>Any discussion of health care tends to favor Democrats because (except in the immediate wake of the ACA passing) most people are fundamentally morally aligned with progressives on this issue.<
And I strongly suspect most people are fundamentally *financially* aligned with progressives on this issue, too. Even quite high-salaried persons are pretty vulnerable to the costs associated with catastrophic illness.
"And I strongly suspect most people are fundamentally *financially* aligned with progressives on this issue, too. Even quite high-salaried persons are pretty vulnerable to the costs associated with catastrophic illness."
I honestly don't think most well off people with insurance think about this until it happens to them. If they're happy with their benefits and not spending much out of pocket routinely, I doubt catastrophic illness risk would make them want to tear up their health insurance and reform things.
If you are unemployed under ACA, then you are getting subsidies if not Medicaid. COBRA has value if you leave your job to become self-employed, but not if you simply lose your job.
I spent six months as a post-doc in Australia. The Australian government required me to prove I had health insurance, and I couldn't buy into Australian health insurance, so I had to go on COBRA. It was nearly $1000 a month as a healthy 28 year old man.
I'm semi-surprised COBRA worked for you. I would assume employer-based (or COBRA-based) coverage by US carriers is generally valid if one is a tourist, but I'd have guessed it normally doesn't cover a person who moves abroad for work or school.
Fortunately, I didn't test it by having a medical emergency during the time. I don't recall if I told the insurance company that I was going to be overseas, and the Australian government just needed me to show a certificate saying I had private insurance. I don't recall if they checked to verify that the insurance was valid while temporarily working in Australia.
I didn’t even know where to begin to look. Obamacare hadn’t been passed yet so I didn’t know where to buy private insurance outside of an employer, and since I was only in Australia for six months I couldn’t buy Australian insurance.
>I honestly don't think most well off people with insurance think about this until it happens to them.<
I agree they may not think about it with great frequency. But if it's a campaign issue that's attracting significant coverage, they're likely to...uh...think about it! Most affluent, PMC Americans are sufficiently smart or well-educated to be aware of the principal threats to their well-being, and among these are uninsured health disasters. It's perfectly understandable why Democrats tend to outperform Republicans on the issue of healthcare coverage.
>I doubt catastrophic illness risk would make them want to tear up their health insurance and reform things.<
Who said anything about "tearing up their health insurance"? I just think people in the main oppose big changes to the status quo on healthcare—including cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. Democrats could indeed take a political hit if they won a trifecta and embarked on a round of major reform (as they did in 1994 and 2010). The status quo seems to satisfy most Americans. Which is part of the reason they favor the Democratic Party's approach: Democrats want to defend that status quo.
I think the original idea of Medicaid was to insulate it from political meddling and rollback by getting the states bought into it, and it's turned out *exactly* the opposite. Eliminating Medicaid entirely and providing the same coverage to the same people through Medicare would be much better, much more politically sustainable. (Not to mention more efficient.)
Yeah. I'd repeal Medicaid outright and replace it with a federal program that includes a public option if if were up to me. Would be expensive for the federal government, sure, but on the other hand state governments would be able to slash their budgets significantly.
Yeah, I don't think anyone is talking about "ripping up their health insurance" if by that you mean going for some Medicare for all thing. What PMC folks like is lots of government back stop and rules that keep them safe from that catastrophic risk --- no penalties for preexisting conditions, keeping your kids on your plan until they're 26, no cuts to Medicare and Medicaid so your parents aren't wiped out by their costs, etc.
But you have to keep your job to keep your insurance. If you get sick, that can be tough. If you have a hundred grand in liquid assets, you don’t have too much to worry about paying for cobra, but having to pay cobra and the mortgage and basic expenses if you get sick and can’t work extends precarity needlessly far up the income ladder.
One of my parents got cancer at 55, had to leave their job because of being too sick to work, and tried to afford COBRA so they could continue cancer treatment.
There’s no individual mandate anymore, so Trump can easily strip away the exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion while keeping guaranteed issue. The gymnastics that went into writing Obamacare always made it vulnerable to future changes.
>How so? The out of pocket max is likely a few $1,000 which shouldn’t be a problem.<
It shouldn't be a problem because of laws passed by Democrats.
No one has a lifetime guarantee of employment with health benefits. If they were to lose their health insurance, they would indeed be quite vulnerable. A battle with cancer could easily set a person back a couple of million or more. Once upon a time we lived in a country where it was quite common for people to be uninsurable. Then along came the ACA (and before that, Medicare).
Democrats don't want to weaken or repeal these programs. Many Republicans wish to repeal and voucherize them. Hence the advantage enjoyed by Democrats on this issue.
The Movement Conservatism approach to healthcare—glibertarianism—appeals to about three percent of the population.
I don't understand why American conservatism is like this while (for example) the British Tories got walloped in an election recently and peacefully left. It strikes me as an important question, really one of the most important questions.
>>I don't understand why American conservatism is like this while (for example) the British Tories got walloped in an election recently and peacefully left<<
Part of the reason is that conservatives in the US believe their views aren't just better for society, but are constitutionally legitimate in a way that liberal policies are not. This view was bubbling up long, long before the arrival of the MAGA movement. For years I've been reading conservatives opine that the United States Constitution as properly construed prohibits most liberal/left policies and mandates conservative ones. In other words, many people on the right in America believe the left doesn't possess a legitimate authority to govern, because the policies they'll implement aren't allowed by the Constitution (again, as properly construed—by them!).
If you believe that your political opponents are essentially engaged in an effort to subvert the constitution, it's not much of a stretch to arrive at the place where any and all tactics—including violence, including elections stealing—are justified to gain or hold onto power.
As to why this dynamic and over-arching belief system have become entrenched among American conservatives I cannot say, though it may flow from simply religiosity. I think it's fair to observe that millenarian, evangelical Christianity is a lot more common in the United States than in other wealthy democracies.
Isn't the answer Donald Trump? Whatever McConnell's other faults he didn't support this. Basically all Republicans besides Donald Trump would have left office more peacefully.
Yeah I agree that's a huge part of it. But the other part of it is that it wasn't just crazy Uncle Donald being dragged out of the White House -- he had support. He could assemble this mob, get it retroactively legitimized by the RW media afterward, keep the party's loyalty.
One guy's personal pathology is more important than it should be, but why is it getting this reception? (He ran for president before btw, in 2000 through the Reform Party, and it was such a complete flop that no one really remembers it. Something changed!)
The percentage of uninsured peaked at 16% in 2010 and was slightly less than 8% in 2023. I don't want to downplay the importance of ACA to those who had pre-existing conditions but it did not solve the main issue with US healthcare, which is cost. That requires fundamental changes in both regulation and supply side reforms, which neither side is running on.
Or just regular illness and procedures that are absurd. I'm early 30s and have a very good job in biotech, and I think I almost fainted when I got ambulance bill for $8000 *after* insurance. It was a non-emergency transfer from one ER to another with the service I needed but had to take an ambulance to show continuous care otherwise I'd have to start over and wait another 10 hours in that ER while in severe pain, 10 miles total distance, casual drive, I was chatting with the tech the whole time. Then a doctor who spoke to me for less than 60 seconds charged me for 2 hours of time, that was $500 after insurance. Then the hospital charged me for a 'room', $6000 which was actually just a bed in the hallway of the ER, just on the other side of the monitor of some nurse working on a computer all night. All my appeals got denied. And this was at a hospital in Lake Forest IL, median home price $1m. Nothing to do with wealth. Healthcare sucks
I don't want to be utterly fatalistic two weeks out, lord knows the polls could miss and we are all coconut pilled on November 6th. But in Matt's spirit of pre-logging a take for the sake of unbiased accuracy, I think if Trump wins, especially if he wins the popular vote, we are going to get a thousand think pieces and takes about America's latent blood thirst for authoritarianism, when I think it really is as simple as American's being directionally closer to his positions and vibes on the Economy, on Immigration, and on Foreign Policy. People will spill so many words on what this means when I really think it can be summed up in the mind of a low information swing voter as "eggs cost more" and nothing deeper than that. That is both promising, in the sense that voters are more elastic than we assume, but also frustrating in that it requires democrats to be consistently better than they have proven capable of lately.
"I actively want the authoritarian asshole" and "I don't care that the candidate is an authoritarian asshole, I support him because muh grocery prices" are distinct positions to be sure, but that doesn't make the latter *admirable*, and if our moral framework is consequentialism, the two positions collapse into the same thing.
I've said it before on this Substack and I'll say it again: I became an American citizen as an adult, which means I had to study for and take the citizenship test. One of the questions and answers I had to memorize was: "What does it mean that America is a nation of laws? No one is above the law/Everyone has to obey the law." The naturalization ceremony was a really emotional moment for me, I was proud to become an American.
And now I'm being told that only pointy-headed elitists care about trifles like "the rule of law" or "democracy," while red-blooded salt-of-the-earth Real Americans(TM) are happy to kiss the feet of any Caesar who promises them cheaper groceries and gasoline and illegal immigrant deportations.
In my lifetime, I've watched several "factions" within my family realign politically:
- The immigrant generation being super pro-America and big believers in the American Dream whose brains were slowly poisoned by right-wing talk radio and now engender a specific hatred of recent immigrants because "we did it the right way"
- The generation under them, benefiting from the aforementioned American Dream becoming Reaganites and voting Republican because they don't like taxes
- That same generation boomeranging back to viscerally anti-Trump voters
- Flag-waiving blue-collar Democrats who retired in front of FOX News and turned into angry, paranoid anti-Obama Republicans
- Lifelong Democrats / liberals who just support liberal causes and aren't sufficiently engaged with the media to notice or care about woke brainworms
Personally, I'm the only person in my household who was born in the US, so I can literally see how important the Rule of Law is when I look at the certificates from the Department of State that permit my family to exist here. But the trend I see in my family is that the pro forma flag-waivers who were outwardly "proud to be an American" tended to be sucked into the FOX News Trump vortex, while the "wouldn't be caught dead wearing an American flag apron" are all now anti-Trump rule-of-law people.
I strongly dislike the caricature of Real Americans (TM) as the ones driving around in jacked-up trucks stealing Harris signs (which is absolutely a thing that happens around my neck of the woods) and am sad that they really do seem to want an authoritarian asshole to smite their imagined enemies and restore them to prominence that never existed. But I also see plenty of people who are discovering that they are, in fact, proud Americans because they are suddenly afraid of losing their country.
To which I'd add: There have always been disengaged, low-information people too short-sighted to care about freedom and self-government. What's new in America is that there used to be *elite* structures -- the media, the parties, community groups and mass-membership orgs -- that kept that opinion from dominating, that cajoled or convinced or shamed people out of voting on it or running by pandering to it.**
And now all of those restraining institutions have been gutted. Local news is gone, parties (especially the Republican Party) are hollow shells, America is a "bowling alone" society where most people's days are dominated by hours of passive video consumption.
The termites have eaten the load-bearing timbers and now democracy is swaying.
** Sure, it wasn't perfect, Huey Long was popular in the 1930s -- but it took the Great Depression to make that happen. Now, the economy is roaring and Trump is more popular than Long was.
I’m more worried about Democrats reaction. I’m already seeing the predictable takes of “Harris is losing because she is not left wing enough! Or Harris is losing because she won’t stand up for Gaza!” just bad, dumb takes based on activist fantasy.
This is why if Trump is to win, I hope to god he just wins the popular vote outright. It will be so much harder for the left to argue that the problem was insufficient progressivism if you just lose straight up, something Democrats have not experienced in a non post 9/11 fever dream context since *checks notes* THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY EIGHT(!!!!!!).
I genuinely think you're making a mistake if you think the left will care about harsh realities like a failure to win the popular vote in x years when making their arguments and considerations for the future. It took a very long time to get Labour members in the UK to vote for a centrist despite ample evidence of the failure of their political project at getting politicians that amped them up into power.
Democrats have been losing the House of Representatives way more often since the 90s and have become somewhat more socially progressive since then, so I don't see how it would change with one relatively close election, popular vote slightly to Trump or not. A real life example of this happening would be Democrats after three GOP pres. terms (1992) or Republicans after five Dem pres. terms (1952). But that just isn't how 2024 is going to be read by either party.
When leftist delusion was at its absolute peak we ended up with Biden. I think the Democratic establishment is fairly good at paying lip service to the left (and even picking up some of the less awful ideas) without actually making decisions based on their flawed thinking.
I disagree with describing the Afghanistan withdrawal as losing a war, and I worry that how it was framed in the media is going to discourage politicians from ending military commitments.
I'm worried you're too optimistic about the "don't lose a war" point. It isn't often that we start a war and lose it all within one 4-year term. There's Bay of Pigs, then you've got to go back to, what, War of 1812?
So the real lesson there isn't to avoid adventurism, it's that when you're bogged down in an unwinnable war, you should always just kick the can down the road to the next guy.
Point 1 definitely seems like the biggest missed opportunity for Democrat messaging — “tariffs means higher prices, Trump’s irresponsibile deficit spending proposals will make inflation higher!” — this doesn’t require anyone to adopt terminal values different than those they already hold.
The Afghanistan war can be divided into two missions -
1. The war on terrorism (Al Qaeda) - a huge success.
2. Nation building and installing a US friendly government as an alternative to Taliban - an unmitigated disaster.
Biden as President is responsible for neither. 1 happened under Bush and Obama. The surrender on 2 happened under Trump when his administration signed a treaty with the Taliban, excluding the Afghan government (something that I'm supportive of).
Republicans can’t all be so stupid as to miss the arrow from across-the-board tariffs and mass deportation of workers to higher prices. Everyone wants inflation for the right reasons, they just hate seeing it for the wrong ones.
When i've seen Trump supporters acknowledge that tariffs are paid by consumers, their ready answer is "well it's a good thing that imports will be more expensive so that people buy American made things instead", which, ok... presumes there's a ready American made product to purchase instead, for one, and completely misses the impact this will have on supply chains regardless, stuff that is "made in America" may still be impacted by the price push down if any supply input to that product was tariffed. And there is nothing stopping American manufacturers and sellers from just raising the price point on American made goods either to match the tariff priced foreign imports if they see people are still buying - this is a lot of what happened with inflation, corporations did raise and keep prices high mostly because consumers continued buying things anyway, so why lower the price until they have to?
Re. 1 - It depends on the level of unemployment vs inflation. If you look at 2012, unemployment was 5.6% which is not low, but not terrible. If unemployment had been reached what inflation hit under Biden, then I think Obama would have lost as well.
Of course the problem is that while I don't believe the most apocalyptic predictions about a victorious Trump canceling future elections, I do absolutely think they will take whatever steps they can to put future elections on as unlevel a playing field as possible. There would be many people in the new administration who have power and who openly admire Viktor Orban.
I think this is one of the more insidious parts of WW2 being a foundational part of most western nations national myths. The long shadow of Hitler's rise to power (and appeasement but thats a separate matter) means people frame democratic backsliding as the precursor to an imminent Enabling Act. When this doesn't happen people start to dismiss the claims that someone is a threat to liberal democracy as bunk because it didn't come to pass. When the insidious reality is you don't need anything as dramatic to undermine democracy: standard gerrymandering, voter suppression and other methods of democratic backsliding are a real threat. The rhetoric that Trump is going to end democracy probably does more harm than good under this while a culture more attuned to democratic backsliding would be receptive to moderate claims.
As an aside its also why I suspect some of the Project 2025 claims are counterproductive, the average voter inherently isn't going to believe that Trump is going to carry out trans genocide or whatever the front page of Reddit claims. But people would believe that Trump will end abortion and medicare and so on.
Is this really our moral standard now? "Well this guy isn't going to be literally as bad as Hitler, so that means it's ok"? Is this how far we've fallen in the world's oldest democracy?
My point is less "its bad as Hitler or its nothing" but rather that the cultural memory makes people frame it and perceive others framing as being comparisons to Hitler. Which doesn't really work because he likely isn't on the trajectory of Hitler and people know this and discount it. When the trajectory he is on, that of Orban or worse developing world flawed democracies is incredibly concerning in of itself. Slow Boring avoids this and correctly frames him as a serious threat to democracy in ways he actually is but a lot of places don't.
But also, Hitler held elections. They were rigged and fake but they were held.* Putin holds similar elections now for similar reasons. It takes an alternative legitimating ideology to simply dispense with elections entirely, as under Communism or, back in the day, the divine right of kings. Trump doesn't have that, he just has his cult of personality.
There will be elections regardless of who's in power, the question is just whether they'll be honest.
Trump won't cancel any elections. He doesn't need to. Assuming he wins and is still of sound mind in 2028 (a very big assumption, to be sure), he might well be able run the country as an old school political boss/kingmaker.
I could be wrong but he doesn't seem to have an interest in politics or running the country beyond staying out of jail. I'm guessing that if he wins, he'll let JD Vance do all the work while he takes credit for all the successes and throws him under the bus for the failures.
Probably true. I'm just not super interested in parsing the difference "pro-strongman" and "pro-strongman if it means cheaper eggs". Especially since it won't actually mean cheaper eggs.
There is definitely a segment of (male) voters who have erections over Trump’s face pasted on Rambo’s body draped in the American flag. True authoritarians. Probably 30-40% of the Republican party at this point. They don’t care about the price of eggs, they want a ”strong leader” who will make bad people suffer (immigrants, liberals, the childless etc) regardless of the costs.
Agree it is not a terminal value for anyone (even committed monarchists are not out here saying “well I disagree with his whole platform but he’s authoritarian and I’m a single issue voter on that issue”) but I do think there are people for whom, controlling for “generally agree with views” think it is a positive vs a negative. Tendency to like a guy who can “break the rules and really get things done” is not evenly distributed I don’t think.
I mean when it comes to building housing, rail transit, nuclear reactors, and computer chip factories, I want a guy who can break the rules and really get shit done!
Definitely agree. I am exceedingly confident that if trump actually implements his insane Tarriff war he will be at 2008 George Bush levels of popularity.
The best reason to expect a real authoritarian play from Trump II is how unpopular the actual consequences of this agenda would be. He (let's be real, he's not leaving as long as he's alive, whatever the constitution says) and his party would get thrown out of office handily. Given that he and they won't accept that, the answer is to rig the elections.
Explain to me how he just doesn't leave? POTUS 48 directs the secret service to evict him at Noon Jan 20, 2029. What other option is there? That person becomes president by operation of law there's nothing Trump could do any more than you or I at that point.
a) He very well might be dead (or too unhealthy) by 2028 and it’s moot. 78 is pretty old.
b) Allowing an election to take place involving other candidates, letting your own party consolidate behind one of them, and then at the last minute saying “whoops, no” would not work. He’d be out on schedule, with or without some disruption.
c) The play is instead to come up with some fig leaf — “it only bans >2 consecutive terms” perhaps — stand for election again, and have a compliant Supreme Court bless it.
This of course depends on getting enough elite support to ignore the plain meaning of the law, but if he has that support it won’t matter much that the outcome is illegal on a fair reading.
I've seen this concern about SCOTUS and "Consecutive Terms" so many times now and I honestly feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Not only is there literally zero chance that 5 SCOTUS justices just read past the "two," the plain unambiguous language of the statue contemplates a maximum time in office of 10 years! "...no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once." Such a rule would be utterly superfluous if there was not a hard cap on how many years you can serve in the ordinary course, as opposed to merely a cap on consecutive terms alone. Law is not just Harry Potter where you just say some magic words and get to play SIMS Politics while wearing robes.
It’s one thousand percent immigration and inflation. Trump is able to exploit those issues more relative to a baseline R because he doesn’t mind lying through his teeth and saying they are much worse than they are, perhaps, but those are the issues people are voting on, like, Globally. I don’t know how you can look at Europe and not see that immigration is Issue 1, 2, and 3 for a lot of folks.
Trump's lies on immigration are less damaging and easily refuted (just over half of potential Trump voters believe the Springfield story) compared to the magnitude of the actual failure on immigration.
It’s definitely interesting (though it’s an increase of an earlier and pretty long lasting gender split in the USA)! What’s your explanation, and is it in conflict with immigration and inflation being the core issues driving the majority of Trump supporter votes?
I think the point is just to say it would be a much harder fight in a cosmic sense if this Americans were trending toward trump broadly for Stephen Miller ideological reasons, not because Trump has positioned himself closer to the Median voter than the flagrantly unpopular incumbent party has. The details and solid policy/governance matter.
"Conversely, if you look at a publication like The Free Press, part of what makes it such a clever pro-Trump op is that they don’t cover the health care stakes in the election with a conservative spin — they don’t cover it at all."
This is, without a doubt, the most parsimonious and accurate description of The Free Press. I've previously said something to the effect of "I'm glad they exist because media bias, etc." and while I don't begrudge them their existence, I think that was a bad take.
Remember when Trump leaked Israeli intelligence to Russia? If Trump does something like that again in his second term, I'm really curious as to how the FP and Dailywire will respond.
On the same note, every article and segment is of finite length. The decision of what to include and what to cut is fundamentally a subjective choice that is going to involve bias.
objectivity is an establishment delusion. the only truth is the location and vector of every particle. which particles you care about and which heuristics you use to describe them are necessarily subjective
Jumped out at me as galaxy brained and unfair, interestingly. People should be allowed to criticize silly stuff on the left without being derided as a Trump operative. If “common sense on social issues, free speech, and support for the Israel side of the Gaza conflict” are Republican coded that’s the fault of
I agree - people should be allowed to criticize silly stuff on the left without being derided as a Trump operative. No argument here. This current publication does it all the time, and is not derided as a pro-Trump op because it also covers over topics.
What gives TFP a whiff of disingenousness is that despite its stated goal to revive "old-school journalism values," its "criticize silly stuff on the left" beat basically overwhelms everything else (to be fair, they do run articles that e.g. stick up for the rights of Muslim NGOs targeted for debanking by the US government on Israel's say-so - which should also not be a partisan issue, per se). As MY says, "silly stuff on the left" is not comprehensive of all political issues. What TFP is choosing to not cover are not obscure issues: e.g. "what will Trump do on tariffs?" or "what will Trump do on taxes?" are pretty obviously pertinent questions. And yet, crickets - because describing those positions accurately would weaken the editorial line of "Trump is the lesser of two evils because lol silly stuff on the left."
I feel similarly about TFP's constant "silly stuff on the left" coverage to how I feel about constant "Trump is a threat to democracy" coverage. Both are referencing actually-existing phenomena, but when a publication covers one to the exclusion of basically everything else, I think it's reasonable to ask what it is they're really trying to do. The answer is "create a discourse community," which is a fine goal, but it's also cool to be honest about that, especially if part of your premise is criticizing mainstream publications for also creating a discourse community.
yep, i'm (still) a (reluctant sometimes) TFP subscriber. I do still appreciate the takes and stuff but the right wing bias cannot be denied. Even the "satirical" TGIF column is heavily slanted on finding "absurdities from the left" almost exclusively - and i have a few times at least detected a misrepresentation or exaggeration of the original facts or story linked - and they occasionally pepper in something mildly snarky or critical about Trump or Republicans their comment section erupts in total offended outrage with threats to cancel lol. So much for the posture this is a "free thinking non-partisan" audience ;p
I wondered for a while it insisted on placing such a heavy thumb on the anti-left stuff then I read a NY Times piece not too long about the fact that Chris Rufo is a major TFP donor and that the intention is to "red pill" moderate and centrist Democrats into Republican voting. It has left me a bit more "reluctant" since. I've subscribed since it was Common Sense and even then when it was still the Trump Presidency and a Republican Senate there was outsized reporting about "Democrats in Disarray" in the House - which compared to the absurd shit show of the Republican House that couldn't even elect a SOH for over 80 days, that I don't believe TFP talked about even at all, it's irksome as a reader. I don't even think they made much of Jan 6 and the stolen election lies and attempts to overturn the election, or at least not nearly as much as the Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal ;p.
Every time I think about cancelling over the whitewash the Right and Trump gets in this supposed "centrist" outlet they publish something good and I stay ;p Their comment section though is another story ;p
This would have been better phrased as "Conversely, if you look at a publication like The Free Press, part of what makes it such a clever pro-Trump op is that they don't turn to the camera at the end of every article and say 'I'm exactly the same kind of center-left Democrat as Matt Yglesias.'"
I read FP every day, for my heterodox coverage that sometimes makes me uncomfortable, and Matt absolutely nailed this. I've felt for a long time that FP sneakily criticizes Biden/Harris 100% of the time, while begrudgingly throwing in a anti-Trump take 5% of the time. They have literally never said something unironically positive of Harris, except in a recent piece that puts "why I support Harris" right next to "why I support Trump".
I think this article gets at my mild disagreement with popularism. I definitely agree that it's counterproductive to talk endlessly about Democrats' unpopular views. At the margin, changing coverage from heavy breathing about immigration to heavy breathing about abortion/"democracy" probably helps a bit. However, I think the upside of repeating focus-group tested "popular" messages might be limited.
I think where I disagree with the model of popularist persuasion is in the degree to which voters' focus can be shifted from one issue to another. Voters in this election genuinely seem to be concerned about (1) the economy, (2) immigration, and (3) abortion. When *asked* about (1) or (2), I don't think it'll be terribly effective to just blurt out "ROE V. WADE!" And I don't think talking endlessly about abortion will make voters forget their other concerns. (The passage about how to pivot from immigration to Trump's economic policies, or the passage about what the NYT headlines should say, are illustrative of my disagreement here.)
The description of the FP's coverage is also helpful in highlighting the disagreement. Matt looks at it and sees Bari Weiss and co. carefully plotting how to trick people into voting for Trump and then planning coverage accordingly. I think this is basically dead wrong. Many of the FP's writers are centrist-type people who just feel a visceral hatred of what the left has become and would like to talk endlessly about it (e.g. Coleman Hughes or Nellie Bowles). As a result, the publication is also appealing to people on the right, and coverage is tilted towards issues that aren't of particular political significance.
However, no one reading this is being distracted from what they want to read about: they go to the FP precisely because of the issues it chooses to cover. Everyone would stop reading if they started to run hysterical articles about why Obamacare is horrible -- they wouldn't suddenly start voting for Trump.
>Everyone would stop reading if they started to run hysterical articles about why Obamacare is horrible.<
I don't think anyone is expecting them to morph into Vox or HuffPost. But do they run *any* articles about healthcare, say, or about the deaths of women caused by barriers in delivering reproductive healthcare in the post-Dobbs environment? Surely Bari Weiss has the authority to determine what topics appear in FB. Strangely, though, in the run-up to the election, they seem very focused on a mix of topics maximally helpful to the cause of getting Trump a second term. Which is their right. First amendment and all that!
Sometimes if it looks like a pro-Trump rag , swims like a pro-Trump rag, and quacks like a pro-Trump rag, it's a pro-Trump rag.
This is my thing with Greenwald, as well. Back in the Bush days he was VERY interested in symbolic attacks on the press's independence, but Trump just makes him yawn in this regard.
In a certain way, Glenn Greenwald’s psychology is consistent. He was always more concerned about the abridgment of civil liberties that occurs when institutions convince themselves they need to a respond to an ever greater “threat”.
He was more concerned about Muslims caught in the cross hairs of the War on Terror than he was about Islamic Terrorism, he’s more concerned about conservatives getting caught up on the War Against White Supremacy than he’s concerned about white supremacy itself, and he’s more concerned about what institutions would do to fight the War For Democracy than he is about the threat to democracy itself (Trump).
It is in some ways true that institutional overreaction to certain “dangers” does more damage to its overall health than the threat itself. But I think his threat assessment is wrong here.
I dunno, Greenwald knows more about dealing with authoritarians than anyone in this forum, and I'm inclined to take him quite seriously because he's often been a lone voice against establishment overreach and abuse of power.
GG is a singularly obsessed person whose only motivating issue is exposing American foreign alliances to not be based on humanitarian or international law. He wants to convince ppl, of both parties, that it’s a sham and we should dismantle most of our foreign alliance network. Secondly, he harbors deep suspicion of American national security agencies. People should remember he wrote about how we should have universal healthcare in 2008 and then wrote why he plans to vote for Ron Paul against Obama if it came to that.
I don’t think he’s a right winger but it’s the intensity and salience of his issues that makes him de facto pro-trump imo. However, his latest segment was screeching about how Mariam Adelson is bribing Trump to allow Israel to annex the West Bank and ethnically cleanse Palestinians. So he’s consistent on his issues.
However, following GG judgment’s on this issue alone doesn’t take into account the wider range of issues that are on the ballot.
The problem is that his interest in overreach and abuse of power didn't include the government at all from 2017-2020. Well, actually it wouldn't surprise me if he was concerned (not unreasonably!) about mask mandates, because those were aligned with *liberal* power, not conservative. Again, this is very different from how he operated when Bush was president!
Nah, Glenn has no consistent philosophy, he basically just approaches political writing like the litigator he was trained as and zealously fights for his side with few if any intellectual (or moral) scruples.
And that's all well and good if you are a attorney trying a case, the system is set up that way, but it makes for pretty crappy take writing IMO hence why I stopped reading him in 2009. Like Saul Goodman he's totally full of it, even if he's good at crafting arguments for his "clients" (in this case, Bari and the "liberals-are-the-real-authoritarians" crowd.)
Imo GG has a remarkable ability to compartmentalize all other issues for his own personal hang ups and obsessions.
His attitude towards Mike Johnson is illustrative. Before he became house speaker, GG had on Mike Johnson, who he knew wants to criminalize gay sex, to talk about the illegality of FISA warrants. After the interview, he called Mike Johnson a good and smart person despite some “disagreements”. After he became speaker, GG started lashing out at Mike Johnson because he changed his mind about FISA. GG then started screeching at him for being a “simp” authoritarian morally bankrupt person who “sold out American privacy to FBI ghouls”. So just to be clear, GG who is gay with kids, was cool w Mike Johnson when he just wanted to criminalize gay sex but drew the line on FISA warrants.
I don't believe he's ever shown a scintilla of interest in civil liberties abuses (threatened or practiced) under Trump, and it's not like those were unknown.
It's been in their coverage numerous times -just it's harder for trump to actually take actions, but it's usually at least brought up in a rock vs hard place kind of way.
It's also something that's been kinda dropped across the board because it stopped being a partisan thing. Those stories always included a lack of transparency or not enough interviews and access. It's hard to make that claim when Biden has done even media, Harris has done very little, and you have the behind the scenes social media company pressures. But all those stories they make sure to mention trumps various attacks on the press.
I think if you polled their staff, a majority of them would be anti-Trump. Yes, much of the coverage is anti-left, but I doubt the FP would endorse Trump for president. I think the topic selection is much more organic than what Matt believes, and this is *precisely* what could make some of it persuasive to a hypothetical center-right voter who's trying to make up their mind.
Andrew Sullivan lost his mind in his recent newsletter over some "gender-affirming care scandal" that, frankly, I had difficulty following and that ended in his questioning if he could actually vote for Harris. Sullivan is clearly not a Trump supporter, but is also clearly not faking his blind rage over (specific sub-sets) of "wokeness".
I am fully willing to believe that the folks at the FP are also not faking their passionate antipathy, which influences not only their selection of topics, but how they cover them. You could write a story about how Trump dehumanizes immigrants by just pointing that fact out or you could instead nut-pick some lefty writing about how Trump's dehumanizing of immigrants is a manifestation of the colonial-settler mindset that proves, once again that we're all terrible people for existing.
To your point, one approach might persuade a center-right voter to question voting for Trump and the other might persuade them that he's the lesser of two evils.
Trump represents such a unique threat to our country, I truly have no patience for any writers who question their commitment to voting against him based on their distaste for trans issues or wokeness.
I can't say with 100% certainty that Trump will upend American democracy, try to arrest political enemies and journalists, and join the global axis of authoritarians. But he certainly could. And there's a lot of middle ground that I am quite certain he will operate in. That's before you get into his economically disastrous tariff and immigration policies. Again, truly I have no patience for Sullivan's line of thinking, it's not thoughtful or remotely persuasive.
"Trump represents such a unique threat to our country, I truly have no patience for any writers who question their commitment to voting against him based on their distaste for trans issues or wokeness."
I share your distaste of Trump, but I cannot emphasize enough that it appears ~49% of the voters are not in the same place and you need to meet them where they are if you want to have a chance at persuading them.
Absolutely! I'm not discounting anyone who votes for Trump, many of my relatives are happily voting for him and that's okay.
My gripe is with columnists who seemingly share my fear of Trump, but are willing to place their issues with woke or trans issues on the same level as his insane attacks against American democracy.
I think the issue is separating regular voters from political writers who are supposedly experts in their fields.
If while watching football games yesterday, I said to the person next to me "hey the Vikings shouldn't have blitzed there" and the person said "what's a blitz"? I'd be a little incredulous why they are at a sports bar, but also say to myself not everyone is as nerdy about watching sports as I am. However, if that same person than told me they were a football writer for ESPN and once was defensive coordinator in the NFL, I think I would be in my rights to be absolutely flabbergasted and seriously question why this person was a sports writer.
To bring this to politics. It's one thing for normie voters to have their reasons for voting for Trump; single issue voters, only spotty news readers, just general distaste for inflation. It's quite another for supposedly well informed writers who are supposedly up to speed on all the myriad ways Trump is terrible, but then turn around and say maybe they shouldn't vote for Harris because she hasn't done enough interviews or sketched out her policy vision. I'm looking at you Brett Stephens; you have the most sought after perch in journalism, to say you "don't know enough" as a supposed politics expert says you probably shouldn't hold the job you hold.
Are they watching this campaign? Are they listening to Trump? How much more "persuading" do they need that this guy is a danger and absolutely unfit for office?
Yeah I can’t take someone like that seriously anymore. I’m pretty against a lot of the current gender ideology, but it would be insane to vote for Trump because of that. I feel confident I/we can push back on extreme gender ideology on the left (some of which I think will prove a passing fad anyway). it doesn’t even come close to the potential threats from a second Trump Administration.
What blows my mind is how otherwise very intelligent people normalize the downside risks between a Trump administration and a Harris administration.
The argument for Trump—even from this supporters—always involves some level of "sure, there's that one thing he said that I really don't agree with, but he won't actually do it because it's just hyperbolic rhetoric" followed by some form of "and Harris' plan is not specific enough and there was that one time she said something left-wing in 2019".
But then "that one thing he said" is like "I'll put 1000% tariff on imports from China" which will destroy the US economy and negatively impact everyone's lives and then he'll emphatically underscore that he's completely serious about it. Meanwhile that thing Harris said was like "I don't support cash bail in all circumstances" which will likely have zero effect on the person making the criticism and she has since completely disavowed it anyway.
This and the comments below seem to be dealing with a different Sullivan than I have read, who keeps saying he's voting for Harris for exactly the reasons you just laid out.
I find Sullivan very persuasive -- he's one of 3 substacks I pay for! The most persuasive argument I think Matt has made is that Harris will be constrained by a Republican Congress.
Just out of curiosity, and as someone who also pays for him, what do you find Sullivan persuasive on?
In my experience, his shrill insistence on "woke" agenda and the ability to pretend like every perceived transgression of anyone on the left is something that should be attributable to the entirety of the democratic party is tiresome. And I say that as someone who largely agrees with his take on a number of those issues, but disagrees with how widespread and important he claims them to be. But I think it's helpful to hear an alternative viewpoint, and I normally find the links and quotes he shares to be worth the cost of admission.
I don’t think much of anyone should base their vote on it (if a child in my family had received “gender affirming care” I might feel otherwise), but there really is a pretty awful medical scandal there. At some point after the election, that should become the acknowledged reality.
The scandal was and is both simpler and more profound than how you’ve relayed it here. You just don’t care about it.
The assistant secretary for health with HHS interfered with and pressured the premier international organization for trans health care’s (WPATH) standards of care, while also trumpeting the WPATH and their standards as being objective and the world’s leading authority.
How did Levine interfere? Insisting—in an email—that WPATH drop any and all age guidelines for hormonal and surgical interventions for explicitly political reasons, saying that any mention of age limits for minors would be a political disaster for gender affirming care.
All of this and much more damning about the circular appeals to authority that gender affirming care relies on came out of an amicus brief from Alabama to the Supreme Court, which is taking up a state ban case in December.
I think our government secretly pressuring an international authority to change their guidelines for political expediency when we are talking about permanently altering minors’ bodies—without so much evidence that it’s possible to make such a political change—is kind of a big deal.
Just to add to this, WPATH is already compromised. They commissioned a study from a center at Johns Hopkins in an attempt to launder their crazy views*. However, the people at Hopkins actually still had some integrity and found no evidence supporting "gender affirming care" for children. So WPATH blocked them from publishing any of their results, trying to bury it.
*This is an organization that supports those with a "eunuch identity". They should not be listened to on anything.
Absolutely, and correct. I believe WPATH also coerced John’s Hopkins to include a statement about their independence even after WPATH meddled with their review. Stunning and shameless.
It’s not that I don’t care, it is that I don’t see how any of this translates into “so now I don’t know if I can vote for Harris”. And that was the thesis of Sullivan’s rambling newsletter, which I still can’t parse even after having read your explanation. (But it does indeed sound like a scandal!)
It’s just very difficult to rationally reason on these kinds of moral issues.
If I were (say) in Venezuela and I were voting in an election to potentially oust Maduro, I would jump at virtually any opportunity to do so. Maduro is a strongman authoritarian and a threat to free expression across the Caribbean and South American spheres. However, if my only possible alternative were a guy who was scrupulously pro-democracy but also brutally committed some sort of violent act (let’s say murder, for the sake of hyperbole), I would have a very difficult time emotionally reconciling that fact with the rational and logical conclusion that he would still be far better than Maduro! It’s just that highly emotional issues on this scale are really, really hard to rationalize.
Not the point of your post, but man on man am I so happy to read you write "Andrew Sullivan lost his mind in his recent newsletter over some "gender-affirming care scandal" that, frankly, I had difficulty following".
I thought the same thing. To the point that I couldn't really tell how much I did or didn't disagree with what he was writing because I started blinking my eyes multiple times because I genuinely had trouble understanding what he was saying. His rhetoric was so over the top my inclination was to say he was misrepresenting what was going on. But I wouldn't even know where to begin as far as what I thought he got right or wrong on the substance.
Just goes to show how easy it is to go down the rabbit hole on a topic and lose the forest for the trees (to mix up my metaphors).
As I read it, Sullivan’s point was essentially that two new analyses of medical codes from insurance data showed that (at a low end) some 15,000 minors in the US had been subject to puberty blockers or associated surgeries over the past few years.
The anger in his prose was centered on the fact that so many elite figures and institutions have been lying to the public, insisting that none of this has been happening, minors aren’t involved, etc.
Sullivan and Mike Pesca have served as sort of a lighthouse for me, a fixed reference point when I start reading the same sentiments over and over in mainstream outlets. But that newsletter has me worried that he might tip into that "we're not Trump supporters, but all we do is write about about completely insane the woke mob that he opposes is" crowd... like the Free Press.
I think they're falling to audience capture. The writers may have started out moderate-conservative, but their commentariat is wild-eyed and rabidly anti-Democrat. No nuance at all for those guys! So if you want to keep your subscription revenue, well...
In media spaces in our current, highly polarized era, 50-50 political environments don't seem to happen much in the real world. Slow Boring is about the closest I've seen to this ideal, and even here, actual hardcore MAGA-style Republicans seem rare. Most websites, blogs, Substacks, Twitter feeds and so-forth seem to be overwhelmingly one side of the political divide or the other. They may *start out* trying to be an honest, down-the middle arbiter of ideas, but they seldom seem to be able to remain that way very long.
I mean, I may make fun of this comment section for being too centrist, but there's like maybe half-a-dozen people here who are to the right of Larry Hogan at best overall (even though many people here do focus too much on the policy they're most conservative on.)
Yep. Olivia Reingold wrote an article politely asking "isn't it strange that a super pro-life state (Alabama) is so bad at providing health care for having babies?" and you should see the comments.
I read one of the Free Press articles and thought, "Huh, it's conservative and I don't agree with it, but it's well thought out and the author makes some good points."
Then I looked at the comment section, which wasn't far off from "Biden is LiTeRaLLy SaTAn wHo wiLL dEstRoY AmEriCA" and I went "Gaaah, my eyes!" and I haven't been back since.
Matt Y deserves a ton of credit for not letting his comment section turn into a cesspool.
The comments sections always presage the aforementioned audience capture. At first it's just a couple of edgelords sneaking through, then I'm emphatically cancelling a subscription with sadness in my heart. I feel like the Bulwark is heading that direction, but maybe it's just people processing their anxiety about the election, as I am doing at this very moment.
It also makes me wonder what is going to happen to so many Substacks once the wavefunction of the 2024 election collapses. Like, what does audience capture look like once the Trump threat has passed or—shudder—he takes the oath of office?
Again, I've said it before - any Substack, even ones written by liberal people that don't occasionally post things like Matt does which basically say, "the Democratic Party is cool and does good things," and occasionally says mean things about the Republicans like "rich people only care about tax cuts and sometimes lie about other issues they care about (which got even the commenters here upset)" will eventually fall into right-wing craziness in the comments.
That’s news to me. Andrew Sullivan is about as centrist as it gets. I subscribe to both and my perception is that MattY is clearly uncomfortable writing about thorny issues like race or trans because he knows his subscribers whereas Sully is not. I think it takes a lot of courage for an old white guy who’s not part of the far right to write honestly about race because you know what the first line of attack is going to be.
But it's also the commentariat they created. By choosing an editorial narrative that leans almost entirely as "anti-left/woke" and leaves the right untouched they are naturally going to attract a readership of mostly right wing conservatives that have been bathing in "anti-woke" narratives in right wing media for years, thrilled to hear it repeated by supposed "liberals and Democrats" from a "former NY Times insider" no less (who can spill tea on one of the most hated mainstream media outlets within the Right), and their choice to not balance the anti-woke stuff with even mildly critical pieces about the Right, and particularly Trump, from the get-go is how they ended up with a very vocal hard right commentariat that isn't just hard right, it's still a majority consensus there that the 2020 election was "stolen" : P
And TFP feeds that with hyping up the supposed "scandal" of the "media coverup" of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which is so over-exaggerated in the facts of, let alone of its impact to the 2020 election to voters who weren't already "all in" on the supposed "Biden Crime Family Narrative" aka already Trump supporters), while not writing a single article about the widespread top down Trump driven efforts to overturn election results with a hell of a lot of cooperation from Republican party officials, but equally important, countered by a relative handful *almost all of whom have been "replaced" since 2020!!*, as just one "maybe important" story that a "centrist non-partisan" outlet might want to run ;p
But point being, when they put something out that is even just "Trump snark" the commentariat is in revolt. But that's a situation TFP created in the first place and cannot have been that naive in believing that a stridently anti-woke editorial slant wasn't going to be primarily a right wing attraction, and which they could have mellowed and balanced out by being equally as hardcore about right wing/Trump bullshit to draw in a more moderate audience that is frankly just less Trumpy. The fact that they chose not to do that and continue to not do that despite the stakes involved with this election for even the non-"TQ" portions of the "LGB" demographic from a Project 2025 designed Trump Administration (IVF being something Nellie and Bari have used!) is... telling.
I also don't think idea of right leaning audience capture is necessarily in conflict with it being a defacto pro-Trump endeavor. Maybe many of the writers have only been negatively polarized into being anti-left in their heart of hearts and will actually write in Joe Manchin for President, but they're acting as an echo chamber for the Trump audience and knowingly if they ever read their own comment section.
Yes, I am aware of those claims. You’ll note that article claims, for instance, that the hospital where the unfortunate woman was treated “was well-equipped to treat” her infection. That does not appear to be true: the federal government says the majority of sepsis cases in the hospital DO NOT receive appropriate care.
The Propublica piece says Georgia made abortion illegal “with few exceptions” without noting that among the exceptions are when there is no detectable fetal heartbeat and when a physician determines that a medical emergency exists.
Pretty far down in the article, it notes, “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman,” but Propublica didn’t let that get in the way of its provocative headline.
they actually have run some post-Dobbs horror stories... there was one recently too about the epidemic of closures of rural maternal delivery centers, which when read into, did seem to try to debunk the notion that this was driven by harsh abortion bans and restrictions and more about the economics of rural hospitals and maternity centers in general (low birthrates, etc) - but did pose a pretty sharp retort about the fact that such "pro life" states could invest more resources into subsidizing maternity care especially in underserved areas as part of being "pro life" versus just legislating unworkable bans that also have the impact of driving providers out of the field (let alone the impacts on actual women). This is one of the areas that TFP has "crossed over" the line so to speak on otherwise pushing non-stop "stuff that might want to make people vote against Democrats" :/
I think this comment gets at my mild disagreement with those who disagree with popularism. I'm not sure what you're advocating for here. When the discussion is focused on things that make Democrats worse off, do you think they should keep engaging on those subjects to keep the negative messaging in the news longer? I feel like that's a terrible idea. I remember debate classes and moot court instructions as a younger man, and the advice was always the same- when the discussion gets to your weakest area, make a quick comment and then try and steer the conversation back to your stronger points. You don't want to get bogged down reminding everyone of your weakest arguments.
I think your analysis of the FP gets at this. A lot of people that will read the FP won't be diehard lovers of their content on day one. I know, because I read them for a short while after seeing a link to an article I was interested in and signing up for a month's subscription. So a lot of the readers will just be normal people coming to the publication for a variety of reasons. If their media ecosystem never exposes them to anything counter to the political preferences of the editors then those readers understanding of the counter-arguments will be blunted. This seems self evidently true when looking at the impact Fox has had over the decades. Is the impact enormous? Maybe not, precisely because a lot of those readers will come into it with certain biases or preferences for what they want in the first place. But saying it won't have monumental impacts isn't the point. "Everyone would stop reading if they started to run hysterical articles about why Obamacare is horrible -- they wouldn't suddenly start voting for Trump." No one is saying they should do that. But covering health care at all is bad for Trump, even if they say his policies are correct! Just look at all the research on misinformation- even covering it at all strengthens it. Matt provided the example of SS privatization to address exactly this- talking about an issue that is unpopular, even when the framing is positive towards the unpopular position, is a bad idea that just hurts your politically. That's why FP doesn't cover health care- because talking about at all, even to say that Trump's policies are good, will remind people that they think the republicans are the worse party on heath care.
Your position seems to be that the impact of the popular "messages might be limited." You say "I don't think it'll be terribly effective to just blurt out "ROE V. WADE!" And I don't think talking endlessly about abortion will make voters forget their other concerns.". I don't think anyone argues that the impact will be enormous or that it is so easy to make people completely forget their other concerns. Only that it's far more likely to have some positive impact on your electoral chances than engaging repeatedly with unpopular topics would be.
The arguments against popularism always strike me as pretending that popularists are saying that their positions will lead to overwhelming electoral landslides and then saying that the argument is overblown and therefore wrong, but that's not what the argument is actually saying in my experience. Only that it's tactically smarter to talk about issues that are good for you and that you should avoid engaging in topics that are bad for you, and that doing so will have some impact on voters.
I can sympathize with a lot of what you're saying. My main complaint about popularism is that it's tactical advice masquerading as a grand theory of political strategy.
Perhaps popularism's proponents don't ever explicitly say "this will bring us huge victories." However, if they didn't think of it as a grand theory, it wouldn't be an "-ism"! Matt's entire project with popularism is to contrast it with "mobilization-ism," which is a different grand theory of winning elections. (Saying, roughly, that you win by being very hard left all the time.) I would say 90% of his strategic advice to Democrats is about popularism.
I view popularism, instead, as something akin to "show up for job interviews on time." It's obviously a useful piece of advice, but it'll only get you so far. No one would ever write an entire book about job interview strategy where 90% of it is about how to be punctual.
What would I suggest Democrats do instead? I'm not 100% sure, but I think the very first step is to develop a fuller theory of political persuasion. Such a theory would have to answer basic questions such as "what candidate attributes do voters care about?", "how do voters draw inferences about candidates' attributes?", "how credible is a candidate's statement likely to be?", and so forth.
Popularism falls short of this benchmark. It's kind of like a guide on how to be likable that argues "you say the types of things that likable people say." It's at once obviously true and also not really sufficient when considered as actionable advice.
I think it is a grand theory of how to win elections, but I think you're overstating how anyone claims that will happen. You're acting as if the proponents are claiming it will swing the electorate by huge margins, when the real argument is that the electorate is polarized and marginal impacts matter. Popularism helps you get a few points that you wouldn't otherwise get in ways that the grand mobilization strategy doesn't, and if elections are decided by just a few points than those small improvements have outsized impacts (if Dems win every swing state in an election cycle they end up with a Senate majority, even though the electorate only swung 3 points in a few elections). It's not that the GMS is too broad and doesn't get huge vote totals- the counterargument to it is that it's actually a myth and driving the mobilization in the way the proponents advocate doesn't actually move the needle. It's a messaging strategy that highlights unpopular things in order to try and drive unlikely voters who won't actually appear.
Again, it sounds like you're saying that your problem with popularism is that it doesn't drive double digit swings in election outcomes. Nobody claims that (at least not that I've seen), so that sounds like a strawman. So I'll go back to my question about you actually disagree with here. Do you think Dems should spend more time talking about unpopular ideas? Do you think they shouldn't highlight the things that voters care about that they would argue they can make a difference about?
"No one would ever write an entire book about job interview strategy where 90% of it is about how to be punctual." What if 90% of interviewees weren't showing up on time? I agree that popularism should be so obvious that you shouldn't have to say it, but democrats and republicans spend a significant amount of time talking about incredibly unpopular things to try and a) drive up the turnout of imaginary voters, or b) appeal to their base, and when people turn around and say "talk about things voters care about and that they support to win elections!" people show up and say popularism is actually bad. It WILL only get you so far, but at the moment both parties aren't getting that far at all because they're rejecting popularism in far too many instances.
I'm always perplexed by people who will say something is so obvious precisely while they're arguing against it. Why aren't you saying "popularism should be supported so I agree with the goal, but it's insufficient so we should do that AND this other thing that's not getting enough play"?
As I said, I *agree* with popularism as a piece of advice. I just think it's insufficient as a guidebook.
I tried to do precisely what you're asking for in my last point -- I'd like a fuller model of voting behavior. I think that by focusing on "popularism," we trick ourselves into believing that this one piece of advice (which would certainly factor into such a model) is a substitute for a model.
It's troubling to me (as it should be to anyone) that our discourse about electoral strategy is so superficial.
If you gave Bari Weiss truth serum and asked her, Is your intent with editorial choices at the FP to get your readers to vote for Trump, I am pretty confident the answer would be no. You can argue, and indeed do so persuasively in this piece, that an increase in trump vote share is a consequence of the sum total of the FP output, but I highly doubt it is their motivation/intention.
I dunno. Smart people have been known to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Weiss's principal motivations might well be, say, making a good living doing interesting work while providing the marketplace with what she views as good journalism that might not see the light of day if it were up to the mainstream elite media. Fair!
But perhaps helping to defeat the nominee of a party she strongly dislikes is for her an added value?
I think what is true is that in her mind she thinks she is doing something righteous. She is not cackling to herself and saying "I'm such a great political hack." But she definitely knows she is helping Trump. But the thing is that from her perspective, it's not that she is focusing on anti-woke issues in order to help Trump (hackery); rather, she is helping Trump because that is the way to advance the ball on anti-woke issues (which is ethical and good, since it's an abstract "cause" not a man or a political party).
Ironically for her, I think Trump winning would reinvigorate wokeness far more than defeat it, but I think we’ve already discussed this here at some point recently.
True. I guess what I'd say to this is that the "heighten the contradictions" mentality sometimes pops up on the right just as it does on the left. And sometimes what partisans (on both the right and the left) really want to do to their enemies is not to shrink their number, but simply to own them.
I think there is a tipping point where people shift from disaffected libertarian-contrarianism to rationalizing propaganda and that it occurs at a specific a dollar amount. I watched that process play out with Matt Taibbi in great detail. The endpoint is really the same for all social media celebrities; likes make right.
In the interest of poking the bear I think this says more about Matt than about Bari. Matt really does see himself as a partisan operative whose responsibility is partly to get democrats elected. He is making editorial choices with that goal in mind.
> If you gave Bari Weiss truth serum and asked her, Is your intent with editorial choices at the FP to get your readers to vote for Trump, I am pretty confident the answer would be no.
I agree with that. I also think Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald would say the same thing and mean it just as much. But I think that just tells you that people are really bad at sussing out their own motivations
The Free Press is frustrating b/c it has a number of people who write for it who I like (Kat Rosenfield, Emily Yoffe, Katie Herzog), but I fundimentally disagree with it's mission and think it's a bad influence on it's audience and these people.
That mission also makes me skeptical of even it's good articles, because I suspect it's always trying to frame everything in a light that makes the left look bad. It's like the opposite of listening to Michael Hobbs.
You make good points, and the issue about FP's targeting had gone completely over my head. But I still think a) the Democrats' culture war is profoundly self-destructive, b) it's still not too late for Harris to explicitly disavow some of her dumber past positions, and c) it's perhaps time for her to say something that doesn't sound like it was already repeatedly vetted by focus groups.
Interesting. I've done my very best to avoid all advertisements....not an easy task considering that I live in one of the swing states. I wish that every single Progressive Democrat in the country was required to watch one hour of those ads, as a kind of moral compensation for holding fast to their views. To me it seems so bloody obvious, but I guess I'm not a Progressive.
I have no idea what does or doesn't work. Absolutely none. I am however convinced that Trump is not the complete blithering idiot portrayed by the mainstream press.
Why? Even good campaigns have terrible ideas. There's zero evidence anti-transphobic appeals work in competitive elections. Because it's not a major issue to voters.
It'd be like if the Democratic Party message was actually focused on how Project 2025 would make it easier to fire government employees and replace them with Trump appointees. Sure, it'd be might be mildly unpopular, but nobody thinks that's as big deal.
Trump should be running ads on inflation, immigration, crime, and that's it. Again, the GOP did the same thing in 2022...and looked how well that worked for them.
An honest question: why do left-of-center pundits call Trump's tax cuts "tax cuts for the rich"? Marginal tax rates were cut across the board, the standard deduction was markedly increased (benefiting lower-income people disproportionately), and mortgage deductions and SALT deductions were limited (hurting higher brackets).
Higher-income taxpayers pay the lion's share of taxes, so any across-the-board tax cuts are necessarily going to put more money back into their pockets. Or is it the change in estate taxes, alternative minimum taxes, and corporate taxes? There were legitimate principled justifications for these, which one might disagree with, but simply calling them "tax cuts for the rich" strikes me as demagogic.
It is rare to find anyone honest about taxes. This is especially true of the TCJA, which was (on net) a very good Republican bill, though not the one I would have liked to see. It lowered federal taxes, which makes it a Republican bill. But it did so in a way that made the tax system better -- higher standard deduction, lower taxes for investments, lower taxes for corporations, maintained the system's high degree of progressivity.
If one proposed a change to federal income taxes that said "raise everyone's tax rate by 1 percentage point", the left would focus on the increase on lower-incomer people, the right would focus on how much more the rich will pay (in $$ terms) and the public would remain confused.
Taxing investments less than labor income is hideous. I find taxing capital gains less than the sweat of one’s brow more “morally offensive” than deporting every illegal.
I see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, I agree that there is something distasteful about taxing investment income less than income earned by sweat. But, on the other hand, it also seems distasteful that you have to somehow earn investment income on your sweat-income, or it will be gradually eaten up by inflation: and why should the government get to tax that?
And I understand the policy benefits of encouraging investment.
Or you could spend it instead of investing it. The reason that taxes on gains from investment have been lower than labor is that the former is more scarce than the latter, and so society incentivizes the investment to gain more of it.
But certainly you agree that you will be more likely to take a risk and engage in more investing (rather than being more likely to buy a bigger boat, for instance), if the tax code strongly encourages this. I don't know where the sweet spot is, but I don't think it's a simple question or morally simple.
I think the stock market is overvalued and I keep what wealth I have in demand deposits. My wife and mother and trust fund are all heavily invested in the stock market, I prefer safety first and want the liquidity to find a big case when I get one. My first priority is capitalizing contingent fee cases that come my way
This is the best argument for reduced taxation of capital gains, but it’s easily countered by phasing in (sharp cutoffs = bad) high taxes on capital gains, or doing it like we do marginal income taxes with steps.
Of course that sidesteps the idea of taxing unrealized gains, which is another can of worms altogether.
Don't invest and be penny wise and pound foolish then. People invest because of higher returns, not because of tax rates. Even if investment income is taxed at 50%, people will choose investments over getting 2% interest in the savings account if the market returns 10-20% consistently every year. Conversely, even if investments are not taxed, if the market returns 2%, people will choose the savings option because of the lower risk.
Unless lower corporate taxes (I would make it even lower at 10-15%) are paired with taxing capital gains the same as regular income, it's a terrible tax policy. I agree with the idea of simplifying the tax code and getting rid of most deductions but not at the cost of increasing deficits for the future generations (and future me).
By back of the envelope calculations with the current deficit and need to increase defense spending suggests we should be increasing effective tax rates around 5% on average. Or you know go back to what we tried to do in the 90s.
If that's the standard, then I think you're arguing that any across-the-board tax cut is a tax cut for the rich (and, I'm sorry, at that point it sounds like demagoguery to me). Rich people just pay so much more in taxes than others. Here's a good graphic, for instance - and this was after the Trump tax cuts.
Going by this graph, it looks like more than 50% of income is earned by the top 10%. Given that, I agree that across-the-board income tax cuts will usually disproportionately benefit the rich.
Bearing that in mind, maybe the standard should instead be whether a tax cut makes the tax system more progressive or regressive in net effect.
Here's an across-the-board tax cut that is *not* a tax cut for the rich.
A cut of 1% in the marginal rate for income from $50,000 to $100,000, combined with a hike of 1% in the marginal rate for income from $100,000 to $150,000. This is an across-the-board tax cut, because not one person pays more tax under the new proposal than under the old one, but the rich get precisely 0 benefit from it.
No one proposes things like this because people don't understand how something like this is an across-the-board tax cut. But anything that only reduces marginal rates and doesn't increase any marginal rates *is* a tax cut that is tilted towards the rich.
That's correct: Any "across-the-board" tax cut is a tax cut for the rich. Note that these are marginal rates for income brackets. If you cut the lowest bracket, the rich get a tax cut. If you cut the second-lowest bracket, the rich get another tax cut. If you cut the highest bracket, the rich get yet another tax cut, this one worth many thousands of dollars, but regular people do not get that tax cut.
I think you have a misunderstanding here. If all tax brackets were reduced by 2% (to simplify things), all taxpayers would receive a 2% tax cut. It's not like the cuts you get in the lower brackets somehow accumulate; they just apply to different quantities of your income.
I don't think you have a misunderstanding here, I think you are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes with sophistry.
If all tax brackets are reduced by 2%, then the rich receive a 2% tax cut on every bracket of income that they have, whereas a regular person would only receive a 2% tax cut on the lower brackets (covering a much smaller amount of income) since those are the only brackets that they reach.
Both the rich and regular people receive - all the else being equal - a total 2% reduction in taxes. The only difference is that 2% is a lot larger in nominal dollar terms for a rich person because that’s how percentages work.
It’s true that if you only gave the 2% reduction to the lowest bracket, then the poor would receive the full 2% and everyone else who has income subject to other brackets would receive less than that.
Because you could cut the lowest marginal rate from 10% to 5% (for instance), and the highest rate from 39% to 38.7% (for instance), and demagogues could just label that as a "tax cut for the rich," because it would still be the case that rich people got larger dollar cuts than poor people. At the same time, that seems like a tax cut in a progressive direction.
Real estate, AMT, and corporate tax cuts are tax cuts for the rich. No one who isn’t making a lot of money pays the AMT, for example. Now, you may think there are philosophical reasons to cut rich people’s taxes. OK, but does still mean you are delivering tax cuts for the rich.
If I argued against the death penalty, would you think it's legitimate to describe this stance as "reducing penalties for murderers"? How about assessing the merits of the arguments for the various tax code changes?
Removing a penalty for murder is in fact part of the death penalty. That isn’t its only function, but it is one of them. You don’t like the AMT or the estate tax. Ok, but these specifically target rich people. So if you argue for reducing them, you are explicitly offering tax breaks for rich people. You might as well own it and explain why reducing taxes on rich people will lead us into the glorious future if that’s what you support.
Eliminating AMT is not necessarily a tax break and would be good (my proposal is to eliminate all deductions and replace them with credits that are capped e.g. You get 5K of SALT taxes credited to your tax bill instead of a 10K max deductions or a maximum of 12K in mortgage interest. In this case you don't need AMT but rich people might pay more than they would have under AMT).
I think for a large percentage of people, who just believe the government should not be in the business of killing people outside of war, reducing penalties for murders *is* the point. They don't want the government killing people, *even* as a penalty for murder.
One of the primary arguments _for_ the death penalty is that it deters murderers. Punishment definitely is correlated with deterrence.
It turns out that the death penalty as a punishment actually has pretty bad correlation with deterrence, so it doesn't actually work that way well, but, most non-demagogues think the death penalty helps with deterrence VIA the mechanism of punishment, so removing it will reduce punishment of murderers which will "obviously"(albeit seeming incorrectly) reduce the deterrence of murder.
I guess technically they're not saying the critique is it stops penalizing murderers but that it stops deterring them, but since the proposed deterrence is via the mechanism of penalty, they seem close enough to me.
I don't think I understand this comment at all. I agree that people who want to get rid of the death penalty aren't motivated by a desire to reduce penalties for murderers. But what would be demagogic about pointing out that the effect is exactly that?
If Joe Biden were against the death penalty (I don't know what his position actually is), and Trump said, "Elect Joe Biden, and you'll be supporting decreased penalties for murderers," you don't think that would be demagogic?
Similarly, if you say, "Vote for Republicans, and you'll be supporting tax cuts for the rich," that is demagogic if Republicans also cut taxes for the non-rich and there were many rationales for the tax cuts that had nothing to do with giving money to the rich.
If marginal tax rates were cut across the board, then mathematically that strengthens the conclusion that they were tax cuts for the rich because the rich cumulatively benefit from every cut to every tax bracket, while working-class and middle-class people only benefit from the cuts to the lower brackets.
TCJA cost approximately $5T. It's benefits were spread fairly evenly across rich and poor. The standard deduction and tax bracket changes, however, expire next year. These had by far the largest middle class impact. The remaining tax cuts, largely for the rich, are permanent. It was intentionally designed as a bitter pill tax cut for the rich with a temporary sugar coating to make it more palatable.
> Higher-income taxpayers pay the lion's share of taxes, so any across-the-board tax cuts are necessarily going to put more money back into their pockets.
This is false. You could cut payroll taxes, gas taxes, tariffs, income on lower brackets and the effect would be progressive, or at least much less regressive than what Trump did. Cutting marginal tax rates on the highest income brackets is the opposite of an across-the-board cut.
True. But you could still do an income tax cut that gives the same amount to everybody, instead of more to the rich. The Republicans didn't do this because they didn't want to.
OK, but what do you mean by that? By increasing the standard deduction, the Trump tax cuts made it so a lot of people no longer had to pay taxes at all (their taxes were reduced by 100%). The reductions in marginal rates were pretty even down the line. But if you're only paying $1000 in taxes, a 100% reduction is less in absolute dollar terms than a 1% reduction if you're paying $200k in taxes.
As I posted above (with a graph), rich people pay way more in income taxes than others, and any significant percentage decrease (even if it makes the tax code more progressive) is going to benefit rich people more in dollar terms than poor people.
Leaving aside the changes to estate, corporate, and alternative minimum taxes, on a percentage basis I don't think it's clearly right to call the tax cuts "tax cuts for the rich" (or, at least, I need to be convinced otherwise, which is why I asked the question). And the estate, corporate, and alternative minimum tax changes had other justifications, like them or not.
Well, yes, there's always a "justification" for cutting taxes on the rich. But here's what I mean: If you cut the 10% bracket to 9%, everybody from the cashier at Wawa to Elon Musk gets about 11 extra bucks. If you cut the 37% rate, only people who make $600K get anything. That's a tax cut for the rich.
And if you raise income taxes by $100 per person, but made it increase by and additional $1 in each tax bracket, the argument would focus on the % increase instead.
Yeah, but that's because doing an across-the-board tax increase is a policy choice that some would disagree with. It's not a mathematical inevitability, and neither is anything you might want to do on tax cuts.
Because my taxes went up (thanks to the fact that I can no longer itemize my taxes thanks to the increased standard deduction), and I am middle class, and definitely not rich? But if you own a $5million dollar home and therefore your interest payments were high enough to make it easy to itemize, you got to reduce your tax bill quite a lot. People with enough money to be paying good CPAs got a big tax break.
I think it is quite interesting to note that along with the 2017 tax cuts, they also changed the way you define your withholding, making it way more confusing. This led to a huge number of people not withholding enough, which in turn led to a huge number of people being fooled into thinking they got more take home pay... until, of course, April 15th rolled around and the IRS said "Fuck you, pay me".
You can still itemize your deductions, but it is now more beneficial for you to take the standard deduction: in that one particular aspect, you got a tax cut. I don't understand your comment about the $5m home: $5m homeowners always itemized and continue to do so. I obviously don't know why your taxes went up, but you haven't explained that here.
Paying CPAs to get a better tax deal has nothing to do with the Trump tax cuts.
"...the standard deduction was markedly increased (benefiting lower-income people disproportionately)..."
Isn't this the opposite? If you let everybody deduct $10 from their income for tax purposes, then the person who's marginal dollar is taxed at 40% saves $4, while the person who's marginal dollar is taxed at 10% saves $1. Do I have this wrong?
This seems mostly right, but complicated by the fact that the rich mostly itemize their deductions and the poor mostly don't. Any increase to the standard deduction that isn't enough to actually make you stop itemizing doesn't help an itemizer at all.
It's what Splendric says, but he didn't say it strongly enough, IMO. Only lower-income people take the standard deduction. Single filers get only about $15k via the standard deduction. If you have a mortgage and pay more than $10k in state and local taxes, it's already worthwhile to itemize.
This isn't true. The number of people who took the standard deduction went up quite a lot after the DJTA. The dominant factor isn't income, it is interest rate payments. Someone who makes $300k a year, but has a 2.9% mortgage on a $600k house they bought in 2014 probably doesn't itemize.
It makes the tax code more progressive; it does not benefit high-income taxpayers; it is a way in which the Trump tax cuts are not just "tax cuts for the rich."
No. As a share of income the benefit greatly aids the bottom of the tax paying population because it exempts more of their income. It basically raises the threshold where people start paying income taxes. At the top end of the income distribution the change in the standard deduction increase is small enough that doesn't materially change the income bracket that marginal dollar is taxed at (and those people are itemizing most likely.) The bulk of their taxable income doesn't change its tax rate why at the bottom, because the brackets are more narrow, will benefit more (and there are more people that are going to shift income brackets down at the bottom of the distribution than at the top.)
Because the bulk of the tax cuts went to corporations, which were made permanent but the tax cuts for the individuals were temporary and are about to expire in 2025.
"But they don’t matter to everyone, especially not to people inclined toward a very cynical view of politics and the world."
I disagree with this. Imagine if the Democrats nominated a terrible person who nonetheless delivered on abortion and health care. Say a person 3 times as sleazy as Bill Clinton was.
I bet a lot of partisan Dems would support him, and it wouldn't even be cynical at all. Maybe some of the arguments would be cynical, but the support would not be. Because partisans care more about those deliverables than they care about character issues.
But to get to that person, it would have to be Blagojevich or Menendez, maybe Alcee Hastings, maybe Cornelius Gallagher? Trump is a toxic combination of grift and viciously authoritarian views, with a flavor of incuriosity and incompetence thrown in. "Three times as sleazy as Bill Clinton" grossly understates the problem. Maybe reanimated Andrew Johnson? For a mirror-image Democrat, you would need someone who was both a crook and a Leninist, and for all the faults of the Ds, that person would struggle to get a Democratic presidential nomination. Orban is the exact current equivalent. On those facts I think there are a fair few Ds who would say no.
If Trump were just 3x Bill Clinton levels of sleaze, that would look like just his personal petty corruption and buckraking -- treating the Secret Service as an ATM, steering contracts to friends and family, not selling his businesses before taking office, etc. Maybe some shady stuff about discouraging investigations of all this. If Republicans decided they'd tolerate that to ban abortion, that's one thing. It wouldn't be good.
But it wouldn't be a fundamental threat to American self-government. The *systemic* corruption is the problem with Trump: he tried to overturn one election, he's trying hard to rig this one before and after voting, and he'd do so with gusto and state power next time if reelected now.
The economy is the #1 issue for swing voters, and Kamala avoiding it makes it sound like she has no answer, and she's to blame, and she's trying to distract people on the topic they care most about.
If someone asks me if I beat my wife, and wife-beating is the #1 topic people care about, and I respond with "This election is really about democracy", people will be thinking "This guy is absolutely beating his wife."
The issue is that many low-information swing voters think "Trump is a loud-mouth jerk, but if I just mute his Twitter account, his massive business skill will solve this and I'll get all the good parts without the bad parts."
So you need to attack this head-on in some way. A few possible ways:
You could point out that inflation is a world-wide phenomenon, and Joe isn't to blame.
You could point out that we have: a higher stock market, lower unemployment, even lower black unemployment. Point out that you're beating Trump on every metric he boasted about during his term.
You could begin with a Clinton-esque "I feel your pain"-type answer instead of just hoping everyone will not remember the inflation. (Kamala's first answer in the debate was horrible on this topic.)
Or you could steal the tactic from the Swiftboat guys and just go after Trump's business skill. Remember when the draft-dodging cocaine user went against the war hero and somehow convinced the electorate that Kerry had no advantage in this area?
Is it really hard to convince people that someone who failed at casinos, steaks, airlines, schools, and was funded largely through his dad's tax fraud and a heavily edited TV game show is actually bad at business?
Fighting a must-win campaign by conceding the #1 issue swing voters care about seems like a recipe for losing.
I think it's false that Harris doesn't talk about the economy. She talks about it lots, has various policies.
I do think the D message on the economy is weak because so many prominent Democratic constituencies are anti-productivity and at times openly anti-growth, which in economy with relatively high rates/inflation is a problem, and voters can smell that problem. Some of the more right-wing leaning commenters on SB have got pretty angry Democrats loading up, say, a semiconductor fab bill with environmental, child-care, union and equity initiatives.
I take your point but also Trump’s tariff proposals and Harris’ price gouging proposals are testing quite well and I think most people here would agree that those things are anti-productivity and anti-growth.
Agreed. That's the problem with trying to match Trump pander for pander on economic populism. You can fool some of the people all of the time...
My sense is Harris feels (probably rightly) she has less space to operate with on economic matters because of the recency of the inflation burst. And so on the economy, she tends to come across as more of a reactive follower than a proactive leader: I'll see your tax free tips and raise you $25k in down payment assistance!
I think the swift boating thing has become a little overrated. Bush ran on 9/11 and the war on terror, he won on 9/11 and making sure we didn’t have another 9/11 because 9/11 was bad and we have to prevent another 9/11. 9/11.
Jesus that election was painful to watch, knowing Bush was going to win. At no point did I think Kerry had a chance. America didn’t want an anti war candidate, the wound was still too fresh, people were in ass kicking mode.
The fundamentals weren't great for Dems in 2004 but Kerry outperformed the fundamentals and came damn close to winning.
Flipping just Ohio would have changed the result, and Kerry was actually slightly leading in the final polls in Ohio. My personal recollection is that it was a nailbiter.
Also, the economy was pretty good, it was easy (in retrospect, too easy) to buy a house and Bush ran on an “America is good” message while Kerry was more strongly affiliated with the AmeriKKKa crowd.
In November 2004 US employment still had not recovered to its pre 2001 recession peak. If a Democrat ran under such a situation I doubt they'd've got away with calling it pretty good.
On the other hand, employment was recovering quickly. So maybe the vibes were good.
>In November 2004 US employment still had not recovered to its pre 2001 recession peak<
Voters care more about what they perceive the direction of the economy to be than absolute levels. Reagan won a giant landslide in 1984 amidst a backdrop of fairly elevated levels of unemployment. So, too, needless to say, did FDR in 1936.
There was ample Dem hopium observable that cycle. And then some. I never thought Kerry had much of a chance, either. By the autumn of 2004 the country was three+ years into an economic expansion (with low inflation), and Americans seldom eject incumbents when that's the case, at least if the incumbent party's only in its first term.
The problem is that honestly, Biden is NOT responsible for the great economic performance nor to blame for the excess inflation. Three is no time machine to have his Administration say anything about inflation except that the are sure J Powell will handle it or to unsay anything about "stimulating" the economy (mistakenly understood by the public as =inflation).
Harris could run on oil and gas production and tie that to support for Ukraine/NATO (tie to Trump's pro-Russia attitude) and the turn to support for nuclear power generation. She should definitely run on Biden bringing down the deficit and how that reduces interest rates and she plans to do even more (tie into housing)
Sometimes I think Harris so so paralyzed by the Democratic coalition of “The Groups” that she can’t say anything meaningful without risking massive backlash so a lot of the time she just says nothing, which is bad.
Meanwhile, Trump is just out there freewheeling and not giving a damn and people read that as “real”.
And I agree that we're so late in the process that it basically doesn't matter. We're just waiting for the votes to be counted.
But I wish just once Kamala got up and said: "You know how much Trump brags about his great stock market? His great job market? His low black unemployment? Then he should be voting for me because we did better on all three."
Then talk about how the 10% inflation in the US compared to the 10% in the UK, the 10% in Germany, the 8% in Mexico, etc.
And not "We passed a $200B bill to reduce inflation..."
There was a headline in Bloomberg this morning stating that Trump's stated policy proposals would bankrupt Social Security within six months. That strikes me as exactly the kind of media coverage that should be good for Kamala and exactly the kind of thing that should sink a candidate. But until Joe Rogan makes a big deal about it, no one who matters (in the election) will hear about it.
The headline changed since this morning, but this is the first paragraph:
"Donald Trump’s agenda for a second presidential term would drive Social Security to insolvency three years earlier and eventually slash benefits by nearly a third, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group estimated Monday."
What exactly is morally outrageous about Trump’s immigration policy? Are deportations morally outrageous? If so, how do we even have an immigration policy? You can’t have criminal justice if you defund the police and you can’t have an immigration policy if you let people break it without consequences.
There is surely room for disagreement over how many illegal immigrants we should deport. My answer is the least desirable 20-25%. However, there is nothing morally outrageous about wanting to deport all illegals, it’s just that deporting all of them is more principled than practical, and it’s probably better to bend the law than to have huge labor shortages. Is aggregate supply a fundamentally moral issue?
Trump’s race baiting is certainly distasteful. But how is it fundamentally different than the elder Bush’s Willie Horton ad? I find anti black face baiting far, far, far more distasteful than anti-immigrant rhetoric. By global standards, the US has treated immigrants pretty well and blacks rather poorly. Latinos, after all, find American alluring enough that they are coming here illegally. Blacks largely did not chose to come here and many whites have never wanted them to assimilate.
I don't know if I'd call it morally outrageous, but I do think, as you seem to acknowledge here, that Trump's immigration policy would inflict great economic cost on the people. A few who are blinded enough by xenophobia may accept that tradeoff, but I feel confident that most would not, and they need to be properly confronted about the tradeoff to this policy.
I think people (including me to be honest) assume Trump will back off if the backlash becomes significant. This is like Matt's nameless business leaders he sometimes references who don't believe Trump will actually go that far to begin with. Whereas there apparently isn't as strong a mechanism to influence democrats to step up enforcement. So voters would rather err on the side of being too harsh rather than being too lenient with the expectation that the former would be moderated.
I'd have more confidence in this if the executive didn't have so much existing power on this policy, and also tariffs, and that these are two things that Trump really cares about. I hope you're right, and there's certainly a part of my brain that thinks you'll be.
There are some groups of illegal immigrants (DREAMers) whom it would really be immoral to deport.
For others, it is less clear but still (at least) distasteful. At some point, for those who have set down roots in a community, maybe had kids (who are American citizens), have had a job for years in the US, it starts to look pretty close to morally repugnant to kick them out.
I think this is right. I caught some flak for opposing family immigration here the other day, but telling people, in advance, "we are bringing in people of working age and your family members aren't going to get a preference" is fair and humane in a way that saying "you've lived here for several years, your kids have gone to school here, all your friends are here, and we are kicking you out" is less humane.
In other words, the way to fix immigration is to set clear rules for the future and enforce them, even firmly, against border crossers and visa overstayers, while allowing those who have been here a long time and who have assimilated themselves into America to stay.
You didn't ask about bright lines, you asked how deportations [could be] morally outrageous, and he's giving you a reasonable answer. Deporting someone who's lived here for 10 years and created a family with American citizens would certainly cause pain to all parties involved (including his / her citizen relatives).
So that seems like a reasonable answer, and I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
The steelman would be that a lot of these people are only de-jure not-American, have little in the way of ties to their country of citizenship, and that the only purpose their deportation would serve and the real reasoning behind it is to diminish the nonwhite share of the US population.
It is moral outrageous to up root productive members of society and impoverish the rest of us becasue DJT doesn't like immigrants. But I agree that the proper take is to argue the economic damage not the morality of causing that damage.
Everything else aside, imagine that you are a naturalized American citizen of Mexican descent named Emilio Martinez, and you still speak with a Spanish accent. In Trump's America, you are pulled over/stopped multiple times a month by the police and/or ICE agents, who demand to see your proof of citizenship, because you look and sound like an Illegal Immigrant Who Must Be Deported.
You have done nothing to deserve this, and even if you agree with mass deportations in principle, I imagine it would get tiring after a while.
Here's how: I don't trust Trump. I don't trust him personally and his platform includes, more or less explicitly, making it so that his party can't lose elections. Freed of external constraints and with no internal conscience, why should you expect him to stop this policy at any sane point?
His coalition includes a bunch of people who want really horrific things. When the "selectorate" in a more authoritarian America is no longer swing-state voters but some combination of security services, right-wing media propagandists and armed men, are you sure they won't get what they want?
I'm not sure they will, by the way -- we don't have to get *too* alarmist to be much more alarmed than if someone like Mitt Romney were running on stepping up immigration enforcement.
Identifying millions of people as undesirable outsiders based on the circumstances of their birth, and running a campaign to round up and deal with them at scale, is a categorically evil activity. The undesirable identity is always chosen to seem like an obviously good idea to conservatives and not particularly objectionable to moderates at the time. You have to recognize the danger in the structure.
Denying an initial entry or deporting an overstaying tourist, maybe not. Deporting or refusing re-entry to someone with an established life in the US, yes probably.
I'm not saying I want to do it, but it's not at all based on the circumstances of their birth but rather on specific illegal actions they took and continue to take.
(That is, I agree Democrats' strong issues are stuff Democrats need to talk about to win, in 15 days. Even though, in practice, his mass deportation, federal workforce purge--personally overseen by Elon Musk--and military crackdown on blue cities will all merge into one grand horror that will render Trump the most hated, unpopular president in American history and the U.S. a pariah to the world, if enacted. But like you said, voters don't see that right now and don't want to hear it.)
In any case, there's a complication. Not everyone likes to talk about health care or abortion--and not just because they're emotive feelie-feels people who have no discipline. Some of them genuinely do not know much about those issues. Or their expertise lies elsewhere.
For my part, I'm a lowly space engineer. Health care and abortion, though important issues, are not my thing.
To the extent I'm "using my agency" and "steering the national conversation", it's toward expressing hope that for once in his life, Elon Musk specifically will fail in his goals on November 6.
It's not the easiest election-impacting argument in the world to make. In fact, it probably makes no impact at all. Though Elon is a net-unpopular figure in the country now, and he's certainly more well-known than he used to be, he's not a politician. Or rather, he has many of the benefits and power of being a politician with none of the accountability.
Hence, by making this argument, I'm likely not helping any Democrat win, least of all Kamala Harris (ironically, a space nerd and Moon fanatic by her own admission, but I digress). I'm just blarping my own horn and making a few Slow Boring dudes (most of us are dudes, let's be honest) irritated in the process.
For what it's worth, what I'm harping on, in these final 15 days, is this:
1.) Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a very smart person, thinks he is "using" Donald Trump by becoming his foul, VP-equivalent lieutenant. He thinks he and his goals, like Mars colonization, or Tesla sales, or anti-woke policy, are going to benefit long-term from that.
They will not. Donald Trump is not a man you "use", no matter how rich or smart you are. He uses you. Loyalty is a one-way street with him, not a two-way.
The instant Trump sees Elon as no longer useful to him, he will discard him like a wet rag. He will burn Elon, and everything he's built, to the ground.
More broadly,
2.) American space exploration will not survive being associated with corruption, violence, culture war, religious fanaticism, and racism. Elon’s dragging it, kicking and screaming, into that association.
If he does, and elects Trump, the instant anti-Trump forces grab an instant of power, they will not be politically able to support either him or any effort associated with him. He will tar the very notion of Moon and Mars colonization with the irremovable stink of Trump dictatorship. Likely, for good.
Elon cannot see either of those basic truths, because the world's richest man has chosen to be dim and dumb and stupid (and really, more accurately, vengeful, obsessed, maniacal, and brain-broke) in this contingent historical moment. Worse, if he can see them, he's likely accepted that trade, and has decided that democracy has to be accordingly broken for his dreams to be made real.
Either way, he's dragging my industry into unbreakable alliance with authoritarianism and thuggery. It's not acceptable and I will do what I can to stop it. Hopefully, by Harris beating them both in 15 days.
I don't make that argument because it sways voters. I make it because it's the right thing to do. Someone's got to say it, in public, before the moment of decision is here. And the only people who might listen to me are a tiny minority who don't follow much politics anyway.
Have to talk to people where they’re at, and out here in the world, you come from an an angle that you know is important to the listener, someone you know. We all out here have to play the person, as poker aficionados say, while people like Matt play the percentages.
You may notice I do not talk about abortion at all or healthcare much on my Substack because that is not where my self-perceived comparative advantage is.
At least PART of the reason to reject Trump is the reaction could propel us well to the “left” of center.
I really hate bringing this up since it has a long history of dividing Slow Borers, and it may even be ironic that I am bringing this up for a reason that will become self explanatory. But in all my suffering through commercials during watching football, it's clear that, in addition to immigration, inflation, or Biden, Republicans really think that trans issues are going to be bad for Democrats, because it's one that they are relentlessly bringing up all the time. I'm hoping that they're miscalculating here, and that the normie opinion is something close to "I don't want to hear about this at all, why do you keep mentioning it, GOP?", but it's clear that they don't think that's the case from their actions. I could be quite content it if is a bad issue for Democrats that should be avoided, but is it?
Well the issue is that on some things (women’s sports, youth medical transition) the Republicans are closer to being right on the merits than Democrats are.
What are the mainstream Dem positions on those issues? My understanding is "throw up our hands" (slightly worse than the R position but nbd to me) and "be very cautious about it but don't make it impossible" which is pretty good?
Yes, avoiding those issues helps Democrats electorally. Why raise the salience of a niche issue that divides your coalition and reduces your electoral popularity?
I would propose thinking about it this way: normie opinion being "I don't want to hear about this at all, why do you keep mentioning it, GOP?", is fully compatible with "is a bad issue for Democrats that should be avoided," because the fact that anyone even knows that the issue exists or has high salience is basically 100% down to Democrat-coded activism. The Democrats' only real line of affirmative attack here is "The Republicans are weird to care about this so much, and their tenor and policies are mean-spirited" but there's no credible way to claim that the Democrats don't have basically the normative position that the Republicans accuse them of having, nor I expect would making such a claim be considered acceptable, intra-party.
In view of that, keeping mum to signal that it's low-salience to the Democratic party seems like the optimal play.
I think trans might be kind of like abortion in that most people don't really want to think about it, are kind of mushy about it, but if forced to pick an extreme they tend to side with one party's view over the other.
It failed as an issue in 2020, it failed as an issue in 2022, it's failed when they've tried to attach it in every referendum even quasi-related to it, like abortion ones.
People are mildly to the right of Democratic policy on some transgender issues, but also don't really care about it parts of this comment section and every centrist who lives in a D+50 city do to such a great extent.
Right, and if anything, the salience of the issue has actually cooled because neither Biden nor Harris nor really any prominent Dems seem like zealots about it. They're taking the generic libertarian-ish position that it's about freedom and healthcare.
It's like Matt has said on other issues: you *can* attack someone on it, but if you strawman their position too much, you lose your credibility.
Trans issues definitely seems like an animating issue for many people. In my pretty liberal town I have seen a couple of "Democrats for Trump" signs which seemed sort of strange and then I noticed they also have signs about Trans related issues.
It seems like an area where some people's "normie" non-political answer to some of the questions isn't really one that Democrats love.
Sometimes when people are really passionate about it it can seem off-putting to people who are less immersed in discourse. But if you force people to give an answer on sports teams or bathrooms or children getting surgery you get a mixed bag of responses.
I think some people might agree with Republicans but also think it is kind of "weird" how often they bring it up.
One thing that pops up in the polling is that people tend to not want much to happen. They don't want to require/ban/make it illegal to do things a lot of the time. There seems to be a sense that people want things to just sort of work out or go away in a way that doesn't require them to make a hard line decision.
The Republican reasoning is there's a sort of young man who's not politically engaged but who seethes when he sees transwomen in his Tinder feed, and they're trying to motivate him to get off his couch on election day.
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.
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.
>Any discussion of health care tends to favor Democrats because (except in the immediate wake of the ACA passing) most people are fundamentally morally aligned with progressives on this issue.<
And I strongly suspect most people are fundamentally *financially* aligned with progressives on this issue, too. Even quite high-salaried persons are pretty vulnerable to the costs associated with catastrophic illness.
"And I strongly suspect most people are fundamentally *financially* aligned with progressives on this issue, too. Even quite high-salaried persons are pretty vulnerable to the costs associated with catastrophic illness."
I honestly don't think most well off people with insurance think about this until it happens to them. If they're happy with their benefits and not spending much out of pocket routinely, I doubt catastrophic illness risk would make them want to tear up their health insurance and reform things.
But what if you lose your job? It's not so bad now, but in the pre-ACA world it was absolutely something that well-off people would worry about.
COBRA coverage was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Two generations of well-off people haven’t had to worry about losing coverage when leaving a job.
Lol COBRA. Sure that's great if you want to spend four figures on your monthly premiums while you're unemployed.
COBRA is definitely not as cheap as the ACA plans, but
1) You could wait a bit and buy COBRA retroactively if you need it
2) It still insures against catastrophic risk.
Point 1 is definitely the benefit of COBRA. Where else can you make a cost/benefit decision on insurance retroactively?
4 figures a month is just normal for a family plan if you aren't getting subsidies.
If you are unemployed under ACA, then you are getting subsidies if not Medicaid. COBRA has value if you leave your job to become self-employed, but not if you simply lose your job.
I was on COBRA, and it was very affordable, because my company had terrible health insurance. :)
And it’s only good for 18 months at that.
“Lol COBRA”
It predated ACA by a quarter-century. The problem you posited did not exist.
I don't think you understand either how COBRA worked or how ACA changed things.
I spent six months as a post-doc in Australia. The Australian government required me to prove I had health insurance, and I couldn't buy into Australian health insurance, so I had to go on COBRA. It was nearly $1000 a month as a healthy 28 year old man.
I'm semi-surprised COBRA worked for you. I would assume employer-based (or COBRA-based) coverage by US carriers is generally valid if one is a tourist, but I'd have guessed it normally doesn't cover a person who moves abroad for work or school.
Fortunately, I didn't test it by having a medical emergency during the time. I don't recall if I told the insurance company that I was going to be overseas, and the Australian government just needed me to show a certificate saying I had private insurance. I don't recall if they checked to verify that the insurance was valid while temporarily working in Australia.
Did you look elsewhere?
I didn’t even know where to begin to look. Obamacare hadn’t been passed yet so I didn’t know where to buy private insurance outside of an employer, and since I was only in Australia for six months I couldn’t buy Australian insurance.
>I honestly don't think most well off people with insurance think about this until it happens to them.<
I agree they may not think about it with great frequency. But if it's a campaign issue that's attracting significant coverage, they're likely to...uh...think about it! Most affluent, PMC Americans are sufficiently smart or well-educated to be aware of the principal threats to their well-being, and among these are uninsured health disasters. It's perfectly understandable why Democrats tend to outperform Republicans on the issue of healthcare coverage.
>I doubt catastrophic illness risk would make them want to tear up their health insurance and reform things.<
Who said anything about "tearing up their health insurance"? I just think people in the main oppose big changes to the status quo on healthcare—including cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. Democrats could indeed take a political hit if they won a trifecta and embarked on a round of major reform (as they did in 1994 and 2010). The status quo seems to satisfy most Americans. Which is part of the reason they favor the Democratic Party's approach: Democrats want to defend that status quo.
The main reform that needs to happen now is getting rid of Medicaid block grants and administering it federally to get around non-expansion states.
I think the original idea of Medicaid was to insulate it from political meddling and rollback by getting the states bought into it, and it's turned out *exactly* the opposite. Eliminating Medicaid entirely and providing the same coverage to the same people through Medicare would be much better, much more politically sustainable. (Not to mention more efficient.)
Yeah. I'd repeal Medicaid outright and replace it with a federal program that includes a public option if if were up to me. Would be expensive for the federal government, sure, but on the other hand state governments would be able to slash their budgets significantly.
Yeah, I don't think anyone is talking about "ripping up their health insurance" if by that you mean going for some Medicare for all thing. What PMC folks like is lots of government back stop and rules that keep them safe from that catastrophic risk --- no penalties for preexisting conditions, keeping your kids on your plan until they're 26, no cuts to Medicare and Medicaid so your parents aren't wiped out by their costs, etc.
But you have to keep your job to keep your insurance. If you get sick, that can be tough. If you have a hundred grand in liquid assets, you don’t have too much to worry about paying for cobra, but having to pay cobra and the mortgage and basic expenses if you get sick and can’t work extends precarity needlessly far up the income ladder.
One of my parents got cancer at 55, had to leave their job because of being too sick to work, and tried to afford COBRA so they could continue cancer treatment.
It didn't go well.
There’s no individual mandate anymore, so Trump can easily strip away the exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion while keeping guaranteed issue. The gymnastics that went into writing Obamacare always made it vulnerable to future changes.
“ Even quite high-salaried persons are pretty vulnerable to the costs associated with catastrophic illness.”
How so? The out of pocket max is likely a few $1,000 which shouldn’t be a problem.
That is in the post-ACA world. But the Republican Party's goal is to take us back to the pre-ACA world.
>How so? The out of pocket max is likely a few $1,000 which shouldn’t be a problem.<
It shouldn't be a problem because of laws passed by Democrats.
No one has a lifetime guarantee of employment with health benefits. If they were to lose their health insurance, they would indeed be quite vulnerable. A battle with cancer could easily set a person back a couple of million or more. Once upon a time we lived in a country where it was quite common for people to be uninsurable. Then along came the ACA (and before that, Medicare).
Democrats don't want to weaken or repeal these programs. Many Republicans wish to repeal and voucherize them. Hence the advantage enjoyed by Democrats on this issue.
The Movement Conservatism approach to healthcare—glibertarianism—appeals to about three percent of the population.
"If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy." -- David Frum
He was right! About enough conservatives, anyway.
I don't understand why American conservatism is like this while (for example) the British Tories got walloped in an election recently and peacefully left. It strikes me as an important question, really one of the most important questions.
>>I don't understand why American conservatism is like this while (for example) the British Tories got walloped in an election recently and peacefully left<<
Part of the reason is that conservatives in the US believe their views aren't just better for society, but are constitutionally legitimate in a way that liberal policies are not. This view was bubbling up long, long before the arrival of the MAGA movement. For years I've been reading conservatives opine that the United States Constitution as properly construed prohibits most liberal/left policies and mandates conservative ones. In other words, many people on the right in America believe the left doesn't possess a legitimate authority to govern, because the policies they'll implement aren't allowed by the Constitution (again, as properly construed—by them!).
If you believe that your political opponents are essentially engaged in an effort to subvert the constitution, it's not much of a stretch to arrive at the place where any and all tactics—including violence, including elections stealing—are justified to gain or hold onto power.
As to why this dynamic and over-arching belief system have become entrenched among American conservatives I cannot say, though it may flow from simply religiosity. I think it's fair to observe that millenarian, evangelical Christianity is a lot more common in the United States than in other wealthy democracies.
Isn't the answer Donald Trump? Whatever McConnell's other faults he didn't support this. Basically all Republicans besides Donald Trump would have left office more peacefully.
Yeah I agree that's a huge part of it. But the other part of it is that it wasn't just crazy Uncle Donald being dragged out of the White House -- he had support. He could assemble this mob, get it retroactively legitimized by the RW media afterward, keep the party's loyalty.
One guy's personal pathology is more important than it should be, but why is it getting this reception? (He ran for president before btw, in 2000 through the Reform Party, and it was such a complete flop that no one really remembers it. Something changed!)
The percentage of uninsured peaked at 16% in 2010 and was slightly less than 8% in 2023. I don't want to downplay the importance of ACA to those who had pre-existing conditions but it did not solve the main issue with US healthcare, which is cost. That requires fundamental changes in both regulation and supply side reforms, which neither side is running on.
Or just regular illness and procedures that are absurd. I'm early 30s and have a very good job in biotech, and I think I almost fainted when I got ambulance bill for $8000 *after* insurance. It was a non-emergency transfer from one ER to another with the service I needed but had to take an ambulance to show continuous care otherwise I'd have to start over and wait another 10 hours in that ER while in severe pain, 10 miles total distance, casual drive, I was chatting with the tech the whole time. Then a doctor who spoke to me for less than 60 seconds charged me for 2 hours of time, that was $500 after insurance. Then the hospital charged me for a 'room', $6000 which was actually just a bed in the hallway of the ER, just on the other side of the monitor of some nurse working on a computer all night. All my appeals got denied. And this was at a hospital in Lake Forest IL, median home price $1m. Nothing to do with wealth. Healthcare sucks
I don't want to be utterly fatalistic two weeks out, lord knows the polls could miss and we are all coconut pilled on November 6th. But in Matt's spirit of pre-logging a take for the sake of unbiased accuracy, I think if Trump wins, especially if he wins the popular vote, we are going to get a thousand think pieces and takes about America's latent blood thirst for authoritarianism, when I think it really is as simple as American's being directionally closer to his positions and vibes on the Economy, on Immigration, and on Foreign Policy. People will spill so many words on what this means when I really think it can be summed up in the mind of a low information swing voter as "eggs cost more" and nothing deeper than that. That is both promising, in the sense that voters are more elastic than we assume, but also frustrating in that it requires democrats to be consistently better than they have proven capable of lately.
"I actively want the authoritarian asshole" and "I don't care that the candidate is an authoritarian asshole, I support him because muh grocery prices" are distinct positions to be sure, but that doesn't make the latter *admirable*, and if our moral framework is consequentialism, the two positions collapse into the same thing.
I've said it before on this Substack and I'll say it again: I became an American citizen as an adult, which means I had to study for and take the citizenship test. One of the questions and answers I had to memorize was: "What does it mean that America is a nation of laws? No one is above the law/Everyone has to obey the law." The naturalization ceremony was a really emotional moment for me, I was proud to become an American.
And now I'm being told that only pointy-headed elitists care about trifles like "the rule of law" or "democracy," while red-blooded salt-of-the-earth Real Americans(TM) are happy to kiss the feet of any Caesar who promises them cheaper groceries and gasoline and illegal immigrant deportations.
It makes me sick.
In my lifetime, I've watched several "factions" within my family realign politically:
- The immigrant generation being super pro-America and big believers in the American Dream whose brains were slowly poisoned by right-wing talk radio and now engender a specific hatred of recent immigrants because "we did it the right way"
- The generation under them, benefiting from the aforementioned American Dream becoming Reaganites and voting Republican because they don't like taxes
- That same generation boomeranging back to viscerally anti-Trump voters
- Flag-waiving blue-collar Democrats who retired in front of FOX News and turned into angry, paranoid anti-Obama Republicans
- Lifelong Democrats / liberals who just support liberal causes and aren't sufficiently engaged with the media to notice or care about woke brainworms
Personally, I'm the only person in my household who was born in the US, so I can literally see how important the Rule of Law is when I look at the certificates from the Department of State that permit my family to exist here. But the trend I see in my family is that the pro forma flag-waivers who were outwardly "proud to be an American" tended to be sucked into the FOX News Trump vortex, while the "wouldn't be caught dead wearing an American flag apron" are all now anti-Trump rule-of-law people.
I strongly dislike the caricature of Real Americans (TM) as the ones driving around in jacked-up trucks stealing Harris signs (which is absolutely a thing that happens around my neck of the woods) and am sad that they really do seem to want an authoritarian asshole to smite their imagined enemies and restore them to prominence that never existed. But I also see plenty of people who are discovering that they are, in fact, proud Americans because they are suddenly afraid of losing their country.
To which I'd add: There have always been disengaged, low-information people too short-sighted to care about freedom and self-government. What's new in America is that there used to be *elite* structures -- the media, the parties, community groups and mass-membership orgs -- that kept that opinion from dominating, that cajoled or convinced or shamed people out of voting on it or running by pandering to it.**
And now all of those restraining institutions have been gutted. Local news is gone, parties (especially the Republican Party) are hollow shells, America is a "bowling alone" society where most people's days are dominated by hours of passive video consumption.
The termites have eaten the load-bearing timbers and now democracy is swaying.
** Sure, it wasn't perfect, Huey Long was popular in the 1930s -- but it took the Great Depression to make that happen. Now, the economy is roaring and Trump is more popular than Long was.
Agree with everything you said, PLUS nowadays we have social media, which seems to bring out the worst in human nature.
Nothing has made me more sure that the vast majority of people are p-zombies than social media.
It’s not great!
Isn't deportation of an illegal immigrant the law?
I’m more worried about Democrats reaction. I’m already seeing the predictable takes of “Harris is losing because she is not left wing enough! Or Harris is losing because she won’t stand up for Gaza!” just bad, dumb takes based on activist fantasy.
This is why if Trump is to win, I hope to god he just wins the popular vote outright. It will be so much harder for the left to argue that the problem was insufficient progressivism if you just lose straight up, something Democrats have not experienced in a non post 9/11 fever dream context since *checks notes* THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY EIGHT(!!!!!!).
I genuinely think you're making a mistake if you think the left will care about harsh realities like a failure to win the popular vote in x years when making their arguments and considerations for the future. It took a very long time to get Labour members in the UK to vote for a centrist despite ample evidence of the failure of their political project at getting politicians that amped them up into power.
That would be a tremendously sad day for our country.
Democrats have been losing the House of Representatives way more often since the 90s and have become somewhat more socially progressive since then, so I don't see how it would change with one relatively close election, popular vote slightly to Trump or not. A real life example of this happening would be Democrats after three GOP pres. terms (1992) or Republicans after five Dem pres. terms (1952). But that just isn't how 2024 is going to be read by either party.
And when the backlash comes for Trump and he's super unpopular, these left wing fantasies may well last into the Democratic primary in 2028.
When leftist delusion was at its absolute peak we ended up with Biden. I think the Democratic establishment is fairly good at paying lip service to the left (and even picking up some of the less awful ideas) without actually making decisions based on their flawed thinking.
I think the lesson will probably be 1. Inflation worse than unemployment
2. Don't lose a war on your watch.
3. Pandemics are too important to leave to the Public Health people.
If Trump enacts half his economic agenda we could get a 2nd test on point 1 very quickly.
Point 2 won't be all bad if it leads less foreign adventure.
And point 3 is probably just correct.
I disagree with describing the Afghanistan withdrawal as losing a war, and I worry that how it was framed in the media is going to discourage politicians from ending military commitments.
That was the point of how it was framed in the media.
I'm worried you're too optimistic about the "don't lose a war" point. It isn't often that we start a war and lose it all within one 4-year term. There's Bay of Pigs, then you've got to go back to, what, War of 1812?
So the real lesson there isn't to avoid adventurism, it's that when you're bogged down in an unwinnable war, you should always just kick the can down the road to the next guy.
Lincoln’s reelection did not look good until Sherman took Atlanta
Obama could have wound it down at the beginning of his second term
Honestly, his first. Killing Bin Laden would have been a great beginning to the end.
I agree that that's the optimistic take, which is why I wrote it won't be "all" bad "if" it leads to less adventurism.
Point 1 definitely seems like the biggest missed opportunity for Democrat messaging — “tariffs means higher prices, Trump’s irresponsibile deficit spending proposals will make inflation higher!” — this doesn’t require anyone to adopt terminal values different than those they already hold.
I think that is way way too complex and economically wonky for the uh cognitive level of the voters who are still undecided at this point in the game
I mean maybe, but Harris tried this in the debate(called it, accurately, a sales tax) and he just said "foreign companies pay this".
The Afghanistan war can be divided into two missions -
1. The war on terrorism (Al Qaeda) - a huge success.
2. Nation building and installing a US friendly government as an alternative to Taliban - an unmitigated disaster.
Biden as President is responsible for neither. 1 happened under Bush and Obama. The surrender on 2 happened under Trump when his administration signed a treaty with the Taliban, excluding the Afghan government (something that I'm supportive of).
Republicans can’t all be so stupid as to miss the arrow from across-the-board tariffs and mass deportation of workers to higher prices. Everyone wants inflation for the right reasons, they just hate seeing it for the wrong ones.
I think the mechanics of tariffs are absolutely above the pay grade of habitual partisan voters.
When i've seen Trump supporters acknowledge that tariffs are paid by consumers, their ready answer is "well it's a good thing that imports will be more expensive so that people buy American made things instead", which, ok... presumes there's a ready American made product to purchase instead, for one, and completely misses the impact this will have on supply chains regardless, stuff that is "made in America" may still be impacted by the price push down if any supply input to that product was tariffed. And there is nothing stopping American manufacturers and sellers from just raising the price point on American made goods either to match the tariff priced foreign imports if they see people are still buying - this is a lot of what happened with inflation, corporations did raise and keep prices high mostly because consumers continued buying things anyway, so why lower the price until they have to?
Re. 1 - It depends on the level of unemployment vs inflation. If you look at 2012, unemployment was 5.6% which is not low, but not terrible. If unemployment had been reached what inflation hit under Biden, then I think Obama would have lost as well.
Of course the problem is that while I don't believe the most apocalyptic predictions about a victorious Trump canceling future elections, I do absolutely think they will take whatever steps they can to put future elections on as unlevel a playing field as possible. There would be many people in the new administration who have power and who openly admire Viktor Orban.
I think this is one of the more insidious parts of WW2 being a foundational part of most western nations national myths. The long shadow of Hitler's rise to power (and appeasement but thats a separate matter) means people frame democratic backsliding as the precursor to an imminent Enabling Act. When this doesn't happen people start to dismiss the claims that someone is a threat to liberal democracy as bunk because it didn't come to pass. When the insidious reality is you don't need anything as dramatic to undermine democracy: standard gerrymandering, voter suppression and other methods of democratic backsliding are a real threat. The rhetoric that Trump is going to end democracy probably does more harm than good under this while a culture more attuned to democratic backsliding would be receptive to moderate claims.
As an aside its also why I suspect some of the Project 2025 claims are counterproductive, the average voter inherently isn't going to believe that Trump is going to carry out trans genocide or whatever the front page of Reddit claims. But people would believe that Trump will end abortion and medicare and so on.
Is this really our moral standard now? "Well this guy isn't going to be literally as bad as Hitler, so that means it's ok"? Is this how far we've fallen in the world's oldest democracy?
WTAF?
My point is less "its bad as Hitler or its nothing" but rather that the cultural memory makes people frame it and perceive others framing as being comparisons to Hitler. Which doesn't really work because he likely isn't on the trajectory of Hitler and people know this and discount it. When the trajectory he is on, that of Orban or worse developing world flawed democracies is incredibly concerning in of itself. Slow Boring avoids this and correctly frames him as a serious threat to democracy in ways he actually is but a lot of places don't.
But also, Hitler held elections. They were rigged and fake but they were held.* Putin holds similar elections now for similar reasons. It takes an alternative legitimating ideology to simply dispense with elections entirely, as under Communism or, back in the day, the divine right of kings. Trump doesn't have that, he just has his cult of personality.
There will be elections regardless of who's in power, the question is just whether they'll be honest.
* for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_German_parliamentary_election_and_referendum
Republicans = Nazis, America is just more resistant to Nazis now than Weimar Germany was.
Trump won't cancel any elections. He doesn't need to. Assuming he wins and is still of sound mind in 2028 (a very big assumption, to be sure), he might well be able run the country as an old school political boss/kingmaker.
I could be wrong but he doesn't seem to have an interest in politics or running the country beyond staying out of jail. I'm guessing that if he wins, he'll let JD Vance do all the work while he takes credit for all the successes and throws him under the bus for the failures.
Probably true. I'm just not super interested in parsing the difference "pro-strongman" and "pro-strongman if it means cheaper eggs". Especially since it won't actually mean cheaper eggs.
I think understanding the difference is pretty important if you want to avoid strongmen (even though both are bad).
Fair enough, although I doubt there are any truly principled believers in strongmanism. It's always a means to an end.
There is definitely a segment of (male) voters who have erections over Trump’s face pasted on Rambo’s body draped in the American flag. True authoritarians. Probably 30-40% of the Republican party at this point. They don’t care about the price of eggs, they want a ”strong leader” who will make bad people suffer (immigrants, liberals, the childless etc) regardless of the costs.
Agree it is not a terminal value for anyone (even committed monarchists are not out here saying “well I disagree with his whole platform but he’s authoritarian and I’m a single issue voter on that issue”) but I do think there are people for whom, controlling for “generally agree with views” think it is a positive vs a negative. Tendency to like a guy who can “break the rules and really get things done” is not evenly distributed I don’t think.
I mean when it comes to building housing, rail transit, nuclear reactors, and computer chip factories, I want a guy who can break the rules and really get shit done!
See I want a guy that can build a deregulatory / YIMBY coalition to *repeal* the rules, not an executive who simply breaks them.
Definitely agree. I am exceedingly confident that if trump actually implements his insane Tarriff war he will be at 2008 George Bush levels of popularity.
The best reason to expect a real authoritarian play from Trump II is how unpopular the actual consequences of this agenda would be. He (let's be real, he's not leaving as long as he's alive, whatever the constitution says) and his party would get thrown out of office handily. Given that he and they won't accept that, the answer is to rig the elections.
Explain to me how he just doesn't leave? POTUS 48 directs the secret service to evict him at Noon Jan 20, 2029. What other option is there? That person becomes president by operation of law there's nothing Trump could do any more than you or I at that point.
Well, a few things I think:
a) He very well might be dead (or too unhealthy) by 2028 and it’s moot. 78 is pretty old.
b) Allowing an election to take place involving other candidates, letting your own party consolidate behind one of them, and then at the last minute saying “whoops, no” would not work. He’d be out on schedule, with or without some disruption.
c) The play is instead to come up with some fig leaf — “it only bans >2 consecutive terms” perhaps — stand for election again, and have a compliant Supreme Court bless it.
This of course depends on getting enough elite support to ignore the plain meaning of the law, but if he has that support it won’t matter much that the outcome is illegal on a fair reading.
I've seen this concern about SCOTUS and "Consecutive Terms" so many times now and I honestly feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Not only is there literally zero chance that 5 SCOTUS justices just read past the "two," the plain unambiguous language of the statue contemplates a maximum time in office of 10 years! "...no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once." Such a rule would be utterly superfluous if there was not a hard cap on how many years you can serve in the ordinary course, as opposed to merely a cap on consecutive terms alone. Law is not just Harry Potter where you just say some magic words and get to play SIMS Politics while wearing robes.
It’s one thousand percent immigration and inflation. Trump is able to exploit those issues more relative to a baseline R because he doesn’t mind lying through his teeth and saying they are much worse than they are, perhaps, but those are the issues people are voting on, like, Globally. I don’t know how you can look at Europe and not see that immigration is Issue 1, 2, and 3 for a lot of folks.
Trump's lies on immigration are less damaging and easily refuted (just over half of potential Trump voters believe the Springfield story) compared to the magnitude of the actual failure on immigration.
Why not? Men tend to be more negative about immigration.
It’s inflation, immigration, and the feminization of the Democratic Party.
It’s definitely interesting (though it’s an increase of an earlier and pretty long lasting gender split in the USA)! What’s your explanation, and is it in conflict with immigration and inflation being the core issues driving the majority of Trump supporter votes?
I think you once again conflate the Democratic party with far left fringe activists
I think it's a distinction without a difference if Americans are willing to support a fascist that much because of the price of eggs.
I think the point is just to say it would be a much harder fight in a cosmic sense if this Americans were trending toward trump broadly for Stephen Miller ideological reasons, not because Trump has positioned himself closer to the Median voter than the flagrantly unpopular incumbent party has. The details and solid policy/governance matter.
"Conversely, if you look at a publication like The Free Press, part of what makes it such a clever pro-Trump op is that they don’t cover the health care stakes in the election with a conservative spin — they don’t cover it at all."
This is, without a doubt, the most parsimonious and accurate description of The Free Press. I've previously said something to the effect of "I'm glad they exist because media bias, etc." and while I don't begrudge them their existence, I think that was a bad take.
Remember when Trump leaked Israeli intelligence to Russia? If Trump does something like that again in his second term, I'm really curious as to how the FP and Dailywire will respond.
Hand wringing, much, much handwringing.
Blame Biden and Hillary
The dailywire existed at the time, but I can't find any mention of Lavrov.
It's a great example of how I've long held that all media is inherently biased by the very decision of what they decide to cover and not cover.
On the same note, every article and segment is of finite length. The decision of what to include and what to cut is fundamentally a subjective choice that is going to involve bias.
objectivity is an establishment delusion. the only truth is the location and vector of every particle. which particles you care about and which heuristics you use to describe them are necessarily subjective
So, about that.
It’s a useful heuristic though
Jumped out at me as galaxy brained and unfair, interestingly. People should be allowed to criticize silly stuff on the left without being derided as a Trump operative. If “common sense on social issues, free speech, and support for the Israel side of the Gaza conflict” are Republican coded that’s the fault of
Democrats, not TFP.
Why should someone be allowed to say whatever they want without people saying things about what they're saying?
Well you would say that because you are obviously a Chinese spy whose posts are REALLY intended to undermine America.
I agree - people should be allowed to criticize silly stuff on the left without being derided as a Trump operative. No argument here. This current publication does it all the time, and is not derided as a pro-Trump op because it also covers over topics.
What gives TFP a whiff of disingenousness is that despite its stated goal to revive "old-school journalism values," its "criticize silly stuff on the left" beat basically overwhelms everything else (to be fair, they do run articles that e.g. stick up for the rights of Muslim NGOs targeted for debanking by the US government on Israel's say-so - which should also not be a partisan issue, per se). As MY says, "silly stuff on the left" is not comprehensive of all political issues. What TFP is choosing to not cover are not obscure issues: e.g. "what will Trump do on tariffs?" or "what will Trump do on taxes?" are pretty obviously pertinent questions. And yet, crickets - because describing those positions accurately would weaken the editorial line of "Trump is the lesser of two evils because lol silly stuff on the left."
I feel similarly about TFP's constant "silly stuff on the left" coverage to how I feel about constant "Trump is a threat to democracy" coverage. Both are referencing actually-existing phenomena, but when a publication covers one to the exclusion of basically everything else, I think it's reasonable to ask what it is they're really trying to do. The answer is "create a discourse community," which is a fine goal, but it's also cool to be honest about that, especially if part of your premise is criticizing mainstream publications for also creating a discourse community.
yep, i'm (still) a (reluctant sometimes) TFP subscriber. I do still appreciate the takes and stuff but the right wing bias cannot be denied. Even the "satirical" TGIF column is heavily slanted on finding "absurdities from the left" almost exclusively - and i have a few times at least detected a misrepresentation or exaggeration of the original facts or story linked - and they occasionally pepper in something mildly snarky or critical about Trump or Republicans their comment section erupts in total offended outrage with threats to cancel lol. So much for the posture this is a "free thinking non-partisan" audience ;p
I wondered for a while it insisted on placing such a heavy thumb on the anti-left stuff then I read a NY Times piece not too long about the fact that Chris Rufo is a major TFP donor and that the intention is to "red pill" moderate and centrist Democrats into Republican voting. It has left me a bit more "reluctant" since. I've subscribed since it was Common Sense and even then when it was still the Trump Presidency and a Republican Senate there was outsized reporting about "Democrats in Disarray" in the House - which compared to the absurd shit show of the Republican House that couldn't even elect a SOH for over 80 days, that I don't believe TFP talked about even at all, it's irksome as a reader. I don't even think they made much of Jan 6 and the stolen election lies and attempts to overturn the election, or at least not nearly as much as the Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal ;p.
Every time I think about cancelling over the whitewash the Right and Trump gets in this supposed "centrist" outlet they publish something good and I stay ;p Their comment section though is another story ;p
“Common sense” LOL
This would have been better phrased as "Conversely, if you look at a publication like The Free Press, part of what makes it such a clever pro-Trump op is that they don't turn to the camera at the end of every article and say 'I'm exactly the same kind of center-left Democrat as Matt Yglesias.'"
I read FP every day, for my heterodox coverage that sometimes makes me uncomfortable, and Matt absolutely nailed this. I've felt for a long time that FP sneakily criticizes Biden/Harris 100% of the time, while begrudgingly throwing in a anti-Trump take 5% of the time. They have literally never said something unironically positive of Harris, except in a recent piece that puts "why I support Harris" right next to "why I support Trump".
I think this article gets at my mild disagreement with popularism. I definitely agree that it's counterproductive to talk endlessly about Democrats' unpopular views. At the margin, changing coverage from heavy breathing about immigration to heavy breathing about abortion/"democracy" probably helps a bit. However, I think the upside of repeating focus-group tested "popular" messages might be limited.
I think where I disagree with the model of popularist persuasion is in the degree to which voters' focus can be shifted from one issue to another. Voters in this election genuinely seem to be concerned about (1) the economy, (2) immigration, and (3) abortion. When *asked* about (1) or (2), I don't think it'll be terribly effective to just blurt out "ROE V. WADE!" And I don't think talking endlessly about abortion will make voters forget their other concerns. (The passage about how to pivot from immigration to Trump's economic policies, or the passage about what the NYT headlines should say, are illustrative of my disagreement here.)
The description of the FP's coverage is also helpful in highlighting the disagreement. Matt looks at it and sees Bari Weiss and co. carefully plotting how to trick people into voting for Trump and then planning coverage accordingly. I think this is basically dead wrong. Many of the FP's writers are centrist-type people who just feel a visceral hatred of what the left has become and would like to talk endlessly about it (e.g. Coleman Hughes or Nellie Bowles). As a result, the publication is also appealing to people on the right, and coverage is tilted towards issues that aren't of particular political significance.
However, no one reading this is being distracted from what they want to read about: they go to the FP precisely because of the issues it chooses to cover. Everyone would stop reading if they started to run hysterical articles about why Obamacare is horrible -- they wouldn't suddenly start voting for Trump.
>Everyone would stop reading if they started to run hysterical articles about why Obamacare is horrible.<
I don't think anyone is expecting them to morph into Vox or HuffPost. But do they run *any* articles about healthcare, say, or about the deaths of women caused by barriers in delivering reproductive healthcare in the post-Dobbs environment? Surely Bari Weiss has the authority to determine what topics appear in FB. Strangely, though, in the run-up to the election, they seem very focused on a mix of topics maximally helpful to the cause of getting Trump a second term. Which is their right. First amendment and all that!
Sometimes if it looks like a pro-Trump rag , swims like a pro-Trump rag, and quacks like a pro-Trump rag, it's a pro-Trump rag.
I also can’t remember them ever doing a story on trump’s numerous attacks on the press.
Isn’t that kind of in their name?
This is my thing with Greenwald, as well. Back in the Bush days he was VERY interested in symbolic attacks on the press's independence, but Trump just makes him yawn in this regard.
In a certain way, Glenn Greenwald’s psychology is consistent. He was always more concerned about the abridgment of civil liberties that occurs when institutions convince themselves they need to a respond to an ever greater “threat”.
He was more concerned about Muslims caught in the cross hairs of the War on Terror than he was about Islamic Terrorism, he’s more concerned about conservatives getting caught up on the War Against White Supremacy than he’s concerned about white supremacy itself, and he’s more concerned about what institutions would do to fight the War For Democracy than he is about the threat to democracy itself (Trump).
It is in some ways true that institutional overreaction to certain “dangers” does more damage to its overall health than the threat itself. But I think his threat assessment is wrong here.
Always found his profile incredibly fascinating: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/glenn-greenwald-the-bane-of-their-resistance
I dunno, Greenwald knows more about dealing with authoritarians than anyone in this forum, and I'm inclined to take him quite seriously because he's often been a lone voice against establishment overreach and abuse of power.
GG is a singularly obsessed person whose only motivating issue is exposing American foreign alliances to not be based on humanitarian or international law. He wants to convince ppl, of both parties, that it’s a sham and we should dismantle most of our foreign alliance network. Secondly, he harbors deep suspicion of American national security agencies. People should remember he wrote about how we should have universal healthcare in 2008 and then wrote why he plans to vote for Ron Paul against Obama if it came to that.
I don’t think he’s a right winger but it’s the intensity and salience of his issues that makes him de facto pro-trump imo. However, his latest segment was screeching about how Mariam Adelson is bribing Trump to allow Israel to annex the West Bank and ethnically cleanse Palestinians. So he’s consistent on his issues.
However, following GG judgment’s on this issue alone doesn’t take into account the wider range of issues that are on the ballot.
The problem is that his interest in overreach and abuse of power didn't include the government at all from 2017-2020. Well, actually it wouldn't surprise me if he was concerned (not unreasonably!) about mask mandates, because those were aligned with *liberal* power, not conservative. Again, this is very different from how he operated when Bush was president!
Nah, Glenn has no consistent philosophy, he basically just approaches political writing like the litigator he was trained as and zealously fights for his side with few if any intellectual (or moral) scruples.
And that's all well and good if you are a attorney trying a case, the system is set up that way, but it makes for pretty crappy take writing IMO hence why I stopped reading him in 2009. Like Saul Goodman he's totally full of it, even if he's good at crafting arguments for his "clients" (in this case, Bari and the "liberals-are-the-real-authoritarians" crowd.)
Wait hasn’t he been shitting on Bari and calling her a hypocritical piece of shit since Oct7?: https://youtu.be/2sFQYHrXaMY?si=fbqKo-tNLS56PsJ2
https://youtu.be/b6h_TcP9YpE?si=M9jdZCkOedR1YaZ7
Imo GG has a remarkable ability to compartmentalize all other issues for his own personal hang ups and obsessions.
His attitude towards Mike Johnson is illustrative. Before he became house speaker, GG had on Mike Johnson, who he knew wants to criminalize gay sex, to talk about the illegality of FISA warrants. After the interview, he called Mike Johnson a good and smart person despite some “disagreements”. After he became speaker, GG started lashing out at Mike Johnson because he changed his mind about FISA. GG then started screeching at him for being a “simp” authoritarian morally bankrupt person who “sold out American privacy to FBI ghouls”. So just to be clear, GG who is gay with kids, was cool w Mike Johnson when he just wanted to criminalize gay sex but drew the line on FISA warrants.
This only makes sense if you think the U.S. government ceases to be an institution when Trump is president.
I don't believe he's ever shown a scintilla of interest in civil liberties abuses (threatened or practiced) under Trump, and it's not like those were unknown.
It's been in their coverage numerous times -just it's harder for trump to actually take actions, but it's usually at least brought up in a rock vs hard place kind of way.
It's also something that's been kinda dropped across the board because it stopped being a partisan thing. Those stories always included a lack of transparency or not enough interviews and access. It's hard to make that claim when Biden has done even media, Harris has done very little, and you have the behind the scenes social media company pressures. But all those stories they make sure to mention trumps various attacks on the press.
The FP does, in fact, run articles about the horrors of Republican abortion policy:
https://www.thefp.com/p/my-unborn-baby-was-dying-abortion-allie-phillips
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-case-of-kate-coxand-the-trouble-ee8?utm_source=publication-search
I think if you polled their staff, a majority of them would be anti-Trump. Yes, much of the coverage is anti-left, but I doubt the FP would endorse Trump for president. I think the topic selection is much more organic than what Matt believes, and this is *precisely* what could make some of it persuasive to a hypothetical center-right voter who's trying to make up their mind.
Andrew Sullivan lost his mind in his recent newsletter over some "gender-affirming care scandal" that, frankly, I had difficulty following and that ended in his questioning if he could actually vote for Harris. Sullivan is clearly not a Trump supporter, but is also clearly not faking his blind rage over (specific sub-sets) of "wokeness".
I am fully willing to believe that the folks at the FP are also not faking their passionate antipathy, which influences not only their selection of topics, but how they cover them. You could write a story about how Trump dehumanizes immigrants by just pointing that fact out or you could instead nut-pick some lefty writing about how Trump's dehumanizing of immigrants is a manifestation of the colonial-settler mindset that proves, once again that we're all terrible people for existing.
To your point, one approach might persuade a center-right voter to question voting for Trump and the other might persuade them that he's the lesser of two evils.
Trump represents such a unique threat to our country, I truly have no patience for any writers who question their commitment to voting against him based on their distaste for trans issues or wokeness.
I can't say with 100% certainty that Trump will upend American democracy, try to arrest political enemies and journalists, and join the global axis of authoritarians. But he certainly could. And there's a lot of middle ground that I am quite certain he will operate in. That's before you get into his economically disastrous tariff and immigration policies. Again, truly I have no patience for Sullivan's line of thinking, it's not thoughtful or remotely persuasive.
"Trump represents such a unique threat to our country, I truly have no patience for any writers who question their commitment to voting against him based on their distaste for trans issues or wokeness."
I share your distaste of Trump, but I cannot emphasize enough that it appears ~49% of the voters are not in the same place and you need to meet them where they are if you want to have a chance at persuading them.
Absolutely! I'm not discounting anyone who votes for Trump, many of my relatives are happily voting for him and that's okay.
My gripe is with columnists who seemingly share my fear of Trump, but are willing to place their issues with woke or trans issues on the same level as his insane attacks against American democracy.
I think the issue is separating regular voters from political writers who are supposedly experts in their fields.
If while watching football games yesterday, I said to the person next to me "hey the Vikings shouldn't have blitzed there" and the person said "what's a blitz"? I'd be a little incredulous why they are at a sports bar, but also say to myself not everyone is as nerdy about watching sports as I am. However, if that same person than told me they were a football writer for ESPN and once was defensive coordinator in the NFL, I think I would be in my rights to be absolutely flabbergasted and seriously question why this person was a sports writer.
To bring this to politics. It's one thing for normie voters to have their reasons for voting for Trump; single issue voters, only spotty news readers, just general distaste for inflation. It's quite another for supposedly well informed writers who are supposedly up to speed on all the myriad ways Trump is terrible, but then turn around and say maybe they shouldn't vote for Harris because she hasn't done enough interviews or sketched out her policy vision. I'm looking at you Brett Stephens; you have the most sought after perch in journalism, to say you "don't know enough" as a supposed politics expert says you probably shouldn't hold the job you hold.
I hope they're reachable.
I'm starting to have some doubts.
Are they watching this campaign? Are they listening to Trump? How much more "persuading" do they need that this guy is a danger and absolutely unfit for office?
Yeah I can’t take someone like that seriously anymore. I’m pretty against a lot of the current gender ideology, but it would be insane to vote for Trump because of that. I feel confident I/we can push back on extreme gender ideology on the left (some of which I think will prove a passing fad anyway). it doesn’t even come close to the potential threats from a second Trump Administration.
What blows my mind is how otherwise very intelligent people normalize the downside risks between a Trump administration and a Harris administration.
The argument for Trump—even from this supporters—always involves some level of "sure, there's that one thing he said that I really don't agree with, but he won't actually do it because it's just hyperbolic rhetoric" followed by some form of "and Harris' plan is not specific enough and there was that one time she said something left-wing in 2019".
But then "that one thing he said" is like "I'll put 1000% tariff on imports from China" which will destroy the US economy and negatively impact everyone's lives and then he'll emphatically underscore that he's completely serious about it. Meanwhile that thing Harris said was like "I don't support cash bail in all circumstances" which will likely have zero effect on the person making the criticism and she has since completely disavowed it anyway.
This and the comments below seem to be dealing with a different Sullivan than I have read, who keeps saying he's voting for Harris for exactly the reasons you just laid out.
He said that on his 10/11 post but his 10/18 post said this issue was making him reconsider. (I think he'll still vote Harris after he calms down)
As yeah but the entire concern trolling is bad
I find Sullivan very persuasive -- he's one of 3 substacks I pay for! The most persuasive argument I think Matt has made is that Harris will be constrained by a Republican Congress.
Just out of curiosity, and as someone who also pays for him, what do you find Sullivan persuasive on?
In my experience, his shrill insistence on "woke" agenda and the ability to pretend like every perceived transgression of anyone on the left is something that should be attributable to the entirety of the democratic party is tiresome. And I say that as someone who largely agrees with his take on a number of those issues, but disagrees with how widespread and important he claims them to be. But I think it's helpful to hear an alternative viewpoint, and I normally find the links and quotes he shares to be worth the cost of admission.
I don’t think much of anyone should base their vote on it (if a child in my family had received “gender affirming care” I might feel otherwise), but there really is a pretty awful medical scandal there. At some point after the election, that should become the acknowledged reality.
The scandal was and is both simpler and more profound than how you’ve relayed it here. You just don’t care about it.
The assistant secretary for health with HHS interfered with and pressured the premier international organization for trans health care’s (WPATH) standards of care, while also trumpeting the WPATH and their standards as being objective and the world’s leading authority.
How did Levine interfere? Insisting—in an email—that WPATH drop any and all age guidelines for hormonal and surgical interventions for explicitly political reasons, saying that any mention of age limits for minors would be a political disaster for gender affirming care.
All of this and much more damning about the circular appeals to authority that gender affirming care relies on came out of an amicus brief from Alabama to the Supreme Court, which is taking up a state ban case in December.
I think our government secretly pressuring an international authority to change their guidelines for political expediency when we are talking about permanently altering minors’ bodies—without so much evidence that it’s possible to make such a political change—is kind of a big deal.
Just to add to this, WPATH is already compromised. They commissioned a study from a center at Johns Hopkins in an attempt to launder their crazy views*. However, the people at Hopkins actually still had some integrity and found no evidence supporting "gender affirming care" for children. So WPATH blocked them from publishing any of their results, trying to bury it.
*This is an organization that supports those with a "eunuch identity". They should not be listened to on anything.
Absolutely, and correct. I believe WPATH also coerced John’s Hopkins to include a statement about their independence even after WPATH meddled with their review. Stunning and shameless.
It’s not that I don’t care, it is that I don’t see how any of this translates into “so now I don’t know if I can vote for Harris”. And that was the thesis of Sullivan’s rambling newsletter, which I still can’t parse even after having read your explanation. (But it does indeed sound like a scandal!)
It’s just very difficult to rationally reason on these kinds of moral issues.
If I were (say) in Venezuela and I were voting in an election to potentially oust Maduro, I would jump at virtually any opportunity to do so. Maduro is a strongman authoritarian and a threat to free expression across the Caribbean and South American spheres. However, if my only possible alternative were a guy who was scrupulously pro-democracy but also brutally committed some sort of violent act (let’s say murder, for the sake of hyperbole), I would have a very difficult time emotionally reconciling that fact with the rational and logical conclusion that he would still be far better than Maduro! It’s just that highly emotional issues on this scale are really, really hard to rationalize.
Not the point of your post, but man on man am I so happy to read you write "Andrew Sullivan lost his mind in his recent newsletter over some "gender-affirming care scandal" that, frankly, I had difficulty following".
I thought the same thing. To the point that I couldn't really tell how much I did or didn't disagree with what he was writing because I started blinking my eyes multiple times because I genuinely had trouble understanding what he was saying. His rhetoric was so over the top my inclination was to say he was misrepresenting what was going on. But I wouldn't even know where to begin as far as what I thought he got right or wrong on the substance.
Just goes to show how easy it is to go down the rabbit hole on a topic and lose the forest for the trees (to mix up my metaphors).
As I read it, Sullivan’s point was essentially that two new analyses of medical codes from insurance data showed that (at a low end) some 15,000 minors in the US had been subject to puberty blockers or associated surgeries over the past few years.
The anger in his prose was centered on the fact that so many elite figures and institutions have been lying to the public, insisting that none of this has been happening, minors aren’t involved, etc.
Sullivan and Mike Pesca have served as sort of a lighthouse for me, a fixed reference point when I start reading the same sentiments over and over in mainstream outlets. But that newsletter has me worried that he might tip into that "we're not Trump supporters, but all we do is write about about completely insane the woke mob that he opposes is" crowd... like the Free Press.
Andrew Sullivan has been a hysterical reactionary for 3-4 years now.
I think they're falling to audience capture. The writers may have started out moderate-conservative, but their commentariat is wild-eyed and rabidly anti-Democrat. No nuance at all for those guys! So if you want to keep your subscription revenue, well...
That sounds right.
In media spaces in our current, highly polarized era, 50-50 political environments don't seem to happen much in the real world. Slow Boring is about the closest I've seen to this ideal, and even here, actual hardcore MAGA-style Republicans seem rare. Most websites, blogs, Substacks, Twitter feeds and so-forth seem to be overwhelmingly one side of the political divide or the other. They may *start out* trying to be an honest, down-the middle arbiter of ideas, but they seldom seem to be able to remain that way very long.
I mean, I may make fun of this comment section for being too centrist, but there's like maybe half-a-dozen people here who are to the right of Larry Hogan at best overall (even though many people here do focus too much on the policy they're most conservative on.)
Yep. Olivia Reingold wrote an article politely asking "isn't it strange that a super pro-life state (Alabama) is so bad at providing health care for having babies?" and you should see the comments.
That was one of the reasons I cancelled my subscription before the free first month expired. The comments sections were insane.
I read one of the Free Press articles and thought, "Huh, it's conservative and I don't agree with it, but it's well thought out and the author makes some good points."
Then I looked at the comment section, which wasn't far off from "Biden is LiTeRaLLy SaTAn wHo wiLL dEstRoY AmEriCA" and I went "Gaaah, my eyes!" and I haven't been back since.
Matt Y deserves a ton of credit for not letting his comment section turn into a cesspool.
The comments sections always presage the aforementioned audience capture. At first it's just a couple of edgelords sneaking through, then I'm emphatically cancelling a subscription with sadness in my heart. I feel like the Bulwark is heading that direction, but maybe it's just people processing their anxiety about the election, as I am doing at this very moment.
It also makes me wonder what is going to happen to so many Substacks once the wavefunction of the 2024 election collapses. Like, what does audience capture look like once the Trump threat has passed or—shudder—he takes the oath of office?
If Trump wins that means that any attempt by Matt to write informed essays on policy will just look pathetic and sad.
Again, I've said it before - any Substack, even ones written by liberal people that don't occasionally post things like Matt does which basically say, "the Democratic Party is cool and does good things," and occasionally says mean things about the Republicans like "rich people only care about tax cuts and sometimes lie about other issues they care about (which got even the commenters here upset)" will eventually fall into right-wing craziness in the comments.
That’s news to me. Andrew Sullivan is about as centrist as it gets. I subscribe to both and my perception is that MattY is clearly uncomfortable writing about thorny issues like race or trans because he knows his subscribers whereas Sully is not. I think it takes a lot of courage for an old white guy who’s not part of the far right to write honestly about race because you know what the first line of attack is going to be.
But it's also the commentariat they created. By choosing an editorial narrative that leans almost entirely as "anti-left/woke" and leaves the right untouched they are naturally going to attract a readership of mostly right wing conservatives that have been bathing in "anti-woke" narratives in right wing media for years, thrilled to hear it repeated by supposed "liberals and Democrats" from a "former NY Times insider" no less (who can spill tea on one of the most hated mainstream media outlets within the Right), and their choice to not balance the anti-woke stuff with even mildly critical pieces about the Right, and particularly Trump, from the get-go is how they ended up with a very vocal hard right commentariat that isn't just hard right, it's still a majority consensus there that the 2020 election was "stolen" : P
And TFP feeds that with hyping up the supposed "scandal" of the "media coverup" of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which is so over-exaggerated in the facts of, let alone of its impact to the 2020 election to voters who weren't already "all in" on the supposed "Biden Crime Family Narrative" aka already Trump supporters), while not writing a single article about the widespread top down Trump driven efforts to overturn election results with a hell of a lot of cooperation from Republican party officials, but equally important, countered by a relative handful *almost all of whom have been "replaced" since 2020!!*, as just one "maybe important" story that a "centrist non-partisan" outlet might want to run ;p
But point being, when they put something out that is even just "Trump snark" the commentariat is in revolt. But that's a situation TFP created in the first place and cannot have been that naive in believing that a stridently anti-woke editorial slant wasn't going to be primarily a right wing attraction, and which they could have mellowed and balanced out by being equally as hardcore about right wing/Trump bullshit to draw in a more moderate audience that is frankly just less Trumpy. The fact that they chose not to do that and continue to not do that despite the stakes involved with this election for even the non-"TQ" portions of the "LGB" demographic from a Project 2025 designed Trump Administration (IVF being something Nellie and Bari have used!) is... telling.
I also don't think idea of right leaning audience capture is necessarily in conflict with it being a defacto pro-Trump endeavor. Maybe many of the writers have only been negatively polarized into being anti-left in their heart of hearts and will actually write in Joe Manchin for President, but they're acting as an echo chamber for the Trump audience and knowingly if they ever read their own comment section.
This is a classic bad book review, "the author didn't write about what I wanted to read!".
Not covering issues you think would benefit your side does not an opponent make.
“…about the deaths of women caused by barriers in delivering reproductive healthcare in the post-Dobbs environment?”
Maybe there are no such articles to be written. At least not factual ones.
Yeah about that. https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-amber-thurman-death
Yes, I am aware of those claims. You’ll note that article claims, for instance, that the hospital where the unfortunate woman was treated “was well-equipped to treat” her infection. That does not appear to be true: the federal government says the majority of sepsis cases in the hospital DO NOT receive appropriate care.
https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/details/hospital/110191/view-all?city=Atlanta&state=GA&zipcode=
The Propublica piece says Georgia made abortion illegal “with few exceptions” without noting that among the exceptions are when there is no detectable fetal heartbeat and when a physician determines that a medical emergency exists.
Pretty far down in the article, it notes, “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman,” but Propublica didn’t let that get in the way of its provocative headline.
You just argued that ducks are Trump supporters. I suspect this is true given their level of buoyant entitlement.
Maybe they meant fumb ducks?
This comment deserves more likes.
they actually have run some post-Dobbs horror stories... there was one recently too about the epidemic of closures of rural maternal delivery centers, which when read into, did seem to try to debunk the notion that this was driven by harsh abortion bans and restrictions and more about the economics of rural hospitals and maternity centers in general (low birthrates, etc) - but did pose a pretty sharp retort about the fact that such "pro life" states could invest more resources into subsidizing maternity care especially in underserved areas as part of being "pro life" versus just legislating unworkable bans that also have the impact of driving providers out of the field (let alone the impacts on actual women). This is one of the areas that TFP has "crossed over" the line so to speak on otherwise pushing non-stop "stuff that might want to make people vote against Democrats" :/
I think this comment gets at my mild disagreement with those who disagree with popularism. I'm not sure what you're advocating for here. When the discussion is focused on things that make Democrats worse off, do you think they should keep engaging on those subjects to keep the negative messaging in the news longer? I feel like that's a terrible idea. I remember debate classes and moot court instructions as a younger man, and the advice was always the same- when the discussion gets to your weakest area, make a quick comment and then try and steer the conversation back to your stronger points. You don't want to get bogged down reminding everyone of your weakest arguments.
I think your analysis of the FP gets at this. A lot of people that will read the FP won't be diehard lovers of their content on day one. I know, because I read them for a short while after seeing a link to an article I was interested in and signing up for a month's subscription. So a lot of the readers will just be normal people coming to the publication for a variety of reasons. If their media ecosystem never exposes them to anything counter to the political preferences of the editors then those readers understanding of the counter-arguments will be blunted. This seems self evidently true when looking at the impact Fox has had over the decades. Is the impact enormous? Maybe not, precisely because a lot of those readers will come into it with certain biases or preferences for what they want in the first place. But saying it won't have monumental impacts isn't the point. "Everyone would stop reading if they started to run hysterical articles about why Obamacare is horrible -- they wouldn't suddenly start voting for Trump." No one is saying they should do that. But covering health care at all is bad for Trump, even if they say his policies are correct! Just look at all the research on misinformation- even covering it at all strengthens it. Matt provided the example of SS privatization to address exactly this- talking about an issue that is unpopular, even when the framing is positive towards the unpopular position, is a bad idea that just hurts your politically. That's why FP doesn't cover health care- because talking about at all, even to say that Trump's policies are good, will remind people that they think the republicans are the worse party on heath care.
Your position seems to be that the impact of the popular "messages might be limited." You say "I don't think it'll be terribly effective to just blurt out "ROE V. WADE!" And I don't think talking endlessly about abortion will make voters forget their other concerns.". I don't think anyone argues that the impact will be enormous or that it is so easy to make people completely forget their other concerns. Only that it's far more likely to have some positive impact on your electoral chances than engaging repeatedly with unpopular topics would be.
The arguments against popularism always strike me as pretending that popularists are saying that their positions will lead to overwhelming electoral landslides and then saying that the argument is overblown and therefore wrong, but that's not what the argument is actually saying in my experience. Only that it's tactically smarter to talk about issues that are good for you and that you should avoid engaging in topics that are bad for you, and that doing so will have some impact on voters.
I can sympathize with a lot of what you're saying. My main complaint about popularism is that it's tactical advice masquerading as a grand theory of political strategy.
Perhaps popularism's proponents don't ever explicitly say "this will bring us huge victories." However, if they didn't think of it as a grand theory, it wouldn't be an "-ism"! Matt's entire project with popularism is to contrast it with "mobilization-ism," which is a different grand theory of winning elections. (Saying, roughly, that you win by being very hard left all the time.) I would say 90% of his strategic advice to Democrats is about popularism.
I view popularism, instead, as something akin to "show up for job interviews on time." It's obviously a useful piece of advice, but it'll only get you so far. No one would ever write an entire book about job interview strategy where 90% of it is about how to be punctual.
What would I suggest Democrats do instead? I'm not 100% sure, but I think the very first step is to develop a fuller theory of political persuasion. Such a theory would have to answer basic questions such as "what candidate attributes do voters care about?", "how do voters draw inferences about candidates' attributes?", "how credible is a candidate's statement likely to be?", and so forth.
Popularism falls short of this benchmark. It's kind of like a guide on how to be likable that argues "you say the types of things that likable people say." It's at once obviously true and also not really sufficient when considered as actionable advice.
I think it is a grand theory of how to win elections, but I think you're overstating how anyone claims that will happen. You're acting as if the proponents are claiming it will swing the electorate by huge margins, when the real argument is that the electorate is polarized and marginal impacts matter. Popularism helps you get a few points that you wouldn't otherwise get in ways that the grand mobilization strategy doesn't, and if elections are decided by just a few points than those small improvements have outsized impacts (if Dems win every swing state in an election cycle they end up with a Senate majority, even though the electorate only swung 3 points in a few elections). It's not that the GMS is too broad and doesn't get huge vote totals- the counterargument to it is that it's actually a myth and driving the mobilization in the way the proponents advocate doesn't actually move the needle. It's a messaging strategy that highlights unpopular things in order to try and drive unlikely voters who won't actually appear.
Again, it sounds like you're saying that your problem with popularism is that it doesn't drive double digit swings in election outcomes. Nobody claims that (at least not that I've seen), so that sounds like a strawman. So I'll go back to my question about you actually disagree with here. Do you think Dems should spend more time talking about unpopular ideas? Do you think they shouldn't highlight the things that voters care about that they would argue they can make a difference about?
"No one would ever write an entire book about job interview strategy where 90% of it is about how to be punctual." What if 90% of interviewees weren't showing up on time? I agree that popularism should be so obvious that you shouldn't have to say it, but democrats and republicans spend a significant amount of time talking about incredibly unpopular things to try and a) drive up the turnout of imaginary voters, or b) appeal to their base, and when people turn around and say "talk about things voters care about and that they support to win elections!" people show up and say popularism is actually bad. It WILL only get you so far, but at the moment both parties aren't getting that far at all because they're rejecting popularism in far too many instances.
I'm always perplexed by people who will say something is so obvious precisely while they're arguing against it. Why aren't you saying "popularism should be supported so I agree with the goal, but it's insufficient so we should do that AND this other thing that's not getting enough play"?
As I said, I *agree* with popularism as a piece of advice. I just think it's insufficient as a guidebook.
I tried to do precisely what you're asking for in my last point -- I'd like a fuller model of voting behavior. I think that by focusing on "popularism," we trick ourselves into believing that this one piece of advice (which would certainly factor into such a model) is a substitute for a model.
It's troubling to me (as it should be to anyone) that our discourse about electoral strategy is so superficial.
If you gave Bari Weiss truth serum and asked her, Is your intent with editorial choices at the FP to get your readers to vote for Trump, I am pretty confident the answer would be no. You can argue, and indeed do so persuasively in this piece, that an increase in trump vote share is a consequence of the sum total of the FP output, but I highly doubt it is their motivation/intention.
I dunno. Smart people have been known to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Weiss's principal motivations might well be, say, making a good living doing interesting work while providing the marketplace with what she views as good journalism that might not see the light of day if it were up to the mainstream elite media. Fair!
But perhaps helping to defeat the nominee of a party she strongly dislikes is for her an added value?
I think what is true is that in her mind she thinks she is doing something righteous. She is not cackling to herself and saying "I'm such a great political hack." But she definitely knows she is helping Trump. But the thing is that from her perspective, it's not that she is focusing on anti-woke issues in order to help Trump (hackery); rather, she is helping Trump because that is the way to advance the ball on anti-woke issues (which is ethical and good, since it's an abstract "cause" not a man or a political party).
This is my read also. She strikes me as quite sincere on her podcast. (While noting that it is possible to be sincere yet hypocritical!)
Ironically for her, I think Trump winning would reinvigorate wokeness far more than defeat it, but I think we’ve already discussed this here at some point recently.
True. I guess what I'd say to this is that the "heighten the contradictions" mentality sometimes pops up on the right just as it does on the left. And sometimes what partisans (on both the right and the left) really want to do to their enemies is not to shrink their number, but simply to own them.
It only helps Trump because the Dems won't simply disavow the crazy shit in a meaningful way.
Agreed.
I think there is a tipping point where people shift from disaffected libertarian-contrarianism to rationalizing propaganda and that it occurs at a specific a dollar amount. I watched that process play out with Matt Taibbi in great detail. The endpoint is really the same for all social media celebrities; likes make right.
In the interest of poking the bear I think this says more about Matt than about Bari. Matt really does see himself as a partisan operative whose responsibility is partly to get democrats elected. He is making editorial choices with that goal in mind.
> If you gave Bari Weiss truth serum and asked her, Is your intent with editorial choices at the FP to get your readers to vote for Trump, I am pretty confident the answer would be no.
I agree with that. I also think Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald would say the same thing and mean it just as much. But I think that just tells you that people are really bad at sussing out their own motivations
The Free Press is frustrating b/c it has a number of people who write for it who I like (Kat Rosenfield, Emily Yoffe, Katie Herzog), but I fundimentally disagree with it's mission and think it's a bad influence on it's audience and these people.
That mission also makes me skeptical of even it's good articles, because I suspect it's always trying to frame everything in a light that makes the left look bad. It's like the opposite of listening to Michael Hobbs.
One thing that would take the air out of the FP is if pro-Democrat outlets were willing to publish those pieces you like more often.
You make good points, and the issue about FP's targeting had gone completely over my head. But I still think a) the Democrats' culture war is profoundly self-destructive, b) it's still not too late for Harris to explicitly disavow some of her dumber past positions, and c) it's perhaps time for her to say something that doesn't sound like it was already repeatedly vetted by focus groups.
Interesting. I've done my very best to avoid all advertisements....not an easy task considering that I live in one of the swing states. I wish that every single Progressive Democrat in the country was required to watch one hour of those ads, as a kind of moral compensation for holding fast to their views. To me it seems so bloody obvious, but I guess I'm not a Progressive.
Except those ads don't work.
I have no idea what does or doesn't work. Absolutely none. I am however convinced that Trump is not the complete blithering idiot portrayed by the mainstream press.
Why? Even good campaigns have terrible ideas. There's zero evidence anti-transphobic appeals work in competitive elections. Because it's not a major issue to voters.
It'd be like if the Democratic Party message was actually focused on how Project 2025 would make it easier to fire government employees and replace them with Trump appointees. Sure, it'd be might be mildly unpopular, but nobody thinks that's as big deal.
Trump should be running ads on inflation, immigration, crime, and that's it. Again, the GOP did the same thing in 2022...and looked how well that worked for them.
An honest question: why do left-of-center pundits call Trump's tax cuts "tax cuts for the rich"? Marginal tax rates were cut across the board, the standard deduction was markedly increased (benefiting lower-income people disproportionately), and mortgage deductions and SALT deductions were limited (hurting higher brackets).
Higher-income taxpayers pay the lion's share of taxes, so any across-the-board tax cuts are necessarily going to put more money back into their pockets. Or is it the change in estate taxes, alternative minimum taxes, and corporate taxes? There were legitimate principled justifications for these, which one might disagree with, but simply calling them "tax cuts for the rich" strikes me as demagogic.
It is rare to find anyone honest about taxes. This is especially true of the TCJA, which was (on net) a very good Republican bill, though not the one I would have liked to see. It lowered federal taxes, which makes it a Republican bill. But it did so in a way that made the tax system better -- higher standard deduction, lower taxes for investments, lower taxes for corporations, maintained the system's high degree of progressivity.
If one proposed a change to federal income taxes that said "raise everyone's tax rate by 1 percentage point", the left would focus on the increase on lower-incomer people, the right would focus on how much more the rich will pay (in $$ terms) and the public would remain confused.
Taxing investments less than labor income is hideous. I find taxing capital gains less than the sweat of one’s brow more “morally offensive” than deporting every illegal.
I see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, I agree that there is something distasteful about taxing investment income less than income earned by sweat. But, on the other hand, it also seems distasteful that you have to somehow earn investment income on your sweat-income, or it will be gradually eaten up by inflation: and why should the government get to tax that?
And I understand the policy benefits of encouraging investment.
But if you have capital you will want to maximize the return on it whether or not it is taxed
Or you could spend it instead of investing it. The reason that taxes on gains from investment have been lower than labor is that the former is more scarce than the latter, and so society incentivizes the investment to gain more of it.
That’s just bullshit. There is so much capital seeking returns that VCs fund low probability projects
But certainly you agree that you will be more likely to take a risk and engage in more investing (rather than being more likely to buy a bigger boat, for instance), if the tax code strongly encourages this. I don't know where the sweet spot is, but I don't think it's a simple question or morally simple.
I think the stock market is overvalued and I keep what wealth I have in demand deposits. My wife and mother and trust fund are all heavily invested in the stock market, I prefer safety first and want the liquidity to find a big case when I get one. My first priority is capitalizing contingent fee cases that come my way
This is the best argument for reduced taxation of capital gains, but it’s easily countered by phasing in (sharp cutoffs = bad) high taxes on capital gains, or doing it like we do marginal income taxes with steps.
Of course that sidesteps the idea of taxing unrealized gains, which is another can of worms altogether.
Don't invest and be penny wise and pound foolish then. People invest because of higher returns, not because of tax rates. Even if investment income is taxed at 50%, people will choose investments over getting 2% interest in the savings account if the market returns 10-20% consistently every year. Conversely, even if investments are not taxed, if the market returns 2%, people will choose the savings option because of the lower risk.
Unless lower corporate taxes (I would make it even lower at 10-15%) are paired with taxing capital gains the same as regular income, it's a terrible tax policy. I agree with the idea of simplifying the tax code and getting rid of most deductions but not at the cost of increasing deficits for the future generations (and future me).
By back of the envelope calculations with the current deficit and need to increase defense spending suggests we should be increasing effective tax rates around 5% on average. Or you know go back to what we tried to do in the 90s.
Remove charitable deductions? That will do it for both left and right "groups".
Only itemizers benefit from the charitable deduction so increasing the standard deduction has/had a similar effect.
I think it’s quite fair to note that in dollar terms, the benefits of the TCJA overwhelmingly flowed to the wealthiest Americans.
If that's the standard, then I think you're arguing that any across-the-board tax cut is a tax cut for the rich (and, I'm sorry, at that point it sounds like demagoguery to me). Rich people just pay so much more in taxes than others. Here's a good graphic, for instance - and this was after the Trump tax cuts.
https://taxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/FedData_2.png
Going by this graph, it looks like more than 50% of income is earned by the top 10%. Given that, I agree that across-the-board income tax cuts will usually disproportionately benefit the rich.
Bearing that in mind, maybe the standard should instead be whether a tax cut makes the tax system more progressive or regressive in net effect.
Here's an across-the-board tax cut that is *not* a tax cut for the rich.
A cut of 1% in the marginal rate for income from $50,000 to $100,000, combined with a hike of 1% in the marginal rate for income from $100,000 to $150,000. This is an across-the-board tax cut, because not one person pays more tax under the new proposal than under the old one, but the rich get precisely 0 benefit from it.
No one proposes things like this because people don't understand how something like this is an across-the-board tax cut. But anything that only reduces marginal rates and doesn't increase any marginal rates *is* a tax cut that is tilted towards the rich.
That's correct: Any "across-the-board" tax cut is a tax cut for the rich. Note that these are marginal rates for income brackets. If you cut the lowest bracket, the rich get a tax cut. If you cut the second-lowest bracket, the rich get another tax cut. If you cut the highest bracket, the rich get yet another tax cut, this one worth many thousands of dollars, but regular people do not get that tax cut.
I think you have a misunderstanding here. If all tax brackets were reduced by 2% (to simplify things), all taxpayers would receive a 2% tax cut. It's not like the cuts you get in the lower brackets somehow accumulate; they just apply to different quantities of your income.
Two things can be true here: cutting all tax brackets gives everyone a tax cut, and it gives the richer more of a tax cut.
I don't think you have a misunderstanding here, I think you are trying to pull the wool over people's eyes with sophistry.
If all tax brackets are reduced by 2%, then the rich receive a 2% tax cut on every bracket of income that they have, whereas a regular person would only receive a 2% tax cut on the lower brackets (covering a much smaller amount of income) since those are the only brackets that they reach.
This doesn't change anything.
The rich person's total taxes go down the same percent as the less wealthy people's do.
If the tax rate on $100 of income is 10%, and the tax rate from 101-1001 is 20% and you cut the tax rate across the board by 10%.:
Someone making $100 was paying $10 in taxes and is now paying $9.
Someone making $1001 was paying $10 + $180 (0.2*900) = $190.
Now they are paying $9 + $162 (0.18*900) = $171.
$190*.9= $171
The rich person started off paying 19 times more tax than the other person
(190/10)
And ends up paying 19 times more tax than the other person
(171/9)
I really think you should look up "marginal tax bracket." I'm not trying to pull the wool over your eyes, and I'm not trying to insult you.
Both the rich and regular people receive - all the else being equal - a total 2% reduction in taxes. The only difference is that 2% is a lot larger in nominal dollar terms for a rich person because that’s how percentages work.
It’s true that if you only gave the 2% reduction to the lowest bracket, then the poor would receive the full 2% and everyone else who has income subject to other brackets would receive less than that.
Because you could cut the lowest marginal rate from 10% to 5% (for instance), and the highest rate from 39% to 38.7% (for instance), and demagogues could just label that as a "tax cut for the rich," because it would still be the case that rich people got larger dollar cuts than poor people. At the same time, that seems like a tax cut in a progressive direction.
Well, and they (think they) need government services least.
Real estate, AMT, and corporate tax cuts are tax cuts for the rich. No one who isn’t making a lot of money pays the AMT, for example. Now, you may think there are philosophical reasons to cut rich people’s taxes. OK, but does still mean you are delivering tax cuts for the rich.
If I argued against the death penalty, would you think it's legitimate to describe this stance as "reducing penalties for murderers"? How about assessing the merits of the arguments for the various tax code changes?
Removing a penalty for murder is in fact part of the death penalty. That isn’t its only function, but it is one of them. You don’t like the AMT or the estate tax. Ok, but these specifically target rich people. So if you argue for reducing them, you are explicitly offering tax breaks for rich people. You might as well own it and explain why reducing taxes on rich people will lead us into the glorious future if that’s what you support.
Eliminating AMT is not necessarily a tax break and would be good (my proposal is to eliminate all deductions and replace them with credits that are capped e.g. You get 5K of SALT taxes credited to your tax bill instead of a 10K max deductions or a maximum of 12K in mortgage interest. In this case you don't need AMT but rich people might pay more than they would have under AMT).
Yes, I would think that would be a fair critique of an anti-death-penalty approach, and in fact it's by far the most common critique.
The most common critique made by demagogues, I think.
There are a lot of rationales for getting rid of the death penalty, and reducing penalties for murderers does not rank highly among them.
I think for a large percentage of people, who just believe the government should not be in the business of killing people outside of war, reducing penalties for murders *is* the point. They don't want the government killing people, *even* as a penalty for murder.
One of the primary arguments _for_ the death penalty is that it deters murderers. Punishment definitely is correlated with deterrence.
It turns out that the death penalty as a punishment actually has pretty bad correlation with deterrence, so it doesn't actually work that way well, but, most non-demagogues think the death penalty helps with deterrence VIA the mechanism of punishment, so removing it will reduce punishment of murderers which will "obviously"(albeit seeming incorrectly) reduce the deterrence of murder.
I guess technically they're not saying the critique is it stops penalizing murderers but that it stops deterring them, but since the proposed deterrence is via the mechanism of penalty, they seem close enough to me.
I don't think I understand this comment at all. I agree that people who want to get rid of the death penalty aren't motivated by a desire to reduce penalties for murderers. But what would be demagogic about pointing out that the effect is exactly that?
If Joe Biden were against the death penalty (I don't know what his position actually is), and Trump said, "Elect Joe Biden, and you'll be supporting decreased penalties for murderers," you don't think that would be demagogic?
Similarly, if you say, "Vote for Republicans, and you'll be supporting tax cuts for the rich," that is demagogic if Republicans also cut taxes for the non-rich and there were many rationales for the tax cuts that had nothing to do with giving money to the rich.
Life imprisonment is worse than the death penalty
If marginal tax rates were cut across the board, then mathematically that strengthens the conclusion that they were tax cuts for the rich because the rich cumulatively benefit from every cut to every tax bracket, while working-class and middle-class people only benefit from the cuts to the lower brackets.
TCJA cost approximately $5T. It's benefits were spread fairly evenly across rich and poor. The standard deduction and tax bracket changes, however, expire next year. These had by far the largest middle class impact. The remaining tax cuts, largely for the rich, are permanent. It was intentionally designed as a bitter pill tax cut for the rich with a temporary sugar coating to make it more palatable.
> Higher-income taxpayers pay the lion's share of taxes, so any across-the-board tax cuts are necessarily going to put more money back into their pockets.
This is false. You could cut payroll taxes, gas taxes, tariffs, income on lower brackets and the effect would be progressive, or at least much less regressive than what Trump did. Cutting marginal tax rates on the highest income brackets is the opposite of an across-the-board cut.
OK, let me revise that: "Any across the board *income* tax cuts are necessarily going to put more money back into their pockets."
True. But you could still do an income tax cut that gives the same amount to everybody, instead of more to the rich. The Republicans didn't do this because they didn't want to.
OK, but what do you mean by that? By increasing the standard deduction, the Trump tax cuts made it so a lot of people no longer had to pay taxes at all (their taxes were reduced by 100%). The reductions in marginal rates were pretty even down the line. But if you're only paying $1000 in taxes, a 100% reduction is less in absolute dollar terms than a 1% reduction if you're paying $200k in taxes.
As I posted above (with a graph), rich people pay way more in income taxes than others, and any significant percentage decrease (even if it makes the tax code more progressive) is going to benefit rich people more in dollar terms than poor people.
Leaving aside the changes to estate, corporate, and alternative minimum taxes, on a percentage basis I don't think it's clearly right to call the tax cuts "tax cuts for the rich" (or, at least, I need to be convinced otherwise, which is why I asked the question). And the estate, corporate, and alternative minimum tax changes had other justifications, like them or not.
Well, yes, there's always a "justification" for cutting taxes on the rich. But here's what I mean: If you cut the 10% bracket to 9%, everybody from the cashier at Wawa to Elon Musk gets about 11 extra bucks. If you cut the 37% rate, only people who make $600K get anything. That's a tax cut for the rich.
And if you raise income taxes by $100 per person, but made it increase by and additional $1 in each tax bracket, the argument would focus on the % increase instead.
Yeah, but that's because doing an across-the-board tax increase is a policy choice that some would disagree with. It's not a mathematical inevitability, and neither is anything you might want to do on tax cuts.
Because my taxes went up (thanks to the fact that I can no longer itemize my taxes thanks to the increased standard deduction), and I am middle class, and definitely not rich? But if you own a $5million dollar home and therefore your interest payments were high enough to make it easy to itemize, you got to reduce your tax bill quite a lot. People with enough money to be paying good CPAs got a big tax break.
I think it is quite interesting to note that along with the 2017 tax cuts, they also changed the way you define your withholding, making it way more confusing. This led to a huge number of people not withholding enough, which in turn led to a huge number of people being fooled into thinking they got more take home pay... until, of course, April 15th rolled around and the IRS said "Fuck you, pay me".
The limit for mortgage interest deduction is 750k. So, your example of someone living in a $5 million home is not a particularly good one.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p936.pdf
You can still itemize your deductions, but it is now more beneficial for you to take the standard deduction: in that one particular aspect, you got a tax cut. I don't understand your comment about the $5m home: $5m homeowners always itemized and continue to do so. I obviously don't know why your taxes went up, but you haven't explained that here.
Paying CPAs to get a better tax deal has nothing to do with the Trump tax cuts.
"...the standard deduction was markedly increased (benefiting lower-income people disproportionately)..."
Isn't this the opposite? If you let everybody deduct $10 from their income for tax purposes, then the person who's marginal dollar is taxed at 40% saves $4, while the person who's marginal dollar is taxed at 10% saves $1. Do I have this wrong?
This seems mostly right, but complicated by the fact that the rich mostly itemize their deductions and the poor mostly don't. Any increase to the standard deduction that isn't enough to actually make you stop itemizing doesn't help an itemizer at all.
It's what Splendric says, but he didn't say it strongly enough, IMO. Only lower-income people take the standard deduction. Single filers get only about $15k via the standard deduction. If you have a mortgage and pay more than $10k in state and local taxes, it's already worthwhile to itemize.
This isn't true. The number of people who took the standard deduction went up quite a lot after the DJTA. The dominant factor isn't income, it is interest rate payments. Someone who makes $300k a year, but has a 2.9% mortgage on a $600k house they bought in 2014 probably doesn't itemize.
It makes the tax code more progressive; it does not benefit high-income taxpayers; it is a way in which the Trump tax cuts are not just "tax cuts for the rich."
No. As a share of income the benefit greatly aids the bottom of the tax paying population because it exempts more of their income. It basically raises the threshold where people start paying income taxes. At the top end of the income distribution the change in the standard deduction increase is small enough that doesn't materially change the income bracket that marginal dollar is taxed at (and those people are itemizing most likely.) The bulk of their taxable income doesn't change its tax rate why at the bottom, because the brackets are more narrow, will benefit more (and there are more people that are going to shift income brackets down at the bottom of the distribution than at the top.)
Because for the last half century every time Republicans do one of these things, the vast majority of the money goes to the rich.
"Tax cuts for the rich" is a description of the effects, not intentions, of the policy.
Because the bulk of the tax cuts went to corporations, which were made permanent but the tax cuts for the individuals were temporary and are about to expire in 2025.
"But they don’t matter to everyone, especially not to people inclined toward a very cynical view of politics and the world."
I disagree with this. Imagine if the Democrats nominated a terrible person who nonetheless delivered on abortion and health care. Say a person 3 times as sleazy as Bill Clinton was.
I bet a lot of partisan Dems would support him, and it wouldn't even be cynical at all. Maybe some of the arguments would be cynical, but the support would not be. Because partisans care more about those deliverables than they care about character issues.
But to get to that person, it would have to be Blagojevich or Menendez, maybe Alcee Hastings, maybe Cornelius Gallagher? Trump is a toxic combination of grift and viciously authoritarian views, with a flavor of incuriosity and incompetence thrown in. "Three times as sleazy as Bill Clinton" grossly understates the problem. Maybe reanimated Andrew Johnson? For a mirror-image Democrat, you would need someone who was both a crook and a Leninist, and for all the faults of the Ds, that person would struggle to get a Democratic presidential nomination. Orban is the exact current equivalent. On those facts I think there are a fair few Ds who would say no.
If Trump were just 3x Bill Clinton levels of sleaze, that would look like just his personal petty corruption and buckraking -- treating the Secret Service as an ATM, steering contracts to friends and family, not selling his businesses before taking office, etc. Maybe some shady stuff about discouraging investigations of all this. If Republicans decided they'd tolerate that to ban abortion, that's one thing. It wouldn't be good.
But it wouldn't be a fundamental threat to American self-government. The *systemic* corruption is the problem with Trump: he tried to overturn one election, he's trying hard to rig this one before and after voting, and he'd do so with gusto and state power next time if reelected now.
So, LBJ and Woodrow Wilson?
They both won elections.
Do did Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
The economy is the #1 issue for swing voters, and Kamala avoiding it makes it sound like she has no answer, and she's to blame, and she's trying to distract people on the topic they care most about.
If someone asks me if I beat my wife, and wife-beating is the #1 topic people care about, and I respond with "This election is really about democracy", people will be thinking "This guy is absolutely beating his wife."
The issue is that many low-information swing voters think "Trump is a loud-mouth jerk, but if I just mute his Twitter account, his massive business skill will solve this and I'll get all the good parts without the bad parts."
So you need to attack this head-on in some way. A few possible ways:
You could point out that inflation is a world-wide phenomenon, and Joe isn't to blame.
You could point out that we have: a higher stock market, lower unemployment, even lower black unemployment. Point out that you're beating Trump on every metric he boasted about during his term.
You could begin with a Clinton-esque "I feel your pain"-type answer instead of just hoping everyone will not remember the inflation. (Kamala's first answer in the debate was horrible on this topic.)
Or you could steal the tactic from the Swiftboat guys and just go after Trump's business skill. Remember when the draft-dodging cocaine user went against the war hero and somehow convinced the electorate that Kerry had no advantage in this area?
Is it really hard to convince people that someone who failed at casinos, steaks, airlines, schools, and was funded largely through his dad's tax fraud and a heavily edited TV game show is actually bad at business?
Fighting a must-win campaign by conceding the #1 issue swing voters care about seems like a recipe for losing.
I think it's false that Harris doesn't talk about the economy. She talks about it lots, has various policies.
I do think the D message on the economy is weak because so many prominent Democratic constituencies are anti-productivity and at times openly anti-growth, which in economy with relatively high rates/inflation is a problem, and voters can smell that problem. Some of the more right-wing leaning commenters on SB have got pretty angry Democrats loading up, say, a semiconductor fab bill with environmental, child-care, union and equity initiatives.
I take your point but also Trump’s tariff proposals and Harris’ price gouging proposals are testing quite well and I think most people here would agree that those things are anti-productivity and anti-growth.
I would argues that "proposals" are rarely anti-productivity or anti-growth. \S
How often does Biden/Kamala talk about their successes vs how often does Trump talk about his successes?
Does the average swing voter know that Biden has: a better stock market, lower unemployment, and lower black unemployment?
Does the average voter know that people have so much money to spend that all the airports are packed?
If Trump had the same facts, you would never stop hearing about it.
Does the average voter know that nearly every major economy experienced similar inflation?
People give Trump a pass on covid because it was a world-wide thing, but they look at inflation as a US problem caused by Joe.
Economic success is part of Trump's brand. For Kamala, it's something brought up in a half-hearted way.
Kamala has more money that God to fill the airways. They could have done a much better job at this.
Agreed. That's the problem with trying to match Trump pander for pander on economic populism. You can fool some of the people all of the time...
My sense is Harris feels (probably rightly) she has less space to operate with on economic matters because of the recency of the inflation burst. And so on the economy, she tends to come across as more of a reactive follower than a proactive leader: I'll see your tax free tips and raise you $25k in down payment assistance!
I think the swift boating thing has become a little overrated. Bush ran on 9/11 and the war on terror, he won on 9/11 and making sure we didn’t have another 9/11 because 9/11 was bad and we have to prevent another 9/11. 9/11.
Jesus that election was painful to watch, knowing Bush was going to win. At no point did I think Kerry had a chance. America didn’t want an anti war candidate, the wound was still too fresh, people were in ass kicking mode.
The fundamentals weren't great for Dems in 2004 but Kerry outperformed the fundamentals and came damn close to winning.
Flipping just Ohio would have changed the result, and Kerry was actually slightly leading in the final polls in Ohio. My personal recollection is that it was a nailbiter.
It absolutely was a nailbiter. The morning of the 2004 election no one knew who would win. Best comp since then would be the 2020 election.
If people cared that much about electing war heroes, Dole, McCain and Kerry all would have won.
Also, the economy was pretty good, it was easy (in retrospect, too easy) to buy a house and Bush ran on an “America is good” message while Kerry was more strongly affiliated with the AmeriKKKa crowd.
In November 2004 US employment still had not recovered to its pre 2001 recession peak. If a Democrat ran under such a situation I doubt they'd've got away with calling it pretty good.
On the other hand, employment was recovering quickly. So maybe the vibes were good.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
>In November 2004 US employment still had not recovered to its pre 2001 recession peak<
Voters care more about what they perceive the direction of the economy to be than absolute levels. Reagan won a giant landslide in 1984 amidst a backdrop of fairly elevated levels of unemployment. So, too, needless to say, did FDR in 1936.
>At no point did I think Kerry had a chance<
There was ample Dem hopium observable that cycle. And then some. I never thought Kerry had much of a chance, either. By the autumn of 2004 the country was three+ years into an economic expansion (with low inflation), and Americans seldom eject incumbents when that's the case, at least if the incumbent party's only in its first term.
The problem is that honestly, Biden is NOT responsible for the great economic performance nor to blame for the excess inflation. Three is no time machine to have his Administration say anything about inflation except that the are sure J Powell will handle it or to unsay anything about "stimulating" the economy (mistakenly understood by the public as =inflation).
Harris could run on oil and gas production and tie that to support for Ukraine/NATO (tie to Trump's pro-Russia attitude) and the turn to support for nuclear power generation. She should definitely run on Biden bringing down the deficit and how that reduces interest rates and she plans to do even more (tie into housing)
Sometimes I think Harris so so paralyzed by the Democratic coalition of “The Groups” that she can’t say anything meaningful without risking massive backlash so a lot of the time she just says nothing, which is bad.
Meanwhile, Trump is just out there freewheeling and not giving a damn and people read that as “real”.
I agree they're not responsible.
And I agree that we're so late in the process that it basically doesn't matter. We're just waiting for the votes to be counted.
But I wish just once Kamala got up and said: "You know how much Trump brags about his great stock market? His great job market? His low black unemployment? Then he should be voting for me because we did better on all three."
Then talk about how the 10% inflation in the US compared to the 10% in the UK, the 10% in Germany, the 8% in Mexico, etc.
And not "We passed a $200B bill to reduce inflation..."
Where's the showmanship?
There was a headline in Bloomberg this morning stating that Trump's stated policy proposals would bankrupt Social Security within six months. That strikes me as exactly the kind of media coverage that should be good for Kamala and exactly the kind of thing that should sink a candidate. But until Joe Rogan makes a big deal about it, no one who matters (in the election) will hear about it.
could you link to that?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-21/trump-s-plans-set-social-security-benefits-up-for-33-cut-watchdog-warns
The headline changed since this morning, but this is the first paragraph:
"Donald Trump’s agenda for a second presidential term would drive Social Security to insolvency three years earlier and eventually slash benefits by nearly a third, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group estimated Monday."
There is this in the WP that appears to be based off a Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget report : https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/21/social-security-crfb-trump-harris/
What exactly is morally outrageous about Trump’s immigration policy? Are deportations morally outrageous? If so, how do we even have an immigration policy? You can’t have criminal justice if you defund the police and you can’t have an immigration policy if you let people break it without consequences.
There is surely room for disagreement over how many illegal immigrants we should deport. My answer is the least desirable 20-25%. However, there is nothing morally outrageous about wanting to deport all illegals, it’s just that deporting all of them is more principled than practical, and it’s probably better to bend the law than to have huge labor shortages. Is aggregate supply a fundamentally moral issue?
Trump’s race baiting is certainly distasteful. But how is it fundamentally different than the elder Bush’s Willie Horton ad? I find anti black face baiting far, far, far more distasteful than anti-immigrant rhetoric. By global standards, the US has treated immigrants pretty well and blacks rather poorly. Latinos, after all, find American alluring enough that they are coming here illegally. Blacks largely did not chose to come here and many whites have never wanted them to assimilate.
I don't know if I'd call it morally outrageous, but I do think, as you seem to acknowledge here, that Trump's immigration policy would inflict great economic cost on the people. A few who are blinded enough by xenophobia may accept that tradeoff, but I feel confident that most would not, and they need to be properly confronted about the tradeoff to this policy.
I think people (including me to be honest) assume Trump will back off if the backlash becomes significant. This is like Matt's nameless business leaders he sometimes references who don't believe Trump will actually go that far to begin with. Whereas there apparently isn't as strong a mechanism to influence democrats to step up enforcement. So voters would rather err on the side of being too harsh rather than being too lenient with the expectation that the former would be moderated.
I'd have more confidence in this if the executive didn't have so much existing power on this policy, and also tariffs, and that these are two things that Trump really cares about. I hope you're right, and there's certainly a part of my brain that thinks you'll be.
bingo
There are some groups of illegal immigrants (DREAMers) whom it would really be immoral to deport.
For others, it is less clear but still (at least) distasteful. At some point, for those who have set down roots in a community, maybe had kids (who are American citizens), have had a job for years in the US, it starts to look pretty close to morally repugnant to kick them out.
I think this is right. I caught some flak for opposing family immigration here the other day, but telling people, in advance, "we are bringing in people of working age and your family members aren't going to get a preference" is fair and humane in a way that saying "you've lived here for several years, your kids have gone to school here, all your friends are here, and we are kicking you out" is less humane.
In other words, the way to fix immigration is to set clear rules for the future and enforce them, even firmly, against border crossers and visa overstayers, while allowing those who have been here a long time and who have assimilated themselves into America to stay.
how is this a moral bright line in a way that taxation or health care affordability isn’t?
You didn't ask about bright lines, you asked how deportations [could be] morally outrageous, and he's giving you a reasonable answer. Deporting someone who's lived here for 10 years and created a family with American citizens would certainly cause pain to all parties involved (including his / her citizen relatives).
So that seems like a reasonable answer, and I'm not sure what you're complaining about.
The steelman would be that a lot of these people are only de-jure not-American, have little in the way of ties to their country of citizenship, and that the only purpose their deportation would serve and the real reasoning behind it is to diminish the nonwhite share of the US population.
It is moral outrageous to up root productive members of society and impoverish the rest of us becasue DJT doesn't like immigrants. But I agree that the proper take is to argue the economic damage not the morality of causing that damage.
To Matt’s point about winning the election, I don’t think sharing his moral outrage with Trump’s immigration policy was a good move.
"Are deportations morally outrageous?"
Everything else aside, imagine that you are a naturalized American citizen of Mexican descent named Emilio Martinez, and you still speak with a Spanish accent. In Trump's America, you are pulled over/stopped multiple times a month by the police and/or ICE agents, who demand to see your proof of citizenship, because you look and sound like an Illegal Immigrant Who Must Be Deported.
You have done nothing to deserve this, and even if you agree with mass deportations in principle, I imagine it would get tiring after a while.
That’s a question of law enforcement tactics and search and seizure law
Here's how: I don't trust Trump. I don't trust him personally and his platform includes, more or less explicitly, making it so that his party can't lose elections. Freed of external constraints and with no internal conscience, why should you expect him to stop this policy at any sane point?
His coalition includes a bunch of people who want really horrific things. When the "selectorate" in a more authoritarian America is no longer swing-state voters but some combination of security services, right-wing media propagandists and armed men, are you sure they won't get what they want?
I'm not sure they will, by the way -- we don't have to get *too* alarmist to be much more alarmed than if someone like Mitt Romney were running on stepping up immigration enforcement.
Identifying millions of people as undesirable outsiders based on the circumstances of their birth, and running a campaign to round up and deal with them at scale, is a categorically evil activity. The undesirable identity is always chosen to seem like an obviously good idea to conservatives and not particularly objectionable to moderates at the time. You have to recognize the danger in the structure.
“…is a categorically evil activity”
Is US immigration law categorically evil?
Denying an initial entry or deporting an overstaying tourist, maybe not. Deporting or refusing re-entry to someone with an established life in the US, yes probably.
I'm not saying I want to do it, but it's not at all based on the circumstances of their birth but rather on specific illegal actions they took and continue to take.
Childhood arrivals haven’t done anything illegal besides exist in our presence with the wrong identity traits.
I violently agree with you here.
(That is, I agree Democrats' strong issues are stuff Democrats need to talk about to win, in 15 days. Even though, in practice, his mass deportation, federal workforce purge--personally overseen by Elon Musk--and military crackdown on blue cities will all merge into one grand horror that will render Trump the most hated, unpopular president in American history and the U.S. a pariah to the world, if enacted. But like you said, voters don't see that right now and don't want to hear it.)
In any case, there's a complication. Not everyone likes to talk about health care or abortion--and not just because they're emotive feelie-feels people who have no discipline. Some of them genuinely do not know much about those issues. Or their expertise lies elsewhere.
For my part, I'm a lowly space engineer. Health care and abortion, though important issues, are not my thing.
To the extent I'm "using my agency" and "steering the national conversation", it's toward expressing hope that for once in his life, Elon Musk specifically will fail in his goals on November 6.
It's not the easiest election-impacting argument in the world to make. In fact, it probably makes no impact at all. Though Elon is a net-unpopular figure in the country now, and he's certainly more well-known than he used to be, he's not a politician. Or rather, he has many of the benefits and power of being a politician with none of the accountability.
Hence, by making this argument, I'm likely not helping any Democrat win, least of all Kamala Harris (ironically, a space nerd and Moon fanatic by her own admission, but I digress). I'm just blarping my own horn and making a few Slow Boring dudes (most of us are dudes, let's be honest) irritated in the process.
For what it's worth, what I'm harping on, in these final 15 days, is this:
1.) Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a very smart person, thinks he is "using" Donald Trump by becoming his foul, VP-equivalent lieutenant. He thinks he and his goals, like Mars colonization, or Tesla sales, or anti-woke policy, are going to benefit long-term from that.
They will not. Donald Trump is not a man you "use", no matter how rich or smart you are. He uses you. Loyalty is a one-way street with him, not a two-way.
The instant Trump sees Elon as no longer useful to him, he will discard him like a wet rag. He will burn Elon, and everything he's built, to the ground.
More broadly,
2.) American space exploration will not survive being associated with corruption, violence, culture war, religious fanaticism, and racism. Elon’s dragging it, kicking and screaming, into that association.
If he does, and elects Trump, the instant anti-Trump forces grab an instant of power, they will not be politically able to support either him or any effort associated with him. He will tar the very notion of Moon and Mars colonization with the irremovable stink of Trump dictatorship. Likely, for good.
Elon cannot see either of those basic truths, because the world's richest man has chosen to be dim and dumb and stupid (and really, more accurately, vengeful, obsessed, maniacal, and brain-broke) in this contingent historical moment. Worse, if he can see them, he's likely accepted that trade, and has decided that democracy has to be accordingly broken for his dreams to be made real.
Either way, he's dragging my industry into unbreakable alliance with authoritarianism and thuggery. It's not acceptable and I will do what I can to stop it. Hopefully, by Harris beating them both in 15 days.
I don't make that argument because it sways voters. I make it because it's the right thing to do. Someone's got to say it, in public, before the moment of decision is here. And the only people who might listen to me are a tiny minority who don't follow much politics anyway.
Have to talk to people where they’re at, and out here in the world, you come from an an angle that you know is important to the listener, someone you know. We all out here have to play the person, as poker aficionados say, while people like Matt play the percentages.
You may notice I do not talk about abortion at all or healthcare much on my Substack because that is not where my self-perceived comparative advantage is.
At least PART of the reason to reject Trump is the reaction could propel us well to the “left” of center.
I really hate bringing this up since it has a long history of dividing Slow Borers, and it may even be ironic that I am bringing this up for a reason that will become self explanatory. But in all my suffering through commercials during watching football, it's clear that, in addition to immigration, inflation, or Biden, Republicans really think that trans issues are going to be bad for Democrats, because it's one that they are relentlessly bringing up all the time. I'm hoping that they're miscalculating here, and that the normie opinion is something close to "I don't want to hear about this at all, why do you keep mentioning it, GOP?", but it's clear that they don't think that's the case from their actions. I could be quite content it if is a bad issue for Democrats that should be avoided, but is it?
Well the issue is that on some things (women’s sports, youth medical transition) the Republicans are closer to being right on the merits than Democrats are.
I'm skeptical that there is a "right on the merits" solution to these issues.
What are the mainstream Dem positions on those issues? My understanding is "throw up our hands" (slightly worse than the R position but nbd to me) and "be very cautious about it but don't make it impossible" which is pretty good?
Yes, avoiding those issues helps Democrats electorally. Why raise the salience of a niche issue that divides your coalition and reduces your electoral popularity?
I would propose thinking about it this way: normie opinion being "I don't want to hear about this at all, why do you keep mentioning it, GOP?", is fully compatible with "is a bad issue for Democrats that should be avoided," because the fact that anyone even knows that the issue exists or has high salience is basically 100% down to Democrat-coded activism. The Democrats' only real line of affirmative attack here is "The Republicans are weird to care about this so much, and their tenor and policies are mean-spirited" but there's no credible way to claim that the Democrats don't have basically the normative position that the Republicans accuse them of having, nor I expect would making such a claim be considered acceptable, intra-party.
In view of that, keeping mum to signal that it's low-salience to the Democratic party seems like the optimal play.
Ok, so we have state patronage of an esoteric eunuch cult, but the other guys are _complaining_ about it. Weird!
I think trans might be kind of like abortion in that most people don't really want to think about it, are kind of mushy about it, but if forced to pick an extreme they tend to side with one party's view over the other.
It failed as an issue in 2020, it failed as an issue in 2022, it's failed when they've tried to attach it in every referendum even quasi-related to it, like abortion ones.
People are mildly to the right of Democratic policy on some transgender issues, but also don't really care about it parts of this comment section and every centrist who lives in a D+50 city do to such a great extent.
https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-modern-electoral-history-of-transphobia
Right, and if anything, the salience of the issue has actually cooled because neither Biden nor Harris nor really any prominent Dems seem like zealots about it. They're taking the generic libertarian-ish position that it's about freedom and healthcare.
It's like Matt has said on other issues: you *can* attack someone on it, but if you strawman their position too much, you lose your credibility.
Trans issues definitely seems like an animating issue for many people. In my pretty liberal town I have seen a couple of "Democrats for Trump" signs which seemed sort of strange and then I noticed they also have signs about Trans related issues.
It seems like an area where some people's "normie" non-political answer to some of the questions isn't really one that Democrats love.
Sometimes when people are really passionate about it it can seem off-putting to people who are less immersed in discourse. But if you force people to give an answer on sports teams or bathrooms or children getting surgery you get a mixed bag of responses.
I think some people might agree with Republicans but also think it is kind of "weird" how often they bring it up.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
One thing that pops up in the polling is that people tend to not want much to happen. They don't want to require/ban/make it illegal to do things a lot of the time. There seems to be a sense that people want things to just sort of work out or go away in a way that doesn't require them to make a hard line decision.
The Republican reasoning is there's a sort of young man who's not politically engaged but who seethes when he sees transwomen in his Tinder feed, and they're trying to motivate him to get off his couch on election day.
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.
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.