I agree with the overall point of this post a lot and am trying to put it into practice in my own life. But contra the last paragraph, every Democrat absolutely should be "protecting every bureaucrat" from the kinds of things happening right now at USAID, the FBI, and elsewhere. Republicans want to bring fed workers back to the office? Fine. They want to issue new EOs countermanding Biden's EOs? Great. They want to use their control of all the branches of government (!) to change or eliminate USAID or NIH or the Dept of Education by law? I would hate it, but my side lost. But these weekend blitzkriegs with zero legislative foundation are lawless and terrifying, and the fed workers caught in the crossfire absolutely should be protected. And every Dem -- not just the few that represent Northern Virginia or suburban Maryland -- should care.
Also recent NYT poll shows 18% of adults support letting transgender people play in opposing sports league. It's just not a winning issue for Democrats.
Leah Thomas is the reason I switched my position on this particular issue. I was like “why are all these young women protesting this anonymously?” and it’s because of harassment and cruelty that would be directed at them for expressing sensible concerns around fairness and NCAA policy.
So because of one transwoman playing in women's sports?
The head of the NCAA says he's aware of fewer than 10 transgender people among the 510,000 NCAA athletes
That's two thousandths of one percent!
We should denounce *both* sides for making this such a huge issue, and especially Trump because he's the President now. Let leagues and conferences come up with their own policy and obliterate it from the national debate. It's a complete non-issue nationally.
Agree that the question of transwomen in the NCAA should be left up to the NCAA or whatever sports authority controls the sport in question. But given the tiny numbers, why are transpeople at the center of political discourse at all? Why do liberals feel the need to elevate gender dysphoria to heroic status rather than acknowledge it as an individual problem best dealt with by allowing those individuals to access specialized care, and not be subject to discrimination in housing or employment discrimination—but also that we don’t have to reorder how we deal with everyone else’s sexuality in order to accommodate the worldview of a tiny number of trans-activists with big social media followings? Seems to me that all the flying of trans flags and celebrating trans visibility day has made life dramatically worse for most trans people, given what’s going on. It’s fine for the influencers, for whom attention, especially negative attention, is literally money in the bank, but for most it seems to be making their lives infinitely harder.
I used to have more of the activist position. The whole Leah Thompson debate and seeing how female athletes were villainized by the political camp I used to identify with pushed me away from that position. I used to be like “Joe Rogan is a bigot and should be disregarded.” Now I am like “there are legitimate questions and we shouldn’t immediately jump down people’s throats.”
Yes it's a small issue, but the "active left" made it a big issue and the "active right" latched on. Why on earth did this trans-issue even become a "thing"? That was all the doing of the "active left"
I cant tell you how much this matters to folks who are typically Democratic voters.
why should i be invested in the well being sod workers who generally make well above the median wage, have enjoyed high levels of job security and have often made the economy less efficient?
i don’t want trump to target political enemies, but i don’t see how that necessitates coddling bureaucrats
I’m less concerned with coddling bureaucrats than protecting the critical work they do to help dispense government services.
Like I’m not upset personally for the person who is in charge of the treasury department payment system got fired, I’m upset because some unqualified doge person is now doing their job.
I have little confidence that the incumbent bureaucrats are the most qualified. They have navigated the security clearance/drug test/veteran’s preference game. Half the professionals in silicon valley would be fired if held to those standards. The current federal work force has been optimized for rule following and conscientiousness. It lacks dynamism.
I think comment speaks to why I have a lot of time for libertarianism as a critique of government but why I loathe libertarianism as all encompassing worldview.
Even the most left wing Berniecrat would probably agree that there are areas of bureaucracy that could be pared back. A Bernicrat my focus more on Defense than someone more right wing, but nonetheless the idea that a) among two million Federal employees there must be people who's jobs are not necessary b) give size of Federal spending there must be areas that could be cut back at little to no cost, is almost by definition true.
That's not what's happening here. Musk appears to be trying to get rid of various Federal functions on what appear to be pretty spurious claims of being totally in the bag for super leftists and without any sense of what these government functions actually do.
The latter point I think is important. I think 40 years of right wing propaganda has implanted the idea even with people more centrist or left of center that wide swaths of the government are completely useless and could be rid of tomorrow at no cost and if you peak under the hood you discover that's not actually as true one might think.
And that's a problem at the very top, where procedures are determined, IT and process investments made, automation allowed or disallowed... but the vast majority of human endeavor below the cutting-edge is better served by rule-following and conscientiousness than whatever "dynamism" is as a personal trait. This is just as true in the private sector; I do not need the HR person processing my hiring paperwork to be dynamic, I need them to fill the paperwork out correctly and promptly and boringly.
We literally discussed this yesterday; teachers need to drill an immense amount of basic, foundational knowledge and methodology into elementary-age children and they find it boring so they keep trying to falsify research saying it can be done "dynamically." They're wrong, as you're wrong.
We need people who can go to work for the government and do their boring-ass jobs so your parents get their Social Security checks on time, so requests for information are processed correctly, so records of property ownership are updated routinely, so military paychecks go out in the right amounts, so all access badges are scanned at sensitive installations, so we have all of the up-to-date information on H5N1 in a single location, ad infinitum.
We can talk about process and procedure bloat but the answer there is still "kill all the lawyers." It's never going to be "kill all the bureaucrats," nor "kill all the construction workers," as you have proposed at various times in the past.
Your profession is and will continue to be the problem for however long it takes the rest of us to prize your hands from the throat of literally every other field of endeavor and force 90% of you out of the field for fear of penury.
I realize this is self interested, but I think people simply don't comprehend the extent to which, practically speaking, "get rid of the lawyers!" means getting rid of the rights and claims people have against government action that affects them. Over-proceduralism can absolutely be a stifling cost disease, see NIMBY meetings and specious suits to stop development Etc. But at base level, its much more emotionally satisfying for people to say "Yea F**K the lawyers!!!" than to say "Get rid of my ability to stop the government from violating what I earnestly believe to be my legal/constitutional rights!!!" and I think everyone would see this if they thought a little harder about it. The worst ills can be curbed by well drafted statutes, not giving rise to unnecessary causes of action. But that isn't to say the mechanism of protecting these tights, i.e. the lawyers, is itself wrong, just that it can be inefficiently applied.
I guess we'll find out, David. My strong prior is that as inefficient as government processes are, things can get much much much worse and the little doggies seem intent on making that happen.
These guys have no interest in government working better; they're in the "drown it in the bathtub" crowd.
I need to think through this more but Ezra's last podcast was AWESOME. He's totally back on track. I'm continually impressed with how stupid the Silicon Valley team is. The All-In pod Saturday was like an SNL skit for tech-bro non-sense (EDIT: For real, they talk about how they have a DOGE text thread and all post eggplant emojis for every press release - total high school idiots). Here's where they all go wrong. They're constrained by digital thinking. They've never worked within physical supply chains where people can be operational bottlenecks. A great example is hospitals. So for the VA it's either the nurses or the doctor who are the ops. bottleneck. And Musk's stupid memo just offered them a buyout. There are 1000s of similar people constrained operating models across the government. But Musk is an idiot and thinks in terms of software where sure ... after the heavy upfront tech build the maintenance cost is significantly less. That's just not how physical supply chains and / or value chains work.
Before the hiring freeze, my office received about 300 applicants for a position that we were hiring. The caliber of candidates we interviewed was quite high, and a lot of smart, seemingly dedicated people wanted to do the work. I don't think that passing a public trust security clearance or drug test is a very high bar.
We, as a nation, have long since decided that if you are dynamic and ambitious, we would prefer that you were employed in the private sector than in the public. This sounds strange and off-putting when said out loud, and possibly even offensive to public sector workers. Nonetheless, it's very much the cornerstone of how our various levels of government hire, retain, and promote employees. It's also quite possibly a reason that we as a nation are so much wealthier than the others. We absolutely don't want the "most qualified" processing grant applications at the NHS or teaching high school. We want them becoming scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs and then aiming for big bucks and recognition in the private sector. The last thing we should want is Silicon Valley hiring standards for governmental employees.
There are also government employees doing research at national labs, the NIH etc. (The US doesn't have an "NHS"). The EPA does intramural research on things like filters to remove PFAS "forever chemicals," sometimes in collaboration with academics.
I would agree with you, though, that people like the EPA scientists do more incremental work and are less driven than many academics. I don't know people working in national labs, but I think they compete with physics departments for good researchers, and I know that the top ranks of the government's medical scientists are often drawn from top academics.
For the larger number of government employees whose role is to administer services or monitor regulatory compliance, it makes even more sense to look for people who are rule-followers, have relevant degrees and work experience, but are not necessarily ambitious or "dynamic." You don't need dynamism or creativity to do the job, you just need to understand the policies and figure out how they apply in edge cases. (Also pass background checks, to avoid hiring people likely to abuse the modest power of their job, or to steal sensitive information, etc.) If you're Einstein, you'd be better employed elsewhere, and if you're Einstein in such a job, the greatest service your boss can do to humanity is to pay you to use your real skills instead.
It has nothing to do with coddling bureaucrats, and everything to do with observing the proper constitutional structure of the Republic.
I would have figured that went without saying.
No one here wants to coddle a god damned bureaucrat; you can dispense with that notion forthwith. I want to see the administrative state massively reorganized; but I also want to see it happen LEGALLY, not as part of a fucking coup. Duh.
This is an important point. If Congress was mandating all of this with legislation we would be firmly in 'elections have consequences' territory. The executive playing chicken with the other branches is another matter entirely, and a recipe for catastrophe.
I retired from the government during COVID, and my wife will be retiring within the next few months. I honestly don’t understand your focus on “dynamic personalities”. Our coworkers had/have a range of personalities, from dynamic (and some manic) to more laid back (and lethargic), much as you would find in any large organization. But I don’t think we want a government composed entirely of dynamic personalities. One friend works on uncovering Medicare/medicaid fraud, which is extremely detail oriented work that may not be a great fit for dynamic personalities. Another worked on the mirrors of the James Webb telescope, which again was extraordinarily time consuming and detail focused. It is because of the careful engineering that the telescope was successful. I am sure dynamic personalities are helpful in some government jobs, and perhaps even beneficial as part of otherwise detail-focused teams, but I don’t think we want only (or even mostly), DPs.
Apropos government pay, the CBO report linked below indicates that total federal government compensation is about 10 percent below what it would be if fed pay was comparable to private sector pay. It shows what many of us intuited, which was that for lower skilled jobs, fed pay was higher than the alternative, while at the higher skilled jobs/education levels, pay was significantly lower.
Eyeballing that chart, I...don't think it shows that pay is significantly lower for *most* high skilled/high education employees in general? There's really only a big difference in favor of the private sector for workers with doctorates or professional degrees, which is a tiny portion of the workforce. For workers with master's and bachelor's degrees, the difference looks negligible.
According to table 1-1 of the report, 23 percent of federal government employees have a masters degree, and a further 10 percent have a professional degree or doctorate (the comparable figures for the private sector are 11 percent and 4 percent). I don’t think 33 percent is a tiny percent of the workforce.
Hit post too quickly. I agree that for many (most?) feds, pay is fairly competitive, and it has other lifestyle and non-pecuniary benefits. I was objecting to the original posters comment that feds are overpaid. Also, for many top level employees, wages are significantly below what people with comparable responsibilities would make in the private sector. David Lebryk, the treasury official who recently left after DOGE took over the federal payments system, was responsible for overseeing over $5 trillion annually. He was likely making somewhere in the neighborhood $200,000. Not at all a bad salary, but fairly low given his incredibly important responsibilities.
Fair enough, but the really big difference only comes in for professional degrees/doctorates. For master's degree holders - a good majority of that 33% - the difference looks very small.
I also wonder if the smaller number of professional degree/doctorate holders in the private sector has something to do with the big wage premium for that group.
You should be invested in having an independent civil service that wields state power based on what the law says, and where elected officials set general policy priorities for them but are buffered from direct control over hiring and firing, etc. If the civil service is not independent and is instead chosen based on its loyalty to specific electeds and/or can be ordered to act to advance the narrow short-term political interests of said electeds, then you're not going to have a functioning liberal democracy for very long. Maybe you don't value that though - most Republicans today don't.
I mean you don't have to imagine. It's literally how this country existed on a Federal level until the Pendleton Act of 1883 under the idea that "hey maybe it's not a good idea that have a system where a President can get shot by deranged man expecting a sweet heart job in return for supporting his nomination".
It's sort of forgotten now, but civil service reform was basically the issue of the day in late 19th century. Go read Edmund Morris' first book about Teddy Roosevelt to see how much of his political life involved this issue (and one of the first issues that helped push him left policy wise).
Also, read up on how local government operates. There are absolutely still echoes of old school Tammany Hall machine politics today in hiring practices/how government contracts are handed out etc.
There's been a nostalgia for the "smoke filled room" of the past given the inertia of Congress today (a definite background predicate as to how Trump or his minions can at least so far get away with what appears to be blatantly illegal acts). A nostalgia I can understand to a degree and why I like that Matt has pointed out the importance of "Secret Congress".
But yeah, let's not overromanticize how things used to operate; it was astonishingly corrupt and there's a reason there years/decades long efforts to reform the system.
The problem with the Pendleton Act of 1883 is that it pushed the source of assassinations from deranged job seekers to deranged anarchists and other radical ideologues.
I mean, Garfield could have just given Guiteau a job, you know?
Like most left leaning people I've been appalled by what Trump and Musk have done to our institutions and the constitution over the last few weeks but admittedly I have a hard time articulating how what they've done will actually affect people's lives in tangible terms.
Despite the fact they're actively burning the federal bureaucracy to the ground you'd have to figure they're smart enough to keep critical systems that run critical programs like medicare and social security running so it's not so obvious how things like DOGE will actually affect people.
Maybe the answer is the erosion of institutions and liberal democracy along with the attenuated corruption doesn't necessarily impact people's day to day lives immediately but eventually these things lead to poorer and less prosperous nations. In way it's like Climate Change in that not all the effects are felt at once which makes it harder to argue against.
Yes, as this illustrates, we just have a fundamental difference in values. I believe in the corniest version of American civics that we learn about in K-12. You think all of that is naive, fake, and sanctimonious and would be willing to try a right-wing autocracy in the name of "efficiency." (Efficient at what? Only you can answer that.) You're on the same intellectual arc as Tucker Carlson and will probably end up in the same place, wherever that is.
No one said the law is more efficient than other options. Cutting across someone’s lawn is more efficient than waiting at the light, which is why we had to outlaw it so people wouldn’t do that.
Efficiency only matters if it is efficiency towards a good end. I think that the end of setting up a system that persists and enables policies to last for multiple years at a time is valuable, and worth the inefficiency of preventing each new administration from immediately firing and replacing all employees.
People fundamentally misunderstand what "efficiency" looks like in government. If you're a business producing some good or service, you can keep selling until the marginal cost of a good/service equals the marginal benefit. In government, YOU DON'T GET TO STOP PROVIDING SERVICES. This of course means you have to do insane, inefficient things that a business would never contemplate.
Amazon can ignore people who don't know how to use computers. The government has to figure out how to get social security benefits to seniors who don't know how to use computers or speak English as a first language. This is obviously going to impose higher costs to reach these extreme edge cases.
When I worked for the federal government, the higher level employees made less than they would in the private sector, and the lower level employees made more plus received things like health care and paid holidays that they wouldn't in the private sector. (I was somewhere in the middle.) I don't see this as coddling. I see it as a workplace that respects its workers, and there wasn't the same morale problem as in places where there are cavernous disparities between the high and low level employees. If that makes me a Socialist, so be it.
It's also worth noting that in the European private sector, high-level and mid-level employees tend to make less than their American private sector counterparts, but low-level employees often make more and have better benefits compared to their American counterparts.
I'm not saying that's necessarily better (though I'm also not saying it's not better) -- just pointing out that even the private sector doesn't need to be as unequal as it is in the US.
I probably wouldn't cry too much if Congress passed a law and axed a bunch of programs.
But Congress needs to pass a law. Firing FBI agents *doing their jobs* because the people who broke the law were fans of the current president is some Banana Republic shit. Chilling effect is chilling.
These sorts of comparisons just aren't helpful though as government bureaucracies and internet start ups are just really different things. If you try to develop a new burrito delivery ap and fail it doesn't really matter, you wasted some money but the VC's have plenty more and you just move on to the next project (just like the guys in Silicon Valley the show). And indeed that's how the industry works, more ideas don't work, most new companies fail etc
But if you make a poor decision about say, how Flint Michigan should get it's water, you can end up with devastating consequences for years. This is why there are often all sorts of annoying rules in bureaucracies, because doing the wrong thing can be worse than doing nothing.
See also how the "move fast and break stuff" approach to building a deep sea submersible craft ended up with everyone getting killed.
I don't know if I agree with this take. Surely America would benefit from some more dynamism and risk taking by the employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Let's just shake things up!
This is also about who is going to decide to work for the federal government over the next 20 years. Would anyone with options want to live through this?
Who are you actually talking about? I just looked up the most common federal jobs. Unsurprisingly, most of them are related to the post office. I don't need my mail sorter to be "dynamic."
One of the top 10 federal jobs is registered nurses. They definitely have to be quick on their feet and it is a plus if they can think of more efficient workflows, but I don't need them thinking up new "dynamic" approaches to care that haven't been properly tested.
Another big chunk is clerical and office services. As another poster said above, we want people who do those jobs to follow procedures. In the past few years I have filed the FAFSA for my kids. I have a complicated financial situation, so I called them several times for assistance. (They were extremely helpful, by the way.) I don't want them to have me "dynamically" fill out the FAFSA, thus perhaps jeopardizing my kid's chance of aid. I need them to know the rules and procedures to get the form to the proper channels and optimize the chances of scholarships.
Fair question. I’m not talking about clerical/blue collar workers. I’m talking about the sorts Trump has been targeting- FBI managers, prosecutors, the top couple dozen civil servants in each cabinet department.
I would like these people to be more dynamic than they have proven in recent decades. Mechanically applying kludgy laws does not work well
I think the FAFSA is a good example because I my understanding is that all of the relevant law and regulations is already publicly accessible from online sources. Eg, Google returned "20 U.S. Code § 1090 - Free Application for Federal Student Aid", https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1090 . There are links to assorted ".gov" sites.
Hence, similar to taxes, a motivated and resourceful individual could figure out nearly everything on their own without any support nor even high-level guideance. At most they might need a phone call (or ideally public support forum ticket) to ask for clarification on sufficiently ambiguous cases.
Yet why do we even need such complex procedures and regulations in the first places? So much of this was built incrementally where each additional complication claims to help some charitable group of applicants, yet the sum result in mess for even government experts to apply.
Moreover, there are possibilities for exploitation and the need for auditing. Eg, I recall a fellow college applicant circa 2003 claiming their family was liquidating assets into undocumented forms like cash and precious metals to better qualify for more financial aid. That could've just been an absurd idea their parents joked with (moreover cash withdraws and gold purchases are tracked). Nonetheless, the possibility exists, and I've heard that strategically timed divorces are a known mechanism to enhancing student financial aid.
But why do we even need such a complex system in the first place to determine student aid on a per-a-student basis? Why not just incentivize educational institutions to be financially efficient and reward those that do so with block grants?
It's not just about getting fired. It's about getting asked to do illegal things and getting smeared in the press by the world's richest man based on conspiracy theories he watched online.
If Musk/Trump said "we're going to work with Congress to modernize the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and use our expanded authority to remove the lowest 20% performing employees in select agencies," then literally no one here would be complaining. This is not what they're doing. Or if they said "we're not going to prioritize environmental protection as much. We're going to request less funding from Congress, which might mean we need fewer workers in the future," no one would complain. Again, this is not what's happening.
Reposting this link to a CBO report comparing government and private sector pay. The takeaway is that, for total compensation costs (pay+benefits), workers with professional degree or doctorate were under compensated, those with high school or less were overcompensated, and for bachelors degree they were close to private sector compensation. Interestingly, each of these groups accounts for one third of federal employees. I don’t know what your definition of coddling is, but this doesn’t seem like it to me (a retired, formerly reasonably paid fed). But I think Ben’s comment is the most important, that the key is having qualified people. I fear the next few years are going to be a test of theory that we don’t need qualified people in important jobs, just Elon’s acolytes and other true believers.
That's another potential topic for reform, though it should be discussed by people with much more software experience than I have: updating the software infrastructure to be more robust, more readable, etc. so we don't depend so much on a small number of obscure people who have somehow made things work that look like they shouldn't, but which bear the weight of lots of important stuff on top of them.
I have heard anecdotes about tax refunds taking longer to arrive because of this.
When people start realizing that all of this is messing with their money (or, if not money, other things that they expect the government to provide, like the post, or fixing potholes in the road, etc), a lot of them are going to get very ticked off.
I agree that the government could work a lot more efficiently, but the problem is that DOGE, despite the E, doesn't appear concerned with creating efficiency, they are ok with simply making it not work at all. Which is going to create a ton of chaos. And maybe when it all shakes out, we will be better off for it... but let's not pretend that the chaos isn't going to also lead to a lot metaphorical (or even literal!) blood being spilt.
I don’t want the Democrats to be the party of defending every bureaucrat! Isn’t this a losing issue?
Trump has this ability to criticize his opponents in a way that is wrong, but makes them respond by making their unpopular opinions clear. We should be compromising and accepting that Trump gets to run some layoffs etc, not “defending every bureaucrat”.
Apologies if you have seen this before, but one way to fight back was promoted on substack by Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny) a while back. The Democrats must get louder to respond forcefully to the administration blitz. They can form form a Democratic People's Cabinet, our best folks fighting, calling out illegalities, and presenting an alternative vision.
Please >repost< and sign this petition! Over 5K signers so far!
I want to hope that bad headlines cost Trump some popularity. Maybe on the margins they will, though his supporters' disregard for inconvenient facts and other people's welfare, and his and his allies' disregard for the law are not encouraging.
I read that article. But, if you view the issue from the perspective of Trump or Musk, the value of a life of a person in Africa is considered zero, so any dollar spent on USAID, is, by definition, waste, and, similarly, people dying because of an abrupt termination has zero cost, because their lives have zero value.
To be clear, this attitude that people's lives have zero value because they're on another continent is despicable, but it's at the same time, very consistent with everything we know about Trump's worldview, and probably a fair chunk of his supporters too.
Ironically, Africa is the continent where Musk was born. But in South Africa and nearby countries, the people affected by the abrupt termination of USAID and PEPFAR are almost all black...
Not only should Democrats throw Biden under the bus, for the love of god *Someone* in 2028 needs to loudly make the point that but for a once in a century pandemic, they would have lost in 2020 too, and even still they only won by what, 50,000 or so well placed votes? Saying the party barely lost in 2024 or could have won if Kamala had more time is missing the forrest for the trees. By 2028, this is a party that will not have wielded a genuine electoral mandate in 16 years! Yet has moved further and further away from voters during that time. We need to fully shake the etch-a-sketch more than ever. I didn't appreciate until Matt's post a few weeks ago how directly Trump ran against the Aughts and 2010's GOP to enormous success. The next Democratic President is going to have to overtly and forcefully run against the failures of 2010's and 2020's Democrats.
I liked because I agree with the sentiment... but it's genuinely hard to know as regards 2020, because a lot of the batshit leftist and/or batshit IDpol crap that alienated moderates from the center-left happened because or downstream of COVID.
Trump was not terribly popular in February 2020 and may well have lost if the Democrats just ran a normal campaign in November with a normal candidate.
"...a normal campaign in November with a normal candidate"
That didn't seem to be on the agenda at the time. Biden was the most normal they could come up with, and he was probably only suitable to the basement campaign that the pandemic enabled to seem normal.
I think that it's notable that Biden pivoted to the left after he sewer up the primary. Now, this is hard to disentangle from the fact that in early spring 2020, the economy was completely imploding. Even Donald Trump got onboard with a temporary quasi-UBI with the unemployment insurance. However, I do think that shift happened in part because of Covid.
Agreed. Without COVID Biden might or might not win, though I don't think the left has even a tiny chance of stitching it up, and a brokered convention where the moderates eventually settle on one of their own in exchange for cabinet and VP slots seems likely.
Whichever moderate does win is not going to have to contend with either the economic or social upheaval of our 2020, instead just trying to make policy amidst an economy which is close to full employment already, with inflation starting to tick up just a hair.
So long as it's a moderate, I think beating Trump is likely, perhaps by a wider margin than in the real world. I'm not sure whether they take the Senate or not (the 2 GA seats seem very contingent, but so does NC and sort of IA), but regardless of whether they have a razor-thin trifecta or not, there's not going to be much push for stimulus and spending measures beyond bipartisan moves on infrastructure and semis. The main partisan initiatives are probably further healthcare cost reforms to Medicaid, Medicare, and the ACA.
I agree this is literally unknowable what would have happened. That being said, I think in the minds of many voters, especially now that Trump has won and retconning backwards how badly the Biden presidency ended, many will convince themselves he only won in the first place because of the pandemic. Regardless which is correct, I think rhetorically, recognizing not only the more restrained claim about just the July Crisis in 2024, but a larger claim about Democrats' long running and overarching problems may yield better fruit with the electorate if done well. Run not only against Trump but against a particular theory of why Democrats failed. Not as a third party or independent, but as a distinct and powerful voice with a clear vision of the case, What went wrong, why they are different. Trump, Obama, Bill Clinton and other highly successful campaigners have done exactly this.
Yes, it's vital to throw Biden under the bus. The good news is that it turns out that it will be trivially easy to win in 2028. All the Democrats have to do is not nominate Biden.
Whew!
In reality, the problem with the Democrats is not Biden, but being in thrall to The Groups. Forget Biden, and focus like a laser on that problem.
This is probably right but its hard to know for sure. How much of Biden's sagging approval was inflation rate or the inflation of his age. But as I say above, electorally speaking, we don't have to know, because the strongest campaign message is probably a clean break, which is easier to make by demonstrating you conceive of the problem in grander terms then "Dems were 1.5% short in the tipping state this November," and more "this hasn't been working for years!" which is closer to voter's current precpetions.
The compromise position would be a trucker cap. Or a onesie. Both of which are known to have tremendous capacity for spreading subtle political messages.
I'm pretty sure you're a middle aged white guy, you don't actually make any sartorial choices.
You could have a sub AI level algorithm make random choices for you from the Jos A Banks website, and the only person who notice any difference in your appearance would be your wife.
Jesus, "middle-aged"? Ouch. I have a short remaining window in which I can still claim "early 30's"!!!
Otherwise... [direct hit, damage critical]... I have a few tailored suits, one of which still fits, and some decent shoes and dresswear. My daily wear is absolutely tees/henleys, shorts/jeans, couple fleeces, a wool overcoat... I have a single built-in cabinet worth of clothing including as-yet-unopened socks and underwear, lol.
I still think Democrats haven't found the handle on something they can use to bash Trump with that can break through to the low info crowd. His most alarming stuff (illegal expansion of executive power) is still too high minded in the "threat to democracy" way, and it's just not going to register.
I think there's fertile soil in the corruption/personal enrichment camp, especially around Elon and his China businesses, his SpaceX contracts, his being a billionaire mucking around the federal government. A way in with Trump could be Kushner's Saudi funds, Trump social and $Trump acting as bribery slush funds, etc. Honestly the fact we don't have enough speaks to abject failures of politically-minded oversight when Democrats had Congress from '18-'22.
We don’t need the low info crowd, or very little of it. Much of it won’t turn out once Trump is off the ticket anyhow. Dems need to win back moderates and ”mid info voters” by moving right on immigration, crime/order, guns and trans issues. That’s all that is needed for 55-ish % of the national vote. Everything else can stay the same, more or less.
We overcomplicate things. Simply:
1. Enforce the border and clearly stand for regulated, controlled immigration. 2. Enforce the law and public order. 3. Accept that gun rights is part of America’s history, culture and soul in many places. Mandate background checks and increase mental health support instead of banning guns. 4. Abandon the more extreme trans issues such as surgery on kids and biological men competing in women’s sports.
And voila, Dems will be the dominant party for a generation or more.
The low info crowd sets the vibes, and going diet republican won't help. Barack Obama dominated the low info crowd.
In addition, the Trump GOP has demonstrated the value of expending more effort slandering your opposition and making them toxically unpopular rather than making yourself look all that good. Democrats need to make Trump Bush-in-October-2008 toxic to permanently flush him and his politics out of the system. That's going to require finding a hammer and beating his brains out with it. 2008 gave us three hammers to brain Bush - Iraq, Katrina, GFC. Kanye saying Bush hates black people was a bit of proto-Trumpian drama that absolutely helped Democrats by breaking through to the low info crowd. Michael Moore pre-Alex Jones'd wild shit for years but for the left. That's what has to start happening.
I would have said it's the exact opposite. The "low info crowd", are people who don't pay much attention (by definition). They are picking up the vibe from various elites and weaving that into whatever is happening in their personal lives with things like inflation, lockdowns, etc.
Also, by 2025 definitions, Obama dominated exactly by going "Republican lite". Not by slanderig his opponents.
It’s much harder for Dems to pull that off as we don’t have a built in propaganda network for the tuned out voter, but no time to start like the present I suppose
Yeah i've always questioned the idea that this centrist shove will make the democrats actually have a dominant party. They need to prove it, in my opinion. Personally, I think it just makes them look weak.
Sincere question, not trolling: when is it strong to do what the electorate wants and when is it strong to stand on principles even though it’s unpopular? I don’t know the right answer, something-something-political-capital.
I think one criteria might be whether the issue is cultural vs economic/geopolitical with more deference to the people on the former?
There’s also a third approach which is for political actors to make a case for change or signal an openness to it rather than immediately initiating it.
The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act lost the South for the Democrats forever, making it harder for them to win the White House or to hold Congress.
It was still a very very good thing to do. Most of the time, government doesn't do that much. At other times, it can change the course of history, even if the people aren't ready for it, and punish you for the effort. It's worth losing power for.
Prove it? It gets proven over and over again every election cycle at just about every level, even in 2024, when the strongest overperformers were centrist Democrats like Tester and Gallego. The only 2 Democrats to win more than one presidential election since FDR are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Every Democratic majority going back decades would not have been possible without some centrist (and in some cases even farther to the right) Democrats winning tough elections.
That is, I believe less in criticizing Trump - who will be gone in four years - and more in making the Democratic political agenda more popular (and frankly more reasonable) by cutting away the stupid or unworkable parts.
I think it's yes/and, but Democrats have more work to do on balance wresting the narrative away from Republicans than making their own policies more popular.
“… especially around Elon and his China businesses, his SpaceX contracts…”
Yeah, keep reminding Americans that Musk leads the only American organization that can reliably put rockets into space. That’ll gin up the fear and loathing.
It’s called the cost of business of running a multinational company that has factories in china. I bet you’re typing this uninformed comment from an iPhone ….if you’re so concerned about China’s influence give it up. Sell all your index funds that contain APPL also.
If you’re only concerned with China’s influence on Elon Musk your politically biased and a hypocrite
Trump's right hand man—the world's wealthiest person—does, in fact, have critical business interests that overwhelmingly depend on the goodwill of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China. That's just a fact. Donald Trump as President isn't *required* to give such a person such unprecedented access and influence. That's a freely made choice on Trump's part.
It's not unreasonable to point out that Musk's intricate relationship with America's most dangerous geopolitical rival makes his unique position problematic from a national security standpoint. Nor is it inconceivable we could see negative ramifications consequently arise. The opposition party in my view is duty-bound to point out such truths. And the President, needless to say, is running certain political risks because of this situation.
"The opposition party in my view is duty-bound to point out such truths"
If you're correct about the threat posed by Musk, I think - no, I know - that the opposition party is duty bound to *do* something about it. Have any of them proposed viable action?
People who have to pay “the cost of business with China” should not be involved with setting American government policy!!! It’s not that fucking hard to understand!!
Where is he setting policy ? DOGE is auditing government spending, and making suggestions to Trump, and Trump can decide what to do if it's within his power. This is what he campaigned on and he won, and he is doing what he said he was going to do. That is a good thing!
On top of that, We are broke, and our fiscal trajectory is not sustainable. We need to reduce the size of government / cut costs and based on what we are seeing out of USAID alone, there is going to be a lot bloat to remove. Wait till they audit the DOD!
Do you honestly think the status quo was ok? Your team has been in power for 12/16 year's and it has been a fucking disaster.
What do you mean by “ok”? Do you mean “good enough that we shouldn’t bother trying to make anything better”? Absolutely not - no society has ever been at that position.
Do you mean “better enough than most societies have ever been that we should be careful not to break too much with our improvements”? Absolutely yes.
Now I think the covid response shows that we actually probably have been too careful with a lot of things - in 2020 we were able to make a lot of radical changes and nothing too bad happens, so maybe we can operate at that level of alacrity. But much of the current plan seems to be going much farther and much faster.
The fact that Trump’s most important advisor has severe conflict of interests with our largest geopolitical rival is a large concern. Trump campaigned on being tough on China but he is so corrupt and bribable (reversal on TikTok) that I’m worried he will be compromised.
As for US being broke, nothing Republicans or Musk will do will lower the deficit. Every single dollar they “save” is just going to offset by tax cuts. That worked ok in 2017 when Republicans had been strangling stimulus during a recession for 8 years, but it’s not going to work now.
...yes? And also evidence that he has played nice footsies with the CCP to protect is shanhai gigafactories? Not sure what you're getting at, I'm not married to mauling Musk over spaceX. But musk is compromised and could be made politically useful.
I'm not a fan of the bull in a china shop approach to governing, to be sure. I also think he'll be out on his ear soon after something he did embarrasses Trump.
Well, if you care about SpaceX as a functioning concern, it actually wouldn't--he has a coterie of minders keeping his fingers out of the stuff that actually matters.
When Elom gets really engineering hands-on, you get stupid broken shit like ¡CyBeRTrUcK!
You might be right but I’m trying to give him a little more credit than that. If Musk was just the leader of an electric car company and a rocket company, I would have no problem with him. It’s being heavily involved in really bad politics that I have a problem with.
Oh, of course that is true--I deeply and profoundly wish he would fuck off to some tropical island and I never had to think about him for one second ever again for any reason.
Now imagine you're a Tesla shareholder. It has lost 24% of its market cap in just the past six weeks. (Much worse than Nvidia!)
In a just world, he'd be facing shareholder lawsuits soon. In this world, anyone who started such a lawsuit would soon find themselves under investigation by the FBI, if not the CIA and IRS as well.
$TSLA is all the way down to where it was in ... December, 2024. Up 98% over the past year. Up 6% CAGR over 3 years. Up 38% CAGR over 10 years. Not exactly a track record where shareholder lawsuits would be warranted.
I've stayed away from $TSLA as an investment, as I think its cash flows don't justify its price. But the market has disagreed with me (so far!).
My advice is to avoid mixing politics and investing.
The more sincere low information voters trusted Trump to lower grocery prices. This won’t happen. Why not draw attention to that with price trackers, etc?
The Republican disinfo machine is going to use its superior access to the information channels median voters use to distort that. I guarantee you the message moving forward will either be "we fixed inflation" "the statistics are lies" or they won't even talk about prices, just jangle the keys somewhere else. By all means do it. But we need to be ready to counter all three of those talking points/tactics and just tracking prices and hoping the median voters can connect the dots won't cut it.
"...Republican disinfo machine is going to use its superior access to the information channels median voters use..."
Dunno what you mean by "median voters," but Pew says the biggest source is TV news, and that the big three networks plus CNN are still at the top of that food chain:
Ok. To clarify, "superior access to the information channels" actually means they're just better communicators? That the Democrats have a messaging problem?
This isn't true. I know numerous people who voted for Trump who have no idea what DOGE is, and voted for Trump primarily because they didn't like Biden.
I submitted explicit evidence that there are people who didn't vote for DOGE, so your immediate claim was wrong.
Beyond that, Trump won big with "low information voters" and lost "high information voters." You're saying that large numbers of "low information voters" all knew what DOGE was and supported it when they voted. That doesn't strike you as unreasonable.
Elon was at Trump rallies, on stage talking about DOGE. He was at MSG etc. The people you are calling "low information voters" are just basically people that get their info from TV and not from newsletters like Slow Boring.
It's a derogatory term for people you feel like are beneath you. Drop a link to your resume in here. Let's see what makes you so special ?
I completely disagree that "Low information voters" is derogatory. I would describe 60%+ of voters that way. Another term would be "normies" or people who don't follow politics in depth and as such don't have a deep understanding of how politics and policy work. People who follow politics deeply are the "sickos" as its a stressful and mostly disappointing subject matter.
But that doesn't mean that most people know as much as I do, or people here. This is no different from any other subject where some people have great interest and follow it, and others are aware of it, but don't know it that deeply. Whether its the Roman Empire or Taylor Swift. Polls repeatedly show that most people can't name members of SCOTUS, their state house/senate representatives, their own House rep. They mostly vote by party. You want to tell me they know/knew about DOGE?
Reclaim the mantle of law & order. Ideally with a message closer to "Trump just pardoned a bunch of thugs who attacked police officers" vs. "Technically those payments could be considered campaign contributions, and if so, the campaign didn't follow reporting requirements" or "giving employees access to this database requires a prescribed onboarding process, and skipping that technically makes that effort against the law"
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this article. Unless there is someone in your social circle that you can persuade, it doesn't make sense to engage in the drama, which sucks out valuable energy that can be directed to more productive action! And I love how you focused on WINNING, and then followed up with many issues that Democrats fought for that were unpopular and/or had no chance of being enacted. I really enjoy your articles that combine policy/politics with the mindset of what we need to embody in order to be more effective right now! Thank you!
> someone in your social circle that you can persuade
The panic has gotten so bad that people are even self-sabotaging within their social circle and persuading people in the opposite direction. I've heard multiple stories of very progressive people telling their friends and coworkers not to speak publicly about LGBT issues because they will get blacklisted from future NIH grants, and it's infuriating to me. We're not gonna make it through this mess as a country unless we can stand up and push back against a little intimidation.
> not to speak publicly about LGBT issues because they will get blacklisted from future NIH grants
At this point, I think a lot of things are possible, *but* I still wouldn't expect this. I'm reviewing a pile of NIH proposals right now, and I have no clue about the opinions on LGBT issues of the PIs (nor would I care). NIH typically has pretty strict paylines and just funds grants scored below a certain threshold.
(not implying that it's your viewpoint, just commenting on others saying it.)
I think we are in the part of the movie where the good guys discover that the bad guys have set a ticking bomb. What do the good guys do? They call up their bomb disposal expert, give them whatever support the expert asks for, stands back and hopes the expert comes through. They DON’T crowd or micro manage the expert while they are working. Right now Trump and Musk are igniting a constitutional crises with their attempts to unlawfully stop authorized spending. That’s the bomb. We have bomb control experts - people who understand administrative law and legislative procedure, who know how to use the courts and leverage what legislative power we have (given the very small Republican congressional majority it’s probably more than a lot of people think) and I’m confident that right now they are working on the bomb. For the vast majority of us, the best we can do is let them cook- give them the support they need but not try to micromanage them. On the other hand, I do understand issues, public opinion and elections, so my time is best spent continuing to analyze how we failed in 2024, what we need to do win in 2026 and 2028 and work to fix our coalitional politics to make that happen. Because this nightmare doesn’t end until we start winning elections again.
I’ve said before and no doubt will say it again, but it’s astonishing that anyone has to point out that *winning elections is actually the only way to achieve anything.* I love this comment and the one (currently) above requesting SB merch with the slogan “wouldn’t you have rather won?.” Winning elections is the only way to fix this, and that has to be our north star.
The problem is that for the part of the democratic party that is disproportionately represented in the media, activist base, and online, they "know" in their heart of hearts that the only way to win is to move even further to the left. If only those moderates weren't so selfish. If they weren't so obsessed with protecting their power and advancing their agenda they would let us do what we need to to actually win an election. Do I think this is true? Not even a little bit but the "just moderate to win an election" has issues winning over the left. Will it work on the rotting husk of the #resistance? I hope so.
This is true, but when I see an Amy Klobuchar cozying up to Trump or a John Fetterman voting for Pam Bondi, I become despondent. What part of "opposition party" do they not understand?
I understand it though. Obviously they're wrong. But intuitively it sort of makes sense that the way to ensure better outcomes in the long run is to move to the extreme in the short run. Sort of like how a sports team that's doing well early in a game ought to run up the score as much as possible so as to give itself a cushion in case the other team is able to make a push late in the game. I would file this misunderstanding in the same bucket as "the government should tighten its belt when the economy is bad, just like a family does."
There are a lot of left-wingers who just want left-wing policy for instrumental reasons and will use whatever arguments are handy at any given time. But there are other liberals out there (call them the swing voters of the left-of-center coalition) who genuinely misunderstand how politics works. We just need to explain to them, and keep explaining to them without getting frustrated, *why* their intuitive understanding is wrong.
MY forgot; word every criticism and worry to others in terms of how it will affect ordinary, median-income, middle-class voters, even if you personally find other causes and other people more sympathetic, because you’re wrong if you think everyone else agrees.
I still don't believe there will be notable opposition to Trump and Musk until they break something foundational, e.g., Musk's tinkering with Treasury payments causing an economic crisis or schools shutting down. His deportation agenda will likey be catastrophic. This country runs on an underground economy--migrant workers harvest our food, put roofs on our houses, work in our hotels. You deport their relatives and scare them enough into not coming, and they won't be replaced. I'm a small farmer who does my own labor, and let me tell you, you won't get Americans to harvest fruit in ninety degree temperatures.
Here in Maine we get returning seasonal workers who work legally for a bit more than minimum wage, but less than retail/fast food. They develop long term relationships with farmers and growers year over year, work legally on visas, get the job done, and enjoy a much better standard of living in their home countries. There are also a lot of American farm workers doing complimentary work like supervision, running more complex machinery, and doing processing.
Potatoes and apples don't cost noticably more here than they do where illegal workers do the work.
The idea that we actually can't get by without illegal workers in agriculture is on pretty shaky ground.
I think there's a big conflation between we need illegal immigration vs. we've needed immigration and we've allowed it to occur illegally.
You don't have to get all the way to One Billion Americans to look around the country and see that immigration, in the numbers we've experienced, both legal and illegal, is a critical part of our nation's GDP over the past several decades.
People have come here, they near universally work, and our economy absorbs them and expands. Take several million working age folks out of the economy and bad things will happen. Some sectors will get hit harder than others, but all will suffer.
We need to control our borders, we need to figure out how to bring some legal status to the people who are here and have been here for some time, and we need to be realistic about the need to keep some immigration flowing both low skill and high.
To address your point directly, there is clear moral difference between slavery and illegal immigration. The cost of no cotton in return for emancipation would have been worth whatever it was. The declaration of some immigration as illegal is strictly a decree of malum prohibitum, we've declared it illegal, but it is not immoral.
Lots of PMCs worried about who will clean their toilets and care for their children. I'm not convinced that agriculture is the big problem sector. Maybe construction, but I think urban service industries are likely to see big hits.
GC's reliance on lots of mom & pop contractors is one of the problems with the visa system. A company has to be big enough to have the wearwithal to handle the administrative load in order to participate.
Something like 44 percent of farm workers are undocumented illegal immigrants, according to estimates.
Should these people have H-2A visas? Sure, probably. Do you trust that the Trump administration is going to handle that process in a competent way? Nope. Those 44 percent could disappear to El Salvador and just not be replaced, thus ushering in the labor crisis that I think is very likely.
I think Trump would listen to farmers. Not that he'd go along with everything they want, but that he'd give them a fair hearing. And H-2A visas help solve two problems that Trump and many of his supporters dislike: Lack of control over who gets into the country, and entire families coming to stay permanently.
I mean Trump screwed over farmers during his last administration with trade war stuff, and then proceeded to just bail them out. Most likely that could just happen again
"In 2020–22, 32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization."
They're still estimating around 42 percent of farm workers are illegals. I know everybody loves to argue and pretend that they know what's going on, but I'm in the industry and these estimates are probably low. Even if the Trump administration doesn't target illegal farm workers, the culture of fear will have repercussions that reverberate throughout various industries. Is it good that we have an underground labor force? Of course not. Can they be easily replaced? Absolutely not.
No, people who came here illegally "jumping the line" should NOT be issued any visas. Crime should not pay. Rather, bring in law abiding immigrants on visas to replace the illegals.
Aren't we still paying low wages to H-2A agricultural visas though? I agree, I don't like the idea that we can't get by without illegal workers, but clearly we need low wage workers. The truth is somewhere in between. American's simultaneously think some people should work for the bare minimum so they can engage as much consumption as possible and cheap goods.
I mean I can only speak for where I currently live, but I think they make around minimum wage depending on the state right? It's like $16 an hour where I live. Additionally, housing is supposed to be provided at little or no cost to them, but that is not always the case with them. My state had an entire issue where they were basically taking people's visas and taking housing costs out of their wages. It was a huge scandal.
Further, do you not consider minimum wage to be a low wage? Additionally, more than two-thirds of U.S. crop workers are foreign born, according to the USDA. It is also estimated that 40%+ of them are undocumented migrants. Either we need to really punish the companies who are doing the hiring or actually pay people more. If you want American people to do the work, you either need to pay higher wages for American workers to do it or expand the pool of H2 visas.
Again, it goes back to my point though, requiring the backbone of your agriculture be done by people making minimum wage and then have 40% of the workforce be undocumented isn't good. Or at least have a pathway for people that are undocumented to get the actual visas.
We are going in circles, and you are obviously not engaging in good faith. Even for the average American citizen, minimum wage is a low wage. Immigration aside.
It's like you are debating to try and be right or simply dismissive instead of being thoughtful about the actual problem and deeper issues we should try to resolve. You asked questions, I provided a detailed reply, and you just pick something easy to reply to without even taking it seriously.
It’s funny. I was gonna post the same chart! Like … I just don’t *get* this new approach to immigration where we throw our hands up because we have TOO many illegal immigrants. This makes no sense. There’s a path forward where with stricter enforcement we actually work the visa process.
Fantastic, I’m sure the Americans who voted for Agent Orange because of the price of eggs will be f**king thrilled to pay $30 for a pint of blueberries.
Working for the lowest possible wages a day and calling it work training is a bit generous. When your society depends on prison labor or agriculture visas or the population will be upset at the price of goods, there may be a problem with the society... Just my 2 cents...
I mostly agree but would say there are *some* ideological exceptions. My impression is American soldiers in Gaza is extremely unpopular with Trump's base and they would revolt if he actually tried it. (For now they are worried but willing to believe it is a negotiation tactic.)
Honestly, from what I've seen from the right wing sphere, until they are personally affected they'll keep ignoring how people are actually hurting or the bad things that happen. Until it is their friends, family or their own checks that get hurt they won't care. Right now, they are cutting around the margins, hurting agencies that barely make a dent in the overall budget, but there is absolutely they can save the 1-2 Trillion they are looking to save without hurting a millions of Americans. I'm convinced that American's will need to feel pain, that is the only thing we seem to understand.
Who is the most normal likeable Democrat out there right now? Put them on TV.
The best advice I could give Democrats is to just be patient. Take Trump to court for the important things, if you know you could win. Otherwise, just accept that he’s going to fuck around for the next couple of years. But we all know when you fuck around you find out. Either people will like his policies or they won’t. If he is truly bad as we all think, then Democrats will win the next election and be able to reverse things. The worst thing to do there is to get these people out in the street protesting things that aren’t sympathetic.
I am pro foreign aid, but I have been astonished to see some of these questionable spending payments like transgender operas. Yes I know it is a tiny fraction of tax dollars, but perception matters.
Agree, much of what is going on that is truly bad falls into the bucket of illegal Executive overreach, the best response there is the courts.
The dems need to just be clear about what's bad, not freak out about the stupid like Gaza, and hold fire until stuff really starts to bite on normal people.
Ezra's latest pod is awesome and covered exactly this. The "freeze" reversal was a good example and hilariously demonstrates just how incompetent Trump's new administration is (even after having years to plan this out). They thought through precisely zero of the OMB impacts and then just walked it all back in a day. Bunch of literal idiots.
There are things like abolishing CEQ, rescinding the A4, curtailing some of the climate crisis and DEIA initiatives (I don’t support firing these HR workers, just reassigning their work to ADA and EOE such stuff).
There are things like the USPS closing the loophole Shein or Temu exploited and reopening it that makes me confused.
Then there are all the direct threats to government employees, RTO without notice, the freezing of congressional mandated freezes, the firing of IGs , etc.
Wray stepping down is insane. Appointees with fixed terms that have protections clearing the way for Musk and Co to violate law is insane.
So in short, I am open to accepting some positive things. They are just washed out by the effluence.
Replacing the heads of IT in various agencies with political appointees is just uniquely stupid. During the first Trump term, I liked the corporate tax cuts, space force and operation warp speed. Everything else was pretty stupid. Right now, everything seems pretty stupid.
"Or does fighting mean recapturing the spirit of 2006 and recruiting the largest possible tent of Trump opponents?"
[IFeelLikeImTakingCrazyPills.gif]
Harris did try to recruit a large tent of Trump opponents! For Christ's sake, she campaigned with Liz Cheney, who disagrees with her completely on policy, but they made common cause for the sake of beating Trump! I listened to Kamala's speeches, and she always, always spoke as inclusively (in the good normie sense, not the DEI sense). "I want to be President for all Americans, not just those who support me." Ads featuring Americans of different races and ages and geographic locations and SES levels, sure to include members of the military and rural people. "I know Trump's type, he's a crook and I've dealt with ones like him = I'm appealing to your sense of decency, to see what an unfit a-hole he is, also I implicitly value law and order and am not running on some wild-eyed lefty ACAB agenda."
"But drosophilist," I hear you say, "she just said that to get elected, of course nobody believed her!"
Meanwhile, over in Trump's world:
2024!Trump: Project 2025? What's that? Never heard of it. Also I'm gonna put America first, no more wasteful foreign adventures!
Voters: Sounds good, Mr. Trump, we'll vote for you!
2025!Trump: Psych! Project 2025 is real and it's spectacular, also watch me do a 180 from "focus on America first" to "bat-guano insane babbling about annexing Panama/Greenland/kicking out the Gazans and building a Riviera in the Middle East"!
Political commenters: [shocked Pikachu face]
me: /headdesk
I'm not saying voters should have trusted Kamala uncritically, but I will go to my grave not understanding how ANYONE could consider Kamala/a random person picked off the street to be less "honest" or "trustworthy" than Trump.
I don't know what Matt meant, but I don't think anyone should blame Harris personally. She ran a pretty good campaign over those 100 days or so. I'd give her at least a B, maybe a B+. This is about sustained effort over time, since what you do and what you message between campaigns impacts the effectiveness of your tactics once you're in an active campaign.
It was a fine campaign in a universe where Biden is decently popular and abortion and democracy are the #1 and #2 issues, but that's not the universe we live in.
It's like crediting a basketball coach for a strategy that would've been brilliant back when the 3-pt line didn't exist and then when he loses, blaming the existence of the 3-pt line instead of criticizing the coach for not factoring in the existence of the 3-pt line.
No. As it turns out she lost by a pretty small margin, so while it's true that in hindsight we know that a higher-risk/higher-reward strategy might have succeeded while her strategy failed, she was not so far off the mark that you can conclude the risk/benefit calculation was foreseeably wrong ex ante.
It doesn't require hindsight. We watched her polling numbers and favorability slip in real time over September and October as some of us criticized the decisions she was and wasn't making.
I guess I just don't see how a campaign that spends $1 billion only for their candidate to lose ground in both polling and favorability in the final months without a major scandal could be considered anything other than a colossal failure given the fundamental purpose of a campaign.
I mean I agree with you, but "You can run a pretty good campaign and focus on the right things and still lose to a flaming garbage can of a candidate who ran the shittiest campaign in US history" is depressing as f**k. Definitely picked the wrong year to quit sniffing glue.
Look, mathew, you're a lot further right than I am, and that's fine. Good-faith disagreement on policy is part of a free society!
I just think you're being a bit unfair to Biden/Harris by cherry-picking the worst about them, as in:
1. Immigration crisis: agree, they screwed the pooch on that one, should have been working on it harder from the beginning. "America is a land of immigrants but also a land of laws, if you want to come here you must do so legally."
2. Extra stimulus caused inflation: this is a case of "fighting the last battle," I think. Biden remembered how Obama had been castigated for passing a too-small stimulus during the global financial crisis of 2008/"bailing out Wall Street, not Main Street." So Biden erred in the opposite direction. I'm guessing he both thought that he was right on the merits and that voters would reward him for preventing a depression/massive unemployment. [Pitch Meeting Guy voice] "Whoops! Whoopsie!"
3. Yes, trans issues were unpopular, they shouldn't have pushed for the far-left interpretation. "Taxpayer-funded gender reassignment for prisoners" is the f**king Willie Horton of 2024.
4. Student loans: Yes, they tried to give a goodie to a constituency that generally supports them. They're not the first politicians to do so and won't be the last. This is what I mean by you being a bit unfair/cherrypicking: you mention the student loans (boo, Biden bad!) but say nothing about the government $$$ for chip fabs and other manufacturing, a lot of which went specifically to red states and was intended to provide jobs for the non-college-educated Forgotten Man who's being sneered at by the snooty liberal coastal bourgeoisie.
5. Are you a veteran? I can't remember for sure. I might be confusing you for someone else. I'm a civilian with zero military experience, so forgive me for talking out my ass on this one, but this has to be said:
Afghanistan was a f**king quagmire. It was never, ever going to turn into a small-l liberal Western-friendly democracy, no matter how many more American lives/resources/$$$ we poured into that place. Yes, the exit was mismanaged and someone in the Biden administration/the military was horribly naive to think that the Afghan National Army would hold out for a few months instead of folding instantaneously like a wet towel. But somebody had to pull the goddamn plug, and I actually respect Biden for going through with it, knowing that he would pay the price politically. That's an example of doing the unpopular but right thing. I sure as hell wouldn't want Americans still stuck in Afghanistan while simultaneously supporting Ukraine against Russia.
Sincerely curious, which of these describes you best?
a) I wanted Biden to pull out of Afghanistan, but I don't like the way he did it [legit]
b) if we had stayed in Afghanistan for [n more years], it would have transformed into a stable country and ally, and then we could leave [at what cost in American lives and $?]
c) I would prefer for Americans to stay in Afghanistan until the heat death of the universe rather than ever surrender to the Taliban [I respect your opinion but disagree most strongly with it]
6. Boy howdy, if we're gonna do guilt by association, we can be here all day. It's not like the GOP doesn't have its share of utter wingnuts who make Trump look sane. Anyone remember Mr. "I'm a Black Nazi" in North Carolina?
"Good-faith disagreement on policy is part of a free society!". First agreed. Which is one of the reasons I subscribe here. I try very hard to get out of my echo chamber and understand people on the other side. My grandma was a lot definitely a liberal, but I remember many wonderful conversations with her on topics where we diagreed.
1. Sounds like we are in agreement.
2. Yes I understand why Biden went big on the extra stimulus despite warnings. My bigger problem is once inflation became apparent, there were all the denials and refusal to fix the problem. Once inflation started shooting up, there were still hundreds of billions unspent. Why not pull those back?
We all make mistakes, and the first one I can understand. But the refusal to change course was a big problem for me.
3. agreed.
4. It's not just that the student loan forgiveness was bad policy (which it was). It was the unconstitutional manner in which it was done. The CHIPS act was a bipartisan bill that went through congress. I have areas of disagreement with it, but overall I count it as a win for Biden and something he did right (same with the infrastructure bill.
5. Yes I'm a veteran. I didn't serve in Afghanistan, although my brother did. I think it's important to remember a couple of things there.
Yes we had been there 2 decades, spent a lot of lives and money. But the situation in 2020 was not the situation in 2010. Things had stabilized. Few Americans were dying, and it was mostly the Afghanistan army that was doing all the fighting.
But and this is crucial, the Afghanistan army that we had been built was dependent on a lot of US support still. We just pulled the rug out from under them, and so of course they crumbled.
I'm wanted to leave to, but we needed to first help the Afghanistan army build the support structure to replace us. We didn't do that. Yep that would probably have taken another 5 years. And cost more money, but I believe if we had done that we could have left a stable country behind.
Also I firmly believe that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was partially predicated on our withdrawal (of course hard to prove).
You're absolutely correct the GOP has it's share of nuts. Which is why even though I lean conservative I couldn't vote for Trump.
On #2, Biden absolutely deserves blame for the hard he caused the economy. By the time he proposed the American Rescue Plan the economy was already showing signs of very strong recovery. And we already knew by that point that most of the earlier direct stimulus (checks to households) had been saved, not spent. In February economists were projecting nearly 6% GDP growth for 2021.
No, Biden's "stimulus" was nothing of the sort. It was a big cash giveaway intended to distract from the fact that most of the rest of the spending was going to be wasted.
What we needed from Kamala is a Sister Souljah moment. What we needed is for her to come out againt *any* Biden policy. What we needeed for her is to provide a minimally plausible explanation for her 180 from the very extreme positions she endorsed in 2020. She did none of that. She also refused to acknoweldge the media landscape of 2024 campaigning like it's still the aughts. Without all that you can't say she campaigned properly. Yes, she was dealt a difficult hand. And yes, the general anti-incumbant factors made her the underdog in any case. BUT she is still very very from being blameless in all of this.
I feel she at least could have said that the pivot on asylum policy during the last year of the administration should have come sooner. How hard would that have been?
Agree, and she could have said something like “I ran on these [list unpopular positions] as a then-Senator from California, but now that I’m VP of all Americans, I have developed a new perspective and come around to [more centrist/popular positions].” Throw California under the bus, I don’t care! It would have been better than what we got 🍊🐍🤬🤮
Running with Liz Cheney is just running on more not Trumpiness instead of an affirmative vision. Harris was hamstrung by the being a continuation of the undeservedly unpopular Biden-Harris administration.
You made an offhand remark about supporting protests. I agree in the abstract that protests can be valuable, though many actual protests are not. Are you aware of good protest movements to support right now? The only ones I’ve heard about are protests in Santa Ana and Los Angeles about deportation, which seem like the wrong focus, since it’s probably actually one of the few drastic things Trump is doing that is legal, and is also even popular.
Thank you for writing this. It's frightening living in Northern Virginia and thinking about the abuse some of my neighbors working for the government are receiving, but I'm fine, my family is fine, and our friends are doing fine. I wish there was something more I could do to help directly, but it's probably best that I focus on other issues that I actually have more direct influence over. I've got the luxury of not having to worry about the assault on the federal workforce if I don't want to think about it.
Instead, I'm thinking forward toward the off-off-year elections in November, and putting my energy into being a YIMBY and advocating for housing. Those are things that I have some influence over and I can be productive on.
“A lot of grifters and opportunists are out there claiming that Democrats in Congress aren’t [fighting Trump].”
Few Congressional Democrats look past their self interest towards the broader interest of the party. In 2024, only two house Democrats lost primaries. None were defeated by leftists, they both lost for crossing the zionist lobby. Yet House Democrats are in the thrall of immigration, DEI and transgender activists. They did not support bold, centrist legislation during the last Congress. Why did we have to wait for Trump to sign an executive order protecting women’s sports from gender dysphoric men? That should never have become an issue. Congressional Democrats kept the groups happy even as the groups drove moderates from the party. That does not qualify as fighting and calling out unworthy elites isnt grifting.
Yeah, why didn't Biden do *anything* about transwomen in women's sports?
"The Biden Administration’s interpretation of Title IX would allow transgender student athletes to participate in sports based on their gender identity with consideration for students’ age, level of competition and the individual sport’s status as a contact sport. However, these criteria may also be used by local education agencies and states to limit athletic participation to sex assigned at birth under certain circumstances."
In other words: nuanced attempt to create policy to deal with a tangled situation BAD! Blunderbuss policy aimed at stoking outrage rather than helping people deal with that situation GOOD!
A simpler message: Our government has big issues to deal with and this is not one of them. Let private sports organizations make their own policy. No to the nanny state!
I get it people care, even if the odds that their daughter will have to compete with a transwoman are almost infinitesimal. But as the saying goes, don’t make a federal case of it. The issue is not big enough to warrant policy at the federal level. Let each group make their own policy. It shouldn’t matter that they get federal funding; the federal government shouldn’t have a ruling interest on this question.
That is pretty much my position. If the NCAA wants to make it their policy that you must be born female to compete in women' sports, that's fine by me, but exactly what categories of competition there are, and who is eligible for each category feels like an issue best decided by the sports leagues, not the government.
Of course, the counter argument is that there are special provisions in law requiring universities to have women's sports, so the government has already butted itself into sports leagues, like it or not, thus, an official interpretation of that law is required.
The lack of attention to Zellnor Myrie is more likely because he’s 37 and has never managed more than two employees, so people are skeptical about handing him the 300,000-employee, $100 billion City government.
Everyone has to pick the dose of drama/pain they want to inflict upon themselves.
However, this past couple weeks has convinced me that the President of the United States is a sadist and I'm trying hard NOT to look the other way. There's no way to rationalize his recent conduct, ,particularly the way he's needlessly and excessively inflicting fear and pain of people for no obvious reason. I used to think stuff like this was just about creating a show for his supporters, but these past weeks have convinced me that the cruelty really is the point.
Personally, I'm trying as hard as I can to stare this evil in the face as much as I can and witness it first hand and in real time. We all have a responsibility for what our country does and even just being a witness and experiencing is part of that responsibility.
I admire your commitment, but in accordance with the proverb “it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” I strongly suggest you pair bearing witness with doing something positive, even if it’s something small. Are you able to volunteer in your community? Donate to a good cause? Witnessing the sh!t show and not being able to do anything is a recipe for bitterness and despair.
@drosophilist, I just want to note that you were right about this. I was (and am still) angry with the Dems for being so out of touch as to make *this* a viable option for a majority of voters. I hoped (foolishly) that with an actual mandate the incoming administration would step up; I have been shocked by the malice. But I should have expected it, and the support that they *still* seem to enjoy makes me very apprehensive about the future.
Specifically, I'm staying tuned in and not giving up twitter or disconnecting from the news. I'm trying to keep the same routine as I normally do in terms of how much energy and focus I spend on current events. Not more. Not less. My goal is to roughly know the big picture reality about exactly what the Trump Administration is doing and the reasons it gives for its actions. Also, I'm trying to understand what Trump's supporters are saying and thinking about the Administration's actions.
But how is that worth anything? Consuming information (as opposed to entertainment) only has value insofar as it affects your actions. If it doesn't affect your actions in any way, then there's no point.
I think what's happening now is historic and will be viewed as a pivot point in terms of both our identity as a nation and our relationship to the rest of the world. I could have this totally wrong of course. I'm aware of that and I keep that in mind.
That said, my belief is that experiencing these times more fully as they unfold will change who I am as a person compared to if I don't do that.
I think of this as similar to my experience with 9/11 and its aftermath. I could have just turned off the news and spared myself the distress and sadness of the whole thing. I was personally unaffected by it for the most part. But I believe the full experience of 9/11 changed me and it informs my politics to this day. I view what's happening today somewhat similarly (although of course it's a totally different situation).
The occasion of the consumption need not be the occasion of the action. The two may be years, decades apart. The consumption of information is an additive process: what you don't learn today affects what you can understand tomorrow.
This is where I'm starting to shift my thinking as Trump 2.0 plays out. I previously thought this was just about "owning the libs" and watching libs suffer and getting payback against the libs. The fact that other people got hurt in the process was just a side effect that he didn't care about.
Now I think that's wrong. This is not about owning the libs. Trump's motivation here is to continue giving his followers the steady stream of human suffering they're demanding from him. Everything he does is to feed his followers, who get a feeling of power and exhilaration from knowing the harm he's causing is because of their support of him. This is not about the libs at all and what we do is irrelevant.
I disagree. I think Trump feels wronged -- deeply and unfairly wronged -- by the actions of the FBI during Russiagate, by the military brass who withheld information from him, by the Resistance™ during his first term, by the Justice Department during the past 4 years and by government officials during Covid.
He didn't know enough about the Executive Branch to do much about it during his first term, so he tweeted a lot. The interregnum during the past 4 years gave him the time to assemble a team of loyalists who are looking to either (1) take revenge or (2) root out the Deep State as he defines it. Or both.
That's a good point about the Justice/FBI stuff. I guess it's important to avoid single/simple explanations for everything when there certainly are multiple motivations at work.
I said this upthread, but I think of this similarly to the way I think about 9/11. I wasn't directly impacted personally, but staying engaged and taking in the anger, sadness and sorrow that it caused changed me. I think I'm better for it. If not better, at least more experienced and different.
For one concrete example, prior to 9/11 I thought of Israel as being needlessly harsh and bullying. But staying tuned in to how it felt then, I said to my wife "this must be how people in Israel feel all the time." I still don't agree with everything Israel does, but now I cut them a ton more slack, having experienced the fear and anger I felt in the days following the attacks.
Well, he may be a sadist, but if he can rid the FAA of all its DEI hires so we never again have to experience all the plane crashes that resulted since it hired so many people who aren't white men, then I'll be happy!
I agree with the overall point of this post a lot and am trying to put it into practice in my own life. But contra the last paragraph, every Democrat absolutely should be "protecting every bureaucrat" from the kinds of things happening right now at USAID, the FBI, and elsewhere. Republicans want to bring fed workers back to the office? Fine. They want to issue new EOs countermanding Biden's EOs? Great. They want to use their control of all the branches of government (!) to change or eliminate USAID or NIH or the Dept of Education by law? I would hate it, but my side lost. But these weekend blitzkriegs with zero legislative foundation are lawless and terrifying, and the fed workers caught in the crossfire absolutely should be protected. And every Dem -- not just the few that represent Northern Virginia or suburban Maryland -- should care.
Agreed. THIS is the priority. Gaza, Greenland, Panama — these are distractions.
I would throw the “trans sports ban” into this noise machine category.
President doesn’t have control over what rules independent sports leagues do.
Also recent NYT poll shows 18% of adults support letting transgender people play in opposing sports league. It's just not a winning issue for Democrats.
Leah Thomas is the reason I switched my position on this particular issue. I was like “why are all these young women protesting this anonymously?” and it’s because of harassment and cruelty that would be directed at them for expressing sensible concerns around fairness and NCAA policy.
So because of one transwoman playing in women's sports?
The head of the NCAA says he's aware of fewer than 10 transgender people among the 510,000 NCAA athletes
That's two thousandths of one percent!
We should denounce *both* sides for making this such a huge issue, and especially Trump because he's the President now. Let leagues and conferences come up with their own policy and obliterate it from the national debate. It's a complete non-issue nationally.
Agree that the question of transwomen in the NCAA should be left up to the NCAA or whatever sports authority controls the sport in question. But given the tiny numbers, why are transpeople at the center of political discourse at all? Why do liberals feel the need to elevate gender dysphoria to heroic status rather than acknowledge it as an individual problem best dealt with by allowing those individuals to access specialized care, and not be subject to discrimination in housing or employment discrimination—but also that we don’t have to reorder how we deal with everyone else’s sexuality in order to accommodate the worldview of a tiny number of trans-activists with big social media followings? Seems to me that all the flying of trans flags and celebrating trans visibility day has made life dramatically worse for most trans people, given what’s going on. It’s fine for the influencers, for whom attention, especially negative attention, is literally money in the bank, but for most it seems to be making their lives infinitely harder.
I used to have more of the activist position. The whole Leah Thompson debate and seeing how female athletes were villainized by the political camp I used to identify with pushed me away from that position. I used to be like “Joe Rogan is a bigot and should be disregarded.” Now I am like “there are legitimate questions and we shouldn’t immediately jump down people’s throats.”
Yes it's a small issue, but the "active left" made it a big issue and the "active right" latched on. Why on earth did this trans-issue even become a "thing"? That was all the doing of the "active left"
I cant tell you how much this matters to folks who are typically Democratic voters.
Most high school and university sports teams rely on government funding. Your point verges upon disinformation
why should i be invested in the well being sod workers who generally make well above the median wage, have enjoyed high levels of job security and have often made the economy less efficient?
i don’t want trump to target political enemies, but i don’t see how that necessitates coddling bureaucrats
I’m less concerned with coddling bureaucrats than protecting the critical work they do to help dispense government services.
Like I’m not upset personally for the person who is in charge of the treasury department payment system got fired, I’m upset because some unqualified doge person is now doing their job.
I have little confidence that the incumbent bureaucrats are the most qualified. They have navigated the security clearance/drug test/veteran’s preference game. Half the professionals in silicon valley would be fired if held to those standards. The current federal work force has been optimized for rule following and conscientiousness. It lacks dynamism.
I think comment speaks to why I have a lot of time for libertarianism as a critique of government but why I loathe libertarianism as all encompassing worldview.
Even the most left wing Berniecrat would probably agree that there are areas of bureaucracy that could be pared back. A Bernicrat my focus more on Defense than someone more right wing, but nonetheless the idea that a) among two million Federal employees there must be people who's jobs are not necessary b) give size of Federal spending there must be areas that could be cut back at little to no cost, is almost by definition true.
That's not what's happening here. Musk appears to be trying to get rid of various Federal functions on what appear to be pretty spurious claims of being totally in the bag for super leftists and without any sense of what these government functions actually do.
The latter point I think is important. I think 40 years of right wing propaganda has implanted the idea even with people more centrist or left of center that wide swaths of the government are completely useless and could be rid of tomorrow at no cost and if you peak under the hood you discover that's not actually as true one might think.
And that's a problem at the very top, where procedures are determined, IT and process investments made, automation allowed or disallowed... but the vast majority of human endeavor below the cutting-edge is better served by rule-following and conscientiousness than whatever "dynamism" is as a personal trait. This is just as true in the private sector; I do not need the HR person processing my hiring paperwork to be dynamic, I need them to fill the paperwork out correctly and promptly and boringly.
We literally discussed this yesterday; teachers need to drill an immense amount of basic, foundational knowledge and methodology into elementary-age children and they find it boring so they keep trying to falsify research saying it can be done "dynamically." They're wrong, as you're wrong.
We need people who can go to work for the government and do their boring-ass jobs so your parents get their Social Security checks on time, so requests for information are processed correctly, so records of property ownership are updated routinely, so military paychecks go out in the right amounts, so all access badges are scanned at sensitive installations, so we have all of the up-to-date information on H5N1 in a single location, ad infinitum.
We can talk about process and procedure bloat but the answer there is still "kill all the lawyers." It's never going to be "kill all the bureaucrats," nor "kill all the construction workers," as you have proposed at various times in the past.
Your profession is and will continue to be the problem for however long it takes the rest of us to prize your hands from the throat of literally every other field of endeavor and force 90% of you out of the field for fear of penury.
I realize this is self interested, but I think people simply don't comprehend the extent to which, practically speaking, "get rid of the lawyers!" means getting rid of the rights and claims people have against government action that affects them. Over-proceduralism can absolutely be a stifling cost disease, see NIMBY meetings and specious suits to stop development Etc. But at base level, its much more emotionally satisfying for people to say "Yea F**K the lawyers!!!" than to say "Get rid of my ability to stop the government from violating what I earnestly believe to be my legal/constitutional rights!!!" and I think everyone would see this if they thought a little harder about it. The worst ills can be curbed by well drafted statutes, not giving rise to unnecessary causes of action. But that isn't to say the mechanism of protecting these tights, i.e. the lawyers, is itself wrong, just that it can be inefficiently applied.
I guess we'll find out, David. My strong prior is that as inefficient as government processes are, things can get much much much worse and the little doggies seem intent on making that happen.
These guys have no interest in government working better; they're in the "drown it in the bathtub" crowd.
I need to think through this more but Ezra's last podcast was AWESOME. He's totally back on track. I'm continually impressed with how stupid the Silicon Valley team is. The All-In pod Saturday was like an SNL skit for tech-bro non-sense (EDIT: For real, they talk about how they have a DOGE text thread and all post eggplant emojis for every press release - total high school idiots). Here's where they all go wrong. They're constrained by digital thinking. They've never worked within physical supply chains where people can be operational bottlenecks. A great example is hospitals. So for the VA it's either the nurses or the doctor who are the ops. bottleneck. And Musk's stupid memo just offered them a buyout. There are 1000s of similar people constrained operating models across the government. But Musk is an idiot and thinks in terms of software where sure ... after the heavy upfront tech build the maintenance cost is significantly less. That's just not how physical supply chains and / or value chains work.
I suspect you are right, but I don’t see how defending bureaucrats does anything beyond pissing off normies.
Before the hiring freeze, my office received about 300 applicants for a position that we were hiring. The caliber of candidates we interviewed was quite high, and a lot of smart, seemingly dedicated people wanted to do the work. I don't think that passing a public trust security clearance or drug test is a very high bar.
We, as a nation, have long since decided that if you are dynamic and ambitious, we would prefer that you were employed in the private sector than in the public. This sounds strange and off-putting when said out loud, and possibly even offensive to public sector workers. Nonetheless, it's very much the cornerstone of how our various levels of government hire, retain, and promote employees. It's also quite possibly a reason that we as a nation are so much wealthier than the others. We absolutely don't want the "most qualified" processing grant applications at the NHS or teaching high school. We want them becoming scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs and then aiming for big bucks and recognition in the private sector. The last thing we should want is Silicon Valley hiring standards for governmental employees.
There are also government employees doing research at national labs, the NIH etc. (The US doesn't have an "NHS"). The EPA does intramural research on things like filters to remove PFAS "forever chemicals," sometimes in collaboration with academics.
I would agree with you, though, that people like the EPA scientists do more incremental work and are less driven than many academics. I don't know people working in national labs, but I think they compete with physics departments for good researchers, and I know that the top ranks of the government's medical scientists are often drawn from top academics.
For the larger number of government employees whose role is to administer services or monitor regulatory compliance, it makes even more sense to look for people who are rule-followers, have relevant degrees and work experience, but are not necessarily ambitious or "dynamic." You don't need dynamism or creativity to do the job, you just need to understand the policies and figure out how they apply in edge cases. (Also pass background checks, to avoid hiring people likely to abuse the modest power of their job, or to steal sensitive information, etc.) If you're Einstein, you'd be better employed elsewhere, and if you're Einstein in such a job, the greatest service your boss can do to humanity is to pay you to use your real skills instead.
are you saying politicians and prosecutors are unambitious?
It has nothing to do with coddling bureaucrats, and everything to do with observing the proper constitutional structure of the Republic.
I would have figured that went without saying.
No one here wants to coddle a god damned bureaucrat; you can dispense with that notion forthwith. I want to see the administrative state massively reorganized; but I also want to see it happen LEGALLY, not as part of a fucking coup. Duh.
This is an important point. If Congress was mandating all of this with legislation we would be firmly in 'elections have consequences' territory. The executive playing chicken with the other branches is another matter entirely, and a recipe for catastrophe.
I retired from the government during COVID, and my wife will be retiring within the next few months. I honestly don’t understand your focus on “dynamic personalities”. Our coworkers had/have a range of personalities, from dynamic (and some manic) to more laid back (and lethargic), much as you would find in any large organization. But I don’t think we want a government composed entirely of dynamic personalities. One friend works on uncovering Medicare/medicaid fraud, which is extremely detail oriented work that may not be a great fit for dynamic personalities. Another worked on the mirrors of the James Webb telescope, which again was extraordinarily time consuming and detail focused. It is because of the careful engineering that the telescope was successful. I am sure dynamic personalities are helpful in some government jobs, and perhaps even beneficial as part of otherwise detail-focused teams, but I don’t think we want only (or even mostly), DPs.
Apropos government pay, the CBO report linked below indicates that total federal government compensation is about 10 percent below what it would be if fed pay was comparable to private sector pay. It shows what many of us intuited, which was that for lower skilled jobs, fed pay was higher than the alternative, while at the higher skilled jobs/education levels, pay was significantly lower.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235
Eyeballing that chart, I...don't think it shows that pay is significantly lower for *most* high skilled/high education employees in general? There's really only a big difference in favor of the private sector for workers with doctorates or professional degrees, which is a tiny portion of the workforce. For workers with master's and bachelor's degrees, the difference looks negligible.
According to table 1-1 of the report, 23 percent of federal government employees have a masters degree, and a further 10 percent have a professional degree or doctorate (the comparable figures for the private sector are 11 percent and 4 percent). I don’t think 33 percent is a tiny percent of the workforce.
Hit post too quickly. I agree that for many (most?) feds, pay is fairly competitive, and it has other lifestyle and non-pecuniary benefits. I was objecting to the original posters comment that feds are overpaid. Also, for many top level employees, wages are significantly below what people with comparable responsibilities would make in the private sector. David Lebryk, the treasury official who recently left after DOGE took over the federal payments system, was responsible for overseeing over $5 trillion annually. He was likely making somewhere in the neighborhood $200,000. Not at all a bad salary, but fairly low given his incredibly important responsibilities.
Fair enough, but the really big difference only comes in for professional degrees/doctorates. For master's degree holders - a good majority of that 33% - the difference looks very small.
I also wonder if the smaller number of professional degree/doctorate holders in the private sector has something to do with the big wage premium for that group.
You should be invested in having an independent civil service that wields state power based on what the law says, and where elected officials set general policy priorities for them but are buffered from direct control over hiring and firing, etc. If the civil service is not independent and is instead chosen based on its loyalty to specific electeds and/or can be ordered to act to advance the narrow short-term political interests of said electeds, then you're not going to have a functioning liberal democracy for very long. Maybe you don't value that though - most Republicans today don't.
I mean you don't have to imagine. It's literally how this country existed on a Federal level until the Pendleton Act of 1883 under the idea that "hey maybe it's not a good idea that have a system where a President can get shot by deranged man expecting a sweet heart job in return for supporting his nomination".
It's sort of forgotten now, but civil service reform was basically the issue of the day in late 19th century. Go read Edmund Morris' first book about Teddy Roosevelt to see how much of his political life involved this issue (and one of the first issues that helped push him left policy wise).
Also, read up on how local government operates. There are absolutely still echoes of old school Tammany Hall machine politics today in hiring practices/how government contracts are handed out etc.
There's been a nostalgia for the "smoke filled room" of the past given the inertia of Congress today (a definite background predicate as to how Trump or his minions can at least so far get away with what appears to be blatantly illegal acts). A nostalgia I can understand to a degree and why I like that Matt has pointed out the importance of "Secret Congress".
But yeah, let's not overromanticize how things used to operate; it was astonishingly corrupt and there's a reason there years/decades long efforts to reform the system.
The problem with the Pendleton Act of 1883 is that it pushed the source of assassinations from deranged job seekers to deranged anarchists and other radical ideologues.
I mean, Garfield could have just given Guiteau a job, you know?
I'd rather have the ideologues. It's not a good society if people can threaten the president to get taxpayer money for themselves, personally.
Like most left leaning people I've been appalled by what Trump and Musk have done to our institutions and the constitution over the last few weeks but admittedly I have a hard time articulating how what they've done will actually affect people's lives in tangible terms.
Despite the fact they're actively burning the federal bureaucracy to the ground you'd have to figure they're smart enough to keep critical systems that run critical programs like medicare and social security running so it's not so obvious how things like DOGE will actually affect people.
Maybe the answer is the erosion of institutions and liberal democracy along with the attenuated corruption doesn't necessarily impact people's day to day lives immediately but eventually these things lead to poorer and less prosperous nations. In way it's like Climate Change in that not all the effects are felt at once which makes it harder to argue against.
when the law is an unwieldy kludge and the filibuster makes changing it very difficult, mechanically following the law is not necessarily efficient
Yes, as this illustrates, we just have a fundamental difference in values. I believe in the corniest version of American civics that we learn about in K-12. You think all of that is naive, fake, and sanctimonious and would be willing to try a right-wing autocracy in the name of "efficiency." (Efficient at what? Only you can answer that.) You're on the same intellectual arc as Tucker Carlson and will probably end up in the same place, wherever that is.
Dumping toxic waste in the Cuyahoga River is more efficient than disposing waste safely, so let's just do that instead.
mostly false. i want to be like norway with cheap gas and legal pot. i’m trying to figure out how to get there and i’m not getting any younger
No one said the law is more efficient than other options. Cutting across someone’s lawn is more efficient than waiting at the light, which is why we had to outlaw it so people wouldn’t do that.
Efficiency only matters if it is efficiency towards a good end. I think that the end of setting up a system that persists and enables policies to last for multiple years at a time is valuable, and worth the inefficiency of preventing each new administration from immediately firing and replacing all employees.
People fundamentally misunderstand what "efficiency" looks like in government. If you're a business producing some good or service, you can keep selling until the marginal cost of a good/service equals the marginal benefit. In government, YOU DON'T GET TO STOP PROVIDING SERVICES. This of course means you have to do insane, inefficient things that a business would never contemplate.
Amazon can ignore people who don't know how to use computers. The government has to figure out how to get social security benefits to seniors who don't know how to use computers or speak English as a first language. This is obviously going to impose higher costs to reach these extreme edge cases.
What is this word "efficiency" you keep mentioning?
Seriously, "efficiency" isn't the highest value of the democratic form of governance. It's a lot more complicated.
When I worked for the federal government, the higher level employees made less than they would in the private sector, and the lower level employees made more plus received things like health care and paid holidays that they wouldn't in the private sector. (I was somewhere in the middle.) I don't see this as coddling. I see it as a workplace that respects its workers, and there wasn't the same morale problem as in places where there are cavernous disparities between the high and low level employees. If that makes me a Socialist, so be it.
It's also worth noting that in the European private sector, high-level and mid-level employees tend to make less than their American private sector counterparts, but low-level employees often make more and have better benefits compared to their American counterparts.
I'm not saying that's necessarily better (though I'm also not saying it's not better) -- just pointing out that even the private sector doesn't need to be as unequal as it is in the US.
I probably wouldn't cry too much if Congress passed a law and axed a bunch of programs.
But Congress needs to pass a law. Firing FBI agents *doing their jobs* because the people who broke the law were fans of the current president is some Banana Republic shit. Chilling effect is chilling.
These sorts of comparisons just aren't helpful though as government bureaucracies and internet start ups are just really different things. If you try to develop a new burrito delivery ap and fail it doesn't really matter, you wasted some money but the VC's have plenty more and you just move on to the next project (just like the guys in Silicon Valley the show). And indeed that's how the industry works, more ideas don't work, most new companies fail etc
But if you make a poor decision about say, how Flint Michigan should get it's water, you can end up with devastating consequences for years. This is why there are often all sorts of annoying rules in bureaucracies, because doing the wrong thing can be worse than doing nothing.
See also how the "move fast and break stuff" approach to building a deep sea submersible craft ended up with everyone getting killed.
I don't know if I agree with this take. Surely America would benefit from some more dynamism and risk taking by the employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Let's just shake things up!
Why have human air traffic controllers when we could just use a cool new AI program that's in beta! What could possibly go wrong?
This is also about who is going to decide to work for the federal government over the next 20 years. Would anyone with options want to live through this?
Dynamic personalities aren’t that afraid of getting fired because they have confidence they’ll land on their feet
G-d, you’re insufferable.
false. but you certainly are
Who are you actually talking about? I just looked up the most common federal jobs. Unsurprisingly, most of them are related to the post office. I don't need my mail sorter to be "dynamic."
One of the top 10 federal jobs is registered nurses. They definitely have to be quick on their feet and it is a plus if they can think of more efficient workflows, but I don't need them thinking up new "dynamic" approaches to care that haven't been properly tested.
Another big chunk is clerical and office services. As another poster said above, we want people who do those jobs to follow procedures. In the past few years I have filed the FAFSA for my kids. I have a complicated financial situation, so I called them several times for assistance. (They were extremely helpful, by the way.) I don't want them to have me "dynamically" fill out the FAFSA, thus perhaps jeopardizing my kid's chance of aid. I need them to know the rules and procedures to get the form to the proper channels and optimize the chances of scholarships.
Fair question. I’m not talking about clerical/blue collar workers. I’m talking about the sorts Trump has been targeting- FBI managers, prosecutors, the top couple dozen civil servants in each cabinet department.
I would like these people to be more dynamic than they have proven in recent decades. Mechanically applying kludgy laws does not work well
I think the FAFSA is a good example because I my understanding is that all of the relevant law and regulations is already publicly accessible from online sources. Eg, Google returned "20 U.S. Code § 1090 - Free Application for Federal Student Aid", https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1090 . There are links to assorted ".gov" sites.
Hence, similar to taxes, a motivated and resourceful individual could figure out nearly everything on their own without any support nor even high-level guideance. At most they might need a phone call (or ideally public support forum ticket) to ask for clarification on sufficiently ambiguous cases.
Yet why do we even need such complex procedures and regulations in the first places? So much of this was built incrementally where each additional complication claims to help some charitable group of applicants, yet the sum result in mess for even government experts to apply.
Moreover, there are possibilities for exploitation and the need for auditing. Eg, I recall a fellow college applicant circa 2003 claiming their family was liquidating assets into undocumented forms like cash and precious metals to better qualify for more financial aid. That could've just been an absurd idea their parents joked with (moreover cash withdraws and gold purchases are tracked). Nonetheless, the possibility exists, and I've heard that strategically timed divorces are a known mechanism to enhancing student financial aid.
But why do we even need such a complex system in the first place to determine student aid on a per-a-student basis? Why not just incentivize educational institutions to be financially efficient and reward those that do so with block grants?
It's not just about getting fired. It's about getting asked to do illegal things and getting smeared in the press by the world's richest man based on conspiracy theories he watched online.
It doesn’t pay enough to attract such folks—not enough upside potential.
If Musk/Trump said "we're going to work with Congress to modernize the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and use our expanded authority to remove the lowest 20% performing employees in select agencies," then literally no one here would be complaining. This is not what they're doing. Or if they said "we're not going to prioritize environmental protection as much. We're going to request less funding from Congress, which might mean we need fewer workers in the future," no one would complain. Again, this is not what's happening.
Reposting this link to a CBO report comparing government and private sector pay. The takeaway is that, for total compensation costs (pay+benefits), workers with professional degree or doctorate were under compensated, those with high school or less were overcompensated, and for bachelors degree they were close to private sector compensation. Interestingly, each of these groups accounts for one third of federal employees. I don’t know what your definition of coddling is, but this doesn’t seem like it to me (a retired, formerly reasonably paid fed). But I think Ben’s comment is the most important, that the key is having qualified people. I fear the next few years are going to be a test of theory that we don’t need qualified people in important jobs, just Elon’s acolytes and other true believers.
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-04/59970-Compensation.pdf
if federal workers aren’t coddled, why are federal jobs hard to get?
This sounds like a caricature. Counterpoint: https://open.substack.com/pub/eatingpolicy/p/jed?r=3na1i&utm_medium=ios
That's a great story.
That's another potential topic for reform, though it should be discussed by people with much more software experience than I have: updating the software infrastructure to be more robust, more readable, etc. so we don't depend so much on a small number of obscure people who have somehow made things work that look like they shouldn't, but which bear the weight of lots of important stuff on top of them.
I have heard anecdotes about tax refunds taking longer to arrive because of this.
When people start realizing that all of this is messing with their money (or, if not money, other things that they expect the government to provide, like the post, or fixing potholes in the road, etc), a lot of them are going to get very ticked off.
I agree that the government could work a lot more efficiently, but the problem is that DOGE, despite the E, doesn't appear concerned with creating efficiency, they are ok with simply making it not work at all. Which is going to create a ton of chaos. And maybe when it all shakes out, we will be better off for it... but let's not pretend that the chaos isn't going to also lead to a lot metaphorical (or even literal!) blood being spilt.
Courts can only respond after the illegal actions have been committed, they generally can’t pre-empt said actions.
I don’t want the Democrats to be the party of defending every bureaucrat! Isn’t this a losing issue?
Trump has this ability to criticize his opponents in a way that is wrong, but makes them respond by making their unpopular opinions clear. We should be compromising and accepting that Trump gets to run some layoffs etc, not “defending every bureaucrat”.
Apologies if you have seen this before, but one way to fight back was promoted on substack by Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny) a while back. The Democrats must get louder to respond forcefully to the administration blitz. They can form form a Democratic People's Cabinet, our best folks fighting, calling out illegalities, and presenting an alternative vision.
Please >repost< and sign this petition! Over 5K signers so far!
www.change.org/shadowcabinet
(see https://snyder.substack.com/p/shadow-cabinet)
The sudden USAID purge is also a lot more harmful precisely because the admin did it lawlessly. For instance, the New York Times covers how the "drop what you're doing and stop work this instant" nature of the law endangered participants in multinational clinical trials (gift link): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vE4.3_Eo.arQyGo_vz7JZ&smid=url-share
I want to hope that bad headlines cost Trump some popularity. Maybe on the margins they will, though his supporters' disregard for inconvenient facts and other people's welfare, and his and his allies' disregard for the law are not encouraging.
I read that article. But, if you view the issue from the perspective of Trump or Musk, the value of a life of a person in Africa is considered zero, so any dollar spent on USAID, is, by definition, waste, and, similarly, people dying because of an abrupt termination has zero cost, because their lives have zero value.
To be clear, this attitude that people's lives have zero value because they're on another continent is despicable, but it's at the same time, very consistent with everything we know about Trump's worldview, and probably a fair chunk of his supporters too.
Ironically, Africa is the continent where Musk was born. But in South Africa and nearby countries, the people affected by the abrupt termination of USAID and PEPFAR are almost all black...
Related: the chaos and apparently-unintended harm of the HHS freeze: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/vast-carelessness
“Wouldn’t you rather have won?” on a SB logo hoodie pls
Not only should Democrats throw Biden under the bus, for the love of god *Someone* in 2028 needs to loudly make the point that but for a once in a century pandemic, they would have lost in 2020 too, and even still they only won by what, 50,000 or so well placed votes? Saying the party barely lost in 2024 or could have won if Kamala had more time is missing the forrest for the trees. By 2028, this is a party that will not have wielded a genuine electoral mandate in 16 years! Yet has moved further and further away from voters during that time. We need to fully shake the etch-a-sketch more than ever. I didn't appreciate until Matt's post a few weeks ago how directly Trump ran against the Aughts and 2010's GOP to enormous success. The next Democratic President is going to have to overtly and forcefully run against the failures of 2010's and 2020's Democrats.
I liked because I agree with the sentiment... but it's genuinely hard to know as regards 2020, because a lot of the batshit leftist and/or batshit IDpol crap that alienated moderates from the center-left happened because or downstream of COVID.
Trump was not terribly popular in February 2020 and may well have lost if the Democrats just ran a normal campaign in November with a normal candidate.
"...a normal campaign in November with a normal candidate"
That didn't seem to be on the agenda at the time. Biden was the most normal they could come up with, and he was probably only suitable to the basement campaign that the pandemic enabled to seem normal.
I think that it's notable that Biden pivoted to the left after he sewer up the primary. Now, this is hard to disentangle from the fact that in early spring 2020, the economy was completely imploding. Even Donald Trump got onboard with a temporary quasi-UBI with the unemployment insurance. However, I do think that shift happened in part because of Covid.
Agreed. Without COVID Biden might or might not win, though I don't think the left has even a tiny chance of stitching it up, and a brokered convention where the moderates eventually settle on one of their own in exchange for cabinet and VP slots seems likely.
Whichever moderate does win is not going to have to contend with either the economic or social upheaval of our 2020, instead just trying to make policy amidst an economy which is close to full employment already, with inflation starting to tick up just a hair.
So long as it's a moderate, I think beating Trump is likely, perhaps by a wider margin than in the real world. I'm not sure whether they take the Senate or not (the 2 GA seats seem very contingent, but so does NC and sort of IA), but regardless of whether they have a razor-thin trifecta or not, there's not going to be much push for stimulus and spending measures beyond bipartisan moves on infrastructure and semis. The main partisan initiatives are probably further healthcare cost reforms to Medicaid, Medicare, and the ACA.
I agree this is literally unknowable what would have happened. That being said, I think in the minds of many voters, especially now that Trump has won and retconning backwards how badly the Biden presidency ended, many will convince themselves he only won in the first place because of the pandemic. Regardless which is correct, I think rhetorically, recognizing not only the more restrained claim about just the July Crisis in 2024, but a larger claim about Democrats' long running and overarching problems may yield better fruit with the electorate if done well. Run not only against Trump but against a particular theory of why Democrats failed. Not as a third party or independent, but as a distinct and powerful voice with a clear vision of the case, What went wrong, why they are different. Trump, Obama, Bill Clinton and other highly successful campaigners have done exactly this.
A good start for the coming elections for Dems: Publicly renounce identity politics, and do it loud and proud.
Yes, it's vital to throw Biden under the bus. The good news is that it turns out that it will be trivially easy to win in 2028. All the Democrats have to do is not nominate Biden.
Whew!
In reality, the problem with the Democrats is not Biden, but being in thrall to The Groups. Forget Biden, and focus like a laser on that problem.
As long as it's an electric bus...
Whoever won in 2020 was losing in 2024, unless Trump succeeded in rigging the election in the meantime.
This is probably right but its hard to know for sure. How much of Biden's sagging approval was inflation rate or the inflation of his age. But as I say above, electorally speaking, we don't have to know, because the strongest campaign message is probably a clean break, which is easier to make by demonstrating you conceive of the problem in grander terms then "Dems were 1.5% short in the tipping state this November," and more "this hasn't been working for years!" which is closer to voter's current precpetions.
Superlike™️
And make it full-zip!
Dislike.
Compromise position: t shirt
We should let Derek Guy make the final decision.
The compromise position would be a trucker cap. Or a onesie. Both of which are known to have tremendous capacity for spreading subtle political messages.
anti-quarter zip, pro full zip or no zip
*sigh* Guys, this sucks but being a big tent means you have to accept ppl you disagree with even if they are wrong. /s <3
Down with "gear" in general! Bland, indistinguishable clothing for all, so I don't have to make sartorial choices!
I'm pretty sure you're a middle aged white guy, you don't actually make any sartorial choices.
You could have a sub AI level algorithm make random choices for you from the Jos A Banks website, and the only person who notice any difference in your appearance would be your wife.
Jesus, "middle-aged"? Ouch. I have a short remaining window in which I can still claim "early 30's"!!!
Otherwise... [direct hit, damage critical]... I have a few tailored suits, one of which still fits, and some decent shoes and dresswear. My daily wear is absolutely tees/henleys, shorts/jeans, couple fleeces, a wool overcoat... I have a single built-in cabinet worth of clothing including as-yet-unopened socks and underwear, lol.
"...a middle aged white guy, you don't actually make any sartorial choices"
That's a gross stereotype, especially when you consider how Millennials dress.
I still think Democrats haven't found the handle on something they can use to bash Trump with that can break through to the low info crowd. His most alarming stuff (illegal expansion of executive power) is still too high minded in the "threat to democracy" way, and it's just not going to register.
I think there's fertile soil in the corruption/personal enrichment camp, especially around Elon and his China businesses, his SpaceX contracts, his being a billionaire mucking around the federal government. A way in with Trump could be Kushner's Saudi funds, Trump social and $Trump acting as bribery slush funds, etc. Honestly the fact we don't have enough speaks to abject failures of politically-minded oversight when Democrats had Congress from '18-'22.
We don’t need the low info crowd, or very little of it. Much of it won’t turn out once Trump is off the ticket anyhow. Dems need to win back moderates and ”mid info voters” by moving right on immigration, crime/order, guns and trans issues. That’s all that is needed for 55-ish % of the national vote. Everything else can stay the same, more or less.
We overcomplicate things. Simply:
1. Enforce the border and clearly stand for regulated, controlled immigration. 2. Enforce the law and public order. 3. Accept that gun rights is part of America’s history, culture and soul in many places. Mandate background checks and increase mental health support instead of banning guns. 4. Abandon the more extreme trans issues such as surgery on kids and biological men competing in women’s sports.
And voila, Dems will be the dominant party for a generation or more.
The low info crowd sets the vibes, and going diet republican won't help. Barack Obama dominated the low info crowd.
In addition, the Trump GOP has demonstrated the value of expending more effort slandering your opposition and making them toxically unpopular rather than making yourself look all that good. Democrats need to make Trump Bush-in-October-2008 toxic to permanently flush him and his politics out of the system. That's going to require finding a hammer and beating his brains out with it. 2008 gave us three hammers to brain Bush - Iraq, Katrina, GFC. Kanye saying Bush hates black people was a bit of proto-Trumpian drama that absolutely helped Democrats by breaking through to the low info crowd. Michael Moore pre-Alex Jones'd wild shit for years but for the left. That's what has to start happening.
"The low info crowd sets the vibes"
I would have said it's the exact opposite. The "low info crowd", are people who don't pay much attention (by definition). They are picking up the vibe from various elites and weaving that into whatever is happening in their personal lives with things like inflation, lockdowns, etc.
Also, by 2025 definitions, Obama dominated exactly by going "Republican lite". Not by slanderig his opponents.
Barack Obama dominated the low-info voters pre/in the very early days of social media. I think that’s relevant
"going diet republican won't help"
Those aren't diet republican positions, they are smack dab in the main stream of moderate voter positions.
They are majority positions.
It’s much harder for Dems to pull that off as we don’t have a built in propaganda network for the tuned out voter, but no time to start like the present I suppose
“ And voila, Dems will be the dominant party for a generation or more.”
That would only be true if republicans didn’t respond and change their policies and tactics to compensate.
A less insane Republican party is also a win.
Dems consistently underestimate Republicans
If republicans moderated as well, that would be a good thing.
I would love to sane political parties
Yeah i've always questioned the idea that this centrist shove will make the democrats actually have a dominant party. They need to prove it, in my opinion. Personally, I think it just makes them look weak.
Sincere question, not trolling: when is it strong to do what the electorate wants and when is it strong to stand on principles even though it’s unpopular? I don’t know the right answer, something-something-political-capital.
I think one criteria might be whether the issue is cultural vs economic/geopolitical with more deference to the people on the former?
There’s also a third approach which is for political actors to make a case for change or signal an openness to it rather than immediately initiating it.
The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act lost the South for the Democrats forever, making it harder for them to win the White House or to hold Congress.
It was still a very very good thing to do. Most of the time, government doesn't do that much. At other times, it can change the course of history, even if the people aren't ready for it, and punish you for the effort. It's worth losing power for.
The CRA was broadly popular. They lost the South, sure, but it probably would've been more politically costly to oppose it and lose the north.
https://news.gallup.com/vault/316130/gallup-vault-americans-narrowly-1964-civil-rights-law.aspx
The civil rights act was also broadly popular with the rest of the country
It's a legit question. Reasonable people will disagree on that.
Prove it? It gets proven over and over again every election cycle at just about every level, even in 2024, when the strongest overperformers were centrist Democrats like Tester and Gallego. The only 2 Democrats to win more than one presidential election since FDR are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Every Democratic majority going back decades would not have been possible without some centrist (and in some cases even farther to the right) Democrats winning tough elections.
That is, I believe less in criticizing Trump - who will be gone in four years - and more in making the Democratic political agenda more popular (and frankly more reasonable) by cutting away the stupid or unworkable parts.
I think it's yes/and, but Democrats have more work to do on balance wresting the narrative away from Republicans than making their own policies more popular.
If I knew Spanish, I would write, "porque no los dos."
#acshully, if you knew Spanish you would write "por que no los dos." Por que means why, porque means because.
“… especially around Elon and his China businesses, his SpaceX contracts…”
Yeah, keep reminding Americans that Musk leads the only American organization that can reliably put rockets into space. That’ll gin up the fear and loathing.
Fine, then focus on how he's behold to the communist party of China
It’s called the cost of business of running a multinational company that has factories in china. I bet you’re typing this uninformed comment from an iPhone ….if you’re so concerned about China’s influence give it up. Sell all your index funds that contain APPL also.
If you’re only concerned with China’s influence on Elon Musk your politically biased and a hypocrite
Oh wow I see you are critical of society yet continue to live in it...I am very smart
This comment makes no sense, and also doesnt address my points, but cool!
Because it's incredibly stupid! Yes I am biased! I want Democrats to win! Are you new here??
Trump's right hand man—the world's wealthiest person—does, in fact, have critical business interests that overwhelmingly depend on the goodwill of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China. That's just a fact. Donald Trump as President isn't *required* to give such a person such unprecedented access and influence. That's a freely made choice on Trump's part.
It's not unreasonable to point out that Musk's intricate relationship with America's most dangerous geopolitical rival makes his unique position problematic from a national security standpoint. Nor is it inconceivable we could see negative ramifications consequently arise. The opposition party in my view is duty-bound to point out such truths. And the President, needless to say, is running certain political risks because of this situation.
"The opposition party in my view is duty-bound to point out such truths"
If you're correct about the threat posed by Musk, I think - no, I know - that the opposition party is duty bound to *do* something about it. Have any of them proposed viable action?
People who have to pay “the cost of business with China” should not be involved with setting American government policy!!! It’s not that fucking hard to understand!!
Where is he setting policy ? DOGE is auditing government spending, and making suggestions to Trump, and Trump can decide what to do if it's within his power. This is what he campaigned on and he won, and he is doing what he said he was going to do. That is a good thing!
On top of that, We are broke, and our fiscal trajectory is not sustainable. We need to reduce the size of government / cut costs and based on what we are seeing out of USAID alone, there is going to be a lot bloat to remove. Wait till they audit the DOD!
Do you honestly think the status quo was ok? Your team has been in power for 12/16 year's and it has been a fucking disaster.
“ Do you honestly think the status quo was ok?”
What do you mean by “ok”? Do you mean “good enough that we shouldn’t bother trying to make anything better”? Absolutely not - no society has ever been at that position.
Do you mean “better enough than most societies have ever been that we should be careful not to break too much with our improvements”? Absolutely yes.
Now I think the covid response shows that we actually probably have been too careful with a lot of things - in 2020 we were able to make a lot of radical changes and nothing too bad happens, so maybe we can operate at that level of alacrity. But much of the current plan seems to be going much farther and much faster.
If you think this is about an 'audit' and not impoundment and graft, you're one of the most gullible people i've ever seen.
The fact that Trump’s most important advisor has severe conflict of interests with our largest geopolitical rival is a large concern. Trump campaigned on being tough on China but he is so corrupt and bribable (reversal on TikTok) that I’m worried he will be compromised.
As for US being broke, nothing Republicans or Musk will do will lower the deficit. Every single dollar they “save” is just going to offset by tax cuts. That worked ok in 2017 when Republicans had been strangling stimulus during a recession for 8 years, but it’s not going to work now.
There is actually evidence that Musk has rocket contracts.
...yes? And also evidence that he has played nice footsies with the CCP to protect is shanhai gigafactories? Not sure what you're getting at, I'm not married to mauling Musk over spaceX. But musk is compromised and could be made politically useful.
There is also evidence that a large chunk of Telsa’s profits and supply chain are also subject to CCP whims.
How large?
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas-china-sales-rise-record-high-83000-december-2025-01-03/
Most of TSLA supply chain is outside of china …let the man cook, focus on someone more useless
(A) Musk is a man of substantial accomplishments, a genuine business visionary like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie.
(B) He's also not elected, and yet seems to be running the country.
I suspect (A) doesn't insulate the administration from the potential unpopularity of (B), especially when the inevitable problems happen.
I'm not a fan of the bull in a china shop approach to governing, to be sure. I also think he'll be out on his ear soon after something he did embarrasses Trump.
It would be great if he went back to that instead of spending most of his time shitposting on X or setting the federal government on fire.
Well, if you care about SpaceX as a functioning concern, it actually wouldn't--he has a coterie of minders keeping his fingers out of the stuff that actually matters.
When Elom gets really engineering hands-on, you get stupid broken shit like ¡CyBeRTrUcK!
You might be right but I’m trying to give him a little more credit than that. If Musk was just the leader of an electric car company and a rocket company, I would have no problem with him. It’s being heavily involved in really bad politics that I have a problem with.
Oh, of course that is true--I deeply and profoundly wish he would fuck off to some tropical island and I never had to think about him for one second ever again for any reason.
Now imagine you're a Tesla shareholder. It has lost 24% of its market cap in just the past six weeks. (Much worse than Nvidia!)
In a just world, he'd be facing shareholder lawsuits soon. In this world, anyone who started such a lawsuit would soon find themselves under investigation by the FBI, if not the CIA and IRS as well.
$TSLA is all the way down to where it was in ... December, 2024. Up 98% over the past year. Up 6% CAGR over 3 years. Up 38% CAGR over 10 years. Not exactly a track record where shareholder lawsuits would be warranted.
I've stayed away from $TSLA as an investment, as I think its cash flows don't justify its price. But the market has disagreed with me (so far!).
My advice is to avoid mixing politics and investing.
The more sincere low information voters trusted Trump to lower grocery prices. This won’t happen. Why not draw attention to that with price trackers, etc?
The Republican disinfo machine is going to use its superior access to the information channels median voters use to distort that. I guarantee you the message moving forward will either be "we fixed inflation" "the statistics are lies" or they won't even talk about prices, just jangle the keys somewhere else. By all means do it. But we need to be ready to counter all three of those talking points/tactics and just tracking prices and hoping the median voters can connect the dots won't cut it.
"...Republican disinfo machine is going to use its superior access to the information channels median voters use..."
Dunno what you mean by "median voters," but Pew says the biggest source is TV news, and that the big three networks plus CNN are still at the top of that food chain:
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/10/10/where-americans-turn-for-election-news/pj_2024-10-10_2024-election-news_2-01/
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/10/10/where-americans-turn-for-election-news/pj_2024-10-10_2024-election-news_2-03/
So you're saying that the Republicans control that?
Yes. They are much better at setting narrative.
Ok. To clarify, "superior access to the information channels" actually means they're just better communicators? That the Democrats have a messaging problem?
Or they will make the statistics lie. Nice knowin' ya, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yes
If you voted Trump because you wanted eggs to be cheaper you don't need a tracker to tell you if those prices have come down or not.
if you voted for trump because you want eggs to be cheaper, you are probably low iq and you need to be spoon fed truthful data
Everyone that voted for Trump voted for DOGE
Finally! I agree with Francis!
Welcome Marc! Glad to have you on board!
This isn't true. I know numerous people who voted for Trump who have no idea what DOGE is, and voted for Trump primarily because they didn't like Biden.
John, your anecdotal evidence is irrelevant
Your comment was "EVERYONE."
I submitted explicit evidence that there are people who didn't vote for DOGE, so your immediate claim was wrong.
Beyond that, Trump won big with "low information voters" and lost "high information voters." You're saying that large numbers of "low information voters" all knew what DOGE was and supported it when they voted. That doesn't strike you as unreasonable.
Elon was at Trump rallies, on stage talking about DOGE. He was at MSG etc. The people you are calling "low information voters" are just basically people that get their info from TV and not from newsletters like Slow Boring.
It's a derogatory term for people you feel like are beneath you. Drop a link to your resume in here. Let's see what makes you so special ?
I completely disagree that "Low information voters" is derogatory. I would describe 60%+ of voters that way. Another term would be "normies" or people who don't follow politics in depth and as such don't have a deep understanding of how politics and policy work. People who follow politics deeply are the "sickos" as its a stressful and mostly disappointing subject matter.
But that doesn't mean that most people know as much as I do, or people here. This is no different from any other subject where some people have great interest and follow it, and others are aware of it, but don't know it that deeply. Whether its the Roman Empire or Taylor Swift. Polls repeatedly show that most people can't name members of SCOTUS, their state house/senate representatives, their own House rep. They mostly vote by party. You want to tell me they know/knew about DOGE?
Reclaim the mantle of law & order. Ideally with a message closer to "Trump just pardoned a bunch of thugs who attacked police officers" vs. "Technically those payments could be considered campaign contributions, and if so, the campaign didn't follow reporting requirements" or "giving employees access to this database requires a prescribed onboarding process, and skipping that technically makes that effort against the law"
>>I still think Democrats haven't found the handle on something they can use to bash Trump with that can break through to the low info crowd.<<
That's probably true. It's only week 3 of the Trump restoration.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this article. Unless there is someone in your social circle that you can persuade, it doesn't make sense to engage in the drama, which sucks out valuable energy that can be directed to more productive action! And I love how you focused on WINNING, and then followed up with many issues that Democrats fought for that were unpopular and/or had no chance of being enacted. I really enjoy your articles that combine policy/politics with the mindset of what we need to embody in order to be more effective right now! Thank you!
> someone in your social circle that you can persuade
The panic has gotten so bad that people are even self-sabotaging within their social circle and persuading people in the opposite direction. I've heard multiple stories of very progressive people telling their friends and coworkers not to speak publicly about LGBT issues because they will get blacklisted from future NIH grants, and it's infuriating to me. We're not gonna make it through this mess as a country unless we can stand up and push back against a little intimidation.
> not to speak publicly about LGBT issues because they will get blacklisted from future NIH grants
At this point, I think a lot of things are possible, *but* I still wouldn't expect this. I'm reviewing a pile of NIH proposals right now, and I have no clue about the opinions on LGBT issues of the PIs (nor would I care). NIH typically has pretty strict paylines and just funds grants scored below a certain threshold.
(not implying that it's your viewpoint, just commenting on others saying it.)
I think we are in the part of the movie where the good guys discover that the bad guys have set a ticking bomb. What do the good guys do? They call up their bomb disposal expert, give them whatever support the expert asks for, stands back and hopes the expert comes through. They DON’T crowd or micro manage the expert while they are working. Right now Trump and Musk are igniting a constitutional crises with their attempts to unlawfully stop authorized spending. That’s the bomb. We have bomb control experts - people who understand administrative law and legislative procedure, who know how to use the courts and leverage what legislative power we have (given the very small Republican congressional majority it’s probably more than a lot of people think) and I’m confident that right now they are working on the bomb. For the vast majority of us, the best we can do is let them cook- give them the support they need but not try to micromanage them. On the other hand, I do understand issues, public opinion and elections, so my time is best spent continuing to analyze how we failed in 2024, what we need to do win in 2026 and 2028 and work to fix our coalitional politics to make that happen. Because this nightmare doesn’t end until we start winning elections again.
I’ve said before and no doubt will say it again, but it’s astonishing that anyone has to point out that *winning elections is actually the only way to achieve anything.* I love this comment and the one (currently) above requesting SB merch with the slogan “wouldn’t you have rather won?.” Winning elections is the only way to fix this, and that has to be our north star.
The problem is that for the part of the democratic party that is disproportionately represented in the media, activist base, and online, they "know" in their heart of hearts that the only way to win is to move even further to the left. If only those moderates weren't so selfish. If they weren't so obsessed with protecting their power and advancing their agenda they would let us do what we need to to actually win an election. Do I think this is true? Not even a little bit but the "just moderate to win an election" has issues winning over the left. Will it work on the rotting husk of the #resistance? I hope so.
This is true, but when I see an Amy Klobuchar cozying up to Trump or a John Fetterman voting for Pam Bondi, I become despondent. What part of "opposition party" do they not understand?
I understand it though. Obviously they're wrong. But intuitively it sort of makes sense that the way to ensure better outcomes in the long run is to move to the extreme in the short run. Sort of like how a sports team that's doing well early in a game ought to run up the score as much as possible so as to give itself a cushion in case the other team is able to make a push late in the game. I would file this misunderstanding in the same bucket as "the government should tighten its belt when the economy is bad, just like a family does."
There are a lot of left-wingers who just want left-wing policy for instrumental reasons and will use whatever arguments are handy at any given time. But there are other liberals out there (call them the swing voters of the left-of-center coalition) who genuinely misunderstand how politics works. We just need to explain to them, and keep explaining to them without getting frustrated, *why* their intuitive understanding is wrong.
MY forgot; word every criticism and worry to others in terms of how it will affect ordinary, median-income, middle-class voters, even if you personally find other causes and other people more sympathetic, because you’re wrong if you think everyone else agrees.
I still don't believe there will be notable opposition to Trump and Musk until they break something foundational, e.g., Musk's tinkering with Treasury payments causing an economic crisis or schools shutting down. His deportation agenda will likey be catastrophic. This country runs on an underground economy--migrant workers harvest our food, put roofs on our houses, work in our hotels. You deport their relatives and scare them enough into not coming, and they won't be replaced. I'm a small farmer who does my own labor, and let me tell you, you won't get Americans to harvest fruit in ninety degree temperatures.
Here in Maine we get returning seasonal workers who work legally for a bit more than minimum wage, but less than retail/fast food. They develop long term relationships with farmers and growers year over year, work legally on visas, get the job done, and enjoy a much better standard of living in their home countries. There are also a lot of American farm workers doing complimentary work like supervision, running more complex machinery, and doing processing.
Potatoes and apples don't cost noticably more here than they do where illegal workers do the work.
The idea that we actually can't get by without illegal workers in agriculture is on pretty shaky ground.
There is a whiff of "How will the cotton get picked if we don't have slaves" to the economic arguments for illegal immigration.
I think there's a big conflation between we need illegal immigration vs. we've needed immigration and we've allowed it to occur illegally.
You don't have to get all the way to One Billion Americans to look around the country and see that immigration, in the numbers we've experienced, both legal and illegal, is a critical part of our nation's GDP over the past several decades.
People have come here, they near universally work, and our economy absorbs them and expands. Take several million working age folks out of the economy and bad things will happen. Some sectors will get hit harder than others, but all will suffer.
We need to control our borders, we need to figure out how to bring some legal status to the people who are here and have been here for some time, and we need to be realistic about the need to keep some immigration flowing both low skill and high.
To address your point directly, there is clear moral difference between slavery and illegal immigration. The cost of no cotton in return for emancipation would have been worth whatever it was. The declaration of some immigration as illegal is strictly a decree of malum prohibitum, we've declared it illegal, but it is not immoral.
Lots of PMCs worried about who will clean their toilets and care for their children. I'm not convinced that agriculture is the big problem sector. Maybe construction, but I think urban service industries are likely to see big hits.
GC's reliance on lots of mom & pop contractors is one of the problems with the visa system. A company has to be big enough to have the wearwithal to handle the administrative load in order to participate.
GC?
General contractor.
https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/NAWS-data-fact-sheet-FINAL.docx-3.pdf
Something like 44 percent of farm workers are undocumented illegal immigrants, according to estimates.
Should these people have H-2A visas? Sure, probably. Do you trust that the Trump administration is going to handle that process in a competent way? Nope. Those 44 percent could disappear to El Salvador and just not be replaced, thus ushering in the labor crisis that I think is very likely.
I think Trump would listen to farmers. Not that he'd go along with everything they want, but that he'd give them a fair hearing. And H-2A visas help solve two problems that Trump and many of his supporters dislike: Lack of control over who gets into the country, and entire families coming to stay permanently.
I mean Trump screwed over farmers during his last administration with trade war stuff, and then proceeded to just bail them out. Most likely that could just happen again
You can just look at the H-2A growth rates from 2017-2021 to test this hypothesis. They ~ doubled.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor
"In 2020–22, 32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization."
They're still estimating around 42 percent of farm workers are illegals. I know everybody loves to argue and pretend that they know what's going on, but I'm in the industry and these estimates are probably low. Even if the Trump administration doesn't target illegal farm workers, the culture of fear will have repercussions that reverberate throughout various industries. Is it good that we have an underground labor force? Of course not. Can they be easily replaced? Absolutely not.
No, people who came here illegally "jumping the line" should NOT be issued any visas. Crime should not pay. Rather, bring in law abiding immigrants on visas to replace the illegals.
Without looking, because I'm on site today, the number of visa openings can be increased by Congress, right?
So just do that. To the moon if need be.
I don't think there's an annual cap on those visas.
Aren't we still paying low wages to H-2A agricultural visas though? I agree, I don't like the idea that we can't get by without illegal workers, but clearly we need low wage workers. The truth is somewhere in between. American's simultaneously think some people should work for the bare minimum so they can engage as much consumption as possible and cheap goods.
"...paying low wages..."
Compared to what?
I mean I can only speak for where I currently live, but I think they make around minimum wage depending on the state right? It's like $16 an hour where I live. Additionally, housing is supposed to be provided at little or no cost to them, but that is not always the case with them. My state had an entire issue where they were basically taking people's visas and taking housing costs out of their wages. It was a huge scandal.
Further, do you not consider minimum wage to be a low wage? Additionally, more than two-thirds of U.S. crop workers are foreign born, according to the USDA. It is also estimated that 40%+ of them are undocumented migrants. Either we need to really punish the companies who are doing the hiring or actually pay people more. If you want American people to do the work, you either need to pay higher wages for American workers to do it or expand the pool of H2 visas.
Again, it goes back to my point though, requiring the backbone of your agriculture be done by people making minimum wage and then have 40% of the workforce be undocumented isn't good. Or at least have a pathway for people that are undocumented to get the actual visas.
"...do you not consider minimum wage to be a low wage?"
No, but I am not, for instance, a Haitian immigrant.
We are going in circles, and you are obviously not engaging in good faith. Even for the average American citizen, minimum wage is a low wage. Immigration aside.
It's like you are debating to try and be right or simply dismissive instead of being thoughtful about the actual problem and deeper issues we should try to resolve. You asked questions, I provided a detailed reply, and you just pick something easy to reply to without even taking it seriously.
As states have implemented stricter employment verification, the use of H-2A agricultural visas has risen dramatically over the last 10-15 years.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=104874
It’s funny. I was gonna post the same chart! Like … I just don’t *get* this new approach to immigration where we throw our hands up because we have TOO many illegal immigrants. This makes no sense. There’s a path forward where with stricter enforcement we actually work the visa process.
At $100/hr you will.
Fantastic, I’m sure the Americans who voted for Agent Orange because of the price of eggs will be f**king thrilled to pay $30 for a pint of blueberries.
Kind of you to assume these people eat fruits and vegetables.
All those MAHA moms who love RFK Jr. do. Or at least they buy fruits and vegetables for their Instagram reels.
What do they eat? Meat? Who do you think butchers and shrinkwraps that?
Lots of times? Former prison inmates who went through a training program. It’s a big work training program in some states.
Working for the lowest possible wages a day and calling it work training is a bit generous. When your society depends on prison labor or agriculture visas or the population will be upset at the price of goods, there may be a problem with the society... Just my 2 cents...
Parents of young children going to start rioting in the streets if they start messing with blueberry prices.
I mostly agree but would say there are *some* ideological exceptions. My impression is American soldiers in Gaza is extremely unpopular with Trump's base and they would revolt if he actually tried it. (For now they are worried but willing to believe it is a negotiation tactic.)
Honestly, from what I've seen from the right wing sphere, until they are personally affected they'll keep ignoring how people are actually hurting or the bad things that happen. Until it is their friends, family or their own checks that get hurt they won't care. Right now, they are cutting around the margins, hurting agencies that barely make a dent in the overall budget, but there is absolutely they can save the 1-2 Trillion they are looking to save without hurting a millions of Americans. I'm convinced that American's will need to feel pain, that is the only thing we seem to understand.
The underground economy was doing fine before Biden let in 12M more illegals….
Who is the most normal likeable Democrat out there right now? Put them on TV.
The best advice I could give Democrats is to just be patient. Take Trump to court for the important things, if you know you could win. Otherwise, just accept that he’s going to fuck around for the next couple of years. But we all know when you fuck around you find out. Either people will like his policies or they won’t. If he is truly bad as we all think, then Democrats will win the next election and be able to reverse things. The worst thing to do there is to get these people out in the street protesting things that aren’t sympathetic.
I am pro foreign aid, but I have been astonished to see some of these questionable spending payments like transgender operas. Yes I know it is a tiny fraction of tax dollars, but perception matters.
Agree, much of what is going on that is truly bad falls into the bucket of illegal Executive overreach, the best response there is the courts.
The dems need to just be clear about what's bad, not freak out about the stupid like Gaza, and hold fire until stuff really starts to bite on normal people.
Ezra's latest pod is awesome and covered exactly this. The "freeze" reversal was a good example and hilariously demonstrates just how incompetent Trump's new administration is (even after having years to plan this out). They thought through precisely zero of the OMB impacts and then just walked it all back in a day. Bunch of literal idiots.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/29/federal-funding-freeze-memo-rescinded
There are things like abolishing CEQ, rescinding the A4, curtailing some of the climate crisis and DEIA initiatives (I don’t support firing these HR workers, just reassigning their work to ADA and EOE such stuff).
There are things like the USPS closing the loophole Shein or Temu exploited and reopening it that makes me confused.
Then there are all the direct threats to government employees, RTO without notice, the freezing of congressional mandated freezes, the firing of IGs , etc.
Wray stepping down is insane. Appointees with fixed terms that have protections clearing the way for Musk and Co to violate law is insane.
So in short, I am open to accepting some positive things. They are just washed out by the effluence.
Agreed that ending the de minimus exception is good.
Replacing the heads of IT in various agencies with political appointees is just uniquely stupid. During the first Trump term, I liked the corporate tax cuts, space force and operation warp speed. Everything else was pretty stupid. Right now, everything seems pretty stupid.
"Or does fighting mean recapturing the spirit of 2006 and recruiting the largest possible tent of Trump opponents?"
[IFeelLikeImTakingCrazyPills.gif]
Harris did try to recruit a large tent of Trump opponents! For Christ's sake, she campaigned with Liz Cheney, who disagrees with her completely on policy, but they made common cause for the sake of beating Trump! I listened to Kamala's speeches, and she always, always spoke as inclusively (in the good normie sense, not the DEI sense). "I want to be President for all Americans, not just those who support me." Ads featuring Americans of different races and ages and geographic locations and SES levels, sure to include members of the military and rural people. "I know Trump's type, he's a crook and I've dealt with ones like him = I'm appealing to your sense of decency, to see what an unfit a-hole he is, also I implicitly value law and order and am not running on some wild-eyed lefty ACAB agenda."
"But drosophilist," I hear you say, "she just said that to get elected, of course nobody believed her!"
Meanwhile, over in Trump's world:
2024!Trump: Project 2025? What's that? Never heard of it. Also I'm gonna put America first, no more wasteful foreign adventures!
Voters: Sounds good, Mr. Trump, we'll vote for you!
2025!Trump: Psych! Project 2025 is real and it's spectacular, also watch me do a 180 from "focus on America first" to "bat-guano insane babbling about annexing Panama/Greenland/kicking out the Gazans and building a Riviera in the Middle East"!
Political commenters: [shocked Pikachu face]
me: /headdesk
I'm not saying voters should have trusted Kamala uncritically, but I will go to my grave not understanding how ANYONE could consider Kamala/a random person picked off the street to be less "honest" or "trustworthy" than Trump.
I don't know what Matt meant, but I don't think anyone should blame Harris personally. She ran a pretty good campaign over those 100 days or so. I'd give her at least a B, maybe a B+. This is about sustained effort over time, since what you do and what you message between campaigns impacts the effectiveness of your tactics once you're in an active campaign.
It was a fine campaign in a universe where Biden is decently popular and abortion and democracy are the #1 and #2 issues, but that's not the universe we live in.
It's like crediting a basketball coach for a strategy that would've been brilliant back when the 3-pt line didn't exist and then when he loses, blaming the existence of the 3-pt line instead of criticizing the coach for not factoring in the existence of the 3-pt line.
That’s a good analogy. She didn’t run the campaign for the cards she was dealt.
No. As it turns out she lost by a pretty small margin, so while it's true that in hindsight we know that a higher-risk/higher-reward strategy might have succeeded while her strategy failed, she was not so far off the mark that you can conclude the risk/benefit calculation was foreseeably wrong ex ante.
It doesn't require hindsight. We watched her polling numbers and favorability slip in real time over September and October as some of us criticized the decisions she was and wasn't making.
Yes, you turned out to be right, but because you were only barely right, it's incorrect to say that it was clear beforehand. Hence the B grade.
I guess I just don't see how a campaign that spends $1 billion only for their candidate to lose ground in both polling and favorability in the final months without a major scandal could be considered anything other than a colossal failure given the fundamental purpose of a campaign.
I mean I agree with you, but "You can run a pretty good campaign and focus on the right things and still lose to a flaming garbage can of a candidate who ran the shittiest campaign in US history" is depressing as f**k. Definitely picked the wrong year to quit sniffing glue.
It's not just about the campaign, it's about the way they governed.
Biden/Harris did loosen up the border which in large part caused the immigration crisis.
They did push for extra stimulus that fueled inflation.
They did push unpopular Trans issues.
They did try and forgive student loans.
They did withdraw from Afghanistan in a disastrous way.
Not to mention all the disorder stuff from blue cities and states that are associated with the Democratic brand more broadly.
Look, mathew, you're a lot further right than I am, and that's fine. Good-faith disagreement on policy is part of a free society!
I just think you're being a bit unfair to Biden/Harris by cherry-picking the worst about them, as in:
1. Immigration crisis: agree, they screwed the pooch on that one, should have been working on it harder from the beginning. "America is a land of immigrants but also a land of laws, if you want to come here you must do so legally."
2. Extra stimulus caused inflation: this is a case of "fighting the last battle," I think. Biden remembered how Obama had been castigated for passing a too-small stimulus during the global financial crisis of 2008/"bailing out Wall Street, not Main Street." So Biden erred in the opposite direction. I'm guessing he both thought that he was right on the merits and that voters would reward him for preventing a depression/massive unemployment. [Pitch Meeting Guy voice] "Whoops! Whoopsie!"
3. Yes, trans issues were unpopular, they shouldn't have pushed for the far-left interpretation. "Taxpayer-funded gender reassignment for prisoners" is the f**king Willie Horton of 2024.
4. Student loans: Yes, they tried to give a goodie to a constituency that generally supports them. They're not the first politicians to do so and won't be the last. This is what I mean by you being a bit unfair/cherrypicking: you mention the student loans (boo, Biden bad!) but say nothing about the government $$$ for chip fabs and other manufacturing, a lot of which went specifically to red states and was intended to provide jobs for the non-college-educated Forgotten Man who's being sneered at by the snooty liberal coastal bourgeoisie.
5. Are you a veteran? I can't remember for sure. I might be confusing you for someone else. I'm a civilian with zero military experience, so forgive me for talking out my ass on this one, but this has to be said:
Afghanistan was a f**king quagmire. It was never, ever going to turn into a small-l liberal Western-friendly democracy, no matter how many more American lives/resources/$$$ we poured into that place. Yes, the exit was mismanaged and someone in the Biden administration/the military was horribly naive to think that the Afghan National Army would hold out for a few months instead of folding instantaneously like a wet towel. But somebody had to pull the goddamn plug, and I actually respect Biden for going through with it, knowing that he would pay the price politically. That's an example of doing the unpopular but right thing. I sure as hell wouldn't want Americans still stuck in Afghanistan while simultaneously supporting Ukraine against Russia.
Sincerely curious, which of these describes you best?
a) I wanted Biden to pull out of Afghanistan, but I don't like the way he did it [legit]
b) if we had stayed in Afghanistan for [n more years], it would have transformed into a stable country and ally, and then we could leave [at what cost in American lives and $?]
c) I would prefer for Americans to stay in Afghanistan until the heat death of the universe rather than ever surrender to the Taliban [I respect your opinion but disagree most strongly with it]
6. Boy howdy, if we're gonna do guilt by association, we can be here all day. It's not like the GOP doesn't have its share of utter wingnuts who make Trump look sane. Anyone remember Mr. "I'm a Black Nazi" in North Carolina?
"Good-faith disagreement on policy is part of a free society!". First agreed. Which is one of the reasons I subscribe here. I try very hard to get out of my echo chamber and understand people on the other side. My grandma was a lot definitely a liberal, but I remember many wonderful conversations with her on topics where we diagreed.
1. Sounds like we are in agreement.
2. Yes I understand why Biden went big on the extra stimulus despite warnings. My bigger problem is once inflation became apparent, there were all the denials and refusal to fix the problem. Once inflation started shooting up, there were still hundreds of billions unspent. Why not pull those back?
We all make mistakes, and the first one I can understand. But the refusal to change course was a big problem for me.
3. agreed.
4. It's not just that the student loan forgiveness was bad policy (which it was). It was the unconstitutional manner in which it was done. The CHIPS act was a bipartisan bill that went through congress. I have areas of disagreement with it, but overall I count it as a win for Biden and something he did right (same with the infrastructure bill.
5. Yes I'm a veteran. I didn't serve in Afghanistan, although my brother did. I think it's important to remember a couple of things there.
Yes we had been there 2 decades, spent a lot of lives and money. But the situation in 2020 was not the situation in 2010. Things had stabilized. Few Americans were dying, and it was mostly the Afghanistan army that was doing all the fighting.
But and this is crucial, the Afghanistan army that we had been built was dependent on a lot of US support still. We just pulled the rug out from under them, and so of course they crumbled.
I'm wanted to leave to, but we needed to first help the Afghanistan army build the support structure to replace us. We didn't do that. Yep that would probably have taken another 5 years. And cost more money, but I believe if we had done that we could have left a stable country behind.
Also I firmly believe that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was partially predicated on our withdrawal (of course hard to prove).
You're absolutely correct the GOP has it's share of nuts. Which is why even though I lean conservative I couldn't vote for Trump.
On #2, Biden absolutely deserves blame for the hard he caused the economy. By the time he proposed the American Rescue Plan the economy was already showing signs of very strong recovery. And we already knew by that point that most of the earlier direct stimulus (checks to households) had been saved, not spent. In February economists were projecting nearly 6% GDP growth for 2021.
No, Biden's "stimulus" was nothing of the sort. It was a big cash giveaway intended to distract from the fact that most of the rest of the spending was going to be wasted.
What we needed from Kamala is a Sister Souljah moment. What we needed is for her to come out againt *any* Biden policy. What we needeed for her is to provide a minimally plausible explanation for her 180 from the very extreme positions she endorsed in 2020. She did none of that. She also refused to acknoweldge the media landscape of 2024 campaigning like it's still the aughts. Without all that you can't say she campaigned properly. Yes, she was dealt a difficult hand. And yes, the general anti-incumbant factors made her the underdog in any case. BUT she is still very very from being blameless in all of this.
I feel she at least could have said that the pivot on asylum policy during the last year of the administration should have come sooner. How hard would that have been?
Agree, and she could have said something like “I ran on these [list unpopular positions] as a then-Senator from California, but now that I’m VP of all Americans, I have developed a new perspective and come around to [more centrist/popular positions].” Throw California under the bus, I don’t care! It would have been better than what we got 🍊🐍🤬🤮
Running with Liz Cheney is just running on more not Trumpiness instead of an affirmative vision. Harris was hamstrung by the being a continuation of the undeservedly unpopular Biden-Harris administration.
I think the Biden/Harris administration was deservedly unpopular. They made a bunch of stupid choices.
"
Biden/Harris did loosen up the border which in large part caused the immigration crisis.
They did push for extra stimulus that fueled inflation.
They did push unpopular Trans issues.
They did try and forgive student loans.
They did withdraw from Afghanistan in a disastrous way.
"
How many voters were actually listening to Kamala's speeches?
Matt, lots of good points here! Curious what you take take on the DNC promoting David Hogg is. Seems like a step in the wrong direction
You made an offhand remark about supporting protests. I agree in the abstract that protests can be valuable, though many actual protests are not. Are you aware of good protest movements to support right now? The only ones I’ve heard about are protests in Santa Ana and Los Angeles about deportation, which seem like the wrong focus, since it’s probably actually one of the few drastic things Trump is doing that is legal, and is also even popular.
The problem in this flood the zone era is that
1) nothing actually takes effect until the courts decide
2) once the courts decide it's too late to change the outcome
3) the courts are unelected so they're not very receptive to protest
I am not a fan of protest and would be interested in hearing more about this.
Thank you for writing this. It's frightening living in Northern Virginia and thinking about the abuse some of my neighbors working for the government are receiving, but I'm fine, my family is fine, and our friends are doing fine. I wish there was something more I could do to help directly, but it's probably best that I focus on other issues that I actually have more direct influence over. I've got the luxury of not having to worry about the assault on the federal workforce if I don't want to think about it.
Instead, I'm thinking forward toward the off-off-year elections in November, and putting my energy into being a YIMBY and advocating for housing. Those are things that I have some influence over and I can be productive on.
“A lot of grifters and opportunists are out there claiming that Democrats in Congress aren’t [fighting Trump].”
Few Congressional Democrats look past their self interest towards the broader interest of the party. In 2024, only two house Democrats lost primaries. None were defeated by leftists, they both lost for crossing the zionist lobby. Yet House Democrats are in the thrall of immigration, DEI and transgender activists. They did not support bold, centrist legislation during the last Congress. Why did we have to wait for Trump to sign an executive order protecting women’s sports from gender dysphoric men? That should never have become an issue. Congressional Democrats kept the groups happy even as the groups drove moderates from the party. That does not qualify as fighting and calling out unworthy elites isnt grifting.
Yeah, why didn't Biden do *anything* about transwomen in women's sports?
"The Biden Administration’s interpretation of Title IX would allow transgender student athletes to participate in sports based on their gender identity with consideration for students’ age, level of competition and the individual sport’s status as a contact sport. However, these criteria may also be used by local education agencies and states to limit athletic participation to sex assigned at birth under certain circumstances."
In other words: nuanced attempt to create policy to deal with a tangled situation BAD! Blunderbuss policy aimed at stoking outrage rather than helping people deal with that situation GOOD!
https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/t9-ath-nprm.pdf?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=
Biden's position was wrong on the merits, and wrong on messaging. The right message was the simple one.
No biological males in women's sports.
A simpler message: Our government has big issues to deal with and this is not one of them. Let private sports organizations make their own policy. No to the nanny state!
Which private organizations are we talking about here? We are talking about public schools, or schools that get federal funding.
That's why people care. It's because it's the sports organizations that their daughters are competing in.
I get it people care, even if the odds that their daughter will have to compete with a transwoman are almost infinitesimal. But as the saying goes, don’t make a federal case of it. The issue is not big enough to warrant policy at the federal level. Let each group make their own policy. It shouldn’t matter that they get federal funding; the federal government shouldn’t have a ruling interest on this question.
That is pretty much my position. If the NCAA wants to make it their policy that you must be born female to compete in women' sports, that's fine by me, but exactly what categories of competition there are, and who is eligible for each category feels like an issue best decided by the sports leagues, not the government.
Of course, the counter argument is that there are special provisions in law requiring universities to have women's sports, so the government has already butted itself into sports leagues, like it or not, thus, an official interpretation of that law is required.
Biden’s position was unacceptable to me and to a supermajority of the American people. he should apologize to the women he hurt
The lack of attention to Zellnor Myrie is more likely because he’s 37 and has never managed more than two employees, so people are skeptical about handing him the 300,000-employee, $100 billion City government.
Have you ever considered that the city government only needs two employees?!!?
(/s, in case such is actually necessary.)
Musk Thought takes Manhattan
Everyone has to pick the dose of drama/pain they want to inflict upon themselves.
However, this past couple weeks has convinced me that the President of the United States is a sadist and I'm trying hard NOT to look the other way. There's no way to rationalize his recent conduct, ,particularly the way he's needlessly and excessively inflicting fear and pain of people for no obvious reason. I used to think stuff like this was just about creating a show for his supporters, but these past weeks have convinced me that the cruelty really is the point.
Personally, I'm trying as hard as I can to stare this evil in the face as much as I can and witness it first hand and in real time. We all have a responsibility for what our country does and even just being a witness and experiencing is part of that responsibility.
I admire your commitment, but in accordance with the proverb “it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” I strongly suggest you pair bearing witness with doing something positive, even if it’s something small. Are you able to volunteer in your community? Donate to a good cause? Witnessing the sh!t show and not being able to do anything is a recipe for bitterness and despair.
@drosophilist, I just want to note that you were right about this. I was (and am still) angry with the Dems for being so out of touch as to make *this* a viable option for a majority of voters. I hoped (foolishly) that with an actual mandate the incoming administration would step up; I have been shocked by the malice. But I should have expected it, and the support that they *still* seem to enjoy makes me very apprehensive about the future.
What value is there in witnessing it in “real time”? I’d wait for the morning paper or the evening news and live your life the rest of the time.
That's roughly what I mean by real time, as opposed to completely tuning out as some people are advocating/doing.
What are you doing exactly, except all the stuff Matt just said is useless?
Specifically, I'm staying tuned in and not giving up twitter or disconnecting from the news. I'm trying to keep the same routine as I normally do in terms of how much energy and focus I spend on current events. Not more. Not less. My goal is to roughly know the big picture reality about exactly what the Trump Administration is doing and the reasons it gives for its actions. Also, I'm trying to understand what Trump's supporters are saying and thinking about the Administration's actions.
But how is that worth anything? Consuming information (as opposed to entertainment) only has value insofar as it affects your actions. If it doesn't affect your actions in any way, then there's no point.
I think what's happening now is historic and will be viewed as a pivot point in terms of both our identity as a nation and our relationship to the rest of the world. I could have this totally wrong of course. I'm aware of that and I keep that in mind.
That said, my belief is that experiencing these times more fully as they unfold will change who I am as a person compared to if I don't do that.
I think of this as similar to my experience with 9/11 and its aftermath. I could have just turned off the news and spared myself the distress and sadness of the whole thing. I was personally unaffected by it for the most part. But I believe the full experience of 9/11 changed me and it informs my politics to this day. I view what's happening today somewhat similarly (although of course it's a totally different situation).
The occasion of the consumption need not be the occasion of the action. The two may be years, decades apart. The consumption of information is an additive process: what you don't learn today affects what you can understand tomorrow.
What good do you think is done by giving the sadist what he wants, which is more people to witness the suffering?
He wouldn’t be out there killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa unless he knew it was a way to get more tv ratings than the Grammy’s.
This is where I'm starting to shift my thinking as Trump 2.0 plays out. I previously thought this was just about "owning the libs" and watching libs suffer and getting payback against the libs. The fact that other people got hurt in the process was just a side effect that he didn't care about.
Now I think that's wrong. This is not about owning the libs. Trump's motivation here is to continue giving his followers the steady stream of human suffering they're demanding from him. Everything he does is to feed his followers, who get a feeling of power and exhilaration from knowing the harm he's causing is because of their support of him. This is not about the libs at all and what we do is irrelevant.
I disagree. I think Trump feels wronged -- deeply and unfairly wronged -- by the actions of the FBI during Russiagate, by the military brass who withheld information from him, by the Resistance™ during his first term, by the Justice Department during the past 4 years and by government officials during Covid.
He didn't know enough about the Executive Branch to do much about it during his first term, so he tweeted a lot. The interregnum during the past 4 years gave him the time to assemble a team of loyalists who are looking to either (1) take revenge or (2) root out the Deep State as he defines it. Or both.
That's a good point about the Justice/FBI stuff. I guess it's important to avoid single/simple explanations for everything when there certainly are multiple motivations at work.
That may be true - but it still doesn’t say how paying close attention and watching the suffering helps.
I said this upthread, but I think of this similarly to the way I think about 9/11. I wasn't directly impacted personally, but staying engaged and taking in the anger, sadness and sorrow that it caused changed me. I think I'm better for it. If not better, at least more experienced and different.
For one concrete example, prior to 9/11 I thought of Israel as being needlessly harsh and bullying. But staying tuned in to how it felt then, I said to my wife "this must be how people in Israel feel all the time." I still don't agree with everything Israel does, but now I cut them a ton more slack, having experienced the fear and anger I felt in the days following the attacks.
Well, he may be a sadist, but if he can rid the FAA of all its DEI hires so we never again have to experience all the plane crashes that resulted since it hired so many people who aren't white men, then I'll be happy!
Be careful. You become what you contemplate.
Live free or die!