I like the list. A lot to unpack here. Two things I look forward to hearing more from Matt about:
1. The "policy ratchet" literature, in item 11: "This is not how politics works, it defies all the conventional wisdom, and in the case of the CTC, it involved violently misreading the 'policy ratchet' literature in a way that almost defies comprehension"
2. The question of how the South African experience influences Thiel / Sacks / Musk is really interesting along a couple of axes of interpretation. The one you mention -- how electoral democracy can lead to bad economic outcomes -- and also in terms of how to navigate a multicultural society that contains **dramatically** different cultural norms.
I totally understand how white south africans could find Democracy threatening. When your group is begins with 20% of the electorate and the other group is growing faster, you’re gonna lose, and, best case, there will be really stiff taxes, worst case reparations and expropriation. But America is completely different. Whites are 65% of the electorate and, while this share is decreasing, Latinos are assimilating and inter marrying about as quickly as their numbers are increasing. There’s a very good chance America can slowly become multiracial without upheaval.
I am not totally sure why, but America seems supernaturally gifted at assimilation. The term "multicultural" feels almost misleading because it understates the extent to which new cultures just get absorbed into the whole.
I assume it has something to do with that quote about how you can’t become French, Japanese, etc, but you can become American. If the end goal is actually achievable, there’s something to work at.
There are a number of small but significant things that add up to this. We say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school, for instance. This is important to us because without America as a country there's no such thing as an American; whereas without the country of Sweden (for instance) there's still the concept of a Swedish person.
I think this is largely just the result of a few things happening in the right order:
1. The British Empire established English as arguably the most important international language by the end of WWI and made their culture known to basically the whole planet.
2. Anglophones unified in one country got control of the entire contiguous US, an enormously overpowered geographic advantage that let their population and economy grow enormously.
3. WWII decimated much of the world right as mass media and international communications were taking off.
This firmly established a huge population of Anglophones, English as the default and most useful language worldwide, and American/British culture as understood worldwide.
This inherently makes the US good at assimilation because it requires few changes on the part of Americans: The people who come in are going to learn English fluently no later than the second generation and they're mostly going to be OK with bits of culture like Christmas and secular rule of law and blue jeans. The other FIVEYES countries of course get a similar effect.
Canada has the best immigrants, because it gets them carefully. They get industrious, hard working, law abiding types from throughout the Commonwealth. Yet even Canada is slowing down, probably because the rent in Canada is way too high.
It depends what you mean by getting the best immigrants. If you're only interested in, "of the most impressive people who move to a country they weren't born in, where do they go?" then the USA wins hands down, it has the best opportunities for impressive and successful people to become superstars or super-rich, or to work in very prestigious organizations or on very exciting projects.
But "getting the best immigrants" could also mean "how appealing is the median immigrant, as seen by existing citizens?" or "can we successfully exclude immigrants who have little to recommend them to the citizens?" By those measures, the USA's long border with a much poorer country and its overloaded immigration system are disadvantages, whereas Canada has the luxury of being inaccessible by land except from a huge country that is slightly richer per capita, puts a lot of distance between Canada and land migrants, and absorbs those migrants or deports them in the opposite direction of Canada. This means that while not being as attractive as the USA for future Nobel laureates, startup founders etc., Canada also gets fewer "low-quality" immigrants because they can't walk in.
The US is very gifted at assimilation compared to "Old Europe" (France seemed to have been doing a good job with immigration from other parts of Europe, mostly Italy and Spain, in the 19th C, although Captain Dreyfus would disagree).
It's not clear to me (YMMV) that the US is particularly standout compared to other emigrant/settler nation-states like Australia, Brazil, Mexico, even Canada**. I confess that I say that based more on anecdata and "vibes" much more than having solid time series, but e.g. the on the ground change from the White Australia of 2-3 generations back and today is pretty striking.
** the asterisk on Canada having to do with the ongoing and not really settled (from what I can tell) battles over how Francophony cashes out, both within Quebec and at the Federal level.
The French have the closest thing in Europe to the civic identity that America has achieved. There is a greater value on french culture (language and norms) than french ethnicity. Liberté, egalité, fraternité.” Maybe laïcité too.
It's the inexorable force of American pop culture. A child of immigrants will want to be an American teenager, no matter how much their parents try to stop it. Local cultural enclaves will hold the first immigrant generation. The second generation will visit and feel guilty that their kids no longer speak the language of the old country.
I have talked to a number of white South Africans who find democracy threatening, but it is not this sort of abstract principle. It's more like, worrying that if Malema and the EFF party gain power there will be anti-white-person violence. Their political theme song is all about killing white people, it's a very reasonable thing to be worried about. And I think this drives a lot of people to emigrate which I think is a totally reasonable response. (Especially if you are a skilled professional who would make more money in the US or Europe.)
In some sense, this is reaping what you sow, right? You shouldn't be surprised if a government built on racist violence falls, and then there's more political violence later. But that doesn't really reassure people like, a white woman who grew up in Cape Town and had nothing to do with any apartheid government because she was 2 years old when that fell and now is thinking hey maybe she should bring up her children elsewhere and she is just a bit worried about the effects of South African democracy in general.
And also the EFF doesn't look like it will gain power in the near future, the current coalition government seems promising IMO. So maybe it will just work out.
Just to set the facts down, in 1996 the percentage of white SAs relative to total population was 10.9%. Today it’s 7.3% and emigration is a big component of that loss. I can’t tell you if I’ve talked to the avg white SA (probably not) but the sense I get is that there continues to be a deep recognition that that apartheid was wrong. However it is also very unfortunate that Mandela was succeeded by a progressively more incompetent and corrupt Presidents of SA. Horrifically high crime rates (tho slight trending down), a murder rate about 7.5x greater than the US.
And so there is a sense that in several easy to measure ways, SA has become a much weaker economic entity, much less safe and deteriorating capital base over time.
In fact a diaspora of SA (white and black, but mostly white ) can be found in both major English speaking population centers in the, US, UK and Asia Pacific (especially Australia) and also the Netherlands.
I am sure there is a great sense of loss and disappointment and that would permeate the thinking of powerful emigrants.
The British empire and its afterglow were totally awesome for privileged white people. They were often better for no whites than the Belgian congo or dutch east indies, but ymmv.
I suspect Elon Musk would strongly agree America is different, and one could argue cutting the asylum immigration is a part of accelerating that process of assimilation and inter-marrying[1]. Separate from Musk but similar to his views, it is unsurprising Latino voters have trended less Democratic as Republicans become more of their early 20th century form on the immigration issue. Desire for social mobility within a national citizenry and desire for higher immigration are not obviously the same thing, and in some ways, can directly conflict.
At any rate, South Africa is simply a very different country from the US with very different problems (deterioration of electrical grid, potable water, air force, things we take for granted as capabilities of developed countries[2].) It seems like a basic error for leftists to analogize South Africa before and after apartheid when trying to argue with Israeli citizens about the (real) injustice of the West Bank occupation. But that's a whole other thing.
There was an NYT hit-piece on Musk's childhood that iirc was pretty bad and became a cause célèbre among people who complain about the Times self-editing. (The reporter tweeted: "Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid govt propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege. @lynseychutel & I explored his early life") It was a bit rich to suggest that the problem with Apartheid SA was "unchecked speech," and the article promised a lot more than it delivered (white fellow students said he was standoffish and stood out because he would go to Black kids birthday parties, which doesn't exactly make him look bad). But I bet there's more material for better reporters.
No, he *did* go, and his white classmates who avoided Black kids their age said that Musk didn’t have many friends that they knew. It is one of the only things I’ve read that made me think well of Musk, although it isn’t meant to
While Matt's point about the connection between electoral majoritarianism and "bad" economic policy is definitely right in terms of Musk/Thiel/Sacks' thinking, I really think there's something even broader where these guys link politics-as-such to societal decline.
None of the three are supporters of apartheid, really I think all three found and still find their country of origin to have been depressing and hopeless, and that leads them to find the idea of a mass polity governing itself and working through its disputes at the ballot box to be unserious and naive in a way more intense than people from the historically and culturally democratic NATO sphere would ever feel.
That Trumpism is a cheap and cartoonish anti-politics easily pushed to the will of oligarchs is precisely the appeal. Gangsterism reads to them as more serious than the "fantasy" of self-government. Racism per se is a bit of a red herring.
British TV shows aside, every South African I have met in America has been quite friendly. Heck, my middle school principal was an immigrant from South Africa, and he was pretty cool.
For South Africa, you can probably start with the documentary Lethal Weapon 2, it covers some of the history of the apartheid period and illustrates some examples of race relations in the culture there at the time.
I watched Lethal Weapon 2 for the first time last year. In a day and age of Tom Cruise in Top Gun 2 battling “the enemy” it sure was a (pleasant) surprise to see how anti-South Africa Hollywood was willing to be in the late-80s!
Also the George Harrison song during the credits rips.
Everyone was anti-South African. Paul Simon took a ton of heat for making Graceland, even though he was working with blacks performing black African music.
I work with a few guys from South Africa and they’re great guys, charismatic and fun. The other common denominator is that they’re cowboys; very comfortable with risk, impatient with playing it safe. For whatever that’s worth, which is probably nothing. But I see something similar with the rich guys supporting Trump.
Agree the specifics about the policy ratchet would be good to hear more about as Matt was a big proponent of some version of CTC expansion as I recall.
The South Africa question is very interesting. They have a huge unauthorized immigration problem, in part because many in the ANC see keeping out people from neighboring countries as having echoes of apartheid and Bantustans.
The last time I was in Joberg was at least 8-10 years ago. At the time, there was a huge influx of Nigerians into the country. The corners of most streets had groups of Nigerians hanging around all day (or so my driver and the people I talked to). It had a look that you would find familiar in Chicago or Baltimore, but at a much larger scale. Black and White SAs both were blaming a whole bunch of social ills on the newcomers.
But we do NOT have a society with dramatically different cultural norms. Republicans _claim_ that Democrats have dramatically different cultural norms, but it's not true. The problem of electoral democracy are the same as always, people want contradictory things. Not worse now than in 1789.
What do people mean by "all of these"? Isn't it just Thiel and Musk? What other billionaire South Africans are there that I'm missing? Do we need a geopolitical theory to explain 2 egomaniacs who happen to be from the same country?
You definitely see disparaging remarks made about Cuban-Americans in progressive circles. That even crops up in snarky replies to Matt on Twitter because the commenters presume Matt's Cuban ancestors were fleeing Castro, rather than fleeing Batista in an earlier wave of refugees.
I think it makes sense to consider the democracy-skeptical angle of a South African given that South Africa represents one of the great economic development setbacks of any world nation in the past 50 years. The economy writ large collapsed and has essentially not grown since the ‘90s, and it is no longer a leader among African bloc economies. Overlapping energy crises have exacerbated this trend. Crime rates soared and for several years were among the highest in the world. Dissatisfaction with the govt has been sky-high during this time but corruption continued unabated for decades. It’s all very Argentina-esque albeit even more dramatic in some ways. I find it to be a tragedy. The nation had so much potential after the end of apartheid; virtually no one expected the next decades would be so calamitous.
Luckily the current coalition seems slightly more stable and considerably more competent than previous governments, but they have a long road ahead of them if they want to regain their status as the preeminent African economy south of the Sahel.
Yeah. Interestingly Namibia, where Thiel is from, has had a much more stable transition to democracy. Of course, there are only a few people there and there are tons of racial disparities, but it’s avoided the malgovernment of SA.
Was the Mandela government corrupt? I had the impression that the policies put in place to correct racial injustice were poorly structured. Which I understand. It's got to be hard to successfully make over a society so dramatically.
Who doesn't get along here? Musk, Sacks, and Thiel are all part of the PayPal mafia, and while they may not be the best of friends, they certainly influence each other.
I'm aware of the falling out back then but thought they'd somewhat patched it up or had others as go between, but TBH I'm not really sure. Thiel and Sacks are definitely part of the same group of PayPal Republicans though.
For context, he's among the most respected names in tech as the founder of YCombinator and Sam Altmans former boss. Great argument that will appeal to moderates in tech, including those highly suspicious of Democrats economic policy. Here's the message:
Why Moderates Should Vote for Harris
People on the far left and the far right have already decided who to vote for in the next election. Voting for the other party would be unthinkable. But what if you're a moderate?
I'm a moderate, and I'm voting for Harris. The reason is not that I love the Democrats' policies. Both parties' policies seem a roughly equal mix of good and bad. The reason I'm voting for Harris is that this election is about character.
As far as I can tell, Harris is a typical politician. That may not seem much of a recommendation. But Trump is something far worse. He seems to be completely without shame.
We saw that the last time he was president. He ran the White House like a mob boss, choosing subordinates for loyalty rather than ability. No one knows that better than the people who worked for him. Almost half the cabinet-level appointees from his previous administration have refused to endorse him. They're warning us what he's like.
The worst thing he did, in my opinion, was when he tried to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election. He knew he'd lost, but he called Mike Pence and tried to get him not to certify the election. Thank God Pence had the character to stand up to him. I don't like to think what might have happened if he hadn't.
Trying to remain in power after losing an election is banana republic stuff. You don't do that in America. Conceding gracefully when you lose an election is more important than any policy a politician might have, because it's only this principle that allows us to get rid of politicians whose policies don't work.
So sure, Harris is a typical politician. But Trump is a crook. You can't have that sort of person as president. It's too risky.
To add some more context, he's written numerous essays defending tech, capitalism, and even economic inequality. He's solidly on the right with respect to economics and has the billions to back that up. Eg, his 2005 article, "Inequality and Risk", https://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
ChatGPT summarizes this better than I could (because I haven't read it in nearly 20 years) as:
> Paul Graham’s essay "Inequality and Risk" argues that reducing economic inequality through wealth redistribution dampens people’s willingness to take risks, which he sees as crucial for startup innovation. He suggests that high potential rewards encourage risk-taking necessary for venture funding and founding startups. He emphasizes that attacking inequality by limiting wealth stifles economic growth, advocating instead to address corruption and the links between wealth and power. Graham concludes that societies should focus on transparency to limit power abuses, rather than reducing inequality itself.
Thanks! Yeah, life got too crazy in the mornings, I miss sitting with a cup of coffee and reading/commenting…. But I do still read and scan the comments when I can! Usually too late in the day to jump in the fray much :)
"It's much easier to bomb a family's home. The system is built to look for them in these situations."
Built to look for them at home. Built to. And yet the person saying this is not a critic of the Israeli regime. It's an intelligence officer describing business as usual.
Paul Graham is a sort of avatar of the “normie”* opinion among Silicon Valley elite, so this is mostly expected but nonetheless welcome news.
*”normie” in the sense that he is not associated with the countercultural elitist intellectual circles that form a kind of nebulae of contrarianism in the valley… including the Yarvin/Thiel/Musk crowd, but also those whose politics are dominated by EA, the e/acc fringe, etc
Graham's opinion that the problem is Americans don't take enough risks and need to be offered unlimited financial rewards in order to get them to do it is kinda weird to me, but understandable(self-interested) given his position.
It's nice to see somebody of that class not quoting Moldbug.
I completely agree that Trumps norm breaking, corruption, and (at best) quasi criminality is the worst thing about him, and are why I voted against him despite my dislike of many of Biden’s policies. I think he has personally and permanently increased what politicians will be able to get away with. Flabbergasting that he doesn’t even TRY to not get caught in lie and avoid scandal.
I still remember when conservatives were (rightly!) critical of Obama pushing the envelope on an unbound executive. Trump is that times about a thousand, plus he’s the most corrupt president since Grant. Can’t have that in office, even if it saves you taxes and is better in regulation.
If he were running against Sanders or something I’d have a hard decision to make. Against Harris it’s very easy, if unpleasant.
This is why I don't completely blame Dems for focusing so much on bashing Trump. You need to be strategic about it and meet people where they are at, but the dude is such an obvious conman. I agree with Matt substantively that focusing on policy is probably better but I think we have to admit that it's kind of counterintuitive and doing what feels counterintuitive is often quite hard to square mentally/emotionally!
I think you might have better said something more like "most corrupt Presidential Administration since Grant**". AFAIK, unlike Trump, there are no claims of personal corruption on Grant's part (correction welcome).
** The Harding administration _might_ need a word. I'm not sure whether there are any ANSI standard Z-scaled corruption metrics [especially metrics based on data rather than surveys and vibes like Transparency International], although I'd be quite interested to know of any.
I listened to a BBC podcast on Grant a few years back and got the strong sense that contemporary scholars generally agree that he wasn't personally corrupt- it was more that he had a fierce soldier's loyalty to the sometimes sketchy people that he'd fought with and didn't give them enough oversight, and the circumstances after the Civil War made it very hard to police corruption anyway.
The various scholars agreed that his reputation for extreme corruption was mostly due to a confederate black legend-type effort.
This seems like a really low value endorsement in practice: almost everyone who cares about Paul Graham's opinion, or even knows who he is, lives outside of any remotely competitive state (maybe a few in TX?). The tech donor class definitely respects his opinion, but swaying their donations and influence a week before the election, when a third of ballots have already been dropped off, seems like too little and too late.
he was the first person whose prediction that biden would be out after the debate actually rang true to me, basically saying ``this is not my crowd, but the lack of people lining up behind biden means there is a rebellion, and once they've done that it is hard to go back''. also has a beef with sacks.
>But for the record, I agree. The odds of American democracy collapsing, conditional on Trump winning, are below 50 percent.<
It seems to me there's possibly a gray zone where American democracy hasn't truly "collapsed" as such, but it's become (1) weakened almost beyond recognition, and (2) in that weakened state has been substantially highjacked by the right so as to make progressive policy outcomes in the foreseeable future incredibly difficult to attain. That's where I think we're headed if Trump wins next week.
That’s a good point. American democracy isn’t over if trump appoints two 45 year old hard right judges to the Supreme Court. But that would solidify a pretty terrifying super majority on the court.
I think the result of a second Trump term is the "enshittification" of many things we enjoy about modern American life and less a full collapse of democracy. Take what has happened to Google Search, and apply it to everyday stuff, right?
I don't think it's hard to envision a scenario where Trump comes in and immediately does two or three things; pulls all support for Ukraine, enacts some bonkers level of tariffs, and starts deporting folks left and right. The first, while terrible, probably won't affect our day-to-day life, but a more emboldened Russia probably will, at some point. The tariffs and immigration shit will be felt immediately. You can see marks like Musk and Carlson know this already, because their most recent speeches keep hammering the point home that there might be a period of difficulty before things get better. Paraphrasing here, of course, but they know that shit might get real uncomfortable, and they need to sell that there's some light at the end of the tunnel.
Also, I think the people who are acknowledging the potential negative immediate impact of a Trump sequel on the conservative side are overrating the extent to which they will be able to shield themselves from the brunt of the policy consequences.
I've heard, and been fascinated by that recent rhetoric from Musk and Carlson. It seems to be them admitting that they know Trump's planned tariff policy will be horrible for Americans, especially their base. Yet, they don't seem to have internalized the biggest political lesson of the past few years: voters hate when prices drastically increase!
They both have insane egos, but I hope they know that they're empty words about sacrifice won't stop voters from sending a bunch of Republicans packing in the 2026 midterms because of Trump's stupid tariffs.
I think they believe it's gonna happen, but that they'll be able to use it as a weapon of cronyism. They can punish their enemies, and make their friends reliant on them.
my read of elon (and thiel?) is that they are more idealistic than that. they believe in pushing big reforms. think ``crisis capitalism'' but in the us this time, and the crisis is donald trump.
They may think he can be dissuaded once in power, and that he should say anything he needs to to get elected. Hell, he may have even *told* them privately he won't go crazy on tariffs.
For the record I'm not saying I strongly believe this to be the case. Trump does indeed seem fascinated by taxing imports, and maybe he really is that crazy. I'm simply suggesting *gaslighting* is just as much a part of Trump's repertoire as craziness and economic illiteracy.
All I want is for some Trump defending Republican to sit in an interview and articulate a defense for Trump's stated tariff policy, not the one they're hoping he enacts or maybe has privately promised them.
I get it that when Harris talks about going after "price gouging" she really doesn't mean it, but thinks it helps her with voters.
Are you suggesting that Trump feels the same when he talks about a 20% tariff on all imports? Does he think that's something that revs up voters who aren't already with him?
I don't think so. I think he really means it and would want to do it, as much as he wants to do anything as President that doesn't interfere with his round of golf and cable TV watching.
tariffs have been his passion for a very long time.
as far as harris and price gouging, i do think she wants a national law analogous to the state ones. (there are clips of clinton explaining the rationale for it, if you want to make an analogy with elon...) i think we all believe it will not do much, but i think it is reasonable to assume that she thinks there is a there there.
>>Are you suggesting that Trump feels the same when he talks about a 20% tariff on all imports? Does he think that's something that revs up voters who aren't already with him?<<
Trump has always been a "base first" politician. So, yes, I think he believes his general "America First" brand helps him. He may be wrong on that—I'd be the first person to state that Donald Trump isn't a very clever politician.
yeah, the people doing this aren't politicians, but i did find that a bit remarkable. a political commentator (sarlin) compared this to the sort of messaging coming from milei in argentina. it is interesting to me that in the us (at least on blogs such as mr) he is touted as a success. by contrast, i talked to an older argentine math professor at a conference recently and she has been really horrified by what has been happening, says that there are lots of old people who are homeless and in poverty now, etc, etc.
i guess that is part of what happens when one starts to dismantle things like rent control, social safety nets etc, but it was still very jarring to hear about it.
Which could lead to a long lasting tension as to whether Democrats end up attempting court packing and/or ignoring SCOTUS if it keeps dismantling its agenda when they have legislative and executive power.
EDIT: this also helps explain point 6, why there isn't more Republican hand wringing, and it's because they have this ace in the hole.
I agree with Matt’s take that the institutional logic of a strong SCOTUS is fundamentally anti-progressive. SCOTUS being so Dem friendly during the 20th century was an anomaly born of Democrats holding the Presidency continuously from 1933-1953 and then Republicans after that having some weird luck picking justices that turned out more liberal than expected.
I expect Dems will turn against SCOTUS and the courts as our collective memories of the Warren court fade.
Court packing sounds extreme and would be a temporary fix in any case. I think the better long term move, for those of us hoping to rebuild state capacity while also winning partisan battles, is jurisdiction stripping and statutory reform.
Jurisdiction stripping is the right answer (court packing only leads to repacking when the GOP controls the government) but interestingly I think it is an impossible sell to the Groups, which are basically built on a foundation of public interest litigation.
Can't the courts simply find an invented reason that jurisdiction stripping doesn't apply to them? For example Congress specifically used JS to remove the court's ability to review military tribunals for terrorist suspects in the mid-2000s. In Hamdan v Rumsfeld the Supreme Court simply said that Congress lacked the power to remove their jurisdiction, and then invalidated parts of the law. Seems like the courts would simply do that again in any high-profile case (full disclosure of priors, I'm a legal realist and I think 'constitutionality' is Calvinball for people with high Wordsum scores)
"Can't the courts simply find an invented reason that jurisdiction stripping doesn't apply to them?"
Yes, which SCOTUS has already done as you pointed out. And which is an unequivocally good thing, as illustrated by the military tribunals case, because jurisdiction stripping is basically putting a giant, "Imma gonna do an unconstitutional!!!" winking-smiley-face sign on whatever it is the legislature tries to strip jurisdiction from.
>Can't the courts simply find an invented reason that jurisdiction stripping doesn't apply to them?<
At some point we'll likely have a showdown between Democrats who have finally faced up to the reality that our courts' penchant for legislating must be reigned in—and judges who don't want their ability to legislate reigned in. Also known as a constitutional crisis.
That's not my understanding of Hamdan v Rumsfeld. That decision doesn't object in principle to the section of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 that includes jurisdiction stripping, they just say that it doesn't apply to Hamdan's case specifically.
Boumediene v. Bush does include the idea that you can't strip jurisdiction for habeas claims specifically, without providing an adequate alternative, because of the Suspension Clause.
(I'm like 90% legal realist myself, but I do think SCOTUS will be very hesitant to invalidate the idea of jurisdiction stripping in general.)
Repacking is an overblown risk. The actual bouts of packing and counter-packing we've actually seen in American history have been characterized by either rapid back-and-forths that get solved relatively quickly (within a few years) or one-offs where the party doing the packing managed to avert kicking off a spiral.
People act like this shit is just gonna go into an endless spiral, but that's not what ever actually happens. So maybe stop saying it'll happen?
How would jurisdiction stripping be better than court packing. If the GOP gains a majority necessary to repacking, why would they be unable to do the same with jurisdiction stripping?
I think a strong SCOTUS is fundamentally anti Progressive change via unconstitutional means. Dems have responded to running aground on legislative efforts by trying to do via executive and courts what they can only do via Article I. I am exceedingly confident the SCOTUS would not say block a duly enacted congressional law doing insert progressive policy vision, National Abortion law, Single Payer Healthcare, Climate etc. Its when you get weird bankshots like the Clean Power plan, or unilateral student debt cancelation etc that you end up before A.III, that is a meaningful difference. Whether progressive treat it as such remains to be seen, but I think a detethering of courts from enforcing separation of powers will really quickly bite lefties in the ass.
I know you're joking, but the whole idea of Congress "just passing legislation" and the refusal to deal with what that actually means -- abolishing the filibuster, among other things -- is part of what's gotten us to this place where we're dealing with real fascism.
Congress stopped working because of the filibuster, so everyone started looking to the other two branches to make policy, and meanwhile all of our problems kept getting worse and worse, which finally led to people being dumb and desperate enough to give the fascists a bite at the apple.
Meanwhile, centrist jackasses like Manchin kept insisting all along that Congresscritters just needed to smoke more cigars with each other, and abolishing the filibuster would cause an unacceptable harm -- nay, MIGHT even enable FASCISM.
It's kinda hard to take them seriously when they stick their heads in the sand while the actual fascists are on the warpath.
Its seems a bit wild that Progressives would want to disempower the courts. Lawyers are incredibly liberal politically but temperamentally conservative as a group. Even most conservative lawyers are more liberal than the average conservative. If you take power away from courts/lawyers it seems almost certainly that this will empower conservatives.
For example - let's say that congress strips jurisdiction over gerrymandering from the courts and gives it to the FEC. You really think that the GOP is not going to be able to work an agency better than they can the courts? Are you assuming that Democrats will make these changes, but the GOP won't be able/willing to stack whatever agency they need do to make their own changes?
This is incorrect. Courts are institutionally incremental actors. They generally impede large changes. And they are most unpopular when they allow/enact large change (e.g. Dobbs). Progressives have been extremely effective at using the courts to foster incremental progressive change over the last century. Now Republicans are trying to do that, but it will likely be at most a very slow process, because that's how the court works.
Meanwhile - let's say that Harris wins and the polls are wrong so she pulls off a trifecta. Gets into office and breaks the filibuster to pass a national abortion law that strips jurisdiction from SCOTUS to review it. Then a recession hits in 2028, she is unpopular and JD Vance is swept into power with a Republican trifecta. Do you think the courts will be better at destroying what progressives want, or an Republican trifecta with jurisdiction stripping normalized by Democrats to alleviate any constitutional issues that might come up?
Jurisdiction stripping is only "worth a shot" to avoid judicial review of legislation and regulations (which is what people on the left are referring to) if you believe the GOP will never, ever again control the presidency and Congress.
Well, from the perspective of a partisan Democrat, jurisdiction stripping is only a double-edged sword if Republicans control the Presidency and Congress while we control the courts. Until we control the courts again, it’s just a one-edged sword.
Also, I do think it would be good, in a nonpartisan state capacity sense, if elected politicians had an easier time carrying out their political programs and faced fewer veto points in general.
I think that if it got to court packing, it'd be part of a larger backlash against a second Trump term, and most people would see it as a restoration of the court's legitimacy. A defeated GOP with a Trump either dead (of old age or conflict) or in jail (of conflict, obv) would kind of just *get* that the coke-and-booze party was over, they were able to temporarily steal a whole lot of political "loot", and they'd be too busy trying to claw their way back to popularity and reassemble their now-fracturing propaganda machine to bother anything but a token resistance.
All the cries of "tyranny" would ring hollow if a renegade SCOTUS had been caught enabling an actual brief era of Trumpist *tyranny*, and convicted in the court of public opinion.
I personally think court packing is a dumb idea. However, every time the Court shows itself in the tank for Trump (like the immunity decision, but *not* Dobbs) it normalizes the idea just a bit more.
To be clear, court packing is a bad idea, for the retaliation reasons Dilan stated, but as you state, depending on how far SCOTUS goes it might end up being the least bad path for Democrats.
As I told Dilan, retaliation risk is overstated. There's never been an "endless spiral", not even a protracted one. The history is mostly defined by opportunism and the party doing the packing actually getting away with it.
I want random empanelment from a larger pool (the DC circuit has been suggested).
The randomness is what encourages good law, because even though any one panel might be particularly extreme, they're all but guaranteed that an oppositely extreme panel might have a bite at the same apple. Consensus will largely rule the day, while still leaving room for ambitious/landmark rulings if the majority can make a convincing case to their peers.
Also, less opportunity for a jackass like Kennedy to hog the spotlight. Since the median panel will be slightly unbalanced, a median jurist who wants to play calvinball will be unpopular and usually get ignored by solid majorities.
There's a reason a lot of very rich and/or very reactionary people support a man whose policy mix is confused, inconsistent, transactional and often not in keeping with the traditions of Movement Conservatism. Trump's lack of attention to policy is a feature not a bug, because he just wants his side to win, and isn't interested in picking fights over his public policy "convictions" (he doesn't have any). And the chaos and norm-breaking he enables can help usher in a Project 2025 world.
I think there’s a reason why right wingers are so enamored with Orban. I suspect that if Trump tried to go full Putin, his hardcore supporters would go along but a pretty decent chunk of his voting base would rebel. But going full Orban basically creates plausible deniability. It’s not like opposition parties don’t exist at all. And it’s not like all opposition media has completely been stamped out. But strategically rig the game so that you are still extremely likely to win by selectively going after opposition leaders, universities (easy anti elite target) and press you can make sure always win.
It’s why the WaPo thing with not endorsing is a big deal to me. Honestly think newspapers giving endorsements for president is long past its sell by date (down ballot is another matter). But the timing of WaPo’s decision screams this is Bezos protecting his interest in Amazon agains retaliation. It’s disturbing sign of what could be coming.
The idea Trump is going to successfully capture state and mass media coverage like Orban did or retain large legislative majorities like Orban is a very bold claim and demands a serious theory of the case given what actually happened in his first term. It's especially rich given the behavior of the White House press pool before Biden's debate.[1] Of course, that behavior was not quite Orban-level either given the plenty of competitive conservative outlets free to report on Biden's condition to mass audiences.
If a Republican president is elected, I predict a Democratic House majority by 2027. If a Democratic president is elected, I predict a Republican House majority by 2027. People arguing the 2026 midterm election will fall to the mixed rating we observe in Economist, V-Dem, Freedom House ratings of Hungary need to explain their prediction.
And per the university argument, if were a Democrat, I wouldn't even go there. I would be too embarrassed by the blatant patronage of my party's executive spending to subsidize universities through their over-built and politicized state of loyalty oaths to even bother invoking that analogy against Republicans. Harvard's Claudine Gay scandal was an entirely predictable outcome of this kind of ideological and fiscal coziness.
The structural problem is, if Trump wins, all a Dem House majority can do is block some things he wants to do. Nothing gets better. It's just defending against further losses.
Meanwhile, he's packing the courts. A 2027 Dem backlash majority, possibly even a 2028 trifecta win, ends up with a thermostatic GOP House majority in 2031 just in time for redistricting. No courts to bail Dems out - in fact, they'll undermine counter-gerrymandering efforts by Dems to lock down their own blue states.
It's not Orbanism. But there's no trajectory out of the crisis. The Trumpist GOP cements itself as a viable minoritarian party and raises the EC bar somewhere to 52-55% for Democrats.
Also, if Trump wins, the stability he can create within his coalition potentially helps them stave off an expected collapse. Last time around, it started out slow, and then ended up as a constant parade of kakistocrats after all the competent people left. This time around, they've all got their power bases -- Vivek, Carlson, Vance, Miller, etc. And if he's enacting all these tariffs as a mass extortion program -- exempting various hangers-on if they pay fealty -- then that helps the New Kakistocrats further cement their power bases. Tucker will be back on Fox every night, telling Trump which of this or that industrial concern deserves an exemption from the tariffs. Vance will probably open a clearinghouse for these sorts of requests.
The point is, instead of collapsing into infighting, they'll secure their oligarchic revenue streams and simultaneously build the right wing propaganda machine to new heights.
I'm just spitballing here, but I just want to show what's *possible*. In the worst-case-but-still-realistic scenario, even if Democrats are winning "majorities" and "trifectas", they probably won't be able to enact a national policy until the late 2030s at the earliest, and Trumpism will become a long-term fact of life instead of a temporary 10-year bout of insanity.
It's the difference between a 10-year bout with breast cancer culminating in a double mastectomy, and then going into perfect remission for the next 40 years; and having the double mastectomy and then spending the next 20 years stamping out metastases in countless hellish rounds of chemo. In the former case, you have a chance of growing your hair back and getting some implants to feel like "a real woman again" (not a broader statement, it's just for the metaphor based on what I've heard about how SOME women feel). In the latter case, you become a shell of yourself. Any reconstructive surgery or semblance of "health" is just plain off the table. And you may NEVER recover.
Whether we call that Orbanism or not, it's still fucking terrible.
If socially conservative writers going to Budapest junkets convince Republican politicians to change the platform to win majorities in a counter-cycle midterm and work *with elected Republicans* to bully popular news outlets to write in a way consistently favorable to the GOP, they will have succeeded with popularism even more than Matt Yglesias ever dreamed possible.
But in reality, popularism did not hold the House for Democrats in 2022. I really doubt those conservatives or Orban presenting himself as a Russo-Ukrainian war negotiator to Mar-o-Lago can pull off a 2026 red wave under Trump. I'm not saying it's impossible. But a basic theory of how this is going to play out should accompany an extraordinary prediction.
as far as i understand, budapest isn't really where the base of oban's support is, as it is much more liberal than the countryside. orban is in a position that lets him play off the eu and russia against each other and then pay off his supporters with the profits. this isn't really a system that can be replicated at scale.
By Budapest junkets, I am referring to the Hungarian government sponsoring various weekend trips and seminars for Anglophone conservative writers upset with social/immigration politics in the US/EU. It's rather funny/embarrassing how much Hungary being referred to as a successful pro-natalist, anti-immigration, socially conservative country taking on the EU libs took off in proportion to that. Especially how lopsided it was in proportion to conservative pieces on Poland's conservative government.
But on a more serious matter, the concerns about Hungarian elections no longer being free and fair have much to do with Orban's relationship to Hungarian mass media and state media, which I believe qualitatively differs from Poland which also received scrutiny over court appointment reforms. Poland was always having free and fair elections, regardless of Tusk's recent election victory.
The latter was mostly whining by EU liberals who think authoritarianism is when an activist puts up a fake anti-gay sign on a road sign to criticize your country's marriage laws. A bit like when Trump's invocation of the West in a speech to Poland was called white nationalism by writers at The Atlantic. The boredom quickly ended when we witnessed Russia launch a new invasion towards Kiev, and Poland took it more seriously than their previous critics in actual military spending and preparation. But in Hungary, this is a very valid complaint so far as I can tell, and Hungary is rated at mixed in various democracy indices for a reason. It's not just socially liberal politicking.
Its funny cuz I think a lot of what a number of politico types current hate about the US system actually helps to act against a sort of authoritarian consolidation.
Our constant staggered elections means even a trifecta only gets two years to do anything before they come before the voters again, and the modern midterm penalty usually results in a loss of power.
Our convoluted state-level electoral system does allow for some shenanigans and anti-democratic consoldiation of power, but its sufficiently devolved that the effects are limited and it can be hard to coordinate a united effort to tip the scales in one direction. Just see how the SC waffled back and forth on court power in determing electoral maps when state elections kept changing who would benefit in aggregate.
My hopefully not optimistic view of US politics following a Trump win next week is that: The public quickly sours on Trump again like they did after 2016 and the GOP ends up getting whalloped once more in 26. By 28 voters are ready for change again while the rule holds that Trumpian politics doesn't work without Trump leaving the Dems winning another trifecta while the GOP either starts to move away from the Trump era or doubles down only to lose for another 1-2 election cycles.
Yea, the upside of the loss in efficiency that is a source of frustration for many progressives is that consolidation of power is pretty tough.
I am keeping all fingers and toes crossed for Harris, but I also think if Trump wins we can probably assume resistance and lack of cooperation from lots of other fully legitimate centers of power from day 1 and the House turning back blue in 2026 (guessing if Trump wins we won't take the house). There's also a decent possibility that even a relatively conservative judiciary does a dance where they're way more charitable to Trump than he deserves on the merits while still never signing off on quite what he demands.
Which doesn't mean it won't be bad. I think what Trumpian nihilism is doing to our culture and politics will be a lot harder to stamp out over the long term than any particular policy changes likely to occur if he wins.
"I think what Trumpian nihilism is doing to our culture and politics will be a lot harder to stamp out over the long term than any particular policy changes likely to occur if he wins."
For me, it's the tariff power and what it means for the chance of cronyism to entrench the MAGA establishment.
That is, if they lose, and then Trump bows out or passes on, then they collapse into infighting over the scraps of his political empire while the prosecutions close in on them. Disaffected MAGAites can't sustain their anger amid the disappointment, turning away from the party.
But if they win, then they stave off the infighting. If he happens to die in office, Vance becomes the new king of the party sheerly by dint of being the 48th president (shudder). The tariffs allow them to erect an exemption regime: Just imagine Fox rehiring Tucker and him taking turns interviewing various billionaires who come on his show to gush over Dear Leader and explain just why they deserve to get a tariff exemption. A new flood of revenue reinvigorates their propaganda machine just as it was starting to fracture, and keeps the leading cronies away from each other's throats, busily building up their own little fiefdoms.
This is one of the underappreciated features of having the Electoral College instead of a national popular vote, it means that there's no centralized place to screw with results. (Other than congressional ratification, as we found out - and this proves the point!) As disputing election results becomes a constant thing, it's a better idea to push for mandatory proportional allocation of EVs by each state instead of a national popular vote.
We haven’t seen this in a while but third party national spoiler effects can be much more exaggerated in a national popular vote than in the Electoral College. Nader got 3,000,000 votes in a race sub 500,000 margin, Third parties got 7,000,000 votes with a margin of under 3,000,000 in 2016. If we ever went to a National Popular Vote we really should have a top two run off French Style.
The issue with proportional allocation is that it greatly increases the likelihood of one candidate failing to get a majority in close elections, throwing it to the House. I found someone who actually calculated it, finding that, for example, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2016 all would have gone to the House.
On the contrary, the lack of House expansion is the main reason why PV - EC mismatch has become so common recently compared to history. Further, Matt glosses over the point that more EC’s from bigger House dilutes EC’s from the Senate. Plus a huge problem with the lack of a larger House is the Wyoming issue he cites. At a minimum, the size of the House should be set so that there isn’t such a huge difference in district population. This is only going to grow worse over time as relative populations grow, and increasing the size of the House is the only way to fix it.
His argument boils down (IMO) to the perfect being the enemy of the good. Yes, there are “better” options for addressing the EC, but all of them require amending the Constitution, which simply isn’t going to happen anytime soon. House expansion, by contrast, solves most of the problem and is much easier to accomplish.
You're adjusting the House to fix the Presidency. The House is already so large that its difficult for backbenchers to have much say or accomplish much. As a result, the most important vote by far are the leadership elections. If you made the House even larger, you would exacerbate that trajectory even more. If you have a 1000 members or more, why bother having most of them even go to Washington. Just vote for the leadership teams and they'll do all the negotiating. The Representatives can just stay in their districts.
+1000 Increasing the size of the House could actually happen and would unequivocally reduce the risk of PV/EC splits. Getting rid of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment and such an amendment isn't passing without a literal civil war happening. (The making-the-perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good is a *colossal* issue with discussions about electoral reforms in general, IMO, as becomes immediately apparent any time a discussion of using something other than first-past-the-post voting comes up and then you get people bickering about whether IRV or Borda or any of a dozen or more increasingly convoluted voting methodologies produces the "right" result.)
The small-state advantage is already diluted from Winner Take All.
But you're still right about expansion bringing the PV back closer to EV. And Matt is wrong that expansion wouldn't be worth it.
This is why although I relentlessly argue for RCV, I'm not opposed to a number of other reforms. We need ALL of them to add up to a more balanced, dynamic, and responsive system.
The National Popular Vote initiative does not require amending the Constitution. Instead it calls for states to pass laws that would give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote (assuming enough states sign on to cover at least 270 votes). That is, the EC works just as it always has, but the states award their electoral votes differently.
This is a good point, but I’m not sure that electing the president by national popular vote requires a single national place of certification. For instance, the NPVIC—the least-unlikely way we get a national popular vote—still relies on the EC and the existing state-level mechanisms for certification, it's just that the member states of the Compact would be relying on each others' certified numbers to determine which candidate is awarded their EVs rather than looking exclusively to their own. You can also imagine a pure national popular vote system with the EC abolished where the job of the new central electoral authority (probably a beefed-up FEC) is just to add up numbers certified at the state level—pretty much the same role as that of Congress in the current system and therefore neither an improvement nor a decline relative to today.
Also to get up on my hobbyhorse, in a parliamentary system the head of government would be chosen by the House, from the House, and I see no reason the current decentralized system of certifying elections for Members of Congress would change just because they now choose the head of government.
I think that applies to a national popular vote as well. Of course, it's not "centralized" either and to flip the results you'd have to screw with hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes in many different locations. It's probably safer from manipulation than the EC (viz, Florida 2000).
The goal of putting Trump into office, if you’re Trump-adjacent, is to rig the system such that in the future, Trumpism-without-Trump will be sustainable.
As best I can tell, Trumpism is ALL about Trump. As hard as various people have tried to make it more than about him, Trump has resisted pretty much all attempts to do so.
Beyond the narcissism and nursing personal grudges, Trumpism is about hating the people its supporters hate. Vance is the perfect avatar of Trumpism without Trump.
I find this a weird way of thinking about progress. There has been a ton of progress in recent generations. In the 1960s US, inter-racial marriage was illegal (in some states) but marital rape was legal, to cite one jarring example. In Britain marital rape was legal till 1991 and only formally banned by law in 2003!
If democracy is lost, much of that progress could be lost. So in a situation where you're making big if imperfect progress while also facing a big downside risk, I think it's logical to balance making further progress with risk mitigation, and not solely focus on how much more progress you could make if you the risk wasn't there.
This is probably an excellent explanation for the institutional conservativization of progressivism.
But I think this is something of a distinction without a difference. There's a lot of downside risk, sure, but I think the signal Harris's election could send to the rest of the nation -- especially if she successfully weathers what appears to be an impending opening salvo of Cold War II in her first term -- could indeed create a lot of upside as well.
So IMO it's not "wierd" to mourn that lost upside potential. As a fiercely anti-doomerist progressive, being able to appreciate the progress we've already had is precisely what also helps me appreciate the future potential upside. My diagnosis of the doomers, in fact, is that they overly focus on the mourning (both of past and future potential) and don't appreciate the promise of the future enough.
As a progressive, I want to live to see as much progress as possible. Mourning any loss thereof is only natural, even if I try to minimize that mourning because I view it as largely counterproductive.
This is core to Nate Silver’s framework of Village People and River People. What is the appropriate amount of downside risk to gain in the benefits of the upside improvements?
He argues that most Village people are too risk averse but there are utilitarian River types who don’t properly understand the nuances of downside risks and thinks it’s all a mathematical equation that gives you the answer.
His conversation with Sam Harris about SBF was interesting. It seems fair to say SBF undervalued downside risks. SBF might argue that there is an SBF in some multiverse living in eternal bliss and the sacrifice of all the other SBF’s is worth it because it maximizes the total value.
Personally, I would have generally followed the law to avoid prison and stashed $20 million aside. After that sure go max EV risk, if that’s your thing because you’re Degen Gambler to the bone.
SBF is best thought of as a conman and charlatan who used the Effective Altruism framework to identify his victims and cover his activities, rather than some EA adherent who just went too far.
He is Bernie Madoff using being Jewish or Gerald Payne using his "Greater Ministries International Church". Finding targets for fraud in religious (or semi-religious in the case of Effective Altruism) sects is as old as religion itself.
The way our system has traditionally worked is that enabling some tool or means doesn’t just enable it for one President or party. Expansions of, for example, Executive power over previous decades have benefited both parties and neither have sought to substantially roll those back.
It’s been a bit frustrating for me personally, to see many left-of center people continue to advocate for increasing the authority of the federal government and especially the Executive while also saying that Trump will end democracy. If Trump can end democracy, then maybe it’s past time to roll back Executive power.
Yep, it's a "laugh through the tears" kind of thing, but I genuinely find it funny watching large numbers of people in various progressive outlets unironically posting, "Trump is a LITERAL fascist who will LITERALLY declare himself Maximum Leader for Life and immediately begin committing LITERAL genocide if he takes office" pieces in alternation with both the perennial "Federalism is a fascist plot, so we must crush the sovereignty of the states and give all power to the central government" pieces and the recently more popular "Judicial review is a fascist plot, so we must free the executive branch from oversight by the courts" pieces.
It makes me think of this Bastiat quote, which is not directly about federalism, but goes to the point about centralized authority:
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority."
That's the core of why I think that a multiparty system is the true ideal.
I've probably already bored you and countless other SBers with my anecdote from Drutman about how the ideal number of parties has been found to be 4-6 (at least by some poli-scis).
But I think the *reason* why it works is because it hits the sweet spot of Madison's notion that diffusion of power across a diversity of opinion would create counterbalancing ambitions. The sad reality of our system is, it's TOO balanced, because it was left under FPTP to just devolve into two entrenched parties. There simply aren't enough degrees of freedom for majority issues to reliably pass without damaging party unity.
Having 4-6 parties means that coalitions never last long enough to entrench into formal alliances. They form, then break, then re-form, then break, and so on. All of the mainstream parties get a bite at the apple from time to time, and only the extremes are locked out of power.
One side wants to undermine our democratic institutions, render elections meaningless, and use the justice system to cow people and persecute its enemies, while the other wants to use executive power, reviewed by mostly unsupportive courts, to push through means-tested student debt. That's a tough one, alright.
Didn't SCOTUS flip off Trump in December 2020 over the stolen election claims? I think a theory of how SCOTUS enables Republicans to render the 2026 or 2028 elections no longer free and fair at the absolute minimum needs to start from that ruling and explain what will happen in the proceeding years.
But they more recently ruled that a huge amount of what he did in trying to prosecute those claims was not illegal because he supposedly did it in the course of his presidential duties.
From a libertarian standpoint, I hate the presidential immunity ruling, but it was plainly correct from how the U.S. constitutional system has to work in practice for military operations to be possible in most circumstances outside of officially declared wars. To argue against that decision, you need to explain why, for example, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama couldn't be prosecuted for at least manslaughter, if not murder, for the deaths of American citizens killed in anti-terror operations they authorized.
Even if some sort of immunity is indeed needed, the immunity ruling was too expansive.
I think the worse ruling was the 14A ruling. Besides just being wrong on the merits, it creates a potential opening for ignoring 22A under the same "states can't adjudicate this" argument.
And given just how clearly 14A should have DQ'ed Trump by its plain meaning, and yet the court "complied in advance" rather than face mass controversy, means that even if in all reality they've got a 99% chance of DQing Trump in a 22A case in 2028, I wouldn't trust them to make the right decision anymore.
"The previous president can't be prosecuted on these specific types of executive actions, and future rulings may explain further the grounds he can be prosecuted on" is
1) a very frustrating ruling to read for the grounds of prosecution in the future.
2) a very hard case from the standpoint of a country with free and fair elections, as opposed to elections followed by lawfare (see Latin America.)
3) a non-sequitur to the December 2020 matter of electors and election lawsuits.
I think to the degree that people who answer to the President take “if the President does it, it’s not illegal” to be official constitutional doctrine, they will be more willing to act on the President’s undemocratic commands.
Yes, I would place the probability of something between Hungary and Poland (before the last election) at 25%. Authoritarian and weakened but elections still mattering. Probability would be higher if we weren’t a Federal system.
I'm not quite ready to go that far, though I agree the situation is dire. Joe Biden and Democrats were able to get a lot of progressive legislation enacted in 21 and 22. Our alliances are in much better shape than four years ago. Our national security apparatus is still staffed in apolitical fashion, by professionals. Vital public sector bodies like the FTC and the Fed haven't been politicized to the point of non-functionality. Debt-ceiling hijinks have become less common under Biden. And so on. And if Harris wins, Trump will, I think, be on his way to paying for at least some of his crimes.
So, to state the obvious, a lot is riding on next week's outcome. But yes, if Trump wins, he'll obviously escape justice, and our judiciary will lurch even further in the direction of blatant, right wing activism. And it'll be open season in red state legislatures on voting rights and democratic norms. And the United States may put the final nails in the coffin of the rules-based order, even as we withdraw from NATO and pull the plug on Ukraine and extort Japan and South Korea. And we may well see a national abortion ban. Also, Trump (perversely) may well be a less practical politician in his second term, because of his inability to seek a second term. And so don't be surprised if he's more willing than in 2017-2020 to let his people run wild on policy matters. I can hardly wait.
Well, defeating him for a SECOND TIME would be one form of making him pay a price for his crimes; and it's far from clear he won't yet spend time behind bars if he loses the election. He's still facing a lot of very serious legal problems.
But sure, the half of our political system known as the GOP is utterly broken right now, that's true, and the various constitutional remedies available to protect the country from the iniquities of tyrants aren't designed to work when the polity is divided 51-49.
On 2: I think an economy of zoom meetings and fast casual drive through, while individually rational in each specific decision, is actually miserable for most people and part of our national unhappiness.
I know it's insanely convenient and for a subset of people, necessary. But if you have the time, or can make the time, just go to a grocery store and buy ingredients for meals. Doing Uber eats or even grocery delivery all the time is just kind of a bummer.
Curious to see how popular/unpopular this take is on SB.
I have to say, Tesco grocery delivery in the UK is awesome: cheap (£8 a month for unlimited deliveries), professional (they use their own people, they don't subcontract it, and the drivers are friendly and do a heroic job of navigating in Oxford's wildly shitty traffic), very good service (don't want something, or accidentally order the wrong thing like when I ordered six bags of lemons? Just hand it back to the driver and get a basically instant refund) and doesn't use additional packaging (they roll it up in plastic crates that they then take back). I don't have a car, and so getting to a grocery store of any appreciable size would be a major pain in the ass for me - not to mention that the delivery routes are taking trips off the road.
On the produce question, most produce in UK supermarkets is pre-packaged (which is not great, but this is independent of delivery), so there's really no difference if you get it or someone else does.
Oh, and since you can purchase any kind of alcohol in UK grocery stores, they will also deliver that. Also, great discounts; I just got a bottle of Laphroaig 10 yr for £10 off.
I don't have fear. I have pickiness. I only want fruit and vegetables that taste good, not overripe or underripe produce, or varieties that don't taste good (like e.g. Delicious apples). And if the fruit or vegetable I planned on doesn't look good or is expensive, I want the freedom to pick something different that looks better.
I use Instacart a lot and it’s never really been an issue. Probably because I’m usually putting them in a curry/stew/stir fry and not relying on any vegetable to be a star.
Like tonight I’m making green curry and like basically the peppers need to be hot, the sauce rich and a bunch of vegetables will enhance the flavor but I’d be lying if I said I can taste any one of their flavors. I so seldom just eat produce.
Why is going to a grocery store less of a bummer than getting grocery delivery? I agree that it is better for produce (somehow Amazon Fresh has a knack for finding green bananas that turn brown before they turn yellow) and going out of the house can be fun and social in many ways, but grocery shopping is not one of them.
It depends on how you shop, but when I'm shopping I pick up things not on the list that I remember, and buy meat on sale to stick in the freezer. Plus, I don't trust Doordash to choose my produce. Then again, I actually like grocery shopping and missed it during the pandemic.
I'm with you here. We use DoorDash a lot but I prefer to do my own groceries. One trip to Safeway a week and one trip to Costco in 2-3 weeks is quite manageable.
Re your last point, I wish I could superlike™️ your larger point a thousand times. You will eat better, save tons of money, be healthier and probably more sane, create less garbage, and feel empowered by the ability to take care of yourself in a meaningful way.
I think if people order meals through Uber eats rather than making meals it's because that what's they prefer to do and think it a worthwhile use of their limited funds.
Right, and if people stay at home scrolling Instagram instead of going out to do something active, that is also what they prefer to do in the moment. But the effect on happiness and flourishing seems very bad.
I'm a Hegelian (thesis/antithesis/synthesis and all that) and I think if people really don't want to do something after a while they'll change what they're doing. Otherwise, they obviously must prefer what it is they're doing. I don't always like their choices but I bet many people don't like mine. It's a beautiful sunny day outside and here I am furiously typing because someone is wrong on the Internet (not *you,* Tom, of course).
As a counter, to take the most extreme example, an addict in the moment prefers to take another hit than to not, even if their longer-term preference is to quit. And addiction is an area where the connection between using and the negative life effects is very patent, whereas the connection between spending every evening on social media or Netflix and finding that your life is not very fulfilling is harder to pinpoint. I do indeed find that my decision to comment on Substack a lot has a negative impact on some areas of my life, but in the moment it’s almost always more tempting to comment than to do whatever would be better for me.
Note, revealed preference theory breaks down when people have time inconsistent preference, myopia, incomplete preferences, or poorly ordered preferences.
Lots of people who buy products then come to complain about how much they spend, but somehow keep doing it.
I'm down with people who make good use of that kind of job, not looking to take it away from them, I see the utility, but it's fucking depressing. The whole process is aesthetically and philosophically ugly. The apps suck and hide huge up charges, the process of waiting for pickup and delivery is stress inducing and aggravating for everyone involved, the food quality is reduced, and nobody really wrestled with the fact that it enabled people to feel like they were being upright citizens by ‘staying home and staying safe’ during the pandemic while a whole class of poor people ran their errands for them. I have to say I look down on people who can't go get their own takeout, as silly as that is.
“…the process of waiting for pickup and delivery is stress inducing and aggravating…”
I see the scooter-driving delivery folks around here hanging out in clusters on the side of the street, shooting the breeze and smoking cannabis while they wait for their Uber Eats notifications. They don’t seem stressed.
One of the last times I got food through an app, the guy was constantly texting and calling me because the restaurant was a shit show and he was obviously worried that I was going to dock his tip for their tardiness and disorganization. I'm sure when you don't have an order on deck, just chilling and waiting for an order is not stressful, but that's not really relevant.
but you can still go to mcdonald’s if you insist snd, if you are willing to drop $3 more, there’s chipotle/cava/panera. The people working at those places are bringing in the highest real wages they’ve commanded since at least the 80s.
Yes that's the individually rational aspect of these decisions. My point is that, as in many situations, a collection of individually rational decisions can produce a suboptimal outcome for everyone.
Completely agree with that. Any individual daily choice to be isolated is totally reasonable—some days you’re tired or sick or don’t want to see anyone. But an every day atomized society? Dreadful.
>>...what’s happening internationally. The UK Conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian Liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right party lost its first post-Covid elections in Australia....<<
Oh to live in a sane polity, where, when your side is facing possible defeat, you're at worst looking at, I dunno, copays for dental work? A point or two off the corporate income tax? Stingier means-testing for childcare? Maybe a bump up in the retirement age, or a reduction in green energy subsidies?
What was happening in former Yugoslavia (which currently has two EU member states) in the 1990s is even more recent than the death of Franco. And a large part of the EU today was still occupied by the Soviets after Spain joined the EU.
A few years ago my cousin drove us around Split pointing out demarcations of battles and rattled of the names of the people who died fighting next to him. Also, he was skeptical about joining the EU because the Euro would make everything more expensive and they would move factories to cheaper labor markets.
Right. Judging by the available comps (Germany, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Chile) a MAGA dictatorship won't endure indefinitely. Probably a mere 20-40 years.
Italy is always my go-to for thinking about fascism in America, but Spain is a good reference too, especially considering the Catholic streak in the far-right now. Maybe it'd be like Francoist Spain, but with Berlusconi at the helm.
Living standards were rising pretty briskly throughout most of Franco's rule. Not that this made up for his tyranny, but still...
The thing that scares me about MAGA isn't only their authoritarian bent, but their gross policy ignorance. It won't be Peter Thiel directing us into some kind of booming technocratic nirvana. It'll be Bannon and Miller running social policy while Heritage dismantles the safety net and regulatory apparatus. We won't just have fewer rights. We'll also have a lot less prosperity and security, more crime, and less innovation. In short, we'll be a lot less free AND quite a bit poorer and sicker.
The durations of the dictatorships in part of those countries were directly tied to the lifespan of a specific dictator. There is no way Trump is lasting even 20 years.
LOL! Perhaps, but I look at it mostly with regard to concerns that Trump will refuse to leave office if he's elected to a second term. He'll be 82 in 2028 and, if you look at other examples of authoritarian regimes, that's basically the age range when dictators LOSE power, not seize it for the first time, because by that point it's obvious to everyone how decrepit the leader is and that the upsides to getting out on a limb to try keeping the dictator in power are severely limited because he's going to be dead soon anyway.
Westward from the Oder there seems to be a distinct attitude in much of Europe that they have reached some enlightened endstate.
There is a failure to recognize that Europe's current calm and quality of life are largely downstream of America providing much of Europe's defense, making war between European powers basically impossible, keeping sea lanes open, and pushing technological innovation.
(There are some exceptions to this-- the UK is an example, I think. Also, I blame a lot of the American left for treating Europe as some kind of wonderland American can aspire to be.)
(There are some exceptions to this-- the UK is an example, I think. Also, I blame a lot of the American left for treating Europe as some kind of wonderland American can aspire to be.)
Only if we distribute nukes to Germany, Poland, Ukraine, South Korea like candy and back off from our defense obligations can we have the ultimatum battle whether we want to to be the American left's dream of a West European wonderland or the libertarian's dream of a low-tax, small state utopia.
I'm not sure about the AfD, but, while LePen wants to take France in a nationalistic, isolationist direction, I seriously doubt she'd be able to undermine France's constitutional order like MAGA can (and, to some extent, already has, eg, our Supreme Court). IOW, she'd make her undesirable changes only at the pleasure of the French electorate. They could vote her out if they didn't like it. But I think the increasingly reactionary nature of America's federal judiciary AND the increasingly reactionary nature of many state governments (France is obviously a unitary state)—combined with the serious lack of independence of our civil service—actually renders the United States more vulnerable than France to a descent into right wing, autocracy-adjacent madness.
Charles, to what degree has LePen gone in the Meloni direction--by that I mean taking "far right" positions on immigration, LGBT issues, and (by European standards) climate, but chilling out on the whole "leave the EU, Pro-Russia" angle that we saw from her earlier?
Also meant to add: if Le Pen or her successor ever take power in France, I doubt the crank factor will equal what MAGA can do in the US. Michael Flynn was Donald Trump's literal national security adviser. Michael Fucking Flynn.
The idea that I have is that politics is dead in those countries. They are trapped in a system where it’s delivering poor results but no one wants to change anything. The upside to what you’re saying is that in America, parties are actually trying to do things which reflects a fundamentally healthy system.
I'm not quite sure why people talk about how bad the conservative party did over there as if it's meaningful. My understanding is that it did poorly because the more right-leaning Reform party pulled votes away from them. It wasn't a mandate for Labour, kind of the opposite. Am I wrong?
You are in fact wrong on the Tories. The Tories dropped from 44% of the popular vote to 24% in one election. The Reform Party went from 2% to 14%. That leaves another 8% that moved to Labour - as you probably know, an 8% shift is pretty big and affects dozens of seats in a large Parliament.
The mandate for Labour was not overwhelming, this is true. They went from 32% under Jeremy Corbyn to 34% this time.
would trump dare increase the retirement age? frankly, i’m not sure i would vote for harris if she wanted to increase the retirement age or cut my social security.
So, to be clear: you’d look at Trump and Harris and say, “One has broken America’s tradition of peaceful transfer of power, openly fantasized about being a dictator, and spoken about using the military against the enemy within. The other said she’d make me work longer before I can retire. They are both equally bad! F*** it, I’m not voting for either!”
I know this mindset exists, but it’s depressing as hell to see it in the SB comment section.
Your valuing the peaceful transfer of power is just “aesthetic preferences.” The fiction that Harris somehow “slept her way to the top” is apparently much worse. (Things David has said in these threads.)
So last time it was raised was 1983, from 65->67, based on people born in 1938 or later, so people who were 20 years from retirement or more. (<= 45)
Following that logic, doing it in 2025 you'd want people who were <= 47 years old, so probably 1978 would be the more likely cutoff(and going up the longer it takes in the term to pass)
You're not 28 are you? I don't see an increase in the retirement age on the horizon in the US, but if such a change were to one day arrive, it seems highly likely it would only affect the still quite young.
Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed with your conclusion, but I think at this point the median GOP federal office holder is so retarded that they would actually vote for an immediate multi-year jump in the retirement age for everyone under 55 or maybe even 60 without blinking.
I'm...skeptical? They're a bunch of nutcases, but they appear to still be squeamish about slashing retirement programs. But you could be right! It party depends on whether or not we continue to have fair elections. If not, then, yes, all bets are off because the last guardrail (fear of voter wrath) will finally be removed.
Looking forward to what articles you have on deck for the upcoming days before the election, Matt. I've been commenting less these recent days because I'm burned out of election coverage and really want it to be over, because, like you after this article, there's not much else to say. It'll be quite nice to read something different for a change, and something different is what makes this site a good subscription.
Yeah, everyone is trying to be a good team player (including me), but to me the only interesting things to note (there are so few, we’ve been doing this for so long) aren’t strictly helpful. Look forward to more interesting conversations (hopefully after a win).
America’s pandemic experience was unusual because our election occurred about 40% of the way through the pandemic. Biden presided over more covid deaths, but Trump was president during the scariest moments and greatest disruptions. It’s not really clear whether Biden or Trump is the “pandemic president,” the best answer is probably both.
However, Trump was president when the stimulus checks, forgivable PPP loans, and enhanced unemployment went out. Biden was president when liberal scolds resisted a return to normal even after vaccines had become available. Politically disengaged people remember that the checks went out under Trump and the inflation and most shameless risk aversion happened under Biden.
Biden might have made political hay out of the pandemic by aggressively embracing a return to normal. His international peers didn’t help him. In the summer of ‘21, there were no spectators at the olympics and the Canadian border was still closed to tourists. Trump’s relatively lax approach to covid and aggressive pursuit of vaccines has aged very well. Americans— especially the young American men who are swinging towards Trump, like seeing womens’ faces and didn’t want to distance forever.
There are a lot more dead Americans than Canadians or Japanese people, despite our creation of the vaccines (by far the best thing Trump did). I don't think the Trump approach otherwise aged well at all.
Death is a political outcome Americans are surprisingly cool with. We have more murders, more overdoses, more heart attacks and more infant mortality than our peer countries and show little inclination to change.
I prefer to reduce death by having people at the greatest risk of untimely death (eg middle age smokers/alcoholics/over eaters) voluntarily change their conduct. I would rather let people live their lives than force them to live as long as possible.
Are you suggesting that we eliminate taxes on alcohol and smoking, as well as make fentanyl available in vending machines? Or arguing that outright bans on existing problematic behavior are more problematic than the benefits one might hope they provide?
I'm ok with taxes on smoking, alcohol and also think we need to heavily tax sweeteners (sugar, corn syrup etc).
I would also legalize basically all drugs.
People should be free to do what they want with their own body even if it's bad for them. But I shouldn't have to pay for it. IE you use the taxes to offset the healthcare costs.
My feeling is that legalizing all drugs would eventually lead to a world, so dystopian, that most people would recant that view. What happens when someone invents a drug so addictive that anyone who tries it once is effectively hooked for life?
What is the externality to me or other fellow citizens from fentanyl deaths? There are externalities associated with alcohol abuse - drunk driving accidents/public misbehavior, or smoking in public - secondary smoke. I don't care if people die from drug overdoses.
The cost of crime prevention, the cost of incarceration, the cost of healthcare, the reduction in GDP, the cost of more and more children (possibly yours) falling to drug addiction, the embarrassment of living in a failed state?
Even the people who were dying (“the olds”) were pretty comfortable with the outcome, going by the attitudes of my relatives in their 80s. If you’ve only got a few years left anyways, why spend them socially isolated and behind a mask.
More politically salient is how much are those who died during covid are missed. The people who died were mostly old or quite unhealthy, it’s not like a war where promising young men were struck down before reaching their prime. Covid is probably a better way to go than alzheimer’s/parkinson’s/extreme old age
Very much this, as someone dealing with a relative in late stage Alzheimer’s the past few years. It’s an absolutely horrible way to spend the last few years of life.
Your last sentence is totally true, but having a Covid icu nurse for a husband made me realize that deaths from covid certainly wasn’t only old people. Middle aged Mexicans and black folks had a rough go of it.
There's a lot more Americans of any kind than Canadians or Japanese. Where we really pulled ahead of other countries in Covid death rate was in 2021-22 as vaccination rates lagged, which is much more a result of conservative cultural forces more than Trump administration policy.
Obviously our population is bigger but it's true per capita. And Trump policy is very much not separable in either direction from conservative cultural forces!
Point 20 is the one that frustrates me the most. If Trump wins based on inflation backlash, I fear greatly that we will get much more inflation than before, and people will suffer for the opposite of what they wanted. It's where the original vision Matt had for Vox would have been very useful, and it's a shame that that original vision wasn't lucrative enough on the market.
I very much hope that Trump loses but I don’t find this “Trump’s plans will cause inflation” narrative to be very persuasive, and I don’t think the median voter does either.
Trump is constrained by Congress, and a GOP trifecta may produce somewhat higher deficits but is not likely to generate a significant degree of inflation. It is ridiculous to take Trump’s campaign promises on their face and say he’s going to spend $8T — he is promising any goody he can because he has (rightly, I think) assessed that there is some upside and no downside to doing so.
Again, though, as Matt has pointed out, the best case for Trump remains not "his policies are good" but "well, he won't actually do the stuff he's saying he will" and that is wild
My wife and I were having this exact discussion this morning. Trump's worst case scenario's are REALLY bad (say using the military to go after American citizens/elected officials).
But the chances of them happening are pretty low. Because all of the American institutions are setup to resist them.
On the other hand the worst case of a Harris presidency such as nuking the filibuster or court packing seem REALLY likely. And I think would be a disaster for the country (especially packing the court).
"REALLY likely"? Have you looked at Senate election polls? The best possible case for Dems is a 50/50 split. Such a Senate will not nuke the filibuster or pack the Court.
Yes if Republicans win the senate that would be great. Divided government is what we need. Keep the crazy parts of each side away from unchecked power.
So the stuff that Trump is actually saying and running on are *unlikely* to happen in your view, but the stuff that Kamala is specifically not saying or running on is *really likely?*
That's totally backwards and a ridiculous rationalization. Just because you introduce some nuance about "Institutions" doesn't mean you can just fabricate the rest of reality around it and pretend it's rational that Trump is a lower-risk choice.
Also, the comment you were replying to is saying that the BEST case scenarios for Trump are all bad — based on him *not* doing anything he's running on.
She probably won't have the congress needed to do either! On the other hand, Trump likely *would* in a victory; then, to your original point, we'd just need to hope he doesn't or can't do any of the bad stuff he's actually promising to do.
It’s more a question of “can’t” than “won’t.” Many of Trump’s proposals are fantasies, even compared to the usual proclivity for candidates to make promises they have no power to deliver.
Okay, but Harris won’t be able to do almost anything she’s talked about doing. And that’s also been of some comfort to her more centrist backers (see Cuban and the bizarre taxing unrealized gains thing). It seems worth mentioning that the same applies to Trump not being a one man super legislature.
Trump is *not* constrained by Congress when it comes to tariffs, or to bullying the Fed, and those are the two most obviously inflationary things he has said he will do.
They are more constrained by the fiscal reality at this point. I know it’s easy to just say that they will be irresponsible because they only care about cutting taxes. But choosing to believe that they will majorly cut taxes given the fiscal shape we’re in requires believing that Congressional Republicans are considerably *less responsible* than they were in 2003 or 2017. Will they do everything they can to extend Trump tax cuts? Yes. Will they explode the deficit to such a degree that it causes inflation to spike? I would bet not.
This is just the old "Trump is incompetent" excuse, that has it's own issues, but Trump winning almost certainly means Republicans doing well enough to take Congress.
In any case, the President does have significant powers to impose tariffs, without Congress. He can do a lot unilaterally. They haven't been used super widely, because of a series of norms and consensus that Trump famously doesn't buy into. That's probably a big part of their appeal to Trump. Tariffs would be inflationary to most consumer, but who knows, maybe he'll just use it on businesses that piss him off (i.e. don't pay bribes).
The tariffs cause inflation this is a little weird, because tariffs should decrease demand by lowering the deficit while increasing the prices people experience. But “Trump will explode the deficit” and “Trump will unilaterally raise taxes” are ideas that are in tension, even if it’s not impossible to imagine both happening.
So in one sense that’s an “anti-inflation” measure, but I don’t think most people will buy that technically inflation has gone down if the prices they pay have gone up.
I agree with you. The price increases will be experienced as inflation but that is different from a classic demand-induced wage-price spiral. That’s all I’m saying.
Increasing prices by X% is increasing prices. The demand reductions from that is got to offset some of the price increases, but prices will still go up. Also the amount of revenue from tariffs will not offset the tax cuts.
Which leads to the whole problem of failing to communicate the tradeoffs: you can't be getting checks instead of paying taxes, and not having inflation at the same time! And yes, I know a retort can be "But but, I want a check for *me*, and to tax the hell out of *them*!"
That point got hardest for me for exactly that reason. The press has portrayed inflation as solely Biden's fault and they are obscuring the differene between a Dem platfom that fights inflation with a Trump platform that will raise prices by a lot. It is infuriating.
I understand it's an election, but "Trump is an unreliable tabloid man and Congressional Republicans backed by middle class voters and mid-sized business donors will make this impossible" pretty correctly shot down the "Trump is suggesting a universal healthcare plan" punditry in 2016. It even correctly shot down "Build the Wall", which Trump literally made his top campaign message and even unsuccessfully got in a shut-down with a GOP-led Congress over funding for.
I'm not saying it's impossible Trump and GOP Congress worked out some sort of tariff to income and payroll tax trade, but being convinced the same Republicans that killed Paul Ryan's DBCFT in 2017 are going to say "yes, I want 20% upticks in all foreign consumed goods" is a tell someone is not very interested in Congressional politics and relies exclusively on presidential campaigns to make sense of reality. Which must be miserable; Biden promised 11 trillion in spending and 2 trillion in revenue over ten years in 2020. How could anyone possibly vote for that kind of inflationary ruin on the American people in good conscience?
I've been practicing a corollary to 1, where I remind myself that in June/July I was certain we were going to lose and had kind of accepted it. Then Biden stepped down and the Harris campaign has refought the race to a draw. Now when I feel badly that it's so close I remind myself that it was almost lost and that helps in an odd way.
The politically perverse part of me desperately wants to witness the specter of Kamala Harris losing the popular vote by 780,000 votes, but getting the mother of all perfectly efficient distributions en route to winning all seven swing states and that Omaha district. MAGA heads would be exploding near and far.
This is what I'm rooting for because it would (or should) depolarize the electoral college issue. And also it will make every partisan on both sides turn into hypocrits immediately, which is fun to see.
I think the danger is that conservatives just use it as a way to say that Harris is an illegitimate President and use it to justify trying another Jan 6, without really getting on board with any fair reforms.
I think that the sitting President on January 6th, 2025 will have a lot fewer qualms about quelling a pro-Trump riot than the sitting President on January 6th, 2021 did.
Well, to be clear, a very narrow win like the one I've described is probably consistent with NOT taking the House back, and is also surely more vulnerable to a GOP coup. So, I wasn't *really* being serious.
No exploding heads, the Electoral College will just become another manifestation of the deep state rigging things for the elites. I can already see the National Review articles about how Democrats are so hypocritical for wanting to abolish the EC while benefiting from it - one more example of left hypocrisy!
I call this "hypocrisy murder-suicide." It's where you successfully call out your opponent on their hypocrisy but doing so also exposes how you're also being hypocritical. You see it everywhere.
The dirty little secret of hypocrisy is that it's a hollow accusation that ends up in users simply ditching sincerely expressing opinions rather than actually trying to hold consistent positions.
Also, i don't think this kind of consistency is desirable anyway.
“The Trump 2016 move..”. I’ll stop you right there. Even someone like Matt falls prey to giving too much credit to Trump or ascribes medium to long term thinking that doesn’t exist. The fact is by accident he bumbled his way to a winning message and succeeded with a strategy that would have derailed almost anyone else by sheer luck. It’s the story of his entire life.
It’s unfortunately part of why too many people don’t think he’s that dangerous (you could add 28. Last 8 years has depressingly proven that complete shameless lying is less harmful to a political campaign than it should be). Because it’s precisely because his one talent is reading a crowd and catering to a crowd that allows to get away with so much of what he says. Because people know there is so little long term thinking to his actions you can say to yourself “oh he’s just saying that”.
Trump himself may have been lucky to some extent, but his political strategy was being given to him by people like Steve Bannon who really did have an understanding of what white non-college voters in Midwest states wanted to hear.
I’m struggling to conceptualize how this could be even close to true. Paul Ryan and his ilk were essentially exiled from power in the Trump administration.
Bannon had a bunch of ambitious quasi-white nationalist and autarkical programs he wanted Trump to push. Trump instead fired Bannon and largely contented himself with tax cuts and appointing pro-life judges.
Sorry, but the modal Paul Ryan policy package involves tax cuts, full or partial Social Security privatization, Medicare/Medicaid cuts, and a focus on deficit reduction.
Other than the first item, Trump’s admin was roughly as ideologically distant from that approach as could be possible while still running and governing as a Republican. Sure he did tax cuts, but that was hardly because he was committed to some hard-charging fiscally conservative traditionalist GOP policy framework. Saying that Trump “embraced Paul Ryan” seems like a massive epistemic error.
I don't think this is really true. There is an interesting idea that I heard through James Scott about charismatic political leaders, and how influence flows both ways with them. Part of the deal with these sorts of leaders is that they are incredibly sensitive to what their followers think, and so they can act in part like a channel for their people. It's not entirely one-sided, they also influence their followers, but the point is that the influence goes both ways.
That's not to say there is strategic medium- to long-term thinking, but I don't think it's just luck. He is legitimately talented in this way.
For the most part I agree, which is why Trump's "message" doesn't work for anyone but him. Vance eked out a narrow victory in a deep red state, and only with billionaire backing. The message is a loser, and they need to attach it to Trump to get their nationalist isolationism across the line.
Trump's only skill is selling himself, and if we give him any credit it's that he may be the best ever at doing so. He saw a market of pent up resentment towards establishment Washington and the media and capitalized.
One of the few half glass full takes I have is I think trumpism doesn’t outlast Trump. I mean certain aspects may; more skepticism to free trade, less openness to immigration. But in totality it seems really clear his entire oeuvre is an electoral loser. Again I go back to a bizarre electoral strength is because he lies so much you can tell yourself he doesn’t actually want to do the worst stuff he’s proposed. But other politicians? Much easier to believe they actually want to implement Christian nationalist or extreme nativist policy or other parts of trumpism that isn’t actually that popular (there’s a big gap between “I want borders more under control” and “I think we should get rid of all immigrants”
I've been thinking about Matt's "parties should moderate their way to success," ideas, and where it falls short.
I think one reason that pure "moderate on policy" isn't always the winning move -- and why Trump gets less grief from his right wing than Democrats get from their left -- is that if you just concede a bunch of points, it makes you look weak and uninspiring. This particularly hurts you with your base and donors, who want to see an advocate and a fighter.
I think part of Trump's idiosyncratic appeal is that he was able to moderate on losing issues for the Republicans while being so pugnacious that the right wing is still satisfied that they have an advocate.
This is all despite the fact that she’s staying on message with abortion and the “opportunity economy.” I think popularism sometimes comes off as the awkward kid in school trying to become popular by doing a bad impression of how popular kids act. People don’t like that.
(Obviously the NYT interviews aren’t representative, so take this with a grain of salt.)
As I said, the point *isn’t* that this is a representative sample of opinions. I’m just using the fact that *some* Democrats would hold these opinions to highlight a theoretical mechanism by which “saying whatever sounds popular” might have some costs.
(Also, I’m not “amplifying” anything by posting this halfway down a SB comments section and noting the limitations! This was in the NYT at the top of the op-ed page!)
The problem isn't that she's saying things that are popular with voters, it's that she *used to say things that weren't*, and switched positions. She, and Democrats generally, should have always been focused on their strongest issues and not gone out of their way to embrace positions that were popular with the most obnoxious activists but not the broader normie public.
I take your point, but I think there's some path-dependence in the optimal messaging strategy. Certainly it's best to campaign consistently and credibly throughout your entire career on popular ideas. But what if you already took some unpopular positions?
Consider someone who's always marketed themselves as the Candidate of Peace and Veganism. Suppose the Candidate decides to run for president and realizes that Peace and Veganism are horrendously unpopular among the general electorate. So the Candidate starts to run ads where people are firing off assault rifles and barbecuing burgers, looking somewhat uncomfortable and robotic throughout. Maybe the Candidate makes a short appearance at the 4th of July hot dog eating contest to make a stilted proclamation of love for War and Meat.
Is this the optimal messaging strategy for the Candidate? I doubt it. The base will drop their support and normie voters will just be confused. Why support this candidate when others are more credible on the issues of War and Meat?
A lot of people are puzzled by the responses people give pollsters when they’re asked “are you better off now than you were four years ago.” - “four years ago there was a pandemic and epidemic riots! How could you possibly be worse off?”
I think these people are taking the question too literally. Respondents aren’t thinking “let’s see, 2024 minus four is 2020, what was I doing in October 2020…”
They’re just telling the pollster if they were happier during the 4-year period when Trump was president. And frankly, that’s what pollsters actually want to know. Not a literal subtraction problem.
I think it’s more that 2020 doesn’t feel like part of our timeline. I noticed that during the pandemic, I found it hard to remember what things were like before, and in the post-pandemic era my memory of the pandemic is fading faster than my memory of 2019.
I think it’s related to all the contextual factors of memory, how when you’re hanging out with one group of friends, the past times you were hanging out with them seem more recent and memorable.
It can't be emphasized enough how bananas it is that Trump is going to win because people are mad about high prices and inflation when his only actual policy idea is tariffs that will raise prices and cause inflation. I mean it really is the stupidest thing in the world.
Why not? Democrats have made it abundantly clear through the messaging over the last 4 years that handling inflation is not a high priority and have mostly allowed Republicans to control the narrative on the issue.
What are you talking about? Inflation is already back to close to 2% and has been in the basically normal range since mid-2023. Agree that Republicans have had better messaging, but that’s because it’s way easier to hammer generic platitudes about “this wouldn’t happen on my watch” or vagaries about “I would’ve done things differently” than try to convince the public that Fed rate hikes take time to work.
The only substantive policy that would’ve made a difference after inflation started is cutting the deficit and Republicans certainly are not advocating for that.
Yes and people don't know this stuff among other things because, as I said, Democrats have allowed Republicans to control the narrative and Harris continues to do so.
The messaging I think is a tough question. Biden tried early on to tout his Administration's accomplishments, and the consensus was that it didn't work. The public believed the economy was bad, and telling them different just made them angrier. Democrats had to meet voters where they were at.
At the same time, there's plenty of evidence that relentless propaganda works, starting with Trump. Say something enough, vehemently enough, and for long enough, people may believe you.
But then again, Trump has a uniquely powerful hold on his base, and Democrats may simply not be able to bully the public into believing (correctly) that the economy is good. Democrats also lack propaganda outfits, of which Fox News is now among the least embarrassing.
I think something people miss is that while the media is well to the left of the average voter, they are very critical of lefty *politicians*. You couldn't get MSNBC, NPR and the NYT all insisting that the economy is amazing, and it's all thanks to Master Joe.
The idea that Democrats need most of the major media outlets to effectively act as campaign arms for the party simply to beat one of the most unpopular opponents in modern political history is a pretty enormous indictment of the state of the party.
You may as well say the opposite. The fact that Trump, an unpopular candidate, has managed to do as well as he has speaks to the power of the rightwing media propaganda machine.
It's not a question of belief. Biden and Harris have barely talked about anything but inflation and prices for the last two years. That's an empirical fact.
I used to work a lot in South Africa and met plenty of nice South Africans (including Afrikaners). Admittedly, this was in the 2010s and not the 1980s, so a generation-removed from Apartheid. However, one thing I did find is a disturbingly widespread fatalism among those same, very nice (white) South Africans around the potential for most Black South Africans to ever really be co-equal or to run the state or organizations effectively. This was a tricky thing because the South African government post-Mandela has been notoriously feckless and corrupt. So you can find plenty of "evidence" for a racist take on the Rainbow Nation. (For any DC natives, you'll see a parallel in the reactionary response to the likes of Marion Barry after the District gained Home Rule, and the various follow-on cases of official corruption and ineptitude among Black politicians in the DC City Council up to the present, especially from the impoverished and majority-Black Ward 8, including most recently disgraced Council Member Trayon White).
It's also clear to see that South African policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has often been executed in a manner that's sub-optimal. For one thing, it just hasn't worked to integrate the private sector: I never saw more than a handful of South African professional businesses where the management weren't entirely white. For another thing, when BEE's not paired with effective efforts to actually increase Black social capital (and South African public education is woeful), you just get frustration over an arbitrary quota system that appears to secure slots for unqualified people. This is the real-life version of what American Conservatives think DEI is.
And lest we forget the third leg of this South African-style reactionary stool: don't forget the anxieties around (racialized) crime! White South Africans, to the man (even the Progressives and Liberals), are all constantly talking about the fear of violent crime. And, unlike Americans who hype immigrant crime, South Africans aren't really exaggerating the threat: South Africa is one of the most murderous countries in the world, with an intentional homicide rate an incredible SEVEN TIMES that of the United States'. And the crimes are often the grizzly stuff of MAGA fever dreams: from white farmers hog-tied and brutally raped/murdered by Black marauders to similar fates befalling wealthy white urbanites behind gates and fences. The charitable explanation for the "unnecessarily" violent nature of even property crimes like burglaries and car-jackings is that the violent legacy of Apartheid lead to a lot of racial resentment, mixed with the extreme inequality you see in South Africa that maps directly with race. But, again, this is what American MAGA Conservatives see when they think about crime at the hands of non-whites and immigrants: a lurid fever-dream of the restive underclasses delighting in brutalizing them and stealing their property.
It doesn't help if an outsider like me pipes in with an "objective" perspective on how this is all the result of a total failure to rectify the racial injustices and persistent economic inequality in South African society. The awkward fact is that almost all of South Africa's 10% of the population who are white are middle-class plus and live a quite decent life, while almost all the 90% who aren't white live impoverished, wretched lives not so improved from the Apartheid Era. And what happens to a dream deferred? If Black South Africans resent white South Africans and a minority of them resort to radical populist politics or violent crime as a means to finally "make things right," can you blame them? And isn't it a little complacent that 30 years after Apartheid ended, the racial gap remains so wide? For me, the lesson of South Africa is exactly that you cannot retain forms of Apartheid and extreme, racialized inequality indefinitely, without reaping what you sew.
But the likes of Elon Musk clearly see it differently, and double-down on their "boss-ism." Looking at the disappointments of Post-Apartheid South Africa, you can begin to see what a Thiel / Sacks / Musk "anti-Woke" reactionary agenda worldview looks like and how it can be corroborated in the existing South Africa of today. And how the United States, viewed through this dark mirror, deepens their conviction that all is hierarchy and that democracy isn't just foolish, but dangerous.
I have no direct experience with South Africa in any capacity, but I have been coming to the conclusion in the past few months (especially since learning Peter Thiel and David Sacks are also South African, beside Musk) that an extremely underexplored aspect of the past four years is the extent to which the 2020 rioting and related progressive ideological moves (whatever one wants to style it as) terrorized US-based South African emigres into believing they need to take extreme and immediate action to prevent the "South-Africanization" of the US.
How would you go about closing the gap? What growth prospects are you going to create for the poor that won’t be available to the white South Africans? Short of a Communist or Cultural Revolution style takeover? And on that subject I’ve heard that if you look at prominent families in pre-revolutionary China and look now, they are significantly represented in the upper echelons of modern China.
All very good questions to which I don't have satisfying answers. I think that, to some extent, intergenerational inequality is baked in and inevitable. But I also think that you can at least attempt to ameliorate it with some investments in social services (like education) and see some closing of the gap. It won't be enough, though.
But if Black South Africans lack capacity to run a modern state, then the policies you propose are a literal impossibility. This basically describes South Africa.
Botswana has been governed very competently (in a relative sense) over the same time period, so it does seem like a problem that should theoretically be tractable… unfortunately it seems like execution is the hardest but also least sexy part of overcoming Apartheid.
MattY has highlighted this point countless times w.r.t. policy battles in the US; passing the bill, changing the gov’t, etc. means very little without competent execution.
> Back when Obama was president and I was floating various slightly inflationary schemes to engineer a more rapid labor market recovery, some of the older people on his team would tell me I was underrating how much people hate inflation.
2010-2020, progressive intelligentsia convinced me that plutocrats suborned the Fed's mandate to keep labor powerless. I'd love to see a post-mortem from those folks on the *popular* preference for low inflation at the expense of higher unemployment.
I imagine with higher unemployment, since it hits 'other people', americans do have a very 'f*ck you got mine' mentality toward political issues, whereas inflation hits everybody.
My take is that inflation 'punishes' virtue -savers, those who avoid debt, people with pensions. While unemployment generally falls hardest on the least competent - companies cut the worst workers, badly run firms close, etc.. Of course, not denying that there isn't a random element to unemployment but this I think is generally true and people observe it.
My understanding of the political science is that your plausible hypothesis is false. The median voter hates seeing the value of their salary erode, will attribute (inflation-aided) raises as entirely due to their personal accomplishments, and grits their teeth every time they pay for gas or groceries, which is weekly. But I do not have a citation to hand.
Fair enough, I would say it's still the same mechanic though, my hard earned salary is diluted the same way my lazy cousins' is. But if layoffs happens he's much more likely to be hit than me.
I like the list. A lot to unpack here. Two things I look forward to hearing more from Matt about:
1. The "policy ratchet" literature, in item 11: "This is not how politics works, it defies all the conventional wisdom, and in the case of the CTC, it involved violently misreading the 'policy ratchet' literature in a way that almost defies comprehension"
2. The question of how the South African experience influences Thiel / Sacks / Musk is really interesting along a couple of axes of interpretation. The one you mention -- how electoral democracy can lead to bad economic outcomes -- and also in terms of how to navigate a multicultural society that contains **dramatically** different cultural norms.
I totally understand how white south africans could find Democracy threatening. When your group is begins with 20% of the electorate and the other group is growing faster, you’re gonna lose, and, best case, there will be really stiff taxes, worst case reparations and expropriation. But America is completely different. Whites are 65% of the electorate and, while this share is decreasing, Latinos are assimilating and inter marrying about as quickly as their numbers are increasing. There’s a very good chance America can slowly become multiracial without upheaval.
I am not totally sure why, but America seems supernaturally gifted at assimilation. The term "multicultural" feels almost misleading because it understates the extent to which new cultures just get absorbed into the whole.
I assume it has something to do with that quote about how you can’t become French, Japanese, etc, but you can become American. If the end goal is actually achievable, there’s something to work at.
There are a number of small but significant things that add up to this. We say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school, for instance. This is important to us because without America as a country there's no such thing as an American; whereas without the country of Sweden (for instance) there's still the concept of a Swedish person.
I think this is largely just the result of a few things happening in the right order:
1. The British Empire established English as arguably the most important international language by the end of WWI and made their culture known to basically the whole planet.
2. Anglophones unified in one country got control of the entire contiguous US, an enormously overpowered geographic advantage that let their population and economy grow enormously.
3. WWII decimated much of the world right as mass media and international communications were taking off.
This firmly established a huge population of Anglophones, English as the default and most useful language worldwide, and American/British culture as understood worldwide.
This inherently makes the US good at assimilation because it requires few changes on the part of Americans: The people who come in are going to learn English fluently no later than the second generation and they're mostly going to be OK with bits of culture like Christmas and secular rule of law and blue jeans. The other FIVEYES countries of course get a similar effect.
Canada has the best immigrants, because it gets them carefully. They get industrious, hard working, law abiding types from throughout the Commonwealth. Yet even Canada is slowing down, probably because the rent in Canada is way too high.
This is almost certainly false at the high end of the spectrum. Might be true to some extent at the mid or lower end of the spectrum.
Attracting high-end immigrants depends mostly on having high-end jobs for them, no? In that regard, you can't really beat the USA.
Obviously the US gets the best immigrants. How is this even debatable?
It depends what you mean by getting the best immigrants. If you're only interested in, "of the most impressive people who move to a country they weren't born in, where do they go?" then the USA wins hands down, it has the best opportunities for impressive and successful people to become superstars or super-rich, or to work in very prestigious organizations or on very exciting projects.
But "getting the best immigrants" could also mean "how appealing is the median immigrant, as seen by existing citizens?" or "can we successfully exclude immigrants who have little to recommend them to the citizens?" By those measures, the USA's long border with a much poorer country and its overloaded immigration system are disadvantages, whereas Canada has the luxury of being inaccessible by land except from a huge country that is slightly richer per capita, puts a lot of distance between Canada and land migrants, and absorbs those migrants or deports them in the opposite direction of Canada. This means that while not being as attractive as the USA for future Nobel laureates, startup founders etc., Canada also gets fewer "low-quality" immigrants because they can't walk in.
The US is very gifted at assimilation compared to "Old Europe" (France seemed to have been doing a good job with immigration from other parts of Europe, mostly Italy and Spain, in the 19th C, although Captain Dreyfus would disagree).
It's not clear to me (YMMV) that the US is particularly standout compared to other emigrant/settler nation-states like Australia, Brazil, Mexico, even Canada**. I confess that I say that based more on anecdata and "vibes" much more than having solid time series, but e.g. the on the ground change from the White Australia of 2-3 generations back and today is pretty striking.
** the asterisk on Canada having to do with the ongoing and not really settled (from what I can tell) battles over how Francophony cashes out, both within Quebec and at the Federal level.
The French have the closest thing in Europe to the civic identity that America has achieved. There is a greater value on french culture (language and norms) than french ethnicity. Liberté, egalité, fraternité.” Maybe laïcité too.
France has worse race riots than Britain, Spain or Germany
It got an assist from having a slate wiped blank to start from...
It's the inexorable force of American pop culture. A child of immigrants will want to be an American teenager, no matter how much their parents try to stop it. Local cultural enclaves will hold the first immigrant generation. The second generation will visit and feel guilty that their kids no longer speak the language of the old country.
I have talked to a number of white South Africans who find democracy threatening, but it is not this sort of abstract principle. It's more like, worrying that if Malema and the EFF party gain power there will be anti-white-person violence. Their political theme song is all about killing white people, it's a very reasonable thing to be worried about. And I think this drives a lot of people to emigrate which I think is a totally reasonable response. (Especially if you are a skilled professional who would make more money in the US or Europe.)
In some sense, this is reaping what you sow, right? You shouldn't be surprised if a government built on racist violence falls, and then there's more political violence later. But that doesn't really reassure people like, a white woman who grew up in Cape Town and had nothing to do with any apartheid government because she was 2 years old when that fell and now is thinking hey maybe she should bring up her children elsewhere and she is just a bit worried about the effects of South African democracy in general.
And also the EFF doesn't look like it will gain power in the near future, the current coalition government seems promising IMO. So maybe it will just work out.
Just to set the facts down, in 1996 the percentage of white SAs relative to total population was 10.9%. Today it’s 7.3% and emigration is a big component of that loss. I can’t tell you if I’ve talked to the avg white SA (probably not) but the sense I get is that there continues to be a deep recognition that that apartheid was wrong. However it is also very unfortunate that Mandela was succeeded by a progressively more incompetent and corrupt Presidents of SA. Horrifically high crime rates (tho slight trending down), a murder rate about 7.5x greater than the US.
And so there is a sense that in several easy to measure ways, SA has become a much weaker economic entity, much less safe and deteriorating capital base over time.
In fact a diaspora of SA (white and black, but mostly white ) can be found in both major English speaking population centers in the, US, UK and Asia Pacific (especially Australia) and also the Netherlands.
I am sure there is a great sense of loss and disappointment and that would permeate the thinking of powerful emigrants.
The British empire and its afterglow were totally awesome for privileged white people. They were often better for no whites than the Belgian congo or dutch east indies, but ymmv.
Aren’t there a lot of vultures from India robbing South Africa too?
im genuinely curious what this means
Referring to these guys: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/how-the-gupta-brothers-hijacked-south-africa-corruption-bribes
I suspect Elon Musk would strongly agree America is different, and one could argue cutting the asylum immigration is a part of accelerating that process of assimilation and inter-marrying[1]. Separate from Musk but similar to his views, it is unsurprising Latino voters have trended less Democratic as Republicans become more of their early 20th century form on the immigration issue. Desire for social mobility within a national citizenry and desire for higher immigration are not obviously the same thing, and in some ways, can directly conflict.
At any rate, South Africa is simply a very different country from the US with very different problems (deterioration of electrical grid, potable water, air force, things we take for granted as capabilities of developed countries[2].) It seems like a basic error for leftists to analogize South Africa before and after apartheid when trying to argue with Israeli citizens about the (real) injustice of the West Bank occupation. But that's a whole other thing.
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/halting-immigration-wont-stop-the-u-s-from-becoming-a-majority-minority-nation.html
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/gangs-corruption-and-collapse-the-slow-and-steady-demise-of-south-africa-a-7ed1fcd1-a2e8-446a-9ff9-074718215281
I also found the South African MAGA cabal quite an interesting and unexplored point. I would read a book or long form article on it.
Kind of shocking there hasn't been a New Yorker long form feature on it.
They could title it “The Neo-apartheidists bankrolling the MAGA GOP” or something similar.
"From Pretoria to Palo Alto: The South African stagehands behind Trump's MAGA movement"
There you go
There was an NYT hit-piece on Musk's childhood that iirc was pretty bad and became a cause célèbre among people who complain about the Times self-editing. (The reporter tweeted: "Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid govt propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege. @lynseychutel & I explored his early life") It was a bit rich to suggest that the problem with Apartheid SA was "unchecked speech," and the article promised a lot more than it delivered (white fellow students said he was standoffish and stood out because he would go to Black kids birthday parties, which doesn't exactly make him look bad). But I bet there's more material for better reporters.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/its-crazy-that-major-media-outlets
A NYT reporter complaining about unchecked speech is the most 2020s thing ever.
How anybody, let alone a reporter based in SA, could claim that the Apartheid government embodied "the dangers of unchecked speech" is hard to fathom.
They censored books and newspapers and locked up people who disagreed with them!!
[Me doing the DiCaprio pointing in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" meme.]
Isn't it bad that he wouldn't go to black kids birthday parties?
No, he *did* go, and his white classmates who avoided Black kids their age said that Musk didn’t have many friends that they knew. It is one of the only things I’ve read that made me think well of Musk, although it isn’t meant to
Hasn’t there? They’ve certainly done long form pieces on Thiel and Musk
While Matt's point about the connection between electoral majoritarianism and "bad" economic policy is definitely right in terms of Musk/Thiel/Sacks' thinking, I really think there's something even broader where these guys link politics-as-such to societal decline.
None of the three are supporters of apartheid, really I think all three found and still find their country of origin to have been depressing and hopeless, and that leads them to find the idea of a mass polity governing itself and working through its disputes at the ballot box to be unserious and naive in a way more intense than people from the historically and culturally democratic NATO sphere would ever feel.
That Trumpism is a cheap and cartoonish anti-politics easily pushed to the will of oligarchs is precisely the appeal. Gangsterism reads to them as more serious than the "fantasy" of self-government. Racism per se is a bit of a red herring.
It's also a classic libertarian talking point. "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep arguing on what's for dinner."
"I've travelled this old world of ours from Barnsley to Peru
I've had sunstroke in the arctic and a swim in Timbuktu
I've seen unicorns in Burma and a yeti in Nepal
And I've danced with ten-foot pygmies in a Montezuma hall
I've met the king of China and the working Yorkshire miner
But I've never met a nice South African"
Charlize Theron seems pretty cool. Also, to be pedantic, so did Nelson Mandela. Never met either of them, though
To be pedantic, "South African" in the song refers to Afrikaners. (It was the '80s!) So Theron is a counterexample but Mandela is not.
Her career depends on seeming to be pretty cool. Ellen Degeneres seemed really cool and likable too.
Ellen is South African? I thought she was from Louisiana.
I mean you can’t really tell about a lot of people from their persona.
British TV shows aside, every South African I have met in America has been quite friendly. Heck, my middle school principal was an immigrant from South Africa, and he was pretty cool.
I have. I also have talked about politics there. What a place.
Trevor Noah seems nice and funny. Go to one of his comedy shows.
Still salty over the Second Boer War?
For South Africa, you can probably start with the documentary Lethal Weapon 2, it covers some of the history of the apartheid period and illustrates some examples of race relations in the culture there at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkJnc0mlhIw
I watched Lethal Weapon 2 for the first time last year. In a day and age of Tom Cruise in Top Gun 2 battling “the enemy” it sure was a (pleasant) surprise to see how anti-South Africa Hollywood was willing to be in the late-80s!
Also the George Harrison song during the credits rips.
Everyone was anti-South African. Paul Simon took a ton of heat for making Graceland, even though he was working with blacks performing black African music.
Hey, Rogue Nation did nothing wrong!
I work with a few guys from South Africa and they’re great guys, charismatic and fun. The other common denominator is that they’re cowboys; very comfortable with risk, impatient with playing it safe. For whatever that’s worth, which is probably nothing. But I see something similar with the rich guys supporting Trump.
Agree the specifics about the policy ratchet would be good to hear more about as Matt was a big proponent of some version of CTC expansion as I recall.
The South Africa question is very interesting. They have a huge unauthorized immigration problem, in part because many in the ANC see keeping out people from neighboring countries as having echoes of apartheid and Bantustans.
The last time I was in Joberg was at least 8-10 years ago. At the time, there was a huge influx of Nigerians into the country. The corners of most streets had groups of Nigerians hanging around all day (or so my driver and the people I talked to). It had a look that you would find familiar in Chicago or Baltimore, but at a much larger scale. Black and White SAs both were blaming a whole bunch of social ills on the newcomers.
But we do NOT have a society with dramatically different cultural norms. Republicans _claim_ that Democrats have dramatically different cultural norms, but it's not true. The problem of electoral democracy are the same as always, people want contradictory things. Not worse now than in 1789.
What do people mean by "all of these"? Isn't it just Thiel and Musk? What other billionaire South Africans are there that I'm missing? Do we need a geopolitical theory to explain 2 egomaniacs who happen to be from the same country?
I've heard no one disparaging random Russian Americans. Cubans engender hostility from lefties because they vote conservatively.
You definitely see disparaging remarks made about Cuban-Americans in progressive circles. That even crops up in snarky replies to Matt on Twitter because the commenters presume Matt's Cuban ancestors were fleeing Castro, rather than fleeing Batista in an earlier wave of refugees.
I think it makes sense to consider the democracy-skeptical angle of a South African given that South Africa represents one of the great economic development setbacks of any world nation in the past 50 years. The economy writ large collapsed and has essentially not grown since the ‘90s, and it is no longer a leader among African bloc economies. Overlapping energy crises have exacerbated this trend. Crime rates soared and for several years were among the highest in the world. Dissatisfaction with the govt has been sky-high during this time but corruption continued unabated for decades. It’s all very Argentina-esque albeit even more dramatic in some ways. I find it to be a tragedy. The nation had so much potential after the end of apartheid; virtually no one expected the next decades would be so calamitous.
Luckily the current coalition seems slightly more stable and considerably more competent than previous governments, but they have a long road ahead of them if they want to regain their status as the preeminent African economy south of the Sahel.
Yeah. Interestingly Namibia, where Thiel is from, has had a much more stable transition to democracy. Of course, there are only a few people there and there are tons of racial disparities, but it’s avoided the malgovernment of SA.
Was the Mandela government corrupt? I had the impression that the policies put in place to correct racial injustice were poorly structured. Which I understand. It's got to be hard to successfully make over a society so dramatically.
Who doesn't get along here? Musk, Sacks, and Thiel are all part of the PayPal mafia, and while they may not be the best of friends, they certainly influence each other.
I'm aware of the falling out back then but thought they'd somewhat patched it up or had others as go between, but TBH I'm not really sure. Thiel and Sacks are definitely part of the same group of PayPal Republicans though.
Big New: Paul Graham came out in support of Harris with a very persuasive argument to appeal to techie moderates, https://x.com/paulg/status/1851200055220306378
For context, he's among the most respected names in tech as the founder of YCombinator and Sam Altmans former boss. Great argument that will appeal to moderates in tech, including those highly suspicious of Democrats economic policy. Here's the message:
Why Moderates Should Vote for Harris
People on the far left and the far right have already decided who to vote for in the next election. Voting for the other party would be unthinkable. But what if you're a moderate?
I'm a moderate, and I'm voting for Harris. The reason is not that I love the Democrats' policies. Both parties' policies seem a roughly equal mix of good and bad. The reason I'm voting for Harris is that this election is about character.
As far as I can tell, Harris is a typical politician. That may not seem much of a recommendation. But Trump is something far worse. He seems to be completely without shame.
We saw that the last time he was president. He ran the White House like a mob boss, choosing subordinates for loyalty rather than ability. No one knows that better than the people who worked for him. Almost half the cabinet-level appointees from his previous administration have refused to endorse him. They're warning us what he's like.
The worst thing he did, in my opinion, was when he tried to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election. He knew he'd lost, but he called Mike Pence and tried to get him not to certify the election. Thank God Pence had the character to stand up to him. I don't like to think what might have happened if he hadn't.
Trying to remain in power after losing an election is banana republic stuff. You don't do that in America. Conceding gracefully when you lose an election is more important than any policy a politician might have, because it's only this principle that allows us to get rid of politicians whose policies don't work.
So sure, Harris is a typical politician. But Trump is a crook. You can't have that sort of person as president. It's too risky.
To add some more context, he's written numerous essays defending tech, capitalism, and even economic inequality. He's solidly on the right with respect to economics and has the billions to back that up. Eg, his 2005 article, "Inequality and Risk", https://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html
ChatGPT summarizes this better than I could (because I haven't read it in nearly 20 years) as:
> Paul Graham’s essay "Inequality and Risk" argues that reducing economic inequality through wealth redistribution dampens people’s willingness to take risks, which he sees as crucial for startup innovation. He suggests that high potential rewards encourage risk-taking necessary for venture funding and founding startups. He emphasizes that attacking inequality by limiting wealth stifles economic growth, advocating instead to address corruption and the links between wealth and power. Graham concludes that societies should focus on transparency to limit power abuses, rather than reducing inequality itself.
Based.
Hi Marie! Haven’t seen you around here for a while. Welcome back!
Thanks! Yeah, life got too crazy in the mornings, I miss sitting with a cup of coffee and reading/commenting…. But I do still read and scan the comments when I can! Usually too late in the day to jump in the fray much :)
FWIW, he's also been very supportive of Palestinians and human rights in general (which unfortunately is surprising for a VC), and this apparently goes back at least ten years (https://www.timesofisrael.com/snippy-twitter-exchange-exposes-tech-tension-over-gaza/). He's also written about the importance of recognizing and questioning "moral fashions" (https://paulgraham.com/say.html).
https://moguldom.com/454177/silicon-valley-legend-paul-graham-called-anti-semite-for-highlighting-massacre-of-3600-palestinian-children/
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1775854515922628684
"It's much easier to bomb a family's home. The system is built to look for them in these situations."
Built to look for them at home. Built to. And yet the person saying this is not a critic of the Israeli regime. It's an intelligence officer describing business as usual.
Paul Graham is a sort of avatar of the “normie”* opinion among Silicon Valley elite, so this is mostly expected but nonetheless welcome news.
*”normie” in the sense that he is not associated with the countercultural elitist intellectual circles that form a kind of nebulae of contrarianism in the valley… including the Yarvin/Thiel/Musk crowd, but also those whose politics are dominated by EA, the e/acc fringe, etc
Graham's opinion that the problem is Americans don't take enough risks and need to be offered unlimited financial rewards in order to get them to do it is kinda weird to me, but understandable(self-interested) given his position.
It's nice to see somebody of that class not quoting Moldbug.
I completely agree that Trumps norm breaking, corruption, and (at best) quasi criminality is the worst thing about him, and are why I voted against him despite my dislike of many of Biden’s policies. I think he has personally and permanently increased what politicians will be able to get away with. Flabbergasting that he doesn’t even TRY to not get caught in lie and avoid scandal.
I still remember when conservatives were (rightly!) critical of Obama pushing the envelope on an unbound executive. Trump is that times about a thousand, plus he’s the most corrupt president since Grant. Can’t have that in office, even if it saves you taxes and is better in regulation.
If he were running against Sanders or something I’d have a hard decision to make. Against Harris it’s very easy, if unpleasant.
This is why I don't completely blame Dems for focusing so much on bashing Trump. You need to be strategic about it and meet people where they are at, but the dude is such an obvious conman. I agree with Matt substantively that focusing on policy is probably better but I think we have to admit that it's kind of counterintuitive and doing what feels counterintuitive is often quite hard to square mentally/emotionally!
I think you might have better said something more like "most corrupt Presidential Administration since Grant**". AFAIK, unlike Trump, there are no claims of personal corruption on Grant's part (correction welcome).
** The Harding administration _might_ need a word. I'm not sure whether there are any ANSI standard Z-scaled corruption metrics [especially metrics based on data rather than surveys and vibes like Transparency International], although I'd be quite interested to know of any.
I listened to a BBC podcast on Grant a few years back and got the strong sense that contemporary scholars generally agree that he wasn't personally corrupt- it was more that he had a fierce soldier's loyalty to the sometimes sketchy people that he'd fought with and didn't give them enough oversight, and the circumstances after the Civil War made it very hard to police corruption anyway.
The various scholars agreed that his reputation for extreme corruption was mostly due to a confederate black legend-type effort.
Buck stops with Grant etc., but still fair.
Agreed that it was Grant's choice to defend the indefensible. Commander in chief and all that.
This seems like a really low value endorsement in practice: almost everyone who cares about Paul Graham's opinion, or even knows who he is, lives outside of any remotely competitive state (maybe a few in TX?). The tech donor class definitely respects his opinion, but swaying their donations and influence a week before the election, when a third of ballots have already been dropped off, seems like too little and too late.
+ eleventy million
Thank you Mr. Graham!
he was the first person whose prediction that biden would be out after the debate actually rang true to me, basically saying ``this is not my crowd, but the lack of people lining up behind biden means there is a rebellion, and once they've done that it is hard to go back''. also has a beef with sacks.
> Paul Graham came out in support of Harris... For context, he's...
I was really hoping for: '... Billy Graham's son' or something. Not just some tech guy. Lol.
Agree and I really like Matt’s points #22 and 26.
>But for the record, I agree. The odds of American democracy collapsing, conditional on Trump winning, are below 50 percent.<
It seems to me there's possibly a gray zone where American democracy hasn't truly "collapsed" as such, but it's become (1) weakened almost beyond recognition, and (2) in that weakened state has been substantially highjacked by the right so as to make progressive policy outcomes in the foreseeable future incredibly difficult to attain. That's where I think we're headed if Trump wins next week.
That’s a good point. American democracy isn’t over if trump appoints two 45 year old hard right judges to the Supreme Court. But that would solidify a pretty terrifying super majority on the court.
I think the result of a second Trump term is the "enshittification" of many things we enjoy about modern American life and less a full collapse of democracy. Take what has happened to Google Search, and apply it to everyday stuff, right?
I don't think it's hard to envision a scenario where Trump comes in and immediately does two or three things; pulls all support for Ukraine, enacts some bonkers level of tariffs, and starts deporting folks left and right. The first, while terrible, probably won't affect our day-to-day life, but a more emboldened Russia probably will, at some point. The tariffs and immigration shit will be felt immediately. You can see marks like Musk and Carlson know this already, because their most recent speeches keep hammering the point home that there might be a period of difficulty before things get better. Paraphrasing here, of course, but they know that shit might get real uncomfortable, and they need to sell that there's some light at the end of the tunnel.
Also, I think the people who are acknowledging the potential negative immediate impact of a Trump sequel on the conservative side are overrating the extent to which they will be able to shield themselves from the brunt of the policy consequences.
I've heard, and been fascinated by that recent rhetoric from Musk and Carlson. It seems to be them admitting that they know Trump's planned tariff policy will be horrible for Americans, especially their base. Yet, they don't seem to have internalized the biggest political lesson of the past few years: voters hate when prices drastically increase!
They both have insane egos, but I hope they know that they're empty words about sacrifice won't stop voters from sending a bunch of Republicans packing in the 2026 midterms because of Trump's stupid tariffs.
i think we should take this as a sign that they believe it (massive, across the board tariffs) isn't just bullshit but is actually going to happen.
I think they believe it's gonna happen, but that they'll be able to use it as a weapon of cronyism. They can punish their enemies, and make their friends reliant on them.
my read of elon (and thiel?) is that they are more idealistic than that. they believe in pushing big reforms. think ``crisis capitalism'' but in the us this time, and the crisis is donald trump.
That was my main takeaway from thew warnings too.
They may think he can be dissuaded once in power, and that he should say anything he needs to to get elected. Hell, he may have even *told* them privately he won't go crazy on tariffs.
For the record I'm not saying I strongly believe this to be the case. Trump does indeed seem fascinated by taxing imports, and maybe he really is that crazy. I'm simply suggesting *gaslighting* is just as much a part of Trump's repertoire as craziness and economic illiteracy.
All I want is for some Trump defending Republican to sit in an interview and articulate a defense for Trump's stated tariff policy, not the one they're hoping he enacts or maybe has privately promised them.
I'm sick of watching everyone do the weave!
I get it that when Harris talks about going after "price gouging" she really doesn't mean it, but thinks it helps her with voters.
Are you suggesting that Trump feels the same when he talks about a 20% tariff on all imports? Does he think that's something that revs up voters who aren't already with him?
I don't think so. I think he really means it and would want to do it, as much as he wants to do anything as President that doesn't interfere with his round of golf and cable TV watching.
tariffs have been his passion for a very long time.
as far as harris and price gouging, i do think she wants a national law analogous to the state ones. (there are clips of clinton explaining the rationale for it, if you want to make an analogy with elon...) i think we all believe it will not do much, but i think it is reasonable to assume that she thinks there is a there there.
>>Are you suggesting that Trump feels the same when he talks about a 20% tariff on all imports? Does he think that's something that revs up voters who aren't already with him?<<
Trump has always been a "base first" politician. So, yes, I think he believes his general "America First" brand helps him. He may be wrong on that—I'd be the first person to state that Donald Trump isn't a very clever politician.
Presumably he told Elon that he wont slap tariffs on anything Elon doesn't want him to.
Tucker doesn't run any factories, so he has no reason to care.
https://x.com/whstancil/status/1851265385909092565?t=iyV-xDcbAxzv_dAhCG8TIA&s=19
Was looking for the link.
+1000
Re: your last sentence: it’s the “I never thought the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party would eat MY face” phenomenon.
yeah, the people doing this aren't politicians, but i did find that a bit remarkable. a political commentator (sarlin) compared this to the sort of messaging coming from milei in argentina. it is interesting to me that in the us (at least on blogs such as mr) he is touted as a success. by contrast, i talked to an older argentine math professor at a conference recently and she has been really horrified by what has been happening, says that there are lots of old people who are homeless and in poverty now, etc, etc.
i guess that is part of what happens when one starts to dismantle things like rent control, social safety nets etc, but it was still very jarring to hear about it.
Which could lead to a long lasting tension as to whether Democrats end up attempting court packing and/or ignoring SCOTUS if it keeps dismantling its agenda when they have legislative and executive power.
EDIT: this also helps explain point 6, why there isn't more Republican hand wringing, and it's because they have this ace in the hole.
I agree with Matt’s take that the institutional logic of a strong SCOTUS is fundamentally anti-progressive. SCOTUS being so Dem friendly during the 20th century was an anomaly born of Democrats holding the Presidency continuously from 1933-1953 and then Republicans after that having some weird luck picking justices that turned out more liberal than expected.
I expect Dems will turn against SCOTUS and the courts as our collective memories of the Warren court fade.
Court packing sounds extreme and would be a temporary fix in any case. I think the better long term move, for those of us hoping to rebuild state capacity while also winning partisan battles, is jurisdiction stripping and statutory reform.
Jurisdiction stripping is the right answer (court packing only leads to repacking when the GOP controls the government) but interestingly I think it is an impossible sell to the Groups, which are basically built on a foundation of public interest litigation.
Can't the courts simply find an invented reason that jurisdiction stripping doesn't apply to them? For example Congress specifically used JS to remove the court's ability to review military tribunals for terrorist suspects in the mid-2000s. In Hamdan v Rumsfeld the Supreme Court simply said that Congress lacked the power to remove their jurisdiction, and then invalidated parts of the law. Seems like the courts would simply do that again in any high-profile case (full disclosure of priors, I'm a legal realist and I think 'constitutionality' is Calvinball for people with high Wordsum scores)
"Can't the courts simply find an invented reason that jurisdiction stripping doesn't apply to them?"
Yes, which SCOTUS has already done as you pointed out. And which is an unequivocally good thing, as illustrated by the military tribunals case, because jurisdiction stripping is basically putting a giant, "Imma gonna do an unconstitutional!!!" winking-smiley-face sign on whatever it is the legislature tries to strip jurisdiction from.
>Can't the courts simply find an invented reason that jurisdiction stripping doesn't apply to them?<
At some point we'll likely have a showdown between Democrats who have finally faced up to the reality that our courts' penchant for legislating must be reigned in—and judges who don't want their ability to legislate reigned in. Also known as a constitutional crisis.
Beat me to it by 2 minutes.
That's not my understanding of Hamdan v Rumsfeld. That decision doesn't object in principle to the section of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 that includes jurisdiction stripping, they just say that it doesn't apply to Hamdan's case specifically.
Boumediene v. Bush does include the idea that you can't strip jurisdiction for habeas claims specifically, without providing an adequate alternative, because of the Suspension Clause.
(I'm like 90% legal realist myself, but I do think SCOTUS will be very hesitant to invalidate the idea of jurisdiction stripping in general.)
Repacking is an overblown risk. The actual bouts of packing and counter-packing we've actually seen in American history have been characterized by either rapid back-and-forths that get solved relatively quickly (within a few years) or one-offs where the party doing the packing managed to avert kicking off a spiral.
People act like this shit is just gonna go into an endless spiral, but that's not what ever actually happens. So maybe stop saying it'll happen?
Why did it stop in historical cases?
How would jurisdiction stripping be better than court packing. If the GOP gains a majority necessary to repacking, why would they be unable to do the same with jurisdiction stripping?
I think a strong SCOTUS is fundamentally anti Progressive change via unconstitutional means. Dems have responded to running aground on legislative efforts by trying to do via executive and courts what they can only do via Article I. I am exceedingly confident the SCOTUS would not say block a duly enacted congressional law doing insert progressive policy vision, National Abortion law, Single Payer Healthcare, Climate etc. Its when you get weird bankshots like the Clean Power plan, or unilateral student debt cancelation etc that you end up before A.III, that is a meaningful difference. Whether progressive treat it as such remains to be seen, but I think a detethering of courts from enforcing separation of powers will really quickly bite lefties in the ass.
You don't get it -- it's fascism to suggest that Congress pass legislation instead of deferring to unelected executive branch officials!
I know you're joking, but the whole idea of Congress "just passing legislation" and the refusal to deal with what that actually means -- abolishing the filibuster, among other things -- is part of what's gotten us to this place where we're dealing with real fascism.
Congress stopped working because of the filibuster, so everyone started looking to the other two branches to make policy, and meanwhile all of our problems kept getting worse and worse, which finally led to people being dumb and desperate enough to give the fascists a bite at the apple.
Meanwhile, centrist jackasses like Manchin kept insisting all along that Congresscritters just needed to smoke more cigars with each other, and abolishing the filibuster would cause an unacceptable harm -- nay, MIGHT even enable FASCISM.
It's kinda hard to take them seriously when they stick their heads in the sand while the actual fascists are on the warpath.
Its seems a bit wild that Progressives would want to disempower the courts. Lawyers are incredibly liberal politically but temperamentally conservative as a group. Even most conservative lawyers are more liberal than the average conservative. If you take power away from courts/lawyers it seems almost certainly that this will empower conservatives.
For example - let's say that congress strips jurisdiction over gerrymandering from the courts and gives it to the FEC. You really think that the GOP is not going to be able to work an agency better than they can the courts? Are you assuming that Democrats will make these changes, but the GOP won't be able/willing to stack whatever agency they need do to make their own changes?
Courts are better at destruction than creation and they make everything slower and more expensive.
For friends of the State, these qualities outweigh the individual ideological leanings of lawyers.
"Courts are better at destruction than creation."
This is incorrect. Courts are institutionally incremental actors. They generally impede large changes. And they are most unpopular when they allow/enact large change (e.g. Dobbs). Progressives have been extremely effective at using the courts to foster incremental progressive change over the last century. Now Republicans are trying to do that, but it will likely be at most a very slow process, because that's how the court works.
Meanwhile - let's say that Harris wins and the polls are wrong so she pulls off a trifecta. Gets into office and breaks the filibuster to pass a national abortion law that strips jurisdiction from SCOTUS to review it. Then a recession hits in 2028, she is unpopular and JD Vance is swept into power with a Republican trifecta. Do you think the courts will be better at destroying what progressives want, or an Republican trifecta with jurisdiction stripping normalized by Democrats to alleviate any constitutional issues that might come up?
Jurisdiction stripping is worth a shot but could get limited if SCOTUS wants to cite constitutional restrictions on it.
Jurisdiction stripping is only "worth a shot" to avoid judicial review of legislation and regulations (which is what people on the left are referring to) if you believe the GOP will never, ever again control the presidency and Congress.
Well, from the perspective of a partisan Democrat, jurisdiction stripping is only a double-edged sword if Republicans control the Presidency and Congress while we control the courts. Until we control the courts again, it’s just a one-edged sword.
Also, I do think it would be good, in a nonpartisan state capacity sense, if elected politicians had an easier time carrying out their political programs and faced fewer veto points in general.
I think that if it got to court packing, it'd be part of a larger backlash against a second Trump term, and most people would see it as a restoration of the court's legitimacy. A defeated GOP with a Trump either dead (of old age or conflict) or in jail (of conflict, obv) would kind of just *get* that the coke-and-booze party was over, they were able to temporarily steal a whole lot of political "loot", and they'd be too busy trying to claw their way back to popularity and reassemble their now-fracturing propaganda machine to bother anything but a token resistance.
All the cries of "tyranny" would ring hollow if a renegade SCOTUS had been caught enabling an actual brief era of Trumpist *tyranny*, and convicted in the court of public opinion.
I personally think court packing is a dumb idea. However, every time the Court shows itself in the tank for Trump (like the immunity decision, but *not* Dobbs) it normalizes the idea just a bit more.
To be clear, court packing is a bad idea, for the retaliation reasons Dilan stated, but as you state, depending on how far SCOTUS goes it might end up being the least bad path for Democrats.
As I told Dilan, retaliation risk is overstated. There's never been an "endless spiral", not even a protracted one. The history is mostly defined by opportunism and the party doing the packing actually getting away with it.
I want random empanelment from a larger pool (the DC circuit has been suggested).
The randomness is what encourages good law, because even though any one panel might be particularly extreme, they're all but guaranteed that an oppositely extreme panel might have a bite at the same apple. Consensus will largely rule the day, while still leaving room for ambitious/landmark rulings if the majority can make a convincing case to their peers.
Also, less opportunity for a jackass like Kennedy to hog the spotlight. Since the median panel will be slightly unbalanced, a median jurist who wants to play calvinball will be unpopular and usually get ignored by solid majorities.
And scotus could also be an ace in the hole for election victories, like in 2000
This is why Biden should have packed the court day 1
There's a reason a lot of very rich and/or very reactionary people support a man whose policy mix is confused, inconsistent, transactional and often not in keeping with the traditions of Movement Conservatism. Trump's lack of attention to policy is a feature not a bug, because he just wants his side to win, and isn't interested in picking fights over his public policy "convictions" (he doesn't have any). And the chaos and norm-breaking he enables can help usher in a Project 2025 world.
I think there’s a reason why right wingers are so enamored with Orban. I suspect that if Trump tried to go full Putin, his hardcore supporters would go along but a pretty decent chunk of his voting base would rebel. But going full Orban basically creates plausible deniability. It’s not like opposition parties don’t exist at all. And it’s not like all opposition media has completely been stamped out. But strategically rig the game so that you are still extremely likely to win by selectively going after opposition leaders, universities (easy anti elite target) and press you can make sure always win.
It’s why the WaPo thing with not endorsing is a big deal to me. Honestly think newspapers giving endorsements for president is long past its sell by date (down ballot is another matter). But the timing of WaPo’s decision screams this is Bezos protecting his interest in Amazon agains retaliation. It’s disturbing sign of what could be coming.
The idea Trump is going to successfully capture state and mass media coverage like Orban did or retain large legislative majorities like Orban is a very bold claim and demands a serious theory of the case given what actually happened in his first term. It's especially rich given the behavior of the White House press pool before Biden's debate.[1] Of course, that behavior was not quite Orban-level either given the plenty of competitive conservative outlets free to report on Biden's condition to mass audiences.
If a Republican president is elected, I predict a Democratic House majority by 2027. If a Democratic president is elected, I predict a Republican House majority by 2027. People arguing the 2026 midterm election will fall to the mixed rating we observe in Economist, V-Dem, Freedom House ratings of Hungary need to explain their prediction.
And per the university argument, if were a Democrat, I wouldn't even go there. I would be too embarrassed by the blatant patronage of my party's executive spending to subsidize universities through their over-built and politicized state of loyalty oaths to even bother invoking that analogy against Republicans. Harvard's Claudine Gay scandal was an entirely predictable outcome of this kind of ideological and fiscal coziness.
[1] https://freebeacon.com/media/biden-struggled-through-fundraisers-for-months-before-the-debate-the-press-said-nothing/
The structural problem is, if Trump wins, all a Dem House majority can do is block some things he wants to do. Nothing gets better. It's just defending against further losses.
Meanwhile, he's packing the courts. A 2027 Dem backlash majority, possibly even a 2028 trifecta win, ends up with a thermostatic GOP House majority in 2031 just in time for redistricting. No courts to bail Dems out - in fact, they'll undermine counter-gerrymandering efforts by Dems to lock down their own blue states.
It's not Orbanism. But there's no trajectory out of the crisis. The Trumpist GOP cements itself as a viable minoritarian party and raises the EC bar somewhere to 52-55% for Democrats.
Also, if Trump wins, the stability he can create within his coalition potentially helps them stave off an expected collapse. Last time around, it started out slow, and then ended up as a constant parade of kakistocrats after all the competent people left. This time around, they've all got their power bases -- Vivek, Carlson, Vance, Miller, etc. And if he's enacting all these tariffs as a mass extortion program -- exempting various hangers-on if they pay fealty -- then that helps the New Kakistocrats further cement their power bases. Tucker will be back on Fox every night, telling Trump which of this or that industrial concern deserves an exemption from the tariffs. Vance will probably open a clearinghouse for these sorts of requests.
The point is, instead of collapsing into infighting, they'll secure their oligarchic revenue streams and simultaneously build the right wing propaganda machine to new heights.
I'm just spitballing here, but I just want to show what's *possible*. In the worst-case-but-still-realistic scenario, even if Democrats are winning "majorities" and "trifectas", they probably won't be able to enact a national policy until the late 2030s at the earliest, and Trumpism will become a long-term fact of life instead of a temporary 10-year bout of insanity.
It's the difference between a 10-year bout with breast cancer culminating in a double mastectomy, and then going into perfect remission for the next 40 years; and having the double mastectomy and then spending the next 20 years stamping out metastases in countless hellish rounds of chemo. In the former case, you have a chance of growing your hair back and getting some implants to feel like "a real woman again" (not a broader statement, it's just for the metaphor based on what I've heard about how SOME women feel). In the latter case, you become a shell of yourself. Any reconstructive surgery or semblance of "health" is just plain off the table. And you may NEVER recover.
Whether we call that Orbanism or not, it's still fucking terrible.
I agree that "Orbanization" is unlikely to work, but it's what a (vocal and influential) element within the conservative coalition intends.
If socially conservative writers going to Budapest junkets convince Republican politicians to change the platform to win majorities in a counter-cycle midterm and work *with elected Republicans* to bully popular news outlets to write in a way consistently favorable to the GOP, they will have succeeded with popularism even more than Matt Yglesias ever dreamed possible.
But in reality, popularism did not hold the House for Democrats in 2022. I really doubt those conservatives or Orban presenting himself as a Russo-Ukrainian war negotiator to Mar-o-Lago can pull off a 2026 red wave under Trump. I'm not saying it's impossible. But a basic theory of how this is going to play out should accompany an extraordinary prediction.
as far as i understand, budapest isn't really where the base of oban's support is, as it is much more liberal than the countryside. orban is in a position that lets him play off the eu and russia against each other and then pay off his supporters with the profits. this isn't really a system that can be replicated at scale.
By Budapest junkets, I am referring to the Hungarian government sponsoring various weekend trips and seminars for Anglophone conservative writers upset with social/immigration politics in the US/EU. It's rather funny/embarrassing how much Hungary being referred to as a successful pro-natalist, anti-immigration, socially conservative country taking on the EU libs took off in proportion to that. Especially how lopsided it was in proportion to conservative pieces on Poland's conservative government.
But on a more serious matter, the concerns about Hungarian elections no longer being free and fair have much to do with Orban's relationship to Hungarian mass media and state media, which I believe qualitatively differs from Poland which also received scrutiny over court appointment reforms. Poland was always having free and fair elections, regardless of Tusk's recent election victory.
The latter was mostly whining by EU liberals who think authoritarianism is when an activist puts up a fake anti-gay sign on a road sign to criticize your country's marriage laws. A bit like when Trump's invocation of the West in a speech to Poland was called white nationalism by writers at The Atlantic. The boredom quickly ended when we witnessed Russia launch a new invasion towards Kiev, and Poland took it more seriously than their previous critics in actual military spending and preparation. But in Hungary, this is a very valid complaint so far as I can tell, and Hungary is rated at mixed in various democracy indices for a reason. It's not just socially liberal politicking.
Your writing is hard to parse, but I think we agree?
I largely agree with you, but I did find WaPo's multi-part piece against Trump in 2016 helpful in breaking down how Trump specifically could do harm.
Its funny cuz I think a lot of what a number of politico types current hate about the US system actually helps to act against a sort of authoritarian consolidation.
Our constant staggered elections means even a trifecta only gets two years to do anything before they come before the voters again, and the modern midterm penalty usually results in a loss of power.
Our convoluted state-level electoral system does allow for some shenanigans and anti-democratic consoldiation of power, but its sufficiently devolved that the effects are limited and it can be hard to coordinate a united effort to tip the scales in one direction. Just see how the SC waffled back and forth on court power in determing electoral maps when state elections kept changing who would benefit in aggregate.
My hopefully not optimistic view of US politics following a Trump win next week is that: The public quickly sours on Trump again like they did after 2016 and the GOP ends up getting whalloped once more in 26. By 28 voters are ready for change again while the rule holds that Trumpian politics doesn't work without Trump leaving the Dems winning another trifecta while the GOP either starts to move away from the Trump era or doubles down only to lose for another 1-2 election cycles.
Yea, the upside of the loss in efficiency that is a source of frustration for many progressives is that consolidation of power is pretty tough.
I am keeping all fingers and toes crossed for Harris, but I also think if Trump wins we can probably assume resistance and lack of cooperation from lots of other fully legitimate centers of power from day 1 and the House turning back blue in 2026 (guessing if Trump wins we won't take the house). There's also a decent possibility that even a relatively conservative judiciary does a dance where they're way more charitable to Trump than he deserves on the merits while still never signing off on quite what he demands.
Which doesn't mean it won't be bad. I think what Trumpian nihilism is doing to our culture and politics will be a lot harder to stamp out over the long term than any particular policy changes likely to occur if he wins.
"I think what Trumpian nihilism is doing to our culture and politics will be a lot harder to stamp out over the long term than any particular policy changes likely to occur if he wins."
This, a thousand times.
For me, it's the tariff power and what it means for the chance of cronyism to entrench the MAGA establishment.
That is, if they lose, and then Trump bows out or passes on, then they collapse into infighting over the scraps of his political empire while the prosecutions close in on them. Disaffected MAGAites can't sustain their anger amid the disappointment, turning away from the party.
But if they win, then they stave off the infighting. If he happens to die in office, Vance becomes the new king of the party sheerly by dint of being the 48th president (shudder). The tariffs allow them to erect an exemption regime: Just imagine Fox rehiring Tucker and him taking turns interviewing various billionaires who come on his show to gush over Dear Leader and explain just why they deserve to get a tariff exemption. A new flood of revenue reinvigorates their propaganda machine just as it was starting to fracture, and keeps the leading cronies away from each other's throats, busily building up their own little fiefdoms.
This is one of the underappreciated features of having the Electoral College instead of a national popular vote, it means that there's no centralized place to screw with results. (Other than congressional ratification, as we found out - and this proves the point!) As disputing election results becomes a constant thing, it's a better idea to push for mandatory proportional allocation of EVs by each state instead of a national popular vote.
We haven’t seen this in a while but third party national spoiler effects can be much more exaggerated in a national popular vote than in the Electoral College. Nader got 3,000,000 votes in a race sub 500,000 margin, Third parties got 7,000,000 votes with a margin of under 3,000,000 in 2016. If we ever went to a National Popular Vote we really should have a top two run off French Style.
I thought the winner of the national popular vote would only have to get a plurality.
Rcv!
No! Approval or STAR+!
The issue with proportional allocation is that it greatly increases the likelihood of one candidate failing to get a majority in close elections, throwing it to the House. I found someone who actually calculated it, finding that, for example, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2016 all would have gone to the House.
https://www.quora.com/If-all-US-States-assigned-electoral-votes-proportionally-how-different-would-the-US-Presidential-Election-results-be
Or we just increase the size of the House.
Eh, not likely to do anything.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/expand-house
On the contrary, the lack of House expansion is the main reason why PV - EC mismatch has become so common recently compared to history. Further, Matt glosses over the point that more EC’s from bigger House dilutes EC’s from the Senate. Plus a huge problem with the lack of a larger House is the Wyoming issue he cites. At a minimum, the size of the House should be set so that there isn’t such a huge difference in district population. This is only going to grow worse over time as relative populations grow, and increasing the size of the House is the only way to fix it.
His argument boils down (IMO) to the perfect being the enemy of the good. Yes, there are “better” options for addressing the EC, but all of them require amending the Constitution, which simply isn’t going to happen anytime soon. House expansion, by contrast, solves most of the problem and is much easier to accomplish.
You're adjusting the House to fix the Presidency. The House is already so large that its difficult for backbenchers to have much say or accomplish much. As a result, the most important vote by far are the leadership elections. If you made the House even larger, you would exacerbate that trajectory even more. If you have a 1000 members or more, why bother having most of them even go to Washington. Just vote for the leadership teams and they'll do all the negotiating. The Representatives can just stay in their districts.
+1000 Increasing the size of the House could actually happen and would unequivocally reduce the risk of PV/EC splits. Getting rid of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment and such an amendment isn't passing without a literal civil war happening. (The making-the-perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good is a *colossal* issue with discussions about electoral reforms in general, IMO, as becomes immediately apparent any time a discussion of using something other than first-past-the-post voting comes up and then you get people bickering about whether IRV or Borda or any of a dozen or more increasingly convoluted voting methodologies produces the "right" result.)
The small-state advantage is already diluted from Winner Take All.
But you're still right about expansion bringing the PV back closer to EV. And Matt is wrong that expansion wouldn't be worth it.
This is why although I relentlessly argue for RCV, I'm not opposed to a number of other reforms. We need ALL of them to add up to a more balanced, dynamic, and responsive system.
The National Popular Vote initiative does not require amending the Constitution. Instead it calls for states to pass laws that would give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote (assuming enough states sign on to cover at least 270 votes). That is, the EC works just as it always has, but the states award their electoral votes differently.
This is a good point, but I’m not sure that electing the president by national popular vote requires a single national place of certification. For instance, the NPVIC—the least-unlikely way we get a national popular vote—still relies on the EC and the existing state-level mechanisms for certification, it's just that the member states of the Compact would be relying on each others' certified numbers to determine which candidate is awarded their EVs rather than looking exclusively to their own. You can also imagine a pure national popular vote system with the EC abolished where the job of the new central electoral authority (probably a beefed-up FEC) is just to add up numbers certified at the state level—pretty much the same role as that of Congress in the current system and therefore neither an improvement nor a decline relative to today.
Also to get up on my hobbyhorse, in a parliamentary system the head of government would be chosen by the House, from the House, and I see no reason the current decentralized system of certifying elections for Members of Congress would change just because they now choose the head of government.
I think that applies to a national popular vote as well. Of course, it's not "centralized" either and to flip the results you'd have to screw with hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes in many different locations. It's probably safer from manipulation than the EC (viz, Florida 2000).
The goal of putting Trump into office, if you’re Trump-adjacent, is to rig the system such that in the future, Trumpism-without-Trump will be sustainable.
What exactly is "Trumpism-without-Trump?"
As best I can tell, Trumpism is ALL about Trump. As hard as various people have tried to make it more than about him, Trump has resisted pretty much all attempts to do so.
Beyond the narcissism and nursing personal grudges, Trumpism is about hating the people its supporters hate. Vance is the perfect avatar of Trumpism without Trump.
"Do 'politico types' hate the staggered elections?"
Depends on what one means by "politico types," I'd think?
Just having to fend off resurgent illiberal forces is a huge opportunity cost that sets back potential progress attained in the counterfactual.
I find this a weird way of thinking about progress. There has been a ton of progress in recent generations. In the 1960s US, inter-racial marriage was illegal (in some states) but marital rape was legal, to cite one jarring example. In Britain marital rape was legal till 1991 and only formally banned by law in 2003!
If democracy is lost, much of that progress could be lost. So in a situation where you're making big if imperfect progress while also facing a big downside risk, I think it's logical to balance making further progress with risk mitigation, and not solely focus on how much more progress you could make if you the risk wasn't there.
And the last states to ban marital rape, Oklahoma and North Carolina, were in 1993.
This is probably an excellent explanation for the institutional conservativization of progressivism.
But I think this is something of a distinction without a difference. There's a lot of downside risk, sure, but I think the signal Harris's election could send to the rest of the nation -- especially if she successfully weathers what appears to be an impending opening salvo of Cold War II in her first term -- could indeed create a lot of upside as well.
So IMO it's not "wierd" to mourn that lost upside potential. As a fiercely anti-doomerist progressive, being able to appreciate the progress we've already had is precisely what also helps me appreciate the future potential upside. My diagnosis of the doomers, in fact, is that they overly focus on the mourning (both of past and future potential) and don't appreciate the promise of the future enough.
As a progressive, I want to live to see as much progress as possible. Mourning any loss thereof is only natural, even if I try to minimize that mourning because I view it as largely counterproductive.
This is core to Nate Silver’s framework of Village People and River People. What is the appropriate amount of downside risk to gain in the benefits of the upside improvements?
He argues that most Village people are too risk averse but there are utilitarian River types who don’t properly understand the nuances of downside risks and thinks it’s all a mathematical equation that gives you the answer.
His conversation with Sam Harris about SBF was interesting. It seems fair to say SBF undervalued downside risks. SBF might argue that there is an SBF in some multiverse living in eternal bliss and the sacrifice of all the other SBF’s is worth it because it maximizes the total value.
Personally, I would have generally followed the law to avoid prison and stashed $20 million aside. After that sure go max EV risk, if that’s your thing because you’re Degen Gambler to the bone.
SBF is best thought of as a conman and charlatan who used the Effective Altruism framework to identify his victims and cover his activities, rather than some EA adherent who just went too far.
He is Bernie Madoff using being Jewish or Gerald Payne using his "Greater Ministries International Church". Finding targets for fraud in religious (or semi-religious in the case of Effective Altruism) sects is as old as religion itself.
I think we agree.
What would that look like specifically?
The way our system has traditionally worked is that enabling some tool or means doesn’t just enable it for one President or party. Expansions of, for example, Executive power over previous decades have benefited both parties and neither have sought to substantially roll those back.
It’s been a bit frustrating for me personally, to see many left-of center people continue to advocate for increasing the authority of the federal government and especially the Executive while also saying that Trump will end democracy. If Trump can end democracy, then maybe it’s past time to roll back Executive power.
Yep, it's a "laugh through the tears" kind of thing, but I genuinely find it funny watching large numbers of people in various progressive outlets unironically posting, "Trump is a LITERAL fascist who will LITERALLY declare himself Maximum Leader for Life and immediately begin committing LITERAL genocide if he takes office" pieces in alternation with both the perennial "Federalism is a fascist plot, so we must crush the sovereignty of the states and give all power to the central government" pieces and the recently more popular "Judicial review is a fascist plot, so we must free the executive branch from oversight by the courts" pieces.
It makes me think of this Bastiat quote, which is not directly about federalism, but goes to the point about centralized authority:
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? The organizers maintain that society, when left undirected, rushes headlong to its inevitable destruction because the instincts of the people are so perverse. The legislators claim to stop this suicidal course and to give it a saner direction. Apparently, then, the legislators and the organizers have received from Heaven an intelligence and virtue that place them beyond and above mankind; if so, let them show their titles to this superiority."
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law
I think James Madison had some thoughts on this.
That's the core of why I think that a multiparty system is the true ideal.
I've probably already bored you and countless other SBers with my anecdote from Drutman about how the ideal number of parties has been found to be 4-6 (at least by some poli-scis).
But I think the *reason* why it works is because it hits the sweet spot of Madison's notion that diffusion of power across a diversity of opinion would create counterbalancing ambitions. The sad reality of our system is, it's TOO balanced, because it was left under FPTP to just devolve into two entrenched parties. There simply aren't enough degrees of freedom for majority issues to reliably pass without damaging party unity.
Having 4-6 parties means that coalitions never last long enough to entrench into formal alliances. They form, then break, then re-form, then break, and so on. All of the mainstream parties get a bite at the apple from time to time, and only the extremes are locked out of power.
One side wants to undermine our democratic institutions, render elections meaningless, and use the justice system to cow people and persecute its enemies, while the other wants to use executive power, reviewed by mostly unsupportive courts, to push through means-tested student debt. That's a tough one, alright.
Didn't SCOTUS flip off Trump in December 2020 over the stolen election claims? I think a theory of how SCOTUS enables Republicans to render the 2026 or 2028 elections no longer free and fair at the absolute minimum needs to start from that ruling and explain what will happen in the proceeding years.
But they more recently ruled that a huge amount of what he did in trying to prosecute those claims was not illegal because he supposedly did it in the course of his presidential duties.
From a libertarian standpoint, I hate the presidential immunity ruling, but it was plainly correct from how the U.S. constitutional system has to work in practice for military operations to be possible in most circumstances outside of officially declared wars. To argue against that decision, you need to explain why, for example, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama couldn't be prosecuted for at least manslaughter, if not murder, for the deaths of American citizens killed in anti-terror operations they authorized.
Even if some sort of immunity is indeed needed, the immunity ruling was too expansive.
I think the worse ruling was the 14A ruling. Besides just being wrong on the merits, it creates a potential opening for ignoring 22A under the same "states can't adjudicate this" argument.
And given just how clearly 14A should have DQ'ed Trump by its plain meaning, and yet the court "complied in advance" rather than face mass controversy, means that even if in all reality they've got a 99% chance of DQing Trump in a 22A case in 2028, I wouldn't trust them to make the right decision anymore.
"The previous president can't be prosecuted on these specific types of executive actions, and future rulings may explain further the grounds he can be prosecuted on" is
1) a very frustrating ruling to read for the grounds of prosecution in the future.
2) a very hard case from the standpoint of a country with free and fair elections, as opposed to elections followed by lawfare (see Latin America.)
3) a non-sequitur to the December 2020 matter of electors and election lawsuits.
I think to the degree that people who answer to the President take “if the President does it, it’s not illegal” to be official constitutional doctrine, they will be more willing to act on the President’s undemocratic commands.
Yes, I would place the probability of something between Hungary and Poland (before the last election) at 25%. Authoritarian and weakened but elections still mattering. Probability would be higher if we weren’t a Federal system.
>>It's clear that (1) is already the case.<<
I'm not quite ready to go that far, though I agree the situation is dire. Joe Biden and Democrats were able to get a lot of progressive legislation enacted in 21 and 22. Our alliances are in much better shape than four years ago. Our national security apparatus is still staffed in apolitical fashion, by professionals. Vital public sector bodies like the FTC and the Fed haven't been politicized to the point of non-functionality. Debt-ceiling hijinks have become less common under Biden. And so on. And if Harris wins, Trump will, I think, be on his way to paying for at least some of his crimes.
So, to state the obvious, a lot is riding on next week's outcome. But yes, if Trump wins, he'll obviously escape justice, and our judiciary will lurch even further in the direction of blatant, right wing activism. And it'll be open season in red state legislatures on voting rights and democratic norms. And the United States may put the final nails in the coffin of the rules-based order, even as we withdraw from NATO and pull the plug on Ukraine and extort Japan and South Korea. And we may well see a national abortion ban. Also, Trump (perversely) may well be a less practical politician in his second term, because of his inability to seek a second term. And so don't be surprised if he's more willing than in 2017-2020 to let his people run wild on policy matters. I can hardly wait.
Well, defeating him for a SECOND TIME would be one form of making him pay a price for his crimes; and it's far from clear he won't yet spend time behind bars if he loses the election. He's still facing a lot of very serious legal problems.
But sure, the half of our political system known as the GOP is utterly broken right now, that's true, and the various constitutional remedies available to protect the country from the iniquities of tyrants aren't designed to work when the polity is divided 51-49.
On 2: I think an economy of zoom meetings and fast casual drive through, while individually rational in each specific decision, is actually miserable for most people and part of our national unhappiness.
I know it's insanely convenient and for a subset of people, necessary. But if you have the time, or can make the time, just go to a grocery store and buy ingredients for meals. Doing Uber eats or even grocery delivery all the time is just kind of a bummer.
Curious to see how popular/unpopular this take is on SB.
The number of people who let strangers pick their produce is way too high!
I have to say, Tesco grocery delivery in the UK is awesome: cheap (£8 a month for unlimited deliveries), professional (they use their own people, they don't subcontract it, and the drivers are friendly and do a heroic job of navigating in Oxford's wildly shitty traffic), very good service (don't want something, or accidentally order the wrong thing like when I ordered six bags of lemons? Just hand it back to the driver and get a basically instant refund) and doesn't use additional packaging (they roll it up in plastic crates that they then take back). I don't have a car, and so getting to a grocery store of any appreciable size would be a major pain in the ass for me - not to mention that the delivery routes are taking trips off the road.
On the produce question, most produce in UK supermarkets is pre-packaged (which is not great, but this is independent of delivery), so there's really no difference if you get it or someone else does.
Oh, and since you can purchase any kind of alcohol in UK grocery stores, they will also deliver that. Also, great discounts; I just got a bottle of Laphroaig 10 yr for £10 off.
I cook a lot more vegetables than the average person and I don’t get this fear people have about produce.
Like most things are just getting a standard cut and tossed in pan or pot and served and isn’t so precious that only I could pick out my peppers.
I have less trust now because we are scraping the bottom of the labor market for lots of these retail and food delivery jobs.
I don't have fear. I have pickiness. I only want fruit and vegetables that taste good, not overripe or underripe produce, or varieties that don't taste good (like e.g. Delicious apples). And if the fruit or vegetable I planned on doesn't look good or is expensive, I want the freedom to pick something different that looks better.
I have had like 2 Delicious apples in my life that actually tasted good.
I use Instacart a lot and it’s never really been an issue. Probably because I’m usually putting them in a curry/stew/stir fry and not relying on any vegetable to be a star.
Like tonight I’m making green curry and like basically the peppers need to be hot, the sauce rich and a bunch of vegetables will enhance the flavor but I’d be lying if I said I can taste any one of their flavors. I so seldom just eat produce.
Why is going to a grocery store less of a bummer than getting grocery delivery? I agree that it is better for produce (somehow Amazon Fresh has a knack for finding green bananas that turn brown before they turn yellow) and going out of the house can be fun and social in many ways, but grocery shopping is not one of them.
I rucksack groceries twice a week. We need more walkable living areas for people.
If walkable grocery story shopping is like what I see in Manhattan, count me out. I like big grocery stores with aisles you can actually maneuver in.
In Baltimore there are normal stores. NYC is not the only example of walkable city in the U.S. (and those NYC bodegas are cramped.)
Canton has that super nice Safeway.
It depends on how you shop, but when I'm shopping I pick up things not on the list that I remember, and buy meat on sale to stick in the freezer. Plus, I don't trust Doordash to choose my produce. Then again, I actually like grocery shopping and missed it during the pandemic.
I get it excited over vegetables.
Well yeah.
When I travel I love checking out grocery stores in other places - you learn a lot this way
I'm with you here. We use DoorDash a lot but I prefer to do my own groceries. One trip to Safeway a week and one trip to Costco in 2-3 weeks is quite manageable.
I mostly do grocery pickup since it's just so much quicker for a big trip. But I never do food delivery except pizza.
i was cooking a lot during the pandemic, but it wore off since then.
Re your last point, I wish I could superlike™️ your larger point a thousand times. You will eat better, save tons of money, be healthier and probably more sane, create less garbage, and feel empowered by the ability to take care of yourself in a meaningful way.
I think if people order meals through Uber eats rather than making meals it's because that what's they prefer to do and think it a worthwhile use of their limited funds.
Right, and if people stay at home scrolling Instagram instead of going out to do something active, that is also what they prefer to do in the moment. But the effect on happiness and flourishing seems very bad.
I'm a Hegelian (thesis/antithesis/synthesis and all that) and I think if people really don't want to do something after a while they'll change what they're doing. Otherwise, they obviously must prefer what it is they're doing. I don't always like their choices but I bet many people don't like mine. It's a beautiful sunny day outside and here I am furiously typing because someone is wrong on the Internet (not *you,* Tom, of course).
As a counter, to take the most extreme example, an addict in the moment prefers to take another hit than to not, even if their longer-term preference is to quit. And addiction is an area where the connection between using and the negative life effects is very patent, whereas the connection between spending every evening on social media or Netflix and finding that your life is not very fulfilling is harder to pinpoint. I do indeed find that my decision to comment on Substack a lot has a negative impact on some areas of my life, but in the moment it’s almost always more tempting to comment than to do whatever would be better for me.
Most people aren’t addicts. Just as most people aren’t two year olds. In neither case would my rules apply.
Like the Supreme Court, I tend to defer to the “reasonable person” approach.
Note, revealed preference theory breaks down when people have time inconsistent preference, myopia, incomplete preferences, or poorly ordered preferences.
Lots of people who buy products then come to complain about how much they spend, but somehow keep doing it.
I think having everything brought to you by an abject doordasher is worse than drive through, but yeah.
There's something very depressing about this "self-employed" gofer underclass we're creating.
I read that at first as "golfer underclass" and had a very different understanding of what this was referring to.
Isn't "golfer underclass" more or less the plot of Caddyshack?
I'm down with people who make good use of that kind of job, not looking to take it away from them, I see the utility, but it's fucking depressing. The whole process is aesthetically and philosophically ugly. The apps suck and hide huge up charges, the process of waiting for pickup and delivery is stress inducing and aggravating for everyone involved, the food quality is reduced, and nobody really wrestled with the fact that it enabled people to feel like they were being upright citizens by ‘staying home and staying safe’ during the pandemic while a whole class of poor people ran their errands for them. I have to say I look down on people who can't go get their own takeout, as silly as that is.
“…the process of waiting for pickup and delivery is stress inducing and aggravating…”
I see the scooter-driving delivery folks around here hanging out in clusters on the side of the street, shooting the breeze and smoking cannabis while they wait for their Uber Eats notifications. They don’t seem stressed.
I think this is the first time I've seen the phrase "smoking cannabis".
One of the last times I got food through an app, the guy was constantly texting and calling me because the restaurant was a shit show and he was obviously worried that I was going to dock his tip for their tardiness and disorganization. I'm sure when you don't have an order on deck, just chilling and waiting for an order is not stressful, but that's not really relevant.
but you can still go to mcdonald’s if you insist snd, if you are willing to drop $3 more, there’s chipotle/cava/panera. The people working at those places are bringing in the highest real wages they’ve commanded since at least the 80s.
The people at the physical location, sure. I don't think that has anything to do with my point though. See my reply to JPO.
Yeah doordash is worse.
In addition to hurting the mental health of those who do WFH, it also inspires resentment from those who can't. Worst of both worlds.
Going to the office costs a lot of time and going to eat-in restaurants with friends and family costs a lot of money.
Yes that's the individually rational aspect of these decisions. My point is that, as in many situations, a collection of individually rational decisions can produce a suboptimal outcome for everyone.
Completely agree with that. Any individual daily choice to be isolated is totally reasonable—some days you’re tired or sick or don’t want to see anyone. But an every day atomized society? Dreadful.
They should just require single people to come in to the office. Might be more fun for them!
>>...what’s happening internationally. The UK Conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian Liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right party lost its first post-Covid elections in Australia....<<
Oh to live in a sane polity, where, when your side is facing possible defeat, you're at worst looking at, I dunno, copays for dental work? A point or two off the corporate income tax? Stingier means-testing for childcare? Maybe a bump up in the retirement age, or a reduction in green energy subsidies?
The stakes are just so bloody high in America.
It's exhausting to listen to Europeans drone on about how morally and intellectually superior they are to Americans.
Don’t ding them. They are just coping over being poorer than us.
Literally true:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYI3ejDQns4
Spain’s dictatorship ended in living memory, it’s just that the stakes were lower for the rest of us!
There was an on going 30 year terrorist war in the United Kingdom in my lifetime and I'm not yet 30!
What was happening in former Yugoslavia (which currently has two EU member states) in the 1990s is even more recent than the death of Franco. And a large part of the EU today was still occupied by the Soviets after Spain joined the EU.
I blame the Soviet occupation of Europe for the metric system. It’s my go to conspiracy theory when I mess with folks.
A few years ago my cousin drove us around Split pointing out demarcations of battles and rattled of the names of the people who died fighting next to him. Also, he was skeptical about joining the EU because the Euro would make everything more expensive and they would move factories to cheaper labor markets.
"Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
For 49 years now! Wow.
Right. Judging by the available comps (Germany, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Chile) a MAGA dictatorship won't endure indefinitely. Probably a mere 20-40 years.
Italy is always my go-to for thinking about fascism in America, but Spain is a good reference too, especially considering the Catholic streak in the far-right now. Maybe it'd be like Francoist Spain, but with Berlusconi at the helm.
Living standards were rising pretty briskly throughout most of Franco's rule. Not that this made up for his tyranny, but still...
The thing that scares me about MAGA isn't only their authoritarian bent, but their gross policy ignorance. It won't be Peter Thiel directing us into some kind of booming technocratic nirvana. It'll be Bannon and Miller running social policy while Heritage dismantles the safety net and regulatory apparatus. We won't just have fewer rights. We'll also have a lot less prosperity and security, more crime, and less innovation. In short, we'll be a lot less free AND quite a bit poorer and sicker.
I think our two wings of populist authoritarianism have much better analogues in the Americas. Peron (Trump) and Chavez (the far left) for example.
The durations of the dictatorships in part of those countries were directly tied to the lifespan of a specific dictator. There is no way Trump is lasting even 20 years.
Maybe the GOP will build a golden throne powered by human sacrifice like in 40k?
LOL! Perhaps, but I look at it mostly with regard to concerns that Trump will refuse to leave office if he's elected to a second term. He'll be 82 in 2028 and, if you look at other examples of authoritarian regimes, that's basically the age range when dictators LOSE power, not seize it for the first time, because by that point it's obvious to everyone how decrepit the leader is and that the upsides to getting out on a limb to try keeping the dictator in power are severely limited because he's going to be dead soon anyway.
Westward from the Oder there seems to be a distinct attitude in much of Europe that they have reached some enlightened endstate.
There is a failure to recognize that Europe's current calm and quality of life are largely downstream of America providing much of Europe's defense, making war between European powers basically impossible, keeping sea lanes open, and pushing technological innovation.
(There are some exceptions to this-- the UK is an example, I think. Also, I blame a lot of the American left for treating Europe as some kind of wonderland American can aspire to be.)
(There are some exceptions to this-- the UK is an example, I think. Also, I blame a lot of the American left for treating Europe as some kind of wonderland American can aspire to be.)
Only if we distribute nukes to Germany, Poland, Ukraine, South Korea like candy and back off from our defense obligations can we have the ultimatum battle whether we want to to be the American left's dream of a West European wonderland or the libertarian's dream of a low-tax, small state utopia.
If that's what your got from that comment, I think don't of the exhaustion may be coming from seeing it a lot of places where it isn't.
This notably isn’t the case everywhere in Europe— Marine LePen in France or the AfD in Germany pose some pretty Trump-like dangers.
I'm not sure about the AfD, but, while LePen wants to take France in a nationalistic, isolationist direction, I seriously doubt she'd be able to undermine France's constitutional order like MAGA can (and, to some extent, already has, eg, our Supreme Court). IOW, she'd make her undesirable changes only at the pleasure of the French electorate. They could vote her out if they didn't like it. But I think the increasingly reactionary nature of America's federal judiciary AND the increasingly reactionary nature of many state governments (France is obviously a unitary state)—combined with the serious lack of independence of our civil service—actually renders the United States more vulnerable than France to a descent into right wing, autocracy-adjacent madness.
I hope we don't find out if I'm right.
Charles, to what degree has LePen gone in the Meloni direction--by that I mean taking "far right" positions on immigration, LGBT issues, and (by European standards) climate, but chilling out on the whole "leave the EU, Pro-Russia" angle that we saw from her earlier?
Also, is she known for being corrupt the way Trump is? (Getting people to stay at his hotel/etc as basic bribes)
She's on trial for corruption right now.
Also meant to add: if Le Pen or her successor ever take power in France, I doubt the crank factor will equal what MAGA can do in the US. Michael Flynn was Donald Trump's literal national security adviser. Michael Fucking Flynn.
TIL:
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240930-france-s-marine-le-pen-goes-on-trial-in-much-awaited-eu-embezzlement-case
Thanks for the information.
The idea that I have is that politics is dead in those countries. They are trapped in a system where it’s delivering poor results but no one wants to change anything. The upside to what you’re saying is that in America, parties are actually trying to do things which reflects a fundamentally healthy system.
I'm not quite sure why people talk about how bad the conservative party did over there as if it's meaningful. My understanding is that it did poorly because the more right-leaning Reform party pulled votes away from them. It wasn't a mandate for Labour, kind of the opposite. Am I wrong?
You are in fact wrong on the Tories. The Tories dropped from 44% of the popular vote to 24% in one election. The Reform Party went from 2% to 14%. That leaves another 8% that moved to Labour - as you probably know, an 8% shift is pretty big and affects dozens of seats in a large Parliament.
The mandate for Labour was not overwhelming, this is true. They went from 32% under Jeremy Corbyn to 34% this time.
would trump dare increase the retirement age? frankly, i’m not sure i would vote for harris if she wanted to increase the retirement age or cut my social security.
So, to be clear: you’d look at Trump and Harris and say, “One has broken America’s tradition of peaceful transfer of power, openly fantasized about being a dictator, and spoken about using the military against the enemy within. The other said she’d make me work longer before I can retire. They are both equally bad! F*** it, I’m not voting for either!”
I know this mindset exists, but it’s depressing as hell to see it in the SB comment section.
No, see, Trump's not going to actually do the things I don't like, just the things I do like, so it's okay!
Your valuing the peaceful transfer of power is just “aesthetic preferences.” The fiction that Harris somehow “slept her way to the top” is apparently much worse. (Things David has said in these threads.)
100% he would sign off on congressional Republicans increasing the age for everyone born after like 1975.
Minor quibble:
So last time it was raised was 1983, from 65->67, based on people born in 1938 or later, so people who were 20 years from retirement or more. (<= 45)
Following that logic, doing it in 2025 you'd want people who were <= 47 years old, so probably 1978 would be the more likely cutoff(and going up the longer it takes in the term to pass)
I was just spitballing the age at which it'd hit Millenials and younger while avoiding Xers and older.
You're not 28 are you? I don't see an increase in the retirement age on the horizon in the US, but if such a change were to one day arrive, it seems highly likely it would only affect the still quite young.
Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed with your conclusion, but I think at this point the median GOP federal office holder is so retarded that they would actually vote for an immediate multi-year jump in the retirement age for everyone under 55 or maybe even 60 without blinking.
I'm...skeptical? They're a bunch of nutcases, but they appear to still be squeamish about slashing retirement programs. But you could be right! It party depends on whether or not we continue to have fair elections. If not, then, yes, all bets are off because the last guardrail (fear of voter wrath) will finally be removed.
I could be wrong! Based on the way the polling is going, it looks like we'll get to find out . . . . :-P
It’s already been done once, way back in more normal times.
With a multi-decade phase-in that meant nobody who was anywhere close to retirement experienced any sort of meaningful increase in the retirement age!
Those should be ultimate third rails regardless of party
Looking forward to what articles you have on deck for the upcoming days before the election, Matt. I've been commenting less these recent days because I'm burned out of election coverage and really want it to be over, because, like you after this article, there's not much else to say. It'll be quite nice to read something different for a change, and something different is what makes this site a good subscription.
Yes, I can’t recall an election that I was so looking forward to being over and done with.
2016 comes close! 2020 was of course a blur.
Yeah, everyone is trying to be a good team player (including me), but to me the only interesting things to note (there are so few, we’ve been doing this for so long) aren’t strictly helpful. Look forward to more interesting conversations (hopefully after a win).
America’s pandemic experience was unusual because our election occurred about 40% of the way through the pandemic. Biden presided over more covid deaths, but Trump was president during the scariest moments and greatest disruptions. It’s not really clear whether Biden or Trump is the “pandemic president,” the best answer is probably both.
However, Trump was president when the stimulus checks, forgivable PPP loans, and enhanced unemployment went out. Biden was president when liberal scolds resisted a return to normal even after vaccines had become available. Politically disengaged people remember that the checks went out under Trump and the inflation and most shameless risk aversion happened under Biden.
Biden might have made political hay out of the pandemic by aggressively embracing a return to normal. His international peers didn’t help him. In the summer of ‘21, there were no spectators at the olympics and the Canadian border was still closed to tourists. Trump’s relatively lax approach to covid and aggressive pursuit of vaccines has aged very well. Americans— especially the young American men who are swinging towards Trump, like seeing womens’ faces and didn’t want to distance forever.
There are a lot more dead Americans than Canadians or Japanese people, despite our creation of the vaccines (by far the best thing Trump did). I don't think the Trump approach otherwise aged well at all.
Death is a political outcome Americans are surprisingly cool with. We have more murders, more overdoses, more heart attacks and more infant mortality than our peer countries and show little inclination to change.
I prefer to reduce death by having people at the greatest risk of untimely death (eg middle age smokers/alcoholics/over eaters) voluntarily change their conduct. I would rather let people live their lives than force them to live as long as possible.
Are you suggesting that we eliminate taxes on alcohol and smoking, as well as make fentanyl available in vending machines? Or arguing that outright bans on existing problematic behavior are more problematic than the benefits one might hope they provide?
I'm ok with taxes on smoking, alcohol and also think we need to heavily tax sweeteners (sugar, corn syrup etc).
I would also legalize basically all drugs.
People should be free to do what they want with their own body even if it's bad for them. But I shouldn't have to pay for it. IE you use the taxes to offset the healthcare costs.
My feeling is that legalizing all drugs would eventually lead to a world, so dystopian, that most people would recant that view. What happens when someone invents a drug so addictive that anyone who tries it once is effectively hooked for life?
What is the externality to me or other fellow citizens from fentanyl deaths? There are externalities associated with alcohol abuse - drunk driving accidents/public misbehavior, or smoking in public - secondary smoke. I don't care if people die from drug overdoses.
The cost of crime prevention, the cost of incarceration, the cost of healthcare, the reduction in GDP, the cost of more and more children (possibly yours) falling to drug addiction, the embarrassment of living in a failed state?
Exactly. Bringing back Prohibition or a federal 55-mph speed limit will save lives but won't win you many votes.
This is certainly true, but it's also very bad and we should not do more things like that.
Sad but true. Life is cheaper in America than in other rich democracies. This seems plain.
And a lot more car crash deaths.
Even the people who were dying (“the olds”) were pretty comfortable with the outcome, going by the attitudes of my relatives in their 80s. If you’ve only got a few years left anyways, why spend them socially isolated and behind a mask.
More politically salient is how much are those who died during covid are missed. The people who died were mostly old or quite unhealthy, it’s not like a war where promising young men were struck down before reaching their prime. Covid is probably a better way to go than alzheimer’s/parkinson’s/extreme old age
I won't go into details for privacy reasons, but I'm +1ing your last sentence very hard.
Very much this, as someone dealing with a relative in late stage Alzheimer’s the past few years. It’s an absolutely horrible way to spend the last few years of life.
Your last sentence is totally true, but having a Covid icu nurse for a husband made me realize that deaths from covid certainly wasn’t only old people. Middle aged Mexicans and black folks had a rough go of it.
my then 61-62 year old mother was very, very cautious and not particularly high risk.
There's a lot more Americans of any kind than Canadians or Japanese. Where we really pulled ahead of other countries in Covid death rate was in 2021-22 as vaccination rates lagged, which is much more a result of conservative cultural forces more than Trump administration policy.
Obviously our population is bigger but it's true per capita. And Trump policy is very much not separable in either direction from conservative cultural forces!
Point 20 is the one that frustrates me the most. If Trump wins based on inflation backlash, I fear greatly that we will get much more inflation than before, and people will suffer for the opposite of what they wanted. It's where the original vision Matt had for Vox would have been very useful, and it's a shame that that original vision wasn't lucrative enough on the market.
I very much hope that Trump loses but I don’t find this “Trump’s plans will cause inflation” narrative to be very persuasive, and I don’t think the median voter does either.
Trump is constrained by Congress, and a GOP trifecta may produce somewhat higher deficits but is not likely to generate a significant degree of inflation. It is ridiculous to take Trump’s campaign promises on their face and say he’s going to spend $8T — he is promising any goody he can because he has (rightly, I think) assessed that there is some upside and no downside to doing so.
Again, though, as Matt has pointed out, the best case for Trump remains not "his policies are good" but "well, he won't actually do the stuff he's saying he will" and that is wild
My wife and I were having this exact discussion this morning. Trump's worst case scenario's are REALLY bad (say using the military to go after American citizens/elected officials).
But the chances of them happening are pretty low. Because all of the American institutions are setup to resist them.
On the other hand the worst case of a Harris presidency such as nuking the filibuster or court packing seem REALLY likely. And I think would be a disaster for the country (especially packing the court).
"REALLY likely"? Have you looked at Senate election polls? The best possible case for Dems is a 50/50 split. Such a Senate will not nuke the filibuster or pack the Court.
Yes if Republicans win the senate that would be great. Divided government is what we need. Keep the crazy parts of each side away from unchecked power.
So the stuff that Trump is actually saying and running on are *unlikely* to happen in your view, but the stuff that Kamala is specifically not saying or running on is *really likely?*
That's totally backwards and a ridiculous rationalization. Just because you introduce some nuance about "Institutions" doesn't mean you can just fabricate the rest of reality around it and pretend it's rational that Trump is a lower-risk choice.
Also, the comment you were replying to is saying that the BEST case scenarios for Trump are all bad — based on him *not* doing anything he's running on.
I think nuking the filibuster (good!) is more likely than packing the court (don't love!)
She probably won't have the congress needed to do either! On the other hand, Trump likely *would* in a victory; then, to your original point, we'd just need to hope he doesn't or can't do any of the bad stuff he's actually promising to do.
Republicans seem much less enthused about nuking the filibuster than Dems.
It’s more a question of “can’t” than “won’t.” Many of Trump’s proposals are fantasies, even compared to the usual proclivity for candidates to make promises they have no power to deliver.
That still perfectly proves the point.
Okay, but Harris won’t be able to do almost anything she’s talked about doing. And that’s also been of some comfort to her more centrist backers (see Cuban and the bizarre taxing unrealized gains thing). It seems worth mentioning that the same applies to Trump not being a one man super legislature.
Trump is *not* constrained by Congress when it comes to tariffs, or to bullying the Fed, and those are the two most obviously inflationary things he has said he will do.
"a GOP trifecta may produce somewhat higher deficits"
I don't think there's a 'may' here, it's happened every time we've had a GOP *president* since Reagan, let alone a GOP trifecta.
They are more constrained by the fiscal reality at this point. I know it’s easy to just say that they will be irresponsible because they only care about cutting taxes. But choosing to believe that they will majorly cut taxes given the fiscal shape we’re in requires believing that Congressional Republicans are considerably *less responsible* than they were in 2003 or 2017. Will they do everything they can to extend Trump tax cuts? Yes. Will they explode the deficit to such a degree that it causes inflation to spike? I would bet not.
"requires believing that Congressional Republicans are considerably *less responsible* than they were in 2003 or 2017"
I do believe this.
This is just the old "Trump is incompetent" excuse, that has it's own issues, but Trump winning almost certainly means Republicans doing well enough to take Congress.
In any case, the President does have significant powers to impose tariffs, without Congress. He can do a lot unilaterally. They haven't been used super widely, because of a series of norms and consensus that Trump famously doesn't buy into. That's probably a big part of their appeal to Trump. Tariffs would be inflationary to most consumer, but who knows, maybe he'll just use it on businesses that piss him off (i.e. don't pay bribes).
Right, if the president didn't have such power on tariffs I would be more confident in Congress impeding his worst goals.
The tariffs cause inflation this is a little weird, because tariffs should decrease demand by lowering the deficit while increasing the prices people experience. But “Trump will explode the deficit” and “Trump will unilaterally raise taxes” are ideas that are in tension, even if it’s not impossible to imagine both happening.
Tariffs decrease demand by raising prices.
So in one sense that’s an “anti-inflation” measure, but I don’t think most people will buy that technically inflation has gone down if the prices they pay have gone up.
I agree with you. The price increases will be experienced as inflation but that is different from a classic demand-induced wage-price spiral. That’s all I’m saying.
In any event, none of this will happen.
No.
Increasing prices by X% is increasing prices. The demand reductions from that is got to offset some of the price increases, but prices will still go up. Also the amount of revenue from tariffs will not offset the tax cuts.
I think people are angry about not getting government checks for Covid anymore…..
Which leads to the whole problem of failing to communicate the tradeoffs: you can't be getting checks instead of paying taxes, and not having inflation at the same time! And yes, I know a retort can be "But but, I want a check for *me*, and to tax the hell out of *them*!"
As I have said, Americans want to have a diet entirely of cake, to have their cake too, and not get fat.
And as I've said, they're going to get fat and hung over on Trump's policies. So it goes, if it does go.
Sounds good to me, though I prefer cinnamon rolls
That point got hardest for me for exactly that reason. The press has portrayed inflation as solely Biden's fault and they are obscuring the differene between a Dem platfom that fights inflation with a Trump platform that will raise prices by a lot. It is infuriating.
I understand it's an election, but "Trump is an unreliable tabloid man and Congressional Republicans backed by middle class voters and mid-sized business donors will make this impossible" pretty correctly shot down the "Trump is suggesting a universal healthcare plan" punditry in 2016. It even correctly shot down "Build the Wall", which Trump literally made his top campaign message and even unsuccessfully got in a shut-down with a GOP-led Congress over funding for.
I'm not saying it's impossible Trump and GOP Congress worked out some sort of tariff to income and payroll tax trade, but being convinced the same Republicans that killed Paul Ryan's DBCFT in 2017 are going to say "yes, I want 20% upticks in all foreign consumed goods" is a tell someone is not very interested in Congressional politics and relies exclusively on presidential campaigns to make sense of reality. Which must be miserable; Biden promised 11 trillion in spending and 2 trillion in revenue over ten years in 2020. How could anyone possibly vote for that kind of inflationary ruin on the American people in good conscience?
I've been practicing a corollary to 1, where I remind myself that in June/July I was certain we were going to lose and had kind of accepted it. Then Biden stepped down and the Harris campaign has refought the race to a draw. Now when I feel badly that it's so close I remind myself that it was almost lost and that helps in an odd way.
Just when I thought I was out….they pulled me back in!
The politically perverse part of me desperately wants to witness the specter of Kamala Harris losing the popular vote by 780,000 votes, but getting the mother of all perfectly efficient distributions en route to winning all seven swing states and that Omaha district. MAGA heads would be exploding near and far.
This is what I'm rooting for because it would (or should) depolarize the electoral college issue. And also it will make every partisan on both sides turn into hypocrits immediately, which is fun to see.
I think the danger is that conservatives just use it as a way to say that Harris is an illegitimate President and use it to justify trying another Jan 6, without really getting on board with any fair reforms.
I think that the sitting President on January 6th, 2025 will have a lot fewer qualms about quelling a pro-Trump riot than the sitting President on January 6th, 2021 did.
That's going to be a massively hard sell to the general public.
Well, to be clear, a very narrow win like the one I've described is probably consistent with NOT taking the House back, and is also surely more vulnerable to a GOP coup. So, I wasn't *really* being serious.
But your point is taken.
No exploding heads, the Electoral College will just become another manifestation of the deep state rigging things for the elites. I can already see the National Review articles about how Democrats are so hypocritical for wanting to abolish the EC while benefiting from it - one more example of left hypocrisy!
I call this "hypocrisy murder-suicide." It's where you successfully call out your opponent on their hypocrisy but doing so also exposes how you're also being hypocritical. You see it everywhere.
The problem is when your audience are also hypocrites. We're against hypocrisy, except when it's our side doing it.
The dirty little secret of hypocrisy is that it's a hollow accusation that ends up in users simply ditching sincerely expressing opinions rather than actually trying to hold consistent positions.
Also, i don't think this kind of consistency is desirable anyway.
I would laugh so hard.
“The Trump 2016 move..”. I’ll stop you right there. Even someone like Matt falls prey to giving too much credit to Trump or ascribes medium to long term thinking that doesn’t exist. The fact is by accident he bumbled his way to a winning message and succeeded with a strategy that would have derailed almost anyone else by sheer luck. It’s the story of his entire life.
It’s unfortunately part of why too many people don’t think he’s that dangerous (you could add 28. Last 8 years has depressingly proven that complete shameless lying is less harmful to a political campaign than it should be). Because it’s precisely because his one talent is reading a crowd and catering to a crowd that allows to get away with so much of what he says. Because people know there is so little long term thinking to his actions you can say to yourself “oh he’s just saying that”.
Trump himself may have been lucky to some extent, but his political strategy was being given to him by people like Steve Bannon who really did have an understanding of what white non-college voters in Midwest states wanted to hear.
and then he ditched bannon after he won and embraced paul ryan. huge, unforced error.
I’m struggling to conceptualize how this could be even close to true. Paul Ryan and his ilk were essentially exiled from power in the Trump administration.
Bannon had a bunch of ambitious quasi-white nationalist and autarkical programs he wanted Trump to push. Trump instead fired Bannon and largely contented himself with tax cuts and appointing pro-life judges.
Sorry, but the modal Paul Ryan policy package involves tax cuts, full or partial Social Security privatization, Medicare/Medicaid cuts, and a focus on deficit reduction.
Other than the first item, Trump’s admin was roughly as ideologically distant from that approach as could be possible while still running and governing as a Republican. Sure he did tax cuts, but that was hardly because he was committed to some hard-charging fiscally conservative traditionalist GOP policy framework. Saying that Trump “embraced Paul Ryan” seems like a massive epistemic error.
I don't think this is really true. There is an interesting idea that I heard through James Scott about charismatic political leaders, and how influence flows both ways with them. Part of the deal with these sorts of leaders is that they are incredibly sensitive to what their followers think, and so they can act in part like a channel for their people. It's not entirely one-sided, they also influence their followers, but the point is that the influence goes both ways.
That's not to say there is strategic medium- to long-term thinking, but I don't think it's just luck. He is legitimately talented in this way.
Yes. Trump is a social-media algorithm in human form, optimized to deliver a rush of content that reinforces existing prejudices.
THIS should be the comment of the week
For the most part I agree, which is why Trump's "message" doesn't work for anyone but him. Vance eked out a narrow victory in a deep red state, and only with billionaire backing. The message is a loser, and they need to attach it to Trump to get their nationalist isolationism across the line.
Trump's only skill is selling himself, and if we give him any credit it's that he may be the best ever at doing so. He saw a market of pent up resentment towards establishment Washington and the media and capitalized.
One of the few half glass full takes I have is I think trumpism doesn’t outlast Trump. I mean certain aspects may; more skepticism to free trade, less openness to immigration. But in totality it seems really clear his entire oeuvre is an electoral loser. Again I go back to a bizarre electoral strength is because he lies so much you can tell yourself he doesn’t actually want to do the worst stuff he’s proposed. But other politicians? Much easier to believe they actually want to implement Christian nationalist or extreme nativist policy or other parts of trumpism that isn’t actually that popular (there’s a big gap between “I want borders more under control” and “I think we should get rid of all immigrants”
It is impossible to peer into Trump's mind and see if he is being strategic.
I've been thinking about Matt's "parties should moderate their way to success," ideas, and where it falls short.
I think one reason that pure "moderate on policy" isn't always the winning move -- and why Trump gets less grief from his right wing than Democrats get from their left -- is that if you just concede a bunch of points, it makes you look weak and uninspiring. This particularly hurts you with your base and donors, who want to see an advocate and a fighter.
I think part of Trump's idiosyncratic appeal is that he was able to moderate on losing issues for the Republicans while being so pugnacious that the right wing is still satisfied that they have an advocate.
I agree that things aren’t really as simple as just saying things that voters agree with. It can backfire.
I just read an NYT article that interviewed Michigan voters from across the political spectrum. These voters’ one-word impressions of Kamala:
“Not believable. Deceptive. Deceptive. Fake. Opportunist. Incompetent. Go-getting. Word salad. Fresh. Unserious. Change.”
This is all despite the fact that she’s staying on message with abortion and the “opportunity economy.” I think popularism sometimes comes off as the awkward kid in school trying to become popular by doing a bad impression of how popular kids act. People don’t like that.
(Obviously the NYT interviews aren’t representative, so take this with a grain of salt.)
Voter panel soundbite stories are pretty much all fake and you should stop amplifying them.
As I said, the point *isn’t* that this is a representative sample of opinions. I’m just using the fact that *some* Democrats would hold these opinions to highlight a theoretical mechanism by which “saying whatever sounds popular” might have some costs.
(Also, I’m not “amplifying” anything by posting this halfway down a SB comments section and noting the limitations! This was in the NYT at the top of the op-ed page!)
Sure but we know what type of platform you have. Now the story will REALLY get some traction /s
This seems directionally correct but wildly overstated.
The problem isn't that she's saying things that are popular with voters, it's that she *used to say things that weren't*, and switched positions. She, and Democrats generally, should have always been focused on their strongest issues and not gone out of their way to embrace positions that were popular with the most obnoxious activists but not the broader normie public.
I take your point, but I think there's some path-dependence in the optimal messaging strategy. Certainly it's best to campaign consistently and credibly throughout your entire career on popular ideas. But what if you already took some unpopular positions?
Consider someone who's always marketed themselves as the Candidate of Peace and Veganism. Suppose the Candidate decides to run for president and realizes that Peace and Veganism are horrendously unpopular among the general electorate. So the Candidate starts to run ads where people are firing off assault rifles and barbecuing burgers, looking somewhat uncomfortable and robotic throughout. Maybe the Candidate makes a short appearance at the 4th of July hot dog eating contest to make a stilted proclamation of love for War and Meat.
Is this the optimal messaging strategy for the Candidate? I doubt it. The base will drop their support and normie voters will just be confused. Why support this candidate when others are more credible on the issues of War and Meat?
The Democrats have their own share of losing issues - border security, trans, DEI/AA, student loan forgiveness, vaccine mandates.
A lot of people are puzzled by the responses people give pollsters when they’re asked “are you better off now than you were four years ago.” - “four years ago there was a pandemic and epidemic riots! How could you possibly be worse off?”
I think these people are taking the question too literally. Respondents aren’t thinking “let’s see, 2024 minus four is 2020, what was I doing in October 2020…”
They’re just telling the pollster if they were happier during the 4-year period when Trump was president. And frankly, that’s what pollsters actually want to know. Not a literal subtraction problem.
Trump was the President for the first year-ish of the pandemic.
The issue is that people mentally think of the Trump administration as ending after 2019, even though Trump didn’t leave office until January 2021.
I think it’s more that 2020 doesn’t feel like part of our timeline. I noticed that during the pandemic, I found it hard to remember what things were like before, and in the post-pandemic era my memory of the pandemic is fading faster than my memory of 2019.
I think it’s related to all the contextual factors of memory, how when you’re hanging out with one group of friends, the past times you were hanging out with them seem more recent and memorable.
It can't be emphasized enough how bananas it is that Trump is going to win because people are mad about high prices and inflation when his only actual policy idea is tariffs that will raise prices and cause inflation. I mean it really is the stupidest thing in the world.
Why not? Democrats have made it abundantly clear through the messaging over the last 4 years that handling inflation is not a high priority and have mostly allowed Republicans to control the narrative on the issue.
What are you talking about? Inflation is already back to close to 2% and has been in the basically normal range since mid-2023. Agree that Republicans have had better messaging, but that’s because it’s way easier to hammer generic platitudes about “this wouldn’t happen on my watch” or vagaries about “I would’ve done things differently” than try to convince the public that Fed rate hikes take time to work.
The only substantive policy that would’ve made a difference after inflation started is cutting the deficit and Republicans certainly are not advocating for that.
Yes and people don't know this stuff among other things because, as I said, Democrats have allowed Republicans to control the narrative and Harris continues to do so.
Everyone thinks they have the key.
The messaging I think is a tough question. Biden tried early on to tout his Administration's accomplishments, and the consensus was that it didn't work. The public believed the economy was bad, and telling them different just made them angrier. Democrats had to meet voters where they were at.
At the same time, there's plenty of evidence that relentless propaganda works, starting with Trump. Say something enough, vehemently enough, and for long enough, people may believe you.
But then again, Trump has a uniquely powerful hold on his base, and Democrats may simply not be able to bully the public into believing (correctly) that the economy is good. Democrats also lack propaganda outfits, of which Fox News is now among the least embarrassing.
I think something people miss is that while the media is well to the left of the average voter, they are very critical of lefty *politicians*. You couldn't get MSNBC, NPR and the NYT all insisting that the economy is amazing, and it's all thanks to Master Joe.
The idea that Democrats need most of the major media outlets to effectively act as campaign arms for the party simply to beat one of the most unpopular opponents in modern political history is a pretty enormous indictment of the state of the party.
You may as well say the opposite. The fact that Trump, an unpopular candidate, has managed to do as well as he has speaks to the power of the rightwing media propaganda machine.
> Democrats have made it abundantly clear through the messaging over the last 4 years that handling inflation is not a high priority
You can't just make things up out of whole cloth and then act like you're making an argument.
You're free to believe whatever you want
It's not a question of belief. Biden and Harris have barely talked about anything but inflation and prices for the last two years. That's an empirical fact.
I used to work a lot in South Africa and met plenty of nice South Africans (including Afrikaners). Admittedly, this was in the 2010s and not the 1980s, so a generation-removed from Apartheid. However, one thing I did find is a disturbingly widespread fatalism among those same, very nice (white) South Africans around the potential for most Black South Africans to ever really be co-equal or to run the state or organizations effectively. This was a tricky thing because the South African government post-Mandela has been notoriously feckless and corrupt. So you can find plenty of "evidence" for a racist take on the Rainbow Nation. (For any DC natives, you'll see a parallel in the reactionary response to the likes of Marion Barry after the District gained Home Rule, and the various follow-on cases of official corruption and ineptitude among Black politicians in the DC City Council up to the present, especially from the impoverished and majority-Black Ward 8, including most recently disgraced Council Member Trayon White).
It's also clear to see that South African policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has often been executed in a manner that's sub-optimal. For one thing, it just hasn't worked to integrate the private sector: I never saw more than a handful of South African professional businesses where the management weren't entirely white. For another thing, when BEE's not paired with effective efforts to actually increase Black social capital (and South African public education is woeful), you just get frustration over an arbitrary quota system that appears to secure slots for unqualified people. This is the real-life version of what American Conservatives think DEI is.
And lest we forget the third leg of this South African-style reactionary stool: don't forget the anxieties around (racialized) crime! White South Africans, to the man (even the Progressives and Liberals), are all constantly talking about the fear of violent crime. And, unlike Americans who hype immigrant crime, South Africans aren't really exaggerating the threat: South Africa is one of the most murderous countries in the world, with an intentional homicide rate an incredible SEVEN TIMES that of the United States'. And the crimes are often the grizzly stuff of MAGA fever dreams: from white farmers hog-tied and brutally raped/murdered by Black marauders to similar fates befalling wealthy white urbanites behind gates and fences. The charitable explanation for the "unnecessarily" violent nature of even property crimes like burglaries and car-jackings is that the violent legacy of Apartheid lead to a lot of racial resentment, mixed with the extreme inequality you see in South Africa that maps directly with race. But, again, this is what American MAGA Conservatives see when they think about crime at the hands of non-whites and immigrants: a lurid fever-dream of the restive underclasses delighting in brutalizing them and stealing their property.
It doesn't help if an outsider like me pipes in with an "objective" perspective on how this is all the result of a total failure to rectify the racial injustices and persistent economic inequality in South African society. The awkward fact is that almost all of South Africa's 10% of the population who are white are middle-class plus and live a quite decent life, while almost all the 90% who aren't white live impoverished, wretched lives not so improved from the Apartheid Era. And what happens to a dream deferred? If Black South Africans resent white South Africans and a minority of them resort to radical populist politics or violent crime as a means to finally "make things right," can you blame them? And isn't it a little complacent that 30 years after Apartheid ended, the racial gap remains so wide? For me, the lesson of South Africa is exactly that you cannot retain forms of Apartheid and extreme, racialized inequality indefinitely, without reaping what you sew.
But the likes of Elon Musk clearly see it differently, and double-down on their "boss-ism." Looking at the disappointments of Post-Apartheid South Africa, you can begin to see what a Thiel / Sacks / Musk "anti-Woke" reactionary agenda worldview looks like and how it can be corroborated in the existing South Africa of today. And how the United States, viewed through this dark mirror, deepens their conviction that all is hierarchy and that democracy isn't just foolish, but dangerous.
I have no direct experience with South Africa in any capacity, but I have been coming to the conclusion in the past few months (especially since learning Peter Thiel and David Sacks are also South African, beside Musk) that an extremely underexplored aspect of the past four years is the extent to which the 2020 rioting and related progressive ideological moves (whatever one wants to style it as) terrorized US-based South African emigres into believing they need to take extreme and immediate action to prevent the "South-Africanization" of the US.
I think this is what Matt is alluding to here, and it's definitely generative for understanding the far-right/MAGA movement's ideology.
How would you go about closing the gap? What growth prospects are you going to create for the poor that won’t be available to the white South Africans? Short of a Communist or Cultural Revolution style takeover? And on that subject I’ve heard that if you look at prominent families in pre-revolutionary China and look now, they are significantly represented in the upper echelons of modern China.
All very good questions to which I don't have satisfying answers. I think that, to some extent, intergenerational inequality is baked in and inevitable. But I also think that you can at least attempt to ameliorate it with some investments in social services (like education) and see some closing of the gap. It won't be enough, though.
But if Black South Africans lack capacity to run a modern state, then the policies you propose are a literal impossibility. This basically describes South Africa.
Botswana has been governed very competently (in a relative sense) over the same time period, so it does seem like a problem that should theoretically be tractable… unfortunately it seems like execution is the hardest but also least sexy part of overcoming Apartheid.
MattY has highlighted this point countless times w.r.t. policy battles in the US; passing the bill, changing the gov’t, etc. means very little without competent execution.
A lot of "assume a can opener" in anyone's proposed solutions to South Africa's problems.
> Back when Obama was president and I was floating various slightly inflationary schemes to engineer a more rapid labor market recovery, some of the older people on his team would tell me I was underrating how much people hate inflation.
2010-2020, progressive intelligentsia convinced me that plutocrats suborned the Fed's mandate to keep labor powerless. I'd love to see a post-mortem from those folks on the *popular* preference for low inflation at the expense of higher unemployment.
I imagine with higher unemployment, since it hits 'other people', americans do have a very 'f*ck you got mine' mentality toward political issues, whereas inflation hits everybody.
My take is that inflation 'punishes' virtue -savers, those who avoid debt, people with pensions. While unemployment generally falls hardest on the least competent - companies cut the worst workers, badly run firms close, etc.. Of course, not denying that there isn't a random element to unemployment but this I think is generally true and people observe it.
My understanding of the political science is that your plausible hypothesis is false. The median voter hates seeing the value of their salary erode, will attribute (inflation-aided) raises as entirely due to their personal accomplishments, and grits their teeth every time they pay for gas or groceries, which is weekly. But I do not have a citation to hand.
Fair enough, I would say it's still the same mechanic though, my hard earned salary is diluted the same way my lazy cousins' is. But if layoffs happens he's much more likely to be hit than me.