In over two decades of following Matt, I have not sent him many messages but 3 years ago I suggested that a way to get ahead of the impending immigration electoral debacle was to champion an amendment to remove birthright citizenship. Not sure he noticed, or cared, but I think it would have good strategy. Democrats talked about the mortal dangers of Trump and then rearranged deck chairs.
I do think one thing contributing to a sense of helplessness is that actually taking the time to argue, from first principles, positions formerly thought to be too obvious to have to defend--like, for example, that democracy and rule of law are good--has become something of a lost art.
Most defenses amount to a repeating of a shibboleth--"That's fascist!" "That's unconsitutional!" "That's not who we are"--that are really more like pointers to what we assume are shared beliefs but are actually ideas being newly contended in the Internet Age. Meanwhile, the far right (or new right or whatever you want to call them) are steeped in persuasive arguments across social media and various rabbitholes throughout the internet, and they win converts despite weak reasoning because they are essentially unopposed, and can present stale dead-end ideas as some exciting new "dangerous truth".
This Slow Boring space is a rare one on the center left where someone is taking care to actually lay out arguments for things, and it's interesting to see how effective it is in influencing people. You'd think more people would try it. But in any case, I do think that if liberals could actually articulate why, exactly, authoritarianism is bad and democracy and rule of law are good, they would feel more empowerment and less sputtering rage.
I will not claim to know how best to respond to trump, but I’m guessing that there are a whole bunch of traditional republicans who might now see Trump as problematic. For instances if I owned a car dealership, I’d look at the proposed tariffs as an existential threat. (I don’t even begin to comprehend how auto workers voted for trump. Their decision process just seems so different from mine. I’d feel that way even more if my business depended on not only stable trade policies but also undocumented workers for labor. I’m guessing that that describes a lot small business owners.
I don't think you've met many car dealership owners. They are the landed gentry of the US, and they are pretty uniformly MAGA. They will be down with every effort to tear down the government that Trump, Musk, et al are proposing. They are more than well off enough to weather any problems caused by an increase in car prices, and would trade that for things like gutting OSHA, gutting the EPA, reducing IRS enforcement, etc.
In addition to what you wrote, car dealerships are protected from competition via state laws. They are one of the worst examples of regulatory capture around.
Well, if you don't look at it too much and don't really know what tariffs are, it feels good to make foreigners pay, because the common perception is that we already give too much largesse to the world. Also, most people don't really vote with well-formed opinions or analysis, just vibes, especially the persuadable part of the electorate.
I was joking with my friends Trump's personal vendettas overshadowing his coalition management will eventually blow up in some really unusual ways, and may make the #Resistance look REALLY weird in Trump 47 vs. Trump 45. The specific example I had in mind was Trump overstepping and going after businesses and governments in Florida, which leads to Ron Desantis decisively breaking with the national Republican party, If in 10 years, we talk about Desantis Democrats the same way we currently talk about Romney Republicans, I'll consider that a welcome development, even as I will "always" personally despise the politician.
One of the things I find most frustrating about many liberals/progressives/whatever you want to call them today (and I count myself as one of them, BTW), is their tendency to overly analyze and overly study political issues. I suspect it's reflective of their being, on average, better educated, so they have a better handle on how complex and nuanced the world is.
That's a good thing when you're running the government of a large and complex country.
But it's a disastrous way to win elections.
From what I've read (and seen, admittedly only as a local elected official), the vast majority of voters don't study and analyze even their own personal situation before deciding how to cast their ballots. That's not a criticism, BTW: most people simply want to live their lives, and, in that sense, don't really care who's in charge.
You hear that reflected in a common complaint from most voters, "oh, both parties are essentially the same". Which is laughable bullshit today, but a convenient way of externalizing a lack of interest in thinking critically about who to vote for.
The Democratic Party needs to wake up and stop trying to be the only adult in the room. Because being the adult doesn't sell to many people these days. In fact, many of them see it as a reflection of elitist condescension.
Have your policy wonks working on reasonable solutions to issues but also have your mud-slinging attack dogs that live solely to discredit and tear down Republicans. All Republicans. By making visceral pitches that are more likely to connect with voters focused on living their lives.
The Republicans have become past masters at this. And until the Democrats re-learn how to do it, I suspect they're going to be in the political doghouse.
Which, given the policy priorities of the Republican Party, would be fracking terrible.
> But if we end up having a strong revival of Common Sense Democrats who renew the party, defeat Trump, and usher in a new era of broadly shared prosperity, that will have happened because smart reformist candidates won races and paved the way for more success in 2026 and 2028.
I'd actually be much more interested in understanding how local and state capacity can be used as a substitute for federal capacity, given that the scenario above feels absurdly optimistic for this day and age.
(The basic point is that even if there is a Democratic majority and president in 2028, with the current purge of federal expertise, how would such a president even begin to build new programs, carry out initiatives, etc.)
Fighting means fighting. It means not issuing anodyne press releases and mildly scolding official statements. It means when Musk breaks out a Nazi salute, you grab a microphone and say "If that little Nazi punk tries that shit near me, I'll break his jaw and make my grandfather proud."* We need to Captain America this shit.
Trump is a pugilist. He projects strength and action. Right now, the Democrats project schoolmarm at best and terrified hostage at worst. Public communication tactics that were effective against Mitt Romney twelve years ago are not going to be effective against Trump today.
I wish it were different. I wish we could make political decisions based on informed debates of policy and philosophy. I wish we had a Lincoln or Obama who could inspire us to be our best selves; we don't, and even if we did, it might not work. Because what is working right now is lowest common denominator bullying, and Democrats are the ones being bullied. Why should voters trust a party to fight for them if they won't fight for themselves?
"If that little Nazi punk tries that shit near me, I'll break his jaw"
I totally get the impulse and that would feel very satisfying in the moment.
What then? OK, you threatened to punch Musk or actually did so (assuming you got past his security, which would take some doing). Then the Dear Leader's discount Brownshirts kick the shit out of you for assaulting Dear Leader's right-hand man. Then you and some of your friends join your local Antifa group for protection. Wash, rinse, repeat a few times and you've got The Purge 2: Live Free or Die Hard, with pitched battles between proponents and opponents of the Mump regime.
And that's without getting into fun-filled questions like "If Trump orders the military to fire on anti-government protesters, will they object or shrug and be like, Good soldiers follow orders?"
Violence is a ratchet. It's easy to escalate and hella hard to de-escalate, unless you've got a Mandela-level hero working intentionally on the de-escalation. This is NOT a call for pacifism! Sometimes violence is the least bad choice, e.g., if you're Ukrainian and Putin has just invaded your country. But we need to be crystal clear about what calling for violence entails and who would suffer as a result (narrator: the defenseless, it's always the defenseless, including children, who suffer when violence is normalized).
I guess the one thing I'd add to this is that the New York Times in particular wants liberals to doom. A lot of liberal commentators interpret this as the Times trying to help Trump (for example, through its headline word choice) but that isn't really it. The factual information in the articles is good and is generally as critical as is appropriate. What's unique about the Times is not that it fails to be critical but that it practically wallows in a tone of "Trump will probably succeed no matter how bad he gets" or even "Trump is an inexorable, irresistible political force and there are no answers." I think they perceive themselves to be warning their audience about bad things that could happen if they're not vigilant, but surely there's an awareness somewhere in the institution that (1) their readership is mostly liberals, (2) liberals are prone to dooming and depression, (3) dooming and depression lead to clicking, (4) clicking leads to more dooming and depression.
Heh, it was a Narnia reference. Tash is the evil god in the Narnia universe, worshiped by the Calormenes, whose catchphrase/battle cry is “In the name of Tash, the Irresistible, the Inexorable!”
I said Trump as Tash is on brand, because Tash is cruel, demands worship but never does anything nice for his worshipers, and he eats people who disrespect him.
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.
I have a relative whose take is that he's stopped watching/scrolling the news, but does catch up via late night comedians. His view is that the healthiest thing you can do is laugh at it all rather than marinate in it.
I don't think his approach is any better but I have a hard time articulating why.
I would agree with you, and guess that it’s because comedians don’t necessarily cover the most important news, but the stuff they can mock the most. Add in the partisanship, and you’re not getting anything too informative about the news.
I think there's a form of "laughing at it all" that is warm-hearted and compassionate about the absurdity of the human condition. But I think it's far more common to take the form of marinating in cynicism or feeling spiteful & superior about all the idiots in the world. And those mental habits seem marginally worse to me than doomscrolling, while both are inferior to the positive approach MY outlines.
Can you make this post free to share? I think this would be good to pass along to my remaining handful of active facebook using friends who are having daily meltdowns.
Total sidenote but re: Elon Musk “bright young things”, they don’t strike me as very bright - Musk’s companies are not where the smartest tech people go, and many seem to be college dropouts from lower tiered schools.
Both SpaceX and Tesla have performed amazing engineering work. Let's not fall into the trap that disliking Musk's politics means we dishonestly downplay the real accomplishments of those companies.
Special election for the MN House has been rescheduled for March. Good to see the DFL (state Dem party) following the Jared Golden strategy of "Run dudes with sleave tattoos" https://www.david-gottfried.com/
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.
If anyone wants to take concrete action, we are forming an Indivisible Group, “Democracy Action Network,” in Los Angeles. I co-founded a group, Equality Network, in the aftermath of Prop 8 in California. Our goal was to overturn Prop 8 and establish same-sex marriage in the US. I would describe the group’s approach as big-tent and pragmatic. We have an initial organizing call on Sunday at 6PM (I realize the time conflict) if you are interested: www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/752715/?referring_vol=1539289&rname=David&share_context=event_details&share_medium=copy_link . We have more 420 people signed up so far.
In over two decades of following Matt, I have not sent him many messages but 3 years ago I suggested that a way to get ahead of the impending immigration electoral debacle was to champion an amendment to remove birthright citizenship. Not sure he noticed, or cared, but I think it would have good strategy. Democrats talked about the mortal dangers of Trump and then rearranged deck chairs.
I do think one thing contributing to a sense of helplessness is that actually taking the time to argue, from first principles, positions formerly thought to be too obvious to have to defend--like, for example, that democracy and rule of law are good--has become something of a lost art.
Most defenses amount to a repeating of a shibboleth--"That's fascist!" "That's unconsitutional!" "That's not who we are"--that are really more like pointers to what we assume are shared beliefs but are actually ideas being newly contended in the Internet Age. Meanwhile, the far right (or new right or whatever you want to call them) are steeped in persuasive arguments across social media and various rabbitholes throughout the internet, and they win converts despite weak reasoning because they are essentially unopposed, and can present stale dead-end ideas as some exciting new "dangerous truth".
This Slow Boring space is a rare one on the center left where someone is taking care to actually lay out arguments for things, and it's interesting to see how effective it is in influencing people. You'd think more people would try it. But in any case, I do think that if liberals could actually articulate why, exactly, authoritarianism is bad and democracy and rule of law are good, they would feel more empowerment and less sputtering rage.
I will not claim to know how best to respond to trump, but I’m guessing that there are a whole bunch of traditional republicans who might now see Trump as problematic. For instances if I owned a car dealership, I’d look at the proposed tariffs as an existential threat. (I don’t even begin to comprehend how auto workers voted for trump. Their decision process just seems so different from mine. I’d feel that way even more if my business depended on not only stable trade policies but also undocumented workers for labor. I’m guessing that that describes a lot small business owners.
I don't think you've met many car dealership owners. They are the landed gentry of the US, and they are pretty uniformly MAGA. They will be down with every effort to tear down the government that Trump, Musk, et al are proposing. They are more than well off enough to weather any problems caused by an increase in car prices, and would trade that for things like gutting OSHA, gutting the EPA, reducing IRS enforcement, etc.
In addition to what you wrote, car dealerships are protected from competition via state laws. They are one of the worst examples of regulatory capture around.
On more than one occasion I was at charity events with both a dealership owner and the CFO of a regional beer distributorship.
That bit about regulatory capture was ... not their view of it at all.
Well, if you don't look at it too much and don't really know what tariffs are, it feels good to make foreigners pay, because the common perception is that we already give too much largesse to the world. Also, most people don't really vote with well-formed opinions or analysis, just vibes, especially the persuadable part of the electorate.
I was joking with my friends Trump's personal vendettas overshadowing his coalition management will eventually blow up in some really unusual ways, and may make the #Resistance look REALLY weird in Trump 47 vs. Trump 45. The specific example I had in mind was Trump overstepping and going after businesses and governments in Florida, which leads to Ron Desantis decisively breaking with the national Republican party, If in 10 years, we talk about Desantis Democrats the same way we currently talk about Romney Republicans, I'll consider that a welcome development, even as I will "always" personally despise the politician.
One of the things I find most frustrating about many liberals/progressives/whatever you want to call them today (and I count myself as one of them, BTW), is their tendency to overly analyze and overly study political issues. I suspect it's reflective of their being, on average, better educated, so they have a better handle on how complex and nuanced the world is.
That's a good thing when you're running the government of a large and complex country.
But it's a disastrous way to win elections.
From what I've read (and seen, admittedly only as a local elected official), the vast majority of voters don't study and analyze even their own personal situation before deciding how to cast their ballots. That's not a criticism, BTW: most people simply want to live their lives, and, in that sense, don't really care who's in charge.
You hear that reflected in a common complaint from most voters, "oh, both parties are essentially the same". Which is laughable bullshit today, but a convenient way of externalizing a lack of interest in thinking critically about who to vote for.
The Democratic Party needs to wake up and stop trying to be the only adult in the room. Because being the adult doesn't sell to many people these days. In fact, many of them see it as a reflection of elitist condescension.
Have your policy wonks working on reasonable solutions to issues but also have your mud-slinging attack dogs that live solely to discredit and tear down Republicans. All Republicans. By making visceral pitches that are more likely to connect with voters focused on living their lives.
The Republicans have become past masters at this. And until the Democrats re-learn how to do it, I suspect they're going to be in the political doghouse.
Which, given the policy priorities of the Republican Party, would be fracking terrible.
> But if we end up having a strong revival of Common Sense Democrats who renew the party, defeat Trump, and usher in a new era of broadly shared prosperity, that will have happened because smart reformist candidates won races and paved the way for more success in 2026 and 2028.
I'd actually be much more interested in understanding how local and state capacity can be used as a substitute for federal capacity, given that the scenario above feels absurdly optimistic for this day and age.
(The basic point is that even if there is a Democratic majority and president in 2028, with the current purge of federal expertise, how would such a president even begin to build new programs, carry out initiatives, etc.)
Fighting means fighting. It means not issuing anodyne press releases and mildly scolding official statements. It means when Musk breaks out a Nazi salute, you grab a microphone and say "If that little Nazi punk tries that shit near me, I'll break his jaw and make my grandfather proud."* We need to Captain America this shit.
Trump is a pugilist. He projects strength and action. Right now, the Democrats project schoolmarm at best and terrified hostage at worst. Public communication tactics that were effective against Mitt Romney twelve years ago are not going to be effective against Trump today.
I wish it were different. I wish we could make political decisions based on informed debates of policy and philosophy. I wish we had a Lincoln or Obama who could inspire us to be our best selves; we don't, and even if we did, it might not work. Because what is working right now is lowest common denominator bullying, and Democrats are the ones being bullied. Why should voters trust a party to fight for them if they won't fight for themselves?
*Assuming one's grandfather fought in WW2.
"If that little Nazi punk tries that shit near me, I'll break his jaw"
I totally get the impulse and that would feel very satisfying in the moment.
What then? OK, you threatened to punch Musk or actually did so (assuming you got past his security, which would take some doing). Then the Dear Leader's discount Brownshirts kick the shit out of you for assaulting Dear Leader's right-hand man. Then you and some of your friends join your local Antifa group for protection. Wash, rinse, repeat a few times and you've got The Purge 2: Live Free or Die Hard, with pitched battles between proponents and opponents of the Mump regime.
And that's without getting into fun-filled questions like "If Trump orders the military to fire on anti-government protesters, will they object or shrug and be like, Good soldiers follow orders?"
Violence is a ratchet. It's easy to escalate and hella hard to de-escalate, unless you've got a Mandela-level hero working intentionally on the de-escalation. This is NOT a call for pacifism! Sometimes violence is the least bad choice, e.g., if you're Ukrainian and Putin has just invaded your country. But we need to be crystal clear about what calling for violence entails and who would suffer as a result (narrator: the defenseless, it's always the defenseless, including children, who suffer when violence is normalized).
You still didn't describe what you think "fighting" actually means and what you expect it to accomplish.
Your consistent advocacy on behalf of the oil & gas industry is correct and always appreciated. Thank you, sincerely.
I guess the one thing I'd add to this is that the New York Times in particular wants liberals to doom. A lot of liberal commentators interpret this as the Times trying to help Trump (for example, through its headline word choice) but that isn't really it. The factual information in the articles is good and is generally as critical as is appropriate. What's unique about the Times is not that it fails to be critical but that it practically wallows in a tone of "Trump will probably succeed no matter how bad he gets" or even "Trump is an inexorable, irresistible political force and there are no answers." I think they perceive themselves to be warning their audience about bad things that could happen if they're not vigilant, but surely there's an awareness somewhere in the institution that (1) their readership is mostly liberals, (2) liberals are prone to dooming and depression, (3) dooming and depression lead to clicking, (4) clicking leads to more dooming and depression.
"Trump is an inexorable, irresistible political force..."
Trump is Tash? That's kind of on-brand.
I thought it was that Trump is Thanos ("I am inevitable.")?
Heh, it was a Narnia reference. Tash is the evil god in the Narnia universe, worshiped by the Calormenes, whose catchphrase/battle cry is “In the name of Tash, the Irresistible, the Inexorable!”
I said Trump as Tash is on brand, because Tash is cruel, demands worship but never does anything nice for his worshipers, and he eats people who disrespect him.
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.
I am not a fan of protest and would be interested in hearing more about this.
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 have a relative whose take is that he's stopped watching/scrolling the news, but does catch up via late night comedians. His view is that the healthiest thing you can do is laugh at it all rather than marinate in it.
I don't think his approach is any better but I have a hard time articulating why.
Any ideas?
The late night shows are just progressive clapter for people who want to hear their views echoed back to them.
I would agree with you, and guess that it’s because comedians don’t necessarily cover the most important news, but the stuff they can mock the most. Add in the partisanship, and you’re not getting anything too informative about the news.
I think there's a form of "laughing at it all" that is warm-hearted and compassionate about the absurdity of the human condition. But I think it's far more common to take the form of marinating in cynicism or feeling spiteful & superior about all the idiots in the world. And those mental habits seem marginally worse to me than doomscrolling, while both are inferior to the positive approach MY outlines.
Can you make this post free to share? I think this would be good to pass along to my remaining handful of active facebook using friends who are having daily meltdowns.
Total sidenote but re: Elon Musk “bright young things”, they don’t strike me as very bright - Musk’s companies are not where the smartest tech people go, and many seem to be college dropouts from lower tiered schools.
"...college dropouts from lower tiered schools"
That says a lot more about graduates of top-tier schools (not to mention the schools themselves), than it does about Musk's ventures.
Both SpaceX and Tesla have performed amazing engineering work. Let's not fall into the trap that disliking Musk's politics means we dishonestly downplay the real accomplishments of those companies.
Special election for the MN House has been rescheduled for March. Good to see the DFL (state Dem party) following the Jared Golden strategy of "Run dudes with sleave tattoos" https://www.david-gottfried.com/
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
If anyone wants to take concrete action, we are forming an Indivisible Group, “Democracy Action Network,” in Los Angeles. I co-founded a group, Equality Network, in the aftermath of Prop 8 in California. Our goal was to overturn Prop 8 and establish same-sex marriage in the US. I would describe the group’s approach as big-tent and pragmatic. We have an initial organizing call on Sunday at 6PM (I realize the time conflict) if you are interested: www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/752715/?referring_vol=1539289&rname=David&share_context=event_details&share_medium=copy_link . We have more 420 people signed up so far.
"...we are forming an Indivisible Group..."
What makes it indivisible? Or did you mean invisible?