I love Slow Boring and it’s very possible I’m just an idiot, but I honestly have no idea what the upshot of this post is or what it’s even trying to say. Sorry.
I heard a lot of discourse about how the deal proved that moderate Democrats just want to cave too Trump. Matt is obviously associated with the "moderation works" take, so I took this as him responding to that criticism and squaring it with his own opposition to the deal.
Sometimes Matt's starting place seems to be online discourse or criticism he's getting from corners of the internet that I'm completely oblivious to. Today's post was one of those ones where he feels like he's responding to something or arguing against a certain POV he's seeing a lot of. When that's the case setting the stage with more context would be really helpful.
One thing that is very clear from the politix podcast is that a lot of his head space is filled with his arguments with leftists on twitter. Seems kind of unhealthy
As far as I understand things, the smoke filled rooms of the past have been replaced with Twitter. For better or worse it seems like that’s where intra-party disputes, debates over strategy, etc get hashed out these days.
The “better” part is that it’s somewhat more democratic. Easier to get the ear of someone powerful without having prior connections/gone to the right school etc than it used to be if you can post good.
That's one of the main reasons. And also its contrast with how things go on the right, where there is still very much a smoke filled room (maybe vapor filled at this point?) which disseminates marching orders to legislators and media personalities, and actual strategizing takes place.
A lot of those strategists are dumb as hell but at least they are formulating and executing strategies. "Strategy" left-of-center has become a Ouija board.
Someone can try to convince themselves that their time arguing with liars and morons on twitter is somehow productive but you can count me as skeptical what's happening is a healthy hashing out of intraparty disputes
People also overestimate how much people who actually work on policy (particularly in the bureaucracy) are on Twitter vs. how many people on Twitter are just the most overly precious unemployable people imaginable.
A lot of those people aren't even on the level, either. They are just stoking disunity. Social media is poison, even (especially?) for those who make their bread off it.
I mean, intra-Democratic party and intra-left (of center) fighting is a central driver of concrete policy outcomes in America at the moment. I'm not sure how you can look back at the past 15 years and not agree with that.
"Arguments with leftists on twitter" seems as good a proxy as anything else for where the sentiments of left-of-center political discourse and opinions are these days. Is there some place else we should be looking?
It depends how powerful these Twitter leftists are in the Dem party. Judging by general party behavior, they're pretty powerful, so I think it makes sense to argue with them.
But the messaging is also muddy. He comes against the people that wanted to stop fighting, then a couple of paragraphs later criticizes fighters and says that the GOP in the mid Obama years were wrong to keep fighting rather than take the policy wins. It was unclear what it is he's arguing for, or at least it was to me.
This is a reasonsble point. I have been continuously glad that the Republicans didn't get policy wins due to the freedom caucus' strategic incoherence.
I would have liked to see Matt expound on the "kind of partisan hardball that would genuinely cripple MAGA." Because I think that this is the heart of the current debate between the different Democratic factions, and the biggest problem with the Dem fold is that it makes the party look *wildly* less credible on this score. Who cares if the parties win a few voters on fracking, if we just keep falling deeper down this well.
ETA: the post I want is one that says "can a moderate party actually fight MAGA, and what positions would that require them to take." I suspect this includes filibuster reform, SCOTUS changes, gerrymandering reform, maybe even statehood for DC and PR. Matt seems unwilling to go there. I suspect this is because he knows (as we all know) that a "moderate" party will have a hard time agreeing to these very controversial positions. And yet, this seems like the only way we actually achieve durable stability against incremental authoritarian takeover.
My biggest takeaway is that Matt thinks imposing hardships on people is a good thing to do as long as the Republicans are being blamed for it.
I'm sure that is good politics. It is also why I dislike politics so much. They *all* seem to be perfectly fine with imposing hardships as long as either it is the "other people" who are hurt, or the other side gets the blame.
I think some hardship now in return for less in the future is legitimate calculation. Whether that is the case or not is a politicl question I have no expertise in answering,
Also, I think it is a mistake to make the hardship overly much about federal workers. The non-represantative sample of federal wokers in my DC choir is that they were not really suffering, had savings to cope, etc. Legitmat for Kane and Spanberger to prioitize, but less so the Party.
I typically agree with your takes, but I don't understand this one.
Trump was illegally cutting off SNAP as a (seemingly dumb, but ultimately successful?) hardball politics play. This view you're espousing amounts to, "If Trump ever says he'll illegally cut off SNAP benefits, you must capitulate on any political demands, elsewise you're imposing hardships on people for politics."
Using SNAP recipients as political bargaining-chips for preformative resisty stunts is such an unbelievably shitty move. I'm not surprised the progs are ones who pushed the shutdown to go longer. Every single dogshit idea that's cost the Dems legitimacy with the public has come from them, from open borders to defund the police.
It wasn't democrats imposing pain on SNAP recipients - both the moral and the political blame rests entirely with the republicans. If the R thesis is - do what we say or we'll impose hardship on poor people, there's never a world in which dems don't face tough choices. The least bad option here was to push the country into delayed flights, the real catalys for middle class voters picking up the phone and calling their reps, making R's pay a price that becomes too high to accept.
If Dems want to extend ACA subsidies, they should campaign on it and then win elections so they can pass legislation. That's why I voted for them. I didn't vote for them to exploit procedural loopholes to withhold food aid to get some token symbolic concessions of Trump.
It may rest entirely with the Republicans but in voters' eyes, it was all wrapped up with the shutdown which the Democrats caused and proudly owned. People didn't understand that cutting off SNAP was a Trump decision independent of the shutdown. They just saw people out of work, flights canceled, government services being unavailable, no SNAP and concluded it was all part of the same thing, with Democratic fingerprints all over it.
SNAP doesn’t get shut down during government shutdowns. The court confirmed that. Trump just personally decided that his own DOGE will shut down SNAP regardless of what the courts say.
I'm surprised to see *you* making this argument. Democrats are not the only ones with agency here, nor are they even the majority party. Republicans could have continued SNAP by 1) Trump authorizing the emergency funds; 2) negotiating with Democrats and coming to agreement to pass a CR; 3) nuking the filibuster and passing the CR.
Further, if Republicans are wanting to cut SNAP benefits as part of balancing the budget, are you going to outraged because they are imposing hardships on people? Or are you going to examine the policy and consider whether you think the trade offs are worth it?
The calculus still remains the same, though: is it better to alleviate suffering in the short term, even at the price of bringing on more suffering over the long-term (via the policy awfulness that accompanies MAGA wins)? It may feel icky, but we nonetheless need to be very clear eyed about this.
I read Matt as being affirmatively for the option of pushing America into hardship as long as it hurt the other side, rather than as a bad thing that might be necessary.
Either way, the practice of politics requires more moral compromises than I'm willing to do personally. I guess that is why I never got into politics or party dynamics much.
You're point is well taken. I would say from working on campaigns and having a spouse working for two senators (just noting some inside baseball knowledge here), one problem is you can't just take the "politics" out of "politics". Trying to placate literally all sorts of different interest groups, rivals and yes trying to balance short term expediency vs. long term gains is just inherent to the job. This is in a lot of ways one the mistake people make when they pine for some authoritarian leader to "solve" all problems. Politics doesn't actually go away in that scenario. Instead of trying to placate various other politicians, interest groups and voters, you're trying to placate high powered generals, sycophant aides who to your face are telling you how great you are but behind the scenes are jockeying to accumulate more power possibly at your expense or just a few other high powered people who still have some ability to harm you. And as history shows again and again, this sort of politics tends to be much worse for the country and people at large than the former.
Given that you read and comment on this substack, at least to you a degree you clearly understand all of this. Just maybe a gentle reminder. Having said all that, I'll reiterate that I completely get why all this would leave you feeling "icky".
I'll just say one problem is if ending the shutdown was the right thing to do because morally it's not right to continue denying SNAP benefits to people in need, why didn't the 8 senators in question just say that! I mean a few alluded to this reason, but honestly the message was more "we lost this fight" or dumb "we just need to work together" stuff. And as Matt alludes to, seems like the real reason was to protect the fillibuster...which is a terrible reason to cave given how terrible the fillibuster is (Matt didn't really say this in his post, but he really was one of the first commentators out there (I least I read) to make the point about how bad the filibuster is so I think that's sort of the unspoken other reason Matt is so against this cave).
I think the upshot is, the morally right thing to do was actually good politics....if you actually put out that message. Which the senators in question really failed to do in my eyes.
And this is only because of the illusion that the Democrats have power and leverage. In the end, they didn't because Trump and the Republicans care a lot less about pain being inflicted on the population than Democrats do.
For continuing government operations, the filibuster was a trap for the Democrats, because it made them think they did indeed have leverage. They would have been much better off if they could have just refused to invoke the filibuster at all and let unified Republican control of government prove to the American people what it stood for, and take that to the polls.
That's fine as far as it goes, but I think it's extremely relevant that the source of the suffering in question is unambiguously the Republican party and their unilateral and active decision not to fund SNAP. Your responses throughout this thread continually elide this point in favor of highlighting how grubby the business of politics is, I guess because the Dems are just as culpable because for a moment it looked like they might not do literally everything in their power including split up their own caucus to prevent the GOP's policies to do the extremely destructive thing that the GOP wants their policies to do.
It's just a really weird way to think about the issue, no?
I doubt that is true for GS-10 and below, who often make under $60,000, depending on locale. I don't know what percentage of the federal workforce that is, but I had a GS-7 job that required at least a bachelor's degree. Jobs that only require a high school diploma often rank lower than GS-7.
Our county executive was distributing gas cards to TSA agents so they could get to work, and food pantries were set up in locations where federal workers were working without pay, so I definitely think your sample is non-representative. As I type this, I am wondering what kind of pressure federal representatives were getting from local politicians to end the shutdown.
Quite possibly unrepresentative. My sample are are colleg grads. But still as a message, I think we should have emphasized the SNAP, services like air traffic control (and we did) that Trump was shutting down.
Maybe bureaucrats aren’t doing too badly, but air traffic controllers are a different matter, being that it’s already one of the most stressful jobs in existence. Is shutting down air travel (given that the country has an utterly inadequate passenger rail system) no big deal? It’s easy to say only rich people fly, but we’re no longer in the “jet set” age, air travel is no longer just an “elite” thing. Of course a lot of people were probably happy to have an excuse not to have to see their families for Thanksgiving this year.
I think that's one of the big reasons why it made sense to wait just another week. A whole lot more middle and upper middle class voters were going to start feeling the direct affects of the shutdown, in fact they already were (I know because one of them who cancelled a trip to Austin to see family in part because flights started getting cancelled and the prices for the other flights started sky rocketing).
Matt didn't really say this explicitly in his post but Trump seemed absolutely determined to make this shutdown as cruel as possible for no apparent political gain. In fact, it was at his political expense. And yet they went out of their way to make Americans suffer. If air travel continued to deteriorate, you better believe donors would start saying something (even among rich donors, only a small percentage can afford to fly private on any consistent basis). Like, there was a window to put the screws on the Trump administration officials who actually make all of the real decisions.
I think the key is for Matt (and me) is I absolutely believe that Trump represents a unique threat to the Republic. Part of why I'm on board with, we need to nominate moderates for gettable senate seats. But also means that I've come to believe that Americans kind of need to know (and feel) that they're not getting the first Trump administration where the "adults in the room" were still running things.
Pure theatre on Trump’s part. If he wanted to have ait traffic control function, he coud have done so. No way SS checks are more of an essential service than air trafffic.
The deal on the table was a one year extension of the ACA subsidies. Not only is that a trivial return on some open-ended suffering to be imposed right now, but it was a brain-dead, against-our-interests ask in the first place. Protect Republicans from the anger of voters from imposing painful healthcare increases until just after the midterms. Brilliant! That Chuck Schumer is a political genius.
That's politics though, and really any form of negotiation. Not to totally repeat myself from last week but what you're willing to risk needs to be an up front consideration. I'm agnostic as to whether the shut down was the right fight to pick. All of the hits to SNAP, federal employees, air traffic control, and more were known outcomes and leverage points and Republicans were owners of failure to do anything to cultivate bipartisanship on the appropriations deal. What I don't get, is if the known consequences and risks of the strategy were too much to bear, why the fight was picked in the first place.
I totally hear what you're saying but here is my question. Was that a smart escalation by Trump or a huge error that could have blown up in his face? We'll never know since the Dems folded but in a world where for most Americans the president is the government, I'm not sure it wasn't the latter.
Not every form of negotiation is just pure destructive holdup value extraction. I think it is quite bad that is how our politics work now (thanks, Mitch!).
I agree not every form, and I think things go best when both sides approach the matter constructively, but that's not always the world we live in. If you are a pro negotiator you need to be prepared to deal with different methods and to adopt them yourself when called for. I've been negotiating commercial contracts in house for a decade and a half now and I've seen it all. Lower stakes obviously than the trajectory of the US government but what isn't?
I like it best when both sides work through things in good faith and I think things tend to work out best when that happens. Positive sum is possible. But sometimes you are dealing with an asshole or with someone who thinks it's in their best interest to play chicken and you cannot be afraid to do that too. Sometimes I think the lack of private sector experience at the higher levels of the Democratic party is why they have such trouble with Trump. Out in the real world you deal with people where every meeting starts out with 10 minutes of being berated or who are willing to let things go off the rails and sometimes you have to call the bluff even when it's painful for you too. Most of these guys fold or suddenly have an inexplicable change of heart when they realize they aren't going to get one over on you i.e. TACO. But if you're too scared to ever risk difficulty of your own they will get the better every time.
This filibuster was the stupidest negotiating approach imaginable. It begins with the illusion that the Democrats had leverage due to the filibuster. It continued with the idea that Democrats could tolerate the pain being inflicted more than the Republicans. It ended with the braindead "ask" being a one year (until just after the midterms!) extension of the ACA subsidies, thus protecting Republicans from the voters' wrath.
Such a losing strategy.
The Democrats' strategy is plain and simple, if they'd only follow it: acknowledge and declare to the world that the Republicans have total control over the government and whatever happens -- mostly bad -- is totally due to that control and take that to the polls in 2026 and 2028.
I.e., *don't* use the filibuster to shut down the government.
I think you are probably right on what made most sense at the ante stage. What's crazy to me though is deciding to play anyway then folding out of nowhere when the game might unexpectedly be going your way.
The Republicans don't give a shit about federal employees but there was a real risk that the holidays end up ruined due to air traffic control issues and on top of that Trump out of nowhere decides to take the massively unpopular side on SNAP. Think for 5 seconds about how bad this potentially goes for the administration if no one can get home for Thanksgiving (or even Christmas) and all the feel good stories are about Americans coming together to donate food in light of Trump cutting off support. But hey! The Democrats saved the filibuster! From the fight they started! Inspiring!
I agree obstructionism may be the correct play under the circumstances of a Trump administration—it may have even been the correct near term play for Mitch though I’d argue it hasn’t worked out great for his interests in the long run.
I just think that’s a bad equilibrium to be trapped in and we should be looking for ways to escape, so I object to characterizing hostage taking and setting the commons on fire as “that’s politics baby!”
I fear that even if the next R president is a normal Rubio type people will reach for this same playbook and nothing will ever deescalate.
It is definitely a suboptimal equilibrium and it's not how I would prefer the country is run either. My biggest concern about the whole thing though is whether Democratic leadership actually has/had a strategy to begin with. It's one thing to lose, and everyone does sometimes. It's another to seemingly not understand the game you're playing, which is what this feels like to me. I have yet to hear a good explanation as to why this was done to begin with, in light of how it ended.
I (maybe too charitably) interpret the "imposing hardships for partisan reasons" interpretation as specific *to this particular situation* - given the recission weapons Republicans have at their disposal, ending the shutdown in return for nothing only mitigates the hardships in the very short term and does nothing to ensure that they won't be reimposed. If anything, Republicans will learn that they can threaten to throw federal employees and benefits recipients under the bus at will and Democrats will eventually cave.
Having said that, I agree that even that (again, possibly over-charitable) interpretation is a tough sell.
I think he’s trying to do his “if it’s so bad, why didn’t I try to hide it?” move, e.g. “perfect phone call.” I’m dubious on whether it will work when he already carries very little trust on this issue and spent a VERY long time clearly trying to hide it before a few days of allegedly embracing its release (when he had no control over whether it would be released or not.)
I think he just asked the DOJ to open up another investigation which will allow the DOJ to oppose and perhaps prevent opening the Epstein files. The timing is fishy to me. If that's not his plan, and the files are released, then I don't think anyone is going to give him any credit for it.
Also worth noting that Matt and most SB readers are solidly upper middle class (average income is north of 200K, I seem to recall), so of course it’s no skin off our nose.
I had to make personal calls to all forty of my clients to let them know that they probably wouldn't be receiving SNAP and referring them to food banks. Three straight days of delivering bad news to panicked, despairing people. It was brutal and I wasn't even directly affected.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your point. But I think a key point here is the Trump administration was fighting in court to stop SNAP benefits from going out. In other words, you’re dealing with a president and administration who is almost uniquely cruel (dare I say, that’s the point) in the ways they are willing to harm the American people for their own ego or ideology or just personal lack of empathy. As Matt noted, the real actual smart thing for the Trump administration to do would have been to just do a very small bore deal.
Which gets at the nub of Matt’s frustration with the lack of moderation from National Dems. He absolutely sees how unique and dangerous Trump really is. And his frustration with “resist libs” is basically if you all say that you also see how terrible Trump really is you should MORE willing not less willing to support “moderate” candidates because all of your pet issues are basically second order concerns if the republic really is at stake (and if Fascism does take hold, your chances of any of your priorities being addressed is zero). But that goes the same for these senators. Precisely because Trump is a unique threat who seemingly was willing to being astonishingly cruel to American citizens you have to recognize that times like these your have to let Trump own the consequences of his cruelty.
"Precisely because Trump is a unique threat who seemingly was willing to being astonishingly cruel to American citizens you have to recognize that times like these your have to let Trump own the consequences of his cruelty."
Ezra Klein did a widely shared podcast recently where he called for a truly big tent Democratic Party. He explicitly differentiated this from moderating. Big tent is where you expand what it can mean to be a Democratic, while moderating means keeping the tent the same size but shifting it to the center. Separately, Klein leaned towards opposing ending the shut down at this point.
Since Matt and Ezra Klein are friends and both highly regarded centrists, I think Matt feels a little insecure about this new distinction of what "big-tent" means, since it is different than what he has long argued for. That the senators who ended the shutdown are all moderates compound this.
He's a bit centrist and a bit leftist. It's hard to pin it down because I think a lot of people think we should take moderate actions strategically but that a farther left action would be more morally desirable if it was electable.
Not only is hurting Americans for political gain icky, there’s no guarantee it would have kept working. As the hardships compounded, people might have gotten off their asses to see why their flights and food stamps were cancelled and realized “Dems could have passed a budget but decided to play politics.”
If the Democrats were on board with imposing hardships on people, they would be Republicans.
There's no bigger divide between pundits and the officeholders who actually have to field the thousands of calls from people losing jobs, paychecks, food benefits, Thanksgiving trips to see family etc etc than when the former says, "Just tough it out." Sure, easy for you to say, pal.
I don't think it is good politics to make voters angry over disrupted Thanksgiving or Christmas travel. Most won't care about who deserves more blame and will lash out at their local Senators and Congressmen. It's fine to play hardball next year. I don't think Democrats would have come out of this unscathed. SNAP or Obamacare subsidies is a different issue because most people are not affected by it. As soon as the Trump administration disrupted air travel, it became a losing battle for Democrats.
I think the issue is under the current situation Republicans can "have their cake and eat it too" by passing party-line tax cuts then begging Democrats to come up with the votes for bipartisan appropriations bills that maintain popular social programs. If Democrats lean more into hardball, Republicans would need to get rid of the filibuster and govern themselves. That means they would either have to bring their deficit hawks on board with increases in social spending or do more cuts.
The bipartisan situation is good in that it maintains program funding at a higher level, but it's bad insofar as it blurs the boundaries on who stands for what.
On top of the points Ben Krauss made, I think the fundamental point he’s making is to have a fucking strategy to win reddish state senate seats without reliance on GOP own goals (statch rapists, cte infected former football players, super extreme kooks and clowns)…
Unlike Wigan I think he’s trying to speak to people like staffers. Schumer, Shaheens, Warren’s office about how to be a better safe seat senator..
I should add, that in this strategy, you drop the process-monkey obsession (ie the filibuster, the current appropriations process…which btw was cobbled together over eons of far less partisan politics in the senate and counterproductive to today’s political situation).
Matt writes a lot of these kind of slightly meandering pieces, where he expertly covers a lot of ground on a complex issue, but it's not like a traditional essay we learn in school that has a beginning/middle/end. They're not 'in this essay I will' type of focused pieces. Which I think is fine, but yes they frequently don't have a central point that he focuses on in the conclusion or whatever
His 13 thoughts post on this issue was better than the current article. The strength of “x thoughts on y” is it doesn’t claim consistency or unity. With subjects that are this deeply tactical, consistency is often the enemy of truth.
Matt is a bit over-indexed on Twitter and then tries to explain to the rest of us what we feel or are thinking based on Twitter vibes. I think that is why the piece doesn't resonate as well either...
I think there was a much more concise (productive?) post somewhere here that says “it’s outrageous for a retiring fossil like Shaheen to appoint herself national party strategist while ignoring actual moderates, and it’s further disappointing that others joined her for shortsighted reasons.” Instead we got weird asides about fracking bans.
I thought there was a zero percent chance that Trump would be re-elected after 2000, but surprise, here we are. There is no way to be confident that Thune is able to hold this if Trump really starts ramping up the pressure.
Lots of TV coverage of disrupted air travel, with stories of families who can't be united, along with middle class folks of all stripes bitching at their elected reps probably would have gotten some movement on ACA subsidies.
The shutdown had not yet hit anyone that wasn't poor or a government worker. When it landed beyond those groups, and assuming Trump was blamed, some movement would have been likely.
It looks like they are even reducing some Trump tariffs, something he cares about much more deeply than fiscal prudence. So it's not like he never responds to pressure. And this non-deal deal would have been available at any point.
Chris Murphy's strategy of posting and swearing more isn't going to help the Dems much in swing districts and states in 2026 and 2028 but a Democratic Party that moderated on cultural issues a bit and dumped some of the various doctrines of The Groups (banning gas powered cars, fracking, assault weapons etc) probably would do better in upcoming elections in purple and light red parts of the country.
This is the ultimate comment to a Matthew Yglesias article! I am a paid subscriber but I'm not gonna lie: I have in the past taken his articles, uploaded them to ChatGPT, and asked for a summary.
I think Matt is trying to calm the war over the shutdown wiht the objective of making Leadership less in thrall of the Leftist portions of the base on policy questions. The key example being his exmple of fracking. [Possible not the ideal example because anti-fracking is bad policy,not just bad politics and Matt is talking politics.]
I see this as Matt announcing that he gets to define what “Moderation” is. Somehow it reminded me of something Mark Twain once said about the “temperance” movement (temperance originally meaning moderation), that he believed in “temperate temperance.” Maybe Matt is advocating for moderate moderation?
I think this reaction might underline a reason why pundits are reluctant to take the position "it was an okay decision, not what I would have done." In reality that should be our reaction to most things the party leadership does that we disagree with, rather than fuming indignity. But we demand strongly laudatory/condemnatory statements even from pundits who self-brand as "Boring".
The conflation of moderation and popularism felt very worst-argument-in-the-world-y. “Is X moderation?” is just not a useful framing except in opposition to extremists, because moderates are a big diverse group with no internal coherence whatsoever.
I'm surprised you haven't found more of his posts to be incomprehensible, because most of them are just convoluted thinly veiled advertisements for capitulation to the demands of the ruling class.
Oh you again, the Marxist masochist who pays to get annoyed by the neo-liberal, imperialist, sell out, patriarch defending yada yada shill. Thank God you are never going to come anywhere near ruling anything, the reason only partly being that you don't understand the strategy of popularism.
Matt underestimates how many Democratic politicians actually trully believe in banning fracking, allowing males to compete in female sports, and having affirmative action quotas for unqualified minorities. They don't moderate on these type of issues because they are true believers. You can't say that the Democratic Party has become a lot more leftwing over the past 30 years (which Matt does) and then be aghast when Democratic politicians have more sincerely leftwing beliefs.
One can oppose affirmative action or trans athletes competing in sports, but don't appreciate the phrase "quotas for unqualified minorities" or the misgendering in this comment. This isn't Christopher Rufo's substack.
It's really not. The whole debate centers are kind the differences between cis men, cis women, and trans women. Not clarifying which group you're referring to makes the argument less effective. Unless clarity isn't the point and the point is to get in a dig at trans women.
I don't understand the type of person who reads SB, but doesn't have any interest in actually having good faith arguments. I also generally don't think trans women should participate in women's sports. But I don't need to misgender people to think that.
There isn't a technicality that let's this not be intentionally hurtful. You can argue about whether or not "male" is technically wrong, but they had plenty of more specific ways to phrase it and chose a less clear one designed to jab at trans women.
I truly don't understand why they couldn't just make their point and not be hurtful. Or why you have this desire to defend them. Just make your point and be kind to people.
I don't think there was a way they could have phrased it that was simultaneously clear, concise, and not hurtful. Telling someone they can't play in particular sports leagues generates the inherent hurt of exclusion, no matter how you phrase it. I know there were alternative phrasings proposed in this thread, and I think they would have just offended someone else.
"Males" is a concise way of saying "biological males", at least for some people, and nobody bothered to check if Lapsed Pacifist uses it that way before leaping down their throat. (Maybe the inherent inconsistency of calling the leagues "women's [not females'] sports" was enough to conclude mal-intent? But nobody seems interested in changing the terminology for the leagues even as we update the definition.) Lapsed Pacifist's statement was technically accurate; and technical accuracy should be enough.
(There's probably some other commentators reading this and LOLing that I've tried to stand by technically-false statements as accurate-in-gist during past arguments. But I feel like when that's happened I've conceded the technical inaccuracies. More importantly, how we handle technically-false and technically-true statements do not, logically, have to mirror each other.)
I think it's more constructive for public discourse that we take people's statements as abstract propositions, rather than statements of political allegiance (I recognize that Slow Boring is a site about politics). And I think that's particularly true in culture war topics, since it's much harder to argue against someone's political allegiance than a particular view.
So I'm a little frustrated when a long-term relatively-productive commentator gets threatened with a ban because they didn't phrase their opinion to sufficiently suggest that they were on trans peoples' side in the broader project of equality under the law.
It could mean equally qualified. One thing that’s clear now, the current administration is bringing us back to the days of favoring unqualified/less qualified members of majority groups.
There is "qualified", and then everything that doesn't meet that mark. If there are places where you don't need A-rated, and B-rated is acceptable but less desirable, than less qualified may not be unqualified. But if there is a standard that must be met, than anything less than fully qualified is unqualified.
I'm not going to take a position on which if these two scenarios are relevant here, but I certainly don't want anyone who scored a 89 getting into a position where we demand a 90 as qualification.
It's a bit of a moot point because I don't see Democrats arguing for it really anymore but I don't think even the most ardent advocate of affirmative action would advocate someone who falls below the minimum qualifying score from getting in.
But… that is exactly how the admissions system worked in practice for many colleges prior to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Part of the admittal process considered to be unfair was the existence of separate scoring thresholds based upon race.
Either you're explicitly allowing less qualified people in, or you're using race as a tie breaker. I'm not sure how either one is acceptable. There may be some situations where there are actually qualified minority applicants who are simply undiscovered and you can seek them out and plug them into open spots without sacrificing standards, but I've yet to see a meaningful demonstration of that in practice.
I know that in general this board tends to be against occupational licensing, but this seems to be one of the good aspects of it. I haven’t seen data on this, but I reckon occupational licensing leads to more diverse racial statistics, as holding a license in a profession means that one meets the applicable standards.
There exists some argument that minorities have a few inherent extra qualifications that don't show up easily on paper. From this perspective, AA can be seen not as a handout to the less qualified, but as a correction against systemic biases.
Having an atypical cultural background allows for alternative perspectives and approaches not usually considered. The majority is going to naturally want to do things the way they're conditioned to, and will have some bias against other modes of thinking, having an advocate for alternatives is useful.
You might miss out on excellent candidates because the company isn't ready to accept an outsider. If I was forced to work in Japan for some reason, I'm certain I could be a valuable employee, but it would be extremely helpful to have another American around to show me the ropes; I would gravitate towards working for a company that seems to be friendly to American applicants when applying.
If you believe being a minority has, on average, disadvantages in life beyond what the majority experience, then of two equally experienced candidates, the minority had to perform to a higher standard to achieve said experience.
Not a qualification, but evidence strongly suggests that there's an inherent bias towards white and male candidates. Identical resumes, changing only the first name from Jack to Jill, Jamal or Lakisha, showed fewer callbacks and lower perceived competence.
If a company was demanded to have some extra minority workers, they're obviously going to pick the most qualified minority workers that applied. Arguably these folks should have been hired anyway, and weren't because of the above bias.
For the record, this isn't necessarily my position, I just don't think the argument is wholly ridiculous.
The names thing is cited over and over again, but it mixes together both race and class in ways that may exaggerate effects (not to mention the classic study cited is over 20 years old).
As for believing someone may have faced disadvantages on account of their race, that was my point: make it explicitly part of the criteria if you think it matters. Otherwise, what happens (and this is what we can often see) is that rich and/or immigrant black applicants benefit from a kind of "stolen valor", if you will.
Anyway, I do see your point that it's not *wholly* ridiculous, but (1) it's at least somewhat ridiculous and (2) it's still illegal.
So on the one hand, we’re supposed to have a big tent and on the other hand Ben “doesn’t appreciate” referring to people who have y chromosomes and want to play women’s sports as men.
The dissonance is deafening.
Whenever these linguistic quibbles arise, it’s interesting to look at the ratio between likes for the comment and like’s for Ben’s tut tutting.
46-53 suggests a significant minority of SB comment likers affirmatively endorse Sean O’s language.
I’m old enough to think that some linguistic norms are necessary, and I think Matt and Ben have struck a principled balance, but I do think they are even now still a tad too deferential to progressive language foibles and this is contrary to a big tent.
I'd argue it's clearly trying to misgender people. They could have easily said "biological males" or "people AMAB" and they chose not to.
It's not nitpicking. The differences between trans women, cis men, and cis women are at the core of the discussion. Not appropriately differentiating them actually makes the author's argument less clear, but they do it anyway to make a dig at trans women.
As someone who's generally against letting trans women participate in women's sports I don't feel any need to call trans women "males" to make that point.
There are ways to do that without being a dick. Can you give me a good reason why replacing "males" with "trans women" or "people AMAB" would have been any less accurate?
My point is those terms are in fact more accurate and useful for their point. No one is saying any male should compete in women's sports.
So if they're being less clear to use a term they know with 100% will offend people then they're just mean. If there was literally no easily identifiable way to refer to trans women I'd see your point, but it doesn't make sense when there are more accurate words to use.
The second part of an honest answer is that I don't believe that gender identity is anything besides acting out sex stereotypes, and I'm not going to reify or affirm that this is a different kind of person, just like I'm not going to call some goth girl “Queen Amethyst Nightshade” and pretend she's actually a vampire. So, trans women are male and men, AMAB implies that someone assigns sex (which isn't true), and I'm not going to participate in any of this because it's incoherent nonsense.
Some people have terrible issues with their own bodies. That doesn't imply any burden on anyone else to act differently or cooperate in their therapy.
Because these issues implicate male people as a class, not a subset of that class. Since there's no difference between a male and a trans identifying male, if you allow trans identified males into a female space, you are allowing all males into that space, thus eliminating it as a female only space.
There is a persistent shell game being played by certain trans activists where no matter what term is used to refer to the concept "biological male," it is declared "rude" in an effort to interdict people from talking clearly about the underlying concept.
This does not actually persuade anyone; it's just obnoxious. I am not going to play that game, even as someone who FAVORS trans rights on most substantive issues (not women's sports, though).
So? Not all rudeness is misgendering. Nor indeed is all calling someone by a name they wouldn't prefer.
Now, you might say: paying undue attention to sex in a context where most people normally pay attention to gender is simply misgendering disguised. This is probably true even if the person in question is careful to use "male/female" and not "man/woman". But the whole reason gender/sex segregation in sports is a culture war is that the sports context is one in which many (most?) people think biological sex is much more important than gender!
(Not to point too fine a point on it, but: sports is literally about bodily capabilities. I don't think we should be surprised that many people draw the dividing line by bodily characteristics and not interpersonal signaling.)
No, it really isn't. You can just say "trans women".
Even in a discussion about biological traits that have an impact on athletic performance, "male" is imprecise and inaccurate: the type of gametes someone produces doesn't affect how fast they can run. Past testosterone exposure and present circulating testosterone do, but especially when dealing with people who transition at a young age, it's simply incorrect to make assumptions about those levels based on their gametes (or chromosomes, or however else you choose to define sex).
Misgendering is one of the things SB management has decided it's willing to tolerate in order to hang on to the significant subset of subscribers who are really weird about trans people.
You and I clearly disagree about the substance of these issues but this is exactly right. The answer to why Chuck Schumer has changed his political positions is that he has been persuaded of new substantive views!
I think Sean is failing to make a distinction between weakly and strongly held positions.
Things like the fracking ban, youth gender sports, and I think the “racial reconning” version of affirmative action are the products of nodding consensus politics. They are much more flexible than Sean assumes.
Otherwise we would not observe such heavy policing from progressives and the lobbying organizations when figures appear to deviate from preferred positions.
Women’s’ sports implicates fundamental aesthetic question— what is a woman, what is female athletic beauty, how can it be displayed for compellingly. These are not details, they are at the core of my aesthetics.
Two things can absolutely be true; Democrats overall have moved left over the past 20-25 years and that particular issue positions that various “groups” are trying to push are well to the left of not just median voters but to the left of a large percentage of Democrats.
Easy example is LBGTQ issues. You’re typical Dem is probably more pro gay marriage and more pro the government taking actions to protect transgender people than 25 years ago. But on the specific issue of transgender athletes in sports, the activists are well to the left of both the median voter but also seemingly the median democrat.
I mean, even the worst polling shows 20/80 on transgender kids in sports.
That 20% is coming from somewhere and that means in many Biden/Kamala districts, transgender kids in sports has majority support among Democratic voters.
There's no need to be an activist if your position represents where the party is at and taking action on. If it were for those pesky activists, we'd be a lot closer to the 19th century's values than the median values of today.
I'm personally somewhat conflict adverse, so my bias is against antagonistic activism, but when I push myself on that assumption, it's hard to make an argument that change hasn't come because there are annoying activists and pragmatic people in the mix.
Ask the admissions office at UC San Diego. They are admitting hundreds of students who can't do elementary school math, so they know the answer to this question better than I do.
(Just in case it wasn't clear, I purposefully phrased my comment so that it wouldn't endorse Sean O.'s claim as true. But your fact is horrifying too.)
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned the use of race in hiring but the University of Washington was found to be illegally making race-based hiring decisions a couple of years ago[1]. I think it's fair to ask if universities are actually following the letter of the law when it comes to anti-discrimination statutes, and be a bit skeptical of their answers. I'm not concurring with Sean's assertion that discrimination is definitely happening nor his assertion that there are hundreds of unqualified students being admitted to the UC system, but I understand why he wouldn't simply trust the university to be following the law.
Based on the extermely low % of Black students across the UC system, even relative to our state's low Black population, I genuinely don't believe the UC system is doing secret racial preferences.
The word "race" does not even appear on that page (well, actually it does if you ctrl-f, but it's in a link to "California State University Embraces Direct Admissions").
Looking at something that says "this school is admitting a lot of cripplingly underprepared students" and going "ah, must be all the blacks they're letting in because of quotas" is literally the definition of racism.
Honestly, what seems to have happened (changed admissions criteria in a way that limits their ability to discern who is well-prepared) is worse than if they were simply doing targeted admissions of less qualified applicants based on race or ethnicity.
I should have been more clear in my tongue-in-cheek comment and written something like "they know better than I do about who is unqualified." I did not intend to make this about race.
It doesn't have anything to do with this. This is more about not using the ACT/SAT and basing admissions off of personal statements. I should have written my original tongue-in-cheek response more clearly.
It’s not really the government’s job to tell people what sports they can play and affirmative action was abolished by ballot initiative even in California so there is clearly not public support for state-sponsored affirmative action however people also don’t want the government to be micromanaging private universities’ admissions processes which are non-meritocratic in all kinds of ways like legacy preferences and it seems pretty unfair to say it’s legal for schools to advantage you because your ancestors were privileged but not because your ancestors were underprivileged.
Title IX explicitly tells federal funded institutions that they have to have women's sports if there are men's sports. Now the question is if women's sports are for women or for anyone.
You're trying to steal a base with sophistry. The fundamental disagreement is whether or not male people are women, and like someone has already said, the consensus is against your position.
No, the fundamental disagreement is about who should play in women's sports. "Whether or not male people are women" is a separate philosophical argument with no impact on that disagreement.
Your earlier comment was simply wrong, because neither side of the disagreement believes women's sports are for “anyone”.
"No, the fundamental disagreement is about who should play in women's sports."
No, it's about whether we should have "women's sports" or "females' sports". And the sports fanatics seem to be leaning towards the latter, even if they mistakenly still call it "women's sports".
No. The reason gender-segregated sports exists is because it is used to be impossible to lie about one's gender, so that bad actors couldn't cheat the system.
It is now possible for bad actors for to lie about their gender in order to gain a competitive advantage. Does that actually happen? I have no idea; I would guess not TBH.
But Lapsed Pacifist's statement only needs the theoretical possibility to exist. A system that depends on truthful self-ID with no way to punish liars is effectively for everyone. That is true whether or not it is officially for everyone, and whether or not anyone feels comfortable actually saying the lie.
(I come out the other way on needing an ID card to vote because we have a post-hoc system to punish people caught lying to gain an extra vote. Namely, we convict them of election fraud. But I'm not aware of a comparable possibility with gender ID.)
Yeah. Matt's biggest problem in these pieces is that he recognizes to get things done you have to meet people where they are and then forgets that Democrats are the part of the electorate you have to convince first before a Democratic politician can do anything.
If you define elite as a person who has influence, then yes, but politicians and mainstream media are almost always laggards in public opinion. Sexual and gender rights are a great example—the people who lead the change were extremely marginalized for a very, very long time. After decades of activism, they started to get wins with a broader, but still not elite group. When gay marriage became law, the public was close to 50/50, but politicians who endorsed it were still very rare.
Matt's core argument is the Democrats should skate to the puck of public opinion. That makes a party that both has no influence and is always chasing what their voters wanted last year. The argument he makes that I find most convincing is supporting people who run to the sensibility of their districts—the puck moves more slowly in some places, so skating to where it's heading means moving in localized gravity.
I don't think your first paragraph is correct. Media was a major influence on public opinion regarding gay marriage. Famously Will & Grace which premiered in 1998, over 15 years before Obergefell.
Further, when Obergefell was decided in 2015, a majority of US states had passed laws or amendments banning gay marriage, but the Democratic party platform fully endorsed it in 2012.
This comment seems to assume that everey Dem holds every one of those beliefs. That is a fairly ludacrous assumption. Matt has said many times that he has talked with many representatives and senators or their staffers, and that they are almost always heterogenous in one or more ways, but suppress that part as coalition management. What he is arguing here is that they shouldn't.
Right. But that doesn't prevent a lot of Democrats from actually believing these are good policies. The public sees that many Democrats do believe in these policies and they then vote for Republicans.
Kind of like how many Republicans also think that some unpopular ideas such as 100% abortion bans are good policies? I'm not sure I see your point. Parties represent opposite ends of the spectrum, and each of them has its own extreme views.
That does not answer the economic question of whether those tradeoffs are worth it-- much less the second-order political question of whether a controlling majority of voters THINK those tradeoffs are worth it-- but this isn't just mindless obstructionism.
I would imagine, if one looked this up, that the states most affected by, say, metal heap-leach mining's effects are most supportive of that, too (there may even be an economic reason for this insofar as they reap all of the benefits but externalize some of the costs). Yet I don't begrudge protestors their opposition to the environmental horrors of metal heap-leach mining.
As a general rule voters are extraordinarily bad reasoners when it comes to weighing even medium-term environmental degradation against short-term economics. They are the kid in the experiment that eats the marshmallow now and gives up on five marshmallows ten minutes from now. This poses a problem for politicians, for whom following the short-term wishes of their constituents will lead to bad medium-term consequences for those politicians as the actual costs of their actions come into full view. I don't envy anyone trying to walk that tightrope.
"As a general rule voters are extraordinarily bad reasoners when it comes to weighing even medium-term environmental degradation against short-term economics."
Can you cite some evidence for this? The EPA had to come from somewhere.
I don't have anything right to hand, but Erik Loomis's work on the Northern Spotted Owl wars is instructive, I think. If you search that topic over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where he blogs, you will likely hit a trove of history on that subject.
As for the EPA, I think that's best understood as kind of the political equivalent of putting cookies high on a shelf where they're annoying to take down. Having an agency out there tasked with raising environmental concerns and nothing else is an effort to force Type 2 thinking in situations where normally people's gut Type 1 reactions are all as I've described. Unfortunately, the pervasive corruption of the federal civil service by Republicans means it's not very effective.
I'm not in a position to evaluate the actual costs and benefits of fracking-- haven't got the expertise, haven't got the time. But it's obvious that there are costs, and that those costs are potentially not being paid by the people reaping the benefits. That immediately puts the classic negative-externality scenario of environmental harm on the table. It's for the scientists to adjudicate at that point. Internet dillettantes such as ourselves have essentially nothing to add to that conversation.
I’m mixed on this one. It did seem to be damaging Trump because his personality meant that he couldn’t but play his hand wrong here (escalating and branding the shutdown as his).
But the shutdown was very dumb! Wrecking the federal government over expiring subsidies you don’t have the votes for? What are we doing here? An issue where the correct political play is so obviously nonsense on substance.
Made it hard to talk about with my friends and coworkers (who are not the median voter by any means) and was therefore interesting, because to us it was clearly Democrats causing problems for America to cause problems for Trump, exactly like Obama era Republicans (drove me nuts then too).
I kept telling people that the Republicans could vote that 51 votes was enough to pass the budget at any time, and it was their fault for pretending they needed 60 votes.
Of course that was the same thing Trump was saying, so some real "Heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Made a Great Point" energy there.
Mr friends are not idiots. They understand that democrats were voting no on this “requires 60 votes to agree” proposal to end the shutdown. They are invoking the filibuster to block the CR! “ Well republicans could change the long standing rules to override their minority veto if they really wanted” is not a very satisfactory response.
I felt like it was pretty easy to explain to normies by reminding them that Republicans, not democrats, are currently in control of the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.
You can argue nuance all day long, but it comes back to this. Just keep pointing this out. Over and over and over.
I think this line cleanly illustrates why I question the usefulness of Slow Boring's electoral strategy advice:
"The solution is for Chuck Schumer... to make the entire Democratic Party into a party that’s not trying to ban fracking."
I wholeheartedly agree that if, somehow, the Democrats could *credibly* commit to being a party that's more in line with Americans' preferences, they'd be more successful.
But this entirely skips over the hard part! Democratic politicians face serious obstacles to doing this for at least three reasons: their incentives, their beliefs, and their relative weakness.
1. I posted this on the shutdown the other day: of course some Dems were going to fold, because the shutdown strategy was to take *their own* constituencies hostage for extremely limited political gain.
"You want us to fight? Ok, listen to this evil genius plan. We'll make Republicans really feel the pain by shutting down the government and taking their key constituencies hostage: government workers, white collar business travelers, and poor people on SNAP. Then they'll be faced with an impossible dilemma: (a) end the filibuster so that they can do whatever they want, or (b) be blamed for the shutdown and lose 0.2pp in the 2026 midterms once everyone has forgotten about this."
2. A recurring theme in Matt's writing is that for some reason, "moderates" seem extremely weak, to the point where they're entirely unable to prioritize their goals instead of just trying to placate various competing interests. In my view, this is because few Democratic politicians actually believe in moderation as anything other than a strategy to get elected, and even fewer are able to actually articulate their moderate views in a convincing way. This renders Democrats unable to commit to *governing* as moderates. (Why didn't anyone think Kamala was just "running on the economy"?)
3. Democratic politicians are relatively weak because several other elements on the Blue Team hold significant informal authority: donors, the media, NGOs, etc. When politicians try to fight these groups, they can actually fight back.
By contrast, in the Republican Party, whatever Trump says goes. No one can fight him because he simply threatens to ruin their lives. To the extent that Trump was able to jettison unpopular Republican positions, it was because he could actually commit to it. Does anyone actually think that some Little Leaguer like Gluesenkamp Perez could impose their will like this?
(This is behind Matt's frequent observation that whereas there's an entire left-wing media dedicated to attacking Democrats, there aren't really too many right-wing media outlets attacking Trump... that is, until Tucker and Fuentes.)
Why do people keep saying that SNAP benefits not being paid was the fault of the shutdown? That was an illegal decision Trump made specifically to punish the Dems. It had never been done before and was pretty obviously illegal.
If anything, it should've been the nexus of "hugely unpopular position" and "obviously illegal by way of claims of overly broad executive discretion" that both the popularist and no kings folks could've rallied behind!
I think there was essentially a zero percent chance that the Supreme Court would have ruled the SNAP shutoff illegal. That doesn't make your position wrong (it is, in fact, illegal by any even vaguely neutral method of interpretation of statutes), but it does mean that conversations about political strategy have to occur in the shadow of the practical understanding that Republicans will be allowed to do all sorts of illegal shit irrespective of what the law or the Constitution says. When we complain about "illegality," it has to be in a posture that is overtly adversarial to SCOTUS, which means a political framework, not really a legal one.
Yeah, I probably should've been clearer about this. (Agree about it being flagrantly illegal etc.) Cutting off SNAP wasn't an intended effect of the shutdown, but I think the response to the SNAP cutoff illustrates how galaxy-brained the shutdown strategy was.
When SNAP was cut off, you could see left-of-center commentators crowing about how foolish it was, because it gave Democrats even more hostages to leverage against Republicans. But Trump (and, I suspect, many Democratic politicians) correctly understood that this move placed additional pressure on Democrats rather than Republicans. (Because Democrats are the ones who actually care about SNAP recipients!)
Moreover, you'd think the Democrats would've anticipated something like this. Their entire argument was "We're showing how strong we are by taking a stand, because otherwise Republicans will circumvent fiscal procedure with total impunity... but we have no responsibility for the shutdown... and we'll declare victory when the Republicans nuke the filibuster...?"
I think the fact that Trump’s approval rating after the SNAP fiasco was the first time in years where it looked like he, in fact, could not “shoot somebody on 5th avenue and still be popular”, was evidence that Democrats are far from the only ones who care about SNAP recipients.
I think it’s a lot simpler. The core of the Democratic Party has strong views on let’s say 13 issues. Math suggests that to win reliably 52% of the vote they can afford to hold onto seven of those (for arguments sake). A decision to drop the remaining six for the next decade does not seem like a stretch, but then I’m forgetting that this is not a rationality seminar.
I know Matt’s upset about this issue and I think lots of liberal pundits are, I also think he’s right on the politics in the Roman sense.
I have a friend and neighbor that’s an ATC and it was starting to get hairy for him, he’s a middle class guy, his wife has been sick and can’t work, he has two kids one with many health issues, this shut down was really hurting him.
On a personal level I get why it was ended and I gotta say, the human move was ending it.
MY is right but I don’t think it’s a good look. I think it’s counter productive to dwell on it publicly. I have to imagine the Republicans feel like they have won twice with the shut down ending and democrats *complaining* about it ending. We should all just move on.
You’re right it’s not a good look. For Republicans! I think we know pretty conclusively at this point that they were taking most of the blame. And rightly so. They hold majorities in both chambers and could’ve ended the shutdown at any point on their own, without a single Democratic vote.
Maybe my proximity to politics makes me more of a procedural moderate. But the concrete realities were that Mike Johnson was not gonna pass aca subsidies and thune was not going to nuke the filibuster. In Trump 2 the president is not a roving deal maker. That means that holding out was not likely going to do anything in terms of outcomes other than snarl thanksgiving travel.
I want to repeat this: nuking the filibuster was not on the table. Matt has created an argument that Shaheen and appropriators did this deal to save the filibuster. That is simply not true; I’ve spoken to these offices. At no point was John thune, who is a strong institutionalist, going to nuke the filibuster. Matt has used this frame as the reason to fight. But thune is both a totally committed filibuster proponent and smart enough to know that if he nukes the filibuster he would be at Trump and his most right wing members mercy on every policy issue and would personally lose control. No one deep in politics really thought the filibuster was at stake.
The minority party essentially never gets anything from the in power party during a shutdown. This time was not really going to be any different.
I generally don’t love the procedural moderates but someone has to decide that reopening the government in exchange for some things including higher baseline spending is good. I would add that these “minibus” deals are also much more liberal than their house counterparts on policy and will give the Senate a strong hand in final negotiations.
Matt’s moderation is mostly about internecine fighting, but many moderates are primarily focused on government continuity which is fine and good and more important.
I thought the whole idea behind holding out on ACA subsidies was that the only two options left for Republicans was 1) restore ACA subsidies 2) remove the filibuster 3) tell everyone that they're ruining Thanksgiving so they can block popular health care spending. I understand Democrats were never prepared to go that far, but supposing they did, what other options would the other side have?
But the Republicans were not blocking health care spending. The subsidies expired and the bill that was under consideration was an unrelated appropriations bill. I know Dems tried to link the two.
And while they did a good job, I think if people were unable to travel for thanksgiving the news coverage would increase and would not be favorable to democrats. The ACA subsidies are relatively minor for most people who are generally unaffected by the enhanced premiums, and I think the publics tolerance for sacrificing thanksgiving over this would not necessarily hold.
Precisely Trump has said over and over again that he wants to remove the filibuster and the Hill literally just ignores him other than the very marginal trumpy members (MGT, Rick Scott etc.) There probably isn’t 10 republican votes in the senate for filibuster repeal, let alone senate Leadeship’s total opposition.
Which gets to my point of frustration. Both here and on the politic podcast an animating Yglesias claim is that filibuster abolition for appropriations was on the table, and he’s used that claim as a predicate to push this narrative. And it’s just not fundamentally accurate and undermines the whole argument, as such.
> in exchange for some things including higher baseline spending is good.
Listening to Matt on Politix, it's clear that he doesn't assign value to much of what the government does; everything is just viewed through a political lens. To whit, here's something he said (edit: I see you listen to it as well):
"And so now they make the government spend less money than you wanted. Like. Tough shit. You know what I mean? And that, again, goes to the filibuster point where like another point they made on it is is like, look, forget CR forever. If you get rid of the filibuster, like then they're going to negotiate much lower spending levels than what's in our CRs. But it's like, I don't know, man. You know, it's like that. That's not a big deal."
I thought Tim Miller had the best take on the 8 senators who brought the shutdown to a close. Namely, there are actual defensible reasons to a) bring the shutdown to a close and b) a message that would have made sense and positioned the Democratic Party brand in the long term. And a smart operative would have written something sort of like this to say on news shows “We ended this shutdown because unlike the president we actually care about making sure no American goes hungry at night. President Trump is out here talking about how he’s this great populist. And yet when the rubber hits the road he’s out here having Gatsby parties while trying to fight giving SNAP benefits in court. So we stepped up because we are the real party of the regular Americans. We’re the ones who actually standing up for you” (it would be better written than this but think you all get the gist).
Instead, we get just god awful answers about how Dems were actually losing the shutdown (seriously Angus King or whoever wrote his talking points WTF?!) or Jeane Shaheen almost certainly making up a story about how some constituent just wants politicians from both sides to work together (David Broder called from beyond the grave, he wants his talking points back).
And I think this fits in with why I think your podcast colleague has the better of this argument you two are having about moderation and messaging (given he’s on your side that given senate map we can’t just have down the line Dems as nominees in places like Texas or Ohio). I don’t think it’s a mistake that the messaging was so mealy mouthed. It’s not quite a “one true Scotsman” issue but it’s not a mistake to me that over and over again the so called “moderate” position is talking points out of the 90s that make “Inside the beltway” pundits happy and no one else. You make a persuasive case that a) these senators are noting being “moderate” and b) being “moderate” does not mean folding a winning hand. But I think you need to ask the question, do the senators in question think they did the “moderate” thing here? Because if the answer is yes than I think you need to reckon with that answer.
100% agree here. Upon further reflection, although I definitely wanted Dems to continue the fight thru the holidays, I recognized that Trump was unlikely to fold on ACA subsidies (and Dems should probably be grateful for this, politically speaking), so I'm not necessarily opposed to a (temporary) off ramp like we got thru Jan. But for fucks sake, coordinate some decent messaging: Angus King was beyond pathetic.
And to be clear, I say all this as a relatively suffering furloughed Fed, with a wife who was recently RIFed and significant medical expenses for both her and a very sick dog.
I saw this clip and genuinely wondered if some of his staffers needed to be fired when he said this Because my first thought to either Kind or the staffers was "who in god's name are you listening to or reading to help guide your decisions on this issue?! Because whoever that might is either a strict GOP partisan or an absolute imbecile"
I'm not sure I agree that Democrats would have continued to have a winning hand. If flight disruptions had rippled through the Thanksgiving holiday, that would have enraged the public. Who would they have blamed? I dunno, but I think it's hard to assume it wouldn't be the party who kept voting "no." A key Trump asset here was Sean Duffy. He comes across on TV (and I don't know boo about his actual politics) as entirely reasonable and competent. If he's out there explaining why you can't get to Grandma's for Thanksgiving, does that help the Democrats? Color me skeptical. It's one thing for the public to say they support the Democratic argument in the abstract. It's another when they're sitting in LaGuardia for 8 hours.
Plus, he's a former reality TV guy, so there are people who know him from that and would turn around and go, "wait, why is he in charge of American transportation now?"
"Tim Kaine was on the bubble, but joined the dealmakers at the last minute because he got Republicans to make concessions protecting federal workers from Trump’s efforts at mass layoffs. Again, I think it’s totally comprehensible that a Virginia politician would consider this concrete policy win very important. I wish he saw it otherwise, but it illustrates the actual dynamic here, which is that dealmakers were prioritizing policy outcomes while rejectionists wanted to accept a worse policy outcome for the sake of political combat."
I am generally in favor of the "long-term political positioning > short-term policy wins that might be undone anyway without the longer-term political positioning" message of the larger post but...I have a hard time with this. If I knew my career were being anted up as a chip in the pile of partisan hardball, I don't think I would see this as "well, at least I'm being sacrificed for a good cause."
I checked in with the one relative I have who is a federal worker. He was working without pay, and he is not paid nearly enough for a missed paycheck, let alone several, to not hurt, and he's not particularly political. But he was in favor of holding out longer both for whatever short term gains might have been available, and for long term damage to Trump. The degree of animosity felt by government workers towards Trump personally cannot be understated.
The correct understanding of the situation is that there is nothing to sacrifice. Federal employees do not have "careers" under this administration; they have, at best, the opportunity to do evil for a paycheck. That's mercenary recruitment, nothing more, and Democrats should not be enabling it.
I realize that there is a strong desire on the part of people like Kaine to pretend that we still have a civil service, whistleblower protections, etc etc but that is demonstrably false and if wishes were fishes we'd all be eating free sushi for dinner. They need to get their heads out of their asses, and the fact that they cannot or will not do so means they need to be shivved and thrown overboard.
Do you know how many employees illegally fired by this administration have been reinstated through normal channels? Here's a hint: the Merit Systems Protection Board hasn't issued a decision since late March, because it has no quorum, because the Supreme Court allowed Trump to strip it of a quorum by firing the Democratic Board member.
Total resistance and non-cooperation is the only correct game-theoretic response to this administration.
I'm not disagreeing with your assertion that federal employment has become a lot more precarious under Donald Trump. That seems obviously true.
What I take issue with is your characterization of federal employment as simply "the opportunity to do evil for a paycheck" and what appears to be the implication that all these people should simply walk off the job tomorrow. We should just have FBI agents conducting homicide investigations or counter-espionage missions, Medicare employees processing claims, sailors conducting FON operations in the South China Sea, Foreign Service Officers aiding American citizens abroad, federal judges overseeing active litigation, and doctors treating veterans, quit tomorrow?
Again, if that's a fair characterization of your position, I think that's nutty. The point of having a democracy is so that you don't have to have a war of succession every time a bad leader comes to power. You just vote them out instead.
The calculus of when, exactly, Joe Blow, Federal Employee should quit his position is a complex one. From a financial standpoint I would generally advise people to do what I did, which is to look for similar work with a different level of government or the private sector and quit as soon as you've found it (which may take a while). Some jobs (e.g. Foreign Service Officer) simply don't have civilian analogues at all and I don't have a good answer for those folks. Certainly no one should be staying in their position out of the delusion that they can do good things in this administration; working as a Trump mercenary means that at any moment you may be required to sacrifice your honor, ethics, or adherence to the law in order to keep getting paid.
But that's not what we're discussing here. What we're discussing here is how much value CONGRESS should place on the theory that by funding executive branch* operations, they are funding Good Things In Society that counteract the evil the administration is doing with that funding. My position is that Congress should value that at zero because any theoretical funding of Good Things exists solely at the unilateral sufferance of Trump's fascists.
*Obviously this logic does not apply to legislative or judicial branch employees that don't work for Trump, and I'm not sure why you're conflating those situations.
A mailman is "doing evil for a paycheck"? A forest ranger in Yellowstone? A NASA scientist? A second grade teacher at a school for DOD dependents? The guy at the Bureau of Weights and Measures who revises standards for copier paper or something? All of these people are basically Eichmann?
All of those people are-- to the extent that they are allowed to do anything of social value at all (I question, e.g., whether a second-grade teacher who isn't allowed to mention that gay people exist is actually doing social good)-- doing it at the pure sufferance of fascists. The fascists can end that sufferance at any time. Making a soi-disant "deal" that says "the fascists get to keep teaching kids that gay people don't exist if they want to and not if they don't" is protecting nothing; all it is doing is giving the fascists more options.
The Supreme Court has essentially (they're too cowardly to say so explicitly, but one can read between the lines of their stay orders) told us that Trump can do anything he wants, law and appropriations be damned. The necessary corollary to that is that any promises Trump makes, or his lackeys make, are worthless because he can go back on them at any time. Dems both practically cannot and strategically should not engage in any sort of "dealmaking" that binds them but not the opposing party.
This is the most 'heads I win, tails you lose' nonsense Matt has *ever* indulged in. Pure sophistry. He even worked a defense of Sinema in there!
Look, Matt's ideas are gone. His brain has been poisoned by social media. His stated goal is for Democrats to copy the tactics of retreat and failure that have shot Labor to the commanding 18% total approval rating they currently enjoy in Britain. But it turns out the electing self-consciously moderate democrats who govern with their fingers permanently in the wind and with no desire to actually win anything is a *really bad plan*. And now Matt is trying to squirm out of the very obvious outcome of his very bad plan by pointing the finger and saying 'no actually these people are progressives not moderates'.
But it *also* turns out that nominating self-consciously progressive Democrats who adopt unpopular progressive policy positions in a country in which only 25% of people identify as liberal/progressive and in which the Senate exists that gives a heavy advantage to rural states is also a *really bad plan*.
Yeah, the problem for Democrats is that moderates and leftists keep going back and forth between two plans: (a) Democrats can "moderate" and pretend to be something they're not, or (b) very proudly reveal themselves to be who they actually are. Each faction correctly identifies the weakness in the other's plan but fails to spot the futility of their own.
The Democrats are just stuck with personnel who will always struggle to win an election, so really the only viable plan is (c) wait for Republicans to fuck up, which actually does work pretty often.
It’s my impression that the moderate Dems are actually moderate (by the “not making the perfect the enemy of the good” and “we have to win” metrics). I saw many of them capitulating to the pressure of “the groups” before this election. Some felt obliged to say things they didn’t really believe, but a number just felt obliged to say things they believed but knew (or realized a little too late) were bad for their chances nationally. IMO, believing that, say, government bans on trans youth medical care are wrong, but refraining from campaigning on it - even equivocating when asked - because that will help you win elections is the mark of a moderate. Ditto making necessary compromises in order to get something instead of nothing, regardless of your core beliefs.
Here's a thought-- we could elect better moderates.
Mark Carney turned around a seemingly impossible political situation by moderating some policy stances while simultaneously, and credibly, making clear that he was going to tell Trump to go fuck himself. That's not "finger in the wind" governance, it's taking a politically strong position and sticking to it.
That's a far better strategy than taking wild activist-driven merits stances and then caving on them because you're terrified of the consequences of sticking to your guns.
I mean yes, people are willing to put up with people moderating on policy if they're strong. Again, this is why Newsom is currently leading primary polls despite doing lots of things progressives didn't like.
The issue is the Senate is full of people obsessed with the comity of the Senate and seemingly DC specifics, not standing strong.
To be hit-you-over-the-head clear here, I have no truck with those people, hence why I said we needed to elect better moderates. The Tim Kaines of the world should be given a gold watch and politely hustled off to the nursing homes where they belong.
The issue is there are no evidence there are actually 'better moderates' available. Because I see no actual evidence that the moderates Matt likes were actually against caving, they just didn't want to be the people taking the political hit.
I'm certainly open to the idea that moderation is correlated-- even heavily correlated-- with pathetic loserhood. But, as Carney has shown, the correlation is not one hundred percent.
I'm not a moderate though. I'm a social democrat with out of touch crazy woke ideas that'll never work, or so every DNC consultant has said.
The moderates and centrists have told me over and over I'm stupid and shut up, so I'm going to do that and let all the think tanks that popped up after Kamala lost by the narrowest margin since 2000 to say the Democrats and Groups are doing everything wrong to find all these obvious moderate candidates that have been held back by the crazy progressives.
I agree! It's why Matt's desire to champion spineless moderates like Jared Golden as 'the true way forward' is so frustrating. You have to come up with a way to be substantively moderate while also being ferociously anti-Trump and procedurally aggressive. Jared Golden's opponent got traction *because* Golden went wimpy on Trump.
As much as I dislike him, Newsome is making noises like a fighter. The reason most moderates aren't doing that is that they're listening to idiots who have been convinced that Trump has achieved some massive realignment of American politics because they are being brain-poisoned by mainlining right-wing propaganda on twitter.
It's not hard to come up with new ideas right now. Matt's just not doing it, and it's massively disappointing, as someone who used to read him as an 'ideas guy'.
I don't know any other way to read "This wasn’t the Washington Generals blundering away a game for no reason. It was earnest progressive Democrats trying to deliver the least-bad substantive policy outcome." than as 'No True Scotsman'.
I would appreciate hearing your theory of change – what is our least bad idea for a strategy that produces a probable if not guaranteed Democratic majority and presidency?
Glad you asked. I would apply a laser focus to the fact that the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, is 1) bankrupting our country 2) the most corrupt in history 3) in the process of handing our country over to billionaires, Russians, and Saudis 4) aiming to destroy our way of life in this country 5) deserving of absolute and total resistance in every way shape or form. I would encourage accepting a whole lot of divergence on almost any other issue(s) but I would apply an iron-sharp focus to the fact that Trump and his people hate Americans for our freedom and need to be destroyed, completely and totally, without any chance of returning.
Given the polling, this sets Democrats up well for gains in the Midterms. It also sets up the argument for using the 14th Amendment to permanently remove every single Republican Senator, Representative, and Judge who supported Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow our government. I don't really see why being a MAGA Republican should be legal after this - treat an attempted destruction of American Democracy as what it was, and make sure none of these fuckers ever sees even a shred of power ever again. It should have been done in 2021, and it must be done in 2029.
Matt keeps urging Democrats to moderate, but there’s no real urgency for them to do it. Trump is sitting at –13, and Democrats are +4.6 on the generic ballot. That’s not a wave — it’s not how you build a Senate majority — but it is enough to keep almost every incumbent safe and to protect most frontline House members. The last time Democrats held 50 Senate seats, it took a once-in-a-century pandemic to pull it off, and they’ve learned nothing from that. Comfort breeds stasis: with numbers like these, no one in leadership feels pressure to change a thing.
The interesting question, and my intended insinuation, is it now takes huge flukes for Dems to win a senate majority. Given that even once in a century norm breaking by Trump does not have Dems as favorites in 2026, the bar is very high for Democrats to win, and it really will take once in a century type things. Of course a once in a century type crisis happens every couple decades (there are many kinds of crises- depressions, wars, pandemics, insurrections- there’s probably an 8% chance any given cycle has some sort of important “once in a century” dynamic.
I'm generally OK with moderating to win elections conceptually - but one issue I have with this is that part of what makes some members "moderate" is the rhetorical stance they take towards the rest of the party.
E.g. Manchin didn't just oppose certain of the Dems' policy positions, he spent a lot of time talking about how the Democrats generally are too far left, often echoing Republican rhetoric in doing so, and positioning himself as in the center between the two extremes. IIRC he didn't endorse Clinton or Harris, and in 2024 formally became an independent.
I worry that this rhetorical stance is a bigger part of his moderate cred than specific policy positions ... and so trying to have a "more moderates" party just means having more people on the national stage saying "I'm a Democrat and *even I* think Dems are wrong about XYZ"
Manchin was essentially undermining the national Dem brand to boost himself - OK to win a Senate race in WV, but I don't think that works if it's like 30 of your 50 Senators.
Put it this way - you can moderate on something like fracking, but an example of a "more moderate" opinion that Republicans agree with, that it wouldn't help Democrats to adopt, is "voting for Democrats is bad".
If Joe Manchin goes on TV and says "don't ban fracking", fine. But if he goes on TV and says "don't vote for Democrats" - bad! Even if he includes "other than me" at the end.
I'm very biased because my spouse and my I are both Federal workers in Northern VA, and especially because my spouse's entire office was about to be laid off if not for the last minute protections Tim Kaine negotiated into the deal. So, Tim Kaine saved my family's livelihood and career prospects, so, selfishly, big thanks, Tim!
But less selfishly: Large scale unilateral (and almost certainly illegal) government layoffs are bad, and stopping them is good, not just for us Feds but also for the country! Who does the weather forecasts? Who does the disaster response? Who provides the economics data? Matt cares about this stuff --- he's written about the importance of good econ data, and about the need for better state capacity. Well, one way to preserve both those things is to stop the unilateral layoffs of career civil servants.
I am very frustrated by the "Dems cached for nothing" line. Maybe it's not a ton, but no federal layoffs is (1) not nothing, and (2) not just a carve out to a specific constituency.
As far as I can tell the soi-disant prohibition against layoffs is a. completely unenforceable, and b. only applies until January anyway, so I would not exactly start taking those resumes down just yet.
Over the weekend I was driving with my wife and we were talking about the build up of housing in the area. She told me she hates it, thinks it's ugly and blah blah. I kept my mouth shut as I know she votes for pro-housing candidates ... For about 5 minutes...when I quizzed her on her voting response, her response was "it's the right thing to do even though I personally hate the aesthetic, people need to be housed"
I think the same argument stands here. There's a morally right thing to do even though sometimes we hate the result. It's right that people get fed. The distinction is important.
I'd much rather vote for a party with those values rather than some vague sense of winning.
Democrats need to realize that they won and won big.
1) The #1 goal is taking back the house in 2026 and they want to go into the midterm telling voters "We fought hard to give you better healthcare while Trump had all the money he needed for tax cuts, the military, ICE, and nothing for the working class and their health care"
2) Trump cares nothing about deficits and likes giving people free money and things. $2k checks? No tax on tips? Trump could change his mind and fund those Obamacare subsidies and look like a hero. Enough Republicans would get in line. Then Democrats would realize what they lost after it happened.
3) Saving the filibuster is all-important at this moment. People seem to forget that Trump has 3 more years left, and people are opening wondering if we'll have fair elections in 2028. Who exactly is thinking "Let's remove one of the last guardrails so we might have an easier time after 2028?" This is insanity.
People who want to rage scream until 2028 are unsatisfied, but those people need to grow up and operate against a plan that makes sense.
The filibuster doesn't stop anything that the majority party actually wants to happen. It just gives the majority an excuse not to do things it doesn't want to do anyway. The rest is procedural mumbo-jumbo for political junkies.
Wearing my small, non-eningeering hat, as an election official, I despair at how many people--even people who seem to be mostly on the ball about most things--think that the conduction of elections is a federal question at all.
I mean, it can be if Congress wants it to be-- they could absolutely pass a law completely stripping states of any role in running federal elections and federalizing the whole process, and the Constitution would allow that.
They don't WANT to because it's a pain in the ass to have duplicative election bureaucracy. But the fact that it'd be bad policy doesn't mean it's not a federal question.
The #1 goal should not be winning the House, it should be winning the Senate. If Democrats could win the Senate it would make #3 irrelevant at this moment. If Democrats could win both the House and Senate in 2026, then it changes the entire structural debate as Trump is a lame duck and likely seen a sinking ship.
I want to give you 2/3 of a like. The first two points are right and this was a win in terms of framing without taking a hit. Having the Republicans nuke the filibuster to pass a budget would have been a win too, both politically for the short term and for the long run, because no filibuster is better for Dems in the long run as the party that likes to do stuff.
There is a difference between being a moderate, and, like Mamdani, moderating your statements of your positions when it suits yourself better.
A moderate is someone, unlike progressives, who can actually listen to people who believe differently from themselves, can take their concerns seriously, and can work to find common areas. Progressives, however, look down on people different from them (e.g., "low information voters," "voting against their own interests," etc. etc.). They look down on law enforcement, baby boomers, males, white people, etc.
When you can truly see how other people feel and truly validate their views then you find positions that are moderate. You are not (in the common, and boring, current parlance) "fighting" with your opponent.
Jesus was a moderate. He understood and sympathized with all. He didn't "fight." He listened.
I agree with your characterization of political moderates.
Jesus was in no way a moderate. He was a working on the sabbath, hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors, table overturning, miracle claiming, end time predicting preacher who proposed huge revisions to then existing Judaism and told everyone to leave their families and follow his cult movement. People were constantly furious at him! He got executed by the authorities of his own religion!
Depending on your view he was either (I) a radical reformer with a cult of personality or (ii) Literal God setting things right. Moderate is an Odd Take!
p.s. "hanging out with prostitutes." As if that's the something you are saying that dismisses him.
My wife was in a group of five women who were the first female police officers in Seattle, so probably in the same state, in 1975. The women had to meet the same requirements, even physically, that the men did. There were 2200 applicants. 29 were selected. She graduated 3rd.
She did some of her most amazing work with female victims of sex crimes. You wouldn't believe it, and believe the danger she was constantly in.
Early in her career she noticed that they were only arresting prostitutes, never the men, so she asked for permission to do a sting. Well, it was like shooting fish in a barrel (and still would be). But in her work, and in mine as a community psychologist, you learn that "prostitutes" are desperate and abused girls.
For you to talk ill of them, as if Jesus was hanging out with "low lifes" is really something, and makes all of your other points irrelevant in our books.
Also wasn’t speaking ill of sex workers or tax farmers. I was making the point that in the context of Jesus’s day that would be seen as keeping bad company and very unpopular with many people.
He did it anyway as part of his general project radical love for those despised by society. My dude wasn’t triangulating and meeting public opinion where it was.
Feels like you just assumed “radical” is in all events an insult and didn’t read a word I said which was, in fact, a defense of Jesus’s actual views and deeds.
I'm not assuming "radical" is bad. Jesus was the ultimate radical of the entire existence of human beings.
One can be radically moderate. We feel we are. Nobody seems to "get us" that we can see both sides, take all peoples' concerns seriously (we stop at racism and antisemitism). When we make comments we are almost always (not with you---thanks) thrown into the extremes of one camp or another. Know how many times we have been accused of being MAGAs or "lib-tards?" It's because we are liberals, who are not bound by any tribe in terms of our beliefs. In fact, we believe we are much freer than most people are for that reason.
Over and over again we have seen us (not just our views, which would be fine) hated. Hated because we see both sides and value people on all sides.
We feel our views are very very radical. But we end up politically being moderates for that reason.
And as my wife says: "you know when you are a liberal...it's when everyone hates you."
I have! Many times! Loving everyone is in fact a very radical thing to do! That’s what makes it impressive!
From memory, the sermon starts by saying the most despised and persecuted are the most blessed, and you should rejoice when you are persecuted on earth, because you will be rewarded for it in heaven.
Then he talks about how he isn’t changing any of the law, but is in fact making it even more strict in his fulfillment of it. Anger is as bad as murder! Lust is as bad as committed adultery!
Love your enemies! Let them hit you! If someone strikes you turn the other cheek so they can hit that one too! Stop praying publicly (which is, like, a Big Deal in Judaism)!
I mean I could go on but none of this is moderate advice. It’s a worldview of radical love towards fellow man and devotion to God far beyond what is normally (moderately) morally expected of people. Love your friends and neighbors, sure, but your enemies??? Never get mad???.
The whole thing is leading up to his point that nobody (except perhaps Jesus himself) is capable of living up to the law as RADICALLY interpreted by Christ, hence the need for his intercession and sacrifice.
Who, on either side of the political spectrum extremes "loves their neighbors?" They attribute horrible motives to them.
Jesus, like today's moderates, did. They take everyone seriously, like Jesus did. Look at Spencer Cox for an example of a moderate who refuses to engage in the ever popular (these days) "fighting" against Trump or "fighting" against woke.
He was a radical because he was a moderate in a time of constant brutality and warfare. He didn't join in. He saw both sides as being people who are worthy of being loved. NOBODY on the left or right does that now, which is why they aren't moderate.
Moderates are just people with views in the centre of the political spectrum. It’s entirely possible to be a moderate and still be snobbish and elitist, holding voters in contempt. It’s also entirely possible to be politically extreme (whether progressive, conservative or anarcho-syndicalist) and be down to earth, willing to engage with people and keen to find common cause.
Here are some data that may cause you to reflect on your assertion. People on the left are FOUR times as likely to say that political differences are good enough reasons to break things off with your family than are people on the right. People on the left are NOT "willing to engage."
What, precisely, is a "view in the centre of the political spectrum?"
And what are some examples of moderates being snobbish and elitist that compare in ANY, WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM with the elitism shown by people on the left who consider voters different from them to be "low information voters?"
Sorry, but being a moderate is a liberal view of life. And a winning one.
"Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on."
This is the same tired old junk from progressives who wanted to "defund the police." Send money from policing to social workers. THAT is defunding.
(know what else is a hoot about this: Starting in 1977 I worked in Illionois for 30 years as a psychologist. We ALWAYS had mental health crisis teams that accompanied the police.....I worked with these teams all of my career. People like Mamdani and other progressives act like they invented the idea.
"Safety and justice" means there hasn't been "justice."
He didn't change. He is spouting a different, and vaguer idea, but even then he couldn't really be honest. He's a charmer, and that's what he has gotten by on.
I want to say to all police officers in NYC. Come to Arizona. We truly value you.
I love Slow Boring and it’s very possible I’m just an idiot, but I honestly have no idea what the upshot of this post is or what it’s even trying to say. Sorry.
I heard a lot of discourse about how the deal proved that moderate Democrats just want to cave too Trump. Matt is obviously associated with the "moderation works" take, so I took this as him responding to that criticism and squaring it with his own opposition to the deal.
Sometimes Matt's starting place seems to be online discourse or criticism he's getting from corners of the internet that I'm completely oblivious to. Today's post was one of those ones where he feels like he's responding to something or arguing against a certain POV he's seeing a lot of. When that's the case setting the stage with more context would be really helpful.
One thing that is very clear from the politix podcast is that a lot of his head space is filled with his arguments with leftists on twitter. Seems kind of unhealthy
As far as I understand things, the smoke filled rooms of the past have been replaced with Twitter. For better or worse it seems like that’s where intra-party disputes, debates over strategy, etc get hashed out these days.
There’s no “for better” there.
The “better” part is that it’s somewhat more democratic. Easier to get the ear of someone powerful without having prior connections/gone to the right school etc than it used to be if you can post good.
Errr maybe that’s why we keep losing
That's one of the main reasons. And also its contrast with how things go on the right, where there is still very much a smoke filled room (maybe vapor filled at this point?) which disseminates marching orders to legislators and media personalities, and actual strategizing takes place.
A lot of those strategists are dumb as hell but at least they are formulating and executing strategies. "Strategy" left-of-center has become a Ouija board.
Someone can try to convince themselves that their time arguing with liars and morons on twitter is somehow productive but you can count me as skeptical what's happening is a healthy hashing out of intraparty disputes
People also overestimate how much people who actually work on policy (particularly in the bureaucracy) are on Twitter vs. how many people on Twitter are just the most overly precious unemployable people imaginable.
Oh I definitely don’t think it’s healthy
I thought it was all private chats now.
They should get a discord.
This is not true.
Damn, and here I thought I was in the room where it happened.
Not just the smoke filled rooms but the town halls and club dinners too
Sounds about right. So he needs to explain where he's coming from for those of us whose headspaces are filled with other things.
A lot of those people aren't even on the level, either. They are just stoking disunity. Social media is poison, even (especially?) for those who make their bread off it.
Everyone needs to log off more often.
Yes, it seems like this occupies so much of the drive of the substack rather than policy or the concrete issues occurring in American politics
I mean, intra-Democratic party and intra-left (of center) fighting is a central driver of concrete policy outcomes in America at the moment. I'm not sure how you can look back at the past 15 years and not agree with that.
"Arguments with leftists on twitter" seems as good a proxy as anything else for where the sentiments of left-of-center political discourse and opinions are these days. Is there some place else we should be looking?
In-person conversations with people.
It depends how powerful these Twitter leftists are in the Dem party. Judging by general party behavior, they're pretty powerful, so I think it makes sense to argue with them.
But the messaging is also muddy. He comes against the people that wanted to stop fighting, then a couple of paragraphs later criticizes fighters and says that the GOP in the mid Obama years were wrong to keep fighting rather than take the policy wins. It was unclear what it is he's arguing for, or at least it was to me.
This is a reasonsble point. I have been continuously glad that the Republicans didn't get policy wins due to the freedom caucus' strategic incoherence.
I would have liked to see Matt expound on the "kind of partisan hardball that would genuinely cripple MAGA." Because I think that this is the heart of the current debate between the different Democratic factions, and the biggest problem with the Dem fold is that it makes the party look *wildly* less credible on this score. Who cares if the parties win a few voters on fracking, if we just keep falling deeper down this well.
ETA: the post I want is one that says "can a moderate party actually fight MAGA, and what positions would that require them to take." I suspect this includes filibuster reform, SCOTUS changes, gerrymandering reform, maybe even statehood for DC and PR. Matt seems unwilling to go there. I suspect this is because he knows (as we all know) that a "moderate" party will have a hard time agreeing to these very controversial positions. And yet, this seems like the only way we actually achieve durable stability against incremental authoritarian takeover.
My biggest takeaway is that Matt thinks imposing hardships on people is a good thing to do as long as the Republicans are being blamed for it.
I'm sure that is good politics. It is also why I dislike politics so much. They *all* seem to be perfectly fine with imposing hardships as long as either it is the "other people" who are hurt, or the other side gets the blame.
I'm just here for the policy insights.
I think some hardship now in return for less in the future is legitimate calculation. Whether that is the case or not is a politicl question I have no expertise in answering,
Also, I think it is a mistake to make the hardship overly much about federal workers. The non-represantative sample of federal wokers in my DC choir is that they were not really suffering, had savings to cope, etc. Legitmat for Kane and Spanberger to prioitize, but less so the Party.
I'm guessing you aren't on SNAP.
I typically agree with your takes, but I don't understand this one.
Trump was illegally cutting off SNAP as a (seemingly dumb, but ultimately successful?) hardball politics play. This view you're espousing amounts to, "If Trump ever says he'll illegally cut off SNAP benefits, you must capitulate on any political demands, elsewise you're imposing hardships on people for politics."
Using SNAP recipients as political bargaining-chips for preformative resisty stunts is such an unbelievably shitty move. I'm not surprised the progs are ones who pushed the shutdown to go longer. Every single dogshit idea that's cost the Dems legitimacy with the public has come from them, from open borders to defund the police.
It wasn't democrats imposing pain on SNAP recipients - both the moral and the political blame rests entirely with the republicans. If the R thesis is - do what we say or we'll impose hardship on poor people, there's never a world in which dems don't face tough choices. The least bad option here was to push the country into delayed flights, the real catalys for middle class voters picking up the phone and calling their reps, making R's pay a price that becomes too high to accept.
If Dems want to extend ACA subsidies, they should campaign on it and then win elections so they can pass legislation. That's why I voted for them. I didn't vote for them to exploit procedural loopholes to withhold food aid to get some token symbolic concessions of Trump.
It may rest entirely with the Republicans but in voters' eyes, it was all wrapped up with the shutdown which the Democrats caused and proudly owned. People didn't understand that cutting off SNAP was a Trump decision independent of the shutdown. They just saw people out of work, flights canceled, government services being unavailable, no SNAP and concluded it was all part of the same thing, with Democratic fingerprints all over it.
SNAP doesn’t get shut down during government shutdowns. The court confirmed that. Trump just personally decided that his own DOGE will shut down SNAP regardless of what the courts say.
Republicans could have ended it at any time with zero Dem votes.
Sure, but it turns out they didn't need to. And they kept their precious filibuster which is as sacred to their Senators as it is to the Democrats.
I'm surprised to see *you* making this argument. Democrats are not the only ones with agency here, nor are they even the majority party. Republicans could have continued SNAP by 1) Trump authorizing the emergency funds; 2) negotiating with Democrats and coming to agreement to pass a CR; 3) nuking the filibuster and passing the CR.
Further, if Republicans are wanting to cut SNAP benefits as part of balancing the budget, are you going to outraged because they are imposing hardships on people? Or are you going to examine the policy and consider whether you think the trade offs are worth it?
The calculus still remains the same, though: is it better to alleviate suffering in the short term, even at the price of bringing on more suffering over the long-term (via the policy awfulness that accompanies MAGA wins)? It may feel icky, but we nonetheless need to be very clear eyed about this.
I read Matt as being affirmatively for the option of pushing America into hardship as long as it hurt the other side, rather than as a bad thing that might be necessary.
Either way, the practice of politics requires more moral compromises than I'm willing to do personally. I guess that is why I never got into politics or party dynamics much.
You're point is well taken. I would say from working on campaigns and having a spouse working for two senators (just noting some inside baseball knowledge here), one problem is you can't just take the "politics" out of "politics". Trying to placate literally all sorts of different interest groups, rivals and yes trying to balance short term expediency vs. long term gains is just inherent to the job. This is in a lot of ways one the mistake people make when they pine for some authoritarian leader to "solve" all problems. Politics doesn't actually go away in that scenario. Instead of trying to placate various other politicians, interest groups and voters, you're trying to placate high powered generals, sycophant aides who to your face are telling you how great you are but behind the scenes are jockeying to accumulate more power possibly at your expense or just a few other high powered people who still have some ability to harm you. And as history shows again and again, this sort of politics tends to be much worse for the country and people at large than the former.
Given that you read and comment on this substack, at least to you a degree you clearly understand all of this. Just maybe a gentle reminder. Having said all that, I'll reiterate that I completely get why all this would leave you feeling "icky".
I'll just say one problem is if ending the shutdown was the right thing to do because morally it's not right to continue denying SNAP benefits to people in need, why didn't the 8 senators in question just say that! I mean a few alluded to this reason, but honestly the message was more "we lost this fight" or dumb "we just need to work together" stuff. And as Matt alludes to, seems like the real reason was to protect the fillibuster...which is a terrible reason to cave given how terrible the fillibuster is (Matt didn't really say this in his post, but he really was one of the first commentators out there (I least I read) to make the point about how bad the filibuster is so I think that's sort of the unspoken other reason Matt is so against this cave).
I think the upshot is, the morally right thing to do was actually good politics....if you actually put out that message. Which the senators in question really failed to do in my eyes.
And this is only because of the illusion that the Democrats have power and leverage. In the end, they didn't because Trump and the Republicans care a lot less about pain being inflicted on the population than Democrats do.
For continuing government operations, the filibuster was a trap for the Democrats, because it made them think they did indeed have leverage. They would have been much better off if they could have just refused to invoke the filibuster at all and let unified Republican control of government prove to the American people what it stood for, and take that to the polls.
Delenda est filibuster.
That's fine as far as it goes, but I think it's extremely relevant that the source of the suffering in question is unambiguously the Republican party and their unilateral and active decision not to fund SNAP. Your responses throughout this thread continually elide this point in favor of highlighting how grubby the business of politics is, I guess because the Dems are just as culpable because for a moment it looked like they might not do literally everything in their power including split up their own caucus to prevent the GOP's policies to do the extremely destructive thing that the GOP wants their policies to do.
It's just a really weird way to think about the issue, no?
I said that the hardship argumetn should not primarily be about federal workers.
I doubt that is true for GS-10 and below, who often make under $60,000, depending on locale. I don't know what percentage of the federal workforce that is, but I had a GS-7 job that required at least a bachelor's degree. Jobs that only require a high school diploma often rank lower than GS-7.
Our county executive was distributing gas cards to TSA agents so they could get to work, and food pantries were set up in locations where federal workers were working without pay, so I definitely think your sample is non-representative. As I type this, I am wondering what kind of pressure federal representatives were getting from local politicians to end the shutdown.
Quite possibly unrepresentative. My sample are are colleg grads. But still as a message, I think we should have emphasized the SNAP, services like air traffic control (and we did) that Trump was shutting down.
Monday morning quarterbaking. :)
Maybe bureaucrats aren’t doing too badly, but air traffic controllers are a different matter, being that it’s already one of the most stressful jobs in existence. Is shutting down air travel (given that the country has an utterly inadequate passenger rail system) no big deal? It’s easy to say only rich people fly, but we’re no longer in the “jet set” age, air travel is no longer just an “elite” thing. Of course a lot of people were probably happy to have an excuse not to have to see their families for Thanksgiving this year.
I think that's one of the big reasons why it made sense to wait just another week. A whole lot more middle and upper middle class voters were going to start feeling the direct affects of the shutdown, in fact they already were (I know because one of them who cancelled a trip to Austin to see family in part because flights started getting cancelled and the prices for the other flights started sky rocketing).
Matt didn't really say this explicitly in his post but Trump seemed absolutely determined to make this shutdown as cruel as possible for no apparent political gain. In fact, it was at his political expense. And yet they went out of their way to make Americans suffer. If air travel continued to deteriorate, you better believe donors would start saying something (even among rich donors, only a small percentage can afford to fly private on any consistent basis). Like, there was a window to put the screws on the Trump administration officials who actually make all of the real decisions.
I think the key is for Matt (and me) is I absolutely believe that Trump represents a unique threat to the Republic. Part of why I'm on board with, we need to nominate moderates for gettable senate seats. But also means that I've come to believe that Americans kind of need to know (and feel) that they're not getting the first Trump administration where the "adults in the room" were still running things.
Pure theatre on Trump’s part. If he wanted to have ait traffic control function, he coud have done so. No way SS checks are more of an essential service than air trafffic.
The deal on the table was a one year extension of the ACA subsidies. Not only is that a trivial return on some open-ended suffering to be imposed right now, but it was a brain-dead, against-our-interests ask in the first place. Protect Republicans from the anger of voters from imposing painful healthcare increases until just after the midterms. Brilliant! That Chuck Schumer is a political genius.
How many times have we heard that from the Wall Street Journal "let them eat cake" crowd. How disgusting.
My father is a mechanic/electrician for the FAA; he is mandated to work 60 hours during shutdown, and oftentimes alone, which is extremely dangerous.
That's politics though, and really any form of negotiation. Not to totally repeat myself from last week but what you're willing to risk needs to be an up front consideration. I'm agnostic as to whether the shut down was the right fight to pick. All of the hits to SNAP, federal employees, air traffic control, and more were known outcomes and leverage points and Republicans were owners of failure to do anything to cultivate bipartisanship on the appropriations deal. What I don't get, is if the known consequences and risks of the strategy were too much to bear, why the fight was picked in the first place.
I think the SNAP hits at least were unexpected given that historically (even under Trump) they continued during a shutdown.
I totally hear what you're saying but here is my question. Was that a smart escalation by Trump or a huge error that could have blown up in his face? We'll never know since the Dems folded but in a world where for most Americans the president is the government, I'm not sure it wasn't the latter.
Not every form of negotiation is just pure destructive holdup value extraction. I think it is quite bad that is how our politics work now (thanks, Mitch!).
I agree not every form, and I think things go best when both sides approach the matter constructively, but that's not always the world we live in. If you are a pro negotiator you need to be prepared to deal with different methods and to adopt them yourself when called for. I've been negotiating commercial contracts in house for a decade and a half now and I've seen it all. Lower stakes obviously than the trajectory of the US government but what isn't?
I like it best when both sides work through things in good faith and I think things tend to work out best when that happens. Positive sum is possible. But sometimes you are dealing with an asshole or with someone who thinks it's in their best interest to play chicken and you cannot be afraid to do that too. Sometimes I think the lack of private sector experience at the higher levels of the Democratic party is why they have such trouble with Trump. Out in the real world you deal with people where every meeting starts out with 10 minutes of being berated or who are willing to let things go off the rails and sometimes you have to call the bluff even when it's painful for you too. Most of these guys fold or suddenly have an inexplicable change of heart when they realize they aren't going to get one over on you i.e. TACO. But if you're too scared to ever risk difficulty of your own they will get the better every time.
This filibuster was the stupidest negotiating approach imaginable. It begins with the illusion that the Democrats had leverage due to the filibuster. It continued with the idea that Democrats could tolerate the pain being inflicted more than the Republicans. It ended with the braindead "ask" being a one year (until just after the midterms!) extension of the ACA subsidies, thus protecting Republicans from the voters' wrath.
Such a losing strategy.
The Democrats' strategy is plain and simple, if they'd only follow it: acknowledge and declare to the world that the Republicans have total control over the government and whatever happens -- mostly bad -- is totally due to that control and take that to the polls in 2026 and 2028.
I.e., *don't* use the filibuster to shut down the government.
I think you are probably right on what made most sense at the ante stage. What's crazy to me though is deciding to play anyway then folding out of nowhere when the game might unexpectedly be going your way.
The Republicans don't give a shit about federal employees but there was a real risk that the holidays end up ruined due to air traffic control issues and on top of that Trump out of nowhere decides to take the massively unpopular side on SNAP. Think for 5 seconds about how bad this potentially goes for the administration if no one can get home for Thanksgiving (or even Christmas) and all the feel good stories are about Americans coming together to donate food in light of Trump cutting off support. But hey! The Democrats saved the filibuster! From the fight they started! Inspiring!
I agree obstructionism may be the correct play under the circumstances of a Trump administration—it may have even been the correct near term play for Mitch though I’d argue it hasn’t worked out great for his interests in the long run.
I just think that’s a bad equilibrium to be trapped in and we should be looking for ways to escape, so I object to characterizing hostage taking and setting the commons on fire as “that’s politics baby!”
I fear that even if the next R president is a normal Rubio type people will reach for this same playbook and nothing will ever deescalate.
It is definitely a suboptimal equilibrium and it's not how I would prefer the country is run either. My biggest concern about the whole thing though is whether Democratic leadership actually has/had a strategy to begin with. It's one thing to lose, and everyone does sometimes. It's another to seemingly not understand the game you're playing, which is what this feels like to me. I have yet to hear a good explanation as to why this was done to begin with, in light of how it ended.
The real downside risk is that some event happens that lets Republicans effectively recast blame on Democrats.
I (maybe too charitably) interpret the "imposing hardships for partisan reasons" interpretation as specific *to this particular situation* - given the recission weapons Republicans have at their disposal, ending the shutdown in return for nothing only mitigates the hardships in the very short term and does nothing to ensure that they won't be reimposed. If anything, Republicans will learn that they can threaten to throw federal employees and benefits recipients under the bus at will and Democrats will eventually cave.
Having said that, I agree that even that (again, possibly over-charitable) interpretation is a tough sell.
I am going to see if Trump’s approval numbers fully rebound or not.
I’m going to guess his approval ratings are still in the tank, maybe why he’s now for releasing the Epstein files
I think he’s trying to do his “if it’s so bad, why didn’t I try to hide it?” move, e.g. “perfect phone call.” I’m dubious on whether it will work when he already carries very little trust on this issue and spent a VERY long time clearly trying to hide it before a few days of allegedly embracing its release (when he had no control over whether it would be released or not.)
I think he just asked the DOJ to open up another investigation which will allow the DOJ to oppose and perhaps prevent opening the Epstein files. The timing is fishy to me. If that's not his plan, and the files are released, then I don't think anyone is going to give him any credit for it.
I doubt they’re rebounding unless something surprising happens like prices were to actually drop.
Remember MattY said that we have to acknowledge that the strategy of hardball is hurting innocent 3rd parties.
This is something that many people cheering on the hardball shutdown strategy were deliberately ignoring.
They weren’t asking if the juice was worth the squeeze.
Also worth noting that Matt and most SB readers are solidly upper middle class (average income is north of 200K, I seem to recall), so of course it’s no skin off our nose.
Nor are we in the Democratic officeholders' offices with our staff receiving anguished, painful to hear calls coming from constituents every minute.
I had to make personal calls to all forty of my clients to let them know that they probably wouldn't be receiving SNAP and referring them to food banks. Three straight days of delivering bad news to panicked, despairing people. It was brutal and I wasn't even directly affected.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your point. But I think a key point here is the Trump administration was fighting in court to stop SNAP benefits from going out. In other words, you’re dealing with a president and administration who is almost uniquely cruel (dare I say, that’s the point) in the ways they are willing to harm the American people for their own ego or ideology or just personal lack of empathy. As Matt noted, the real actual smart thing for the Trump administration to do would have been to just do a very small bore deal.
Which gets at the nub of Matt’s frustration with the lack of moderation from National Dems. He absolutely sees how unique and dangerous Trump really is. And his frustration with “resist libs” is basically if you all say that you also see how terrible Trump really is you should MORE willing not less willing to support “moderate” candidates because all of your pet issues are basically second order concerns if the republic really is at stake (and if Fascism does take hold, your chances of any of your priorities being addressed is zero). But that goes the same for these senators. Precisely because Trump is a unique threat who seemingly was willing to being astonishingly cruel to American citizens you have to recognize that times like these your have to let Trump own the consequences of his cruelty.
"Precisely because Trump is a unique threat who seemingly was willing to being astonishingly cruel to American citizens you have to recognize that times like these your have to let Trump own the consequences of his cruelty."
Exactly. Well said.
Ezra Klein did a widely shared podcast recently where he called for a truly big tent Democratic Party. He explicitly differentiated this from moderating. Big tent is where you expand what it can mean to be a Democratic, while moderating means keeping the tent the same size but shifting it to the center. Separately, Klein leaned towards opposing ending the shut down at this point.
Since Matt and Ezra Klein are friends and both highly regarded centrists, I think Matt feels a little insecure about this new distinction of what "big-tent" means, since it is different than what he has long argued for. That the senators who ended the shutdown are all moderates compound this.
That's my psychoanalysis.
I’ve never heard someone call Ezra Klein a centrist before how interesting
He's a bit centrist and a bit leftist. It's hard to pin it down because I think a lot of people think we should take moderate actions strategically but that a farther left action would be more morally desirable if it was electable.
Not only is hurting Americans for political gain icky, there’s no guarantee it would have kept working. As the hardships compounded, people might have gotten off their asses to see why their flights and food stamps were cancelled and realized “Dems could have passed a budget but decided to play politics.”
Republicans hold the presidency and majorities in Congress! Dem's can't pass anything themselves, much less a budget.
If the Democrats were on board with imposing hardships on people, they would be Republicans.
There's no bigger divide between pundits and the officeholders who actually have to field the thousands of calls from people losing jobs, paychecks, food benefits, Thanksgiving trips to see family etc etc than when the former says, "Just tough it out." Sure, easy for you to say, pal.
I don't think it is good politics to make voters angry over disrupted Thanksgiving or Christmas travel. Most won't care about who deserves more blame and will lash out at their local Senators and Congressmen. It's fine to play hardball next year. I don't think Democrats would have come out of this unscathed. SNAP or Obamacare subsidies is a different issue because most people are not affected by it. As soon as the Trump administration disrupted air travel, it became a losing battle for Democrats.
I think the issue is under the current situation Republicans can "have their cake and eat it too" by passing party-line tax cuts then begging Democrats to come up with the votes for bipartisan appropriations bills that maintain popular social programs. If Democrats lean more into hardball, Republicans would need to get rid of the filibuster and govern themselves. That means they would either have to bring their deficit hawks on board with increases in social spending or do more cuts.
The bipartisan situation is good in that it maintains program funding at a higher level, but it's bad insofar as it blurs the boundaries on who stands for what.
On top of the points Ben Krauss made, I think the fundamental point he’s making is to have a fucking strategy to win reddish state senate seats without reliance on GOP own goals (statch rapists, cte infected former football players, super extreme kooks and clowns)…
Unlike Wigan I think he’s trying to speak to people like staffers. Schumer, Shaheens, Warren’s office about how to be a better safe seat senator..
I should add, that in this strategy, you drop the process-monkey obsession (ie the filibuster, the current appropriations process…which btw was cobbled together over eons of far less partisan politics in the senate and counterproductive to today’s political situation).
Matt writes a lot of these kind of slightly meandering pieces, where he expertly covers a lot of ground on a complex issue, but it's not like a traditional essay we learn in school that has a beginning/middle/end. They're not 'in this essay I will' type of focused pieces. Which I think is fine, but yes they frequently don't have a central point that he focuses on in the conclusion or whatever
His 13 thoughts post on this issue was better than the current article. The strength of “x thoughts on y” is it doesn’t claim consistency or unity. With subjects that are this deeply tactical, consistency is often the enemy of truth.
Matt is a bit over-indexed on Twitter and then tries to explain to the rest of us what we feel or are thinking based on Twitter vibes. I think that is why the piece doesn't resonate as well either...
I think there was a much more concise (productive?) post somewhere here that says “it’s outrageous for a retiring fossil like Shaheen to appoint herself national party strategist while ignoring actual moderates, and it’s further disappointing that others joined her for shortsighted reasons.” Instead we got weird asides about fracking bans.
But what was the winning hand? What was another month going to get Dems? There was no meaningful big deal to have
As best as I can extrapolate from Matt’s work, the filibuster being nuked and an extra -4% approval rating for Trump and the Republicans
To be clear there was a zero percent chance that John thune was going to nuke the filibuster. Literally no one in politics was having that discussion
I tend to agree with you. That said, I also can't discount Trump getting what he wants from Republicans. Especially at the time.
The president and god emperor of the Republican Party was.
I would say he counts as being in politics
I thought there was a zero percent chance that Trump would be re-elected after 2000, but surprise, here we are. There is no way to be confident that Thune is able to hold this if Trump really starts ramping up the pressure.
Lots of TV coverage of disrupted air travel, with stories of families who can't be united, along with middle class folks of all stripes bitching at their elected reps probably would have gotten some movement on ACA subsidies.
The shutdown had not yet hit anyone that wasn't poor or a government worker. When it landed beyond those groups, and assuming Trump was blamed, some movement would have been likely.
It looks like they are even reducing some Trump tariffs, something he cares about much more deeply than fiscal prudence. So it's not like he never responds to pressure. And this non-deal deal would have been available at any point.
Reduce tariffs, temporary extension of the subsidies.
In other words, reduce the harm people are feeling from Trump policies in the run up to the midterms and thereby make them less angry at Republicans.
Some victory for the Democrats that would be.
The whole post is a velleity because he never specifies what mechanism will make Dems more moderate.
TIL a new word!
Yes, kudos to this David.
It did feel kind of stream of consciousness.
I thought this was just more of, "More thoughts on the shutdown deal" post. Not really coherent, just the thoughts in his head.
Chris Murphy's strategy of posting and swearing more isn't going to help the Dems much in swing districts and states in 2026 and 2028 but a Democratic Party that moderated on cultural issues a bit and dumped some of the various doctrines of The Groups (banning gas powered cars, fracking, assault weapons etc) probably would do better in upcoming elections in purple and light red parts of the country.
bring back the clinton playbook of raising taxes on rich people to reduce the deficit...
I meant more what should the Dem Senate leader do specifically in the legislative body not "what's an ideal policy outcome" though.
This is the ultimate comment to a Matthew Yglesias article! I am a paid subscriber but I'm not gonna lie: I have in the past taken his articles, uploaded them to ChatGPT, and asked for a summary.
Sometimes it's like an old school Simpsons episode: you're along for the ride.
I think Matt is trying to calm the war over the shutdown wiht the objective of making Leadership less in thrall of the Leftist portions of the base on policy questions. The key example being his exmple of fracking. [Possible not the ideal example because anti-fracking is bad policy,not just bad politics and Matt is talking politics.]
Leadershit… hehehe
:) My browser has stopped spell checking me!
I see this as Matt announcing that he gets to define what “Moderation” is. Somehow it reminded me of something Mark Twain once said about the “temperance” movement (temperance originally meaning moderation), that he believed in “temperate temperance.” Maybe Matt is advocating for moderate moderation?
"he believed in 'temperate temperance'"
All things in moderation, including sobriety, chastity, and moderation.
I think this reaction might underline a reason why pundits are reluctant to take the position "it was an okay decision, not what I would have done." In reality that should be our reaction to most things the party leadership does that we disagree with, rather than fuming indignity. But we demand strongly laudatory/condemnatory statements even from pundits who self-brand as "Boring".
The conflation of moderation and popularism felt very worst-argument-in-the-world-y. “Is X moderation?” is just not a useful framing except in opposition to extremists, because moderates are a big diverse group with no internal coherence whatsoever.
I'm surprised you haven't found more of his posts to be incomprehensible, because most of them are just convoluted thinly veiled advertisements for capitulation to the demands of the ruling class.
As opposed to the New Class or the Kulaks?
Oh you again, the Marxist masochist who pays to get annoyed by the neo-liberal, imperialist, sell out, patriarch defending yada yada shill. Thank God you are never going to come anywhere near ruling anything, the reason only partly being that you don't understand the strategy of popularism.
I wouldn't put it quite like that, but this piece did seem unusually muddled for Matt.
Matt underestimates how many Democratic politicians actually trully believe in banning fracking, allowing males to compete in female sports, and having affirmative action quotas for unqualified minorities. They don't moderate on these type of issues because they are true believers. You can't say that the Democratic Party has become a lot more leftwing over the past 30 years (which Matt does) and then be aghast when Democratic politicians have more sincerely leftwing beliefs.
One can oppose affirmative action or trans athletes competing in sports, but don't appreciate the phrase "quotas for unqualified minorities" or the misgendering in this comment. This isn't Christopher Rufo's substack.
It’s not misgendering. He said “males” which is accurate.
It's really not. The whole debate centers are kind the differences between cis men, cis women, and trans women. Not clarifying which group you're referring to makes the argument less effective. Unless clarity isn't the point and the point is to get in a dig at trans women.
I don't understand the type of person who reads SB, but doesn't have any interest in actually having good faith arguments. I also generally don't think trans women should participate in women's sports. But I don't need to misgender people to think that.
OK, but "male" isn't a gender; it's a sex. So it can't be misgendering, which requires calling someone by the wrong gender.
There isn't a technicality that let's this not be intentionally hurtful. You can argue about whether or not "male" is technically wrong, but they had plenty of more specific ways to phrase it and chose a less clear one designed to jab at trans women.
I truly don't understand why they couldn't just make their point and not be hurtful. Or why you have this desire to defend them. Just make your point and be kind to people.
I don't think there was a way they could have phrased it that was simultaneously clear, concise, and not hurtful. Telling someone they can't play in particular sports leagues generates the inherent hurt of exclusion, no matter how you phrase it. I know there were alternative phrasings proposed in this thread, and I think they would have just offended someone else.
"Males" is a concise way of saying "biological males", at least for some people, and nobody bothered to check if Lapsed Pacifist uses it that way before leaping down their throat. (Maybe the inherent inconsistency of calling the leagues "women's [not females'] sports" was enough to conclude mal-intent? But nobody seems interested in changing the terminology for the leagues even as we update the definition.) Lapsed Pacifist's statement was technically accurate; and technical accuracy should be enough.
(There's probably some other commentators reading this and LOLing that I've tried to stand by technically-false statements as accurate-in-gist during past arguments. But I feel like when that's happened I've conceded the technical inaccuracies. More importantly, how we handle technically-false and technically-true statements do not, logically, have to mirror each other.)
I think it's more constructive for public discourse that we take people's statements as abstract propositions, rather than statements of political allegiance (I recognize that Slow Boring is a site about politics). And I think that's particularly true in culture war topics, since it's much harder to argue against someone's political allegiance than a particular view.
So I'm a little frustrated when a long-term relatively-productive commentator gets threatened with a ban because they didn't phrase their opinion to sufficiently suggest that they were on trans peoples' side in the broader project of equality under the law.
What would be the name of the gender if not "male"?
In general? I don't know. In this context? "Men".
By definition, affirmative action is giving a spot to somebody that is less qualified than the other candidates.
If not, you wouldn't need affirmative action.You would just give it to the most qualified candidate
It could mean equally qualified. One thing that’s clear now, the current administration is bringing us back to the days of favoring unqualified/less qualified members of majority groups.
Hey chat, I have a question about English vocabulary. Does "less qualified" mean "unqualified"?
There is "qualified", and then everything that doesn't meet that mark. If there are places where you don't need A-rated, and B-rated is acceptable but less desirable, than less qualified may not be unqualified. But if there is a standard that must be met, than anything less than fully qualified is unqualified.
I'm not going to take a position on which if these two scenarios are relevant here, but I certainly don't want anyone who scored a 89 getting into a position where we demand a 90 as qualification.
It's a bit of a moot point because I don't see Democrats arguing for it really anymore but I don't think even the most ardent advocate of affirmative action would advocate someone who falls below the minimum qualifying score from getting in.
But… that is exactly how the admissions system worked in practice for many colleges prior to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Part of the admittal process considered to be unfair was the existence of separate scoring thresholds based upon race.
Either you're explicitly allowing less qualified people in, or you're using race as a tie breaker. I'm not sure how either one is acceptable. There may be some situations where there are actually qualified minority applicants who are simply undiscovered and you can seek them out and plug them into open spots without sacrificing standards, but I've yet to see a meaningful demonstration of that in practice.
I know that in general this board tends to be against occupational licensing, but this seems to be one of the good aspects of it. I haven’t seen data on this, but I reckon occupational licensing leads to more diverse racial statistics, as holding a license in a profession means that one meets the applicable standards.
I would not have use unqualified because I think that's usually unlikely.
But less qualified definitely is the case
There exists some argument that minorities have a few inherent extra qualifications that don't show up easily on paper. From this perspective, AA can be seen not as a handout to the less qualified, but as a correction against systemic biases.
This just sounds like magical thinking. If you can name these qualifications, you can use them in the evaluation.
Some of the qualifications might include:
Having an atypical cultural background allows for alternative perspectives and approaches not usually considered. The majority is going to naturally want to do things the way they're conditioned to, and will have some bias against other modes of thinking, having an advocate for alternatives is useful.
You might miss out on excellent candidates because the company isn't ready to accept an outsider. If I was forced to work in Japan for some reason, I'm certain I could be a valuable employee, but it would be extremely helpful to have another American around to show me the ropes; I would gravitate towards working for a company that seems to be friendly to American applicants when applying.
If you believe being a minority has, on average, disadvantages in life beyond what the majority experience, then of two equally experienced candidates, the minority had to perform to a higher standard to achieve said experience.
Not a qualification, but evidence strongly suggests that there's an inherent bias towards white and male candidates. Identical resumes, changing only the first name from Jack to Jill, Jamal or Lakisha, showed fewer callbacks and lower perceived competence.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873.pdf
If a company was demanded to have some extra minority workers, they're obviously going to pick the most qualified minority workers that applied. Arguably these folks should have been hired anyway, and weren't because of the above bias.
For the record, this isn't necessarily my position, I just don't think the argument is wholly ridiculous.
The names thing is cited over and over again, but it mixes together both race and class in ways that may exaggerate effects (not to mention the classic study cited is over 20 years old).
As for believing someone may have faced disadvantages on account of their race, that was my point: make it explicitly part of the criteria if you think it matters. Otherwise, what happens (and this is what we can often see) is that rich and/or immigrant black applicants benefit from a kind of "stolen valor", if you will.
Anyway, I do see your point that it's not *wholly* ridiculous, but (1) it's at least somewhat ridiculous and (2) it's still illegal.
So on the one hand, we’re supposed to have a big tent and on the other hand Ben “doesn’t appreciate” referring to people who have y chromosomes and want to play women’s sports as men.
The dissonance is deafening.
Whenever these linguistic quibbles arise, it’s interesting to look at the ratio between likes for the comment and like’s for Ben’s tut tutting.
46-53 suggests a significant minority of SB comment likers affirmatively endorse Sean O’s language.
I’m old enough to think that some linguistic norms are necessary, and I think Matt and Ben have struck a principled balance, but I do think they are even now still a tad too deferential to progressive language foibles and this is contrary to a big tent.
I "liked" this comment, but to be clear, I think "males" is fine; it's clearly referencing biology, not gender identity.
Straight-up lying about the mechanism of post-Bakke affirmative action, on the other hand, is not fine.
I'd argue it's clearly trying to misgender people. They could have easily said "biological males" or "people AMAB" and they chose not to.
It's not nitpicking. The differences between trans women, cis men, and cis women are at the core of the discussion. Not appropriately differentiating them actually makes the author's argument less clear, but they do it anyway to make a dig at trans women.
As someone who's generally against letting trans women participate in women's sports I don't feel any need to call trans women "males" to make that point.
Correctly referring to sex is actually important in these discussions, and you can't crybully people into pretending otherwise.
There are ways to do that without being a dick. Can you give me a good reason why replacing "males" with "trans women" or "people AMAB" would have been any less accurate?
My point is those terms are in fact more accurate and useful for their point. No one is saying any male should compete in women's sports.
So if they're being less clear to use a term they know with 100% will offend people then they're just mean. If there was literally no easily identifiable way to refer to trans women I'd see your point, but it doesn't make sense when there are more accurate words to use.
The second part of an honest answer is that I don't believe that gender identity is anything besides acting out sex stereotypes, and I'm not going to reify or affirm that this is a different kind of person, just like I'm not going to call some goth girl “Queen Amethyst Nightshade” and pretend she's actually a vampire. So, trans women are male and men, AMAB implies that someone assigns sex (which isn't true), and I'm not going to participate in any of this because it's incoherent nonsense.
Some people have terrible issues with their own bodies. That doesn't imply any burden on anyone else to act differently or cooperate in their therapy.
Because these issues implicate male people as a class, not a subset of that class. Since there's no difference between a male and a trans identifying male, if you allow trans identified males into a female space, you are allowing all males into that space, thus eliminating it as a female only space.
Most trans women don't want to be referred to as "males", no matter how you justify it. It's rude.
There is a persistent shell game being played by certain trans activists where no matter what term is used to refer to the concept "biological male," it is declared "rude" in an effort to interdict people from talking clearly about the underlying concept.
This does not actually persuade anyone; it's just obnoxious. I am not going to play that game, even as someone who FAVORS trans rights on most substantive issues (not women's sports, though).
What's so hard about saying "trans women"?
So? Not all rudeness is misgendering. Nor indeed is all calling someone by a name they wouldn't prefer.
Now, you might say: paying undue attention to sex in a context where most people normally pay attention to gender is simply misgendering disguised. This is probably true even if the person in question is careful to use "male/female" and not "man/woman". But the whole reason gender/sex segregation in sports is a culture war is that the sports context is one in which many (most?) people think biological sex is much more important than gender!
(Not to point too fine a point on it, but: sports is literally about bodily capabilities. I don't think we should be surprised that many people draw the dividing line by bodily characteristics and not interpersonal signaling.)
No, it really isn't. You can just say "trans women".
Even in a discussion about biological traits that have an impact on athletic performance, "male" is imprecise and inaccurate: the type of gametes someone produces doesn't affect how fast they can run. Past testosterone exposure and present circulating testosterone do, but especially when dealing with people who transition at a young age, it's simply incorrect to make assumptions about those levels based on their gametes (or chromosomes, or however else you choose to define sex).
Misgendering is one of the things SB management has decided it's willing to tolerate in order to hang on to the significant subset of subscribers who are really weird about trans people.
I actually do not tolerate misgendering! And have banned it in the past
that’s not a big tent
Well, we want a big tent but just not “circus tent” big with clowns.
that’s not inclusive, in fact it’s rather derisive
You and I clearly disagree about the substance of these issues but this is exactly right. The answer to why Chuck Schumer has changed his political positions is that he has been persuaded of new substantive views!
I think Sean is failing to make a distinction between weakly and strongly held positions.
Things like the fracking ban, youth gender sports, and I think the “racial reconning” version of affirmative action are the products of nodding consensus politics. They are much more flexible than Sean assumes.
Otherwise we would not observe such heavy policing from progressives and the lobbying organizations when figures appear to deviate from preferred positions.
Women’s’ sports implicates fundamental aesthetic question— what is a woman, what is female athletic beauty, how can it be displayed for compellingly. These are not details, they are at the core of my aesthetics.
Aesthetics is not a relevant consideration for women's sports!
Two things can absolutely be true; Democrats overall have moved left over the past 20-25 years and that particular issue positions that various “groups” are trying to push are well to the left of not just median voters but to the left of a large percentage of Democrats.
Easy example is LBGTQ issues. You’re typical Dem is probably more pro gay marriage and more pro the government taking actions to protect transgender people than 25 years ago. But on the specific issue of transgender athletes in sports, the activists are well to the left of both the median voter but also seemingly the median democrat.
I mean, even the worst polling shows 20/80 on transgender kids in sports.
That 20% is coming from somewhere and that means in many Biden/Kamala districts, transgender kids in sports has majority support among Democratic voters.
There's no need to be an activist if your position represents where the party is at and taking action on. If it were for those pesky activists, we'd be a lot closer to the 19th century's values than the median values of today.
I'm personally somewhat conflict adverse, so my bias is against antagonistic activism, but when I push myself on that assumption, it's hard to make an argument that change hasn't come because there are annoying activists and pragmatic people in the mix.
So if my quota is for 10 unqualified black people, if I hire 5 qualified black people, do I still need to hire 10 more unqualified people?
Ask the admissions office at UC San Diego. They are admitting hundreds of students who can't do elementary school math, so they know the answer to this question better than I do.
UCSD is less than 2% black.
Unfortunately that doesn't disprove Sean as definitively as one might like, b/c UCSD admits about 10k people/year, and 2% of 10k is about 200 people.
I guarantee that UCSD admits more than 200 white students who can't do elementary school math too.
I saw that report and was aghast.
(Just in case it wasn't clear, I purposefully phrased my comment so that it wouldn't endorse Sean O.'s claim as true. But your fact is horrifying too.)
Race-based affirmative action has been banned in California since 1997.
You literally won on the policy issue you claim to be concerned with and you're continuing the racist rants anyway.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned the use of race in hiring but the University of Washington was found to be illegally making race-based hiring decisions a couple of years ago[1]. I think it's fair to ask if universities are actually following the letter of the law when it comes to anti-discrimination statutes, and be a bit skeptical of their answers. I'm not concurring with Sean's assertion that discrimination is definitely happening nor his assertion that there are hundreds of unqualified students being admitted to the UC system, but I understand why he wouldn't simply trust the university to be following the law.
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/article/racial-discrimination-at-the-university-of-washington
Based on the extermely low % of Black students across the UC system, even relative to our state's low Black population, I genuinely don't believe the UC system is doing secret racial preferences.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/11/12/uc-san-diego-sees-students-math-skills-plummet
The word "race" does not even appear on that page (well, actually it does if you ctrl-f, but it's in a link to "California State University Embraces Direct Admissions").
Looking at something that says "this school is admitting a lot of cripplingly underprepared students" and going "ah, must be all the blacks they're letting in because of quotas" is literally the definition of racism.
Honestly, what seems to have happened (changed admissions criteria in a way that limits their ability to discern who is well-prepared) is worse than if they were simply doing targeted admissions of less qualified applicants based on race or ethnicity.
I should have been more clear in my tongue-in-cheek comment and written something like "they know better than I do about who is unqualified." I did not intend to make this about race.
What does race have to do with this?
It doesn't have anything to do with this. This is more about not using the ACT/SAT and basing admissions off of personal statements. I should have written my original tongue-in-cheek response more clearly.
You mean they're admitting modern students? Have you seen the data on how well the average person can do anything cognitive?
I think every student at a pretigious university should be able to do simple addition and basic algebra, but maybe I am too old-school.
It’s not really the government’s job to tell people what sports they can play and affirmative action was abolished by ballot initiative even in California so there is clearly not public support for state-sponsored affirmative action however people also don’t want the government to be micromanaging private universities’ admissions processes which are non-meritocratic in all kinds of ways like legacy preferences and it seems pretty unfair to say it’s legal for schools to advantage you because your ancestors were privileged but not because your ancestors were underprivileged.
Title IX explicitly tells federal funded institutions that they have to have women's sports if there are men's sports. Now the question is if women's sports are for women or for anyone.
No, the question is whether women's sports are for cis women or for all women.
You're trying to steal a base with sophistry. The fundamental disagreement is whether or not male people are women, and like someone has already said, the consensus is against your position.
No, the fundamental disagreement is about who should play in women's sports. "Whether or not male people are women" is a separate philosophical argument with no impact on that disagreement.
Your earlier comment was simply wrong, because neither side of the disagreement believes women's sports are for “anyone”.
We all agree only women should play in women's sports, though. So what's the issue? Oh, right.
My comment is correct because under self ID, anyone can call themselves a women and play women's sports.
What's the difference between a trans woman and a man?
"No, the fundamental disagreement is about who should play in women's sports."
No, it's about whether we should have "women's sports" or "females' sports". And the sports fanatics seem to be leaning towards the latter, even if they mistakenly still call it "women's sports".
Your side lost this one.
The side of not being an asshole? We'll come back sooner than you think.
No. The reason gender-segregated sports exists is because it is used to be impossible to lie about one's gender, so that bad actors couldn't cheat the system.
It is now possible for bad actors for to lie about their gender in order to gain a competitive advantage. Does that actually happen? I have no idea; I would guess not TBH.
But Lapsed Pacifist's statement only needs the theoretical possibility to exist. A system that depends on truthful self-ID with no way to punish liars is effectively for everyone. That is true whether or not it is officially for everyone, and whether or not anyone feels comfortable actually saying the lie.
(I come out the other way on needing an ID card to vote because we have a post-hoc system to punish people caught lying to gain an extra vote. Namely, we convict them of election fraud. But I'm not aware of a comparable possibility with gender ID.)
"it seems pretty unfair to...advantage you because your ancestors were privileged but not underprivileged."
Isn't that what "privileged" means? An unfair advantage?
Usually it means an unearned advantage, not necessarily an unfair one.
Right, like Tara said.
LeBron is privileged as far as basketball goes. He is tall, athletic, and can accumulate muscle mass easily.
But it's not "unfair" - he follows the rules.
Yeah. Matt's biggest problem in these pieces is that he recognizes to get things done you have to meet people where they are and then forgets that Democrats are the part of the electorate you have to convince first before a Democratic politician can do anything.
I think at least to a certain extent, democratic voters take cues from the elites in their party and media
If the elites turn against an issue, then a lot of the rank and file will follow
If you define elite as a person who has influence, then yes, but politicians and mainstream media are almost always laggards in public opinion. Sexual and gender rights are a great example—the people who lead the change were extremely marginalized for a very, very long time. After decades of activism, they started to get wins with a broader, but still not elite group. When gay marriage became law, the public was close to 50/50, but politicians who endorsed it were still very rare.
Matt's core argument is the Democrats should skate to the puck of public opinion. That makes a party that both has no influence and is always chasing what their voters wanted last year. The argument he makes that I find most convincing is supporting people who run to the sensibility of their districts—the puck moves more slowly in some places, so skating to where it's heading means moving in localized gravity.
I don't think your first paragraph is correct. Media was a major influence on public opinion regarding gay marriage. Famously Will & Grace which premiered in 1998, over 15 years before Obergefell.
Further, when Obergefell was decided in 2015, a majority of US states had passed laws or amendments banning gay marriage, but the Democratic party platform fully endorsed it in 2012.
This comment seems to assume that everey Dem holds every one of those beliefs. That is a fairly ludacrous assumption. Matt has said many times that he has talked with many representatives and senators or their staffers, and that they are almost always heterogenous in one or more ways, but suppress that part as coalition management. What he is arguing here is that they shouldn't.
I think he correctly estimates that these are all unpopular opinions. That’s why he keeps bringing it up.
Right. But that doesn't prevent a lot of Democrats from actually believing these are good policies. The public sees that many Democrats do believe in these policies and they then vote for Republicans.
Kind of like how many Republicans also think that some unpopular ideas such as 100% abortion bans are good policies? I'm not sure I see your point. Parties represent opposite ends of the spectrum, and each of them has its own extreme views.
What is their problem with fracking?
Fracking has a very wide range of known adverse non-carbon related environmental and human-geographic effects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking#Environmental_effects
That does not answer the economic question of whether those tradeoffs are worth it-- much less the second-order political question of whether a controlling majority of voters THINK those tradeoffs are worth it-- but this isn't just mindless obstructionism.
You're right that fracking isn't harmless, but the bans are mostly just obstructionism.
And yet the people most affected by fracking's effects are most supportive of it.
Sort of like the states with the highest percentage of immigrants (illegal and otherwise) are more supportive than states with the lowest percentage.
I would imagine, if one looked this up, that the states most affected by, say, metal heap-leach mining's effects are most supportive of that, too (there may even be an economic reason for this insofar as they reap all of the benefits but externalize some of the costs). Yet I don't begrudge protestors their opposition to the environmental horrors of metal heap-leach mining.
As a general rule voters are extraordinarily bad reasoners when it comes to weighing even medium-term environmental degradation against short-term economics. They are the kid in the experiment that eats the marshmallow now and gives up on five marshmallows ten minutes from now. This poses a problem for politicians, for whom following the short-term wishes of their constituents will lead to bad medium-term consequences for those politicians as the actual costs of their actions come into full view. I don't envy anyone trying to walk that tightrope.
"As a general rule voters are extraordinarily bad reasoners when it comes to weighing even medium-term environmental degradation against short-term economics."
Can you cite some evidence for this? The EPA had to come from somewhere.
I don't have anything right to hand, but Erik Loomis's work on the Northern Spotted Owl wars is instructive, I think. If you search that topic over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where he blogs, you will likely hit a trove of history on that subject.
As for the EPA, I think that's best understood as kind of the political equivalent of putting cookies high on a shelf where they're annoying to take down. Having an agency out there tasked with raising environmental concerns and nothing else is an effort to force Type 2 thinking in situations where normally people's gut Type 1 reactions are all as I've described. Unfortunately, the pervasive corruption of the federal civil service by Republicans means it's not very effective.
I'm not in a position to evaluate the actual costs and benefits of fracking-- haven't got the expertise, haven't got the time. But it's obvious that there are costs, and that those costs are potentially not being paid by the people reaping the benefits. That immediately puts the classic negative-externality scenario of environmental harm on the table. It's for the scientists to adjudicate at that point. Internet dillettantes such as ourselves have essentially nothing to add to that conversation.
A) It produces oil and natural gas
B) They wrongly believe it poisons water supplies
I’m mixed on this one. It did seem to be damaging Trump because his personality meant that he couldn’t but play his hand wrong here (escalating and branding the shutdown as his).
But the shutdown was very dumb! Wrecking the federal government over expiring subsidies you don’t have the votes for? What are we doing here? An issue where the correct political play is so obviously nonsense on substance.
Made it hard to talk about with my friends and coworkers (who are not the median voter by any means) and was therefore interesting, because to us it was clearly Democrats causing problems for America to cause problems for Trump, exactly like Obama era Republicans (drove me nuts then too).
So I have more sympathy for the deal makers.
I kept telling people that the Republicans could vote that 51 votes was enough to pass the budget at any time, and it was their fault for pretending they needed 60 votes.
Of course that was the same thing Trump was saying, so some real "Heartbreaking: Worst Person You Know Made a Great Point" energy there.
Mr friends are not idiots. They understand that democrats were voting no on this “requires 60 votes to agree” proposal to end the shutdown. They are invoking the filibuster to block the CR! “ Well republicans could change the long standing rules to override their minority veto if they really wanted” is not a very satisfactory response.
The good thing about economic fights is they are fights over figures and that enables more compromise than on moral questions
I felt like it was pretty easy to explain to normies by reminding them that Republicans, not democrats, are currently in control of the Presidency, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.
You can argue nuance all day long, but it comes back to this. Just keep pointing this out. Over and over and over.
I think this line cleanly illustrates why I question the usefulness of Slow Boring's electoral strategy advice:
"The solution is for Chuck Schumer... to make the entire Democratic Party into a party that’s not trying to ban fracking."
I wholeheartedly agree that if, somehow, the Democrats could *credibly* commit to being a party that's more in line with Americans' preferences, they'd be more successful.
But this entirely skips over the hard part! Democratic politicians face serious obstacles to doing this for at least three reasons: their incentives, their beliefs, and their relative weakness.
1. I posted this on the shutdown the other day: of course some Dems were going to fold, because the shutdown strategy was to take *their own* constituencies hostage for extremely limited political gain.
"You want us to fight? Ok, listen to this evil genius plan. We'll make Republicans really feel the pain by shutting down the government and taking their key constituencies hostage: government workers, white collar business travelers, and poor people on SNAP. Then they'll be faced with an impossible dilemma: (a) end the filibuster so that they can do whatever they want, or (b) be blamed for the shutdown and lose 0.2pp in the 2026 midterms once everyone has forgotten about this."
2. A recurring theme in Matt's writing is that for some reason, "moderates" seem extremely weak, to the point where they're entirely unable to prioritize their goals instead of just trying to placate various competing interests. In my view, this is because few Democratic politicians actually believe in moderation as anything other than a strategy to get elected, and even fewer are able to actually articulate their moderate views in a convincing way. This renders Democrats unable to commit to *governing* as moderates. (Why didn't anyone think Kamala was just "running on the economy"?)
3. Democratic politicians are relatively weak because several other elements on the Blue Team hold significant informal authority: donors, the media, NGOs, etc. When politicians try to fight these groups, they can actually fight back.
By contrast, in the Republican Party, whatever Trump says goes. No one can fight him because he simply threatens to ruin their lives. To the extent that Trump was able to jettison unpopular Republican positions, it was because he could actually commit to it. Does anyone actually think that some Little Leaguer like Gluesenkamp Perez could impose their will like this?
(This is behind Matt's frequent observation that whereas there's an entire left-wing media dedicated to attacking Democrats, there aren't really too many right-wing media outlets attacking Trump... that is, until Tucker and Fuentes.)
Why do people keep saying that SNAP benefits not being paid was the fault of the shutdown? That was an illegal decision Trump made specifically to punish the Dems. It had never been done before and was pretty obviously illegal.
If anything, it should've been the nexus of "hugely unpopular position" and "obviously illegal by way of claims of overly broad executive discretion" that both the popularist and no kings folks could've rallied behind!
I think there was essentially a zero percent chance that the Supreme Court would have ruled the SNAP shutoff illegal. That doesn't make your position wrong (it is, in fact, illegal by any even vaguely neutral method of interpretation of statutes), but it does mean that conversations about political strategy have to occur in the shadow of the practical understanding that Republicans will be allowed to do all sorts of illegal shit irrespective of what the law or the Constitution says. When we complain about "illegality," it has to be in a posture that is overtly adversarial to SCOTUS, which means a political framework, not really a legal one.
Yeah, I probably should've been clearer about this. (Agree about it being flagrantly illegal etc.) Cutting off SNAP wasn't an intended effect of the shutdown, but I think the response to the SNAP cutoff illustrates how galaxy-brained the shutdown strategy was.
When SNAP was cut off, you could see left-of-center commentators crowing about how foolish it was, because it gave Democrats even more hostages to leverage against Republicans. But Trump (and, I suspect, many Democratic politicians) correctly understood that this move placed additional pressure on Democrats rather than Republicans. (Because Democrats are the ones who actually care about SNAP recipients!)
Moreover, you'd think the Democrats would've anticipated something like this. Their entire argument was "We're showing how strong we are by taking a stand, because otherwise Republicans will circumvent fiscal procedure with total impunity... but we have no responsibility for the shutdown... and we'll declare victory when the Republicans nuke the filibuster...?"
I think the fact that Trump’s approval rating after the SNAP fiasco was the first time in years where it looked like he, in fact, could not “shoot somebody on 5th avenue and still be popular”, was evidence that Democrats are far from the only ones who care about SNAP recipients.
I think it’s a lot simpler. The core of the Democratic Party has strong views on let’s say 13 issues. Math suggests that to win reliably 52% of the vote they can afford to hold onto seven of those (for arguments sake). A decision to drop the remaining six for the next decade does not seem like a stretch, but then I’m forgetting that this is not a rationality seminar.
I know Matt’s upset about this issue and I think lots of liberal pundits are, I also think he’s right on the politics in the Roman sense.
I have a friend and neighbor that’s an ATC and it was starting to get hairy for him, he’s a middle class guy, his wife has been sick and can’t work, he has two kids one with many health issues, this shut down was really hurting him.
On a personal level I get why it was ended and I gotta say, the human move was ending it.
MY is right but I don’t think it’s a good look. I think it’s counter productive to dwell on it publicly. I have to imagine the Republicans feel like they have won twice with the shut down ending and democrats *complaining* about it ending. We should all just move on.
Looking forward to those Epstein files this week.
You’re right it’s not a good look. For Republicans! I think we know pretty conclusively at this point that they were taking most of the blame. And rightly so. They hold majorities in both chambers and could’ve ended the shutdown at any point on their own, without a single Democratic vote.
They really weren't taking most of the blame. It was pretty much split in the polls.
which poll are you looking at? nbc news had 52-42 in favor of dems
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5597069-survey-shows-divided-shutdown-blame/
32% blaming Dems, 35% blaming Republicans, 28% both parties to blame
Maybe my proximity to politics makes me more of a procedural moderate. But the concrete realities were that Mike Johnson was not gonna pass aca subsidies and thune was not going to nuke the filibuster. In Trump 2 the president is not a roving deal maker. That means that holding out was not likely going to do anything in terms of outcomes other than snarl thanksgiving travel.
I want to repeat this: nuking the filibuster was not on the table. Matt has created an argument that Shaheen and appropriators did this deal to save the filibuster. That is simply not true; I’ve spoken to these offices. At no point was John thune, who is a strong institutionalist, going to nuke the filibuster. Matt has used this frame as the reason to fight. But thune is both a totally committed filibuster proponent and smart enough to know that if he nukes the filibuster he would be at Trump and his most right wing members mercy on every policy issue and would personally lose control. No one deep in politics really thought the filibuster was at stake.
The minority party essentially never gets anything from the in power party during a shutdown. This time was not really going to be any different.
I generally don’t love the procedural moderates but someone has to decide that reopening the government in exchange for some things including higher baseline spending is good. I would add that these “minibus” deals are also much more liberal than their house counterparts on policy and will give the Senate a strong hand in final negotiations.
Matt’s moderation is mostly about internecine fighting, but many moderates are primarily focused on government continuity which is fine and good and more important.
I thought the whole idea behind holding out on ACA subsidies was that the only two options left for Republicans was 1) restore ACA subsidies 2) remove the filibuster 3) tell everyone that they're ruining Thanksgiving so they can block popular health care spending. I understand Democrats were never prepared to go that far, but supposing they did, what other options would the other side have?
But the Republicans were not blocking health care spending. The subsidies expired and the bill that was under consideration was an unrelated appropriations bill. I know Dems tried to link the two.
And while they did a good job, I think if people were unable to travel for thanksgiving the news coverage would increase and would not be favorable to democrats. The ACA subsidies are relatively minor for most people who are generally unaffected by the enhanced premiums, and I think the publics tolerance for sacrificing thanksgiving over this would not necessarily hold.
I was surprised they took Trump's comments about the filibuster seriously. He said the same thing in 2018!
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/26/donald-trump-kill-the-filibuster-677151
Precisely Trump has said over and over again that he wants to remove the filibuster and the Hill literally just ignores him other than the very marginal trumpy members (MGT, Rick Scott etc.) There probably isn’t 10 republican votes in the senate for filibuster repeal, let alone senate Leadeship’s total opposition.
Which gets to my point of frustration. Both here and on the politic podcast an animating Yglesias claim is that filibuster abolition for appropriations was on the table, and he’s used that claim as a predicate to push this narrative. And it’s just not fundamentally accurate and undermines the whole argument, as such.
> in exchange for some things including higher baseline spending is good.
Listening to Matt on Politix, it's clear that he doesn't assign value to much of what the government does; everything is just viewed through a political lens. To whit, here's something he said (edit: I see you listen to it as well):
"And so now they make the government spend less money than you wanted. Like. Tough shit. You know what I mean? And that, again, goes to the filibuster point where like another point they made on it is is like, look, forget CR forever. If you get rid of the filibuster, like then they're going to negotiate much lower spending levels than what's in our CRs. But it's like, I don't know, man. You know, it's like that. That's not a big deal."
I thought Tim Miller had the best take on the 8 senators who brought the shutdown to a close. Namely, there are actual defensible reasons to a) bring the shutdown to a close and b) a message that would have made sense and positioned the Democratic Party brand in the long term. And a smart operative would have written something sort of like this to say on news shows “We ended this shutdown because unlike the president we actually care about making sure no American goes hungry at night. President Trump is out here talking about how he’s this great populist. And yet when the rubber hits the road he’s out here having Gatsby parties while trying to fight giving SNAP benefits in court. So we stepped up because we are the real party of the regular Americans. We’re the ones who actually standing up for you” (it would be better written than this but think you all get the gist).
Instead, we get just god awful answers about how Dems were actually losing the shutdown (seriously Angus King or whoever wrote his talking points WTF?!) or Jeane Shaheen almost certainly making up a story about how some constituent just wants politicians from both sides to work together (David Broder called from beyond the grave, he wants his talking points back).
And I think this fits in with why I think your podcast colleague has the better of this argument you two are having about moderation and messaging (given he’s on your side that given senate map we can’t just have down the line Dems as nominees in places like Texas or Ohio). I don’t think it’s a mistake that the messaging was so mealy mouthed. It’s not quite a “one true Scotsman” issue but it’s not a mistake to me that over and over again the so called “moderate” position is talking points out of the 90s that make “Inside the beltway” pundits happy and no one else. You make a persuasive case that a) these senators are noting being “moderate” and b) being “moderate” does not mean folding a winning hand. But I think you need to ask the question, do the senators in question think they did the “moderate” thing here? Because if the answer is yes than I think you need to reckon with that answer.
100% agree here. Upon further reflection, although I definitely wanted Dems to continue the fight thru the holidays, I recognized that Trump was unlikely to fold on ACA subsidies (and Dems should probably be grateful for this, politically speaking), so I'm not necessarily opposed to a (temporary) off ramp like we got thru Jan. But for fucks sake, coordinate some decent messaging: Angus King was beyond pathetic.
And to be clear, I say all this as a relatively suffering furloughed Fed, with a wife who was recently RIFed and significant medical expenses for both her and a very sick dog.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/13-thoughts-on-the-end-of-the-shutdown/comment/175677109
King: "Standing up to Trump didn't work."
Actual, literal quote. Just astounding stuff.
I saw this clip and genuinely wondered if some of his staffers needed to be fired when he said this Because my first thought to either Kind or the staffers was "who in god's name are you listening to or reading to help guide your decisions on this issue?! Because whoever that might is either a strict GOP partisan or an absolute imbecile"
I am afraid in this case that the boyars know perfectly well what's what and have tried to convey it to the czar, who is nuts.
I'm not sure I agree that Democrats would have continued to have a winning hand. If flight disruptions had rippled through the Thanksgiving holiday, that would have enraged the public. Who would they have blamed? I dunno, but I think it's hard to assume it wouldn't be the party who kept voting "no." A key Trump asset here was Sean Duffy. He comes across on TV (and I don't know boo about his actual politics) as entirely reasonable and competent. If he's out there explaining why you can't get to Grandma's for Thanksgiving, does that help the Democrats? Color me skeptical. It's one thing for the public to say they support the Democratic argument in the abstract. It's another when they're sitting in LaGuardia for 8 hours.
I think "chaos in the nation's airports is a golden opportunity for the secretary of transportation" is maybe a teensy bit galaxy-brained.
I bet not one voter in 30 knows who Sean Duffy is. I’m a political junkie and I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.
I think this is true, but if the air travel situation got really bad I bet a lot of people would get familiar with him
Plus, he's a former reality TV guy, so there are people who know him from that and would turn around and go, "wait, why is he in charge of American transportation now?"
Airport lines were already hours deep for weeks. It would have worked, the public would not have spontaneously wised up to reality.
Not at any airport I flew through during the shutdown.
I feel like you can just repeat “Republicans have a majority. They can re-open the government any time they want.”
"Tim Kaine was on the bubble, but joined the dealmakers at the last minute because he got Republicans to make concessions protecting federal workers from Trump’s efforts at mass layoffs. Again, I think it’s totally comprehensible that a Virginia politician would consider this concrete policy win very important. I wish he saw it otherwise, but it illustrates the actual dynamic here, which is that dealmakers were prioritizing policy outcomes while rejectionists wanted to accept a worse policy outcome for the sake of political combat."
I am generally in favor of the "long-term political positioning > short-term policy wins that might be undone anyway without the longer-term political positioning" message of the larger post but...I have a hard time with this. If I knew my career were being anted up as a chip in the pile of partisan hardball, I don't think I would see this as "well, at least I'm being sacrificed for a good cause."
I checked in with the one relative I have who is a federal worker. He was working without pay, and he is not paid nearly enough for a missed paycheck, let alone several, to not hurt, and he's not particularly political. But he was in favor of holding out longer both for whatever short term gains might have been available, and for long term damage to Trump. The degree of animosity felt by government workers towards Trump personally cannot be understated.
Is this different than a union counseling its workers to keep holding out on a strike?
The correct understanding of the situation is that there is nothing to sacrifice. Federal employees do not have "careers" under this administration; they have, at best, the opportunity to do evil for a paycheck. That's mercenary recruitment, nothing more, and Democrats should not be enabling it.
I realize that there is a strong desire on the part of people like Kaine to pretend that we still have a civil service, whistleblower protections, etc etc but that is demonstrably false and if wishes were fishes we'd all be eating free sushi for dinner. They need to get their heads out of their asses, and the fact that they cannot or will not do so means they need to be shivved and thrown overboard.
Unless you truly believe there will never be federal elections ever again, this is a really nutty position to take
Do you know how many employees illegally fired by this administration have been reinstated through normal channels? Here's a hint: the Merit Systems Protection Board hasn't issued a decision since late March, because it has no quorum, because the Supreme Court allowed Trump to strip it of a quorum by firing the Democratic Board member.
Total resistance and non-cooperation is the only correct game-theoretic response to this administration.
I'm not disagreeing with your assertion that federal employment has become a lot more precarious under Donald Trump. That seems obviously true.
What I take issue with is your characterization of federal employment as simply "the opportunity to do evil for a paycheck" and what appears to be the implication that all these people should simply walk off the job tomorrow. We should just have FBI agents conducting homicide investigations or counter-espionage missions, Medicare employees processing claims, sailors conducting FON operations in the South China Sea, Foreign Service Officers aiding American citizens abroad, federal judges overseeing active litigation, and doctors treating veterans, quit tomorrow?
Again, if that's a fair characterization of your position, I think that's nutty. The point of having a democracy is so that you don't have to have a war of succession every time a bad leader comes to power. You just vote them out instead.
You're hearing things I didn't say here.
The calculus of when, exactly, Joe Blow, Federal Employee should quit his position is a complex one. From a financial standpoint I would generally advise people to do what I did, which is to look for similar work with a different level of government or the private sector and quit as soon as you've found it (which may take a while). Some jobs (e.g. Foreign Service Officer) simply don't have civilian analogues at all and I don't have a good answer for those folks. Certainly no one should be staying in their position out of the delusion that they can do good things in this administration; working as a Trump mercenary means that at any moment you may be required to sacrifice your honor, ethics, or adherence to the law in order to keep getting paid.
But that's not what we're discussing here. What we're discussing here is how much value CONGRESS should place on the theory that by funding executive branch* operations, they are funding Good Things In Society that counteract the evil the administration is doing with that funding. My position is that Congress should value that at zero because any theoretical funding of Good Things exists solely at the unilateral sufferance of Trump's fascists.
*Obviously this logic does not apply to legislative or judicial branch employees that don't work for Trump, and I'm not sure why you're conflating those situations.
A mailman is "doing evil for a paycheck"? A forest ranger in Yellowstone? A NASA scientist? A second grade teacher at a school for DOD dependents? The guy at the Bureau of Weights and Measures who revises standards for copier paper or something? All of these people are basically Eichmann?
All of those people are-- to the extent that they are allowed to do anything of social value at all (I question, e.g., whether a second-grade teacher who isn't allowed to mention that gay people exist is actually doing social good)-- doing it at the pure sufferance of fascists. The fascists can end that sufferance at any time. Making a soi-disant "deal" that says "the fascists get to keep teaching kids that gay people don't exist if they want to and not if they don't" is protecting nothing; all it is doing is giving the fascists more options.
The Supreme Court has essentially (they're too cowardly to say so explicitly, but one can read between the lines of their stay orders) told us that Trump can do anything he wants, law and appropriations be damned. The necessary corollary to that is that any promises Trump makes, or his lackeys make, are worthless because he can go back on them at any time. Dems both practically cannot and strategically should not engage in any sort of "dealmaking" that binds them but not the opposing party.
This is the most 'heads I win, tails you lose' nonsense Matt has *ever* indulged in. Pure sophistry. He even worked a defense of Sinema in there!
Look, Matt's ideas are gone. His brain has been poisoned by social media. His stated goal is for Democrats to copy the tactics of retreat and failure that have shot Labor to the commanding 18% total approval rating they currently enjoy in Britain. But it turns out the electing self-consciously moderate democrats who govern with their fingers permanently in the wind and with no desire to actually win anything is a *really bad plan*. And now Matt is trying to squirm out of the very obvious outcome of his very bad plan by pointing the finger and saying 'no actually these people are progressives not moderates'.
But it *also* turns out that nominating self-consciously progressive Democrats who adopt unpopular progressive policy positions in a country in which only 25% of people identify as liberal/progressive and in which the Senate exists that gives a heavy advantage to rural states is also a *really bad plan*.
Yeah, the problem for Democrats is that moderates and leftists keep going back and forth between two plans: (a) Democrats can "moderate" and pretend to be something they're not, or (b) very proudly reveal themselves to be who they actually are. Each faction correctly identifies the weakness in the other's plan but fails to spot the futility of their own.
The Democrats are just stuck with personnel who will always struggle to win an election, so really the only viable plan is (c) wait for Republicans to fuck up, which actually does work pretty often.
What makes you think moderate is something Dems are not?
Listening to them speak and watching their actions...
It’s my impression that the moderate Dems are actually moderate (by the “not making the perfect the enemy of the good” and “we have to win” metrics). I saw many of them capitulating to the pressure of “the groups” before this election. Some felt obliged to say things they didn’t really believe, but a number just felt obliged to say things they believed but knew (or realized a little too late) were bad for their chances nationally. IMO, believing that, say, government bans on trans youth medical care are wrong, but refraining from campaigning on it - even equivocating when asked - because that will help you win elections is the mark of a moderate. Ditto making necessary compromises in order to get something instead of nothing, regardless of your core beliefs.
Here's a thought-- we could elect better moderates.
Mark Carney turned around a seemingly impossible political situation by moderating some policy stances while simultaneously, and credibly, making clear that he was going to tell Trump to go fuck himself. That's not "finger in the wind" governance, it's taking a politically strong position and sticking to it.
That's a far better strategy than taking wild activist-driven merits stances and then caving on them because you're terrified of the consequences of sticking to your guns.
I mean yes, people are willing to put up with people moderating on policy if they're strong. Again, this is why Newsom is currently leading primary polls despite doing lots of things progressives didn't like.
The issue is the Senate is full of people obsessed with the comity of the Senate and seemingly DC specifics, not standing strong.
To be hit-you-over-the-head clear here, I have no truck with those people, hence why I said we needed to elect better moderates. The Tim Kaines of the world should be given a gold watch and politely hustled off to the nursing homes where they belong.
The issue is there are no evidence there are actually 'better moderates' available. Because I see no actual evidence that the moderates Matt likes were actually against caving, they just didn't want to be the people taking the political hit.
Well then we'd better go out and find them!
I'm certainly open to the idea that moderation is correlated-- even heavily correlated-- with pathetic loserhood. But, as Carney has shown, the correlation is not one hundred percent.
I'm not a moderate though. I'm a social democrat with out of touch crazy woke ideas that'll never work, or so every DNC consultant has said.
The moderates and centrists have told me over and over I'm stupid and shut up, so I'm going to do that and let all the think tanks that popped up after Kamala lost by the narrowest margin since 2000 to say the Democrats and Groups are doing everything wrong to find all these obvious moderate candidates that have been held back by the crazy progressives.
I agree! It's why Matt's desire to champion spineless moderates like Jared Golden as 'the true way forward' is so frustrating. You have to come up with a way to be substantively moderate while also being ferociously anti-Trump and procedurally aggressive. Jared Golden's opponent got traction *because* Golden went wimpy on Trump.
As much as I dislike him, Newsome is making noises like a fighter. The reason most moderates aren't doing that is that they're listening to idiots who have been convinced that Trump has achieved some massive realignment of American politics because they are being brain-poisoned by mainlining right-wing propaganda on twitter.
It's not hard to come up with new ideas right now. Matt's just not doing it, and it's massively disappointing, as someone who used to read him as an 'ideas guy'.
The “No true moderate” fallacy
I don’t think he called them progressives? He just said that they aren’t moderating.
“A is not B” + “C is not B” does not equate to “A equals C”.
I don't know any other way to read "This wasn’t the Washington Generals blundering away a game for no reason. It was earnest progressive Democrats trying to deliver the least-bad substantive policy outcome." than as 'No True Scotsman'.
I would appreciate hearing your theory of change – what is our least bad idea for a strategy that produces a probable if not guaranteed Democratic majority and presidency?
Glad you asked. I would apply a laser focus to the fact that the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, is 1) bankrupting our country 2) the most corrupt in history 3) in the process of handing our country over to billionaires, Russians, and Saudis 4) aiming to destroy our way of life in this country 5) deserving of absolute and total resistance in every way shape or form. I would encourage accepting a whole lot of divergence on almost any other issue(s) but I would apply an iron-sharp focus to the fact that Trump and his people hate Americans for our freedom and need to be destroyed, completely and totally, without any chance of returning.
Given the polling, this sets Democrats up well for gains in the Midterms. It also sets up the argument for using the 14th Amendment to permanently remove every single Republican Senator, Representative, and Judge who supported Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow our government. I don't really see why being a MAGA Republican should be legal after this - treat an attempted destruction of American Democracy as what it was, and make sure none of these fuckers ever sees even a shred of power ever again. It should have been done in 2021, and it must be done in 2029.
Matt keeps urging Democrats to moderate, but there’s no real urgency for them to do it. Trump is sitting at –13, and Democrats are +4.6 on the generic ballot. That’s not a wave — it’s not how you build a Senate majority — but it is enough to keep almost every incumbent safe and to protect most frontline House members. The last time Democrats held 50 Senate seats, it took a once-in-a-century pandemic to pull it off, and they’ve learned nothing from that. Comfort breeds stasis: with numbers like these, no one in leadership feels pressure to change a thing.
"the last time... Once in a century pandemic"
They also held it a mere 8 years prior in 2012.
And " the last time" was only two cycles ago.
It's hard, but your phrasing makes it seem much rarer
But democratic really slid to the left since 2012
The interesting question, and my intended insinuation, is it now takes huge flukes for Dems to win a senate majority. Given that even once in a century norm breaking by Trump does not have Dems as favorites in 2026, the bar is very high for Democrats to win, and it really will take once in a century type things. Of course a once in a century type crisis happens every couple decades (there are many kinds of crises- depressions, wars, pandemics, insurrections- there’s probably an 8% chance any given cycle has some sort of important “once in a century” dynamic.
I'm generally OK with moderating to win elections conceptually - but one issue I have with this is that part of what makes some members "moderate" is the rhetorical stance they take towards the rest of the party.
E.g. Manchin didn't just oppose certain of the Dems' policy positions, he spent a lot of time talking about how the Democrats generally are too far left, often echoing Republican rhetoric in doing so, and positioning himself as in the center between the two extremes. IIRC he didn't endorse Clinton or Harris, and in 2024 formally became an independent.
I worry that this rhetorical stance is a bigger part of his moderate cred than specific policy positions ... and so trying to have a "more moderates" party just means having more people on the national stage saying "I'm a Democrat and *even I* think Dems are wrong about XYZ"
Manchin was essentially undermining the national Dem brand to boost himself - OK to win a Senate race in WV, but I don't think that works if it's like 30 of your 50 Senators.
Why not? The alternative is that you just don’t get to have senators in about 2/3 of the country.
If you wish to have a majority in the senate, your NATIONAL brand has to actually adopt some majority opinions.
Put it this way - you can moderate on something like fracking, but an example of a "more moderate" opinion that Republicans agree with, that it wouldn't help Democrats to adopt, is "voting for Democrats is bad".
If Joe Manchin goes on TV and says "don't ban fracking", fine. But if he goes on TV and says "don't vote for Democrats" - bad! Even if he includes "other than me" at the end.
I'm very biased because my spouse and my I are both Federal workers in Northern VA, and especially because my spouse's entire office was about to be laid off if not for the last minute protections Tim Kaine negotiated into the deal. So, Tim Kaine saved my family's livelihood and career prospects, so, selfishly, big thanks, Tim!
But less selfishly: Large scale unilateral (and almost certainly illegal) government layoffs are bad, and stopping them is good, not just for us Feds but also for the country! Who does the weather forecasts? Who does the disaster response? Who provides the economics data? Matt cares about this stuff --- he's written about the importance of good econ data, and about the need for better state capacity. Well, one way to preserve both those things is to stop the unilateral layoffs of career civil servants.
I am very frustrated by the "Dems cached for nothing" line. Maybe it's not a ton, but no federal layoffs is (1) not nothing, and (2) not just a carve out to a specific constituency.
As far as I can tell the soi-disant prohibition against layoffs is a. completely unenforceable, and b. only applies until January anyway, so I would not exactly start taking those resumes down just yet.
Over the weekend I was driving with my wife and we were talking about the build up of housing in the area. She told me she hates it, thinks it's ugly and blah blah. I kept my mouth shut as I know she votes for pro-housing candidates ... For about 5 minutes...when I quizzed her on her voting response, her response was "it's the right thing to do even though I personally hate the aesthetic, people need to be housed"
I think the same argument stands here. There's a morally right thing to do even though sometimes we hate the result. It's right that people get fed. The distinction is important.
I'd much rather vote for a party with those values rather than some vague sense of winning.
Democrats need to realize that they won and won big.
1) The #1 goal is taking back the house in 2026 and they want to go into the midterm telling voters "We fought hard to give you better healthcare while Trump had all the money he needed for tax cuts, the military, ICE, and nothing for the working class and their health care"
2) Trump cares nothing about deficits and likes giving people free money and things. $2k checks? No tax on tips? Trump could change his mind and fund those Obamacare subsidies and look like a hero. Enough Republicans would get in line. Then Democrats would realize what they lost after it happened.
3) Saving the filibuster is all-important at this moment. People seem to forget that Trump has 3 more years left, and people are opening wondering if we'll have fair elections in 2028. Who exactly is thinking "Let's remove one of the last guardrails so we might have an easier time after 2028?" This is insanity.
People who want to rage scream until 2028 are unsatisfied, but those people need to grow up and operate against a plan that makes sense.
The filibuster is a pretty flimsy guardrail for “no more elections”. It can be nuked at any time!
The filibuster doesn't stop anything that the majority party actually wants to happen. It just gives the majority an excuse not to do things it doesn't want to do anyway. The rest is procedural mumbo-jumbo for political junkies.
Wearing my small, non-eningeering hat, as an election official, I despair at how many people--even people who seem to be mostly on the ball about most things--think that the conduction of elections is a federal question at all.
I mean, it can be if Congress wants it to be-- they could absolutely pass a law completely stripping states of any role in running federal elections and federalizing the whole process, and the Constitution would allow that.
They don't WANT to because it's a pain in the ass to have duplicative election bureaucracy. But the fact that it'd be bad policy doesn't mean it's not a federal question.
The #1 goal should not be winning the House, it should be winning the Senate. If Democrats could win the Senate it would make #3 irrelevant at this moment. If Democrats could win both the House and Senate in 2026, then it changes the entire structural debate as Trump is a lame duck and likely seen a sinking ship.
I really don't believe that th senate is a guardrail at all as long as it does not govern. The filibuster just encourages Trump to govern unilaterally
I want to give you 2/3 of a like. The first two points are right and this was a win in terms of framing without taking a hit. Having the Republicans nuke the filibuster to pass a budget would have been a win too, both politically for the short term and for the long run, because no filibuster is better for Dems in the long run as the party that likes to do stuff.
There is a difference between being a moderate, and, like Mamdani, moderating your statements of your positions when it suits yourself better.
A moderate is someone, unlike progressives, who can actually listen to people who believe differently from themselves, can take their concerns seriously, and can work to find common areas. Progressives, however, look down on people different from them (e.g., "low information voters," "voting against their own interests," etc. etc.). They look down on law enforcement, baby boomers, males, white people, etc.
When you can truly see how other people feel and truly validate their views then you find positions that are moderate. You are not (in the common, and boring, current parlance) "fighting" with your opponent.
Jesus was a moderate. He understood and sympathized with all. He didn't "fight." He listened.
THAT's what a moderate is.
I agree with your characterization of political moderates.
Jesus was in no way a moderate. He was a working on the sabbath, hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors, table overturning, miracle claiming, end time predicting preacher who proposed huge revisions to then existing Judaism and told everyone to leave their families and follow his cult movement. People were constantly furious at him! He got executed by the authorities of his own religion!
Depending on your view he was either (I) a radical reformer with a cult of personality or (ii) Literal God setting things right. Moderate is an Odd Take!
He loved everyone. What an "odd take."
Go read the Sermon on the Mount.
p.s. "hanging out with prostitutes." As if that's the something you are saying that dismisses him.
My wife was in a group of five women who were the first female police officers in Seattle, so probably in the same state, in 1975. The women had to meet the same requirements, even physically, that the men did. There were 2200 applicants. 29 were selected. She graduated 3rd.
She did some of her most amazing work with female victims of sex crimes. You wouldn't believe it, and believe the danger she was constantly in.
Early in her career she noticed that they were only arresting prostitutes, never the men, so she asked for permission to do a sting. Well, it was like shooting fish in a barrel (and still would be). But in her work, and in mine as a community psychologist, you learn that "prostitutes" are desperate and abused girls.
For you to talk ill of them, as if Jesus was hanging out with "low lifes" is really something, and makes all of your other points irrelevant in our books.
Also wasn’t speaking ill of sex workers or tax farmers. I was making the point that in the context of Jesus’s day that would be seen as keeping bad company and very unpopular with many people.
He did it anyway as part of his general project radical love for those despised by society. My dude wasn’t triangulating and meeting public opinion where it was.
Feels like you just assumed “radical” is in all events an insult and didn’t read a word I said which was, in fact, a defense of Jesus’s actual views and deeds.
I'm not assuming "radical" is bad. Jesus was the ultimate radical of the entire existence of human beings.
One can be radically moderate. We feel we are. Nobody seems to "get us" that we can see both sides, take all peoples' concerns seriously (we stop at racism and antisemitism). When we make comments we are almost always (not with you---thanks) thrown into the extremes of one camp or another. Know how many times we have been accused of being MAGAs or "lib-tards?" It's because we are liberals, who are not bound by any tribe in terms of our beliefs. In fact, we believe we are much freer than most people are for that reason.
Over and over again we have seen us (not just our views, which would be fine) hated. Hated because we see both sides and value people on all sides.
We feel our views are very very radical. But we end up politically being moderates for that reason.
And as my wife says: "you know when you are a liberal...it's when everyone hates you."
this has been a real discussion. Thanks.
I have! Many times! Loving everyone is in fact a very radical thing to do! That’s what makes it impressive!
From memory, the sermon starts by saying the most despised and persecuted are the most blessed, and you should rejoice when you are persecuted on earth, because you will be rewarded for it in heaven.
Then he talks about how he isn’t changing any of the law, but is in fact making it even more strict in his fulfillment of it. Anger is as bad as murder! Lust is as bad as committed adultery!
Love your enemies! Let them hit you! If someone strikes you turn the other cheek so they can hit that one too! Stop praying publicly (which is, like, a Big Deal in Judaism)!
I mean I could go on but none of this is moderate advice. It’s a worldview of radical love towards fellow man and devotion to God far beyond what is normally (moderately) morally expected of people. Love your friends and neighbors, sure, but your enemies??? Never get mad???.
The whole thing is leading up to his point that nobody (except perhaps Jesus himself) is capable of living up to the law as RADICALLY interpreted by Christ, hence the need for his intercession and sacrifice.
Who, on either side of the political spectrum extremes "loves their neighbors?" They attribute horrible motives to them.
Jesus, like today's moderates, did. They take everyone seriously, like Jesus did. Look at Spencer Cox for an example of a moderate who refuses to engage in the ever popular (these days) "fighting" against Trump or "fighting" against woke.
He was a radical because he was a moderate in a time of constant brutality and warfare. He didn't join in. He saw both sides as being people who are worthy of being loved. NOBODY on the left or right does that now, which is why they aren't moderate.
Against all odds, this is a really good point. I do hope you apply a similar level of criticism to the GOPs more extreme members.
Darned right we do!
Moderates are just people with views in the centre of the political spectrum. It’s entirely possible to be a moderate and still be snobbish and elitist, holding voters in contempt. It’s also entirely possible to be politically extreme (whether progressive, conservative or anarcho-syndicalist) and be down to earth, willing to engage with people and keen to find common cause.
i'd say a lot of elite centrists have incredible contempt for normie suburban liberals.
Here are some data that may cause you to reflect on your assertion. People on the left are FOUR times as likely to say that political differences are good enough reasons to break things off with your family than are people on the right. People on the left are NOT "willing to engage."
What, precisely, is a "view in the centre of the political spectrum?"
And what are some examples of moderates being snobbish and elitist that compare in ANY, WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM with the elitism shown by people on the left who consider voters different from them to be "low information voters?"
Sorry, but being a moderate is a liberal view of life. And a winning one.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/gradual-change-is-fing-awesomeand?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It's also possible Mamdani realized he was wrong about the police and changed his mind.
(Pity about his other positions)
Possible, but I don't believe it
Did he ever say: "I was wrong?"
Look at his speech after winning.
"Safety and justice will go hand in hand as we work with police officers to reduce crime and create a Department of Community Safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crises head on."
This is the same tired old junk from progressives who wanted to "defund the police." Send money from policing to social workers. THAT is defunding.
(know what else is a hoot about this: Starting in 1977 I worked in Illionois for 30 years as a psychologist. We ALWAYS had mental health crisis teams that accompanied the police.....I worked with these teams all of my career. People like Mamdani and other progressives act like they invented the idea.
"Safety and justice" means there hasn't been "justice."
He didn't change. He is spouting a different, and vaguer idea, but even then he couldn't really be honest. He's a charmer, and that's what he has gotten by on.
I want to say to all police officers in NYC. Come to Arizona. We truly value you.