I used to listen to the Weeds and get really interested in kind of technocratic details. The white paper of the week was always fun and I cannot count how often I want to say something about how most universal systems aren’t single payer and all payer rate setting controls costs in these systems and recite something I learned was really high.
And it turns out the dividing line between me and people left of me was much more affect about capitalism/status quo was way greater than I realized. People want to post memes about health care not understand it.
Which is fair because health care policy is really really hard to understand. But it’s also unfair because if you do actually care about it, then you should put in the tedious work of understanding it.
If you care about *any* policy, you should put in the tedious work of understanding it! Andrew makes an excellent and underrated point about how so much of “the discourse” vis-a-vis politics is actually just mood affiliation.
I don't know. We live in an extremely complex world, where policy touches on so many things that aren't visible to most people. Part of the reason to have representative democracy is to accept the reality that most people don't have time to learn that much about the details. Even in an ideal world, is it a good use of people's productive time to do the tedious work of understanding all the policies that are relevant to them vs. coming up with a workable metric that covers that?
I wish voters put a little more work into understanding policy so they wouldn't just vote for the guy who gives them the least complex promise to solve problems without pain. However, that's never going to be reality.
Yeah I was thinking along these lines as well. I think the way I'd put it is that it shouldn't be important for voters to put in the work to understand policy, but that they should instead be able to vote for people based on shared *values*.
This is why I had to do a lot of thinking and reading to feel like I was casting the correct vote in Obama vs. McCain. I really felt like they both shared my values to a large degree, so the question came down to policies (and ultimately, what I thought they'd do about the wars).
But since 2016, at least at the presidential level, the values question has been an easy answer, to the degree that understanding policy details seems unnecessary. (Not that I don't still do it, personally, because I'm a nerd, but it just isn't determinative for my votes at the moment.)
I would like that, but I suspect the incentives are aligned against it. Obama had to wrap his real politics in HOPE, and even that brand of nuanced politics doesn't appear to sell at all now.
I suspect on of the fundamental challenges modern democracies are facing is the world is much too complex for most people to understand, so they feel overwhelmed at even attempting it and resort to more graspable, but usually false, narratives to manage. I'm not sure there is a way out of that, especially as literacy declines.
Note that the original point, made by Ben, was aimed at people who actually *care about* (and presumably talk about) policy. I think we all know that’s not a huge set of people.
I think a lot of people care (and vote on) specific policies, but don't have time enough or feel they have the capacity to understand the details. I care about transit policy and likely know more the 99% of the population about it. I don't have time or energy to go deeper and still have to trust experts. I have a job that's not in transit policy and need to be an expert in that. I have things I do to relax to help me get away from the stress of my job, and deep study of transit policy doesn't do that. Experts need to be experts.
Yeah I was thinking along these lines as well. I think the way I'd put it is that it shouldn't be important for voters to put in the work to understand policy, but that they should instead be able to vote for people based on shared *values*.
This is why I had to do a lot of thinking and reading to feel like I was casting the correct vote in Obama vs. McCain. I really felt like they both shared my values to a large degree, so the question came down to policies (and ultimately, what I thought they'd do about the wars).
But since 2016, at least at the presidential level, the values question has been an easy answer, to the degree that understanding policy details seems unnecessary. (Not that I don't still do it, personally, because I'm a nerd, but it just isn't determinative for my votes at the moment.)
And yet people will get worked up on the nuances of athlete contracts and who is being over/underpaid in a way they didn't 20 years ago. People got wonky about entertainment in a way that made being a fan worse, but didn't channel that energy into anything that actually matters.
Great point. I don't think people need to become *experts* on policy. But if they're going to talk about it, online or (preferably!) in person, they should have some idea what they're talking about, rather than parroting social media accounts or relying on magic words such as "oligarchy" to do all of the work in the assertion.
I am lucky to have worked in research and reporting; over and over and over again, I have gone to original sources and discovered that, no, that's not really what the study concluded or no, the headline/article don't provide the full picture/context of what's in the legislation.
Ignorant question - I really do want to understand and have been working at that to little success for like a decade. Suggestions on where to go to do that better?
I always find it kinda funny to look at polling and see that a majority of Americans are satisfied with their own personal health insurance/doctor/$THING, but Everybody Knows that The System is broken and bullshit anyway, somehow. For many values of $THING beyond healthcare, even. But performative negativity so often seems like a load-bearing pillar of many peoples' identities these days, sadly...
I don't think that is inconsistent though. I have fine healthcare. But if I get fired or quit my job I lose it. This is especially bad, as a common reason people have to leave their job is medical issues.
If you get fired or quit your job, you'll have less income, which will make you eligible for either Medicaid (especially if you live in an expansion state) or a subsidized ACA exchange plan.
I could potentially sign up for a subsidized ACA plan (although in reality when I was working independently a few years ago they were really expensive and I rolled the dice and went without healthcare. But my priorities back then were different as I was in my 20s and had no kids). There's a lot of uncertainty in that too - what kinds of plans will be available in 5-10 years and what will they cost?
So I think it's fair to say that I currently have good healthcare, but I am not confident I will have good healthcare if I leave my current job, and that is a flaw in the system.
I'm sorry to hear that (the part about the uncertainty, obviously, not the part about how you currently have good insurance).
The system definitely has flaws. I would say, however, that the system *as envisioned by the drafters of the ACA* would be pretty decent, and for Americans who have a legit problem with the current flaws in the system, it is counterproductive for them to blame Obama & his allies for not doing more, and de facto helping the other side, whose objective it has been to frustrate the ACA's goals.
Yeah, the polls that consistently showed people rating their own financial situation as fine but saying the country’s economy was bad were batty. At least now that inconsistency is gone just in the bad direction lol
American medical care is the best in the world, especially at the high end. All the richest and most powerful people in the world get their healthcare here. With that being said, does it cost too much? Most likely, yes.
Yeah and there is a question of how much people are actually going to have votes swayed by "Everything is Broken" when that thought is accompanied by "but it's okay for me."
I mean, for what it's worth, that was how perceptions of the economy seemed to work in 2024. But if you are talking about a specific thing like healthcare it might not have the same "waiting for the shoe to drop" feeling a lot of people had [largely intentionally cultivated in them] in '22-'24.
The basic problem here is also the problem that crops up in Matt’s writing. Most voters don’t actually care about “Obama’s issue space” whatever that was, or multi-year tax credit or investment proposals. They care about tangible results they can see and hear and touch. Hence most of what Trump does, and on centrists’ side the absurd focus on “identity politics” (even though in reality this issue is so unimportant in the scheme of Federal politics we should all be forced to jump off a bridge for discussing it) since centrists don’t have any ideas that would result in immediate tangible changes. Hence the public’s interest in policies that result in actual stuff getting done, like Mamdani opening supermarkets or Trump’s latest Fox News bit.
The answer to our political moment isn’t left or right or whatever, it’s doing stuff that appears to make a difference quickly, even if some of the ideas are bad.
"They care about tangible results they can see and hear and touch."
Well, it's kind of a 20/80 mix of that and "what they see on TV," which is pure propaganda for literally half the country.
This is illustrated well by the way people talked about their own economic situation and their local economies during the Biden administration (generally positively), in contrast to their assumptions about the national economy (WORSE THAN THE GFC!!!!!!).
And then when Biden tried to point out the economy was good everybody yelled at him. This whole coalition sucks.
When I started reading left-wing people I thought that the dividing line on “capitalism” is much smaller than it first appears. I always thought of “capitalism” as meaning free markets, but apparently many people think of “capitalism” as meaning status quo. Many left-wing people seem to hold the latter meaning and just dislike the status quo distribution of wealth but aren’t necessarily opposed to free markets, which means they can be persuaded about the value of free markets.
If that is really what she says, she's wrong. People would like to be richer, but they don't "hate" that they aren't if they have what they need materially. What they really hate is being exploited, bled dry and treated like cash cows, which is necessary for capitalism to work.
> being exploited, bled dry and treated like cash cows
Could you define any of these terms in ways that a) are objective b) apply to > 5% of Americans and c) don't apply to pretty much everyone who's ever lived?
The thing that made me realize that I'm perhaps more conservative than I thought was when I realized that, actually, the status quo is pretty good. Standards of living are higher than they've ever been, and America is far richer than any other place.
I always took the most essential part of "conservatism" is "the thing we've been doing for 20, 200, 2000 years? Probably a reason for that!" and by that measure the present administration is the most anti-conservative government in my lifetime.
I think "Chesterton's Fence," which I only heard about recently (though I know it's not some obscure thing) and which I also heard Ben Shapiro mention on Ezra Klein's podcast, is an extremely good articulation of conservative values. "Don't tear down a fence if you don't know why it's there." [edit: I see Nicholas12 also mentioned it a couple of hours ago.]
Of course I vociferously disagree with Shapiro on (A) whether Republicans are embodying that principle in any way whatsoever, rather than doing literally the exact opposite and (B) what exactly constitutes an understanding of a fence, and (C) which well-understood fences are appropriate to keep up. But I think it's a good thing for anybody (who isn't a romantic revolutionary) to keep in mind.
([A] is actually why I think Democrats should loudly insist that they are, in fact, the only conservative party; leftist fury be damned.)
It was a lie concocted by Reagan and Bush and hardcoded into the American public by the media that "liberalism" and "conservativism" are opposite things, or that they are even incompatible with each other. Nixon was a sick son of a bitch but I think he accepted himself as basically being "liberal," despite being and self-identifying as very conservative.
I mean Christ, the alternative is "ILliberal" which I'm pretty sure has zero positive connotations.
I also think it's completely incompatible with free market capitalism, which for better or worse is constantly changing people's way of life in a way that makes social conservatism essentially impossible. What is the time-tested tradition of how to date on Tinder?
I think you could steelman social conservatism by arguing that groups like the Amish have stronger families, less anxiety, and better life outcomes in certain metrics. But they basing their lifestyle around avoiding the technological innovations that our system prioritizes.
I think the evidence is overwhelming that *no one* wants unfettered free market capitalism. Everyone wants regulations restricting it in some way. Its just a matter of which regulations and how much.
And that's fine--one thing I always want Democrats to do when they're promising big things is tell me why their big promises aren't going to mess up the good things we already have going for us in the United States.
I think that people can have whatever opinion about capitalism without getting to the heart of the problem at this moment.
There is a strange belief being put out by some that capitalism and free markets should not just allow but dictate that the uber rich should not just exist and be able to rig the system further. The current libertarian flavored trend is to act like any increase in income/productivity should be given to first corporations, then us, and lastly the public good. And if anything as we get richer as a whole, we should be paying less and less for the public good.
So I for one reject that free markets and capitalism should mean that companies spend most of their innovation budget on how to craft anti-competitive moves instead of providing actual innovation. The relentless way that companies are trying to shim their way into positions of grabbing a slice of my money while providing no discernible benefit is exhausting and infuriating.
"Can you talk about policy details at all" is a funny dividing line. If you can, you're pretty much automatically not on the right right now, which is weird because I feel out of place.
Didn't Matt just say the other day that he doesn't believe in that style of journalism anymore? He now believes you have to read all the white papers on a particular issue and summarize them all simultaneously, but won't have the time or wherewithal to do that.
It is frustrating how accurate, "People want to post memes about ______, not understand it" is. Regardless of what you put in that blank. Government. Infrastructure. Economics.
Yes but not for the reason people think. The White's have health insurance and have access to healthcare at the beginning of the show, but they wanted the very best healthcare that money could buy. In Canada that option wouldn't have been available for them.
> but they wanted the very best healthcare that money could buy
But Walter had that offered to him! Episode 5, Gray Matter.
His old business partner, who supposedly doesn't know about the cancer, offers to hire Walter on as a part-time consultant and casually mentions the excellent health insurance they have. Walter just gets mad at being seen as a charity case despite Schwartz working hard to make it seem otherwise.
Yes, he resents them intensely for buying him out of the Grey Matter and turning it into a huge success while he has to teach wastoids who are not worth his time.
This post is emblematic of what I find kind of annoying about the Politix podcast and the Pod Save bros and everything. There’s a lot of talk about politics and positioning and everything but very little talk about first principles policies. I respect socialists, silly as they may be, because they’re actually willing to say what they believe. Most normie progressive pundits only frame being opposed to the far left as a matter of strategy as opposed to actually disagreeing on the merits.
Like, if you disagree with the administration on healthcare or immigration or whatever it would be nice to talk about what you actually believe. (This criticism is aimed leftward because I’ve given up all hope of non-libertarian conservatives being able to think about policies.)
That's why I am hopefully about projects like The Argument, which is at least trying to articulate what it means to be liberal and defend it - human rights, smartly regulated markets, and a social safety net - to make clearer where the boundary is vs leftism and especially with the right, while inviting in those in the center right.
I can't think of any other publication that's as firmly liberal as them, either now or going back a few years. Slate and Vox were closer to it in the late aughts, but drifted substantially left.
I like The Argument but I think it's telling that there are essentially ~no "Arguments" that represent the perspective of the actual existing Republican party. I believe many of the positions of contemporary conservative politicians are so poorly thought out an argument in their favor cannot survive even a fairly basic fact-check review.
For example, Oren Cass seems kind of like an Ezra Klein of the right in that he's a mild-mannered/policy oriented person. But his ideas are so wrongheaded that he's constantly caught in lies.
If you go far enough to the right, you find people who reject the idea of rational argument as a matter of principle. Truth comes from tradition and hierarchy, not from debate or evidence.
I think the current Republican party just also isn't liberal in any sense of the word, so it's hard to imagine how their positions could be reflected in a publication that is liberal by conception.
I think this is a pretty big problem because a liberal democracy can’t have an illiberal party taking power like half of the time. I agree with Matt that democrats need to figure out how to win . But on the other hand no political party can win every time. So how should a liberal system deal with a large illiberal constituency? I don’t think anyone has mooted a plausible arrangement for this
Isn't a key part of the question whether they believe strong in illiberalism, or whether they'd rather have an illiberal who is tough on immigration than a liberal who isn't?
If it's Option B, the answer is concede on immigration to save liberalism.
If it's Option A, we've had a good ride. I'm skeptical that 45%+ of Americans actively oppose liberalism (i.e. oppose the First Amendment broadly, even if they might be less liberal than existing First Amendment jurisprudence), though so I don't think Option A is very likely.
Yep. I think we're just actually really lucky that Trump is quite old. I don't think the illiberalism of the Republican party is going to survive the collapse of his cult of personality. I might even vote for a Republican again sometime after he dies and the ensuing tumult resolves in some way. It remains to be seen, but I don't think it's impossible.
The hard thing for The Argument is that they have Vox-brain. Whether coming from the progressive-left or from liberals, 1500 word "well actually" posts are only going to take them so far. Now, I get they're not trying to be the mass-appeal publication and are working to get wonks and super online liberals into a more coherent framework, but I'm just not sure that kind of thing will succeed in today's information environment. That said, I'm a subscriber and do enjoy it.
Can you elaborate on what Vox-brain is and why you think it can't succeed? Wasn't Vox a reasonably popular media property for a while? It may not have been financially successful, but it had readership.
It's not really about whether they were commercially successful. For me, Vox-brain is the idea that explaining something to someone in a factual, rational way is a vehicle for accomplishing elite change and that elite change leads to political change.
I liked Vox! I read a lot of it back in the day. While I don't pay for Vox stuff, I do subscribe to The Argument and like their product. That's also the problem. You can change my mind about something by persuading me with facts and figures. I'm a fairly online person who enjoys reading about politics and policy. I don't know how much reach that has in the political system or with the media at large. How many Americans are going to sit down and read a 2,500+ word post about Mississippi's education policy? Not many. They're watching Under-the-Desk-News on TikTok.
The Argument, like Vox, seems to have a different theory of action and that is to appeal to Democratic elites and explain to them why it's important to return to liberalism. Matt's post today is a good reminder that Democratic elites are flawed and, perhaps, not persuadable along factual/rational lines. Beyond that, I'm not convinced this is a path to changing the political landscape in a way that benefits Democrats.
We've spent a long time with media outlets dedicated to fact-checking or explaining or saying, "if you'd just look at the data..." and look where it's gotten us. If we just gave Trump one more Pinocchio or Pants-on-Fire then he wouldn't have won that election. While The Argument isn't doing anything quite that egregious, they traffic in the same kind of stuff. If we'd just show you one more graph about why women should be optimistic about technology, then tech companies will work harder to help women love tech by appealing to their emotions as mothers!
I this you miss how ideas spread and cascade. People willing to do the reading and understand the issues will read the Argument and be convinced or not. They will then take that and bring it back to a broader audience in a summarized and dumbed down way that will convince more and more people.
I get that. I just don't think that's how it works. I'm not sure persuading already liberal very online Substack subscribers to be louder about liberalism online goes anywhere beyond good subscription numbers.
The battle The Argument (along with Searchlight) is engaged in is an internal one of the Democratic party and the liberal/progressive movement allied with it. It's trying to move the center of gravity of the party away from the progressive/identitarian focus that ruled the party for far too long.
Like the Abundance effort, they're speaking the language that party members and leader understand and so have actually picked an approach that has a decent chance to succeed.
Only using a war analogy because it's the one that came to mind:
Sometimes you inflict injury on another nation with bombs, other times with small infantry fire. Sometimes you win by taking steps to lower their morale or starve them out or cut off their supply lines. Or maybe you win by tactically setting up ambushes and surprise attacks.
I guess I'm just trying to boil things down to "there's more than one way to skin a cat". You can persuade some people with facts and figures and rational arguments, others with tiktok vids and others with speeches, kissing babies and shaking hands. There's nothing wrong with writers at the Argument fighting for their particular ideas in the way that appeals to them. They'd probably suck at tiktoks and baby-kissing anways.
If you're saying the Left has too much investment on the fact side overall, then I could agree. To go back to the battle analogy, it's like saying "we've already sent in enough special forces, now we need to drop bombs". Or something. But there's nothing wrong with The Argument people doing what they're doing on its own.
I define "success" for the Argument as a Democratic President coming in in 2029 and forcing Fox News to hire Jerusalem Demsas as their new Editor in Chief.
Yeah that makes sense. I'm more optimistic than you about the ability for the kind of influence done in places like The Argument or Slow Boring or the Ezra Klein Show, and I dunno what it is, Heritage and Claremont on the right?, to slowly percolate into politics and policy without ever actually being “mainstream”.
I would generally consider myself a fan of Liberalism, but what does human rights mean in this context? When I hear human rights and US politics I think of things like foreign policy muddling and meddling in other countries, clumsy versions of "exporting our values" and virtue signalling.
Maybe I should more rightly be thinking of other things, but I'm not sure what they are.
Imo, there are human rights at home that are worth fighting for and there are rights of immigrants who are not citizens to be treated as people as well (if for no other reason you can't really only target "bad people" in practice). Foreign policy gets messy bc of course it is there also but I do reject a level of forceful intervention as a policy at all times but sometimes it is the correct response to unique situations. I have a half baked idea that most sanctions should automatically phase out after ~3 years so they don't just glide on as the status quo without a positive choice.
I think liberals need to talk about individual rights when they're talking about domestic policy. We should appeal to a kind of classic americana sense of individualism embodied in the bill of rights and make the case that protecting those freedoms is the central legacy of liberalism. To me, random guy on the internet, that message would fit with voters far better than human rights framings. Because you're right, human rights are things we think about when we think about other countries doing bad things to their people.
While we probably could point to similarly bad things happening here and rightly call them violations of human rights, that still rubs us the wrong way. Human rights are something nations fight other nations about. They're universal and the system that upholds human rights is international (whether formal and toothless like the UN or the ICC, or informal like "coalitions of the willing" or "feminism demands that we occupy Afghanistan forever"). So, when you tell me the US government is violating human rights, you're telling me that some external authority is going to come correct those abuses. Americans of all stripes kinda hate that! I don't vote for whoever is on the ICC. I might vote for a president to appoint an ambassador but that's not really giving me a voice at the UN. Beyond that, nobody's actually going to do anything about it when the perpetrators are on the security council, have nukes, etc.
But, when you tell me the US government is violating my individual rights, rights that I know are mine and laid out as my inalienable rights in the constitution, then I have a say. I have courts for redress. I have my vote to elect politicians who won't violate my rights. I have free speech to speak out about my rights and a free media to spread that story widely. These rights apply to anyone and everyone visiting the US, living in the US, even illegally. Rights are not a free pass to do crimes, but we all acknowledge that even criminals have rights. It's all a bit naive and Schoolhouse Rock, sure, but that's the association individual rights have in the US as opposed to human rights.
I bet there are many people living in oppressive authoritarian nations around the world who are demoralized now that Trump has abdicated from all efforts to give such people any hope.
Have you been reading the argument? So far, despite their manifesto, they've been writing heterodox articles about how maybe progressives have had things wrong, based on elusive metrics. It must scratch an itch for you, but they're not really championing liberal values as much as championing out of touch technocracy and weird stale memes.
From your comment, I think you might have misread their manifesto... Heterodox articles about progressives being wrong and technocratic liberalism is exactly what I expected from their launch. (You seem to be saying this as a bad thing, but I'm saying it as a good thing.)
“Most normie progressive pundits only frame being opposed to the far left as a matter of strategy as opposed to actually disagreeing on the merits.”
Because theoretically, if American costs weren’t completely out of control and people trusted big bureaucracies to provide good service (looking at you Blue Cities), you could have a real debate about massively increasing taxation to fund a Euro style welfare state. The case for it might be okay (though Euro style welfare states seem to be having severe problems in Europe before they even fund defense at a competitive level, but I digress) - but in the present state in the US the whole thing is DOA, so why even start the conversation?
Maybe a clean sheet reset with Medicare for all really is the theoretical way forward. But you could judge estimating the absolute crapstorm when provider dominoes start to fall when the payer mix acutely changes wouldn’t be worth the savings, so don’t even have the discussion at this point.
Yeah, the way I see it is that there’s currently this debate in which Yglesias/Shor types try to convince the Blue Team to pretend to be more like them.
The problem is that Yglesias/Shor are the right-most fringe of what’s tolerable for liberal society, but they’re *way* too left-wing for their views to win an American election.
I feel like the lesson of popularism is that we shouldn't spend a bunch of time talking about first principles because in many cases those principles may be out of step with public opinion. Instead, Democrats should orient their politics and positioning around issues that do cast them in a positive light with voters.
You should give up hope on libertarians too. It's a routinely disproven and contradictory set of values, that has no credibility elsewhere, is particularly American, and particularly attached to America's decline. As funny as it is, you posture as being post-ideology or something like that, but should still consider how your ideologic constraints allows you to write off socialists as "silly" when there's a lot more of that going on in the world.
I'm curious how libertarian thought is contradictory. It may be normatively wrongheaded, but it seems consistent and coherent, no? Would love to hear your thoughts.
There are a lot of examples from actually existing libertarians in US (most exemplified in Silicon Valley thought), or you can look at Milei's current Argentina, but also with the academic theoreticians, starting first with things like Austrian economics.
The thing I'd like to point out here, is that while you're clearly well educated, and have been engaged with libertarians for a long while, if you haven't come across the criticisms or been made aware of the inconsistency, it's very strange to have such an obvious blindspot for something you're informed on. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt it's not intentional, but really anytime spent online should expose you to libertarians constantly playing rhetorical games that their specific strain of true libertarianism has never been tried.
I think if you want to know why libertarianism eventually will always devolve into a tyrannical society, I can provide some examples about it's inherent inequality (and escalation of it) as the worst problem, but maybe you can suggest some other issues more important to your understanding of libertarianism.
If you're saying that many self-identified libertarians may deviate from libertarian principles if it suits their self-interest or some other goal, well, yes, humans are like that.
But if you're saying the *ideology* is inconsistent - not just normatively a bad idea or ineffective at achieving its stated goals, but self-contradictory - that's a much stronger claim, and not one you've substantiated.
I don't think I've been engaged with them for awhile. I follow some libertarian commentators to diversify my media diet, but I am not and have never been anything resembling a minor expert on it.
Is the thinking that libertarianism inevitably leads to massive inequality which inevitably leads to tyranny which is inherently antithetical to libertarian ideals? Tbh that seems kinda tenuous but I'm sure I'm missing a lot of nuance there.
Didn’t Matt himself recently say he doesn’t believe in a first-principles approach to belief formation in a recent mailbag? Just a thought that this critique seems like it could clearly apply to him.
I get what you're saying, but MY recently came out against first principles politics. And while I like first principles more than he does (we have to know why we want the policies we want!), there's something to be said for that approach.
The Democratic Party has spent the last 80 years building its identity around The New Deal and subsidizing/stimulating demand. But the inflation problem needs to be tackled by increasing supply, which is done with a set of policies that is not in Democrats' comfort zone. So now, (most) Democrats are stuck in a sort of decision paralysis because they know that just throwing money at the inflation problem won't help, but pivoting away from their long-held identity as money-throwers is difficult.
this is tied up with the problem that the parties' support bases are experiencing massive lag on realigning their policy preferences
Democrats are pro-labor, pro-welfare, pro-redistribution, and then their support base is affluent liberals and no one hates them more than the working-class whites who these policies were originally designed to help.
Republicans are for tax cuts on the rich, cutting entitlements, union busting, etc. and their support base is working class people and all the affluent upper-middle-class suburbanites despise them.
Democrats are going to have to realign on a deregulatory, socially liberal, pro-business platform. But of course that can't happen before the people who vote for Democrats realize they don't have to constantly give away the store to people who despise them more than anything in the world in order to be good people.
True that Trump has probably permanently damaged the status of the dollar and the global trading system that underpinned our affordable high quality of life for 30 years but Democrats could at least stanch the bleeding. They will need to thoroughly renounce Trumpism rather than just walk it back a little like Biden and think of ways to create commitment mechanisms so that people feel safe about longer-term investments.
The inflation issue isn't just Trump. COVID created an economic shock that resulted in too many dollars chasing too few goods and services for awhile.
And the problem was the Left-- which is historically bad on inflation because it likes government spending so much-- didn't understand this. Even guys like Paul Krugman who should have known better didn't want to admit that austerity was called for.
That wasn't unique to Trump (although he's a big spender too). It's the result of a Left that fundamentally doesn't want to admit that sometimes the government has to spend less money.
Yeah covid economics and inflation made me realize that Ezra Klein, smart as he may be, is kind of a hack. He was a big proponent of automatic stabilizers at the beginning of covid when unemployment shot up and has not mentioned them at all once inflation caught up to things.
I don't see how this follows. Automatic stabilizers remain a good idea. What turns out to be super hard is to get the scale exactly right. It's a very good thing that we did enhanced unemployment followed by stimulus during and after COVID and avoided a depression - or even a recession! - even though it's a bad thing that inflation got so bad.
From where I'm sitting, nobody really nailed it. The two sides were over-stimulus and under-stimulus. Maybe the Larry Summers crowd was actually fairly close, supporting the early stimulus efforts but not the later ones. But those folks still favored a recession to avoid inflation. Maybe that would have been better, but I'm not entirely convinced.
Austerity would have been terrible. We got 18 months of heightened inflation but in turn we got an economy that recovered far more quickly than that of any other major power. On net it was good, even if the ARP might have been somewhat smaller (e.g., less bailing out of state governments).
The problem with the inflation was less that it hurt people in their pocketbooks (arguably, it had net zero effect) and more that it pissed people off so much that we got Trump and MAGA, perhaps the greatest own goal in modern political history.
How much I want to disagree with your analysis . . . but I can't. My hope is that the party perceives the threat to our nation as so dire in 2026 and 2028 that the nominees realize they don't have to promise big new spending programs and so don't get locked into expensive policies once back in office.
Sorry, Child Tax Credit and subsidized childcare. This is not the time for that.
To expand on Sean O.'s point, I think Trump illustrates one of the major issues with industrial policy as state economic planning - its almost unavoidably ripe for corruption.
I would simply only vote for non-corrupt policy makers.
More seriously, while I'm not confident there was no corruption involved, the DoD's decision to fund MP Materials [1] earlier this year seems like the kind of narrowly targeted industrial policy, focused on an achievable strategic objective, that's probably good for our national defense, if not our economy. Certainly the Office of Strategic Capital seems to have bipartisan support in Congress
Yes if a large strategic rival is subsidizing specific critical industries that put national security at risk, we will need to use some non free market means to protect our own critical industries.
We can't allow China to dominate these industries. It's just as dangerous as missiles in Cuba
"I would simply only vote for non-corrupt policy makers."
hahahahaha <wipes tears from eyes> that's a good one.
In response to your second comment, there are specific reasons why the government should fund narrow industrial or defense programs that are worth the corruption that may crop up, but those are the exception, not the norm. And you have to police those carefully because the desire to make more and more exceptions to get that sweet government subsidy is pernicious.
As a starting point it should be run by Congress who has laid out via legislation what the tariffs will be over the next 10 years.
Sure, a future Congress can change it, and likely will tweak it a bit, but that's a lot easier to plan for then tariffs rates that may change daily depending on who is currently buying $TRUMP or giving gold trinkets to the President.
"I don’t think either of them have the solution to Democrats’ political problems. But it is still important to be clear that Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are not the cause of Democrats’ political problems. "
This sort of ties into the discussion about Harris last week and the ACLU questionnaire but it seems like "Moderates" have trouble affirmatively saying they think the moderate path is better. Maybe this is because they don't believe it and its just a political tactic but it often makes them look really ineffectual.
I don't know about Harris - she seems like a lame poll-weathervane politician to me - but I'm old enough to remember Senator Biden, who was in fact pretty moderate/centrist.
Back during the primaries in 2020, I said my strongest conviction about Harris is that she has no strong convictions, and I haven't seen much of anything in the past five years to change my view on that.
Agreed. I don't think either of Biden or Harris were actually moderates. They seemed much more about being center of the Democratic party - and when the Democratic party started swinging left, they went with it in order to stay in the center of it.
There is a type of Democrat out there who is a relative moderate but thinks that when there is an opportunity to push left (even further left than he/she would want in an ideal world), you should still do it because it gives you more margin for error when the pendulum inevitably swings back to the right.
I think this is a flawed way of looking at political tactics, but it's (a) understandable, and (b) wrong less than 100% of the time.
I'm in the camp that advocating for bad policy is a bad policy regardless. You might accept something as a compromise to make overall progress, but don't push something bad just because its "right" or "left."
This is super true. Moderate, college educated Dems politicians / journalists / party hacks have a strange tic where they often criticize the left but always do it in terms of incrementalism or tactics instead of just saying a specific policy idea is bad. I really started noticing this with Jon favreau who is clearly more neoliberal than his left wing audience but constantly talks around or obfuscates this and ends up saying nothing at all. Once you notice it like every dem politician sounds like this.
There's always an unspoken assumption the left policy must be right about something deep down, just not sure where it is. I imagine this must be even more annoying when leftists hear it tbh
Yeah exactly my thoughts. Like it feels safer to play pundit and say how other people are going to reject your position on trans rights or climate change rather than say “letting trans women play competitive women’s sports doesn’t make sense” or “aggressive netzero emissions policies will do more harm than good”. Abundance is a “safe” way to take the more-conservative position because there’s lot of evidence that the policies actually help disadvantaged people and support progressive governance. But even there you have lots of people unwilling to say “we should lower or abolish IZ mandates because they raise housing costs for everyone”.
Well sometimes it is just tactics. Matt would like One Billion Americans (as would I) but both of us would advise Dem politicians to be pretty tough on immigration enforcement right now.
I believe the problem is that the right is so far off the deep end they don't provide an effect pole to counterbalance the pressure Democratic moderates feel from liberals. You have to remember when they were in their 20s Tim Miller was the right wing version of Favreau!
I don't listen to Favreau's podcast, but if what you're describing is true, then I have sympathy for it. He's trying to persuade his audience, which is primarily composed of neither swing voters nor DSA types, but rather, non-socialist progs who mainly care about social issues. You have to tailor your message to the audience you're trying to persuade, or as Matt once put it in a rather different context, you have to try to address your audience's fears, to imagine what your audience is worried about, and imagine how you can set some of those fears to rest. https://www.slowboring.com/p/natures-bad-editorial-is-a-small
Favs, at least, has the excuse of extreme audience capture where his audience revolts at the slightest hint that maybe the guys aren't 100% in lockstep with progressive orthodoxy. Lovett is the only one who gets away with it (even though I get the sense he's actually more prog than favs or vietor) probably because he just gives off lefty vibes on a personal level.
But actual politicians are not, in fact, left-wing media personalities doing a podcast. The fact that the moderate politicians who actually publicly, substantively disagree with progressives number in the single digits is absurd.
To me this is what’s hopeful about the rise of Abundance pilled thinking. It gives a framework that is more than just the Diet Coke version of the real thing. It provides a “why” and a “how”.
To be clear no candidate anywhere should say “hey so I read this book by two lib journos and it’s really good!”
But they should talk about slashing dumb red tape and getting back to common sense affordability etc.
He totally was during the Biden era and during the mea culpa retrospectives, but you can see an evolution happening here over the last year or so where he has grown increasingly frustrated with moderate Dems and no longer has as much patience for them. I expect a return of the version of Matt who endorsed Bernie Sanders by the midterms.
Possibly? I’m hoping for that. Because “just do moderation” Matt was loathsomely underbaked in his takesmithing. Direly lacking in actually working through what the median voter considers as actually “moderate”.
Obama didn’t win because he had better white papers about affordability; he won because hope and change were perfect synecdoche — two words that captured Bush era malaise and exhaustion. He delivered them masterfully. His incentives were much better than the current leadership’s — he didn’t have to settle a factional controversy, he just had to find the words to win a primary 80 percent of the establishment wanted him to lose. The Democratic Party’s best hope is that some little-known Senate candidate can capture the grassroots and jolt the insiders out of their obsession with staying insiders. Obama did it once, but only because his personal ambition compelled risk taking.
Obama also opposed the Iraq War, which was very much an important issue where Clinton and McCain had both taken a position that turned out to be both wrong and evil. It wasn't just hope and change. Being right on issues helps.
My money (literally, actually) is on Ossoff. I'm surprised he doesn't get more press. I guess people are waiting to see if he can win in Georgia again, as the front runner this time. If he wins that election easily, which I think he might, I think he'll be a shoe in for the nomination.
Tell us more why he would be a shoe-in for the nomination. He strikes me as something of a vanilla politician but admittedly I don't pay a lot of attention to him.
Why him and not Warnock among senators from Georgia?
He's got a bit of the Buttigieg communication ability, being able to be topical while relentlessly turning the topic back toward politically advantageous narratives, except - especially if he wins again, and decisively this time - unlike Buttigieg or all but a handful of the other possible contenders, he has actually been able to win statewide in an important swing state.
Also, to my knowledge, he has been the primary pioneer of a message about Trump's corruption, which ties together the “destroying democracy” argument with bread and butter long-standing kitchen table issues, and which I think will almost certainly be part of the winning message for Democrats next year and in the presidential cycle.
It's possible he won't end up being the best messenger for that message, but in my view he's a front-runner to be the one.
Plus he's just a fairly young and handsome family man. This might not be a positive for the primaries, but it is for the general election.
Goes to show that Obama was a generational political talent. Can't really see any current politician turning something as banal as hope and change into electoral gold.
One trouble I always have in this space is that on the Myers-Briggs scale everyone here is a T, and the takes are very much along those lines, even when (like now) the subject being discussed is much more influenced by the Fs. This minor fact seems to confound people endlessly. Ideas are great, but *people* need to convey them, and who those people are makes a difference.
Yeah.. if you think about it for more than a few seconds it's obvious the politically successful people who are Bernie aligned like.. AOC, Gallego, Mamdani.. have succeeded largely because they make people feel good about voting for them. They have good vibes! And they've gradually moderated on policy, without really losing support. Meanwhile plenty of people have run losing campaigns on wild left wing platforms and gotten almost no support because they were caustic or just weirdos.
I think it's sometimes a little easier to convey good vibes with a certain type of impractical left wing policy than with centrist policies, but let's not give too much credit to the policy for their success.
Yeah good vibes (which is mostly just being nice) are important, you can contrast that to Fetterman who has moderated with bad vibes and would almost certainly lose if he runs again.
In terms of very broad averages it seems like good vibes tends to be correlated with people further left personality-wise, especially as the right gets taken over by the “based ritual”.
Yeah, and other than immigration (where "crack down on irregular immigration" is in fact a popular policy), Trump's policies are largely quite unpopular. His electoral success is infuriating but it's the same symptom as the people who told pollsters they'd rather have a beer with Bush than Kerry, even though Bush famously didn't drink.
He's also managed to remove healthcare and entitlements as issues the electorate cares about by just lying about his healthcare position and then committing to totally unsustainable debt to allow for cutting taxes while maintaining entitlement commitments.
INTJ guilty as charged, so T that I know Bristol-Meyers-Briggsquib has low actual predictive value*, but that's not really the point, as any Feeling could tell you. Just like astrology, where everything's about Freddie Mercury in retrograde and who cares if it actually "works". I still think there has to be some ground truth that actual policies matter, or ideas as Matt's calling them today, but it's undeniable that the politics - the messengers, the scrum, the horse-trading - is so often much higher salience. Perhaps even more important in this degenerate age, which is depressing to consider. Things don't stop maybe being true just because one finds them inconvenient to ponder though.
It seems like the OCEAN classification is more widely accepted and it doesn’t have a thinking/feeling dimension although agreeableness is correlated to it. If you think of the dimension as agreeableness there probably are people on both sides of that dimension here. The real dimension that is not representative of the general public is probably people more likely being to be Ns than Ss (which is correlated with openness in the OCEAN classification).
Not to be far into the weeds but N is intuition and S is sensing. N and S are informational gathering process--to me this means do people read the lines as they are(sensing) or look for hiding meaning between the lines(intuition). I actually think more people are sensors but that people who are interested in politics are more N's than the rest of the public. I definitely think the original contention is right, which is to say more people are feelers than thinkers and make decisions based on feelings/values rather than pure efficiency and getting results regardless of how others feel. OCEAN seems very different in how it measures things that Myers-Briggs test and so they may not really be apples to apples comparison in terms of openness to experience being equivalent to intuition.
This is a great point. If AOC runs and takes a bunch of moderate positions, is she going to read as a moderate? Or are the "extreme left" vibes going to stick to her because Fox News says they're there?
The "extreme left" will stick to her not because of Fox, but because that has been her identity since she burst on the scene regardless of what her current position statements are. People are very skeptical of a leopard that changes it's spots *that* much, and usually with good reason.
So I think you disagree with the thesis of this article? We should debate the leopards because the spots can only change a little? (I don't totally agree, but it's a valid point)
Not necessarily, but I think it misses a big point that policy preferences are more dependent on people than they are the other way around, which seems to be the argument here. There are times when disavowing a previous position works-Jared Golden publicly deciding to be less pro-gun after a mass shooting in his own backyard, for example-but many other times it just seems disingenuous and, yes, inauthentic. The one person who seems completely immune from this standard is Trump and that's because even his supporters know he doesn't care about policy so whatever politically fits the moment he will go with.
Beyond that I think basic human nature undermines MYs whole premise. People are fundamentally tribal in nature and are more likely to debate people not ideas. Ideas obviously come from people and a person's ideas signals what type of person is. People who are both feeling and intuitive in nature(INFJ talking) will often sense that people that make decisions on pure efficiency(Ts) just don't care about the rest of the group and that polarizes the Fs against the Ts. I think Ezra Klein is actually on to the fact that voters want politicians to like and respect them. This the Maya Angelou insight that people won't remember what you said or did but will remember who you made them feel. This absolutely means the merits of policies or the tactical decisions are less important than how voters interpret the motives and values of politicians. People actually care about authenticity. That does not mean voters need to agree with every position but progressives understand that values matter more than tactics but are not particularly good in conveying those values in a way to persuade voters to their position. Mandami is an example of someone who is progressive who can actually expand the tent even if you find his policies aren't great because he talks to voters like their real people and he listens which makes voters feel like he genuinely cares about and likes them.
It should probably be said that this supposedly rare bird is actually really easy to find in the online upper middle class. I always used to think it was the bigger cluster than its reverse, until more detailed polling became an available a few years ago that made clear that populism is in fact more popular than classical liberalism.
Yes, I am definitely dumb enough to be a paid subscriber to Slow Boring. The people who convinced me to move into this quadrant were mostly in the social liberal half, but we're all about Big Tents here, so it's fine.
So I agree that "right to repair" and "all of the above energy" policies are broadly liberal, but actually those exist somewhere in the center right/libertarian quadrant. The problem is the center-auth populist/labor/localist segment of the country that actually hates deregulatory liberalism.
“Right to repair” is not even remotely in the libertarian quadrant. The entire reason it’s salient is because of the bounds to which Lochner-era arbitrary freedom of contract can be extended. Turns out relying on term dickering to result in a non-stupid market-contractual equilibrium doesn’t necessarily work!
ETA: more succinctly, “right to repair” is fundamentally regulatory, not deregulatory.
It's definitely not strictly one or the other, but it's a debate between two lib-right valence considerations. It's property vs contracts that's being balanced. I tend to come down on the property/ownership side of these things. You can't brick a car you sold to someone. They own it. You can't sell a house with a provision that they can't sell it to someone you don't like. Hell, I don't even really think HOAs should be legal. They own it. You can't contract yourself into slavery. You own yourself in a fundamental way that a contract cannot abridge.
These are firmly liberal/libertarian kinds of concerns though.
This is a big problem with increasingly digitalized material goods. How do you require Tesla or anyone to maintain servers and software support for their electric cars indefinitely? It's pretty hard to see how a deregulated economy deals with that. What happens when they go out of business or get bought?
I feel like this is a large sector of problems with self driving cars and the attendant network requirements that people aren't considering. Who owns the the digital infrastructure, and can they just cut you off at any point for TOS violations?
It's definitely a new and growing problem that people need to think seriously about. At least part on the answer, I think, is that when you are selling a product like a Tesla or a multiplayer video game, where what's being sold is actually a a bundle of a product and an obligatory service of networked software support, you have to treat these as distinct goods. My video game should run, as I originally purchased it, on whatever servers I want to log into. Other companies should be able to to offer networking services for Teslas, or simply it must be possible to operate the vehicle in non-networked modes. You can conceptualize this as a sort of actual, good, anti-trust, or simply robust property rights, but it's something that is absolutely necessary to the future of property rights in the digital age.
Microsoft is sunsetting Windows 10 and didn’t provide an upgrade path for lots of computers. Car manufacturers stop making parts after the regulatory required period. Cutting things off happens all the time.
Sure, but Microsoft doesn't brick computers still running IE, and your car will still run fine if you make your own part to spec or find one made somewhere else.
It's the "We bundle our product and service so tightly that if we turn off the service the product dies" thing that's newly and increasingly problematic.
Microsoft will still, for a long time, continue to post the Windows 10 drivers on its website for download. There are loads of assets you can still download from Windows Update if you can manage to get your Windows Vista machine online.
>>. You can't brick a car you sold to someone. They own it. You can't sell a house with a provision that they can't sell it to someone you don't like. Hell, I don't even really think HOAs should be legal. They own it. You can't contract yourself into slavery. You own yourself in a fundamental way that a contract cannot abridge.>>
Even if adopted, this manner of classification could just result in "ownership" being replaced by "transferable licenses" (possibly conditionally transferable, subject to approval by the original licensor). You have to put a specific thumb on the scale in terms of favoring particular forms of contractual or property-dispositional arrangements and terms of alienability and disfavoring others.
I suppose if John Deere wants to try some kind of lease only business model where they can never sell anything on the secondary market without stripping their repair part DRM they're welcome to try that.
I don't think you can rightfully just stick some infinitely transferable ToS on durable goods. Hell, as I've alluded to, even the "software as license" thing properly has limits. The law reflecting these understandings of property rights is well within the proper scope of the state existing to ensure natural rights, even if the exact balance of property vs contract is debatable.
Do these types of people actually not favor right to repair? It’s standing up for the little guy against big faceless corporations; seems like the vibes are right for center-left localists.
The arguments I can think of against something like right to repair are basically:
1. You are literally John Deere or something and it’s directly against your interests.
2. You want a social credit-like system where the state can (put pressure on a private company to) brick your car if you say something mean about Charlie Kirk/refuse to get your Covid vaccine (take your pick).
3. Letting businesses maximize cash flows by charging monopoly rates for maintenance subsidizes innovation that wouldn’t otherwise happen, making us all better off in the long run.
I actually have some sympathy for #3 here, but it’s a very libertarian flavored argument, and none of these reasons seem appealing to the type of voter we’re gesturing towards.
These people absolutely want "their" industry protected from competition, be it John Deere or GM, and Right to Repair is absolutely pro-competition. The people preoccupied with high wage blue collar labor want the government to provide protection/cronyism for industries on the global scale and for union negotiators on the corporate scale, and Right to Repair threatens that project on the first metric.
Now, it obviously does split the coalition somewhat. Independent labor will support it overwhelmingly, but they're going be more free-market oriented than organized labor generally.
While I don't disagree with this per se, the question is how socially conservative? Like what year do we want to peg their level of bigotry/prudishness? I sometimes get the impression that "listening to the people" gets us to a more bigoted place than we'd had in the 1980s which seems a bit at odds with what the realignment actually looks like.
Not wanting to endlessly celebrate someone else's niche lifestyle isn't bigotry, it's minding your own business. I think something ca. 1990-2000 AD would probably satisfy most social conservatives. I think progressives and liberals made the case for tolerance and then barrelled through that to attacking anyone who didn't openly embrace any given alternative lifestyle as a bigot. Tolerance means allowing, not agreeing.
You should actually read Kirk instead of selected, no context quotes from an article written by a hostile author. He's stated his positions in detail numerous times. Go actually read a few paragraphs of the man's words on the subject before taking up an opinion about what he thinks.
Dems already own the prudishness lane but in terms of bigotry I'm not sure what you have in mind? What sorts of racism are broadly popular nowadays and would be acceptable if you were listening to the people?
Maybe it's just me, but I think the complication here is the internet and social media.
You see a parties' image in terms of candidates' statements and records. But it seems to me that the public resents the Dems less for what specific Dems actually said and did, and more for the sense over overwhelming arrogance regarding various "woke" issues over the past decade.
Not by administration figures or members of congress, but by influencers and ordinary people online. How many times this past time did I try to post some subtle difference of opinion on a blue forum, only to be shouted down as a cryto-Nazi? Imagine the experience of some actual centrist.
Republicans have successfully leveraged public disgust with this into a preference for fascist-adjacent candidates as opposed to the party that was fine with all that -- and demonized its dissidents.
This is not to discount Dem factional infighting or stick up for the faction that calls itself moderate. But it does explain why there is widespread annoyance with trying to fight the far right by moving left. That might sound authentic and such to those living in cosmopolitan areas of the country, but most everywhere else it sounds more like throwing in the towel and saying, "Sure, let's lose to the fascists."
It makes me wish for an alternate history where Elon staged a fascist takeover of Twitter and Reddit, and alt right people could declare victory on the culture war, but everything stayed online without breaking containment into the world of real politics.
"What he thought he’d do was take advantage of Bernie’s presence in the race to extract policy concessions from Clinton — get her to break with Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And that’s how it’s been ever since, not just on T.P.P. but essentially across the whole broad suite of issues."
I think one thing that is emblematic of this, and, if we're being real, kind of at the heart of the culture war, is the Democratic approach to "race issues." Generally speaking, the party seems to consider it to be an absolute disaster if their share of the black vote drops below 90%. This leads to them taking unpopular positions, in both substantive ways (like supporting affirmative action well past its sell-by date, or "defund the police") and stylistic ways (using Beyoncé for a campaign theme song, outrage at Trump's comments about Harris's ancestry) to keep as much of that group as possible.
But WHY should Democrats win 90% of black people? WHY should voting be racially polarized? Doesn't that seem... bad? Are they sure they're not losing 5% of white people to keep 10% of black people? Because in absolute numbers that is a really bad trade!
"The cause is Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Democratic leaders in Congress."
I mean, the cause is a flood of propaganda 10 feet deep covering half the country. But I know pundits want to keep being mad at Joe Biden forever.
I'm always the first to defend Biden but Matt was right here, but didn't go deep enough. Biden was President and had the responsibility to try to steer the party and his administration in the right direction and he manifestly did not do that. But the deeper reason is that the center of gravity was with the progressives and the moderates were weak and demoralized. Biden for his entire career was a consensus-maker and a seeker of the center of the party. And so he tilted left after winning the nomination because he was following the party, and he followed it right off the cliff with the rest of the fools.
One of the reasons I'm pretty sympathetic to the view, mostly expressed by the right, of Biden's limited capacities. I think it's pretty clear that Biden at anywhere near his full strength would not have allowed this to happen.
It's totally reasonable to be mad at the most recent president from your own party, when that administration ends in ignominious failure. Thems the breaks!
It's reasonable, I guess, but it's unproductive. Counterproductive, even. The total and uncompromising "concession" that Carter was a terrible failure was a big part of what made the Democrats so moribund in the 80s. (And for some reason they ALSO tried to run his VP while bashing the administration he was part of, constantly, and it worked even worse.)
There's no reason to talk about your party being shitty if it's not SUBSTANTIVE, if it's not towards an end (like Matt's inveighs against "the groups" are, or Ezra Klein's criticism of an ossified regulatory process is), and being mad at Joe Biden is not substantive. It's kind of the opposite, because his policymaking was admirable, and plenty of people want to throw that baby - both the content and the process - out with the stuttering bathwater.
Partisanship exists for a reason, and I can't help but notice that the side that practices it more shamelessly appears to be punching above their weight electorally, when you consider how unpopular their actual policies are, whenever they bother even trying to articulate them.
Reagan's 11th commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."
'20s online liberals: "I'm too ~intellectually honest~ to point out my party is orders of magnitude better than the other one when I could be nitpicking them instead."
Also '20s online liberals: "Why are the VIBES so bad?"
Biden will go down as one of the most failed Presidents in history but I agree with your contention that the party choosing to self-polarize along the black-white race line in 2025 as if it is 1965 is a terrible tactical mistake. Not only is it alienating to geographically powerful rural whites, it is also suboptimal given that the many millions of post 1965 Asian and Latin American immigrants do not see American politics from the lens of civil rights era fights and they will just vote GOP if they see Dems as centering the black-white dichotomy.
Biden "failed" but it's really, really important to not just consider him a "failure" without acknowledging the nuance that his governance was, you know, fucking great. You could have surveyed 100 economists about the economic performance of 2021-2025, or especially since 2023, and he would have outperformed literally every single one of their projections and it would not have been close.
We need to know the SPECIFIC problem. The only problem with his presidency (give or take a foreign policy issue or two) is that he lost, and that happened because of propaganda, and Biden's main problem was that he couldn't speak well enough to counter any of it.
And it's too bad, because he was one of the only people in the party who was actually TRYING to counter it, rather than immediately jumping on the defensive and accepting Fox News framing of every issue. (A tack that many in our party are going to continue forever, because they forgot somewhere in the years since 2016 that it's possible to do anything else.)
(edit: It occurs to me that Carter ALSO had a form of politics that Democrats decided sucked, incorrectly, even though they only lost because of stagflation - he was absolutely pivoting towards the moderate tone that Clinton would end up winning with, but the party retreated back into Yankee liberalism in response to his loss, to horrible results.)
I thought similarly regarding Fox News framing and so forth but I changed my mind in 2023 once it started becoming obvious that Democratic cities were being really stressed by the migrant spike and so it was not just propaganda. It was very real and it triggered a significant amount of "last place aversion" among poor urban voters.
I did not blame Biden for inflation. It was probably baked in no matter what he did given the stimulus + money supply already passed under Trump.
But in my view Biden committed two pieces of epic political malpractice:
1. He allowed a gigantic migration spike that had real impacts on the ground in the low-end economy. The biggest swings against Biden-Harris 2024 occurred in blue states and cities and along the border districts in TX, AZ etc where it was a blood bath.
2. He issued nation wide title IX rules on trans inclusion in schools which created a nation-wide moral panic around children on an issue that affects << 0.1% of the population
I think Harris could have won if it was only inflation. But inflation + migrants + trans sunk her.
So would it be fair to say that a lot of the current dysfunction boils down to Democrats adopting unpopular social policies in an effort to win factional battles and beat back primary challengers? It does seem notable that the current left wing identitarian moment emerged in the post-recession era, when incumbent Democrats, that generally believed in things like Capitalism, were facing primary challenges from progressive candidates that took a more "tear it all down" approach to concepts like the limited liability corporation or private ownership generally.
Certainly there are examples of candidates like Clinton wielding more left wing social positions as a cudgel against their opponents. And while there are an omnicause contingent that view the end of capitalism as a necessary precondition to the liberation of ethnic minorities, there was often no love lost between the socialists and the anti-racism crowd in the early 2020s.
The non-Dem aligned left, for all its faults, is very clear about it's goals, heroes, and villains of its ideology. If there was to be a more 'mainstream' Dem counter, it would have to paint a positive vision of our systems future rather than a purely dystopian one. That would inherently include a far more positive view of AI & technology in general. Someone has to convince people, from the left, of the clear & positive possibilities of our future. Hopefully ideas that weren't drafted a century ago in russian (...or german)
"The non-Dem aligned left, for all its faults, is very clear about its goals, heroes, and villains of its ideology." Is it? I feel like this is always changing. One year it's "Medicare For All". Another year it's anti-monopoly. Oh, hey, now you use the word "Oligarchy". Now it's "Defund The Police" / wait, now it's Gaza. I feel like "the Left" can be quite diffuse in its advocacy and is quite faddish... The Omnicause is a hard target to nail down. Maybe not as hard to nail down as a "moderate" Dem ideology, but the non-Dem-aligned left is likewise a huge group of various individuals and causes and groups and factions, who are in part jockeying amongst themselves.
There are different priorities within "the left", of course, but they have been unwavering in their support of Medicare For All, anti trust legislation, police reform, etc. The only one they have really stepped back on is "defund the police" because that was just a flat out loser even among themselves.
Well, maybe. I think, in the Trump v Obama situation that would occur if Trump tried scuttle the two term limit, that Obama would win handily, but not on the strength of his policy preferences. And Hillary Clinton didn't lose to Trump because she tacked left, she lost because she was very well known prior to her campaign and half the country already despised her for nothing having anything to do with policy. She was only competitive because she was running against a certified looney. Even Ted Cruz would have wiped the floor with her and EVERYONE hates Ted Cruz.
She lost by like 70000 votes across three states. A lot of things mattered. I do think the thing Dems most need is an outsider who isn’t seen as a radical.
Again, were it any Democrat not named Hillary Clinton (Joe Biden was apparently told directly NOT to run), those 70,000 votes and likely a few more would have gone blue. We would have had President O'Malley, not President Trump.
In terms of "outsider", I don't necessarily think that's true. But someone who can demonstrate independent thought and resist undue influence from what Matt calls "the groups" *is* important, I think, as is being clear you will be a president for ALL, not just the people who voted for you.
The fact that not enough Democrats were willing to admit that most Americans will not vote for a self-described socialist, even if he's against identity politics, was the root of a lot of mistakes over the past 10 years. And people made losing two primary campaigns their entire political identity.
I really don't think much of this gets sorted until there's a new nominee. I am sure different congressional leaders could do somewhat better, but the skills to be an insider vote counter and coalition manager are not the same as face of the party on TV or streaming video. (One reason Gingrich flopped so hard as Speaker).
The 2028 campaign is most important campaign of our lifetimes, for the fourth time in row. But this one coukd be higher stakes on Dem nomination side, since the Obama Succession line is finally burned out. The hope, to me, is someone who can shape the coalition around themselves, rather than just manage the existing factions. So far, I like what I have been seeing from Gallego, but obviously open.
This is what galls me about leadership as well. There are *plenty* of Democratic reps from red states and the public needs to see more of that IMO, not a constant parade of cloned pols from NY and Cali and Massachusetts
Yeah, there is a sense in which you want your leadership to come from safe seats so that they can take flak for the caucus without risking a general election loss, but there are safe seats all over the country that don't code as "giga-liberal blue state". There are three seats in Florida over D+10, there are seats in Texas, hell even one of the four seats in Virginia over D+10 would be better than NY or CA.
"I’ve noted this before, but John Fetterman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Jared Golden were all Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016."
Sure ... but they are very much *not* members in good standing of the Long Bernie Insurgency specifically over their cultural moderation. While the moderate party leadership is happy to help MGP and Golden hang on in tough seats, left-factionalist Bernie Cinematic Universe media shits all over them. And this is *good* because the Long Bernie Insurgency has never flipped a Republican-held House seat, even in the 2018 wave.
The people who the Bernie Left *does* see as its own people are Justice Dems types who often take the most toxic positions, reflecting the fact that its base of support is not the normie Dem rank-and-file but the activist intelligentsia. Famously the Long Bernie Insurgency has had trouble winning the Black Church...
A lot of it is factional struggle for the sake of factional struggle, motivated largely by personal antipathy for The Establishment. I have no strong opinions on whether Mills or Platner is the better nominee, but if Schumer had embraced Platner from the beginning, the Sanders left would certainly not have.
I will say I suspect Platner is the worse nominee. The Bernie Left has a consistently terrible track record of picking candidates for competitive seats. So I have the very strong prior that whoever is the newest shiny object for the Left is not a good candidate.
I used to listen to the Weeds and get really interested in kind of technocratic details. The white paper of the week was always fun and I cannot count how often I want to say something about how most universal systems aren’t single payer and all payer rate setting controls costs in these systems and recite something I learned was really high.
And it turns out the dividing line between me and people left of me was much more affect about capitalism/status quo was way greater than I realized. People want to post memes about health care not understand it.
Which is fair because health care policy is really really hard to understand. But it’s also unfair because if you do actually care about it, then you should put in the tedious work of understanding it.
If you care about *any* policy, you should put in the tedious work of understanding it! Andrew makes an excellent and underrated point about how so much of “the discourse” vis-a-vis politics is actually just mood affiliation.
But then I'd have to consider tradeoffs and nuances and I don't like that.
I'd rather say things like "just give everyone healthcare" rather than trying to think about cost sharing or reimbursement rates or whatever.
I don't know. We live in an extremely complex world, where policy touches on so many things that aren't visible to most people. Part of the reason to have representative democracy is to accept the reality that most people don't have time to learn that much about the details. Even in an ideal world, is it a good use of people's productive time to do the tedious work of understanding all the policies that are relevant to them vs. coming up with a workable metric that covers that?
I wish voters put a little more work into understanding policy so they wouldn't just vote for the guy who gives them the least complex promise to solve problems without pain. However, that's never going to be reality.
Yeah I was thinking along these lines as well. I think the way I'd put it is that it shouldn't be important for voters to put in the work to understand policy, but that they should instead be able to vote for people based on shared *values*.
This is why I had to do a lot of thinking and reading to feel like I was casting the correct vote in Obama vs. McCain. I really felt like they both shared my values to a large degree, so the question came down to policies (and ultimately, what I thought they'd do about the wars).
But since 2016, at least at the presidential level, the values question has been an easy answer, to the degree that understanding policy details seems unnecessary. (Not that I don't still do it, personally, because I'm a nerd, but it just isn't determinative for my votes at the moment.)
But the representative could at least understand that there ARE tradeoffs and signal that they understand it.
I would like that, but I suspect the incentives are aligned against it. Obama had to wrap his real politics in HOPE, and even that brand of nuanced politics doesn't appear to sell at all now.
I suspect on of the fundamental challenges modern democracies are facing is the world is much too complex for most people to understand, so they feel overwhelmed at even attempting it and resort to more graspable, but usually false, narratives to manage. I'm not sure there is a way out of that, especially as literacy declines.
Note that the original point, made by Ben, was aimed at people who actually *care about* (and presumably talk about) policy. I think we all know that’s not a huge set of people.
I think a lot of people care (and vote on) specific policies, but don't have time enough or feel they have the capacity to understand the details. I care about transit policy and likely know more the 99% of the population about it. I don't have time or energy to go deeper and still have to trust experts. I have a job that's not in transit policy and need to be an expert in that. I have things I do to relax to help me get away from the stress of my job, and deep study of transit policy doesn't do that. Experts need to be experts.
Yeah I was thinking along these lines as well. I think the way I'd put it is that it shouldn't be important for voters to put in the work to understand policy, but that they should instead be able to vote for people based on shared *values*.
This is why I had to do a lot of thinking and reading to feel like I was casting the correct vote in Obama vs. McCain. I really felt like they both shared my values to a large degree, so the question came down to policies (and ultimately, what I thought they'd do about the wars).
But since 2016, at least at the presidential level, the values question has been an easy answer, to the degree that understanding policy details seems unnecessary. (Not that I don't still do it, personally, because I'm a nerd, but it just isn't determinative for my votes at the moment.)
"What's a barrel shroud and why should we regulate it?"
*EDIT* Also basically any Republican bill from more than 10 years ago about abortion when asked to explain basics of women's anatomy.
And yet people will get worked up on the nuances of athlete contracts and who is being over/underpaid in a way they didn't 20 years ago. People got wonky about entertainment in a way that made being a fan worse, but didn't channel that energy into anything that actually matters.
Great point. I don't think people need to become *experts* on policy. But if they're going to talk about it, online or (preferably!) in person, they should have some idea what they're talking about, rather than parroting social media accounts or relying on magic words such as "oligarchy" to do all of the work in the assertion.
I am lucky to have worked in research and reporting; over and over and over again, I have gone to original sources and discovered that, no, that's not really what the study concluded or no, the headline/article don't provide the full picture/context of what's in the legislation.
It's discouraging how credulous people are...
No one understands American health care policy, there isn’t really one.
Ignorant question - I really do want to understand and have been working at that to little success for like a decade. Suggestions on where to go to do that better?
That's not the practice of the average voter, though
I always find it kinda funny to look at polling and see that a majority of Americans are satisfied with their own personal health insurance/doctor/$THING, but Everybody Knows that The System is broken and bullshit anyway, somehow. For many values of $THING beyond healthcare, even. But performative negativity so often seems like a load-bearing pillar of many peoples' identities these days, sadly...
I don't think that is inconsistent though. I have fine healthcare. But if I get fired or quit my job I lose it. This is especially bad, as a common reason people have to leave their job is medical issues.
You also don’t know there’s a fatal flaw in your health care plan until you really need it and find out.
Also, I know way too many acquaintances that are suffering from bad knees or some other treatable condition that say they can't afford a doctor.
If you get fired or quit your job, you'll have less income, which will make you eligible for either Medicaid (especially if you live in an expansion state) or a subsidized ACA exchange plan.
I sadly do not live in an expansion state.
I could potentially sign up for a subsidized ACA plan (although in reality when I was working independently a few years ago they were really expensive and I rolled the dice and went without healthcare. But my priorities back then were different as I was in my 20s and had no kids). There's a lot of uncertainty in that too - what kinds of plans will be available in 5-10 years and what will they cost?
So I think it's fair to say that I currently have good healthcare, but I am not confident I will have good healthcare if I leave my current job, and that is a flaw in the system.
I'm sorry to hear that (the part about the uncertainty, obviously, not the part about how you currently have good insurance).
The system definitely has flaws. I would say, however, that the system *as envisioned by the drafters of the ACA* would be pretty decent, and for Americans who have a legit problem with the current flaws in the system, it is counterproductive for them to blame Obama & his allies for not doing more, and de facto helping the other side, whose objective it has been to frustrate the ACA's goals.
Yeah, the polls that consistently showed people rating their own financial situation as fine but saying the country’s economy was bad were batty. At least now that inconsistency is gone just in the bad direction lol
See also: Large majorities say I like my kid's school and think it's fine but the state of education in America is awful.
Or "my neighborhood is safe, but crime overall is out of control!"
American medical care is the best in the world, especially at the high end. All the richest and most powerful people in the world get their healthcare here. With that being said, does it cost too much? Most likely, yes.
Yeah and there is a question of how much people are actually going to have votes swayed by "Everything is Broken" when that thought is accompanied by "but it's okay for me."
I mean, for what it's worth, that was how perceptions of the economy seemed to work in 2024. But if you are talking about a specific thing like healthcare it might not have the same "waiting for the shoe to drop" feeling a lot of people had [largely intentionally cultivated in them] in '22-'24.
The basic problem here is also the problem that crops up in Matt’s writing. Most voters don’t actually care about “Obama’s issue space” whatever that was, or multi-year tax credit or investment proposals. They care about tangible results they can see and hear and touch. Hence most of what Trump does, and on centrists’ side the absurd focus on “identity politics” (even though in reality this issue is so unimportant in the scheme of Federal politics we should all be forced to jump off a bridge for discussing it) since centrists don’t have any ideas that would result in immediate tangible changes. Hence the public’s interest in policies that result in actual stuff getting done, like Mamdani opening supermarkets or Trump’s latest Fox News bit.
The answer to our political moment isn’t left or right or whatever, it’s doing stuff that appears to make a difference quickly, even if some of the ideas are bad.
Big agree. Dems need to have deliverism on their mind at all times.
Well, they’re delivering big time on a government shutdown.
"They care about tangible results they can see and hear and touch."
Well, it's kind of a 20/80 mix of that and "what they see on TV," which is pure propaganda for literally half the country.
This is illustrated well by the way people talked about their own economic situation and their local economies during the Biden administration (generally positively), in contrast to their assumptions about the national economy (WORSE THAN THE GFC!!!!!!).
And then when Biden tried to point out the economy was good everybody yelled at him. This whole coalition sucks.
When I started reading left-wing people I thought that the dividing line on “capitalism” is much smaller than it first appears. I always thought of “capitalism” as meaning free markets, but apparently many people think of “capitalism” as meaning status quo. Many left-wing people seem to hold the latter meaning and just dislike the status quo distribution of wealth but aren’t necessarily opposed to free markets, which means they can be persuaded about the value of free markets.
Some examples of this:
https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1515977488110915587
https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1977758442233229355
Cartoons Hate Her has an excellent article on this, pointing out that when people say they hate capitalism, what they actually hate is not being rich.
If that is really what she says, she's wrong. People would like to be richer, but they don't "hate" that they aren't if they have what they need materially. What they really hate is being exploited, bled dry and treated like cash cows, which is necessary for capitalism to work.
> being exploited, bled dry and treated like cash cows
Could you define any of these terms in ways that a) are objective b) apply to > 5% of Americans and c) don't apply to pretty much everyone who's ever lived?
Who has been bled dry?
If you have not, good on you.
No one has, that I know of.
The thing that made me realize that I'm perhaps more conservative than I thought was when I realized that, actually, the status quo is pretty good. Standards of living are higher than they've ever been, and America is far richer than any other place.
I always took the most essential part of "conservatism" is "the thing we've been doing for 20, 200, 2000 years? Probably a reason for that!" and by that measure the present administration is the most anti-conservative government in my lifetime.
I think "Chesterton's Fence," which I only heard about recently (though I know it's not some obscure thing) and which I also heard Ben Shapiro mention on Ezra Klein's podcast, is an extremely good articulation of conservative values. "Don't tear down a fence if you don't know why it's there." [edit: I see Nicholas12 also mentioned it a couple of hours ago.]
Of course I vociferously disagree with Shapiro on (A) whether Republicans are embodying that principle in any way whatsoever, rather than doing literally the exact opposite and (B) what exactly constitutes an understanding of a fence, and (C) which well-understood fences are appropriate to keep up. But I think it's a good thing for anybody (who isn't a romantic revolutionary) to keep in mind.
([A] is actually why I think Democrats should loudly insist that they are, in fact, the only conservative party; leftist fury be damned.)
It was a lie concocted by Reagan and Bush and hardcoded into the American public by the media that "liberalism" and "conservativism" are opposite things, or that they are even incompatible with each other. Nixon was a sick son of a bitch but I think he accepted himself as basically being "liberal," despite being and self-identifying as very conservative.
I mean Christ, the alternative is "ILliberal" which I'm pretty sure has zero positive connotations.
I also think it's completely incompatible with free market capitalism, which for better or worse is constantly changing people's way of life in a way that makes social conservatism essentially impossible. What is the time-tested tradition of how to date on Tinder?
I think you could steelman social conservatism by arguing that groups like the Amish have stronger families, less anxiety, and better life outcomes in certain metrics. But they basing their lifestyle around avoiding the technological innovations that our system prioritizes.
I think the evidence is overwhelming that *no one* wants unfettered free market capitalism. Everyone wants regulations restricting it in some way. Its just a matter of which regulations and how much.
I’ve begun thinking of myself as a Chesterton’s fence liberal, a super niche reference that will surely take the world by storm……
I don't get the chestertons fence concept but I'm sure it exists for a reason
ISWYDT
You're singing Kevin Williamson's song!
And that's fine--one thing I always want Democrats to do when they're promising big things is tell me why their big promises aren't going to mess up the good things we already have going for us in the United States.
Tell it to the group of homeless people living in the tent city in my hometown.
NIMBYs aren't practicing capitalism. the opposite.
I think that people can have whatever opinion about capitalism without getting to the heart of the problem at this moment.
There is a strange belief being put out by some that capitalism and free markets should not just allow but dictate that the uber rich should not just exist and be able to rig the system further. The current libertarian flavored trend is to act like any increase in income/productivity should be given to first corporations, then us, and lastly the public good. And if anything as we get richer as a whole, we should be paying less and less for the public good.
So I for one reject that free markets and capitalism should mean that companies spend most of their innovation budget on how to craft anti-competitive moves instead of providing actual innovation. The relentless way that companies are trying to shim their way into positions of grabbing a slice of my money while providing no discernible benefit is exhausting and infuriating.
I wonder if there is any way to hammer the concept of "economic rent" into the mind of the American voter.
(Paging Mr. Mangione...)
I think in fact the views of most people on both sides of this argument are driven by meme-level understanding.
"Can you talk about policy details at all" is a funny dividing line. If you can, you're pretty much automatically not on the right right now, which is weird because I feel out of place.
Bring back white paper of the week!!!! Maybe that’s in the PM segment? What can we learn from Scandinavian longitudinal studies today?
Didn't Matt just say the other day that he doesn't believe in that style of journalism anymore? He now believes you have to read all the white papers on a particular issue and summarize them all simultaneously, but won't have the time or wherewithal to do that.
It is frustrating how accurate, "People want to post memes about ______, not understand it" is. Regardless of what you put in that blank. Government. Infrastructure. Economics.
*deep breath*
If-Breaking-Bad-had-taken-place-in-Canada-it-would-have-been-over-halfway-through-the-first-episode!!!!
HAHAHAAH AH
HA AHA
AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHGAHAHAHHASSAHAHahhjahgashshashashjahahahahasjjawhashajhahahhahahauahahahasjh
Yes but not for the reason people think. The White's have health insurance and have access to healthcare at the beginning of the show, but they wanted the very best healthcare that money could buy. In Canada that option wouldn't have been available for them.
Surely he could become the meth kingpin of Edmonton in order to fund traveling to the US for treatment?
(or like, he could smuggle in experimental chemo drugs into Canada along with the meth precursors)
> but they wanted the very best healthcare that money could buy
But Walter had that offered to him! Episode 5, Gray Matter.
His old business partner, who supposedly doesn't know about the cancer, offers to hire Walter on as a part-time consultant and casually mentions the excellent health insurance they have. Walter just gets mad at being seen as a charity case despite Schwartz working hard to make it seem otherwise.
Yes, he resents them intensely for buying him out of the Grey Matter and turning it into a huge success while he has to teach wastoids who are not worth his time.
I am shocked, shocked that the self-declared socialists don't like capitalism!
More accurately, "I'm shocked that the self-declared socialists don't even know what capitalism is."
This post is emblematic of what I find kind of annoying about the Politix podcast and the Pod Save bros and everything. There’s a lot of talk about politics and positioning and everything but very little talk about first principles policies. I respect socialists, silly as they may be, because they’re actually willing to say what they believe. Most normie progressive pundits only frame being opposed to the far left as a matter of strategy as opposed to actually disagreeing on the merits.
Like, if you disagree with the administration on healthcare or immigration or whatever it would be nice to talk about what you actually believe. (This criticism is aimed leftward because I’ve given up all hope of non-libertarian conservatives being able to think about policies.)
That's why I am hopefully about projects like The Argument, which is at least trying to articulate what it means to be liberal and defend it - human rights, smartly regulated markets, and a social safety net - to make clearer where the boundary is vs leftism and especially with the right, while inviting in those in the center right.
I can't think of any other publication that's as firmly liberal as them, either now or going back a few years. Slate and Vox were closer to it in the late aughts, but drifted substantially left.
I like The Argument but I think it's telling that there are essentially ~no "Arguments" that represent the perspective of the actual existing Republican party. I believe many of the positions of contemporary conservative politicians are so poorly thought out an argument in their favor cannot survive even a fairly basic fact-check review.
For example, Oren Cass seems kind of like an Ezra Klein of the right in that he's a mild-mannered/policy oriented person. But his ideas are so wrongheaded that he's constantly caught in lies.
If you go far enough to the right, you find people who reject the idea of rational argument as a matter of principle. Truth comes from tradition and hierarchy, not from debate or evidence.
I think the current Republican party just also isn't liberal in any sense of the word, so it's hard to imagine how their positions could be reflected in a publication that is liberal by conception.
I think this is a pretty big problem because a liberal democracy can’t have an illiberal party taking power like half of the time. I agree with Matt that democrats need to figure out how to win . But on the other hand no political party can win every time. So how should a liberal system deal with a large illiberal constituency? I don’t think anyone has mooted a plausible arrangement for this
Isn't a key part of the question whether they believe strong in illiberalism, or whether they'd rather have an illiberal who is tough on immigration than a liberal who isn't?
If it's Option B, the answer is concede on immigration to save liberalism.
If it's Option A, we've had a good ride. I'm skeptical that 45%+ of Americans actively oppose liberalism (i.e. oppose the First Amendment broadly, even if they might be less liberal than existing First Amendment jurisprudence), though so I don't think Option A is very likely.
Yep. I think we're just actually really lucky that Trump is quite old. I don't think the illiberalism of the Republican party is going to survive the collapse of his cult of personality. I might even vote for a Republican again sometime after he dies and the ensuing tumult resolves in some way. It remains to be seen, but I don't think it's impossible.
The hard thing for The Argument is that they have Vox-brain. Whether coming from the progressive-left or from liberals, 1500 word "well actually" posts are only going to take them so far. Now, I get they're not trying to be the mass-appeal publication and are working to get wonks and super online liberals into a more coherent framework, but I'm just not sure that kind of thing will succeed in today's information environment. That said, I'm a subscriber and do enjoy it.
Can you elaborate on what Vox-brain is and why you think it can't succeed? Wasn't Vox a reasonably popular media property for a while? It may not have been financially successful, but it had readership.
It's not really about whether they were commercially successful. For me, Vox-brain is the idea that explaining something to someone in a factual, rational way is a vehicle for accomplishing elite change and that elite change leads to political change.
I liked Vox! I read a lot of it back in the day. While I don't pay for Vox stuff, I do subscribe to The Argument and like their product. That's also the problem. You can change my mind about something by persuading me with facts and figures. I'm a fairly online person who enjoys reading about politics and policy. I don't know how much reach that has in the political system or with the media at large. How many Americans are going to sit down and read a 2,500+ word post about Mississippi's education policy? Not many. They're watching Under-the-Desk-News on TikTok.
The Argument, like Vox, seems to have a different theory of action and that is to appeal to Democratic elites and explain to them why it's important to return to liberalism. Matt's post today is a good reminder that Democratic elites are flawed and, perhaps, not persuadable along factual/rational lines. Beyond that, I'm not convinced this is a path to changing the political landscape in a way that benefits Democrats.
We've spent a long time with media outlets dedicated to fact-checking or explaining or saying, "if you'd just look at the data..." and look where it's gotten us. If we just gave Trump one more Pinocchio or Pants-on-Fire then he wouldn't have won that election. While The Argument isn't doing anything quite that egregious, they traffic in the same kind of stuff. If we'd just show you one more graph about why women should be optimistic about technology, then tech companies will work harder to help women love tech by appealing to their emotions as mothers!
I this you miss how ideas spread and cascade. People willing to do the reading and understand the issues will read the Argument and be convinced or not. They will then take that and bring it back to a broader audience in a summarized and dumbed down way that will convince more and more people.
Or at least that's the hope.
I get that. I just don't think that's how it works. I'm not sure persuading already liberal very online Substack subscribers to be louder about liberalism online goes anywhere beyond good subscription numbers.
The battle The Argument (along with Searchlight) is engaged in is an internal one of the Democratic party and the liberal/progressive movement allied with it. It's trying to move the center of gravity of the party away from the progressive/identitarian focus that ruled the party for far too long.
Like the Abundance effort, they're speaking the language that party members and leader understand and so have actually picked an approach that has a decent chance to succeed.
Only using a war analogy because it's the one that came to mind:
Sometimes you inflict injury on another nation with bombs, other times with small infantry fire. Sometimes you win by taking steps to lower their morale or starve them out or cut off their supply lines. Or maybe you win by tactically setting up ambushes and surprise attacks.
I guess I'm just trying to boil things down to "there's more than one way to skin a cat". You can persuade some people with facts and figures and rational arguments, others with tiktok vids and others with speeches, kissing babies and shaking hands. There's nothing wrong with writers at the Argument fighting for their particular ideas in the way that appeals to them. They'd probably suck at tiktoks and baby-kissing anways.
If you're saying the Left has too much investment on the fact side overall, then I could agree. To go back to the battle analogy, it's like saying "we've already sent in enough special forces, now we need to drop bombs". Or something. But there's nothing wrong with The Argument people doing what they're doing on its own.
I define "success" for the Argument as a Democratic President coming in in 2029 and forcing Fox News to hire Jerusalem Demsas as their new Editor in Chief.
What do you mean by "succeed" here? I suspect it's already a financial success.
So do you mean something more, like succeeding in shifting the political landscape?
Yes, the latter. I don't doubt it'll be a financial success.
Yeah that makes sense. I'm more optimistic than you about the ability for the kind of influence done in places like The Argument or Slow Boring or the Ezra Klein Show, and I dunno what it is, Heritage and Claremont on the right?, to slowly percolate into politics and policy without ever actually being “mainstream”.
I would generally consider myself a fan of Liberalism, but what does human rights mean in this context? When I hear human rights and US politics I think of things like foreign policy muddling and meddling in other countries, clumsy versions of "exporting our values" and virtue signalling.
Maybe I should more rightly be thinking of other things, but I'm not sure what they are.
not sure if this is "human rights" specifically but as a liberal I think the 1st and 14th amendments are what I consider to be foundational
Imo, there are human rights at home that are worth fighting for and there are rights of immigrants who are not citizens to be treated as people as well (if for no other reason you can't really only target "bad people" in practice). Foreign policy gets messy bc of course it is there also but I do reject a level of forceful intervention as a policy at all times but sometimes it is the correct response to unique situations. I have a half baked idea that most sanctions should automatically phase out after ~3 years so they don't just glide on as the status quo without a positive choice.
I think liberals need to talk about individual rights when they're talking about domestic policy. We should appeal to a kind of classic americana sense of individualism embodied in the bill of rights and make the case that protecting those freedoms is the central legacy of liberalism. To me, random guy on the internet, that message would fit with voters far better than human rights framings. Because you're right, human rights are things we think about when we think about other countries doing bad things to their people.
While we probably could point to similarly bad things happening here and rightly call them violations of human rights, that still rubs us the wrong way. Human rights are something nations fight other nations about. They're universal and the system that upholds human rights is international (whether formal and toothless like the UN or the ICC, or informal like "coalitions of the willing" or "feminism demands that we occupy Afghanistan forever"). So, when you tell me the US government is violating human rights, you're telling me that some external authority is going to come correct those abuses. Americans of all stripes kinda hate that! I don't vote for whoever is on the ICC. I might vote for a president to appoint an ambassador but that's not really giving me a voice at the UN. Beyond that, nobody's actually going to do anything about it when the perpetrators are on the security council, have nukes, etc.
But, when you tell me the US government is violating my individual rights, rights that I know are mine and laid out as my inalienable rights in the constitution, then I have a say. I have courts for redress. I have my vote to elect politicians who won't violate my rights. I have free speech to speak out about my rights and a free media to spread that story widely. These rights apply to anyone and everyone visiting the US, living in the US, even illegally. Rights are not a free pass to do crimes, but we all acknowledge that even criminals have rights. It's all a bit naive and Schoolhouse Rock, sure, but that's the association individual rights have in the US as opposed to human rights.
I think we're talking mostly bill of rights stuff
I bet there are many people living in oppressive authoritarian nations around the world who are demoralized now that Trump has abdicated from all efforts to give such people any hope.
Who do you have in mind? Most people I know from countries like that hate Biden / Clinton type politicians.
And there might be as many or more who feel that there's less chance of Yankee interference.
Have you been reading the argument? So far, despite their manifesto, they've been writing heterodox articles about how maybe progressives have had things wrong, based on elusive metrics. It must scratch an itch for you, but they're not really championing liberal values as much as championing out of touch technocracy and weird stale memes.
> despite their manifesto
From your comment, I think you might have misread their manifesto... Heterodox articles about progressives being wrong and technocratic liberalism is exactly what I expected from their launch. (You seem to be saying this as a bad thing, but I'm saying it as a good thing.)
“…what it means to be liberal and defend it - human rights, smartly regulated markets, and a social safety net…”
Perfect encapsulation.
“Most normie progressive pundits only frame being opposed to the far left as a matter of strategy as opposed to actually disagreeing on the merits.”
Because theoretically, if American costs weren’t completely out of control and people trusted big bureaucracies to provide good service (looking at you Blue Cities), you could have a real debate about massively increasing taxation to fund a Euro style welfare state. The case for it might be okay (though Euro style welfare states seem to be having severe problems in Europe before they even fund defense at a competitive level, but I digress) - but in the present state in the US the whole thing is DOA, so why even start the conversation?
Maybe a clean sheet reset with Medicare for all really is the theoretical way forward. But you could judge estimating the absolute crapstorm when provider dominoes start to fall when the payer mix acutely changes wouldn’t be worth the savings, so don’t even have the discussion at this point.
Yeah, the way I see it is that there’s currently this debate in which Yglesias/Shor types try to convince the Blue Team to pretend to be more like them.
The problem is that Yglesias/Shor are the right-most fringe of what’s tolerable for liberal society, but they’re *way* too left-wing for their views to win an American election.
So what are we doing here?
I don’t think I get it. Aren’t they pretty well aligned with Obama, who won decisively twice?
I may be wrong, but this isn't my impression. Shor is a self-described socialist, and Matt wrote "One Billion Americans."
I'm pretty well aligned with Obama. Everyone should just listen to me.
But I don’t see them arguing that Democrats should take those positions.
I feel like the lesson of popularism is that we shouldn't spend a bunch of time talking about first principles because in many cases those principles may be out of step with public opinion. Instead, Democrats should orient their politics and positioning around issues that do cast them in a positive light with voters.
You should give up hope on libertarians too. It's a routinely disproven and contradictory set of values, that has no credibility elsewhere, is particularly American, and particularly attached to America's decline. As funny as it is, you posture as being post-ideology or something like that, but should still consider how your ideologic constraints allows you to write off socialists as "silly" when there's a lot more of that going on in the world.
I'm curious how libertarian thought is contradictory. It may be normatively wrongheaded, but it seems consistent and coherent, no? Would love to hear your thoughts.
There are a lot of examples from actually existing libertarians in US (most exemplified in Silicon Valley thought), or you can look at Milei's current Argentina, but also with the academic theoreticians, starting first with things like Austrian economics.
The thing I'd like to point out here, is that while you're clearly well educated, and have been engaged with libertarians for a long while, if you haven't come across the criticisms or been made aware of the inconsistency, it's very strange to have such an obvious blindspot for something you're informed on. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt it's not intentional, but really anytime spent online should expose you to libertarians constantly playing rhetorical games that their specific strain of true libertarianism has never been tried.
I think if you want to know why libertarianism eventually will always devolve into a tyrannical society, I can provide some examples about it's inherent inequality (and escalation of it) as the worst problem, but maybe you can suggest some other issues more important to your understanding of libertarianism.
I don't know what you mean by "inconsistency".
If you're saying that many self-identified libertarians may deviate from libertarian principles if it suits their self-interest or some other goal, well, yes, humans are like that.
But if you're saying the *ideology* is inconsistent - not just normatively a bad idea or ineffective at achieving its stated goals, but self-contradictory - that's a much stronger claim, and not one you've substantiated.
I don't think I've been engaged with them for awhile. I follow some libertarian commentators to diversify my media diet, but I am not and have never been anything resembling a minor expert on it.
Is the thinking that libertarianism inevitably leads to massive inequality which inevitably leads to tyranny which is inherently antithetical to libertarian ideals? Tbh that seems kinda tenuous but I'm sure I'm missing a lot of nuance there.
Didn’t Matt himself recently say he doesn’t believe in a first-principles approach to belief formation in a recent mailbag? Just a thought that this critique seems like it could clearly apply to him.
I get what you're saying, but MY recently came out against first principles politics. And while I like first principles more than he does (we have to know why we want the policies we want!), there's something to be said for that approach.
The Democratic Party has spent the last 80 years building its identity around The New Deal and subsidizing/stimulating demand. But the inflation problem needs to be tackled by increasing supply, which is done with a set of policies that is not in Democrats' comfort zone. So now, (most) Democrats are stuck in a sort of decision paralysis because they know that just throwing money at the inflation problem won't help, but pivoting away from their long-held identity as money-throwers is difficult.
this is tied up with the problem that the parties' support bases are experiencing massive lag on realigning their policy preferences
Democrats are pro-labor, pro-welfare, pro-redistribution, and then their support base is affluent liberals and no one hates them more than the working-class whites who these policies were originally designed to help.
Republicans are for tax cuts on the rich, cutting entitlements, union busting, etc. and their support base is working class people and all the affluent upper-middle-class suburbanites despise them.
Democrats are going to have to realign on a deregulatory, socially liberal, pro-business platform. But of course that can't happen before the people who vote for Democrats realize they don't have to constantly give away the store to people who despise them more than anything in the world in order to be good people.
Inflation was not a problem during Clinton or Obama, just going back to their policies should be fine.
Except it doesn't really work that way
True that Trump has probably permanently damaged the status of the dollar and the global trading system that underpinned our affordable high quality of life for 30 years but Democrats could at least stanch the bleeding. They will need to thoroughly renounce Trumpism rather than just walk it back a little like Biden and think of ways to create commitment mechanisms so that people feel safe about longer-term investments.
The inflation issue isn't just Trump. COVID created an economic shock that resulted in too many dollars chasing too few goods and services for awhile.
And the problem was the Left-- which is historically bad on inflation because it likes government spending so much-- didn't understand this. Even guys like Paul Krugman who should have known better didn't want to admit that austerity was called for.
That wasn't unique to Trump (although he's a big spender too). It's the result of a Left that fundamentally doesn't want to admit that sometimes the government has to spend less money.
Yeah covid economics and inflation made me realize that Ezra Klein, smart as he may be, is kind of a hack. He was a big proponent of automatic stabilizers at the beginning of covid when unemployment shot up and has not mentioned them at all once inflation caught up to things.
I don't see how this follows. Automatic stabilizers remain a good idea. What turns out to be super hard is to get the scale exactly right. It's a very good thing that we did enhanced unemployment followed by stimulus during and after COVID and avoided a depression - or even a recession! - even though it's a bad thing that inflation got so bad.
From where I'm sitting, nobody really nailed it. The two sides were over-stimulus and under-stimulus. Maybe the Larry Summers crowd was actually fairly close, supporting the early stimulus efforts but not the later ones. But those folks still favored a recession to avoid inflation. Maybe that would have been better, but I'm not entirely convinced.
Austerity would have been terrible. We got 18 months of heightened inflation but in turn we got an economy that recovered far more quickly than that of any other major power. On net it was good, even if the ARP might have been somewhat smaller (e.g., less bailing out of state governments).
The problem with the inflation was less that it hurt people in their pocketbooks (arguably, it had net zero effect) and more that it pissed people off so much that we got Trump and MAGA, perhaps the greatest own goal in modern political history.
We could have had the recovery while still greatly reducing inflation. We just didn't need to waste that last $2 trillion.
Moreover, we should have been reducing red tape to allow supply to increase to meet demand (See housing, energy production etc)
People are disagreeing you but you're 100% right about Clinton. Now would be a good time to take a real swing at reducing the deficit.
How much I want to disagree with your analysis . . . but I can't. My hope is that the party perceives the threat to our nation as so dire in 2026 and 2028 that the nominees realize they don't have to promise big new spending programs and so don't get locked into expensive policies once back in office.
Sorry, Child Tax Credit and subsidized childcare. This is not the time for that.
What's wrong with "industrial policy" as a moderate vibe for state economic planning?
To expand on Sean O.'s point, I think Trump illustrates one of the major issues with industrial policy as state economic planning - its almost unavoidably ripe for corruption.
I would simply only vote for non-corrupt policy makers.
More seriously, while I'm not confident there was no corruption involved, the DoD's decision to fund MP Materials [1] earlier this year seems like the kind of narrowly targeted industrial policy, focused on an achievable strategic objective, that's probably good for our national defense, if not our economy. Certainly the Office of Strategic Capital seems to have bipartisan support in Congress
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/mp-materials-enters-multibillion-dollar-partnership-with-defense-dept-c8f9f806
Yes if a large strategic rival is subsidizing specific critical industries that put national security at risk, we will need to use some non free market means to protect our own critical industries.
We can't allow China to dominate these industries. It's just as dangerous as missiles in Cuba
"I would simply only vote for non-corrupt policy makers."
hahahahaha <wipes tears from eyes> that's a good one.
In response to your second comment, there are specific reasons why the government should fund narrow industrial or defense programs that are worth the corruption that may crop up, but those are the exception, not the norm. And you have to police those carefully because the desire to make more and more exceptions to get that sweet government subsidy is pernicious.
As a starting point it should be run by Congress who has laid out via legislation what the tariffs will be over the next 10 years.
Sure, a future Congress can change it, and likely will tweak it a bit, but that's a lot easier to plan for then tariffs rates that may change daily depending on who is currently buying $TRUMP or giving gold trinkets to the President.
That's just throwing money at political allies.
I mean, so was all of the IRA money that went to renewable energy companies. That doesn't mean the spending was inherently bad policy.
bad policy catches up with you
"I don’t think either of them have the solution to Democrats’ political problems. But it is still important to be clear that Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are not the cause of Democrats’ political problems. "
This sort of ties into the discussion about Harris last week and the ACLU questionnaire but it seems like "Moderates" have trouble affirmatively saying they think the moderate path is better. Maybe this is because they don't believe it and its just a political tactic but it often makes them look really ineffectual.
“What do we want? Incremental progress! When do we want it? In due course!”
But like, do they want that?
It seems like Joe Manchin genuine is like that but Biden and Harris and other "Moderates" are just playing the polls.
I don't know about Harris - she seems like a lame poll-weathervane politician to me - but I'm old enough to remember Senator Biden, who was in fact pretty moderate/centrist.
Back during the primaries in 2020, I said my strongest conviction about Harris is that she has no strong convictions, and I haven't seen much of anything in the past five years to change my view on that.
100 percent same!
Agreed. I don't think either of Biden or Harris were actually moderates. They seemed much more about being center of the Democratic party - and when the Democratic party started swinging left, they went with it in order to stay in the center of it.
There is a type of Democrat out there who is a relative moderate but thinks that when there is an opportunity to push left (even further left than he/she would want in an ideal world), you should still do it because it gives you more margin for error when the pendulum inevitably swings back to the right.
I think this is a flawed way of looking at political tactics, but it's (a) understandable, and (b) wrong less than 100% of the time.
I'm in the camp that advocating for bad policy is a bad policy regardless. You might accept something as a compromise to make overall progress, but don't push something bad just because its "right" or "left."
I would agree with you most of the time, but I also think it's situational.
This is super true. Moderate, college educated Dems politicians / journalists / party hacks have a strange tic where they often criticize the left but always do it in terms of incrementalism or tactics instead of just saying a specific policy idea is bad. I really started noticing this with Jon favreau who is clearly more neoliberal than his left wing audience but constantly talks around or obfuscates this and ends up saying nothing at all. Once you notice it like every dem politician sounds like this.
There's always an unspoken assumption the left policy must be right about something deep down, just not sure where it is. I imagine this must be even more annoying when leftists hear it tbh
Yeah exactly my thoughts. Like it feels safer to play pundit and say how other people are going to reject your position on trans rights or climate change rather than say “letting trans women play competitive women’s sports doesn’t make sense” or “aggressive netzero emissions policies will do more harm than good”. Abundance is a “safe” way to take the more-conservative position because there’s lot of evidence that the policies actually help disadvantaged people and support progressive governance. But even there you have lots of people unwilling to say “we should lower or abolish IZ mandates because they raise housing costs for everyone”.
Well sometimes it is just tactics. Matt would like One Billion Americans (as would I) but both of us would advise Dem politicians to be pretty tough on immigration enforcement right now.
Sometimes it is just tactics. I am specifically talking about cases where I don't believe it's just tactics
I believe the problem is that the right is so far off the deep end they don't provide an effect pole to counterbalance the pressure Democratic moderates feel from liberals. You have to remember when they were in their 20s Tim Miller was the right wing version of Favreau!
Except voters think it's Dems that are too far in the deep end
I mean political operative jon favreau not media personality jon favreau
Helping Barack Obama become the first black President *and* launching the MCU in the same year would be too many accomplishments for one man.
I don't listen to Favreau's podcast, but if what you're describing is true, then I have sympathy for it. He's trying to persuade his audience, which is primarily composed of neither swing voters nor DSA types, but rather, non-socialist progs who mainly care about social issues. You have to tailor your message to the audience you're trying to persuade, or as Matt once put it in a rather different context, you have to try to address your audience's fears, to imagine what your audience is worried about, and imagine how you can set some of those fears to rest. https://www.slowboring.com/p/natures-bad-editorial-is-a-small
Favs, at least, has the excuse of extreme audience capture where his audience revolts at the slightest hint that maybe the guys aren't 100% in lockstep with progressive orthodoxy. Lovett is the only one who gets away with it (even though I get the sense he's actually more prog than favs or vietor) probably because he just gives off lefty vibes on a personal level.
But actual politicians are not, in fact, left-wing media personalities doing a podcast. The fact that the moderate politicians who actually publicly, substantively disagree with progressives number in the single digits is absurd.
To me this is what’s hopeful about the rise of Abundance pilled thinking. It gives a framework that is more than just the Diet Coke version of the real thing. It provides a “why” and a “how”.
To be clear no candidate anywhere should say “hey so I read this book by two lib journos and it’s really good!”
But they should talk about slashing dumb red tape and getting back to common sense affordability etc.
>> There’s a discourse that chalks all these problems up to left-wing junior staffers.
Uhh Matt weren’t you one of this discourse’s biggest proponents?
He totally was during the Biden era and during the mea culpa retrospectives, but you can see an evolution happening here over the last year or so where he has grown increasingly frustrated with moderate Dems and no longer has as much patience for them. I expect a return of the version of Matt who endorsed Bernie Sanders by the midterms.
Possibly? I’m hoping for that. Because “just do moderation” Matt was loathsomely underbaked in his takesmithing. Direly lacking in actually working through what the median voter considers as actually “moderate”.
I don't think he was implying that that discourse was wrong :) Just that it isn't the whole story.
Agreed; it just seemed like he was conveniently leaving himself out of the crowd of people he was criticizing for having the incomplete picture.
Yeah, I interpreted it as a dry joke for those who knew his contribution to that discourse.
Obama didn’t win because he had better white papers about affordability; he won because hope and change were perfect synecdoche — two words that captured Bush era malaise and exhaustion. He delivered them masterfully. His incentives were much better than the current leadership’s — he didn’t have to settle a factional controversy, he just had to find the words to win a primary 80 percent of the establishment wanted him to lose. The Democratic Party’s best hope is that some little-known Senate candidate can capture the grassroots and jolt the insiders out of their obsession with staying insiders. Obama did it once, but only because his personal ambition compelled risk taking.
Obama also opposed the Iraq War, which was very much an important issue where Clinton and McCain had both taken a position that turned out to be both wrong and evil. It wasn't just hope and change. Being right on issues helps.
Defying a silly orthodoxy made the hope and change oratory credible.
My money (literally, actually) is on Ossoff. I'm surprised he doesn't get more press. I guess people are waiting to see if he can win in Georgia again, as the front runner this time. If he wins that election easily, which I think he might, I think he'll be a shoe in for the nomination.
Tell us more why he would be a shoe-in for the nomination. He strikes me as something of a vanilla politician but admittedly I don't pay a lot of attention to him.
Why him and not Warnock among senators from Georgia?
He's got a bit of the Buttigieg communication ability, being able to be topical while relentlessly turning the topic back toward politically advantageous narratives, except - especially if he wins again, and decisively this time - unlike Buttigieg or all but a handful of the other possible contenders, he has actually been able to win statewide in an important swing state.
Also, to my knowledge, he has been the primary pioneer of a message about Trump's corruption, which ties together the “destroying democracy” argument with bread and butter long-standing kitchen table issues, and which I think will almost certainly be part of the winning message for Democrats next year and in the presidential cycle.
It's possible he won't end up being the best messenger for that message, but in my view he's a front-runner to be the one.
Plus he's just a fairly young and handsome family man. This might not be a positive for the primaries, but it is for the general election.
Goes to show that Obama was a generational political talent. Can't really see any current politician turning something as banal as hope and change into electoral gold.
One trouble I always have in this space is that on the Myers-Briggs scale everyone here is a T, and the takes are very much along those lines, even when (like now) the subject being discussed is much more influenced by the Fs. This minor fact seems to confound people endlessly. Ideas are great, but *people* need to convey them, and who those people are makes a difference.
Yeah.. if you think about it for more than a few seconds it's obvious the politically successful people who are Bernie aligned like.. AOC, Gallego, Mamdani.. have succeeded largely because they make people feel good about voting for them. They have good vibes! And they've gradually moderated on policy, without really losing support. Meanwhile plenty of people have run losing campaigns on wild left wing platforms and gotten almost no support because they were caustic or just weirdos.
I think it's sometimes a little easier to convey good vibes with a certain type of impractical left wing policy than with centrist policies, but let's not give too much credit to the policy for their success.
Yeah good vibes (which is mostly just being nice) are important, you can contrast that to Fetterman who has moderated with bad vibes and would almost certainly lose if he runs again.
In terms of very broad averages it seems like good vibes tends to be correlated with people further left personality-wise, especially as the right gets taken over by the “based ritual”.
I guess, from the opposite side, Donald Trump is an excellent example of the messenger mattering more than the policies.
Yeah, and other than immigration (where "crack down on irregular immigration" is in fact a popular policy), Trump's policies are largely quite unpopular. His electoral success is infuriating but it's the same symptom as the people who told pollsters they'd rather have a beer with Bush than Kerry, even though Bush famously didn't drink.
He's also managed to remove healthcare and entitlements as issues the electorate cares about by just lying about his healthcare position and then committing to totally unsustainable debt to allow for cutting taxes while maintaining entitlement commitments.
Yeah and he did that without getting backlash from the conservative wing of the party because they were excited about his vibes.
Another illustration of the pitfalls of single issue polling and think you know something serious about the electorate’s feeling on the issue.
Says more about Kerry than Bush.
INTJ guilty as charged, so T that I know Bristol-Meyers-Briggsquib has low actual predictive value*, but that's not really the point, as any Feeling could tell you. Just like astrology, where everything's about Freddie Mercury in retrograde and who cares if it actually "works". I still think there has to be some ground truth that actual policies matter, or ideas as Matt's calling them today, but it's undeniable that the politics - the messengers, the scrum, the horse-trading - is so often much higher salience. Perhaps even more important in this degenerate age, which is depressing to consider. Things don't stop maybe being true just because one finds them inconvenient to ponder though.
*https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/how-accurate-are-popular-personality-test-frameworks-at-predicting-life-outcomes-a-detailed-investi
**but contra: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html
The Myers-Briggs reference was illustrative only 🙄😒 not a debate point
It seems like the OCEAN classification is more widely accepted and it doesn’t have a thinking/feeling dimension although agreeableness is correlated to it. If you think of the dimension as agreeableness there probably are people on both sides of that dimension here. The real dimension that is not representative of the general public is probably people more likely being to be Ns than Ss (which is correlated with openness in the OCEAN classification).
Not to be far into the weeds but N is intuition and S is sensing. N and S are informational gathering process--to me this means do people read the lines as they are(sensing) or look for hiding meaning between the lines(intuition). I actually think more people are sensors but that people who are interested in politics are more N's than the rest of the public. I definitely think the original contention is right, which is to say more people are feelers than thinkers and make decisions based on feelings/values rather than pure efficiency and getting results regardless of how others feel. OCEAN seems very different in how it measures things that Myers-Briggs test and so they may not really be apples to apples comparison in terms of openness to experience being equivalent to intuition.
This is a great point. If AOC runs and takes a bunch of moderate positions, is she going to read as a moderate? Or are the "extreme left" vibes going to stick to her because Fox News says they're there?
The "extreme left" will stick to her not because of Fox, but because that has been her identity since she burst on the scene regardless of what her current position statements are. People are very skeptical of a leopard that changes it's spots *that* much, and usually with good reason.
So I think you disagree with the thesis of this article? We should debate the leopards because the spots can only change a little? (I don't totally agree, but it's a valid point)
Not necessarily, but I think it misses a big point that policy preferences are more dependent on people than they are the other way around, which seems to be the argument here. There are times when disavowing a previous position works-Jared Golden publicly deciding to be less pro-gun after a mass shooting in his own backyard, for example-but many other times it just seems disingenuous and, yes, inauthentic. The one person who seems completely immune from this standard is Trump and that's because even his supporters know he doesn't care about policy so whatever politically fits the moment he will go with.
As an ENTJ, all I have to say is "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
I'm an INTP, fwiw
On the other hand, it's totally possible to think about feelings (both your own and other people's). It happens to be my spouse's favorite pastime.
Beyond that I think basic human nature undermines MYs whole premise. People are fundamentally tribal in nature and are more likely to debate people not ideas. Ideas obviously come from people and a person's ideas signals what type of person is. People who are both feeling and intuitive in nature(INFJ talking) will often sense that people that make decisions on pure efficiency(Ts) just don't care about the rest of the group and that polarizes the Fs against the Ts. I think Ezra Klein is actually on to the fact that voters want politicians to like and respect them. This the Maya Angelou insight that people won't remember what you said or did but will remember who you made them feel. This absolutely means the merits of policies or the tactical decisions are less important than how voters interpret the motives and values of politicians. People actually care about authenticity. That does not mean voters need to agree with every position but progressives understand that values matter more than tactics but are not particularly good in conveying those values in a way to persuade voters to their position. Mandami is an example of someone who is progressive who can actually expand the tent even if you find his policies aren't great because he talks to voters like their real people and he listens which makes voters feel like he genuinely cares about and likes them.
Need to plot an invasion into the economically liberal, socially conservative quadrant.
Doesn't mean that has to dominate the party, but need to have a meaningful presence. Right to repair and all of the above energy seem like easy wins.
Make the Mississippi Watershed contested again.
Aka the dumbest quadrant
The Dennis Duffy[1] quadrant. It might be dumb, but it is well populated.
[1] https://youtu.be/47TgUnrIArQ
It’s very well populated!
Not the way I would try to win their votes!
The quadrant where a plurality of Americans are.
Very true! And the socially liberal/economically conservative quadrant doesn't really exist outside of, like, Reason magazine staffers
Hi! I am that rare bird, the fiscally conservative but socially liberal. I do not work for Reason magazine. 🙂
It should probably be said that this supposedly rare bird is actually really easy to find in the online upper middle class. I always used to think it was the bigger cluster than its reverse, until more detailed polling became an available a few years ago that made clear that populism is in fact more popular than classical liberalism.
Ah right, economically conservative means economically liberal. I got confused there for a sec.
I think Allen means fiscally conservative, not economically conservative.
yeah, same
Yes, I am definitely dumb enough to be a paid subscriber to Slow Boring. The people who convinced me to move into this quadrant were mostly in the social liberal half, but we're all about Big Tents here, so it's fine.
So I agree that "right to repair" and "all of the above energy" policies are broadly liberal, but actually those exist somewhere in the center right/libertarian quadrant. The problem is the center-auth populist/labor/localist segment of the country that actually hates deregulatory liberalism.
“Right to repair” is not even remotely in the libertarian quadrant. The entire reason it’s salient is because of the bounds to which Lochner-era arbitrary freedom of contract can be extended. Turns out relying on term dickering to result in a non-stupid market-contractual equilibrium doesn’t necessarily work!
ETA: more succinctly, “right to repair” is fundamentally regulatory, not deregulatory.
It's definitely not strictly one or the other, but it's a debate between two lib-right valence considerations. It's property vs contracts that's being balanced. I tend to come down on the property/ownership side of these things. You can't brick a car you sold to someone. They own it. You can't sell a house with a provision that they can't sell it to someone you don't like. Hell, I don't even really think HOAs should be legal. They own it. You can't contract yourself into slavery. You own yourself in a fundamental way that a contract cannot abridge.
These are firmly liberal/libertarian kinds of concerns though.
This is a big problem with increasingly digitalized material goods. How do you require Tesla or anyone to maintain servers and software support for their electric cars indefinitely? It's pretty hard to see how a deregulated economy deals with that. What happens when they go out of business or get bought?
I feel like this is a large sector of problems with self driving cars and the attendant network requirements that people aren't considering. Who owns the the digital infrastructure, and can they just cut you off at any point for TOS violations?
It's definitely a new and growing problem that people need to think seriously about. At least part on the answer, I think, is that when you are selling a product like a Tesla or a multiplayer video game, where what's being sold is actually a a bundle of a product and an obligatory service of networked software support, you have to treat these as distinct goods. My video game should run, as I originally purchased it, on whatever servers I want to log into. Other companies should be able to to offer networking services for Teslas, or simply it must be possible to operate the vehicle in non-networked modes. You can conceptualize this as a sort of actual, good, anti-trust, or simply robust property rights, but it's something that is absolutely necessary to the future of property rights in the digital age.
Microsoft is sunsetting Windows 10 and didn’t provide an upgrade path for lots of computers. Car manufacturers stop making parts after the regulatory required period. Cutting things off happens all the time.
Sure, but Microsoft doesn't brick computers still running IE, and your car will still run fine if you make your own part to spec or find one made somewhere else.
It's the "We bundle our product and service so tightly that if we turn off the service the product dies" thing that's newly and increasingly problematic.
Yeah but even if Toyota doesn't make my alternator, Denso isn't prohibited by copyright laws from making one.
Microsoft will still, for a long time, continue to post the Windows 10 drivers on its website for download. There are loads of assets you can still download from Windows Update if you can manage to get your Windows Vista machine online.
>>. You can't brick a car you sold to someone. They own it. You can't sell a house with a provision that they can't sell it to someone you don't like. Hell, I don't even really think HOAs should be legal. They own it. You can't contract yourself into slavery. You own yourself in a fundamental way that a contract cannot abridge.>>
Even if adopted, this manner of classification could just result in "ownership" being replaced by "transferable licenses" (possibly conditionally transferable, subject to approval by the original licensor). You have to put a specific thumb on the scale in terms of favoring particular forms of contractual or property-dispositional arrangements and terms of alienability and disfavoring others.
I suppose if John Deere wants to try some kind of lease only business model where they can never sell anything on the secondary market without stripping their repair part DRM they're welcome to try that.
I don't think you can rightfully just stick some infinitely transferable ToS on durable goods. Hell, as I've alluded to, even the "software as license" thing properly has limits. The law reflecting these understandings of property rights is well within the proper scope of the state existing to ensure natural rights, even if the exact balance of property vs contract is debatable.
Do these types of people actually not favor right to repair? It’s standing up for the little guy against big faceless corporations; seems like the vibes are right for center-left localists.
The arguments I can think of against something like right to repair are basically:
1. You are literally John Deere or something and it’s directly against your interests.
2. You want a social credit-like system where the state can (put pressure on a private company to) brick your car if you say something mean about Charlie Kirk/refuse to get your Covid vaccine (take your pick).
3. Letting businesses maximize cash flows by charging monopoly rates for maintenance subsidizes innovation that wouldn’t otherwise happen, making us all better off in the long run.
I actually have some sympathy for #3 here, but it’s a very libertarian flavored argument, and none of these reasons seem appealing to the type of voter we’re gesturing towards.
These people absolutely want "their" industry protected from competition, be it John Deere or GM, and Right to Repair is absolutely pro-competition. The people preoccupied with high wage blue collar labor want the government to provide protection/cronyism for industries on the global scale and for union negotiators on the corporate scale, and Right to Repair threatens that project on the first metric.
Now, it obviously does split the coalition somewhat. Independent labor will support it overwhelmingly, but they're going be more free-market oriented than organized labor generally.
While I don't disagree with this per se, the question is how socially conservative? Like what year do we want to peg their level of bigotry/prudishness? I sometimes get the impression that "listening to the people" gets us to a more bigoted place than we'd had in the 1980s which seems a bit at odds with what the realignment actually looks like.
Not wanting to endlessly celebrate someone else's niche lifestyle isn't bigotry, it's minding your own business. I think something ca. 1990-2000 AD would probably satisfy most social conservatives. I think progressives and liberals made the case for tolerance and then barrelled through that to attacking anyone who didn't openly embrace any given alternative lifestyle as a bigot. Tolerance means allowing, not agreeing.
I don't think 1990-2000 politics would satisfy most conservatives. https://www.wired.com/story/charlie-kirk-tpusa-mlk-civil-rights-act/
His objection is to Disparate Impact, which even liberals have principled objections to.
His issue is with the idea of a bureaucracy to enforce civil rights law… to which I have to ask why is this bureaucracy necessary ?
Whether most of it is in fact necessary is a good question.
You should actually read Kirk instead of selected, no context quotes from an article written by a hostile author. He's stated his positions in detail numerous times. Go actually read a few paragraphs of the man's words on the subject before taking up an opinion about what he thinks.
Dems already own the prudishness lane but in terms of bigotry I'm not sure what you have in mind? What sorts of racism are broadly popular nowadays and would be acceptable if you were listening to the people?
Maybe throw the Palestine kiddies under the bus? It's them or transgender folx.
This is the problem I have with this sort of take as well.
This is the largest quadrant
>> Chuck Schumer seems to think the solution to this problem is to nominate Janet Mills instead.
And he’s dangerously wrong about that too.
It’s the clearest evidence yet that he needs to step down.
Maybe it's just me, but I think the complication here is the internet and social media.
You see a parties' image in terms of candidates' statements and records. But it seems to me that the public resents the Dems less for what specific Dems actually said and did, and more for the sense over overwhelming arrogance regarding various "woke" issues over the past decade.
Not by administration figures or members of congress, but by influencers and ordinary people online. How many times this past time did I try to post some subtle difference of opinion on a blue forum, only to be shouted down as a cryto-Nazi? Imagine the experience of some actual centrist.
Republicans have successfully leveraged public disgust with this into a preference for fascist-adjacent candidates as opposed to the party that was fine with all that -- and demonized its dissidents.
This is not to discount Dem factional infighting or stick up for the faction that calls itself moderate. But it does explain why there is widespread annoyance with trying to fight the far right by moving left. That might sound authentic and such to those living in cosmopolitan areas of the country, but most everywhere else it sounds more like throwing in the towel and saying, "Sure, let's lose to the fascists."
It makes me wish for an alternate history where Elon staged a fascist takeover of Twitter and Reddit, and alt right people could declare victory on the culture war, but everything stayed online without breaking containment into the world of real politics.
"What he thought he’d do was take advantage of Bernie’s presence in the race to extract policy concessions from Clinton — get her to break with Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And that’s how it’s been ever since, not just on T.P.P. but essentially across the whole broad suite of issues."
I think one thing that is emblematic of this, and, if we're being real, kind of at the heart of the culture war, is the Democratic approach to "race issues." Generally speaking, the party seems to consider it to be an absolute disaster if their share of the black vote drops below 90%. This leads to them taking unpopular positions, in both substantive ways (like supporting affirmative action well past its sell-by date, or "defund the police") and stylistic ways (using Beyoncé for a campaign theme song, outrage at Trump's comments about Harris's ancestry) to keep as much of that group as possible.
But WHY should Democrats win 90% of black people? WHY should voting be racially polarized? Doesn't that seem... bad? Are they sure they're not losing 5% of white people to keep 10% of black people? Because in absolute numbers that is a really bad trade!
"The cause is Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Democratic leaders in Congress."
I mean, the cause is a flood of propaganda 10 feet deep covering half the country. But I know pundits want to keep being mad at Joe Biden forever.
I'm always the first to defend Biden but Matt was right here, but didn't go deep enough. Biden was President and had the responsibility to try to steer the party and his administration in the right direction and he manifestly did not do that. But the deeper reason is that the center of gravity was with the progressives and the moderates were weak and demoralized. Biden for his entire career was a consensus-maker and a seeker of the center of the party. And so he tilted left after winning the nomination because he was following the party, and he followed it right off the cliff with the rest of the fools.
One of the reasons I'm pretty sympathetic to the view, mostly expressed by the right, of Biden's limited capacities. I think it's pretty clear that Biden at anywhere near his full strength would not have allowed this to happen.
It's totally reasonable to be mad at the most recent president from your own party, when that administration ends in ignominious failure. Thems the breaks!
It's reasonable, I guess, but it's unproductive. Counterproductive, even. The total and uncompromising "concession" that Carter was a terrible failure was a big part of what made the Democrats so moribund in the 80s. (And for some reason they ALSO tried to run his VP while bashing the administration he was part of, constantly, and it worked even worse.)
There's no reason to talk about your party being shitty if it's not SUBSTANTIVE, if it's not towards an end (like Matt's inveighs against "the groups" are, or Ezra Klein's criticism of an ossified regulatory process is), and being mad at Joe Biden is not substantive. It's kind of the opposite, because his policymaking was admirable, and plenty of people want to throw that baby - both the content and the process - out with the stuttering bathwater.
Partisanship exists for a reason, and I can't help but notice that the side that practices it more shamelessly appears to be punching above their weight electorally, when you consider how unpopular their actual policies are, whenever they bother even trying to articulate them.
Reagan's 11th commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."
'20s online liberals: "I'm too ~intellectually honest~ to point out my party is orders of magnitude better than the other one when I could be nitpicking them instead."
Also '20s online liberals: "Why are the VIBES so bad?"
Biden will go down as one of the most failed Presidents in history but I agree with your contention that the party choosing to self-polarize along the black-white race line in 2025 as if it is 1965 is a terrible tactical mistake. Not only is it alienating to geographically powerful rural whites, it is also suboptimal given that the many millions of post 1965 Asian and Latin American immigrants do not see American politics from the lens of civil rights era fights and they will just vote GOP if they see Dems as centering the black-white dichotomy.
Biden "failed" but it's really, really important to not just consider him a "failure" without acknowledging the nuance that his governance was, you know, fucking great. You could have surveyed 100 economists about the economic performance of 2021-2025, or especially since 2023, and he would have outperformed literally every single one of their projections and it would not have been close.
We need to know the SPECIFIC problem. The only problem with his presidency (give or take a foreign policy issue or two) is that he lost, and that happened because of propaganda, and Biden's main problem was that he couldn't speak well enough to counter any of it.
And it's too bad, because he was one of the only people in the party who was actually TRYING to counter it, rather than immediately jumping on the defensive and accepting Fox News framing of every issue. (A tack that many in our party are going to continue forever, because they forgot somewhere in the years since 2016 that it's possible to do anything else.)
(edit: It occurs to me that Carter ALSO had a form of politics that Democrats decided sucked, incorrectly, even though they only lost because of stagflation - he was absolutely pivoting towards the moderate tone that Clinton would end up winning with, but the party retreated back into Yankee liberalism in response to his loss, to horrible results.)
I thought similarly regarding Fox News framing and so forth but I changed my mind in 2023 once it started becoming obvious that Democratic cities were being really stressed by the migrant spike and so it was not just propaganda. It was very real and it triggered a significant amount of "last place aversion" among poor urban voters.
I did not blame Biden for inflation. It was probably baked in no matter what he did given the stimulus + money supply already passed under Trump.
But in my view Biden committed two pieces of epic political malpractice:
1. He allowed a gigantic migration spike that had real impacts on the ground in the low-end economy. The biggest swings against Biden-Harris 2024 occurred in blue states and cities and along the border districts in TX, AZ etc where it was a blood bath.
2. He issued nation wide title IX rules on trans inclusion in schools which created a nation-wide moral panic around children on an issue that affects << 0.1% of the population
I think Harris could have won if it was only inflation. But inflation + migrants + trans sunk her.
So would it be fair to say that a lot of the current dysfunction boils down to Democrats adopting unpopular social policies in an effort to win factional battles and beat back primary challengers? It does seem notable that the current left wing identitarian moment emerged in the post-recession era, when incumbent Democrats, that generally believed in things like Capitalism, were facing primary challenges from progressive candidates that took a more "tear it all down" approach to concepts like the limited liability corporation or private ownership generally.
Certainly there are examples of candidates like Clinton wielding more left wing social positions as a cudgel against their opponents. And while there are an omnicause contingent that view the end of capitalism as a necessary precondition to the liberation of ethnic minorities, there was often no love lost between the socialists and the anti-racism crowd in the early 2020s.
yep, and the same thing happens to the right as well.
I think it's time to get rid of primaries. Bring back the smoke filled back rooms (yes the rooms must have smoke)
The non-Dem aligned left, for all its faults, is very clear about it's goals, heroes, and villains of its ideology. If there was to be a more 'mainstream' Dem counter, it would have to paint a positive vision of our systems future rather than a purely dystopian one. That would inherently include a far more positive view of AI & technology in general. Someone has to convince people, from the left, of the clear & positive possibilities of our future. Hopefully ideas that weren't drafted a century ago in russian (...or german)
"The non-Dem aligned left, for all its faults, is very clear about its goals, heroes, and villains of its ideology." Is it? I feel like this is always changing. One year it's "Medicare For All". Another year it's anti-monopoly. Oh, hey, now you use the word "Oligarchy". Now it's "Defund The Police" / wait, now it's Gaza. I feel like "the Left" can be quite diffuse in its advocacy and is quite faddish... The Omnicause is a hard target to nail down. Maybe not as hard to nail down as a "moderate" Dem ideology, but the non-Dem-aligned left is likewise a huge group of various individuals and causes and groups and factions, who are in part jockeying amongst themselves.
There are different priorities within "the left", of course, but they have been unwavering in their support of Medicare For All, anti trust legislation, police reform, etc. The only one they have really stepped back on is "defund the police" because that was just a flat out loser even among themselves.
That the establishment basically lost faith in the idea of a better future in the Clinton/Obama sense after 2016 is part of the problem.
Jon Favreau suggesting to Ezra Klein that Bernie remade the Dem party like Trump the GOP despite losing twice is a tell.
Not sure what this means? Be more like *Hillary Clinton*?
Probably be more like Obama frankly. Hillary ran far to his left but without his outsider instincts.
Well, maybe. I think, in the Trump v Obama situation that would occur if Trump tried scuttle the two term limit, that Obama would win handily, but not on the strength of his policy preferences. And Hillary Clinton didn't lose to Trump because she tacked left, she lost because she was very well known prior to her campaign and half the country already despised her for nothing having anything to do with policy. She was only competitive because she was running against a certified looney. Even Ted Cruz would have wiped the floor with her and EVERYONE hates Ted Cruz.
She lost by like 70000 votes across three states. A lot of things mattered. I do think the thing Dems most need is an outsider who isn’t seen as a radical.
Jimmy Kimmel!
Again, were it any Democrat not named Hillary Clinton (Joe Biden was apparently told directly NOT to run), those 70,000 votes and likely a few more would have gone blue. We would have had President O'Malley, not President Trump.
In terms of "outsider", I don't necessarily think that's true. But someone who can demonstrate independent thought and resist undue influence from what Matt calls "the groups" *is* important, I think, as is being clear you will be a president for ALL, not just the people who voted for you.
The fact that not enough Democrats were willing to admit that most Americans will not vote for a self-described socialist, even if he's against identity politics, was the root of a lot of mistakes over the past 10 years. And people made losing two primary campaigns their entire political identity.
I really don't think much of this gets sorted until there's a new nominee. I am sure different congressional leaders could do somewhat better, but the skills to be an insider vote counter and coalition manager are not the same as face of the party on TV or streaming video. (One reason Gingrich flopped so hard as Speaker).
The 2028 campaign is most important campaign of our lifetimes, for the fourth time in row. But this one coukd be higher stakes on Dem nomination side, since the Obama Succession line is finally burned out. The hope, to me, is someone who can shape the coalition around themselves, rather than just manage the existing factions. So far, I like what I have been seeing from Gallego, but obviously open.
The Democrats don’t know what they are. Both congressional leaders from NY?
This is what galls me about leadership as well. There are *plenty* of Democratic reps from red states and the public needs to see more of that IMO, not a constant parade of cloned pols from NY and Cali and Massachusetts
Yeah, there is a sense in which you want your leadership to come from safe seats so that they can take flak for the caucus without risking a general election loss, but there are safe seats all over the country that don't code as "giga-liberal blue state". There are three seats in Florida over D+10, there are seats in Texas, hell even one of the four seats in Virginia over D+10 would be better than NY or CA.
Yeah and the presidential front runner from California again. :face palm:
"I’ve noted this before, but John Fetterman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Jared Golden were all Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016."
Sure ... but they are very much *not* members in good standing of the Long Bernie Insurgency specifically over their cultural moderation. While the moderate party leadership is happy to help MGP and Golden hang on in tough seats, left-factionalist Bernie Cinematic Universe media shits all over them. And this is *good* because the Long Bernie Insurgency has never flipped a Republican-held House seat, even in the 2018 wave.
The people who the Bernie Left *does* see as its own people are Justice Dems types who often take the most toxic positions, reflecting the fact that its base of support is not the normie Dem rank-and-file but the activist intelligentsia. Famously the Long Bernie Insurgency has had trouble winning the Black Church...
A lot of it is factional struggle for the sake of factional struggle, motivated largely by personal antipathy for The Establishment. I have no strong opinions on whether Mills or Platner is the better nominee, but if Schumer had embraced Platner from the beginning, the Sanders left would certainly not have.
I think that's right.
I will say I suspect Platner is the worse nominee. The Bernie Left has a consistently terrible track record of picking candidates for competitive seats. So I have the very strong prior that whoever is the newest shiny object for the Left is not a good candidate.