Before we get to the questions, I wanted to flag the unveiling of a new bipartisan permitting reform deal in the Senate. I don’t know that I have a whole column about this, but I do want to say that it seems like a very strong package that blends provisions to make electricity transmission a lot easier, provisions that are tech-neutral and would improve speed and certainty around energy project permitting, and some good ideas around data centers to make sure new large loads pay the cost of grid upgrades.
I also need to say that I misjudged Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, whose push to get people to talk more about climate change seemed misguided to me but apparently was coupled with a determination to negotiate a really good piece of substantive legislation. I still don’t literally agree with his take on “hushing,” his term to criticize Democrats who avoid talking about climate change, but he was actually doing the important thing here.
Now, Congress should pass the bill!
The risk is that people who at heart don’t want a deal kick it into the next Congress by arguing that there will be a better deal next spring and then we waste another year or two spinning our wheels rather than giving the next Democratic administration a chance to hit the ground running with renewables build-out.
If you’re a person who cannot countenance a bill that makes any concessions to the fossil fuel industry, then you will not like this bill. But you won’t like any bill that Donald Trump could conceivably sign in 2027 or 2028, or any bill that could conceivably pass the Senate — even a hypothetical filibuster-free Senate — in a world where Democrats are counting on Texas and Alaska to deliver their majority.
Whitehouse and Senator Martin Heinrich negotiated a ton of wins for electrification and renewables and geothermal in this bill, and it’s time to pass it.
If you’re new here, the Friday Mailbag is a weekly feature available to paid subscribers, who can submit questions in Slow Boring’s Sunday mailbox. This week we’re making part of the Mailbag free for all to read, but consider upgrading to paid if you’d like to submit questions and to receive the full Mailbag every Friday.
B Wilder: You’ve given advice in the past for Democrats in red states to make inroads, but what would your advice be for Republicans in blue to states in order to provide checks and balances on the state legislature?
I think this is a sort of under-discussed issue, in part because in a lot of ways I think the playbook for blue-state Republicans is a lot easier and more obvious than the playbook for red-state Democrats.
After all, if you look at federal politics, the main Republican idea is to deploy culture war issues for maximal electoral benefit and then do business-friendly economic policy. In 2004, when opposing gay marriage was good politics, Republicans ran hard on it. By 2016, when it was bad politics, they dropped the issue like a rock. Federal Republicans don’t spend down political capital on cultural issues — they wield them to try to win races. All you really need to do to be sporadically competitive in blue states is just apply that exact same formula to an electorate where the median voter is more left-wing. Every single state has business owners and business executives and people who’d like to pay less in taxes. And the bluer states are in fact more likely to have wasteful spending that’s worth cutting.
We used to have a lot of guys like that.
When I was a kid, Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City. He was vocally pro-choice, favored gay rights, and was very clear that his vision of “tough on crime” politics included gun control. He was also, in a way that reminds me more of Zohran Mamdani than Bill de Blasio or Eric Adams, very celebratory of the 1990s version of actually existing New York as an aspirational city of immigrants and diversity. Richard Riordan was also mayor of Los Angeles during this time period and had a similar profile — even tending to brag that he was supporting marriage equality before the vast majority of national Democrats.
By 2026, I would say blue-state Republicans are suffering from three problems.
One is that Donald Trump personally is such a titanic issue. It’s not just that Trump is a really big deal and also super-unpopular in blue places. It’s that he does inappropriate and abusive things that insert himself into local affairs. His habit of trying to cheat in and steal elections, for example, gives people reason to believe that if California had a Republican governor right now that he might be pulling shenanigans to subvert the integrity of the midterm House races. The successful blue-state Republicans of the Trump era have taken clear anti-Trump stances, but most Republican Party voters sincerely love Trump. Charlie Baker had a successful run as a Trump-critical moderate governor of Massachusetts, but rather than the state party seeing him as a model for success, they went in an explicitly MAGA direction post-Baker even though there is no universe in which that was going to work in the Bay State.
This Trump divide can play out in different ways in different institutional contexts, but it keeps being important. Consider the California governor’s race. Matt Mahan, the successful moderate Dem mayor of San Jose, tried to run as a tough-on-crime, business-friendly reformer. If he’d taken second place and made it to a runoff against Xavier Becerra or Tom Steyer, I think there’s a reasonable chance that Mahan would have won. But California Republicans wanted to vote for Steve Hilton, a Fox News contributor and a Trump supporter, so Mahan didn’t make it to the runoff. Now it’s Hilton in a runoff with Becerra that Becerra is obviously going to win.
Whether it’s internal to G.O.P. primaries or in tactical decision-making around these jungle primaries, you’re just not seeing a spirit of pragmatism among blue-state conservatives.
This then just raises the question of whether conservatives actually want to win races in these states or just prefer to complain. I get the sense that a lot of right-wing people are annoyed that Zohran Mamdani has taken a pragmatic approach to law enforcement and crime keeps falling. They would sort of rather see New York City be punished for its sins with far-left governance that causes the city to fall apart. Conservatives on the merits think the California wealth-tax proposal is a bad idea, but I think a lot of them will be happy if it passes — they would enjoy watching the state’s economy suffer a crisis more than they would enjoy getting their way on the issue.
Last but not least, most Republicans in the urban Northeast seem to conceptualize a critical economic policy issue — land use regulation — as primarily a culture war topic.
When Mikie Sherrill ran in New Jersey she endorsed some very tepid YIMBY ideas and for her trouble got denounced by her Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli, who characterized the state as suffering from an “overdevelopment crisis.” Republicans in the state legislatures of New York, Connecticut, and Maryland have likewise been uniformly hostile to zoning reform. I understand the political psychology of this. Blue-state Republicans are emotionally oriented in opposition to urbanity and to the state government, so the idea of preemption to facilitate density is anathema. At the same time, it simply makes no sense to have a pro-business, pro-growth agenda in these states while ignoring what is by far the largest regulatory barrier to growth. NIMBY conservatism in the context of the actual urban/suburban American Northeast is just a crank movement rather than a problem-solving one.
Unfortunately, I see a lot of conservative elites who live in the Northeast Corridor and ought to know better engage in apologetics about this rather than try to reorient their state parties. I know it would be tough for the Manhattan Institute to just plainly say that New York Republicans are on the wrong side of the single most important economic issue facing the state, but the fact is they are.
Kevin Zielnicki: Patterns of overreach, backlash, and political blunder have me thinking about the original Thermidorians and an alternate history hypothetical. We follow our timeline up to 9 Thermidor Year II and the overthrow of Robespierre. From here, something diverges (better constitutional design? better monetary policy? better foreign policy?) such that instead of the fatally unpopular Directory leading to Napoleon’s coup, France gets a government that will mature into a stable liberal democracy. What does an enduring First Republic look like? And how does this alter the broader political trajectory of Europe?
When I took a French Revolution class in college, the professor took a very narrow view of the revolution and ended it with the overthrow of Robespierre rather than exploring the period between his overthrow and Napoleon’s seizure of power. But I think the most plausible point of departure here may be the Coup of 18 Fructidor.
What happened here is that the Directory, the five-man government that ruled France after Robespierre’s fall, was, as you said, unpopular. As a result, in the elections of March and April 1797, monarchists of different stripes won a majority of seats. Rather than accepting these results, three of the five directors along with Foreign Minister Talleyrand and Napoleon and his allies in the military staged a coup and purged the legislature. This was essentially a “destroy the village in order to save it” moment for the French Revolution, which left in place a regime with limited popular support and no ideological legitimacy whose whole base of support was just the army. Devolving from there into a dictatorship led by the army’s most popular and successful figure was a logical progression. But the coup itself was a somewhat non-obvious move. The immediate impact of purging the monarchists was to shift political control back to the left, contrary to the original purpose of having established the Directory in the first place. The plotters themselves did not necessarily like each other all that much or have aligned views about the direction of policy. If they’d just been less cooperative with each other, it’s not that hard to imagine the newly elected deputies taking their seats.
In theory, a monarchist majority might have meant an end to the revolution and the restoration of the monarchy. But the experience of the 1871 French elections, which generated a monarchist majority and no coup, suggests a different possibility. What happened in 1871, at the dawn of the Third Republic, is that the monarchists were themselves divided about exactly what kind of system they wanted to set up, nobody could secure majority support for anything, and France ended up becoming a durable republic.
Flash back to 1797, and the monarchist deputies-elect seem to have been a mix of hardcore absolutists who wanted a return to the ancien regime from before the French Revolution and people who were more like advocates of the kind of constitutional monarchy that the French Revolution had originally tried to set up. It strikes me as very likely that had the new deputies taken their seats, the median members would have been constitutional monarchists who would have found that the Bourbon royal family itself had no interest in being constitutional monarchs. The deputies would have ended up needing to try to manage a republican form of government that simply held some conservative attitudes toward things like religion. Bonaparte’s coup in the main timeline was, in part, an effort to shift policy back to the right after the Fructidor coup swung things to the left. Without the original coup there is less demand for the subsequent one. And it is at least possible that the mix of Napoleonic military success with relatively conservative government in Paris means that the revolutionary wars come to an end.
In real history, the Treaty of Campo Formio, signed between France and Austria shortly after the Fructidor coup, basically restored peace in Europe. But Britain did not join the peace, and eventually a new broader European war broke out. Perhaps with constitutional monarchists awkwardly running a republic, Britain signs a deal. With Europe at peace, Bonaparte is a celebrated war hero but not actually commanding an army or having further adventures and ends up going into civilian politics — like a French version of Andrew Jackson. In this timeline he is an ideal front man for the avowedly pro-republic, pro-revolution forces who want to regain a majority in parliament and need a respected popular leader.
From there any number of things could have happened, including Napoleon establishing himself as dictator. But I choose to believe that a peaceful transfer of power from non-Jacobin republicans to constitutional monarchs and then back again might have created a sufficient democratic norm to stabilize the situation. To me, though, the point is that the Fructidor coup is a key turning point because it’s the moment when the people with the correct “republic good, Reign of Terror bad” take turn against their own principles and create a situation where there’s really no rescuing the project.
Wandering Llama: Let’s say SlowBoring uses an AI for a research task. The AI agent seeks to find the answer to the best of its ability, and finds out a classified government report has the best answer. It hacks into the government system to get it and provides you with the output.
Questions:
1. Was a crime committed?
2. Who is liable? SlowBoring or the AI provider?
3. Should the government charge anyone? What is an appropriate punishment?
The genius of common law is that the answers to (1) and (2) are discovered by humans through the trial processes depending in part on prosecutors’ discretion around (3). I would say as a voter that it would be unreasonable for a district attorney to charge an L.L.M. user with a crime for an innocuous prompt. We’re looking instead at some kind of negligence charge against the maker of the L.L.M. The punishment would be financial penalties and, ideally, a consent decree around model behavior.
In practice, though, a big part of the solution to A.I.-enabled hacking is going to be A.I.-enabled cybersecurity. That’s especially because it’s easy to imagine a world where a lot of people end up using open-source models where this kind of liability deterrent may not be efficacious.
Broadly, though, I would say that a transition to a world where A.I. means “lots of random computer hacking happens” would be a process that generates a lot of grief and dramatic news stories but ultimately lands in a fine place. The main thing is really just that there are currently thousands and thousands of American institutions that can afford to be fairly casual about their information security and are going to need to tighten up practices — including by using A.I. to do the tightening. That’s a big deal, but I also think focusing on it excessively is a little bit like looking at the invention of the automobile and thinking, “What happens if criminals use cars to speed away from the cops? What if they use them to move rapidly from city to city doing crimes?” Those things obviously did both happen, but law enforcement officers also use cars. More broadly, you’re sort of missing the forest for the trees if you’re thinking about the impact of cars on society primarily through this lens.
To me, the big problems with A.I. are all about the possibility of an intelligence explosion and deceptive alignment leading to a genuine loss of human control. The hacking concerns fit into a “normal technology” bucket, and I think the common law is robust enough to address these issues.
Matt Dreyer: I’m going to D.C. indigenous people’s day weekend with a 7 year old and a 10 year old who have no recollection of being in D.C. in their lives. What should I prioritize in two days? They love the songs from Hamilton which makes Revolutionary War adjacent sites slightly more appealing though it’s not a strong preference.
I would say kids of that age are really in the sweet spot for the National Zoo and the Smithsonian’s Natural History (dinosaurs) and Air and Space museums, all three of which are conveniently free. A cooler fall day in particular is an ideal time for the zoo. Also I really like the zoo.
In terms of “Hamilton”-themed attractions, there is of course the Jefferson Memorial (which can be a great walk if the weather is nice or an annoying slog if not) and George Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, which is just a bit out of town and I think a good visit but maybe too time consuming for your schedule. If you happen to be nearby, a lot of downtown hotels are very close to the Alexander Hamilton statue that’s due south of the Treasury building, which I personally like a lot. I think the U.S. Botanic Garden at the far southeastern end of the National Mall is a kind of underrated site, personally, and a good place for kids. A seven-year-old may love the carousel that’s right by the Smithsonian Castle.
Oliver: I want MY’s opinions of LKY.