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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.”
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 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.]
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).
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.
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.
Nope I'm in agreement with you. Matt wanted to see Dems holdout to the bitter end seeing as though healthcare is a winning issue for the party politically. After that it kind of meandered a bit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately that doesn't disprove Sean as definitively as one might like, b/c UCSD admits about 10k people/year, and (2% of 11k) is about 200 people.
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.
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.
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.
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 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’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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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 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.
My problem with the analysis here is the notion that the Democrats held a “winning hand”. It is true that the polls showed that Republicans were being blamed more than the Democrats up to the time of the “deal”, but there is no assurance that sentiment would have continued as the shutdown disrupted Thanksgiving and consigned federal workers to more months without pay. Perhaps the Republicans would have eventually dumped the filibuster, so I guess Slow Boring would have considered that a win. I am not convinced about that.
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.
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.
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*.
Even it it was a "mistake" to fold, isn't having some Senators who will buck leadership a path toward the more popularist leadership on other issues in the future?
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.
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.
Errr maybe that’s why we keep losing
There’s no “for better” there.
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
I thought it was all private chats now.
This is not true.
Sounds about right. So he needs to explain where he's coming from for those of us whose headspaces are filled with other things.
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?
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.
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.
Republicans could have ended it at any time with zero Dem votes.
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."
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.
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?
I said that the hardship argumetn should not primarily be about federal workers.
How many times have we heard that from the Wall Street Journal "let them eat cake" crowd. How disgusting.
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
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.
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.
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 think the SNAP hits at least were unexpected given that historically (even under Trump) they continued during a shutdown.
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.
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.
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.”
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 thought this was just more of, "More thoughts on the shutdown deal" post. Not really coherent, just the thoughts in his head.
It did feel kind of stream of consciousness.
The whole post is a velleity because he never specifies what mechanism will make Dems more moderate.
TIL a new word!
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!
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).
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.
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.
I wouldn't put it quite like that, but this piece did seem unusually muddled for Matt.
Nope I'm in agreement with you. Matt wanted to see Dems holdout to the bitter end seeing as though healthcare is a winning issue for the party politically. After that it kind of meandered a bit.
One thing MattY is discounting is the possibility of Republicans getting a good message or pivot point the longer the shutdown goes.
I am just interested to see how much this affects the president’s poll numbers in the longer term.
Hah this was my exact reaction too. A rare miss - from a writing perspective in particular - from Matt.
Me either. Go with the flow regardless of the morality behind it, I guess.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 11k) is about 200 people.
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.
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.
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 simple addition and basic algebra, but maybe I am too old-school.
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.
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.
"it seems pretty unfair to...advantage you because your ancestors were privileged but not underprivileged."
Isn't that what "privileged" means? An unfair advantage?
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 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’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.
The good thing about economic fights is they are fights over figures and that enables more compromise than on moral questions
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.
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.
"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."
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 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
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
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 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.
My problem with the analysis here is the notion that the Democrats held a “winning hand”. It is true that the polls showed that Republicans were being blamed more than the Democrats up to the time of the “deal”, but there is no assurance that sentiment would have continued as the shutdown disrupted Thanksgiving and consigned federal workers to more months without pay. Perhaps the Republicans would have eventually dumped the filibuster, so I guess Slow Boring would have considered that a win. I am not convinced about that.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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*.
Even it it was a "mistake" to fold, isn't having some Senators who will buck leadership a path toward the more popularist leadership on other issues in the future?
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.