Thank you for writing this piece. Even if it was just a blurb in the beginning it was very validating to hear someone explicitly talk about how important the rule of law is. It has been so incredibly disheartening to see how many people, even in these comments, so relentlessly downplay how important it is to have consistently applied laws. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in every conversation about Trump v. Harris where that isn't the central focus.
Responding to the Dan Osborn endorsement at the top, I visited his campaign website and I wasn't impressed by his position issues.
He characterizes the government funding on vaccine development as a 'wasteful handout to the pharmaceutical industry.'
He supports term limits, which political science research shows is bad policy.
I am somewhat skeptical of legalizing marijuana. (I'm worried about the affect on driving safety and nuisance smells in public spaces).
I am skeptical of raising the minimum wage.
I don't agree with his pro-2nd amendment stance on gun rights.
But mainly I didn't see any clear statements that would make me enthusiastic about him. For example, if he clearly said that Trump lost the 2020 election, I would support him against someone who didn't regardless of their positions on other issues. But there's no clear statement on that from him that I've been able to find.
I would be curious to read Matt elaborate his thoughts on this.
You're misunderstanding Musk's point -- he's not saying that SBF won't be investigated, he's saying that the possibility that Democratic politicians were basically accepting bribes from SBF won't be investigated. And it wasn't, right? Because that sort of major-donor-gets-a-bit-of-access-and-gets-their-policy-ideas-considered stuff is routine and there's nothing illegal about it.
I do tire of people comparing anything 2020 to what has happened since, like Matthew did with the murder rate. 2020 was not Trump's fault, and the murder rate still has not dropped to 2019 levels although it may get there in 2024 (depending on which stats you cherry pick). By that metric, Joe Biden has still not restored pre-Covid normalcy. But I think we both know the president has little say when it comes to preventing thugs from killing each other anyway.
The same thing is done with unemployment which is a spectacular joke. To say the unemployment rate now is better than when Trump left office is severely misleading.
I won't vote for Trump, but when people see Democrats lie or intentionally obfuscate about these issues, it pushes them into distrust for Democrats and longing for the good ol' days of 2016-2019. Thus, Trump is reborn.
Wasn’t Trump president until January 2021? Do we just give mulligans because shit happens? People forget he could not handle a crisis and he won’t handle the future ones. I haven’t seen any self reflection from him. Yet his supporters don’t require it at all.
Sure, Harris>>Trump. And if she wins, there will be a sigh of relief that the process worked.
But if she loses? Who's the villain? Biden for hanging on too long? Or for having chosen her in the first place? Harris for a poor campaign? The party for not insisting on some sort of primary to replace Biden?
Matt, do you outline two election recap essays ahead of time?
Why are thirty year UST yields rising even as oil prices, agricultural prices, and Dow Chemical remain weak? Do you agree with Priya Misra's emphasis on deficits?
Or is my alternative explanation closer to the mark: financial markets are anticipating a Trump election victory and therefore lower immigration and higher tariffs?
I think that Kamala’s past record makes more sense if you think of her as a generic Democrat.
When Kamala was a DA and California AG in the 2000s/2010s, she was moderate-ish and tough on crime. As California Senator, she moved to the left. That’s basically how you’d expect a generic Democrat to operate in those roles.
In the 2020 presidential primary, she again moved to the left, which I think was her read of what Dem voters wanted. Bernie was surprisingly strong in 2016 and almost won in 2020. Obviously she was wrong, which is part of why she lost!
I think in practice, Kamala would end up governing pretty similar to any other mainstream Democrat who’s not driven by ideology (Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Whitmer, etc.) As someone who is broadly supportive of what Democrats want to do, that’s totally fine with me.
I think the basic issue is despite what a lot of people here state, many commenters here aren't actually broadly supportive of what the median Democratic Senator or Congressperson wants to prioritize and do (and note, I'm not talking about Matt here).
I think you’re correct. I also think a lot of people here underestimate how much politicians respond to specific political realities. For example, the evidence that Tim Walz and Josh Shapiro are meaningfully different besides one having a Democratic trifecta and the other divided government is very thin…
Right - like maybe some very specific small bore things, but the broad based things Tim Walz did is not that different from what any Democrat not in a red state promises to do. It's why Walz was able to pass it all despite a narrow majority, because it was a median Democratic voter agenda, not an AOC or Bernie agenda.
Democratic voters like cosmopolitan social liberalism more than social conservatism and support broad-based expansions to the welfare state, as long as there aren't big tax increases. There are of course specific conservative opinions some voters have, but the reality is, if you can regular vote for Democrat's, those conservative social values are likely much lower valence than say, increased K-12 funding or whatever.
Like, not all, but a decent chunk of 'social conservatism' of minorities is the equivalent 80-year old black grandmothers in North Carolina who may be quite indeed, quite reactionary on LGBT and abortion, but whom would vote for a transgender abortion doctor before a Republican.
We're all weirdos for deeply caring about all issues.
Now, unfortunately, like all American's, they dislike increased taxes on everybody but very rich people, but alas.
Another banal "Democrats are good" post that I largely agree with that shows the comment section for all it's talk is on the right edge of the Democratic coalition. Talk of how actually the current Supreme Court is good, plenty of talk about how actually Trump is being targeted by the government, and why is everybody mean to poor ole' Elon Musk.
It also shows that for all the talk of how the evil Left and Groups are out of touch w/ the median Democratic voter, when it comes to things like abortion, tax cuts for rich people, and Social Security/Medicare, the median Democratic voter cares far more about all of that than Title IX regulation or whatever.
Now, for all the middle-aged well-off dudes here upset Kamala isn't centrist enough for you, the future isn't going to get any better for you -
Favorability of various people in a recent YouGov poll among young Democrats -
Ironically, this undercuts the view of some of the people to my left that thinks nobody like Kamala among the youths, but it also shows, at least among the Democratic coalition, which has consistently gotten 60%+ of the youth vote, there's not a lot of love for moderation.
The overwhelming view of the comment seems to be to a long article saying "Kamala's focused on things normal voters care about and has moved to the center on a variety of issues" appears to be, "well she hasn't moved conservative enough on my pet issue I'm to the right of voters on, so she's obviously not doing enough to win."
Again, as I've pointed out and somebody else did, Matt saying, "some things Democrat's stand for are good and it's good a Democrat is running on them" seems to rile up a larger part of the comment section than you'd think.
Yeah except the election in 2 weeks is not a Democratic primary, it's a general election. And presumably we want Harris to win the election. To win, she needs to win over the median general election voter, not just the median Democratic voter.
I don't think the things this comment section things she's isn't focusing enough on or thinks are failings is stuff the median voter is worried about to any appreciable amount.
Like, as a dirty SJW social democrat, I don't like some of what she's done, but I agree with Matt she's done the right things to win over the median voter. This comment section meanwhile is praising Betsy DeVos, saying she should've had Mark Cuban or Pat Toomey as VP's, having the same arguments about how she's a DEI hire or unlikable (despite the latter just not being true anymore) or moved even further right on everything, based more on their actual views than anything in reference to actual voters.
I just added the last part as a little poke at all the middle-aged guys here who wish it was 1995 or 2003 forever culturally or politically.
Also, no major Presidential candidate in history has actually tried to be in line with the median voter - even Bill Clinton in 1996 talked about stuff the median Democrat liked more than the median voter, and this weird view a Democratic Presidential nominee should basically ignore what the actual party voters want is sort of silly.
Like, if you want a centrist nominee who only cares about independent voters, fine, but that's not the job of the Democratic or Republican parties.
In general, except maybe on immigration men 18-29 are more woke than older men, as seen by our buddy Milan's polling firm he works for that hasn't been afraid to put out bad numbers.
Hell, she's up +11 among men 18-29 even on transgender issues, the issue that's supposedly going to sink the Democrat's one of these cycles according to people.
So yeah, there are always outliers. There will always be reactionaries upset the world is changing in ways they don't like. However, I think the median male 20-something in this comment section would be seen as wildly too left on a bunch of issues, as seen in this polling.
Considering you come from a political subtribe that saw its greatest success by increasing traction among people who care about politics/society rather than the masses of the asses directly, you should be able to see the winds of change blowing.
Either way, it’ll be funny when we’re all in the nursing home (assuming you’re also under 30) and someone’s like “remember when transgenderism was a thing, that sure was wild” and you find yourself playing the role of like… an antediluvian Storm Thurmond acolyte cursing inside as his drool is wiped off by a stern Barbadian nurse.
- 28% identify as a Democrat and 41% identify as independent
- 42% of independents lean towards Democrats (compared to 49% who lean towards Republicans)
- 23% identify as liberal on economic issues and 33% as liberal on social issues
- 49%(!!!) of Democrats identify as moderate or conservative on economic issues 30% of Democrats identify as moderate or conservative on social issues
So yes, the majority of a Democratic candidate's voters are going to be Democrats, specifically liberal Democrats and the median Democratic voter does lean more liberal, but the math shows that it's very hard to win with a platform and message that's entirely built around appealing to a group of voters that's already going to vote for you anyways when that group is a minority of the general electorate. That's been the case for Democrats for the most of the last century. Winning requires a coalition of Democrats, independents, disaffected Republicans, liberals, moderates and maybe a small sliver of conservatives. And this will probably be the case for the foreseeable future.
Putting aside Gallup's recent (and by recent, the last few years) weirdness on party ID and what 'moderate' means to a Democratic voter, I agree with that you need a big tent, we just disagree on what that big tent needs to be based on.
Again, I'm putting my personal view points aside and only looking at Kamala's actual policies and what she is focusing on.
It just seems you and many people here seem to be upset that 51% of the party is liberal and that if your perfect world, that section of the party would get as little as possible, and you actually would prefer a candidate who only wanted a candidate of moderates, centrist, independents, and disaffected moderates.
If you want James Lankford's immigration policy, Mitt Romney's policy on transgender kids, Mark Cuban's policy on anti-trust, and Betsy DeVoses view on whether or not college students can be punished by their college by anything short of American jury trial standards and this all of the above is more important than abortion and Social Security, as a disproportionate part of this comment section seems to believe, you're probably not going to be happy long-term in the modern Democratic coalition.
The good news is despite the caterwauling here, I actually don't think the above represents a majority of views, at least when combined with saliency.
" This comment section meanwhile is praising Betsy DeVos"
If I couldn't at least look at _some things_ a politician I disliked did well, then I'm being too partisan.
I hadn't paid much attention to her for-profit stuff but it sounds pretty awful. But I can try to find _something_ she did I liked. (And while I think Harris should go back on the Title IX stuff I absolutely don't think it's something she should waste any time on in her campaign)
I thought Obama was overall a pretty good president, but, for instance, I thought he was too right-wing on drone strikes(used them too much without good process)
"His administration didn’t want a ton of asylum-seekers to show up at the border"
That's very interesting Matt. Personally, I suspect the reason Biden suspended deportations for 100 days and made Remain in Mexico totally unworkable is because his administration wanted a ton of asylum-seekers to show up at the border.
So they can get a job in a roaring labor market and acquire a higher quality of life in the United States, a prosperous economy with a lot to gain from more immigrants. This is how I imagine their thought process went. But imo, using executive policy to crank open the gate to millions while Congress refuses was not going to be sustainable in a settled republic.
the podcast erza klein did with mayorkas (sec of homeland security) about this topic was fairly contentious, and it certainly doesn't sound like that is what happened.
So I did listen to it before the new paywall went up, and I thought RogueWPA did a pretty good job summarizing how Mayorkas thinks about this process primarily through judicial capacity to quickly adjudicate more cases rather than stiffly saying no to a lot of people from poor parts of the world.[1] Curious if you disagree with his summary, unfortunately I can't revisit the full podcast right now.
I also think the owner of this Substack wrote a helpful book on why his fellow partisans believe rapidly increasing legal immigration is a really good and important idea. It's a helpful guide to know some of the logic behind center-left administrations in America and Canada. Both of these admins (in very different ways) increased legal immigration expecting backlash mainly through right-wing partisans and have now realized a lot of other people who usually consider voting for them are very upset with the effects on municipal services and quality of life.
To win Hispanic voters, because they supposedly love asylum seekers or they supposedlu love illegal immigration and Democrats seem to think Trump’s immigration stance hurt him with Hispanic voters.
"But successful... entrepreneurs have no excuse for ignoring the extent to which integrity and the rule of law provide the necessary backstop for everything good that comes out of a capitalist economy.".
EXACTLY!! As a pretty successful entrepreneur, I point this out to my entrepreneur friends all the time... They tend to ignore it, because they haven't lived in countries where it doesn't exist. Those that have appreciate it.... And Donald Trump is the opposite... He's about punishing the opposition, and pandering to his buddies. Sadly, the entrepreneur I admire most for his courage & willingness to risk it all on a great vision, Elon Musk, has put his own desire to be left alone to do what he wants ahead of the national interest. The good news is, I think he hurts Trump more than helps... The fact that one crazy guy has another crazy guy supporting him (Even though that crazy guy may actually be a capable businessman, unlike the candidate himself) is hardly compelling to most Americans. Good job!.
So... I could write a comment on how I support Kamala and loathe Agent Orange, but this would be boring. Instead, I will write something that a lot of my fellow Slow Borers will likely disagree with!
Matt Y makes the argument that Kamala is the status quo candidate, that things in America are mostly good and so what we need is a sensible, decent person who won't blow sh*t up and who will make gradual improvements on the margins, such as more housing.
In contrast, Freddie deBoer (who has popped up in the comments again, hi Freddie!) says that we need radical change (of course he does, he's a self-declared Marxist). According to Freddie, neoliberal elites sold out the American working class by supporting free trade and offshoring factory jobs to China. High school-educated Americans in the heartland used to get good, stable, dignified jobs in factories; nowadays those jobs are in China and other developing countries, and the Midwest is full of decaying towns that offer nothing but unemployment, fentanyl, and existential despair. Furious at this betrayal, Heartland Americans turned against the elites and came to support Trump as their champion who will burn the evil system down. Here's the link to Freddie's article: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/they-still-wont-say-that-theyre-sorry
Here's my controversial-ish take: this is a hard problem, and I don't know how to solve it. But, if we could magically go back to the early 1980s, would it have made more sense to trade more protectionism in exchange for more expensive, American-made consumer goods?
Now, please hear me out on this: I grew up in the People's Republic of Poland. We had a much, much lower standard of living than the average person does in America. In my childhood home, we didn't have a microwave, dishwasher, or clothes dryer. Square footage per person was much lower than in America (my childhood apartment = 900 square feet for 4 people). We had one car, purchased when I was six years old, considered a great luxury. LEGOs were imported from the West and hence super expensive, and getting a set for Christmas was a huge deal.
And we weren't super unhappy about all this! I mean, sure we would have LIKED more consumer goods, but it's not like we walked around all day going, "I'm so pissed off about not having a clothes dryer!" Conversely, the hedonic treadmill is real, and it's very quick to go from "I got a new and better stove, wow, cool" to "this piece of sh*t doesn't even have a built-in air fryer, this sucks, I want a newer and still better stove," etc.
So, my point is: I don't want people to live in POVERTY, but I think it would accept a bargain where Americans have fewer consumer goods/slightly lower material standard of living in exchange for the jobs staying in America and not triggering this horrible resentment of the "elites" that resulted in Trump being elected and all this political clusterf*ck we've been dealing with since.
Disclaimers!
1. My plan would have screwed over the Chinese, and I recognize that's bad! The Chinese people deserve to live free of poverty as much as Americans do. To simplify my moral analysis, I am explicitly choosing to focus on America here.
2. Automation might throw a wrench in the works: we refuse to offshore our factories to China, but then automation displaces the factory workers and they still end up pissed off and voting for Trump.
I think if I would've been dropped back to the mid-90's (because most of the real shifts ironically aren't ironically because of NAFTA, but rather China and wider competition from Asia), and in some places, deindustrialization started in the 50's, I'd tell Clinton that largely, retraining and such doesn't work.
Hell, Germany tried really hard and even they're seeing the beginnings of the sort of deindustrialization America saw a few decades ago.
You need to pass a law that allows basically the same amount of movement of jobs but a whole lot of golden parachutes for workers you're displacing, on a sliding scale. If you shut down a plan, you're basically paying 100% of wages of everybody with 20+ years until 65, 80% of over 15+, and so on.
In the long run, the reality is these towns are going to die for the same reasons various ghost towns in the West died, but you can make it a more comfortable decline as you hopefully also invest in alternative paths for younger people in the area.
"A noteworthy development in the labor force over the past six decades has been the slow decline in the labor force participation rate of men 25–54 years.11 After peaking at 97.4 percent in the mid-1950s, the participation rate of men 25–54 years fell to about 88 percent in 2015. (See figure 6.) The rate fell by an average of 1.2 percentage points per decade between 1960 and 1990, and it declined more rapidly between 1990 and 2015."
"One reason for the large decline in participation among men who did not attend college could be that the types of jobs available to this group might have become less desirable and lower paying. Among men, inflation-adjusted wages for those with less than a high school diploma and those with a high school diploma (no college) fell over the 2000–15 period by 6.8 and 6.6 percent, respectively; by contrast, inflation-adjusted wages for those with at least a bachelor’s degree edged up by 1.2 percent over this period.13 Researchers have suggested that employment opportunities of less-educated men have deteriorated in part because technology has changed and globalization increased."
So quit propping them up... Quit propping economically failed states up. JD Vance is basically handouts for rednecks. Giving them monies so they can just hang around and fish and hunt everyday because they find some work beneath them and don't want immigrants over here to work the chicken factories seems bizarre to me.
Good question. Check out the link to Freddie's article for a longer answer, but in short: Freddie claims that common working people's resentment of the elites is a long-term problem stemming from the elites' selling out the common people by allowing factory jobs to be offshored. This is a very potent, emotionally compelling narrative and you can't dispel it by just saying "but we have full employment now, so what's the problem?"
Also, in fairness to Freddie, there's a meaningful difference between "we have full employment" and "it's easy to get a well-paying, stable job in a hollowed-out post-industrial Rust Belt town." (Yes, you can tell the Rust Belt townspeople to move to where the jobs are, but they really hate being told this.)
>>would it have made more sense to trade more protectionism in exchange for more expensive, American-made consumer goods?<<
(1) No, it wouldn't have made sense. We wouldn't have just had "more expensive goods," we'd be a poorer country now.
(2) Every rich country has seen manufacturing's share of output and employment decline. This is mostly due to rising productivity, not trade. We just don't need as many workers to power our manufacturing sector (a sector that's as large as it's ever been in terms of the value it creates) as we used to. That's a good thing. A wonderful thing, in fact. It lets us live better.
(3) We continue to glorify factory jobs in absurd fashion. I see no reason—save the desire to pander to politically important states— that being a line manager in logistics or a warehouse supervisor or a landscaping entrepreneur or an HVAC technician is intrinsically less "dignified" than a job on the factory floor. And in any event America still has millions of jobs in manufacturing (and related fields like mineral extraction and logging) that are often quite well paid. Some of them require a fair amount of education.
(4) The way to allow all Americans to live well is to have a strong economy and an effective safety net that plugs in the gaps. And build some damn houses. We're doing well on the first one. We need to do a bit better on #2 and #3.
"We wouldn't have just had "more expensive goods," we'd be a poorer country now."
Uh, yes? That was my point. More expensive goods = lower material standard of living = poorer country. I understand this. I mean, would it be worth it to accept a somewhat poorer country in exchange for a more harmonious one, without such toxic levels of hatred and resentment of the elites, with common working-class people less willing to vote for a deranged autocrat who hates the same people they hate? I say yes.
Please note, I'm NOT advocating for dire poverty of the "we all live in shacks and eat gruel" kind. I'm talking something like "the average American house is 1500 square feet instead of 2500 square feet [nota bene: still much bigger than my childhood 900-square feet apartment!] and you have a lot fewer gadgets in your kitchen and your child has fewer toys and maybe you get a new cell phone every 7 years instead of every 3 years" kind of thing.
ETA: Your point about productivity is well taken, and I gesture at it with my disclaimer that automation might make this whole discussion moot. I'm not a Luddite and I'm not in favor of preventing/banning automation for the sake of preserving factory jobs.
>would it be worth it to accept a somewhat poorer country in exchange for a more harmonious one<
That bargain was never on offer. The kind of utterly radical shift in the trajectory of the economy required to truly anchor our socioeconomic profile in line with the America of 40 or 50 years ago* wouldn't translate into a "somewhat" poorer country, but a massively poorer one. We might as well bemoan our failure to build colonies on Mars.
Also, as far back as the 1970s, there was a lot of very angry sentiment directed at foreign trade, only then it was Japan that came in for the hatred, not China. There are Youtube clips out there of 70s era US autoworkers sledge-hammering Toyotas. Or look at population statistics for the Rust Belt some time. All those states basically ran into a demographic wall around 1970—they'd been growing briskly for 20+ years after the war, and then the growth slowed to a crawl. My point is, the "harmonious" America that might undercut right wing popularism started to vanish, I fear, more like 60 years ago—not 40.
I would also say that the more expensive American made consumer goods would probably be lower quality (also due to less competition). In some cases that doesn't matter much, but didn't cars get markedly better _and safer_ once Ford & GM had to compete with Toyota and Honda?
I think the point is that Republicans who don't rely on white nationalist base are better Republicans?
Like, regardless of whether you are a Republican or Democrat, can we agree that white nationalism, blood-and-soil style, is a sh*tty, harmful ideology? Seeing some people as inferior because they're not white is just morally wrong.
Biden should, as his las official act in office, absolutely sign an Executive Order deporting any Tech Billionaire from South Africa who made their money during the Dot Com Bubble.
Thank you for writing this piece. Even if it was just a blurb in the beginning it was very validating to hear someone explicitly talk about how important the rule of law is. It has been so incredibly disheartening to see how many people, even in these comments, so relentlessly downplay how important it is to have consistently applied laws. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in every conversation about Trump v. Harris where that isn't the central focus.
Responding to the Dan Osborn endorsement at the top, I visited his campaign website and I wasn't impressed by his position issues.
He characterizes the government funding on vaccine development as a 'wasteful handout to the pharmaceutical industry.'
He supports term limits, which political science research shows is bad policy.
I am somewhat skeptical of legalizing marijuana. (I'm worried about the affect on driving safety and nuisance smells in public spaces).
I am skeptical of raising the minimum wage.
I don't agree with his pro-2nd amendment stance on gun rights.
But mainly I didn't see any clear statements that would make me enthusiastic about him. For example, if he clearly said that Trump lost the 2020 election, I would support him against someone who didn't regardless of their positions on other issues. But there's no clear statement on that from him that I've been able to find.
I would be curious to read Matt elaborate his thoughts on this.
In the spirit of posting to try to influence, if you think they are influential:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/2FKWh4cdKDTRGn7m/
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/srhpgMu5QoysWZVw/
You're misunderstanding Musk's point -- he's not saying that SBF won't be investigated, he's saying that the possibility that Democratic politicians were basically accepting bribes from SBF won't be investigated. And it wasn't, right? Because that sort of major-donor-gets-a-bit-of-access-and-gets-their-policy-ideas-considered stuff is routine and there's nothing illegal about it.
"he's not saying that SBF won't be investigated"
That's literally exactly what he said, though.
Great article.
I do tire of people comparing anything 2020 to what has happened since, like Matthew did with the murder rate. 2020 was not Trump's fault, and the murder rate still has not dropped to 2019 levels although it may get there in 2024 (depending on which stats you cherry pick). By that metric, Joe Biden has still not restored pre-Covid normalcy. But I think we both know the president has little say when it comes to preventing thugs from killing each other anyway.
The same thing is done with unemployment which is a spectacular joke. To say the unemployment rate now is better than when Trump left office is severely misleading.
I won't vote for Trump, but when people see Democrats lie or intentionally obfuscate about these issues, it pushes them into distrust for Democrats and longing for the good ol' days of 2016-2019. Thus, Trump is reborn.
Wasn’t Trump president until January 2021? Do we just give mulligans because shit happens? People forget he could not handle a crisis and he won’t handle the future ones. I haven’t seen any self reflection from him. Yet his supporters don’t require it at all.
Just donated $50 to Dan Osborn's Senate campaign in Nebraska thanks to your nudge.
Sure, Harris>>Trump. And if she wins, there will be a sigh of relief that the process worked.
But if she loses? Who's the villain? Biden for hanging on too long? Or for having chosen her in the first place? Harris for a poor campaign? The party for not insisting on some sort of primary to replace Biden?
Matt, do you outline two election recap essays ahead of time?
Biden is the president. It's all on him.
Dear smart people,
Why are thirty year UST yields rising even as oil prices, agricultural prices, and Dow Chemical remain weak? Do you agree with Priya Misra's emphasis on deficits?
https://x.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1849047457939833289
Or is my alternative explanation closer to the mark: financial markets are anticipating a Trump election victory and therefore lower immigration and higher tariffs?
Off-topic, I know. Apologies.
I think that Kamala’s past record makes more sense if you think of her as a generic Democrat.
When Kamala was a DA and California AG in the 2000s/2010s, she was moderate-ish and tough on crime. As California Senator, she moved to the left. That’s basically how you’d expect a generic Democrat to operate in those roles.
In the 2020 presidential primary, she again moved to the left, which I think was her read of what Dem voters wanted. Bernie was surprisingly strong in 2016 and almost won in 2020. Obviously she was wrong, which is part of why she lost!
I think in practice, Kamala would end up governing pretty similar to any other mainstream Democrat who’s not driven by ideology (Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Whitmer, etc.) As someone who is broadly supportive of what Democrats want to do, that’s totally fine with me.
I think the basic issue is despite what a lot of people here state, many commenters here aren't actually broadly supportive of what the median Democratic Senator or Congressperson wants to prioritize and do (and note, I'm not talking about Matt here).
I think you’re correct. I also think a lot of people here underestimate how much politicians respond to specific political realities. For example, the evidence that Tim Walz and Josh Shapiro are meaningfully different besides one having a Democratic trifecta and the other divided government is very thin…
Right - like maybe some very specific small bore things, but the broad based things Tim Walz did is not that different from what any Democrat not in a red state promises to do. It's why Walz was able to pass it all despite a narrow majority, because it was a median Democratic voter agenda, not an AOC or Bernie agenda.
Democratic voters like cosmopolitan social liberalism more than social conservatism and support broad-based expansions to the welfare state, as long as there aren't big tax increases. There are of course specific conservative opinions some voters have, but the reality is, if you can regular vote for Democrat's, those conservative social values are likely much lower valence than say, increased K-12 funding or whatever.
Like, not all, but a decent chunk of 'social conservatism' of minorities is the equivalent 80-year old black grandmothers in North Carolina who may be quite indeed, quite reactionary on LGBT and abortion, but whom would vote for a transgender abortion doctor before a Republican.
We're all weirdos for deeply caring about all issues.
Now, unfortunately, like all American's, they dislike increased taxes on everybody but very rich people, but alas.
Another banal "Democrats are good" post that I largely agree with that shows the comment section for all it's talk is on the right edge of the Democratic coalition. Talk of how actually the current Supreme Court is good, plenty of talk about how actually Trump is being targeted by the government, and why is everybody mean to poor ole' Elon Musk.
It also shows that for all the talk of how the evil Left and Groups are out of touch w/ the median Democratic voter, when it comes to things like abortion, tax cuts for rich people, and Social Security/Medicare, the median Democratic voter cares far more about all of that than Title IX regulation or whatever.
Now, for all the middle-aged well-off dudes here upset Kamala isn't centrist enough for you, the future isn't going to get any better for you -
Favorability of various people in a recent YouGov poll among young Democrats -
https://twitter.com/demsocsean/status/1848758800351723750
Kamala +84 (92/8)
Walz +69 (74/5)
Bernie +69 (80/11)
Biden +51 (75/24)
AOC +50 (58/8)
DSA +39 (50/11)
Pete +27 (40/13)
Hillary +26 (58/32)
WFP +25 (36/11)
Green Party +9 (32/23)
Ironically, this undercuts the view of some of the people to my left that thinks nobody like Kamala among the youths, but it also shows, at least among the Democratic coalition, which has consistently gotten 60%+ of the youth vote, there's not a lot of love for moderation.
"plenty of talk about how actually Trump is being targeted by the government,"
That's 2 maybe 3 commenters who are mostly being quite disagreed with by the rest of us.
I _am_ on the right edge of the Democratic coalition but don't judge my stances by what those outlying commenters are saying.
The overwhelming view of the comment seems to be to a long article saying "Kamala's focused on things normal voters care about and has moved to the center on a variety of issues" appears to be, "well she hasn't moved conservative enough on my pet issue I'm to the right of voters on, so she's obviously not doing enough to win."
Again, as I've pointed out and somebody else did, Matt saying, "some things Democrat's stand for are good and it's good a Democrat is running on them" seems to rile up a larger part of the comment section than you'd think.
Yeah except the election in 2 weeks is not a Democratic primary, it's a general election. And presumably we want Harris to win the election. To win, she needs to win over the median general election voter, not just the median Democratic voter.
I don't think the things this comment section things she's isn't focusing enough on or thinks are failings is stuff the median voter is worried about to any appreciable amount.
Like, as a dirty SJW social democrat, I don't like some of what she's done, but I agree with Matt she's done the right things to win over the median voter. This comment section meanwhile is praising Betsy DeVos, saying she should've had Mark Cuban or Pat Toomey as VP's, having the same arguments about how she's a DEI hire or unlikable (despite the latter just not being true anymore) or moved even further right on everything, based more on their actual views than anything in reference to actual voters.
I just added the last part as a little poke at all the middle-aged guys here who wish it was 1995 or 2003 forever culturally or politically.
Also, no major Presidential candidate in history has actually tried to be in line with the median voter - even Bill Clinton in 1996 talked about stuff the median Democrat liked more than the median voter, and this weird view a Democratic Presidential nominee should basically ignore what the actual party voters want is sort of silly.
Like, if you want a centrist nominee who only cares about independent voters, fine, but that's not the job of the Democratic or Republican parties.
You’d be surprised at how many of those “middle-aged guys” were born between those two cited years.
In general, except maybe on immigration men 18-29 are more woke than older men, as seen by our buddy Milan's polling firm he works for that hasn't been afraid to put out bad numbers.
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/man-survey-youth-10-22/
Hell, she's up +11 among men 18-29 even on transgender issues, the issue that's supposedly going to sink the Democrat's one of these cycles according to people.
So yeah, there are always outliers. There will always be reactionaries upset the world is changing in ways they don't like. However, I think the median male 20-something in this comment section would be seen as wildly too left on a bunch of issues, as seen in this polling.
Considering you come from a political subtribe that saw its greatest success by increasing traction among people who care about politics/society rather than the masses of the asses directly, you should be able to see the winds of change blowing.
Either way, it’ll be funny when we’re all in the nursing home (assuming you’re also under 30) and someone’s like “remember when transgenderism was a thing, that sure was wild” and you find yourself playing the role of like… an antediluvian Storm Thurmond acolyte cursing inside as his drool is wiped off by a stern Barbadian nurse.
"this weird view a Democratic Presidential nominee should basically ignore what the actual party voters want is sort of silly"
Good thing that's not what I'm arguing, then!
Here is some recent polling about ideology and partisanship from Gallup:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/645776/increase-liberal-views-brings-ideological-parity-social-issues.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx
Some key findings:
- 28% identify as a Democrat and 41% identify as independent
- 42% of independents lean towards Democrats (compared to 49% who lean towards Republicans)
- 23% identify as liberal on economic issues and 33% as liberal on social issues
- 49%(!!!) of Democrats identify as moderate or conservative on economic issues 30% of Democrats identify as moderate or conservative on social issues
So yes, the majority of a Democratic candidate's voters are going to be Democrats, specifically liberal Democrats and the median Democratic voter does lean more liberal, but the math shows that it's very hard to win with a platform and message that's entirely built around appealing to a group of voters that's already going to vote for you anyways when that group is a minority of the general electorate. That's been the case for Democrats for the most of the last century. Winning requires a coalition of Democrats, independents, disaffected Republicans, liberals, moderates and maybe a small sliver of conservatives. And this will probably be the case for the foreseeable future.
Putting aside Gallup's recent (and by recent, the last few years) weirdness on party ID and what 'moderate' means to a Democratic voter, I agree with that you need a big tent, we just disagree on what that big tent needs to be based on.
Again, I'm putting my personal view points aside and only looking at Kamala's actual policies and what she is focusing on.
It just seems you and many people here seem to be upset that 51% of the party is liberal and that if your perfect world, that section of the party would get as little as possible, and you actually would prefer a candidate who only wanted a candidate of moderates, centrist, independents, and disaffected moderates.
If you want James Lankford's immigration policy, Mitt Romney's policy on transgender kids, Mark Cuban's policy on anti-trust, and Betsy DeVoses view on whether or not college students can be punished by their college by anything short of American jury trial standards and this all of the above is more important than abortion and Social Security, as a disproportionate part of this comment section seems to believe, you're probably not going to be happy long-term in the modern Democratic coalition.
The good news is despite the caterwauling here, I actually don't think the above represents a majority of views, at least when combined with saliency.
If you're just going to blatantly lie and make things up about my views, then there's no point in further engaging with you.
" This comment section meanwhile is praising Betsy DeVos"
If I couldn't at least look at _some things_ a politician I disliked did well, then I'm being too partisan.
I hadn't paid much attention to her for-profit stuff but it sounds pretty awful. But I can try to find _something_ she did I liked. (And while I think Harris should go back on the Title IX stuff I absolutely don't think it's something she should waste any time on in her campaign)
I thought Obama was overall a pretty good president, but, for instance, I thought he was too right-wing on drone strikes(used them too much without good process)
"His administration didn’t want a ton of asylum-seekers to show up at the border"
That's very interesting Matt. Personally, I suspect the reason Biden suspended deportations for 100 days and made Remain in Mexico totally unworkable is because his administration wanted a ton of asylum-seekers to show up at the border.
To what end?
So they can get a job in a roaring labor market and acquire a higher quality of life in the United States, a prosperous economy with a lot to gain from more immigrants. This is how I imagine their thought process went. But imo, using executive policy to crank open the gate to millions while Congress refuses was not going to be sustainable in a settled republic.
the podcast erza klein did with mayorkas (sec of homeland security) about this topic was fairly contentious, and it certainly doesn't sound like that is what happened.
Here is a link, although it might be pay-walled: (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alejandro-mayorkas.html)
So I did listen to it before the new paywall went up, and I thought RogueWPA did a pretty good job summarizing how Mayorkas thinks about this process primarily through judicial capacity to quickly adjudicate more cases rather than stiffly saying no to a lot of people from poor parts of the world.[1] Curious if you disagree with his summary, unfortunately I can't revisit the full podcast right now.
I also think the owner of this Substack wrote a helpful book on why his fellow partisans believe rapidly increasing legal immigration is a really good and important idea. It's a helpful guide to know some of the logic behind center-left administrations in America and Canada. Both of these admins (in very different ways) increased legal immigration expecting backlash mainly through right-wing partisans and have now realized a lot of other people who usually consider voting for them are very upset with the effects on municipal services and quality of life.
[1] https://twitter.com/RogueWPA/status/1836955041942610147
To win Hispanic voters, because they supposedly love asylum seekers or they supposedlu love illegal immigration and Democrats seem to think Trump’s immigration stance hurt him with Hispanic voters.
"But successful... entrepreneurs have no excuse for ignoring the extent to which integrity and the rule of law provide the necessary backstop for everything good that comes out of a capitalist economy.".
EXACTLY!! As a pretty successful entrepreneur, I point this out to my entrepreneur friends all the time... They tend to ignore it, because they haven't lived in countries where it doesn't exist. Those that have appreciate it.... And Donald Trump is the opposite... He's about punishing the opposition, and pandering to his buddies. Sadly, the entrepreneur I admire most for his courage & willingness to risk it all on a great vision, Elon Musk, has put his own desire to be left alone to do what he wants ahead of the national interest. The good news is, I think he hurts Trump more than helps... The fact that one crazy guy has another crazy guy supporting him (Even though that crazy guy may actually be a capable businessman, unlike the candidate himself) is hardly compelling to most Americans. Good job!.
So... I could write a comment on how I support Kamala and loathe Agent Orange, but this would be boring. Instead, I will write something that a lot of my fellow Slow Borers will likely disagree with!
Matt Y makes the argument that Kamala is the status quo candidate, that things in America are mostly good and so what we need is a sensible, decent person who won't blow sh*t up and who will make gradual improvements on the margins, such as more housing.
In contrast, Freddie deBoer (who has popped up in the comments again, hi Freddie!) says that we need radical change (of course he does, he's a self-declared Marxist). According to Freddie, neoliberal elites sold out the American working class by supporting free trade and offshoring factory jobs to China. High school-educated Americans in the heartland used to get good, stable, dignified jobs in factories; nowadays those jobs are in China and other developing countries, and the Midwest is full of decaying towns that offer nothing but unemployment, fentanyl, and existential despair. Furious at this betrayal, Heartland Americans turned against the elites and came to support Trump as their champion who will burn the evil system down. Here's the link to Freddie's article: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/they-still-wont-say-that-theyre-sorry
Here's my controversial-ish take: this is a hard problem, and I don't know how to solve it. But, if we could magically go back to the early 1980s, would it have made more sense to trade more protectionism in exchange for more expensive, American-made consumer goods?
Now, please hear me out on this: I grew up in the People's Republic of Poland. We had a much, much lower standard of living than the average person does in America. In my childhood home, we didn't have a microwave, dishwasher, or clothes dryer. Square footage per person was much lower than in America (my childhood apartment = 900 square feet for 4 people). We had one car, purchased when I was six years old, considered a great luxury. LEGOs were imported from the West and hence super expensive, and getting a set for Christmas was a huge deal.
And we weren't super unhappy about all this! I mean, sure we would have LIKED more consumer goods, but it's not like we walked around all day going, "I'm so pissed off about not having a clothes dryer!" Conversely, the hedonic treadmill is real, and it's very quick to go from "I got a new and better stove, wow, cool" to "this piece of sh*t doesn't even have a built-in air fryer, this sucks, I want a newer and still better stove," etc.
So, my point is: I don't want people to live in POVERTY, but I think it would accept a bargain where Americans have fewer consumer goods/slightly lower material standard of living in exchange for the jobs staying in America and not triggering this horrible resentment of the "elites" that resulted in Trump being elected and all this political clusterf*ck we've been dealing with since.
Disclaimers!
1. My plan would have screwed over the Chinese, and I recognize that's bad! The Chinese people deserve to live free of poverty as much as Americans do. To simplify my moral analysis, I am explicitly choosing to focus on America here.
2. Automation might throw a wrench in the works: we refuse to offshore our factories to China, but then automation displaces the factory workers and they still end up pissed off and voting for Trump.
Slow Borers, what say you?
I think if I would've been dropped back to the mid-90's (because most of the real shifts ironically aren't ironically because of NAFTA, but rather China and wider competition from Asia), and in some places, deindustrialization started in the 50's, I'd tell Clinton that largely, retraining and such doesn't work.
Hell, Germany tried really hard and even they're seeing the beginnings of the sort of deindustrialization America saw a few decades ago.
You need to pass a law that allows basically the same amount of movement of jobs but a whole lot of golden parachutes for workers you're displacing, on a sliding scale. If you shut down a plan, you're basically paying 100% of wages of everybody with 20+ years until 65, 80% of over 15+, and so on.
In the long run, the reality is these towns are going to die for the same reasons various ghost towns in the West died, but you can make it a more comfortable decline as you hopefully also invest in alternative paths for younger people in the area.
Help me understand why we keep talking about jobs when we have been beyond full employment for some time?
"A noteworthy development in the labor force over the past six decades has been the slow decline in the labor force participation rate of men 25–54 years.11 After peaking at 97.4 percent in the mid-1950s, the participation rate of men 25–54 years fell to about 88 percent in 2015. (See figure 6.) The rate fell by an average of 1.2 percentage points per decade between 1960 and 1990, and it declined more rapidly between 1990 and 2015."
"One reason for the large decline in participation among men who did not attend college could be that the types of jobs available to this group might have become less desirable and lower paying. Among men, inflation-adjusted wages for those with less than a high school diploma and those with a high school diploma (no college) fell over the 2000–15 period by 6.8 and 6.6 percent, respectively; by contrast, inflation-adjusted wages for those with at least a bachelor’s degree edged up by 1.2 percent over this period.13 Researchers have suggested that employment opportunities of less-educated men have deteriorated in part because technology has changed and globalization increased."
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/labor-force-participation-what-has-happened-since-the-peak.htm
So quit propping them up... Quit propping economically failed states up. JD Vance is basically handouts for rednecks. Giving them monies so they can just hang around and fish and hunt everyday because they find some work beneath them and don't want immigrants over here to work the chicken factories seems bizarre to me.
Good question. Check out the link to Freddie's article for a longer answer, but in short: Freddie claims that common working people's resentment of the elites is a long-term problem stemming from the elites' selling out the common people by allowing factory jobs to be offshored. This is a very potent, emotionally compelling narrative and you can't dispel it by just saying "but we have full employment now, so what's the problem?"
Also, in fairness to Freddie, there's a meaningful difference between "we have full employment" and "it's easy to get a well-paying, stable job in a hollowed-out post-industrial Rust Belt town." (Yes, you can tell the Rust Belt townspeople to move to where the jobs are, but they really hate being told this.)
>>would it have made more sense to trade more protectionism in exchange for more expensive, American-made consumer goods?<<
(1) No, it wouldn't have made sense. We wouldn't have just had "more expensive goods," we'd be a poorer country now.
(2) Every rich country has seen manufacturing's share of output and employment decline. This is mostly due to rising productivity, not trade. We just don't need as many workers to power our manufacturing sector (a sector that's as large as it's ever been in terms of the value it creates) as we used to. That's a good thing. A wonderful thing, in fact. It lets us live better.
(3) We continue to glorify factory jobs in absurd fashion. I see no reason—save the desire to pander to politically important states— that being a line manager in logistics or a warehouse supervisor or a landscaping entrepreneur or an HVAC technician is intrinsically less "dignified" than a job on the factory floor. And in any event America still has millions of jobs in manufacturing (and related fields like mineral extraction and logging) that are often quite well paid. Some of them require a fair amount of education.
(4) The way to allow all Americans to live well is to have a strong economy and an effective safety net that plugs in the gaps. And build some damn houses. We're doing well on the first one. We need to do a bit better on #2 and #3.
Off topic but my apartment is also 900 sq ft for four people, have no car & legos are a pretty big deal to my kids. I am pretty happy tho!
"We wouldn't have just had "more expensive goods," we'd be a poorer country now."
Uh, yes? That was my point. More expensive goods = lower material standard of living = poorer country. I understand this. I mean, would it be worth it to accept a somewhat poorer country in exchange for a more harmonious one, without such toxic levels of hatred and resentment of the elites, with common working-class people less willing to vote for a deranged autocrat who hates the same people they hate? I say yes.
Please note, I'm NOT advocating for dire poverty of the "we all live in shacks and eat gruel" kind. I'm talking something like "the average American house is 1500 square feet instead of 2500 square feet [nota bene: still much bigger than my childhood 900-square feet apartment!] and you have a lot fewer gadgets in your kitchen and your child has fewer toys and maybe you get a new cell phone every 7 years instead of every 3 years" kind of thing.
ETA: Your point about productivity is well taken, and I gesture at it with my disclaimer that automation might make this whole discussion moot. I'm not a Luddite and I'm not in favor of preventing/banning automation for the sake of preserving factory jobs.
>would it be worth it to accept a somewhat poorer country in exchange for a more harmonious one<
That bargain was never on offer. The kind of utterly radical shift in the trajectory of the economy required to truly anchor our socioeconomic profile in line with the America of 40 or 50 years ago* wouldn't translate into a "somewhat" poorer country, but a massively poorer one. We might as well bemoan our failure to build colonies on Mars.
Also, as far back as the 1970s, there was a lot of very angry sentiment directed at foreign trade, only then it was Japan that came in for the hatred, not China. There are Youtube clips out there of 70s era US autoworkers sledge-hammering Toyotas. Or look at population statistics for the Rust Belt some time. All those states basically ran into a demographic wall around 1970—they'd been growing briskly for 20+ years after the war, and then the growth slowed to a crawl. My point is, the "harmonious" America that might undercut right wing popularism started to vanish, I fear, more like 60 years ago—not 40.
I would also say that the more expensive American made consumer goods would probably be lower quality (also due to less competition). In some cases that doesn't matter much, but didn't cars get markedly better _and safer_ once Ford & GM had to compete with Toyota and Honda?
"If Republicans had turned the page on Trump this cycle, they’d be in dramatically better shape in the current election."
I think this is objectively not true: absent Trump, the white nationalist base collapses.
I think the point is that Republicans who don't rely on white nationalist base are better Republicans?
Like, regardless of whether you are a Republican or Democrat, can we agree that white nationalism, blood-and-soil style, is a sh*tty, harmful ideology? Seeing some people as inferior because they're not white is just morally wrong.
Biden should, as his las official act in office, absolutely sign an Executive Order deporting any Tech Billionaire from South Africa who made their money during the Dot Com Bubble.
I simply don't understand how a reasonable person could vote for Donald Trump.