2024 U.S. Election of President and Vice President

[Monash]

Not true! My septic tank exploded. I claimed insurance for a replacement and my premiums went up as a result.

In fact, Jason, anyone with a car accident will tell you their rates went up.

True, it's not as simple inflation causing the cost of insurance premiums to rise it's that any significant increase in the cost of insurance premiums (due to a higher than average rise in claims/payouts) in itself feeds into the inflation rate. Also what have you been eating?

P.S. Colonel you must be chuffed that the great Celine is back in form and punching out songs again like there's no tomorrow (and at the Olympics no less)! I can just imagine the look on your face when you heard the news.

[tbm3fan]

Not true! My septic tank exploded. I claimed insurance for a replacement and my premiums went up as a result.

In fact, Jasom, anyone with a car accident will tell you their rates went up.

Yes, not inflation. Property in California. Fires for most everyone. Beach dwellers the added bonus of strong winter storms wiping out coast line. Florida, hurricanes.

[Officer of Engineers]

It's inflation. insurance companies are not allowed to dip into other pools of policy holders in X to cover losses in Y.

Not true! My septic tank exploded. I claimed insurance for a replacement and my premiums went up as a result.

In fact, Jasom, anyone with a car accident will tell you their rates went up.

[zraver]

How much of this is inflation and how much of this is the result of greater and harsher weather events? .

It's inflation. insurance companies are not allowed to dip into other pools of policy holders in X to cover losses in Y.

The rise in homeowners insurance is absolutely tied to inflation. Replacement costs have been skyrocketing not just because of the natural rising of home values but because that valuation has skyrocketed as prices for everything from 2x4's to labor has skyrocketed. I live in one of the most affordable states in the Union and my property has more than doubled in value in 5 years... Mostly post pandemic. Hell the price of dog food is about 50% more now that it was...

[Ironduke]

2024 RNC vs Idiocracy (2006)

[TopHatter]

How much of this is inflation and how much of this is the result of greater and harsher weather events? I am in the same boat in Virginia, but it is because the insurance company has to raise rates across the boards to handle the increased payouts for damages for fires, floods, hurricanes & tornados. The rise in homeowners insurance has not been much tied to inflation. That has been everything I have read & heard. And as a retiree I listen pay attention to those costs being on a fixed income.

My Florida homeowners insurance was dropped not long after Hurricane Ian level a good chunk of southwest Florida. I live 300 miles away in northeast Florida. I'd never filed a claim or even called my insurance company to check the time.

Insurance companies, who had already been leaving Florida, began fleeing in droves and they continue to do so.

And what was Governor Ron DeFascist's response to this crisis?

He went to war with "woke" Disney.

Not too difficult to see Cult45's priorities.

[rj1]

Regarding interest rate cuts and why the economy as a whole is saying they should not be happening, this Twitter thread is a good explainer.

http://x.com/BobEUnlimited/status/1816786575067394315

The stock markets are completely out of whack with all this. As he states in the thread, the stock markets based on how this is live traded, expect the Federal Reserve to start lowering rates in September and rates to be down 150 basis points (1.50%, or 6 total rate cuts) by June next year. Yet the only basis for this is a theory that rates are restrictive that when you look at the macro data on the economy, there's nothing supporting this theory. The chief arguers for this theory are people in government like Senator Elizabeth Warren and some more progressive-minded politicians. One thing unsaid in all this is a lot of companies have kicked the debt restructuring can down the road into 2025 because the rates in 2023, 2024 are much higher than what they were used to in the ZIRP era. This has effects not just on businesses but also stuff like commercial real estate. They've already done extend and pretend once waiting for hopefully lower rates on debt. If they do cut rates before they should too early, we'll likely get inflation skyrocketing again.

[rj1]

How much of this is inflation and how much of this is the result of greater and harsher weather events? I am in the same boat in Virginia, but it is because the insurance company has to raise rates across the boards to handle the increased payouts for damages for fires, floods, hurricanes & tornados. The rise in homeowners insurance has not been much tied to inflation. That has been everything I have read & heard. And as a retiree I listen pay attention to those costs being on a fixed income.

Insurance companies in general have gotten hammered the last few years. Financial Times' Alphaville blog have been covering the high rates in auto insurance for some time to the point it was a decent contributor to CPI increases.

https://www.ft.com/content/cf42ae85-...7-343bffa95b40

There was too much money out there. The Trump and Biden stimulus packages are in some respectable economic spheres not full of partisan hacks silently considered policy errors. The people that needed the money due to losing their jobs due to Covid actually needed it. Everyone else however just splurged, so this was more money chasing what was the same or actually less goods as factories shuttered or cut down production. No sh*t we got inflation. Per something I read in the FT about a year ago, they think the economy as a whole based on looking at indirect macro statistics only finished using the stimulus money either late last year or early this year. They also shot down interest rates fearing recession which made everything worse. I bought a house in August 2020 on a 15-year mortgage with a rate of 2.375%. Think of where mortgage rates are now. Throw on top of it the student college debt forgiveness is another stimulus (you're taking money away meant for debt repayment and is instead going to be spent on goods, this is absolutely inflationary). Everyone is clamoring for cuts in interest rates so the cost of debt can go considerably down because they've been brainwashed into thinking the last 15 years of the American economy where the cost of debt was effectively zero is normal when it was instead this drastic extreme compared to the 400 years that preceded it. However, the broader economy is not cooperating with rate cuts (the Democrats were really wanting rate cuts to start at the latest summer to aid Biden's reelection). Anyone that wants to talk about inequality or stuff is unaffordable in broader society, yeah, when you allow corporations and super-rich individuals to be able to get more and more debt where they have little skin in the game because debt is so cheap, all they're going to do is bid up the price of everything with little money down. The further away we get from Obama's presidency the more warts that appear, and we get 30 years down the road we're going to have one after another of these academics talking about the horrors wrecked onto the economy and people globally by a decade of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP). Meanwhile Trump has no fiscal conservatism bones in his body, and of course the Democrats don't.

Powell's famous explanation for why this inflation of the past few years occurred was "the Federal Reserve was surprised by the inflation". To quote Stanford economist John Cochrane, "the Federal Reserve saying they were surprised by inflation is like an army saying they were surprised by an invasion" - i.e. if that's the truth, you failed at your job.

[Albany Rifles]

I understand what Wells is getting at. It is true that the middle class has gotten screwed over the last 40 years at least. We all know the reason. Good paying jobs of the past, especially in manufacturing have moved overseas. From there, as the jobs went overseas, we heard how the computer revolution would be providing all kinds of jobs for these displaced workers. What bullshit that was and it was obvious from the get go if you had any brains. Computers equal humans so we don't need humans. End result despondency for these people and ergo the rise of drug use. I'm surprised, but no longer, when I hear of adults I know tell me their sons are still at home when 30. The parents have done well but their kids have had a harder time and this is an upper middle class tech oriented population of engineers, CFOs, bankers, financiers I serve.

Now to me old line Republicans are the big business guys. What is good for them is good for us but just who is us? Yep, the have yachts. Democrats had the opening but fumbled the ball big time. In the end what party you were from didn't matter that much since their major donors where all big business to both sides. A captive audience with the middle class frozen out. They can't donate what they don't have and when the donation rules change it is game over.

So now we have new line Republicans only Trump isn't one of them. Never was as his ego was all about his wealth and only HIS wealth. His father didn't teach him any empathy. He only taught him not to lose while making everyone else the loser. Trump has to go down as one of the greatest con artists we have seen in this country. He throws out lines left and right to see what gets the biggest laugh, or in his case, the biggest applause. He has no firm belief structure at all. He simply goes with the flow and intends to be first in line. The insurrection was a super clear example of that. Get others to do the dirty work by planting the idea, maintain hands off, then ride in as the white knight saving his admirers. Maybe you know why I found him, let's say entertaining since the 70s, as do my older relatives all of which are native New Yorkers. He was a local clown who was harmless. Still a clown, always will be, but more Pennywise now. What he needed was a good punch, or two in the nose, while in high school for an attitude adjustment.

I just saw Trump as a harmless buffoon as well...until his antics regarding the Central Park 5. The news reports of those events came at the period where I was at the most conservative of my life. And things did not appear right from the start. People love to hate on Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton but they were right and Trump was dead wrong. Saw him as a rea; shitty person at that point. And then I found out about the Roy Cohn connection and that sealed the deal for me.

[Albany Rifles]

Harris is going to have a hard time overcoming inflation and the border. The current gas lighting going on ie the economy is doing great border crossings are down ring hollow. I mean I guess for the investor class the economy is great. From my middle-class living room looking at the grocery bills and insurance rates its not so great. Over the last 3 years my rases have totaled 10.5% while official inflation has been 21% but real inflation on many items has been much higher. Our grocery bill has doubled and my homeowners insurance (no claims no local mega disasters) more than doubled. I can't even imagine what it must be like for young families who are facing a future of perpetual renter status. The one bit of relief I was hoping they would get (student loan relief and reform) got totally botched when Biden used his mandate to go after big ticket spending rather than structural reforms to a system set up to prey on students as a vehicle to transfer tax payer money to schools and loan servicers.

If VPOTUS Harris early moves are signaling her longer-term vision she is not going to take this head on but will revert to ultra-liberal totally misreading the mood of the country. Does the Left have the courage to be honest with the American people?

How much of this is inflation and how much of this is the result of greater and harsher weather events? I am in the same boat in Virginia, but it is because the insurance company has to raise rates across the boards to handle the increased payouts for damages for fires, floods, hurricanes & tornados. The rise in homeowners insurance has not been much tied to inflation. That has been everything I have read & heard. And as a retiree I listen pay attention to those costs being on a fixed income.

[zraver]

Yeah, but I think Trump is most likely winning in November and a guy was a couple inches away from assassinating him, and if anything does happen we're getting President Vance. So it pays to look at what President Vance is going to do, because he's either becoming President the next 4 years or is betting favorite as sitting VP come 2028.

Harris is going to have a hard time overcoming inflation and the border. The current gas lighting going on ie the economy is doing great border crossings are down ring hollow. I mean I guess for the investor class the economy is great. From my middle-class living room looking at the grocery bills and insurance rates its not so great. Over the last 3 years my rases have totaled 10.5% while official inflation has been 21% but real inflation on many items has been much higher. Our grocery bill has doubled and my homeowners insurance (no claims no local mega disasters) more than doubled. I can't even imagine what it must be like for young families who are facing a future of perpetual renter status. The one bit of relief I was hoping they would get (student loan relief and reform) got totally botched when Biden used his mandate to go after big ticket spending rather than structural reforms to a system set up to prey on students as a vehicle to transfer tax payer money to schools and loan servicers.

If VPOTUS Harris early moves are signaling her longer-term vision she is not going to take this head on but will revert to ultra-liberal totally misreading the mood of the country. Does the Left have the courage to be honest with the American people?

[Monash]

Yes, but this GOP are running against the pre-2016 GOP as much as they are the Democrats. As a person that identifies more with the pre-2016 GOP but thinks the Democrats are so incredibly out to lunch on so many issues (some of my problems with Trump are he's a 1980s Democrat economically, remove his stance on taxes and he's pretty much an old-school Labor Democrat on the economy and spending, that's why the Teamsters boss was at the RNC), neither of the two main parties represent me. In foreign policy terms, I think you can vote for Trump and that will end up being anti-Ukraine or you can vote for Harris and that will end up being anti-Israel (as pro-Palestine has been connotated to being anti-Israel). Rank-and-file American cares way more about Israel than they do Ukraine. Sorry to make anyone in this thread sad, just being honest.

Your definitely right about Harris and Ukraine/Israel issue but (and call me an optimist) given it's likely to be a close result it's entirely possible that she'll end up having to negotiate for anything and everything she want's with some (of the more sane) Republicans in the House or Senate. So it could be we end up with Ukraine only ever getting 'more' if Israel also still gets a slice of whatever pie is on the table.

[rj1]

I understand what Wells is getting at. It is true that the middle class has gotten screwed over the last 40 years at least. We all know the reason. Good paying jobs of the past, especially in manufacturing have moved overseas. From there, as the jobs went overseas, we heard how the computer revolution would be providing all kinds of jobs for these displaced workers. What bullshit that was and it was obvious from the get go if you had any brains. Computers equal humans so we don't need humans. End result despondency for these people and ergo the rise of drug use. I'm surprised, but no longer, when I hear of adults I know tell me their sons are still at home when 30. The parents have done well but their kids have had a harder time and this is an upper middle class tech oriented population of engineers, CFOs, bankers, financiers I serve.

Now to me old line Republicans are the big business guys. What is good for them is good for us but just who is us? Yep, the have yachts. Democrats had the opening but fumbled the ball big time. In the end what party you were from didn't matter that much since their major donors where all big business to both sides. A captive audience with the middle class frozen out. They can't donate what they don't have and when the donation rules change it is game over.

So now we have new line Republicans only Trump isn't one of them. Never was as his ego was all about his wealth and only HIS wealth. His father didn't teach him any empathy. He only taught him not to lose while making everyone else the loser. Trump has to go down as one of the greatest con artists we have seen in this country. He throws out lines left and right to see what gets the biggest laugh, or in his case, the biggest applause. He has no firm belief structure at all. He simply goes with the flow and intends to be first in line. The insurrection was a super clear example of that. Get others to do the dirty work by planting the idea, maintain hands off, then ride in as the white knight saving his admirers. Maybe you know why I found him, let's say entertaining since the 70s, as do my older relatives all of which are native New Yorkers. He was a local clown who was harmless. Still a clown, always will be, but more Pennywise now. What he needed was a good punch, or two in the nose, while in high school for an attitude adjustment.

Yeah, but I think Trump is most likely winning in November and a guy was a couple inches away from assassinating him, and if anything does happen we're getting President Vance. So it pays to look at what President Vance is going to do, because he's either becoming President the next 4 years or is betting favorite as sitting VP come 2028.

My reason to be a libertarian is not diehard low taxes all the time, it's more based around we're completely destroying mine, my kids', and this country's future not paying the bills and kicking the can down the road combined with everyone's response is to make the government ever larger and central to all activities in this country as the rest of the economy slowly gets rotted away. We're in the 1970s right now. The inflation of Biden was coming one way or another because you can't fight gravity forever. Trump was as much responsible for the inflation as Biden was (he was just conveniently out of power), Trump is going to force interest rates (therefore mortgage rates) to go down because this is politically popular but all it's going to do is destroy the value of the dollar so people can get cheap debt again which will cause the price of everything to go up, and you have people that have all the economic education of an 8-year-old and will celebrate the S&P 500 going up 10% when prices have risen 15%.*** A cheaper dollar will aid domestic manufacturing by making imports more expensive. But this is going to be a tradeoff of the areas that get the manufacturing jobs will boost up while the places that don't are going to see standard of living costs increase. The mercantilism policies of China, Trump was right on and Biden has come around to the same point of view. The government (driven in my opinion by the multinational corporations that were heavily profiting) were the last people to figure out the truth about China that under Xi it would never liberalize, I think the contributing factors to that decision being Covid, the disappearance of Hong Kong as an independent polity, and maybe the public disappearing of Hu Jintao on the side. But I've worked in manufacturing my whole career and that's a primary economic driver while services in contrast are secondary (if no one around you has any money, you can't get paid to serve them - if jobs disappear, services follow), but it's not costless, there are going to be people that suffer from this change.

Industrial policy now is all the rage, both in the Democratic and Republican Parties, the notion of industrial policy being a very historically left-wing economic point of view not out of place in the Soviet Union.

*** Let's please not act like Harris is going to be this champion of the U.S. Dollar, her and the Democrats want to do the exact same thing, Modern Monetary Theory championed by this administration when it came to power a few years ago officially believed inflation was impossible in the current day, which did not age well to say the least.

[tbm3fan]

I understand what Wells is getting at. It is true that the middle class has gotten screwed over the last 40 years at least. We all know the reason. Good paying jobs of the past, especially in manufacturing have moved overseas. From there, as the jobs went overseas, we heard how the computer revolution would be providing all kinds of jobs for these displaced workers. What bullshit that was and it was obvious from the get go if you had any brains. Computers equal humans so we don't need humans. End result despondency for these people and ergo the rise of drug use. I'm surprised, but no longer, when I hear of adults I know tell me their sons are still at home when 30. The parents have done well but their kids have had a harder time and this is an upper middle class tech oriented population of engineers, CFOs, bankers, financiers I serve.

Now to me old line Republicans are the big business guys. What is good for them is good for us but just who is us? Yep, the have yachts. Democrats had the opening but fumbled the ball big time. In the end what party you were from didn't matter that much since their major donors where all big business to both sides. A captive audience with the middle class frozen out. They can't donate what they don't have and when the donation rules change it is game over.

So now we have new line Republicans only Trump isn't one of them. Never was as his ego was all about his wealth and only HIS wealth. His father didn't teach him any empathy. He only taught him not to lose while making everyone else the loser. Trump has to go down as one of the greatest con artists we have seen in this country. He throws out lines left and right to see what gets the biggest laugh, or in his case, the biggest applause. He has no firm belief structure at all. He simply goes with the flow and intends to be first in line. The insurrection was a super clear example of that. Get others to do the dirty work by planting the idea, maintain hands off, then ride in as the white knight saving his admirers. Maybe you know why I found him, let's say entertaining since the 70s, as do my older relatives all of which are native New Yorkers. He was a local clown who was harmless. Still a clown, always will be, but more Pennywise now. What he needed was a good punch, or two in the nose, while in high school for an attitude adjustment.

[rj1]

To support my last post, from a longstanding Canadian political journalist that I read a lot because he is excellent and he gives political insights you simply cannot find in American political journalism, but because he's Canadian he writes referencing Trump to Pierre Poilievre.

(If you don't follow Canadian politics, Trump is a more extreme version of Ontario Premier Doug Ford in my opinion who's effectively married his Progressive Conservative Party with Labor in the province, Ontario being the next best surrogate to compare to the Rust Belt states. Poilievre who should become the next Prime Minister because the Liberals are at the point of knowing they'll lose like the British Tories just did, but Poilievre is imagine Trump but someone with intellectual ideological beliefs expounded upon.)

The party coalitions are changing. I'm not sure Democrats have even figured that out yet that the coalitions are changing, which makes this a dangerous moment in time for them politically in vast swathes of the country. I'm originally a native of North Carolina and taking from the political history there, Democrats where I live in the Midwest are becoming the Republicans of the Solid South era. It's not just that they're losing, it's they're irrelevant to the political conversation. I'm a Libertarian Party member now (our party nationally is a dumpster fire but we're in pretty good state in Indiana) and the 2020 Governor's race in the state, the discussion in the state was not going on between the Republican incumbent and the Democratic challenger, everything the Democrat said was ignored and the discussion that mattered was between the Republican incumbent and the Libertarian challenger. The Governor election this year the only person that even had interest in running for the Democrats was an elected Republican as recently as a few years ago and the Democrat running for the U.S. Senate is gadfly level (she ran for President as a write-in independent in 2020, has raised no money).

http://paulwells.substack.com/p/towa...s-conservatism

Towards a working-class conservatism

What do you get when you cross JD Vance with Pierre Poilievre?


PAUL WELLS
JUL 19, 2024

I want to address some of what’s in the air this month, as the Republicans gather in Milwaukee. I’m going to commit what, for some readers, will be the cardinal sin of taking conservatism seriously, and of taking some conservatives at their word when they describe their view of politics.

Much of what follows is simple observation. And most of today’s main characters are American. But I want to start with something Anthony Koch tweeted the other day. He was press spokesperson for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative leadership campaign, and is off to play a similar role for the BC Conservatives in that province’s upcoming election. After Teamsters Union president Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Koch said this on the big X:

Anyone shocked to see Teamsters Union guys speaking at the RNC hasn't been paying attention.

The political dividing lines are no longer primarily based on competing economic visions, but cultural/social visions.

Ask your average conservative in Canada or the United States (or anywhere in the Western world right now for that matter) why they're a conservative/what it means to be a conservative.

"I'm very passionate about free trade and free market economics" does not make the top 5.

I’ve been more attuned to notice this sort of talk — the notion that conservatives aren’t particularly preoccupied with free trade and free markets, and that “competing economic visions” aren’t much of a basis for defining our politics — since Pierre Poilievre gave an extraordinary speech to construction unions two months ago, one that didn’t otherwise get much coverage.

“You represent the wage-earners and the future pensioners,” Poilievre told the union crowd, across from Ottawa in Gatineau. “Their wages and pensions have lost purchasing power. Meanwhile, big government and big business and big capital has gotten rich by the inflationary policies of government. It is a transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the have-yachts.”

As I hinted when I wrote about the speech at the time, at times Poilievre’s concern for labour over capital sounded positively Marxist. Of course there’s room for all kinds of interpretation of these general principles. But Poilievre has backed anti-scab legislation and demanded an end to the use of foreign workers at Windsor’s NextStar plant.

Now, at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, we saw Trump’s vice-presidential pick, J.D. Vance, proclaiming: “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.” Why? Because “Wall Street barons crashed the economy.” America, Vance said, needs “a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry.”

I mean, if Canada’s NDP had a leader who talked like this, they might be showing some life in the polls.

Look: not being in the business of manufacturing political leaders, I offer no warranty. I’m well aware that Vance has, to say the least, stood for different things at different times during his short life, and if today he represents some “we” that is “done catering to Wall Street,” he should perhaps be reminded that he’s on a ticket with a man who, in office, did more catering to Wall Street than Katz’s Deli.

But there is, in some corners of U.S. Republicanism, a distinct and increasingly bold working-class discourse that (a) upsets many older conservatives; (b) should worry liberals who like to win elections; (c ) may yet make a difference in real governing choices. And what’s more significant for our purposes, it also echos a lot of what we’re hearing from Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

A leading proponent of this conservatism is a guy named Oren Cass.

Cass is the chief economist at American Compass, a wee Washington think tank that proclaims its desire to “supplant blind faith in free markets with a focus on workers, their families and communities, and the national interest.”

Cass had a weekend op-ed in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago that ran, for a few hours, under the terrible headline “Dear Elites (of Both Parties), The People Will Take It From Here, Thanks.” By mid-morning Saturday, somebody had cleaned up that mess, and the piece now appears as “This is What Elite Failure Looks Like.”

I urge everyone to read it, or if it’s behind a paywall, to read some of the other stuff from Cass I’ll throw at you below. He makes a point that I think should be more central to everyone’s understanding of North American politics: that 30 years of post-Cold War governance had already left a smoking crater, long before Donald Trump came along.

Opioid deaths are more than a terrible tragedy. They are also a telltale sign of national decay and desperation. Wages for the typical worker have stagnated for decades, and research I conducted at American Compass, the think tank where I work, has found that the typical worker no longer earns enough to provide middle-class security for a family.

We also found that only around one in five young Americans makes the transition smoothly from high school to college to career, and for young men the figure is lower still. The anti-poverty scholar Scott Winship has shown that for men ages 25 to 29, inflation-adjusted median earnings and compensation were lower in 2020 than they were 50 years earlier. The years leading up to Mr. Trump’s election coincided with the first time on record that Americans ages 18 to 34 were more likely to be living at home with their parents than independently with a significant other.

This strong and widespread feeling that something has gone wrong close to home, which of course is also part of every Poilievre speech, leads voters to develop strong policy preferences.

Another American Compass poll found that Americans agree by 10 to one that ‘we need a stronger manufacturing sector,’ most often because it ‘is important to a healthy, growing, innovative economy.’ Asked to choose, most say they would much rather pay higher prices to strengthen domestic manufacturing than to combat climate change. Only the upper class was evenly split on this question.

Cass is in the uncomfortable position of not being a Trump fan while also not thinking he’s history’s worst monster. He called the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol “a catastrophe for America” and can muster only this minimal endorsement of Trump’s place at the end of those 30 difficult years in American governance: “Like an earthquake triggered by the shifting tectonic plates of American politics, he disrupted a great deal. And in shaking existing structures to their foundations, he exposed and collapsed those that were outdated or poorly constructed. But his manner is not that of a rebuilder.”

Cass is more impressed by a “cadre of young senators, led by Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton.” He was, it’s fair to say, quite a bit more excited by Vance’s veep nomination than most people. The Republicans Cass likes are big on “reshaping global trade and confronting China, rebuilding domestic manufacturing, removing environmental constraints on industrial development, enforcing immigration law and reducing the flow of low-wage workers into the country, discouraging mergers and taxing stock buybacks more aggressively, shifting resources from higher education to noncollege pathways, providing financial support directly to working families instead of through child-care subsidies, and so on.” This is, directionally, quite similar to what Poilievre has been saying for two years, while his opponents tell themselves he has been offering only slogans.

There’s a lot more in Cass’s piece than what I’ve summarized here. Those weekend Times opeds are long. He’s also popped up lately with a column on Vance for the Financial Times. He’s been the subject of profiles in the New York Times and, some months ago, in New Yorkmagazine. He’s on Ezra Klein’s podcast this week. Klein’s comment board hates Cass! On Cass’s own podcast, he interviews Henry Olsen, author of a book that seeks to recast Ronald Reagan as a proud union president (he ran the Screen Actors Guild in his Hollywood days) and heir to FDR’s New Deal pro-worker interventionism.

A lot of conservatives are aghast at all of this. Terence Corcoran, who defends small-government free-market pro-business conservatism with brio at the National Post, could hardly believe what he heard when another pro-working-class Republican, Sohrab Ahmari, showed up at this spring’s Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa. Ahmari was interviewed by Jamil Jivani, the newly-elected Conservative MP who’s tight with this U.S. crew. As indeed, Ahmari is tight with Cass. Ahmari’s chat with Jivani, which essentially nobody has watched since it was posted on Youtube two months ago, is nonetheless worth a listen. The American guest urges the GOP to back universal health care, and calls industrial offshoring and low-wage immigration a formula for driving salaries down that governments are overdue to fix.

“Looming over the Ahmari event, and over the entire Canadian and American conservative movement, is whether the radical anti-markets and pro-statism ideas circulating through the conservative biosphere are actually gaining traction,” Corcoran glowered. “Is that where Canada’s Tories want to go?”

I mean, maybe it is? Exhibit A is just about everything Poilievre has said all year. The anti-scab stuff, the NextStar stuff. (At his own appearance before the same construction-union crowd Poilievre addressed in April, Justin Trudeau asked pointed questions about Poilievre’s spotty record on union issues in government.) As I keep saying, we’re now well into the part of any election cycle where an opposition leader is accused of saying nothing about his plans, even while he’s busy saying quite a lot about his plans.

There are other signs. A lot of Jamil Jivani’s work. A lot of the writing of Ben Woodfinden, a graduate student in Montreal who was busy writing think pieces about revitalized Red Toryism — the piece in question devotes half its energy to rebutting Red Toryism as it is commonly described in the news columns — when he was hired to become Poilievre’s communications director.

Writing about politicians’ ideas is often a sure route to heartbreak, because governing is messy. The serene theorizing of think tanks and conferences bears little resemblance to the riptides of competing interests in power. Talking about this stuff is further complicated by the fact that a lot of these ideas are being generated in the United States, whose politics right now is a tire fire. A second Trump presidency, still hypothetical, would pose at least as many risks as opportunities to a Canadian Conservative government, also still hypothetical.

But one way to understand what politicians want to do is to listen when they talk, to notice whose ideas they amplify and share. If the Conservatives are enjoying success in the polls, including among voters who have been hard for that party to persuade, it may be because some Conservatives are noticing things the incumbents haven’t seen, and saying things the incumbents don’t want to hear.