Implausible catastrophization from climate and child care and health care advocates doesn't convince the broad electorate. But it's useful for in-group competition.
The debate about "popularism" is dumb but it contains a generic critique of centrist pragmatism that is obviously sometimes true, with the question being where you draw the line.
That critique goes: it is more honest and even more practical in the long run to campaign for what you actually believe in, and not devise baroque workarounds to accommodate public opinion. If you aren't willing to fight directly for your radical ideas because you claim it isn't politically prudent to do so, maybe you don't really believe in those ideas.
But the biggest pragmatist / popularist sellouts in America today are the far left, who aren't willing to fight for the broad tax increases that would be necessary to fund their priorities. I think that this is part of why their politics takes the weird form described in this post, where different groups compete by lying or exaggerating about the urgency of their own priorities and the question of how the agenda fits together or how to pay for it stays in soft focus.
AFAICT, your evidence that climate change is less serious than claimed by advocates is that "catastrophizing was unconvincing to Republicans or even to the general public, which Pew found last year ranks climate change as the 17th most important out of 21 major political issues". That seems to imply that the correct thing to do is to present a false, but less catastrophic message, more in tune with the prior beliefs of the general public, including Republicans who believe the whole thing to be a gigantic fraud. That is, environmentalists should lie, but in the opposite direction to the way you claim they are doing now.
Reported maternal death rates rose, because US states shifted over time to use the internationally standard definition. The result was that reported US maternal mortality, which had previously looked bad by comparison with developed countries now appeared comparable to places like Iran and Lebanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_maternal_mortality_ratio
So, the correct message is not at all that advocates are spreading "misinformation about the difficulty and hazardousness of motherhood". The figures being reported now represent the correction of previous (inadequately catastrophic) misinformation. The mistake was to misinterpet this as an actual increase.
AFAICT, none of the centrists pushing the disinformation story has pointed this out. Rather it's "move along, nothing to see here"
This is not correct. Maternal death rates rose because states added a checkbox for current and recent pregnancies to death certificates and started counting *all* deaths from illness among pregnant or recently pregnant women as maternal deaths, which is not in line with the international definition which requires a nexus for the cause of death, and also is not in line with the practice of many other high-income countries which don’t rely on the checkbox data and disclaim a lot of deaths as maternal that the US would count. https://ourworldindata.org/rise-us-maternal-mortality-rates-measurement
From your link: “Methods for identifying and classifying maternal deaths up to 42 days were very similar across countries (except for the Netherlands). Maternal mortality ratios up to 42 days after end of pregnancy varied by a multiplicative factor of four from 2.7 and 3.4 per 100 000 live births in Norway and Denmark to 9.6 in the UK and 10.9 in Slovakia”
The checkbox Josh mentioned was used for women who were pregnant up to a year earlier. So this isn’t apples to apples. Additionally, “The pregnancy checkbox’s use between 2003 and 2017 was associated with some substantial errors. A detailed investigation by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) showed that the checkbox was erroneously ticked in many cases, leading to misclassification and overestimation of maternal death. For example, hundreds of people 70 years of age and older (including 147 women aged 85 years and older in 2013) were certified as pregnant at the time of death or in the year prior.” From https://news.ubc.ca/2024/03/ubc-study-challenges-alarming-u-s-maternal-death-rate-reports/
According to the UBC study, maternal deaths in the US are defined as "“Death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and the site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes.”"
There is a broader category of "pregnancy associated deaths" up to 1 year after being pregnant, but this isn't used to calculate maternal mortality.
The US definition is consistent with the standard international definition, AFAICT, . So, this is apples to apples
Also, the US is not the only country to use checkboxes, so there's no immediate reason to expect it to be more error-prone
I think the fact that many of these groups are unhinged in their behavior does not help. They are completely unwilling to accept any opinion that’s not theirs. The environmental groups who disrupt traffic, try to damage historical sights and interrupt events don’t win anyone over, they make people mad and not support them. It’s not very serious behavior to get anyone on your side.
"I think the only thing that will stop the lying is a structural change in the progressive coalition that makes lying no longer an effective strategy. And I’m not really sure how that could be brought about."
When high levels of deficit spending are less tenable.
I think the Senate electoral math will help with that as well. The path to 50+ Dem Senate votes is narrower now than it was even just a couple of years so that's eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) going to require the groups to put on some reality glasses and engage in persuasion and coalition building. They can't keep pretending the median voter is an Ivy League Lit major.
The debate about "popularism" is dumb but it contains a generic critique of centrist pragmatism that is obviously sometimes true, with the question being where you draw the line.
That critique goes: it is more honest and even more practical in the long run to campaign for what you actually believe in, and not devise baroque workarounds to accommodate public opinion. If you aren't willing to fight directly for your radical ideas because you claim it isn't politically prudent to do so, maybe you don't really believe in those ideas.
But the biggest pragmatist / popularist sellouts in America today are the far left, who aren't willing to fight for the broad tax increases that would be necessary to fund their priorities. I think that this is part of why their politics takes the weird form described in this post, where different groups compete by lying or exaggerating about the urgency of their own priorities and the question of how the agenda fits together or how to pay for it stays in soft focus.
AFAICT, your evidence that climate change is less serious than claimed by advocates is that "catastrophizing was unconvincing to Republicans or even to the general public, which Pew found last year ranks climate change as the 17th most important out of 21 major political issues". That seems to imply that the correct thing to do is to present a false, but less catastrophic message, more in tune with the prior beliefs of the general public, including Republicans who believe the whole thing to be a gigantic fraud. That is, environmentalists should lie, but in the opposite direction to the way you claim they are doing now.
Reported maternal death rates rose, because US states shifted over time to use the internationally standard definition. The result was that reported US maternal mortality, which had previously looked bad by comparison with developed countries now appeared comparable to places like Iran and Lebanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_maternal_mortality_ratio
So, the correct message is not at all that advocates are spreading "misinformation about the difficulty and hazardousness of motherhood". The figures being reported now represent the correction of previous (inadequately catastrophic) misinformation. The mistake was to misinterpet this as an actual increase.
AFAICT, none of the centrists pushing the disinformation story has pointed this out. Rather it's "move along, nothing to see here"
This is not correct. Maternal death rates rose because states added a checkbox for current and recent pregnancies to death certificates and started counting *all* deaths from illness among pregnant or recently pregnant women as maternal deaths, which is not in line with the international definition which requires a nexus for the cause of death, and also is not in line with the practice of many other high-income countries which don’t rely on the checkbox data and disclaim a lot of deaths as maternal that the US would count. https://ourworldindata.org/rise-us-maternal-mortality-rates-measurement
You can look at a set of other high income countries that follow the standard practice here.
https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj-2022-070621
From your link: “Methods for identifying and classifying maternal deaths up to 42 days were very similar across countries (except for the Netherlands). Maternal mortality ratios up to 42 days after end of pregnancy varied by a multiplicative factor of four from 2.7 and 3.4 per 100 000 live births in Norway and Denmark to 9.6 in the UK and 10.9 in Slovakia”
The checkbox Josh mentioned was used for women who were pregnant up to a year earlier. So this isn’t apples to apples. Additionally, “The pregnancy checkbox’s use between 2003 and 2017 was associated with some substantial errors. A detailed investigation by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) showed that the checkbox was erroneously ticked in many cases, leading to misclassification and overestimation of maternal death. For example, hundreds of people 70 years of age and older (including 147 women aged 85 years and older in 2013) were certified as pregnant at the time of death or in the year prior.” From https://news.ubc.ca/2024/03/ubc-study-challenges-alarming-u-s-maternal-death-rate-reports/
According to the UBC study, maternal deaths in the US are defined as "“Death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and the site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management, but not from accidental or incidental causes.”"
There is a broader category of "pregnancy associated deaths" up to 1 year after being pregnant, but this isn't used to calculate maternal mortality.
The US definition is consistent with the standard international definition, AFAICT, . So, this is apples to apples
Also, the US is not the only country to use checkboxes, so there's no immediate reason to expect it to be more error-prone
I think the fact that many of these groups are unhinged in their behavior does not help. They are completely unwilling to accept any opinion that’s not theirs. The environmental groups who disrupt traffic, try to damage historical sights and interrupt events don’t win anyone over, they make people mad and not support them. It’s not very serious behavior to get anyone on your side.
"I think the only thing that will stop the lying is a structural change in the progressive coalition that makes lying no longer an effective strategy. And I’m not really sure how that could be brought about."
When high levels of deficit spending are less tenable.
I think the Senate electoral math will help with that as well. The path to 50+ Dem Senate votes is narrower now than it was even just a couple of years so that's eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) going to require the groups to put on some reality glasses and engage in persuasion and coalition building. They can't keep pretending the median voter is an Ivy League Lit major.