lot of it. In large, complex systems, especially ones shaped by political compromise and changing contexts, some amount of rework is inevitable. I’m not arguing for engineered perfection or one-and-done legislation.
Where I think the distinction matters is between rework as learning and rework as commitment. When a system repeatedly relies on downstream fixes without going back to its original objectives and design, rework stops being transitional and quietly becomes the operating model.
The ACA is a good example. I agree that its survival under sustained political attack says something real about its design given the constraints at the time. But the continued cycle of subsidy fights and affordability patches is also telling us something diagnostic: certain upstream choices are still producing the same downstream stress. The issue isn’t that compromise happened, but that redesign rarely follows.
My concern isn’t ideological purity or technocratic control. It’s legitimacy. When people experience the same fixes year after year, they figure out that something more fundamental isn’t working. A functional system isn’t one with no rework, it’s one where rework trends downward over time instead of becoming permanent.
In that sense, rework isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a feedback signal. Ignoring it doesn’t make the system more realistic, it just shifts the cost elsewhere, usually into public trust.
I'm in sympathy with the basic argument but I think we do have a basic difference. I think the fundamental thing that isn't working with healthcare policy is political and that is not under the power of one political party to address without the cooperation of the other.
Yesterday the NY Times posted a video discussion among centrist senators and ex-senators, Jeff Flake among them. Flake's position on the ACA was that the Democrats had pushed it through along party lines and they should have allowed for more discussion to improve it. I've always liked Flake and he was there (in the House) and I wasn't. But my memory is that, following McConnell's lead, the GOP dug in to resist the ACA on party lines explicitly in order to weaken Obama and regain the White House, despite the fact that the ACA was engineered to bring in GOP votes (and provide cover for essential Blue Dog Dems). I think it was a deeply flawed but roughly optimal outcome for that moment.
In my judgment, there has not been a single moment since where it would have been possible to negotiate a rework that reflected learning, and that the Democratic strategy has seemed like "commitment" because a commitment to preserving most of what it got in 2010 is the learned lesson about optimal rework in the present context.
The simplest (but perhaps least likely) way to weaken the push for ideological purity among some Democratic elements is to achieve an opening to good-faith negotiation on re-optimizing healthcare legislation in a context of substantive "liberal/conservative" dialogue with a shared goal of better health outcomes and broad affordability. Unrealistic ideological commitment is generally a product of the closure of pragmatic alternatives. (That last sentence is not a reflection of anything I actually know, but I think it sounds pretty good!)
I don’t disagree that political closure made good-faith renegotiation effectively impossible. My point is slightly different: once a system’s stability depends on renegotiation, and that renegotiation is structurally infeasible, the system itself has to be understood as non-robust. In the ACA case, when mandate enforcement was removed by the Supreme Court, the system required redesign to remain stable, but it had already been built in that meaningful renegotiation would be extraordinarily difficult. That mismatch is what produced instability and ongoing rework. From a systems perspective, the issue isn’t blame or missed opportunities, it’s that the system depended on a corrective process it could not realistically execute.
No disagreement.
The Republicans have a framework: smash things, and see what happens.
Could you define 'rework'? I have a sense of what you mean but need a bit more clarity.
Here is a classic Deming definition of rework
“Work done to correct, compensate for, or work around a system that is not producing the intended outcome the first time.”
So any legislative fixes would count. But all the internal actions which either individuals have to go through or the people who are working the system have to go through that are repetitive and not adding value also counts.
Here is a general way of thinking about it. A system has inputs, goes through a transformation and delivers outputs. Rework is created in three ways
1) branches off the main transformation setting steps that loops back to it and does not create value
2)adjustments that happen constantly to a step within the transformation because something isn’t working the way it should
3) rework in the entire system because it is not working this
I want to emphasize as Deming did that rework happens because of the design of the system not because people are lazy or incompetent. This is critically important when doing system design as it keeps the emphasis on the system which is the only way to fix it
Very helpful. Thank you.
Today's GOP just happens to be nearer to the center of a political continuum that has pulled center-Left, courtesy of self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists and very Left-leaning 80/20 policy pronouncements more mocked than serious.
The Democratic Left in its 20s during the campus radical protests and urban unrest late 1960s and early 1970s are -- at least those who have not crossed over to the other side -- today's geriatric retirees, older but hardly wiser; of shallow thought and even weaker energy.
A political void, to be sure, and precious little "free stuff" to fill it with for free.
The thinkers who guide the Democratic Party now are all leftists who have rejected the Enlightenment principles of individual rights, reason, and impartiality in favor of subjective experience and group-based rights. The group-based rights feeds into modern identity politics, where the goal is to take group of people and pass laws that benefit them at the expense of the general public. E.g. DEI, rapists in women's prisons, open borders and so on.
- Herbert Marcuse, the most influential Critical Theorist of the Frankfurt School, whose One Dimensional Man became the Bible of the New Left back in the late 1960s. It's an unfalsifiable argument that the Enlightenment created oppression in the guise of freedom. True freedom comes from "liberalizing tolerance" which means silencing conservatives and group-based rights for oppressed groups to replace Enlightenment impartiality. (I am sympathetic to the core claim that modern life as made us "one dimensional", but only Christianity can make us the richly flourishing individuals, not more of the same drug that flattened in the first place).
- Dereck Bell, who extended the Critical Theory of Marcuse into Critical Race Theory, which has rewritten the truth of American history into a parable of slavery. See also, the 1619 Project, which is downstream of his work. We see the apotheosis of Bell's work in Ibram X Kendi's argument that we need a new constitutional amendment that creates an unelected group with totalitarian powers of both legislation and enforcement down to the municipal level to act for anti-racism.
- Judith Butler, a postmodernist who believes that some women have penises and that these men belong in women's locker rooms where they can see women and underage girls changing, and expose themselves to them.
But its the Republicans who have gone crazy, right?
You write that the Dems turning back to Rawls would mean no more culture wars and no more identity politics.
I would argue that these features of the party are somewhat essential to the type of party the Ds have become. Rather than planting a flag and inviting people to come and join if you believe in “What we stand for,” Dems search out blocks of voters with specific interests who seem under represented. They bolt them onto the party by supporting their cause.
The natural result is infighting over who leads and who follows - who gets their cause to the top of the agenda. Or, weirdly, you get this new disturbing hierarchy of oppression ordering and the intersectional idea of the omni-cause.
Abandoning this “bolt-on-a-group-by-supporting-their-agenda” coalition in favor of an over arching general philosophy would undermine how the coalition operates. Lots of people want to pull away from the groups and be a more cohesive party. But what would the Ds be without those groups at this point?
Today, being on the political left too often means dismantling.
Progressivism directs its focus toward police brutality on behalf of the Black community, solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, the fight against anti-trans legislation, immigration injustices affecting undocumented migrants, and the defense of reproductive rights for women. The rallying cries are powerful: Black Lives Matter. Ceasefire Now. Abolish ICE. My Body, My Choice. Defund the Police. These are declarations of urgent moral witness.
But these chants also reveal a movement where the politics of harm reduction has completely overshadowed the politics of aspiration. What does this political movement actually stand for? Oppression is extremely powerful agonist, but if oppression itself becomes your primary framework for explaining the world, you lack a coherent framework.
Great comments…but as for whether the powers that run the Democrats get close to serious on this matters…I’m not holding my breath
I firmly believe there is an important place in public policy for those who are focusing on policy that takes the edge off the hardships of life that impact many people. As the daughter of parents who filed for bankruptcy, I know that bad things can and do happen to good people.
The Democrat party has been tarred with the fact that too often their policy makes the problem worse. You need to look no further than the war on poverty. We still have poverty and now
We have way too many broken families.
According to ChatGPT-
"In the early years of the U.S. War on Poverty (mid-1960s), many public housing and welfare programs discouraged or prohibited fathers from living with their families..."
Number one priority should be to look at the unintended consequences likely to develop.
Number two. Become intolerant of corruption. That is supported by at least 80% of the voters. Not to offend anyone, but too many officials are on the take. Look no further than the elected officials refusing to make it illegal for officials' to invest with non-public information.
Number three, understand that in a democratic society, policy only needs to satisfy 51% of the voters. Keep or create policy like you are playing with fire.
You need to look no further than our public education. If we ever get single payer healthcare, a lot of people, millions of people will be more unhappy than they are now. (A predictable unintended consequence)
I would argue that the progressive project by design is unaccountable. Systems within a liberal framework and not a progressive framework have course corrections and reform built into them. But when it comes to progressivism - Marxism - socialism, that is their goal, not really systems that work or reflecting back on what didn't work and correcting it. There's no accountability, no corrections, there's just more funding and more funding to grow a bigger beast that will further consume all the systems in its trail.
So I would argue that the Democrats' problem is progressivism. And there's no coming back from that. What they have to do is abandon the progressive project in order to come back to a system that involves pluralism, reason, debate, and reform. But I don't see that happening anytime soon. So I could never vote for progressive anything anymore and I won't.
I agree that leftism in America was built on the philosophical foundation of Rawls et al. Today’s leftists have strayed far from that basis. Why? Because their ideas didn’t work.
In general we have followed leftist prescriptions for how to solve societal problems, nowhere more so than in cities run by Democrats for decades. As the failures mounted, leftists turned to ideas like structural racism to explain away their failures, and turned to identity politics as the solution.
Returning to the original foundations of failure will only make matters worse. It’s time to examine the underlying premises that led to this devastation.
Lots to think about. Thanks.
No more identity politics?! Oh, bless your heart! Who will vote for that? Opportunity these days lies in spinning people up and monetizing attention rather actually solving problems. (Makes me think of John Cleese's ex leper in "Life of Brian". " I was doing just fine begging for alms, until this fellow Jesus came along and cured me. Now what will I do?")
Our political system has evolved to be one giant victim/industrial complex, filled with action groups pushing agendas claiming to work to erase the unfair advantage of "those people". Aren't we all victims? And, as for nondiscrimination, discrimination is exactly what DEI groups want. Preferential treatment of certain groups, to right historic wrongs, is discrimination. You can argue that diverse schools and workplaces are a good thing (I remember seeing a report that, if academic performance was the only criterion, California's elite state colleges would be 65% Asian) but single sex bathrooms and sports teams are inherently discriminatory, as is deciding who is a man or woman. Humans are not the same and any attempt to sort them is, by definition discrimination.
In a system where far too many districts and states are safe for one party or the other, contestants in party primaries vie sharply to outdo each other in radicalism, purity and fealty to whichever god king or interest groups they have to appease in order to win the primary and coast through the general election.
What people on the left and right forget is that, while the New Deal may have prevented a complete economic meltdown and communist revolution and civil war in this country, it didn't solve the depression. World War Two did, leaving the US as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the free world. The economic nirvana that lasted from 1945 to 1973 was an anomaly, resulting from an almost complete lack of competition. Young men could drop out of high school and get union-protected jobs in the plant and work their way up to being paid middle class wages for menial work. Management could afford to offer sweet deals to the unions, because their only competition was other manufacturers, who had similar deals with the same unions.
Meanwhile, our international competitors were getting their acts together, and producing products that were better than ours, just not suited to our taste. All it took was the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 to expose the fragility of our economy. Ever since then, our economy has been on a downward trending rollercoaster, with inequality increasing as we revert to the historic mean, which is to have a small elite group and a large proportion of struggling underclass. Attempts to goose the economy by tax cuts and stimulus often worked, at least.temporarily, but left the government a trillion dollars deeper in debt each time.
There's lots of things we can do to stimulate US manufacturing, mostly involving common sense promotion of a stable business environment with as few regulations as possible, (tariffs, especially of basic inputs, such as steel, aluminum,.lumber and copper are entirely counterproductive) but very little we can do to promote affordability without wrecking havoc on much of the economy. The more money people make, the more things will cost, unless we find a magic source of cheap stuff, as happened when so much of our manufacturing went to China. Reshoring our manufacturing will only make things more expensive, unless some miracle of automation occurs. Kicking out illegal immigrants will not make groceries or housing or insurance any cheaper.
The basic rule of economics is that improvements are hard, incremental and subject to setbacks, destruction is easy and often politically expedient and seemingly a good idea at the time.
One thing your comment surfaced for me is that 1945 to early 1970s wasn’t just “better times,” but a different system configuration, labor, capital, and policy were more tightly coupled in ways that later came apart. That helps explain why post-1970s outcomes feel so different even when headline growth looks strong.
I wish the Democrats would drop the term 'abundance.' After the last presidential election, to me it screams 'we're weak, we have no policies whatsoever and we have no clue why so many people don't like us.'
An excellent piece here, as always! It resonates a lot with something I wrote a couple of months ago in an effort to explore the same idea. Who is the "Leader" of this party any more? Why are they still talking about things nobody really cares about? I'd be interested in your thoughts. This is in no way an effort to bring notariety to something I've written, but just genuinely looking for feedback: https://medium.com/@jmuclax21/what-is-americas-goal-right-now-813bf973956c
Reading many of the comments here, I also feel a trend of over-intellectualizing the solution. Why does it have to have some commonly-accepted label in political terms? Couldn't it just be, "Stop talking about things the majority of the country does not care about, and talk about what they DO care about? Stop talking about Trump. For the love of God, stop talking about him."
We don't need leaders that quote "Thinkers" from centuries ago. Again, nobody outside of elite, highly-educated circles even uses the term "Thinkers", and that's part of the problem.
I believe I found a reasonable solution while I was writing-- the obvious flaw of it being that in the process of putting into practice what I'm advising, a large swath of Democrats today would find themselves in an identity crisis that would require some reconciling. But frankly that's ok, some HARD work needs to be done IMO, and great things come from hard work.
The lazy way out is to adopt some "thinker's" framework that was written in an entirely different time and world, and try to apply that-- as opposed to simply responding the obvious signals our society is giving, lay out solutions in wording that everyone understands, and then ignore the Party line when it doesn't serve those solutions. The Parties themselves do not care one iota about people in general-- they care about Winning, "Beating the Republicans", and preserving thin electoral margins every 2 years that are the results of not having a leader strong enough to stand up to Party "Leaders" and tell them "NO" when they want their candidates to tow the line.