I’ve been thinking lately about the question of historical realism in dramatic depictions of the past.

And also about chimneys.

Their absence isn’t always obvious in either fictional (such as “The Odyssey”) or fantastical (such as “House of the Dragon”) depictions of ancient life, but chimneys are a more recent invention than you might think.

Scientists today believe that humans have been making fires for at least 400,000 years. The chimney, by contrast, seems to have been invented in England sometime in the 12th century and only slowly gained popularity over the course of several centuries.

Very early humans were presumably making their fires outside. But to survive winter in even temperate climates, you need a heat source inside your shelter. And in the extreme cold of the Ice Age that afflicted the world 20,000 years ago, people most certainly needed shelter.

Archeologists believe that Ice Age humans spent much of their time in natural rock shelters enhanced by deliberate attempts at insulation and that they spent summer nights in dome structures. All of these would have been heated by fire, of course, but that just meant open hearths in the middle of the dome or cave — essentially a campfire, but inside.

And that was the basic state of home heat for many thousands of years.

People understood that you needed some kind of hole in the ceiling or everyone would suffocate and die. But the upshot is still that people were breathing absolutely filthy air all winter long — something you rarely see depicted on screen because it would be ugly and depressing.

And even though this is long gone as a mainstream concern in developed countries, indoor air pollution from open fires continues to be a major problem facing the global poor.

Cooking as a health hazard

Literally millions of people die every year due to respiratory and pulmonary problems caused by inhaling smoke indoors.

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This week, Jerusalem and I discuss interesting polling from The Argument that asked Americans who they think the elites are. The answer is primarily the very rich, followed by celebrities and to a lesser extent business executives and elected officials.

The mass public largely rejects the conservative concept of an intellectual elite composed of professors, journalists, and people with advanced degrees and seems more aligned with the left-populist concept of anti-elitism as basically just hostility to rich people.

One point I raise is that the “celebrity” category may resolve some of the disjuncture here. After all, a famous and successful journalist or professor can shade into the celebrity category and therefore become elite. Certainly if what you’re interested in is social and political influence, then a famous journalist seems more elite than a similarly famous actor, athlete, or musician — while stipulating of course that the most famous actors, athletes, and musicians are much more famous than the most famous journalists.

My strongest disagreement with the voting public, though, is about its emphasis on the elite status of billionaires relative to business executives.

Of course, many billionaires are business executives and many business executives are billionaires. But to the extent that these categories become disjointed, I think someone like Walmart C.E.O. John Furner is a very important actor in American society even if his net worth is “only” in the low nine figures. To me, the whole point of a concept like “elite” is precisely to distinguish the idea of prestige and influence from mere wealth. Walmart founder Sam Walton’s grandson Lukas is a lot richer than the company’s present-day C.E.O. I’m happy to call him part of the elite just on the basis of his wealth, but, in practical terms, fewer people care what he thinks than pay attention to the views of Furner and other hired-gun C.E.O.s of major companies. Similarly, I would say that senators and four-star generals and admirals are absolutely part of the American elite despite receiving relatively modest compensation. What is the point of the term if not specifically to draw this distinction?

We also delve into some interesting findings about what most Americans believe the elite believes. Jerusalem notes that voters seem to perceive elites as disagreeing with them about basically everything. So most people believe in a government guarantee of health insurance and believe that elites do not support this. But most people oppose government ownership of most businesses, with a larger share saying that elites support the policy. Similarly, Americans believe that elites are against free trade and hold more traditional views about gender roles.

Jerusalem and I discuss all this and more, including the important question of whether we are elites.

Paid subscribers can watch the ad-free embedded video at the top of this post and read the full transcript below.

WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE HERE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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Housing starts declined 12.4 percent in July compared with the month before for single- and multi-family construction, falling 13.5 percent from the same time last year, according to Commerce Department data released this week. Residential permits, though, rose 5 percent — an indicator that new housing could b…

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Yesterday, I wrote about the distinction between the Insurgent Left and the Progressive Establishment. Today, I want to continue trying to enrich people’s understanding of the Democratic Party factional landscape by drawing a distinction on the moderate side between Tactical Moderates and True Believers.

It can be a little hard to tell the difference because if you’re moderate for tactical reasons, you’re of course going to say that you’re a True Believer. And True Believers still believe in the tactical case for moderation and will make that case in an effort to gain support.

The distinction is often revealed only in the moment.

Abigail Spanberger had a somewhat moderate-ish profile as a House member from a blue-leaning purple district, and she ran for governor of Virginia on that profile and won. Virginia only allows governors to serve one term and is a solidly blue state on the federal level, so to whatever extent Spanberger has ambitions to become a senator or serve on a national ticket or in a cabinet, her incentive is to cater to the Progressive Establishment.

The fact that she is instead operating as a force of restraint against the Democratic legislature is thus a source of real frustration to a lot of Virginia Democrats. But I think she’s correct on the merits to raise doubts about mandating collective bargaining for local government employees.

When Sarah McBride went on “The Ezra Klein Show,” it seemed to me that she was trying to create space for a tactical retreat from an electorally indefensible line on trans women’s participation in competitive women’s sports. Martina Navratilova, by contrast, is trying to persuade Democrats that the left’s line on this is genuinely wrong.

I think that within reasonable bounds, tactical moderation is smart.

I do not agree with John Bel Edwards’s positions on guns or abortion, but it’s obviously the case that no candidate espousing progressive views on those topics would have won a gubernatorial election in Louisiana. It would’ve been great if he’d been persuaded to run for Senate. In general, I’d love to see Democrats nominate more politicians like that in the Deep South because it would create a chance to make progress on Medicaid expansion. Both parties’ decision to just write off huge swaths of the country as unwinnable is bad for America, and a renewed spirit of tactical moderation would bring real substantive benefits.

But I also think moderate Democrats are running on fumes in terms of what tactical moderation can accomplish. Expanding the tent in terms of red state recruiting is a totally reasonable agenda that I think even very left-wing people should see the merits of.

At the end of the day, though, if you want to capture the heart of the party, you need to make arguments that are grounded in conviction, and that means arguing on the merits.

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The Joe Manchin paradox

Consider former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Everyone who wasn’t completely addled understood that Democrats were wildly lucky to have a West Virginia Senate seat and that there was no way a conventional progressive could have won the 2012 and 2018 Senate races there.

But I think most progressives felt that Manchin was clearly drawing dead in terms of re-election in 2024 and what they wanted him to do in 2021–22 was YOLO it and vote for filibuster abolition and a sweeping progressive agenda.

And that really is the logic of tactical moderation.

Harry Reid had an old joke about Susan Collins, saying she’ll always be with us except when we need her vote. And there’s clearly something to this. Collins cast a totally inconsequential but highly salient “no” vote on Amy Coney Barrett right before her 2020 re-election, but she cast a consequential vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh and many lower court judges earlier. She’s criticized or broken with Trump on a number of issues but never really collaborated with Democrats to meaningfully restrain him and clearly maintains a sufficiently cordial relationship with the White House that unlike John Cornyn, she never faced a serious MAGA challenger.

But it’s also true that Collins provided decisive votes in favor of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, and against Affordable Care Act repeal in 2017.

There’s probably just no such thing as a politician who at heart agrees with the base about everything but is also good enough at faking moderation to repeatedly win races in tough states like West Virginia and Maine.

So while it’s certainly coherent to appreciate a Manchin-style figure on a purely tactical level without agreeing with him on anything, I think it’s unrealistic to expect that actual politicians are just totally faking it.

Among other things, once you start playing the role of “guy who champions the interests of coal communities against the demands of green groups,” you’ll come to realize that the green groups are genuinely wrong about some things. At the end of the day, I think environmentalists are basically right about coal. But no advocacy community is right about everything, and there’s plenty the climate movement gets wrong. Most elected officials are not incentivized to delve too deeply into the merits of policy or to really scrutinize their coalition partners’ demands. But a Democrat from West Virginia is incentivized to find things the Progressive Establishment is wrong about, so over and above anything tactical, he’s likely to find genuine points of disagreement.

Personally, I think Manchin was wrong on the merits about some important stuff (notably the filibuster) but also substantially correct that the Build Back Better legislation that congressional leadership was pushing for was inflationary. His push to make Democratic climate efforts more focused on innovation and clean energy deployment and less focused on blocking pipelines was right on the merits. The country would be better off today if Democrats had embraced his permitting legislation more fulsomely.

The True Believers

All the way at the other end of the spectrum, you have Representative Ed Case of Hawaii.

Case is a formidable electoral over-performer. In the Split Ticket database, he overperformed by 17 points in 2018, 14 points in 2020, 18 points in 2022, and 17 points in 2024. He’s been in and out of the Blue Dog caucus over some internecine disputes that I don’t really understand, but he generally has a moderate Blue Dog-ish record. He faced a primary challenge this cycle that, for example, slammed him for supporting the SAVE America Act.

The thing about this is that while Case’s vote-getting skills are impressive, there is genuinely no tactical case for having a moderate in this seat.

Kamala Harris won his district 62 to 37. Elizabeth Warren is, as Slow Boring readers know, an absolutely terrible electoral underperformer. It just doesn’t matter because she represents Massachusetts. But Harris did slightly worse in Massachusetts statewide than she did in Case’s district.

Case is moderate because it’s what he believes, not because it’s what he needs to believe to win his district. He’s also lost several statewide primaries — once for governor, twice for Senate — in part because the Democratic Party primary voters of Hawaii generally prefer someone more progressive. In that light, it’s actually pretty impressive that he fended off an insurgent challenger this cycle, and it’s notable that he had to do so based purely on arguing the merits with no real electability case to be made.

Case is truly a one of one in this regard.

But I have absolutely talked to members of Congress who’ve told me they secretly wish they had purple seats so they could mod-out a bit more and then plead electability when the groups give them shit for it. I think this is mostly a mix of lying and self-deception, but it contains a grain of truth. Most people — even people who would describe themselves as quite progressive — have an issue or two where they break from the pack. But vanishingly few safe-seat members are like this. You don’t see many guys in a D+7 seat who espouse an idiosyncratic moderate position on something unless it’s closely related to home state or district politics.

But plenty of people have a heterodoxy or two they’re quietly stifling. There are also plenty of members who like to engage in what I’ve termed “dog-whistle moderation” or maybe meta-moderation, where they’ll speak in abstract terms about the need to meet voters where they are and change the Democratic Party’s brand and not be held hostage to extremists.

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These types tend to complain a lot about the Insurgent Left in a way that doesn’t totally make sense. Iowa didn’t flip from being an Obama-Obama state to a Trump-Trump-Trump state because of Bernie Sanders (who, after all, was in the caucus the whole time). It flipped because mainstream Democrats got more left-wing.

But if you want to change that, you need less obfuscation and more Ed Case energy.

Beyond “the establishment”

Mike Zapler wrote a piece for Axios this week titled “The Democratic Establishment’s Ideas Deficit” in which he argues that “centrists” know what they’re against but have a harder time defining what they’re for.

I think he made some good points but also repeats a fundamental conceptual confusion about this.

If by “the Democratic establishment” you mean something like “the party’s congressional leaders and its past few presidential nominees,” then the reason they have a hard time defining what centrist agenda they favor is that they do not favor a centrist agenda.

It’s actually not even slightly difficult to specify the policy priorities of the Biden-Harris administration as advanced in Congress by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. The Biden-Harris administration wanted to increase the tax revenue share of G.D.P. while making the tax code more progressive and to use the vast majority of that new revenue to increase spending on clean energy and social services. They believed in abortion rights and affirmative action in college admissions and a fairly crude approach to elite representational politics. On their watch, domestic oil-and-gas production reached new record levels but only after efforts to halt new leases were blocked in court. They believed in the neo-Brandeisian antitrust agenda and appointed its key leaders to top regulatory jobs.

The reason this agenda appears to be just “stuff progressives want, minus some of the stuff that progressives want” is because literally that’s what it is.

The establishment’s enthusiasm for progressive policy is tempered by electoral prudence, court losses, and leadership’s need to set priorities, but their agenda is genuinely a subset of the progressive agenda.

At the same time, an alternative centrist agenda is not hard to find or hard to understand. It would emphasize deficit reduction to put downward pressure on inflation and interest rates and prioritize clean energy abundance while championing domestic fossil-fuel production as superior to foreign production as long as demand for oil and gas exists. It would center ideas, like performance pay for teachers, that aim to increase the productivity of the public sector. It would be an agenda that balances the need for an inclusive economy with a healthy respect for the virtues of free markets and that takes seriously supply-side regulatory constraints on things like housing and health care. Add in the notions that crime control and border security are genuinely important state functions, not things to be engaged in reluctantly as a rearguard effort to avoid political harm.

These are not unfamiliar or secret ideas. They represent substantive moderation, a belief that the progressive NGO blob’s analysis of the major policy problems in American life is not really correct or adequate to the scale of the challenges the country is facing.

I understand why many moderate True Believers don’t want to be more assertive about these kinds of issues. They’re afraid of losing primaries to candidates to their left, and they think that articulating some loud and proud moderate positions is risky compared with minimizing the substantive differences and making a tactical case for moderation.

That analysis makes sense, to an extent, but I think that after 10 years of factional warfare, we can see that it’s a losing strategy for the long term. Nobody wins elections based on a pure politics of from-the-heart conviction. But opportunism and practicality can’t be your whole argument. Actually picking fights about important public-policy questions — not fights with the far left but fights with the establishment and the status quo — makes you seem more authentic and interesting. Picking these fights could also help push back against the sense that moderates practice an inherently dreary politics of limits and “no, you can’t do that.” I think there’s something genuinely inspiring about an agenda that uses abundant housing, rapid economic growth in blue states, and low crime to unlock new avenues of opportunity. It’s really shameful for New York and California to be worse at teaching kids to read than Mississippi, and it would be really amazing if the results achieved by their public school systems were commensurate with the resources invested.

The collective action problem around taking on the groups is real, but a presidential campaign could provide a good context for doing so.

Since moderates are better at winning votes, they’ll always have a tactical argument at their disposal. But I think there are a lot of closeted True Believers out there who right now are so afraid of losing to leftists that they forget to actually be different from the leftists they’re afraid of. That needs to change.

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Most of the many Democratic primaries this summer have featured a moderate-versus-progressive split.

And, to an extent, that’s just what you’d expect from a primary. When candidates run against each other, they need to differentiate themselves in some way and the result is typically a bit of an ideological divide, even when that’s not strongly supported by the candidates’ records.

Less typical, though, was this primary season’s marked and fairly coherent left-wing insurgency: Graham Platner in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander in New York, all of whom upset the apple cart.

It’s tempting to shorthand everything that happened over the course of the primary season in terms of this insurgency — not only are those races scored as progressive victories over moderates, but so are wins by Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Phil Weiser in Colorado.

But I think that’s a little perverse.

Flanagan and Weiser were both statewide elected officials who were arguably “next in line” for the races they won. What’s more, while I think you can really say that the candidates they beat (Angie Craig and Michael Bennet, respectively) are more moderate than your average Democrat, that’s actually not true of a lot of the candidates the insurgents beat. In particular, many of the House incumbents who got knocked off, if anything, had political profiles very similar to Flanagan — they were Medicare for All proponents, ICE abolitionists, etc.

In fact, I think a lot of these simplistic characterizations of the 2026 primaries elide the existence of what I’d argue is the largest and most important faction in the Democratic Party.

Let’s call it the Progressive Establishment.

What is the Progressive Establishment? Think of those who favored Barack Obama’s second term leftward pivots or the people who supported Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 but were glad that his presence in the race held her feet to the fire and forced her to tack left on policy. The people who thought Elizabeth Warren in 2020 offered the best of both worlds.

In the House, there are almost 100 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Most of these people do not have the fame and personalistic following of Bernie Sanders or second-generation Berners like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But they have dramatically more formal institutional clout grounded in a big network of progressive foundations, donor tables, and grant-funded NGOs. And if you can’t conceptualize them as a distinct force in Democratic Party politics, you can’t understand the party today.

The left’s intense policy-demanders

National party leaders are much fonder of the Progressive Establishment than they are the Insurgent Left, but in many ways, I find the Progressive Establishment more problematic.

But the leaders and I have an opposite view of this precisely because we see the same thing: the Progressive Establishment is made up of really intense policy-demanders. They care a lot about getting leadership to agree that the Keystone XL pipeline is bad or that voter ID laws are racist or that infrastructure investments have project labor agreements attached. The Progressive Establishment wants members to sign on the dotted line, and when they do, those members become kosher.

The Progressive Establishment also more or less plays by the rules of friendly politics.

Tina Smith’s retirement opened up a Senate seat in Minnesota, so Peggy Flanagan ran for it. She’s more progressive than Amy Klobuchar, but there’s no universe in which Flanagan would have challenged Klobuchar in a primary. In the open seat primary that emerged, Flanagan ran to Angie Craig’s left and hit Craig hard for not being as dogmatic a progressive as she is. But if, instead of retiring, Tina Smith had resigned and Craig had been picked for the vacancy, it’s again impossible to imagine Flanagan running against her. Flanagan is essentially a regular normie Democrat. She’s left-wing, but she doesn’t see that as inconsistent with being a regular normie Democrat because the Democrats are a left-wing party.

You also see this in the contrast between Graham Platner and Troy Jackson, who replaced him on the ticket.

When Jackson was running for governor, Platner endorsed him. They’re generally like-minded, and it’s tough to spot concrete policy differences between them. But Jackson is an experienced Democratic Party politician who mostly gets along with his colleagues. He’s running a banal partisan campaign against Susan Collins and it’s being received as such. Platner’s whole campaign was both a breathtaking exercise in line-jumping and also full of Bernie-style hostility to the institutional Democratic Party. It was a rhetorical mode that was well-suited to the audacious job of running against a sitting governor, but it also rubbed lots of Democrats the wrong way.

Jackson is the Progressive Establishment; Platner was part of the insurgency.

These two groups obviously work together and collaborate at times, but the opposite is also true.

The chief of staff to the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus went on to run the Biden administration’s Office of Presidential Personnel. As a result, C.P.C. elected officials got a lot of say over domestic policy staffing. At the time, many people remarked on the large influx of Warrenite personnel into the Biden administration. Bernie supported that, but there were no senior Bernie staffers or vocal Bernie 2016 endorsers in the administration, because the insurgency is fundamentally about the idea that the insurgents should take over the party, while the Progressive Establishment is much more about scoring specific policy wins.

It’s easy to conceptualize the insurgents as simply being “even further left,” but in a lot of ways they’re just more flexible on policy. As far as the Insurgent Left is concerned, Mamdani can be as tough on crime as he feels like, because he’s one of them and they trust his judgments — criminal-justice-reform groups might complain, but he can blow them off. The Progressive Establishment is much more of a leaderless, networked phenomenon, an endless logroll that can’t really move off its demands.

The dominant faction

Part of what’s frustrating to moderates right now is that the drama over the Insurgent Left has managed to largely erase the existence of the Progressive Establishment, creating a sense that party leadership, incumbent officeholders, and the Democratic Party status quo are all aligned around moderation.

I will happily concede that the Biden-Harris administration was not, on a personnel level, an administration of insurgents or Bernie Sanders loyalists. And on foreign policy issues in general and the Israel-Gaza war in particular, Biden hewed very much to a line that was in keeping with his whole long personal identity as a fairly hawkish moderate Democrat. But much of the current discourse has consisted of the Insurgent Left and the Progressive Establishment teaming up to insist that voter discontent with Gaza was the main problem the Biden administration faced, when the bad issues for him were clearly centered on the economy, on border/immigration issues, and on the diffuse sense that his administration was not the return to normalcy that he promised.

The surprisingly sweeping nature of the Biden policy agenda reflected the circumstances of the pandemic and the ideas of the Progressive Establishment. The agenda came from the progressive think tanks and the progressive advocacy infrastructure and was driven by the insertion into key roles of personnel who believed that being responsive to progressive advocacy infrastructure was the most important thing.

It’s not, of course, that the Progressive Establishment got its way on every single issue. But I do think that with Biden’s domestic policy, the question was always whether ideas emanating from the Progressive Establishment would be adopted.

The Biden administration undertook no significant moderate or reformist initiatives of any kind. There was no equivalent to Bill Clinton’s welfare reform or Barack Obama’s push for performance pay for K-12 teachers.

The Progressive Establishment, to be fair, did the work. They did the organizing, built the media infrastructure, persuaded elites, and basically called the tune. It’s embarrassing for them that it didn’t work well, but objective observers of the scene should acknowledge that this is what happened. The Insurgent Left augurs a new approach to Israel, involves running some perhaps-unwise electoral risks (there’s way more downside to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan than to less-edgy Peggy Flanagan in bluer Minnesota), and threatens to make life uncomfortable for incumbents. But it’s an insurgency against a set of party leaders who already embraced the bulk of the progressive agenda in large part because (except on Israel) the donors party leaders listen to are very progressive.

Conversely, I think moderates are excessively focused on complaining about the insurgents.

It’s true that as a matter of causation, a big reason that Democrats have moved so far left over the past 10 or 15 years is the activity of the Insurgent Left. But in terms of what specifically is happening, the story is that party leaders keep ceding more and more decision-making to the Progressive Establishment, not that insurgents have won all the primaries and taken over. If people who want Democrats to be more willing to say “no” to the groups want to win the argument, we need to make the right argument. The Progressive Establishment dominates the legislatures of almost every blue state. Someone like Abigail Spanberger who’s trying to chart a prudent course for Virginia and keeps clashing with progressives in the legislature as a result isn’t battling with a small band of insurgent leftists; she’s dealing with mainstream progressive advocacy infrastructure.

The insurgent future

When it comes to the future of the Democratic Party, a major known unknown is the actual future of the Insurgent Left.

If Bernie Sanders were younger, the answer would be obvious — he would run again in 2028 and try to win this time. But he’s not younger.

Many assume Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is next in line to be Bernie’s successor as the insurgent leader, but she seems somewhat ambivalent about running. Ro Khanna more obviously has the mix of ambition and egomania that it takes to run for president, but he’s not nearly as well liked as A.O.C. Zohran Mamdani seems to have all the right attributes, but he’s constitutionally ineligible.

The Insurgent Left is very specifically defined by Bernie Sanders. He is the dominant figure, and he has a strong personalistic following that lets him flip-flop from insisting that Biden stay on the ticket even after his disastrous debate performance at the very height of the fighting in Gaza to making Israel the dominant factional issue of 2026. If he passes the baton to A.O.C. in a very clear way, then maybe she just takes this role over. And obviously if he passes the baton and she runs for president and she wins the nomination and then she beats JD Vance, that’s the end of the story — the insurgency will be over because it will have won.

But if she doesn’t run, then it seems like the movement will probably fragment and be absorbed into the larger Progressive Establishment as its members amass seniority.

I think that would be a shame.

Because for all I disagree with the Insurgent Left, I do think their strong leader model and appetite for risk mean they have more upside. Mamdani had a bunch of bad beliefs about housing policy, but he was persuaded of the merits of zoning reform and market-rate construction and as a result he has a good team running those issue areas and is trying to make constructive changes. The Progressive Establishment is structurally incapable of doing anything other than endless everything bagels and really can’t be fixed because its core advocacy infrastructure exists to perform coalition management rather than analyze issues.

The one Insurgent Left figure in a really key race, Abdul El-Sayed, is currently down in the polls in a way that is remarkable given the fundamentals in Michigan. That’s a big problem. But it’s a problem that I think is fixable if he digs in and tries, and the only real question is whether he’ll be adequately motivated to try.

I have no idea what’s in his heart or what he’ll do. But I do think the insurgent movement understands that if he wins his race, that will be a serious coup for them, while if he loses, it’ll be a serious setback.

And for a movement that’s more focused on personalities than on policy minutiae, that means there’s a powerful incentive to try to do what it takes to win — their approach stands in contrast to a Progressive Establishment mindset, which holds that the highest value is to stay on the good side of an endless array of advocacy groups. Ideally, of course, I would just like politicians I agree with to win all the primaries. But failing that, I’d rather have self-confident insurgents than an endless parade of interest group goo.

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Last week’s Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin ended in a shocking result given democratic socialist candidate Francesca Hong’s wide lead in every poll leading up to the election. After weeks of panic from electability-minded Democrats, Milwaukee Co…

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I’m of two minds about the “Woke 1 was crazy” discourse.

1. I agree with those who find this to be inadequately apologetic to the individuals whose lives and careers were unjustifiably upended.

2. No one likes to admit that they were wrong about anything, and if this evasive formulation allows people to shift to new, better views, that’s good.

I’ll offer this Idrees Kahloon article in The Atlantic if you want a taste of (1), but there are lots of articles along those lines and, rather than chime in with one of my own, I want to make a different observation: Whatever you think Woke 1 was, it arose under structural conditions that are very much still with us and that extend well beyond the specific politics of the left.

Many of the themes that dominated Woke 1 discourse have died down. And institutional leaders, to their credit, have gotten a lot better at not reacting in a dysfunctional way to social-media outrage mobs.

But it’s still very much the case that in a world without strong gatekeepers, false or absurd ideas can spread like wildfire and become a kind of instant conventional wisdom.

And what I personally remember most bitterly about Woke 1 is not the behavior of the most hysterical people; it’s the behavior of the people who knew perfectly well that others were behaving hysterically and who carefully avoided saying false or insane things (that’s how you can know that they knew) but who also avoided actively contesting them.

This was, for the most part, savvy behavior.

Those who actually said nutty things have suffered for it to an extent, which is exactly why there’s now this effort to slink away from them. But those who ended up on the wrong side of Woke 1 fads also suffered. The winners were those who ducked the storm — budget experts who knew it wasn’t true that cities spend more money on police than schools but didn’t say so — and emerged with their reputations unscathed.

That incentive structure to avoid being the “well, actually” guy is still very much with us and means that any kind of discourse could go wildly off the rails. And unfortunately, while we are now deeply into an anti-woke backlash on the right, the backlash isn’t taking the form of resisting the poor epistemic practices of the woke left — it’s resisting the value of caring about the weak and unfortunate while replicating the same toxic dynamics.

It’s what it says about you

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The University of Tulsa announced earlier this week that it would cut annual undergraduate tuition and fees from $54,000 to $25,000, starting in fall 2027. Current students will see their current financial aid pac…

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After a very contentious primary season, I think Democrats are now mostly locked and loaded with what’s a broadly reasonable slate of candidates in the key races, albeit certainly not my favorite candidate in all cases.

Strikingly, though, what Democrats do not have is any semblance of a national agenda — no set of policies that they are running on. Back last fall, I pulled these six items from section 5.5 of the moderate manifesto “Deciding to Win,” along with each item’s net favorable rating in a fair poll test that features explicit partisan framing and counterarguments:

• Ban congressional stock trading (+34)

• Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing (+31)

• Raise the minimum wage to $12 (+22)

• Crack down on tax evasion (+18)

• Spend on reducing lead pollution (+14)

• Guarantee abortion rights nationally before 12 weeks (+13)

What I like about this agenda is that these are all ideas to move the policy status quo in a progressive direction, but they are also all ideas that moderates should be comfortable with. You could imagine Mary Peltola or Roy Cooper embracing these six ideas while distancing themselves from the national left in other respects and also imagine Abdul El-Sayed saying he’d like to go much further in a number of areas but is excited to work with a broad range of colleagues on these six items after Democrats win the majority. So why not do it? Maybe cut the lead thing and find something more explicitly affordability-focused like “end the Trump tariffs.”

Tex Pasley: What happens in the alternate history where Ulysses S. Grant sides with the majority of his cabinet and signs the Inflation Bill of 1874?

The context here is that there was a significant financial crisis known as the Panic of 1873 that plunged the world into recession. Back during the Civil War, the American government had started issuing fiat money (“greenbacks”) as a wartime exigency and then shifted back to hard money policies during peacetime. Many members of Congress believed that it would be appropriate to respond to the banking panic by issuing more greenbacks, and they wrote the Inflation Bill of 1874 to accomplish this.

I do not have a really clear answer to the question of what would have happened to American history if Grant had signed this bill, because there is a lot of technical disagreement as to what the bill would even have accomplished.

Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their monumental “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960” downplay the significance of the bill even as they are sharply critical of the deflationary monetary regime of the era. They focus instead on “The Crime of 1873” — the decision to stop using silver as backing for American currency — and some stuff related to reserve requirements at banks. If Friedman and Schwartz are right about this, then vetoing the Inflation Bill was not actually very significant and the key thing is that Grant should have vetoed the Coinage Act of 1873. That said, Charles Calomiris’s 1992 article on greenbacks says that Friedman and Schwartz are wrong and the Inflation Bill would in fact have been efficacious in halting the deflationary spiral and reviving the economy.

This all turns out to be pretty significant because Democrats won a huge landslide in the 1874 House elections and then ended up with the razor-close 1876 presidential election. That race ended up being hotly disputed and Republicans ultimately “won” it by making a deal with Democrats to end Reconstruction.

If you imagine the Grant administration pursuing a more successful monetary policy, whether you see that as focused on the Inflation Bill or the Coinage Act, then Democrats would have made smaller gains in the 1874 midterms and, more importantly, Rutherford B. Hayes would have carried New York and Indiana in 1876 so the whole disputed election scenario would have been avoided. It strains credulity to argue that a strong Hayes administration would have single-handedly saved the Reconstruction project. The fact is that Democrats were bound to win power sooner or later and (unfortunately) ensuring equal voting rights for African Americans was not a winning issue for Republicans with Northern whites. That being said, four more years of federal backing would have mattered to things like the viability of the Readjuster Party, Virginia’s biracial anti-Democratic coalition, and the fusionist episode in North Carolina, when Republicans and Populists joined forces to wrest control from Democrats.

But the other thing about avoiding the sordid compromise that resolved the 1876 election is that Republicans’ willingness to sell out Reconstruction in order to hold the White House cast a retrospective air of opportunism around the whole thing. Obviously one aspect of voting rights for Black Americans that Republicans liked was that it helped them win elections. In the wake of the compromise, I think the dominant understanding in white America became that this was really the only thing at stake. That the corrupt Grant administration and (later) the “Stalwart” faction of the Republican Party supported voting rights for corrupt, opportunistic reasons.

I don’t want to deny that some opportunism was in play (clearly it was) but, in retrospect, I think we also see voting rights as genuinely one of the most profound moral issues of American history. If Reconstruction had ended in 1881 or 1885 under a Democratic administration that won fair and square and willingly chose to wear the black hat on enforcement of the 15th Amendment, then the whole way this issue played out in the rest of American history would have looked different, and it’s more plausible that a subsequent G.O.P. administration in the 1890–1960 period would have tried to take meaningful action.

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This is part of a larger class of phenomena where political consequences that are very interesting to normal people are driven by extremely tedious technical minutiae of monetary policy.

That’s because monetary policy is almost unique in the landscape for its mix of being extremely boring and not the kind of thing a normal person has strong convictions about but also being extremely consequential for short-term economic prosperity, which in turn is a huge deal for election outcomes.

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, to take probably the most important example of this, had a lot of deep roots in the ideological foundations of German nationalism and the trauma of World War I. But Germany was also in a very deep recession in 1932 and pulled out of said recession fairly quickly once Hitler took power. People talk a lot about the hyperinflation of the early Weimar years (1919–23), but that was successfully brought under control. In 1928, with the economy ravaged neither by inflation nor by depression, the Nazi Party finished in ninth place with 2.6 percent of the vote. The Communists were in fourth at 10.6 percent. By 1930, the Depression was in full swing and the Nazis were in second place and the Communists were in third. If the Brüning cabinet had a more effective monetary response to the economic crisis, you can imagine that the neither-Nazi-nor-Communist parties would have done a bit better in 1930 and way better in 1932 and Nazism doesn’t happen. Instead, Hitler took power and the country experienced a rapid economic recovery that entrenched him swiftly.

On a smaller scale, you also see this with Trump and 2016. There are all kinds of deep reasons behind his rise. But the election was extremely close, and I was saying at the time that it was a mistake of Janet Yellen to be preemptively tightening monetary conditions while inflation remained below 2 percent. I think it’s very plausible that slightly different decision-making from the Fed would have led to slightly more votes for Hillary Clinton and thus a very different trajectory of recent American history.

The moral of the story is that for all the ink that gets spilled on hot-button political disputes, the single most underrated thing in politics is getting the technical aspects of macroeconomic policy right.

Owen Gwilliam: Purportedly there is a canon of books that plays a large role in Silicon Valley’s understanding of the world and its role in it, with Patrick Collison offering an attempt at a list and with Tanner Greer offering an assessment (Greer jokes “In Washington people never read books—they just write them.”)

If you could add a book or two to this Silicon Valley canon, what would you suggest?

Collison is trying to be descriptive in terms of listing books that he believes are widely read in Silicon Valley and influential in shaping people’s understanding of how the world works. I would not attempt to argue with him about this or add anything because he would know much better than I would. My observation of tech executives and venture capitalists is that relative to their interests, intelligence, and basic worldview they tend to have weird crank opinions about macroeconomics.

You can see that in everything from Blake Scholl casually endorsing the gold standard this week to how Marc Andreessen used to insist that G.D.P. was mismeasuring the economic impact of the internet using a wildly invalid methodology. That latter opinion was incredibly widespread 10 or 15 years ago and has now vanished because Tyler Cowen spent a lot of time specifically debunking it and tech guys (per Collison’s list) like to read Tyler Cowen. I’m all for reading Marginal Revolution, which is great, but like any good blog its interests are a little bit idiosyncratic and Cowen hasn’t written much about the gold standard issue since 2012 or so. I might recommend Friedman’s “Money Mischief” as an accessible introduction to this basic topic that would prevent people from making dumb mistakes.

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Robert Frodeman: Is it time to revisit the narrative about the 2021 Afghan withdrawal? I remain puzzled why the view took hold that this was a disaster for Biden. The war had gone on way too long, losing lives and treasure; he was boxed in by Trump’s prior agreement; and while 13 deaths were a tragedy isn’t that a low number comparatively?

While I have many criticisms of the Biden presidency, I have always thought the media treatment of this episode was shameful and unfair. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was the right strategic move for the United States. The deaths of the 13 service members are very sad. But over the course of 20 years of war there were 2,459 military deaths, plus nearly 2,000 civilian contractors, more than a dozen C.I.A. personnel, and many dead from various allied nations to say nothing of the Afghan death toll. The whole episode struck me as shamefully successful media manipulation by the architects of an egregious failure that was many years in the making, allowing them to duck blame for their own conduct and instead shift the entire focus onto second-guessing the details of a withdrawal under fire rather than looking at the broad strokes of a massive policy failure.

BBDC: Given how much of an anti establishment mood the electorate is in, I’m worried about the habit that media outlets, commentators and takesters have of using the words “moderate” and “establishment” (or “establishment backed”) interchangeably regardless of the actual backgrounds and experiences of the candidates involved. How can moderate members and candidates successfully position themselves to voters as outsiders? And how can we get journalists and commentators to stop using this lazy language?

Longer post on this coming, but I want to introduce a richer understanding of the factional landscape. There is a relatively small but very noisy real leftist insurgent movement afoot in the party right now. But there is also a much larger and more practically influential “progressive establishment” that the insurgency sometimes targets (as in Melat Kiros versus Diana DeGette) but sometimes champions (as in Peggy Flanagan versus Angie Craig). There’s also a bunch of moderately moderate politicians like Craig and the whole New Dem caucus in the House. Then there is also a small and not that noisy — but I believe growing — group of true moderates like the House Blue Dogs and hopefully Mary Peltola soon. This group is, as I’ve said before, a centrist faction trying to mount a centrist critique of the Clinton / Biden / Harris / Schumer progressive establishment, not trying to defend that status quo.

But, yes, I think moderates need to be as clear and aggressive as possible that we are not arguing for continuation of the Biden-Warren synthesis on domestic policy or are here in life to just prop up Chuck Schumer. I’ve expressed to Third Way’s leaders that while I agree with them that the D.S.A. is bad, I think front-loading an anti-D.S.A. message turns moderates into dupes for an establishment that doesn’t listen to us about anything.

Conversely, while I will not try to claim Luke Bronin as a huge warrior for moderation, he’s an abundance guy who is part of The Bench’s generally pretty moderate slate and he just knocked off an incumbent House member who scored the Working Families Party endorsement. Which is just to say you don’t have to be a leftist to practice anti-establishment politics. You just need some balls.

policy wank: How do you think about applying YIMBYism to a tony vacation destination like Cape Cod where it does sort of seem like the place could be “ruined” by a substantial increase in density?

I’m writing this from my vacation house in a remote town in coastal Maine, so I’m not going to say that I am indifferent to the force of the point that some people like their vacation destinations to be a certain way. But I ultimately don’t think this is a particularly compelling argument.

Suppose more housing is being built in Brooklin, Maine, and stipulate that this is handled in a way that aligns with good-faith issues about well water and septic systems but not just rank NIMBYism or status quo bias. As supply expands, you may run out of additional people who want houses here at which point densification will halt. It’s also possible that there is some increment of new supply such that it generates a reduction in demand, which means that the halting point arrives sooner than if you model it purely as “keep building homes until everyone who wants one gets one.” Either way, a new equilibrium eventually arises that has higher overall welfare and economic prosperity than under the old equilibrium. So that’s good.

Now obviously doing radical upzoning just in one random coastal town is a kind of weird idea that would lead to weird outcomes. In principle what you ought to do is upzone all the towns in Maine simultaneously. That would lead to a larger aggregate improvement in the state’s economic well-being but (probably) a smaller disruption in any given town.

The broader point I would make here is that while preferences vary, so does the built environment of coastal communities in the United States. And essentially all different kinds of coastal places are considered desirable. I am not all that familiar with Cape Cod, but my recollection is that it’s incredibly dense compared with Maine. When I looked up the numbers, I saw that Barnstable County in Massachusetts has 581 people per square mile versus 362 in Cumberland County, which is Maine’s densest county and contains Portland and its suburbs. Of course with vacation communities population density can be misleading, but to the eyeball test this area, which is quaint and rural by Massachusetts standards, is indeed highly urbanized by Maine standards.

So if coastal Maine densified and became similar to Cape Cod, some people would feel that it was ruined — but lots of people love Cape Cod. Similarly, if Cape Cod densified, some people would feel that it was ruined (those people might start vacationing in Maine), but other people might like it better. Miami Beach is very popular. So is Ocean City, Md.

When I went to very dense Juan-les-Pins in France, I thought it was incredibly cool.

The French Riviera has a totally different vibe from a rural getaway, but it is a popular and world-renowned destination. One thing is that while there are for sure congestion disamenities in a vacation getaway, there are also benefits. A beach town with lots of people in it has more varied restaurants and more competition between them. I love spending my summers up here, but it’s hard to see movies when you’re 70 minutes from the nearest theater, and there was no way to catch “The Odyssey” in IMAX.

To make a long story short, I am trying not to be inhuman about this. I am as prone to status quo bias and nostalgia about the particular places I love as anyone else. But there’s a high economic cost to preventing construction where demand is high, and, viewed objectively, people do seem to like all kinds of coastal destinations. These places aren’t actually “ruined” by change.

C-Man: Matt - you mentioned having done transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression. 1) Without too many details, what made you decide to try it (therapist’s suggestion / psychiatrist’s prescription, ineffective medications, etc.)? 2) Did it work?

I was annoyed by some of the side effects of medication and Dr. Google suggested that T.M.S. might be a viable alternative. I believe it’s only actually approved for depression that is resistant to medication and that’s the only case in which insurance will cover it. But I paid out of pocket and thought it worked great. The caveat you are supposed to flag here is that compared to a pill it is very difficult to do a proper double-blind placebo test because having your brain zapped with the magnets feels like someone is hitting you in the head. That being said, even if it only works because of the placebo effect, that still works.

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Yesterday, I mentioned Abdul El-Sayed’s updated messaging on Medicare for All as a promising example of him trying to win over moderate voters. This is also the issue on which I think it makes the most sense for moderate Democrats to broadly embrace what the leftists are saying. But coming together around Medicare for All also means thinking more seriously about what Medicare for All means because you have to go from a slogan to an actual program.

Yesterday’s post was free for all to read, but today’s is for paid subscribers.

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“Medicare for All” is an appealing slogan for two related reasons.

One is that “Medicare” is the name of a program that exists and is already widely used and popular. Taking a popular and widely used thing and giving it to everyone has a kind of obvious appeal that’s lacking in many proposals for sweeping change.

The other is that while most people disagree with most of the values and worldview of secular cosmopolitan liberals, on health care specifically the mass public’s high-level ideological view is basically aligned with progressives’.

Health policy involves a lot of fussy details, and there are plenty of more specific left-wing policy ideas that may be unworkable or at odds with public opinion. But voters fundamentally reject the idea that whether or not sick people get care (or healthy people get preventative treatment) should be left up to the market or depend on ability to pay.

This broad principle, though, greatly under-determines what the policy should actually look like. In the real world, we can’t actually provide unlimited quantities of free on-demand health-care services to everybody, and the fact that this is an appealing moral vision doesn’t change the fact that we can’t do it.

So the question becomes how to instantiate these values in a way that is workable.

Different countries have come up with different answers, and to the extent that the specific proposal that American leftists call “Medicare for All” looks like any of those models, it seems derived from the health-care system of Canada. But going back to the fact that part of the appeal of the slogan is that people are in favor of Medicare, the actually existing health program for senior citizens, it would be smarter for “Medicare for All” to look a lot more like American Medicare.

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Unlike the other books we’ve covered so far on the podcast, I was already a teenage news junkie when this one came out, so I fully participated in the Bowling Alone Discourse at the time. In fact, I was a student at the very college where the author taught when it was published, so Robert Putnam’s ideas and his critics were all around me.

With that vantage point, I was genuinely surprised by how few pages are occupied by the central metaphor about bowling and by how well I think Putnam’s arguments hold up in retrospect. In particular, controversial-at-the-time forecasts about things like an imminent collapse of American churchgoing and skepticism that the internet would provide a viable alternative to the social role of in-person interaction have been vindicated.

My Co-Host Jerusalem, who is a bit younger and coming to the book with a different context, is less impressed. She points out that the causal chains linking Putnam’s preferred kinds of organizations to good outcomes are a bit convoluted and unclear. And she situates his broad argument as part of a 21st-century backlash to liberalism and individualism that she believes is having pernicious effects in the present day.

We agree, I think, that there is a mismatch between the modest share of the text of the book that is dedicated to discussing television and the substantive role it plays in his story. By Putnam’s own account, roughly half the decline in social capital is caused by people watching more and more television over time and thus crowding out all other kinds of activities — a point that resonates in a world of ubiquitous streaming video. But he doesn’t spend that many pages on this point, and none of his proposed solutions confront it directly. Jerusalem also raises the possibility that it may be the video content itself that generates bad outcomes rather than the decline in social capital.

We get into all this and more — including more details about bowling — over the course of a rich and in-depth conversation. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Paid subscribers can watch the ad-free embedded video at the top of this post and read the full transcript below.

WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE

New episodes post every Thursday.

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to tax homeowners who have high-value secondary residences in New York City hit a hurdle Monday when Staten Island Judge Wayne Ozzi ordered a pause on the pied-à-terre tax rollout. The decision came just days aft…

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Since September of 2025, my number one anxiety about the midterm Senate map has been Michigan.

Gary Peters, the incumbent, is 67, which is like a teenager in Senator Years. He would have coasted to re-election in a favorable national political climate for Democrats. Republicans are opting to re-run Mike Rogers, who lost this seat two years ago when Donald Trump was popular and carried Michigan. Beating him when Trump has a 38 percent approval rating isn’t brain surgery.

And yet, as I wrote last fall:

The state I’m sweating is Michigan. I’d expect a generic Democrat to beat a generic Republican in a Trump midterm climate in this purple state. But the left is making a strong play to win this nomination with Abdul El-Sayed, who’s a very nice, very smart person, but I just see no reason to think that voters in this slightly red state are particularly excited about an unusually left-wing Democrat.

To make matters worse, the party establishment decided to line up behind Haley Stevens as the electable alternative. Stevens is an unremarkable mainstream House Democrat on ideology, but she has literally the worst wins-above-replacement (WAR) rating among the six House Democrats from Michigan.

I said back then that Mallory McMorrow would be the best option, but that obviously didn’t work out, and we ended up with the Stevens vs. El-Sayed showdown. It’s worth noting that while McMorrow was the best of the three candidates, there were easily a half-dozen potential nominees1 who at least on paper would have been better.

Dan Rosenheck from The Economist published a piece after the primary wrapped up concluding that El-Sayed is a very weak candidate, such that he thinks Michigan is now a coin toss despite the generic ballot’s distinct blue lean. Elliott Morris offered a counter-take that there’s no reason to believe Stevens would have done better than El-Sayed.

I think both of those takes are interesting but probably overstated by relying too heavily on polling done right at the apex of a very heated primary campaign.

Naturally, El-Sayed and Stevens slagging each other so relentlessly drove up negative sentiment toward both candidates and made them look weak. But within days of the primary wrapping up, Stevens was endorsing him, he was praising her, and the whole statewide ticket was doing a joint photo op.

It’s easy to lose sight of these things in the heat of the moment, but the reason the primary focused so heavily on Israel is that the policy differences between the left and center on 97 percent of issues are either small or unclear. The left has won a lot of notable primary victories against politicians (Diana DeGette, Dan Goldman, Adriano Espaillat) who were not clearly differentiated from their opponent on non-Israel issues. That’s a fascinating trend that will irrevocably alter the U.S.-Israel relationship, but it doesn’t change the fact that most voters (and most politicians!) don’t care very much about this and it’s easy to patch things up.

My view from 50,000 feet is that our generic expectation should be that Stevens would have slightly underperformed a generic Democrat (which is to say she would have won easily) while El-Sayed will probably deliver an electoral performance similar to what we see from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (which is to say he’ll win narrowly). There are a million complications and nuances, and the future isn’t set in stone. But the Michigan primary essentially pitted a generic Democrat with slightly subpar communications skills against a charismatic Democrat with a leftist political identity, so that’s my baseline expectation.

And if El-Sayed maintains that political profile, my recommendation would be to vote for him but to save your donation money for more-aligned, more strategic candidates. Still, when I spoke with El-Sayed (admittedly, years ago), he was certainly better-informed about health policy than your average elected official. And if you’re going to have a left-wing political persona, health care and Israel are probably the two best issues to be identified with.

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So I think if he’s smart and focused and disciplined and pragmatic, he can win over moderate voters and not only win the race but win soundly — the way you’d have expected a Peters or a Jocelyn Benson to win. And I think the smart play for people with moderate commitments is to neither freak out nor bend the knee but try to get to yes.

The promise of normie Muslim politics

I had a Bangladeshi-American friend in college who I thought of as one of the more politically conservative people I knew. He was religiously observant and very much sympathized with his small-business-owner parents’ perspective that red tape and government overregulation were big problems. He was friendly to immigrants, but this was the George W. Bush era so that didn’t mark him out. But he also had a kind of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” worldview that you often see in second-generation immigrants.

So I was a little surprised to learn he had pretty far-left opinions about Israel.

But that was naive of me. Of course, religiously observant Muslim small-business owners have a lot of right-of-center political attitudes while also holding views that align with the American left on specific questions about Israel and racial profiling of Muslims. This is the reason the Black church has become a central pillar of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.

And if you look at Zohran Mamdani’s tenure, I think a lot of his best moments are grounded in that kind of politics. He wants to remove regulatory burdens on food cart operators and has come around to taking crime seriously.

Of course, he’s operating in New York City, which is a much more left-wing jurisdiction than Michigan. But I think that just means El-Sayed would do well to lean harder into that kind of politics. What does the typical immigrant small-business owner think about shoplifting, for example? The question of whether we should take punishing property crimes seriously is exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t come up in Democratic primaries but that meaningfully contributes to swing voters’ concerns about Democrats. Most women who wear a headscarf (and most of their husbands) almost certainly have views on transgender issues that are closer to those of the median voter than to the views you often hear from Democratic politicians.

I think tennis star Coco Gauff just modeled a humane and common sense way to discuss the sports issue. And I think someone with El-Sayed’s profile and identity is ideally situated to sell the left on the idea that a broad populist political coalition can’t just slap away people with traditionalist views about gender — especially views that are shared by 60 percent of the public.

By the same token, second-generation immigrants like El-Sayed are perfectly situated to channel the normie moderate take that openness to immigration is good for the United States and that it should be orderly and lawful.

The Biden-era border chaos was a genuine failure, and the loss of control was a disservice to millions of lawful immigrants. We need to roll back the insanity and excess of the Trump era without re-opening the doors to unselective onrushes of asylum claims.

Perhaps El-Sayed doesn’t believe any of this stuff and would never say it in a million years. But these are all moderate views that don’t contradict what he outlined on the campaign trail and that seem authentic to his basic biography and identity.

Michigan First, not Palestine First

Then there’s Israel. I’ll note here that he had two different campaign messages on the topic, one good and one bad.

The good message was when he told Axios he was the most America First candidate in the race, because “when you keep our money here rather than sending it to some other country’s war machine, that’s America First.” He told Kaitlan Collins that he’s against unconditional military aid to Israel but would also apply that exact same standard to Egypt or Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates “and that’s not because of a focus on what’s happening anywhere. [It’s because of] a focus on what’s happening here.” He noted that there are very poor neighborhoods in Michigan and they deserve the money more than those foreign countries.

This is a good message that’s correct on the merits. While I appreciate that pro-Israel groups have helped moderate Democrats win primaries, the standard pro-Israel view that the United States should donate billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to Israel per year does not make sense.

The problem I have with El-Sayed on Israel is that this position he outlined to Axios is not actually what his position on the issue is. What he says on his website is that he wants an “immediate arms embargo on Israel” and to restore American funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

His ambiguity on this is not unique. The pro-Palestine advocacy movement as a whole makes a lot of hay out of opposition to American financial support for Israel, which they rightly identify as a political winner. But the movement is not a movement of budget hawks who want to reduce wasteful spending; it’s a movement that wants to do whatever it takes to achieve its vision of Palestinian liberation.

I don’t expect El-Sayed to change his convictions about this.

But he should recognize that he won the argument against AIPAC-backed Stevens with the message that he was going to focus on solving Michigan’s problems. He’s going to face another cavalcade of AIPAC money, this time with an electorate that’s less sympathetic to Palestinians’ situation than the one he faced in the primary.

He’s going to need to push back on that money with the argument that AIPAC is pernicious and advocates for bad policies. His best argument will, once again, be the America First / solve problems at home message. Anything he can do to purge his official communications of any commitment to do anything other than prevent American tax dollars from flowing to a foreign government will help him. And because the policy he pretends to have happens to be a lot smarter and more convincing than the policy on his website, I kind of think that if he repeats it enough, he’ll talk himself into it.

El-Sayed is running to solve Michigan’s problems, not Palestine’s. That’s a viable basis for a détente between Jewish and Muslim Democrats that will let us focus on our shared interest in pluralism at home.

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A permission structure on health care

The single most important thing that El-Sayed can do to win moderate support is to leverage his credibility with the left into ending the destructive Medicare for All wars that have paralyzed the Democratic Party for the past 15 years.

For a long time now, the vast majority of Democrats have agreed that the party should move in the direction of expanded public provision of health insurance. And they have also agreed that it is extremely unlikely that the country is going to have a rapid big-bang transition to a Canadian-style single-payer health system, as El-Sayed himself said to Jonathan Cohn.

And yet in every concrete case, leftists have absolutely savaged non-leftists who put incremental ideas on the table, including even transformative ones like Pete Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It. They also (and El-Sayed has been complicit in this) insist on labeling all disagreement with the extremely specific details of the Medicare for All Act as motivated by corruption, even though the law describes a future American health-care system that would be totally unlike the systems that actually exist in Canada or any European country. This has made it extremely difficult for Democrats to come together around specific pieces of legislation that frontliners want to support.

That framing also elides the main issue here, which is that the political process has limited bandwidth for competing priorities.

There was a broad consensus on the left in 2021 that climate had to be the top priority for new spending, which naturally limited the resources available to health care. This kind of prioritization conversation is important, and I am happy to pledge my allegiance to anyone whose enthusiasm for Medicare for All means enthusiasm for health care as a progressive priority ahead in line of climate spending. That opens the door to moderate-friendly ideas like “advance clean energy with permitting reform even though that’s not greens’ first choice” and “acknowledge that there probably won’t be sweeping ICE legislation, so the 2029 immigration agenda needs to focus on strategic redeployment.”

The point is, if El-Sayed can create a permission structure for characterizing “Medicare for All” as an aspirational statement of values rather than a specific piece of legislation, he will be doing a tremendous favor to all kinds of center-left Democrats in a way that will make moderates want him to win.

Alternatively, if he continues the double game where he personally can be incremental about this but anyone else who acts that way is a pawn of the billionaire class, he’ll make people angry.

Make people want you to win

There was a kind of ebullience in moderate circles when Graham Platner’s campaign imploded, even though the result was replacing him with Troy Jackson, who has all the same policy views. The difference is that there was clearly a plan by national factional actors to leverage Platner winning, if it happened, into a campaign against other Democrats. Platner could not or would not see that, having won his primary, his interests would be best served by unifying Maine Democrats behind him rather than acting as a factional tool.

El-Sayed’s eagerness to participate in post-primary unity gestures is a positive sign in this regard.

A primary is a primary, and it’s totally fair to fight hard in one. But the best case for him is to create a situation in which moderate Democrats aren’t privately half-hoping that Dems win in Iowa and Texas while losing Michigan, just to teach the left a lesson. Moderate Democrats shouldn’t want that outcome and I’d like everyone to get to yes here.

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The biggest way to accomplish that is to be nice. Campaign with Gretchen Whitmer and Elissa Slotkin instead of Hasan Piker. Articulate a moderate view or two on something outside the pillars of the campaign. Say the words “big tent” at some point. Acknowledge, privately but clearly, that a candidate who wants financial support from the D.S.C.C. and the Senate Majority PAC is going to need to participate in normal fundraising — that you can’t spend all your time antagonizing Democratic donors and then expect their money.

Most people who work in politics are, in practice, extremely partisan. If you don’t deliberately antagonize them, it’s relatively easy to consolidate support within the party. These primaries are also fought out on relatively narrow grounds. The questions related to Israel and health care are genuinely not the issues where moderating has the most electoral value. As a factional hero, El-Sayed has a lot of running room to move to the center on other topics while minimizing backlash. He should seize the opportunity and make himself a broadly admired and well-liked figure in the party.

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The latest started with Matt Walsh making the good point that Donald Trump driving up prices with his Iran war was a huge political mistake.

Then Andrew Kolvet from Turning Point USA chimed in to say it’s not just groceries; one of his student members offered the following succinct take on affordability: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” At this point, the conservative columnist Marc Thiessen chimed in to defend the Trump administration.

And that in turn led Vice President JD Vance, who perhaps hadn’t been following this exchange closely, to make fun of Thiessen for being fat.

This illustrates the Trump Pain Cave on affordability about as well as anything I can point to. If you want to defend the Trump record, Thiessen’s argument that at the end of the day the price of takeout burritos is not a big deal is the correct one. America is not suffering from mass unemployment or runaway inflation. People are not starving. There are plenty of ways to be a lot thriftier than DoorDashing Chipotle for your family.

At the same time, Vance’s instinct that this is politically toxic is perfectly correct. And Vance and Thiessen have an argument about foreign policy in which Thiessen wrote a column criticizing Vance a few days before the burrito spat as a way of arguing that Trump should stay tough on Iran. So Vance was on a hair trigger, ready to lash out at Thiessen, and when he saw Thiessen saying something politically dumb, he pounced.

But the dumb thing Thiessen said was defending Trump’s policy choices!

Because the fact is that after winning an election in which Trump explicitly and repeatedly promised to bring down the cost of living, he’s done the reverse.

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No victory gardens for Iran

I went on Instacart and verified that I could get two pounds of chicken thighs, 16 ounces of dried pinto beans, 32 ounces of uncooked white rice, eight Mission brand burrito-sized tortillas, a bag of Great Value shredded “fiesta blend” cheese, and pico de gallo ingredients (onion, tomato, jalapeño, lime, and cilantro) for just under $20.

Alternatively, I could get eight burritos with those ingredients delivered from Chipotle, and it would cost over $110.

Of course, there are plenty of in-between options that are neither the burrito taxi nor thrift-maxxing by starting with dried beans. The point is that in an affluent society, the vast majority of people are not living anywhere near a subsistence level, even as they still feel subjective financial stresses.

Consider, for example, the economic situation facing families living in Iran, and you’ll swiftly see that a lot of people are worse off than today’s complaining Americans. During World War II, famously, Americans not only started from a much lower baseline of material prosperity but also put up with all kinds of rationing and other forms of forced and quasi-forced thrift to support the war effort. The government urged Americans to limit meat consumption to 2.5 pounds per person per week under the slogan “share the meat” and put out information promoting the consumption of “v-meats” such as tongue, liver, kidney, brains, and tripe that were exempted from rationing.

And even that was a sign of American affluence! In much of the world, it’s just totally normal for people to eat those undesirable organ meats even when not engaged in total war.

America was a very rich country in the 1940s and we are richer still in the 2020s.

The whole problem with the Trump administration’s war in Iran isn’t that the economic pain it’s inflicting on the American public is, by objective standards, all that large. The problem is that this is not World War II and the voting public has zero patience for incurring any economic pain at all.

Trump took office on an explicit promise to bring prices down and to avoid costly foreign wars. He is instead spending billions of dollars on a war that is pushing up the price of energy, fertilizer, and everything that is made out of energy and fertilizer (i.e., food), and he’s making no effort to justify the sacrifice to the public because he doesn’t want to admit that’s what he did.

Thiessen is a true-believer hawk who thinks the war is worth the price and wants to go out and make that argument. And I appreciate his intellectual honesty. But Trump and Vance know this won’t fly, so they’re left sputtering with rage at their own supporters.

Trump repeats Joe Biden’s sins

The signature facts of the current midterm election are (1) that Trump is hideously unpopular and (2) that while the G.O.P.’s generic ballot numbers are bad, they’re not nearly as bad as Trump’s approval rating.

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Some of this gap is just because even when a president gets down this low, a lot of the people who don’t like him still have very conservative policy views.

If you want to ban abortion and don’t care about helping the poor, it’s very unlikely you’ll vote for congressional Democrats no matter how mad you are at Trump. The best Democrats can reasonably hope for is that you’ll get demoralized and stay home. Still, trying to win over some of these conservative Trump-disapprovers in reach states and reach districts is in fact the key to driving a stake in MAGA, so I would urge Democrats to think about how to expand the tent and recruit edgier candidates in reach seats.

The more tractable issue is that lots of the people who are furious at Trump over the cost of living haven’t forgotten being furious at Biden over it. In tests I’ve seen, the anti-Trump message does better if it’s paired with some distancing from the Biden record to create a generalized anti-elite message.

As someone who observed the Biden administration pretty closely, I think it’s fair to say that once they grasped what a problem inflation was for them politically, they pivoted their whole message to be about the cost of living. The problem is that they didn’t really change their policies.

Their antitrust initiatives suddenly had a cost-of-living frame, but the people they put in charge explicitly wanted to overturn the consumer welfare standard. Their social spending flipped from “this will create jobs” to “this will help people with costs,” but it was still basically the same set of policies. There was nothing Biden championed that Democrats wouldn’t have done if unemployment had been higher and inflation had been lower. They took progressive economic policy ideas that they liked and put them in a cost wrapper.

And then Trump, having explicitly promised to focus on lower prices, proceeded to make policy with almost no regard for their effect on the cost of living:

• Tariffs have pushed up the cost of everything.

• The war in Iran has pushed up the cost of everything.

• The One Big Beautiful Bill raised the deficit (raising the cost of loans) while making it harder for poor people to get medical care and nutrition assistance.

This is just Trump pushing a generic MAGA policy agenda he could’ve cooked up in 2019.

We’ve seen the negative consequences of an austerity regime (regressive tax hikes and cuts to social programs) but no actual fiscal consolidation (the deficit is up thanks to regressive tax cuts), plus there’s a war that costs money and is dealing a supply-side blow to the whole global economy. Total economic growth is healthy because of the A.I. boom, but Trump’s addiction to A.I.-fueled stock-market gains also means that he won’t address export controls sensibly or account for people’s mostly valid anxieties about this technology.

To mount a proper defense of all this, you’d need to acknowledge that Trump has chosen to blow off his campaign promises in order to pursue other goals and just insist that the cost of food is ultimately not that dire.

Congressman Dan Crenshaw, for example, thinks the solution is that people should “stop whining” because “the market doesn’t care what you think something ‘should’ cost.”

He already lost a primary and doesn’t need to worry about how this will play with voters. But every Republican whose name is actually on the ballot should.

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