Another “good issue that Democrats need to talk about is taxing the consumption of the rich, including consumption of some people on Substack that may not think of themselves as “rich.”
“but I think the most important thing for Americans to know is that at the end of the day, McConnell and Trump worked together to overturn Roe, to raise the deficit with tax breaks for the rich, and to try to take health insurance away from millions of working families”
Your statement above, combined with your acknowledgment that Progressive goals lean toward the utopian, speaks to my problem with many of your positions. Your answer seems always to be higher taxes, but never explains how the ever expanding goals and appeal of utopian dreams can be constrained by necessities, such as deficit reduction. Pelosi, as you note, refused to even consider how to reach fiscal sanity respecting Social Security when invited to work on the issue by George W Bush. You may have included the point that he said, this is what I propose, what are your ideas. I agree with lots of critiques of Trump, but condemning him for failing to reduce the deficit is risible, coming from the left.
Matt has argued that deficit reduction should be a goal. The fact that neither party has achieved this doesn’t detract from the goal. Although the argument that a D president and R Congress is usually best for this result.
While I think broadly Matt is right, I want to propose a controversial take on what I want elite media to do.
A huge problem with media coverage on the left is that it is extremely sympathetic to lefty ideas, but it is extremely hard on lefty *politicians*. All conservative news elevates Trump *as a personality*. Matt, as a low empathy person (his words) underestimates how much generally liking people affects who they vote for. He recently retweeted a video of college girls who are voting Kamala because of abortion, but a ton of them said they just liked her more as a person.
Whether the NYT wants to admit it or not, it really wants to split the difference, especially when it comes to moral judgments. That concept of fairness means that, say, profile pieces must be 80% positive and 20% negative if at all possible.
That ends up being sort of unfair to Democrats, but when it comes to Trump, it's *insanely* unfair. It's not "GOP lawmaker is 50% worse than their Democratic counterpoint, so we will be equally critical." It is "Trump is 100x as bad, so we will cover him as 5x as badly." This is untenable by their own standards.
The NYT cannot make the space to include one hundred terrible Trump stories to balance one bad Democratic story, so in my opinion, the only way to make this fair is to stop giving Democrats any negative coverage at all. I understand this sounds extreme, but I also think it makes sense.
So to that extent, yelling at the NYT about their hypocrisy on Trump isn't to make them more negative on Trump, it's to make them much, much more positive on Democrats. I think this a worthy goal.
Broadly, Matt is right. Trump claiming that Haitians is hilarious. The memes and songs "they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs" inspired are great content. But every time a reporter confronts him on it, the public remembers that they don't want immigrants to overwhelm their communities, and Springfield got a huge influx of immigrants. It's *good* that Springfield got those immigrants, but you aren't going to convince voters of that.
The public does also remember that they don't like Donald Trump, and that's useful, but it's probably outweighed by the fact that they don't like immigration.
Josh Barro said Kamala doesn’t have a core. She changes with the winds. People see her as soulless. Perhaps she can change again (she is trying). I may have insinuated Josh got the entire Biden Kamala thing wrong. Maybe not all of it? He did identify Shapiro as the strongest potential candidate. That seems likely true to me.
Josh under appreciated the power of politics to get Biden out and Kamala in.
Long form podcasts are more free flowing than writing takes. You sometimes get insights into people’s real thoughts that you wouldn’t in their writing. I wonder what Josh today would say about Josh a few months ago views on Kamala.
This is from the Dishcast Podcast by Andrew Sullivan.
Not the point of the article, but it's striking to read the rhetoric about social security reform in 2005. I think Matt gets lots of pushback to his contention that the American political landscape has shifted left in many ways over the last 20 years (heck since the late 80s) and I suspect he wanted to include this anecdote as a riposte this critics.
I remember on West Wing, there was an entire episode where Toby figures out some Senator may actually be amenable to social security reform and then works behind the scenes to get social security reform passed. What makes it remarkable is that Toby is supposed to be the left wing idealist of the main characters (he's also the one with the most cynicism or realism about how politics works which is why I personally felt he was the best main character). But just a striking example that social security "reform" (lets be real, cuts) was pretty mainstream at least in the chattering class. There's a reason Gore kept talking about a "lockbox" (only to get pilloried on SNL and thereby undermine the point he was trying to make).
Think Matt overstates the case about left wing drift*. But feel like he's right to point out what different political world we inhabit today.
*if public shifts left on an issue, but it has no effect on electoral outcome, then...what does it matter. If Trump wins, I'm positive GOP will take it as a sign that they can pass strict abortion restrictions (and restrictions on birth control) and not suffer consequences; they'll see the issue like gun control. Or at the very least appoint judges who do the dirty work for them).
Social Security Reform was mainstream among elite Democratic circles. As seen in 2005 when Bush tried to privatize Social Security and Pelosi stood firm, despite all the chattering classes wanting an alternative plan from her, it showed the actual voters were never on the side of Social Security "reform."
Matt, I think Kamala has run a fine campaign. If she loses and you say she lost because of the vp pick, her ad strategy etc, I will definitely drop my subscription. There's something really broken in America and it's not me, Kamala, the Democratic party establishment or the average Democrat. I'll also drop my 30 year subscription to the nytimes. I'll be done.
Democrats were content to run a man who was not only deeply unpopular, but also was clearly not physically and/or mentally capable of running a campaign, and their strategy was basically to gaslight us into believing everything was fine. And then after all of that, they gave us no choice but to run with Kamala whose last presidential campaign crashed and burned very quickly.
So yes, if Trump wins, I think it's fair to heap a lot of blame on the Democratic Party, especially considering Trump himself is still very unpopular. It's not like Democrats are going up against a modern-day Reagan.
To riff on a meme I've seen online: If customers at a restaurant are offered a choice between a piece of chicken and a bowl of dog excrement topped with broken glass, and they pick the dog excrement, it doesn't make much sense to blame the chef for cooking or seasoning the chicken in a suboptimal way.
It's funny that all my leftist friends will see a Kamala loss as proof the ticket should've been, I don't know, Tim Walz and Somebody while everybody here and the Bulwark will see it as proof the ticket should've been Josh Shapiro/Abigail Spanberger.
I understand that this discussion is in the context of the election and not deep policy analysis, but healthcare is an issue where policy wonks (not party leaders) on both sides have made good points. I agree with wonks on the left that there is a role for the government to protect the vulnerable from losing access and I also agree with wonks on the right that you need market based solutions - deregulation, supply side reforms, etc. to bring the costs down, which in turn will make healthcare accessible to more people.
I think the most fundamental problem with healthcare is the lifecycle management of the premiums that people pay into the system. Throughout the healthy, employed phases of your life, you're paying into different pools but when you actually need healthcare, you may not have access to those pools. The solution to this problem is to either have some kind of national healthcare (it's time to retire the stupid term - universal healthcare) that you pay into throughout your life (if you're on the left) or have HSAs that are not tied to the job (if you're on the right). The middle ground is to have both options available or even a federal HSA account, which will make it portable across states. Instead of the focus on tax brackets, the tax subsidy for employer provided healthcare needs to go. Here Democrats are the bad guys because they're beholden to unions. Unless Democrats kick the unions out of their coalition, they'll be stuck with supporting terrible policies.
The downside of this strategy is that you political centrist pro-life crowd is pushed to Trump. My circle is heavily consecutive Catholic and politically unengaged. Last time round I could nudge people towards Biden. I'm not even trying this round. There is no permission structure for pro-life folks to vote Harris is she's making the election about abortion.
I am in my 60s and the greatest revelation of my life experience is the willingness of people to vote for politicians who openly say they will do things to hurt the voter’s interests. In my youth I did a lot of transference- I thought people were logical. I now admit I know little about what moves people to place emotion over evidence, but it is manifest and I marvel at the phenomenon.
So, first of all, narrowly tactically: I would like to make the case that the election is already decided. Like, I know we don't know WHICH WAY the election is decided, but I think that if you had a God-like view of the internal states of everyone, including "whether I'm voting and whether I've decided who to vote for and what it would take to change my mind," that you'd be able to see who was going to win the election, and that no slight modulations of the comms plan of either side could change that. The number of undecideds has shrunk to the point where probably no "normal" campaigning can make a difference. Maybe a truly dramatic event could, but I don't think that narrow tactical choices can.
But second: against tactical communications. Yes, maybe I'm wrong, maybe the election is poised so closely that even with the now very small number of undecideds out there they could turn the election. Certainly back in summer it is reasonable to imagine that tactical campaign decisions mattered.
But is society as a whole better off when everyone is making their communications decisions narrowly tactically? Remember when Matt endorsed tactically lying to people, and has since I guess disavowed that stance? I think he's edging back towards it and I think ultimately we're all better off if we earnestly attempt to approach the truth rather than try to play chess with our arguments.
Even, and indeed perhaps especially right now, when I get that it FEELS like the importance of tactics is at an all-time high but where I would really like people to analyze whether it's actually at an all-time low.
I don’t know, describing The Free Press as “a clever pro-Trump op” seems pretty outrageous conspiracy theory territory. They are pretty straightforwardly advancing certain hobbyhorses for sure, but where is the evidence that Bari Weiss is just pretending to care about that stuff and is actually in the tank for Trump and playing 3D chess.
Seems like the sort of opinion you would generate if you see literally everything through the lens of political messaging for a horse race, which Matt kind of does sometimes, but most people just have Views on Things, including journalists.
Another “good issue that Democrats need to talk about is taxing the consumption of the rich, including consumption of some people on Substack that may not think of themselves as “rich.”
Improvement in ACA coud have been accomplished in 2021, Ideally with financing with a VAT.
You just pantsed TFP in a way that I cannot unsee. Well played.
“but I think the most important thing for Americans to know is that at the end of the day, McConnell and Trump worked together to overturn Roe, to raise the deficit with tax breaks for the rich, and to try to take health insurance away from millions of working families”
Your statement above, combined with your acknowledgment that Progressive goals lean toward the utopian, speaks to my problem with many of your positions. Your answer seems always to be higher taxes, but never explains how the ever expanding goals and appeal of utopian dreams can be constrained by necessities, such as deficit reduction. Pelosi, as you note, refused to even consider how to reach fiscal sanity respecting Social Security when invited to work on the issue by George W Bush. You may have included the point that he said, this is what I propose, what are your ideas. I agree with lots of critiques of Trump, but condemning him for failing to reduce the deficit is risible, coming from the left.
Matt has argued that deficit reduction should be a goal. The fact that neither party has achieved this doesn’t detract from the goal. Although the argument that a D president and R Congress is usually best for this result.
While I think broadly Matt is right, I want to propose a controversial take on what I want elite media to do.
A huge problem with media coverage on the left is that it is extremely sympathetic to lefty ideas, but it is extremely hard on lefty *politicians*. All conservative news elevates Trump *as a personality*. Matt, as a low empathy person (his words) underestimates how much generally liking people affects who they vote for. He recently retweeted a video of college girls who are voting Kamala because of abortion, but a ton of them said they just liked her more as a person.
Whether the NYT wants to admit it or not, it really wants to split the difference, especially when it comes to moral judgments. That concept of fairness means that, say, profile pieces must be 80% positive and 20% negative if at all possible.
That ends up being sort of unfair to Democrats, but when it comes to Trump, it's *insanely* unfair. It's not "GOP lawmaker is 50% worse than their Democratic counterpoint, so we will be equally critical." It is "Trump is 100x as bad, so we will cover him as 5x as badly." This is untenable by their own standards.
The NYT cannot make the space to include one hundred terrible Trump stories to balance one bad Democratic story, so in my opinion, the only way to make this fair is to stop giving Democrats any negative coverage at all. I understand this sounds extreme, but I also think it makes sense.
So to that extent, yelling at the NYT about their hypocrisy on Trump isn't to make them more negative on Trump, it's to make them much, much more positive on Democrats. I think this a worthy goal.
Broadly, Matt is right. Trump claiming that Haitians is hilarious. The memes and songs "they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs" inspired are great content. But every time a reporter confronts him on it, the public remembers that they don't want immigrants to overwhelm their communities, and Springfield got a huge influx of immigrants. It's *good* that Springfield got those immigrants, but you aren't going to convince voters of that.
The public does also remember that they don't like Donald Trump, and that's useful, but it's probably outweighed by the fact that they don't like immigration.
Josh Barro said Kamala doesn’t have a core. She changes with the winds. People see her as soulless. Perhaps she can change again (she is trying). I may have insinuated Josh got the entire Biden Kamala thing wrong. Maybe not all of it? He did identify Shapiro as the strongest potential candidate. That seems likely true to me.
Josh under appreciated the power of politics to get Biden out and Kamala in.
Long form podcasts are more free flowing than writing takes. You sometimes get insights into people’s real thoughts that you wouldn’t in their writing. I wonder what Josh today would say about Josh a few months ago views on Kamala.
This is from the Dishcast Podcast by Andrew Sullivan.
> Nobody ever got cancelled for holding an incorrect view of the cost-benefit ratio of Medicaid expansion
Unfortunately. As with anyone who says it’s acceptable to cut a dime from social security while rich people still exist.
I quit Twitter about 6 months ago but it just feels like Harris is sleep walking into an L.
Harris might lose, but I'm baffled as to how there's any sleep walking involved in it.
Why? What should she do?
Not the point of the article, but it's striking to read the rhetoric about social security reform in 2005. I think Matt gets lots of pushback to his contention that the American political landscape has shifted left in many ways over the last 20 years (heck since the late 80s) and I suspect he wanted to include this anecdote as a riposte this critics.
I remember on West Wing, there was an entire episode where Toby figures out some Senator may actually be amenable to social security reform and then works behind the scenes to get social security reform passed. What makes it remarkable is that Toby is supposed to be the left wing idealist of the main characters (he's also the one with the most cynicism or realism about how politics works which is why I personally felt he was the best main character). But just a striking example that social security "reform" (lets be real, cuts) was pretty mainstream at least in the chattering class. There's a reason Gore kept talking about a "lockbox" (only to get pilloried on SNL and thereby undermine the point he was trying to make).
Think Matt overstates the case about left wing drift*. But feel like he's right to point out what different political world we inhabit today.
*if public shifts left on an issue, but it has no effect on electoral outcome, then...what does it matter. If Trump wins, I'm positive GOP will take it as a sign that they can pass strict abortion restrictions (and restrictions on birth control) and not suffer consequences; they'll see the issue like gun control. Or at the very least appoint judges who do the dirty work for them).
Social Security Reform was mainstream among elite Democratic circles. As seen in 2005 when Bush tried to privatize Social Security and Pelosi stood firm, despite all the chattering classes wanting an alternative plan from her, it showed the actual voters were never on the side of Social Security "reform."
Matt, I think Kamala has run a fine campaign. If she loses and you say she lost because of the vp pick, her ad strategy etc, I will definitely drop my subscription. There's something really broken in America and it's not me, Kamala, the Democratic party establishment or the average Democrat. I'll also drop my 30 year subscription to the nytimes. I'll be done.
Assuming Democrats lose in 2024, do you think this strategy, if broadly adopted, makes it more or less likely that Democrats win in 2026 or 2028?
Democrats were content to run a man who was not only deeply unpopular, but also was clearly not physically and/or mentally capable of running a campaign, and their strategy was basically to gaslight us into believing everything was fine. And then after all of that, they gave us no choice but to run with Kamala whose last presidential campaign crashed and burned very quickly.
So yes, if Trump wins, I think it's fair to heap a lot of blame on the Democratic Party, especially considering Trump himself is still very unpopular. It's not like Democrats are going up against a modern-day Reagan.
To riff on a meme I've seen online: If customers at a restaurant are offered a choice between a piece of chicken and a bowl of dog excrement topped with broken glass, and they pick the dog excrement, it doesn't make much sense to blame the chef for cooking or seasoning the chicken in a suboptimal way.
It's funny that all my leftist friends will see a Kamala loss as proof the ticket should've been, I don't know, Tim Walz and Somebody while everybody here and the Bulwark will see it as proof the ticket should've been Josh Shapiro/Abigail Spanberger.
I understand that this discussion is in the context of the election and not deep policy analysis, but healthcare is an issue where policy wonks (not party leaders) on both sides have made good points. I agree with wonks on the left that there is a role for the government to protect the vulnerable from losing access and I also agree with wonks on the right that you need market based solutions - deregulation, supply side reforms, etc. to bring the costs down, which in turn will make healthcare accessible to more people.
I think the most fundamental problem with healthcare is the lifecycle management of the premiums that people pay into the system. Throughout the healthy, employed phases of your life, you're paying into different pools but when you actually need healthcare, you may not have access to those pools. The solution to this problem is to either have some kind of national healthcare (it's time to retire the stupid term - universal healthcare) that you pay into throughout your life (if you're on the left) or have HSAs that are not tied to the job (if you're on the right). The middle ground is to have both options available or even a federal HSA account, which will make it portable across states. Instead of the focus on tax brackets, the tax subsidy for employer provided healthcare needs to go. Here Democrats are the bad guys because they're beholden to unions. Unless Democrats kick the unions out of their coalition, they'll be stuck with supporting terrible policies.
Kudos for sticking it to that racist fool in the Silver Bulletin comments.
https://open.substack.com/pub/natesilver/p/24-reasons-that-trump-could-win?r=1cj74&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=73371062
The downside of this strategy is that you political centrist pro-life crowd is pushed to Trump. My circle is heavily consecutive Catholic and politically unengaged. Last time round I could nudge people towards Biden. I'm not even trying this round. There is no permission structure for pro-life folks to vote Harris is she's making the election about abortion.
This feels like a Hillary repeat.
I am in my 60s and the greatest revelation of my life experience is the willingness of people to vote for politicians who openly say they will do things to hurt the voter’s interests. In my youth I did a lot of transference- I thought people were logical. I now admit I know little about what moves people to place emotion over evidence, but it is manifest and I marvel at the phenomenon.
I don't like this article.
So, first of all, narrowly tactically: I would like to make the case that the election is already decided. Like, I know we don't know WHICH WAY the election is decided, but I think that if you had a God-like view of the internal states of everyone, including "whether I'm voting and whether I've decided who to vote for and what it would take to change my mind," that you'd be able to see who was going to win the election, and that no slight modulations of the comms plan of either side could change that. The number of undecideds has shrunk to the point where probably no "normal" campaigning can make a difference. Maybe a truly dramatic event could, but I don't think that narrow tactical choices can.
But second: against tactical communications. Yes, maybe I'm wrong, maybe the election is poised so closely that even with the now very small number of undecideds out there they could turn the election. Certainly back in summer it is reasonable to imagine that tactical campaign decisions mattered.
But is society as a whole better off when everyone is making their communications decisions narrowly tactically? Remember when Matt endorsed tactically lying to people, and has since I guess disavowed that stance? I think he's edging back towards it and I think ultimately we're all better off if we earnestly attempt to approach the truth rather than try to play chess with our arguments.
Even, and indeed perhaps especially right now, when I get that it FEELS like the importance of tactics is at an all-time high but where I would really like people to analyze whether it's actually at an all-time low.
I don’t know, describing The Free Press as “a clever pro-Trump op” seems pretty outrageous conspiracy theory territory. They are pretty straightforwardly advancing certain hobbyhorses for sure, but where is the evidence that Bari Weiss is just pretending to care about that stuff and is actually in the tank for Trump and playing 3D chess.
Seems like the sort of opinion you would generate if you see literally everything through the lens of political messaging for a horse race, which Matt kind of does sometimes, but most people just have Views on Things, including journalists.