Anyway, thank you for this. At the risk of sounding overly laudatory, SB has been really important in my own intellectual journey from “replacement-level lefty postmodern-ish social scientist” to “maybe-still-replacement-level but much better informed center-left social scientist skeptical of postmodernist intellectual movements, while still seeing their value in some limited respects.” It’s challenged me to be more empirically rigorous in a way that my PhD program did not (to its detriment). So thank you - part of my job is to think about the meaning of “vibe shifts”, but I really appreciate this as a venue for challenging me to think more practically and concretely.
A big part of my experience here is the truly excellent comment section. At the risk of unintentional omissions and in no particular order, all 45 of the Davids and counting, Dan Quail, drosophilist, Casey, John from FL, Kenny Easwaran, Sharty, Binya, SD, ATX Jake, Colin Chaudhuri, Tired PhD Student, Lapsed Pacifist, Randall, lindamc, Bo, Jean, Bronx Zoo Cobra, Wigan, FrigidWind, Mariana Trench, Deadpan Troglodyte, City of Trees, Matt Hagy, Avery James, THpacis, SomeGuy, Lisa J, srynerson, Tom Hitchner, Richard Gadsden, A.D., Casey, Helikitty, disinterested, and dysphemic treadmill, you’re all great and have helped me think better. I am definitely forgetting people, so please don’t take not appearing on this list as a snub!
Edit: I can’t believe I forgot SB folk hero Rory Hester. He is truly a first among equals in the comments section. He doesn’t come around often, but when he does - it’s going to be good.
Thank you! Your (incomplete!) list is a great reminder of how many quality posters there are, and makes me feel bad that I occasionally get frustrated by them.
(Edit: by "them" I meant "the comments section", not specific posters, though of course that happens too.)
Yes. It is too bad that other sites do not have equally good comments sections, in part becasue Substack does not permit authors to offer single post/small batches to encourage comments from people who do not subscribe.
No no no you don't understand, putting your head up your ass was conceived by the State in order to create methods of self-surveillance and convince people to ink the law upon their own soul.
One of the more exotic papers I read in my first-year grad school seminar “Queer Geographies” was called, I shit (ahem) you not, “Is the anus a grave?”
It made sense in context.
Edit: It was “Is the rectum a grave?” by Leo Bersani.
I actually think Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison is both accurate and correct. Great book, 10/10, would participate in the discovery and ordering of a modern society again.
Agreed; Foucault is a convenient target for anti-postmodernist sentiment because he’s the one most educated people have heard of, but a lot of what he says about power is…basically correct. A very important corrective to some of the coarser marxist theories about hegemony, domination and so on.
Of course, like any big thinker, his thought has been taken in directions that are a bit of a stretch, but that's not really due to shortcomings in his thought as such. He had bad takes (defending pedophilia, celebrating the Iranian Revolution) for sure, but, well, so have a lot of major thinkers.
As someone who is diagnosed with ADHD, I've also grappled with his critique of psychiatric medicine, because there sure is a lot of tension to resolve between the utility of naming and categorizing, and the existence of a range of capacity and ability in humans who are nominally equal in society.
Interestingly enough, "replacement-level" is a term I learned hanging around here. It basically means "unremarkable" - someone who's nothing special, perfectly ordinary.
The "lefty postmodern-ish" is basically proto-woke (i.e. woke before the term was widespread). I didn't have many strong opinions when I went to grad school, so I sort of marinated in the general anti-capitalist (and I mean that literally, not as an insult) social justice-y atmosphere and didn't really question it. As a result I actually didn't really learn much about the world, which you'd think a PhD program would teach you about (if anyone wants to take that as an indictment of elite universities or PhD programs in general, I think that's more or less fair, but I would say the fault was at least half with me).
"Postmodern" here is just a sort of blanket term for "vaguely left-wing criticism of capitalism." It's actually more complicated than that, and there is postmodernist theory that's worth a damn in some contexts, but that would be a long and boring discussion.
In even more layperson terms, I basically used to be a totally unoriginal thinker and I think I'm at least a more creative and bright now.
Thanks for this explanation. I thought this is what you meant but just wanted to clarify. A theme that is top-of-mind for me is persuasion and how people change ideologically. I’m also interested in how people see past their echo chamber (e.g., you eventually seeing past the post-modern critique of the campus; me drifting left after growing up in a very conservative setting).
Just want to say I am 2/2 this week on Slow Boring action. Yesterday I emailed my state rep about modifying CT's EV tax credit system. Today I set up recurring weekly donations until 4/1 for the WI Supreme Court race. I will say your calls to action are much more convincing to me personally because of the ITN framework laid out here.
Matt should have a free article listing 5 things you can do right now if you're pissed off about Trump from a big tent perspective.
I live in the northeast and see a ton of people interested in protesting or somehow showing their disapproval of Trump. They have a lot of well meaning intent but I don't think the headline "Bostonians don't like Trump" is going to be news to anyone, so would like to push them in a more productive direction.
Yes, and the "don't buy anything on Day X" is sad. But at least it's not counterproductive as, for example publicly opposing (the more public the worse) fossil fuel production and transportation projects were and one can imagine some "Anti-Trump" protests could be.
Things like the Women's March in 2017 was good as a reminder that Trump lost the popular vote; that same would not be the case now. A public protest over SNAP cuts could be.
It's Machiavellian, but I'm going to hold off on protesting until kids kicked off their meds by the dissolution of PEPFAR to start dying. I really hope there are investigative journalists on the ground in Malawi and Eswatini recording their stories.
You want an effective protest? Put forty people outside the White house or Capitol, every one of us with a different big glossy sign of a smiling kid Trump killed to save a nickel.
I really don't think protests *work* as well as many (especially on the left) wish.
Americans just don't like hippies.
Protests are most useful for pressuring the Democrats to do things, since they need to be, at a minimum, sympathetic to any vaguely left-wing mass protest movement.
Personally, I actually quite like hippies, LSD, the dead, drag queens, whatever, but I abhor protests. A mob of people mindlessly chanting slogans while intentionally making bystanders lives unpleasant by blocking traffic, vandalizing public spaces, making lots of noise, etc. Ugh. Why would any of this be remotely persuasive to the not already converted?
I think the fact that various policy positions became popular (anti-Vietnam, LGBT, climate) alongside protest movements doesn't at all suggest the protests were helpful in achieving those goals. It seems to be more just a social gathering for like-minded people to feel superior to others.
Dems want to start riots now that they lost an election? Hmm... sounds familiar.
Evidence suggests that focused, reasonable, well-attended protests about specific issues that aren't already dominating the news can be quite effective because they draw attention to their foci and create an impression in viewers' monkey brains that the protestors' position is socially desirable.
The problem is that unfocused, unreasonable, and poorly-attended protests (particularly those that just generally say "down with the other tribe"!) can have a negative effect greater than the positive effect of more responsible protests.
I agree about that kind of protest, of things that only the most strongly committed MAGA supporter could defend.
Now for the pitch: :)
Hi
As you are not already a subscriber, may I inviteyou to subscribe (for free) to my substack,"Radical Centrist?" file:///C:/Users/Thomas/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml
I write mainly about US monetary policy,US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which USpolitical party is least bad and theyare not hard to figure out, but Itry to keep my analysis of the issuesnon-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I constructed a letter I'm going to send to a lot of democratic politiciansand orgs advocating for them to consider the common sense Democrat manifesto.
ChatGPT as an editor is so awesome. I had a letter to my state representatives where my first draft was basically "Knock it off, you white supremacist assholes" and ChatGPT refined it into a polite, five-bullet-point letter that was much more persuasive, even to me!
Is there a way to create a ChatGPT prompt that will always yield a slightly different result? Like ask it to use the timestamp in some RND() function to perturb the output? Would be cool to supply a prompt for people to generate guaranteed unique variants of this kind of thing...
It absolutely does hurt to sit down and spend time drafting text that you think will strike the right emotional balance and clearly state the main points you want it to state - and then to write another version of the same thing that is different but still has to strike the same balance and make the same points.
There is no more value in suffering through this multiple times than there is in multiplying two eight digit numbers by hand without using a calculator.
With the way chatgpt works, it should always generate a slightly different result. if using the api, you can tweak temperature to make it more "creative" as in give more different results.
I’m a Democrat who wants Democrats to win more elections. I worry that the party has become too influenced by an academic, left-wing politics disconnected from working- and middle-class concerns. If Democrats want to win, they must focus on broad, common-sense principles rather than niche ideological debates.
I urge you to consider the nine tenets outlined by Matthew Yglesias in his Common Sense Democrat Manifesto (www.slowboring.com/p/a-common-sense-democrat-manifesto), which presents a vision for an electorally successful and effective Democratic Party:
1) Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.
2) The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.
3) Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.
4) We should judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. Democrats must stop thinking of Americans primarily through a racial lens. Americans are individuals and should be thought of as such.
5) Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.
6) Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.
7) Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.
8) Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.
9) All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.
Democrats succeed when they champion economic fairness, personal freedom, and good governance. But too often, they allow their agenda to be shaped by academic fads and performative virtue-signaling instead of what ordinary voters actually care about. This alienates the working-class Americans who should be the party’s core constituency.
Democrats must be a big-tent coalition that wins in Maine, Michigan, and Montana—not just elite urban enclaves. This means governing effectively, rejecting left-wing ideological litmus tests, and being willing to move right when necessary to win elections.
Yglesias’ work lays out a pragmatic roadmap for a Democratic Party that can win and govern effectively. I hope you will read his Common Sense Democrat Manifesto and take these principles seriously.
Democrats cannot govern if they do not win. Let’s focus on a vision that can win elections, deliver real results, and secure lasting progress.
I get that your comparative advantage is in writing about policy issues rather than, say, the avenues that Trump could use to defy the courts and the likelihood that he'll succeed.
But I think you're underrating something important: there are very, very few center-left commentators who are as trustworthy as you are. Most of them spend 99% of their time writing about how this or that thing that Trump did will be fascism/the apocalypse/etc.
So, despite the fact that there's indeed no shortage of analysis of Trump defying norms and breaking laws, I think many of us simply tune it out because the people writing those articles have cried wolf so much in the past.
At the margin, there may be some value in SB inviting a non-hysterical legal analyst to write some articles. This may be more valuable than, for example, the 100th article whose general gist is
"Trump's economic policy will be inflationary and will increase the deficit, resulting in higher mortgage rates" or "Republicans are cutting benefits for poor people" (I love this blog, but there are *a lot* of these articles! We get it!).
I love Matt so much, but I do wish there was a legal equivalent to Slow Boring sometimes. Often it is understandably a blind spot of his. Unfortunately some of the better legal bloggers completely lack a Slow Boring of Hard Boards ethos when it comes to politics and lend themselves to the kind of alarmist catastrophizing (popehat) criticized here. Or are just are much further left than I want (5-4, Strict Scrutiny etc). Currently the best I can get is David French, but if anyone has recommendations let me know!
Thank you for the Advisory Opinions recommendation. I've been searching for legal coverage that fits the SB balance of wonky enough to be real, not so wonky that it's just for practitioners, not so partisan that it forgoes rational analysis, and broad in its coverage.
I tend to enjoy the free Preet Bahara podcasts, but just can't add another subscription as I'm not fully utilizing what I already pay for. I like Lawfare quite a bit, but the national security focus is too narrow. And, they are sometimes so "of the system" that they aren't able to conceive of structural issues in how law is practiced.
The Volokh Conspiracy is very good. It's full libertarian, but their perspective is out in the open, and I think it's pretty easy to mentally adjust for the obvious blindspots (to get my bias in the open, I'm sympathetic but not remotely dogmatic or philosophically libertarian).
I was going to mention VC too, but as you say, they are (as their byline says) often libertarian, which isn't exactly the type of ideology the top level commenter was looking for.
There's also some high variance among the writers. I think the best and most thoughtful are Volokh himself, Ilya Somin, and Jonathan Adler. Orin Kerr too, but I don't know if he writes there much anymore.
The Volokh Conspiracy is pretty good, especially people like Orin Kerr, Eugene Volokh himself, Sam Bray, and Will Baude, but Josh Blackman, its most frequent poster, is widely regarded as a clown in legal circles. Volokh should have kicked him out years ago but aims for a "big tent."
Yeah, the law subreddit is way more doomer than anyone I've come across. For instance, go to that subreddit and suggest that there will be a midterm election in 2026.
I will say the "move fast and break things" model is exactly the wrong way to implement an autocracy. There's a reason why it's called democratic "backsliding" and not democratic "move fast and break shit."
If you want to hear actual lawyers discuss legal issues, the best public subreddit I've found is /r/legaladviceofftopic. It's full of actual lawyers banned from /r/legaladvice for correcting the mods/the mods' favorites, and it's mostly composed of threads discussing topical hypothetical questions.
If you're a lawyer you can join /r/Lawyers, which is awesome, but that's obviously not an option for most people here.
Reddit is a really bad place to get legal news. All of the subreddits either (1) have a lot of pop-political news, in which case they are nearly entirely non-lawyers (e.g. /r/law), or (2) focus on legal inside baseball, in which case they are nearly entirely lawyers but discussing subjects the public doesn't care about (e.g. /r/lawyertalk, /r/biglaw).
The thing about lawyers online is that public defenders and Biglaw attorneys are wildly overrepresented and that effectively means that any perspectives on the law tend to skew in those directions.
I got to sit in for a bit to conversations among my sister's in-law lawyers. They were analyzing legal approaches to Supreme Court cases (this was before the inauguration.) Their solid background in law gives them a leg up in quickly analyzing legal issues and moving towards creative responses. Some of have done pro-bono work for the Democratic party in the past (saw my brother-in-law on CNN working on one of the lesser-known Florida cases iin 2000.)
One of my hopeful fantasies is that lawyers like them all over the country are getting together, strategizing, and filing lawsuits and/or and providing legal advice for state, local and federal elected officials and their staffs.
I'm a lawyer. Advisory Opinions is the only outlet I know of that is popular both among the public and among lawyers. Just understand that it's right-leaning, and that Sarah Isgur in particular is unusually sympathetic to the Trump administration for a lawyer.
Strict Scrutiny will quite possibly actively make you less informed about the law than if you just didn't listen to anything. I haven't listened to 5-4, but I imagine it's similar. It's irritating that there isn't a decent liberal alternative to Advisory Opinions. That whole space (including blogging) gets really overwhelmed with outrage-bait over analysis.
For more of a hard-law angle, Divided Argument is easily the best Supreme Court podcast, but is much more technical and also only records intermittently. David Lat and Steve Vladeck's Substacks are also solid. Some people like Akhil Amar, but he's an infamous egomaniac, which turns many off him.
Adam Liptak, the New York Times's primary Supreme Court reporter, is very good at what he does, but it's more objective news than commentary.
I like Preet Bharara’s podcast for legal discussions. His interviews are hit or miss due the bland guests, but his legal discussions with Joyce Vance are really informative and fair.
Yeah, it’s a challenge though because the nature of things makes it hard for someone to legitimately know enough to contribute. I could spend days and days talking about financial regulation, a moderate amount of time speaking about first amendment, constitutional separation of powers issues, the APA, but it would take a lot of time to dig into any specific legal questions simply because this stuff is harder than it looks. You really do have to have the right subject matter expert for the right issue if it isn’t someone working full time.
Agreed. I've come to appreciate the depth and nuances of these and other fields, particularly history, from my one streaming subscription: The Great Courses on Amazon Prime. For $8/mo, get access to 100's of high-quality lecture series from reputable and passionate professors. Each is generally 15 to 40 lectures, each of 30 minutes.
As examples, here the 10 most recent series I've watched over the last year or so.
- Books That Matter: The Federalist Papers
- The Vietnam War
- World War I: The Great War
- A Historian Goes to the Movies: Ancient Rome
- Western Civilization II
- History of the United States
- The U.S. Constitution Through History
- The Middle East in the 20th Century
- The Industrial Revolution
- Understanding the New Testament
For several, I've only watched one or two lectures. Others, notably "Western Civilization II" and "The Industrial Revolution", I watched multiple times. Even got the audio book for those two for additional consumption on walks. I highly recommend the general offering of The Great Courses for engaging content to help us better appreciate the depth of various topics of interests as well as to build some high level understanding.
Take this same analysis to right wing leaders. How trustworthy are any of them? What do they spend their time doing?
I think it is fair that many think writing should be to whip up support. That is all they have seen from their opposition for well over 20 years. And it has been working.
I think this take ignores the fundamental conservative-liberal asymmetry. When one party, on a basic philosophical level, is understood by nearly everyone to be arguing for moving backward (i.e. into known territory) and the other party is understood to be arguing for moving forward (i.e. into unknown territory), people are always going to require more trustworthiness and more competence from the latter before they're willing to vote for them.
Between 2005 and 2023, Democrats did quite well in large part because we spent most of that period widely perceived as the more competent and fact-oriented party. But we totally squandered that advantage, at least temporarily, by failing to live up to our ideals and have (or even permit) robust internal debates on things like whether DEI programs actually work and what supporting trans rights actually requires in a policy sense.
I think your timeline is off—Democrats did pretty well in 2006 and 2008, mainly because they were able to take advantage of major disasters for the GOP (the Iraq war and the global financial meltdown, respectively). Since 2010, Democrats have done poorly, totally giving up gains made since the 1930s.
The major disasters definitely helped turn us into the party of perceived competence and greatly accelerated (alongside the global warming issue) our total capture of the institutions that have traditionally been arbiters of truth (the media, scientists, etc...).
We then road that perception of competence and truth-orientation to nearly two decades of national electoral success (at least compared to the immediately preceding two decades) while those captured institutions self-censored and atrophied until the general public ceased trusting them and, soon thereafter, ceased trusting us.
Hard for me to seriously think we did good at Democrats between 2005 and 2023 more than Republicans just really dropped the ball hard right before. This timeframe literally includes Trump getting elected...
Don't get me too wrong. I'm wanting to be the things you describe. I also don't feel too surprised by a lot of the flailing. I further doubt too much could be immediately done to course correct. It will take time. And our general landscape is largely to wait for the next implosion from Republicans.
I do not like that last point. And it is a straight line from how radically different their strategies are to what Democrats think have to be done.
I get your skepticism about saying Democrats did well, but the period covers four successive presidential elections during which Republicans never got closer to winning the popular vote than a -2.1% margin and averaged nearly -4.5%.
Two parties flooding the zone with shit is a great way to end up as Argentina or Brazil. If we're not going to care about the truth, it's not going to make much difference whether we're in power or Republicans are--we're going to get bad policy either way.
Relentless, tribalistic partisanship cannot continue increasing indefinitely without ruining the country and making everyone worse off. And it will be the marginalized who suffer worst from this, as usual.
I largely agree there. I just don't think we have a viable path without fixing at least most relevant actors, though. And I don't see any advice here that actually does that. All it does is near victim blame for why Democrats got beat at the presidential vote. And that is largely from not being in control of the national discourse. Which, again, none of this advice addresses.
At the end of the day, the only way for any of us on here to contribute to changing the culture of the party is to start behaving like the culture is different.
To that end, when I'm in a left-leaning space and get made to feel like I'm in a Portlandia sketch by all the handwringing, I've made it my policy to say so. And more generally, I spend more energy both playing devil's advocate and supporting others' efforts to play devil's advocate in intra-left discussions. If you're looking for action items from me, I'd suggest those.
There are a multitude of articles, podcasts, and video reports on these legal and economic topics on Bloomberg. There is also thoughtful analysis and forecasting on geopolitics and global markets. Moreover, to avoid further marketing my preferred product, I imagine WSJ, FT, and other publications have similar offerings.
A recurring theme in such reporting and analysis is uncertainty and competing narratives. That has been true for the last few years I’ve been paying attention, as well as in earlier contemporary reporting on past events. Even between two Democratic Harvard econ professors—Summers and Furman—there can be substantial differences despite broad agreement.
Moreover, overly confident predictions without sufficient consideration of uncertainty and alternative theories risk credibility. Fully appreciating this as an individual can require a significant time commitment over multi-year scales in my experience.
And of course, there are numerous AI products that could generate individualized studies of contemporary events through different lenses. Hence, I doubt SB-commissioned articles would be useful beyond recommending further resources and self-study for motivated individuals.
- US Treasury yields offer a scorecard for the White House's cost-cutting vows
It was a little after midnight on Feb. 3, and Elon Musk was reveling in the first big trophy from his rapid-fire campaign through Washington to slash government spending. He had just engineered, not even two weeks into President Donald Trump's new term, the sudden shuttering of the US Agency for International Development. But then Musk recognized that the ultimate scorekeepers of the success of his small band of cost-cutters were 200 miles away - on Wall Street. There, bond investors had pushed up yields sharply in the run-up to, and aftermath of, Trump's election and were now refusing to bid them back down.
Summary of "US Bond Yields Remain High Despite Musk's DOGE Efforts" (Bloomberg)
Key Takeaway:
Despite Elon Musk's aggressive cost-cutting through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), bond markets remain skeptical. US Treasury yields stay elevated, reflecting doubts about the sustainability and effectiveness of the administration’s deficit-reduction efforts. Investors fear that tax cuts and tariffs could counteract spending cuts, fueling inflation.
---
1. Bond Markets Are Not Buying DOGE’s Narrative
- Musk’s spending cuts (~$55B claimed, likely far less) have failed to reassure investors.
- 10-year Treasury yields remain high (~4.4-4.7%), up from 4.3% pre-election.
- Bond markets demand tangible, sustained deficit reduction, not just rhetoric.
2. Limited Impact of Spending Cuts
- DOGE’s cuts:
- Shuttered USAID and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
- Many savings blocked by lawsuits.
- Even if DOGE achieves $500B in annual cuts, Trump’s tax cuts and tariffs could erase gains.
- Annual deficit is still ~$1.8T, making current cuts too small to matter.
3. Inflation & Federal Reserve’s Role
- Inflation hit 3% in January, pressuring the Fed to keep rates high.
- Higher bond yields = more expensive borrowing, slowing growth.
4. Market Sentiment: Skepticism & Small Signs of Hope
- Investors see Trump’s policies as inflationary, betting on higher long-term rates.
- Some treasury outperformance vs. swaps suggests mild optimism about deficit cuts.
- Bessent (Treasury Secretary) aims for:
- 3% GDP deficit target by 2028.
- 3% economic growth.
- 3M barrels/day more oil production to ease inflation.
5. The Bigger Debt Crisis Looming
- Debt-to-GDP now 99%, triple 2001 levels.
- Without sustained spending discipline, the US risks a debt spiral.
- Bond markets demand hard evidence, not promises—a lesson learned in the Clinton era.
---
Conclusion:
Musk’s cost-cutting blitz through DOGE has not convinced markets. Structural issues—tax cuts, tariffs, and lawsuits—limit its effectiveness, keeping yields high. Unless the administration proves its ability to shrink deficits sustainably, investors will continue demanding higher returns, tightening financial conditions.
The crazy part? The best course of action for Trump to pursue economically....is to do absolutely nothing. Stop threatening tariffs, scale back mass deportations (early signs to me is that this will be more bark than bite. But still too early to tell), don't pass a massive regressive (and inflationary) tax cut.
Seriously, if he does absolutely nothing all signs are that he should be able to ride the wave of lower interest rates and popularity....which would make him more dangerous given that the public backlash to all of his dangerously unlawful moves will be more mooted if economy is humming.
"We" may get it, but the important thing is to get _that_ message instead of "Trump and Musk are bad hombres" to people who might vote differently in the future. This could also apply to a pithy message about why it's bad to break the law even to do something good like, for the sake of argument, reduce spending on a low or negative value activities.
This approach is refreshing. As a liberal it's exhausting to have my entire news feed and group chats with liberal friends taken over by "oh my god look what trump did" alarmism without any aim toward controllable actions. I can't even use certain subreddits anymore because they're taken over by the most surface level political "jokes." I've set up recurring donations for the Wisconsin supreme Court. That feels a lot more practical than belly aching over the latest outrage of the day the next time I meet up with friends
Something weird happened to reddit post election. It's like they turned up the dial on liberal and also turned up the dial on stupid. Entire site is unreadable now.
I think this is largely because of the cross-promotion reddit does now, showing you posts from subreddits you might be interested in (FYI, you can disable this). This tends to homogenize the site. FWIW, I’m still having a good time in my niche subs, despite the discussions sometimes veering off into surface-level leftism (eg don’t buy from this nail art company because the owner shut down discussion about Dobbs on the brand’s fb page and refused to say if they’re pro-choice)
> eg don’t buy from this nail art company because the owner shut down discussion about Dobbs on the brand’s fb page and refused to say if they’re pro-choice
If people weren't getting nailed, the Dobbs problem would solve itself.
It's so so sad. I was literally trying to just get news on my local hockey team and the sub got brigaded during the whole "remove x links" thing. Literally just wanted to read about hockey and see some dumb Simpsons memes and it's all Musk outrage.
I'm quite certain I'm not the only Technology Connections viewer around these here parts (a fine YouTube channel), and his most recent bit about people casually opting out of online agency was really eye-opening.
Maybe eye-opening in part because the only social media account I have (I don't count Substack) is a very dormant LinkedIn profile.
It's several years ago now, but the Atlantic ran a really good piece about the evolution of social *networks* (thefacebook.com, .edu's only, you see your friends' updates chronologically and nothing from anyone else) to social *media* (every day Twitter has one main character, and the goal is to never be it).
I authentically miss mid-2000s Facebook! It turned into something utterly unrecognizable.
You have a mass of parrots who are trying to repeat the popular zeitgeist for internet points. Trump getting elected is a focusing event for such behavior that brought together disparate groups of babbling morons.
A big reason is Google's search results now emphasize reddit a lot. I work in the SEO Space and there are all kinds of articles and studies on this, Google saw people wanted the community feedback experience so Reddit is now emphasized in search results. It makes me think a lot of people joined because of this and also maybe it going public
Thanks for this info. I have noticed this in my search results, and I thought it was because I was looking for local information (e.g. people's reaction to a public library seceding from their system - don't do this. It will make users angry and cost taxpayers money.)
It makes sense that the vibe shift around the election and again at the start of the new administration would catalyze transitions in community culture, especially if there are longer trends that could just be accelerated. (I don’t know how much I believe the specific claim about Zoomerfication.)
I've noticed this too, even despite Reddit having a very decentralized structure for social media. All the bans on Twitter links are the most frustrating, as it's impeding the flow of good information. Most places seem to be already relenting with unneeded extra step workarounds like allowing screenshots or xcancel links.
I hate Twitter links because people without accounts can’t see replies or threads, so it often looks even worse than the first paragraph of an article above a paywall.
Yes. If you read Zvi Mowshowitz's substack about AI, he finds all the tweets from the top AI developers/users, and puts it all together to make a very useful blog. That's why I maintain a Twitter account, even though it's true that it's mostly a sewer.
I haven't noticed a single issue in r/CookbookLovers or r/Vietnam or r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk or r/HobbyDrama or r/Daddit.
Maybe you could dial back the histrionic claims that the entire site is unusable. There are thousands of subreddits that never come within a million miles of politics.
My hyperlocal subreddit, one of the few I use, became like 50% national politics overnight. This is a real phenomenon even though it hasn't spread to the other niche subreddits I read (which involve sports).
I'm good with my take. As another user mentioned, Reddit is aggressively pushing related subreddits in front of you now, so no matter where you are everything starts to sound the same. It's a god awful site full of delusional people and it's absolutely unusable
The insistence of some lefties that Elon Musk is dumb--and this also applies to Trump, definitely going back to Dubya as well, and who knows, maybe even Reagan--is starting to strike me as some sort of smug cope that these figures aren't really that accomplished, and that if we just keep yelling at all the things they get wrong and expose them as ordinary dummies, it'll somehow enlighten everyone to take the truly wise path of what their worldview prescribes.
I've already issued my take [https://www.slowboring.com/p/sunday-thread-mailbag-125/comment/95634115] on the narrow question of Musk's intelligence. But Matt has it right: he and others are all pursuing value judgments on what they want the government to do and not do. It's good to say that these things are bad, but explaining to those that are willing to listen as to why those would see it as bad has a better chance of being persuasive than getting bogged down into some meaningless argument about cognitive ability.
I think the problem with the discussion around Musk's smarts is that his public image is not just around being smart, but around being a super genius. He's banking off the image of being so smart, that he can wade into any problem that he's vaguely interested in and see solutions that no one else can. Occasionally, he has some interesting ideas, often given to him by smart underlings, but he isn't that smart. See his handling of DoGE and the constant, unearned arrogance that comes from him just straight up not understanding how much of government works. Part of this is just being smart and having decent first principles not being a replacement for experience. Although, everything I've seen suggests that he's very good at some things, but his skills are limited.
What's Elon's IQ? I don't give a shit, but he's not Tony Stark.
Tony Stark isn’t real. Even our current narratives around past actual geniuses likely obscure their very real limitations. At most, we get some apocryphal story about Einstein struggling with math as a student or Feynman scoring at below genius level on some IQ test.
Regardless, I doubt we’re going to break the cult of Musk by debating the nuances of his aptitudes across various dimensions and general intelligence. Moreover, lazy and erroneous attempts to downplay his very real accomplishments only brand us as disingenuous critics who can be easily dismissed.
At most, we can focus on the durable harms attributable to Musk and DOGE that are felt by electorally relevant sections of the public as they materialize over the next few months. Then, those individuals can increasingly reject Musk and Trump using whatever narratives resonate with them—e.g., branding Musk as a moron or a genius who fell to hubris. They can use whatever story they want, as long as it justifies a Democratic vote.
I think there is another axis to criticize Musk. We should criticize him also on the level of operational morals and ethics. His treatment of his own children is not praiseworthy, his treatment of his employees is terrible, and that has implications for how he views federal employees and members of the US public. He also makes a lot of promises that he doesn't meet, over and over and over again.
I don't see why we can't acknowledge both. He's accomplished a lot in ways that show significant skill and foresight, he's currently blowing gaping security holes all over our most critical government systems, firing people without looking into whether they protect fucking missile silos, and is saying literally incomprehensible technobabble that shows an inability to learn the systems he is working with. While that nuance won't convince everyone it absolutely has destroyed many people's opinions of Musk already.
Yes, I agree we can acknowledge both. My concern is around focus and narrative. Over the last decade, I’ve seen numerous critics focus on Musk’s very real weaknesses and personality flaws, then project the failure of his projects—including Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter—based on those narratives. Moreover, they attempted to convince others of the futility of these projects. They were repeatedly proven wrong.
I’m concerned that Democrats are falling into this same trap in addressing Musk and DOGE. Musk already has a long track record of personal and professional issues (to say the least), and I doubt highlighting additional, more recent examples will be particularly convincing to anyone. At best, we need to tie his flaws and failings back to real issues experienced by electorally relevant segments of voters.
Moreover, there’s a very real risk that we’ll fail to do that and instead distract ourselves with our own visceral, obsessive dislike of Musk. We should acknowledge both his personality flaws and our own fascination with them, while recognizing the risk of distraction if we don’t move beyond our personal frame of reference. Many people either don’t care or have different narratives. Hence, defeating Musk through electoral politics will require us to focus on framing that is electorally productive.
Elon Musk could be smarter than nineteen people out of every twenty on the street, and he still runs big and sophisticated enough outfits that five colleagues a day should make him feel every so slightly like a dope.
DOGE is pretty much going according to an Elon playbook. The moves are rapid, draconian and designed to cut too much and build back what turns out to be essential. There is a difference between disagreeing with DOGE actions and those actions failing at their objective.
For all the mockery, Elon achieved his goals at Twitter in that is now modestly profitable and much less left wing. X will maintain a spot in the ecosystem and build back revenue. Elon has little filter, but his business and engineering acumen are generational.
He paid $44 billion to buy a company that, after his own radical changes, is a modestly profitable company that is worth $5-$10billion or so. And much of its modest profitability is because there are a lot of large advertisers who spend money on X precisely and only because they fear Musk's political power and want to stay out of his crosshairs (this is similar to the reasons that people spend money at Trump's resort).
I agree that he is very smart, and is likely an organizational genius. But holding up X as an example isn't the way to prove it. You can say that he "succeeded" because he doesn't care about the money. That might be true, but it also seems like a convenient way to move the goalposts such that failure isn't possible.
He definitely overpaid for platform. There is a non monetary value to a media platform. If advertising normalizes due to time or different leadership, that will increase revenue.
Also, let's zoom in on his overpaying for Twitter.
Between when he made the offer and when the deal completed, the NASDAQ dropped like 25% and Meta dropped 50%. This was a big tech market crash that, like, sure, Musk didn't anticipate, but neither did anyone else. As it started to happen, Musk tried to back out of the deal, but was legally blocked for it.
That was basically bad luck, not stupidity.
How much would Twitter have fallen without Musk there? I mean, it was a social media company, like Meta, but a smaller and much more troubled one than Meta. Meta's stock tanked despite having strong net earnings all through this period. Twitter was running a loss.
If we look at Earth 2, exactly like our Earth except Musk never offered to buy Twitter, it is absurd to imagine that in that world Twitter was going along great at high $30B's range.
None of this is to say that Musk didn't overpay for Twitter, but let's be clear that the majority of the loss of Twitter's value in that time was exogenous market conditions, not something that Musk did.
Nobody forced Musk to buy at an unsustainable valuation.
"Other tech stocks were also overvalued" is somewhat true, although they rebounded to an extent X has not. And part of having "generational business acumen" means not walking into situations like that.
That said, I think that's the wrong way to look at the deal. He didn't buy Twitter to make a bunch of money, he bought Twitter to send a message, and that message was sent and received.
Well considering how haphazard the cuts have been, the misunderstandings around things like Social Security, and the like, I'm not impressed. Just the obsession of treating government like a business, speaks to his ignorance.
I suspect another common thread between the constitutional President and the acting President is that both of them love TALKING about filing lawsuits. The number of lawsuits actually filed.... eh, many people are saying.
Even though the evidence is clear that Musk has definitively misrepresented his talent and intelligence over and over again, including about the most trivial of things, like his global Diablo IV ranking, we can still grant that he's obviously of considerably above average intelligence.
But it doesn't matter. We can't just trust him because he's smart, or has had past successes. We're watching him publicly binge on drugs and indiscriminately take a chainsaw to the civil service. A population whose salaries represent a fragment of a a drop in the bucket of the federal budget, but do play a considerable role in regulating his companies interests. And those employees, at USAID, at CFPB, at the NIH were targeted first.
This cult of genius just has to stop. First, because he isn't the scientific genius he claims to be, not even close. And second, because he's a proven pathological liar, and is lying to the public about his motives while making those motives absolutely crystal clear to anyone paying attention.
Really depends one why you think the goals are! Elon has said publicly he’s going to use DOGE to cut the deficit by $1T this year. DOGE has made very little progress towards that and is extremely unlikely to achieve that. Now maybe he’s lying about that and has other goals, but making assumptions like that starts to enter 4d chess territory very quickly.
This, but unironically. I think “intelligence” is a useful concept, but trying to get a one-dimensional measure of it obscures more than it reveals. It’s often a good idea to talk about whether individual decisions or actions were smart or stupid, but every person (or machine, or animal) does a range of different things of different levels of intelligence, and trying to assign a single level to the whole being is going to make you miss some of the smart or stupid things they are going to do.
There's also a strong time and context dependence to performing intelligence. Is Elon Musk going to do smart things when he's sober and being challenged to solve engineering problems that are important to him? Undoubtedly. Is he also going to act like a smart person while on steroids and ketamine manipulating the levers of federal power and when his main objective function seems to be "marinate in online right-wing conspiracy theories"?
IQ is the most validated concept in all of social science and your explanation here just reveals ignorance of the concept’s history and predictive utility.
Nothing about having a high IQ prevents any given individual from doing bad or stupid things. For instance, here I am arguing on the internet with someone who holds roughly the same level of belief that the world is flat instead of doing things I need to.
Here are some more validated concepts in social science: language, money, law, religion. IQ is much more like power.
GDP is a great concept that doesn’t do everything we want it to do, but I think there is better understanding of what it does and doesn’t do than with IQ.
The very measurement of GDP is a hugely contentious topic, and it has easily understood flaws depending on the specific feature of an economy or personal/household well-being you're trying to understand.
So... yes, basically anyone who actually understands anything about economics understands GDP to be a flawed measure.
I've wondered whether Musk is actually really smart, or mainly charismatic and the beneficiary of a snowball effect. Meaning, charisma and luck got him into an initial successful venture (PayPal?). And then the influence that gained him, combined with his charisma and ability to identify good big-picture ideas (EVs, space), let him motivate and associate with truly smart people, who actually executed on those big ideas.
On a more-micro nitty-gritty level, has he demonstrated any particular brilliance? Like could he even do a coding project or solve a physics or engineering problem? Maybe the answer is yes, but I don't know.
If you read accounts from the time, no, he can't code. He apparently had some self-taught ability, but reports are that they had to hire real programmers back when PayPal was still x.com to fix his shitty glue code.
He also has no engineering qualifications or any patents, nor any real hard-science background at all.
I think we can give him credit for being talented at playing the eccentric genius and drumming up public enthusiasm for Big Science.
Reminds me of the story of Steve Jobs talking to Bill Gates and Bill said, “Steve, you can’t even code.” And Steve responded, “I have people for that.”
I wonder about an even slightly higher level: does he even understand the physics/engineering/coding problems (even if they're too specialized for him to solve himself)? Like, does he know that a spacecraft not only has to reach its destination; it has to accelerate and then decelerate and then match the velocity (speed and trajectory) of the destination. Or does he just think, we've got to collide an object with Mars, and I'll let the engineers figure out how.
I know that's a very simple example, but I wonder how simple his big-picture understanding is. (And, again, it might be that his understanding isn't simple at all.)
Probably an understanding at the level of a bright undergrad, which is the extent of his formal education. Plus some bonus osmosis from working with actual engineers.
He is good at communicating about these ideas at a level that is publicly consumable, but still gives the illusion of greater depth. But then he starts talking about hyperloops and nuking Mars, and you realize he's really just another run of the mill dorm room philosopher, but with infinite money and drugs.
He definitely suffers from 60 Minutes Syndrome, where he sounds very learned and articulate about a topic unless you, yourself, know something about that topic and instantly realize there's a lot of word salad being tossed.
Don't forget the childhood trauma of being born to another philandering narcissistic cutthroat capitalist, and basically having infinite money since birth, but not much paternal warmth.
This is just crazy. Yes, Elon Musk understands Newton's laws of motion.
Like, is he a generational supergenius? No idea. Does he understand Newton's laws of motion? Yes, of course he does. Is he a uniquely capable engineering talent? No idea, probably not. Does he understand enough that it's not just like "you idiot, everyone who spends five minutes on this knows more than you," of course he does! It's insane how people talk themselves into ignoring massive evidence here.
At this point I feel like he's probably tamping down public enthusiasm for Big Science, but especially his obsessions with dumb, scammy shit like crypto and replacing frederal workers with AI.
He has considerable reputation from SpaceX and Tesla of being able to delve into specific hardware engineering problems on short notice. It’s not just high-level management and hiring/motivating people.
The detail-oriented part of his skillset might not extend to Twitter, however, although the cost reductions there seem reasonably impressive, so I’m not very sure.
This reputation is... polished, at least on the SpaceX side. I can't tell you much about auto manufacture, but the "sub-10 micron panel accuracy" of the cheese wedge "truck" should not inspire confidence.
I give Musk credit for jumpstarting some very important enterprises (commercial rockets, EVs). That kind of thing isn't easy to do, or even we SB commenters would have succeeded in like fashion.
How does he compare to, say, Steve Jobs? Not favorably. Not only did Jobs build Apple from nothing and turn it into a lasting behemoth, but he also was behind other incredibly creative enterprises (like Pixar). SpaceX is great, and all credit to Musk, but I don't think it compares to what Jobs did, and as for Tesla, I give it a gold watch for what it did over the years, but the brilliant leader Musk is now presiding over the beginning of its demise. Jobs never had a blight like that on his record, even NeXT.
If businessmen don't have some epic fails on their record, they're probably not trying hard enough. I think James Comey made a similar point about prosecutors never having lost a case -- that's actually bad (or was, in his view).
I think the way you are using the word “charisma” is how I would use the word “intelligence”. It’s some sort of skill that the person has that enables them to do special things, but we shouldn’t identify it with any easy-to-classify skill. I don’t think Musk has the same sort of charisma that Ellen Degeneres or Bill Clinton or Kevin Spacey has, any more than he has the same sort of intelligence as the top coders or engineers at his companies.
I think it is important to differentiate "Musk is dumb and has never been successful" from "Musk keeps saying dumb, probably wrong things about the systems he is working with". The latter gives color to the specific destructive dangers that Musk poses while at DOGE. Some people approve of what Musk is doing because they think he is making smart decisions and using advanced algorithms to find fraud. That he doesn't even know what SQL is when looking at databases, that he hired unvetted neo-nazi hackers, and that he keeps believing obviously false bullshit all point to him being very dumb in ways that put us all in danger. He's just like every other techbro that thinks because they understand programming they can conquer any complex thing. They're smart in one way, but their stupidity more than makes up for it.
The policy ideas Trump's admin proposes to are going to hurt a lot of Americans, including a great many who seem sympathetic to normie, working-to-upper-middle-class audiences; if the media can cover those issues with that focus the backlash will at least see the worst parts of the administration and its pseudo-governmental hangers-on tossed aside and the House back in our hands in 2026.
A great early marker of how serious the Democrats are about winning will be whether the inevitable failure to take the Senate in 2026 is greeted with whining about the map or whether prominent voices in the Party point to the need to widen the coalition and the media actually covers *that* instead of "map unfair."
Look, David, you and I disagree a lot, but I genuinely value your insights and I'm glad we can disagree civilly and rationally.
With that said!
Look at Dan Osborn. The man ran in Nebraska as an Independent, without the dreaded "D" next to his name. I admit I didn't follow his campaign closely, but from what I know, he seemed a genuine moderate who portrayed himself as a regular guy, a man of the people who cares about the working class, not a snooty professor who demands your pronouns and lectures you about white privilege.
And guess what? He freaking lost! To a Republican!
You may say, "Well duh, of course he lost, we're talking deep-red Nebraska here," which is PRECISELY MY POINT and is in direct contradiction to you "Oh Democrats, stop whining about a bad Senate map, just roll up your sleeves and run normie, broadly appealing candidates!" Osborn was normie and broadly appealing, AND HE LOST.
And if Osborn is not convincing enough for you, say hi to former Senators Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester, both broadly liked, both of whom prioritized the working class and bread-and-butter issues over woke bulls hit, both of whom LOST TO MAGA.
What do you say to them? What should/could they have done to be more broadly appealing, or do you concede that, yes, the Democrats really have a disadvantage in the Senate?
I didn't say the Democrats don't have a structural disadvantage in the Senate, I said I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK if the Democrats have a structural disadvantage in the Senate.
That point is completely and utterly irrelevant to winning. If all you want to do is whine, then fine, bitch about the Senate. But it won't change. There is no path to changing it that doesn't lead through a civil war that will kill tens of millions, and there never, ever will be.
If you want to have a reasonable shot at a majority of 53-5 sometime in the 2030's, then yes, hippy punching is the way forward, because it's extraordinarily obvious that the national brand doomed Tester and Brown, and would have doomed Manchin, and caused Casey to narrowly lose, and led to Barnes winning the primary and fucking up in 2022, and probably also Ryan as well.
It does not matter who runs in these states when the Democratic brand nationally is viewed as synonymous with the dysfunction of your home or my northern and eastern neighbors, and with the insanity of the post-liberal left.
We cannot and will not win, excepting occasions when the Republicans preside over utter catastrophe, unless we make the normies understand that we are not the party of cachet-chasing, virtue-signaling hipster leftism and we won't tolerate it.
Ok, that makes sense, but then, how DO we "make the normies understand"? Kamala tried - her 2024 campaign was remarkably free of woke virtue signaling - and it didn't work.
If you're saying that elected Democrats need to exert greater discipline over their colleagues and be like, "ok everyone, beating Trump is priority number one, two and three, so shut up about unpopular culture war issues, always be shutting up about unpopular culture war issues" then sure, I agree with you. Will it be enough? Will enough normies notice?
Because if you're saying "make every lefty activist on social media STFU forever," that's not realistic, what with the First Amendment and all. There will always be woke idiots somewhere on Bluesky for the GOP to nutpick.
"Kamala tried - her 2024 campaign was remarkably free of woke virtue signaling"
It's not just the campaigns that matter, it's the 4 years that come before it. You have to govern like a moderate normie, not just pretend come election season.
The easiest example of course is they should have cracked down on the border in year 1. AND pushed a bi-partisan bill that year. That would have earned them a ton of credibility.
Destroy the Groups. Destroy the personal and professional lives of their leadership. Make their ground-level employees go door knock in suburban Columbus if they want to get back into politics in any capacity.
Do this loudly. Force as many people from the leftmost several percent that's been engaged in "entryism" into the Democratic Party to either eat shit in perpetuity or leave for the Greens, and then ostracize anyone they manage to elect to Congress, make them sit on the opposition benches with the rightist nutjobs when we take the House, etc.
Fetterman, who you've complained about here, is up 20 points in favorability polling because he's following this playbook and sounding normal and reasonable while he does it. He explicitly told the Hamas-verstehers to get fucked, he's told the left-greens to get fucked, he does it loudly and then when they whine about it online he has his social media people troll the shit out of them.
And if the Democrats ever hold the Senate again he will be a 95% reliable vote on every bread-and-butter issue there is.
If his brand becomes the national brand, we will win most of the time, in all of PA, WI, ME, GA, NC, and AZ. That's a majority already, and places like OH, FL, or IA might be in reach in years when the GOP fucks up.
The electorate's mushy middle does not currently believe there is a sliver of daylight between you and Tema Okun, hell maybe even between me and Tema Okun. That needs to change or we will be a permanent minority party to a greater degree than the GOP in 1944.
It works. You don't like it, but it works, demonstrably in the real world.
And if we'd started the job before 2024 maybe Eastern Europe wouldn't be on its own dealing with Russia and we'd have bought time for Trump to goddamned die already before the GOP managed to sweep back to power.
For years, the GOP publicly disavowed open white supremacists like David Duke. That probably diminished the enthusiasm for "establishment Republicans" in most Louisiana parishes. But presumably, they knew that wouldn't hurt them in contested races where it counted.
The Bulwark, Sam Harris, and others were gently suggesting that Kamala should contrive a performative Sister Souljah moment on…. something. Anything. She, of course, declined to take a risk of this or any other sort. Obama and Bill Clinton were confident enough to punch left when necessary. Perhaps this has something to do with them winning two terms.
And from a more Machiavellian perspective, there may be the Giorgia Meloni method, or the Reverse Gillibrand. Feign sudden onset fascism for as long as it takes to get that magic autowin “R” next to your name and once you are in, commit to six years of relative sanity before your career ends. As far as I know, no one has tried this. And if a critical mass of such entryists got in, it could actually go some way to fixing America.
Can you name key large issues where either voted against the Dem majority? Both Senemia and Manchin were vocal about opposing key aspects of the Democrat excesses. Thus buying them credibility.
And Manchin at least used that credibility to win again and again in ruby red WV. You need to take that model and then use in in swing states, where your odds are better.
Moreover, you still need the national brand to moderate. Because they taint everything else.
I basically never make top-level comments, but I'll add a perspective from outside the US.
I find Americans to be a parochial bunch. Not the SB crowd so much, and this is a US-focused blog, so I'm not really faulting you for this.
Nevertheless, a consequence of being a behemoth behind two oceans is that events outside the US can seem less important. I'd like to push SB in the direction of recognising that many of the shifts in US foreign policy - picking fights within the Americas, siding with Russia against Europe and Ukraine... this is BIG NEWS and it has the potential to be far more consequential in the long term than some of the minor domestic aggravations the GOP and Trump are provoking.
What can Americans (and the ~25% of non-American readers) do to push in the right direction? This is also valuable, in my opinion, and not inconsistent with the main argument of the post.
OMG yes. Trump just pissed away 80 years’ worth of alliances and international goodwill. This is irreversible for decades, plural. To say nothing of people in poor countries who will literally die because Melon Husk wrecked USAID.
On behalf of the 48% of Americans who didn’t want any of this shit, I am truly sorry.
The toughest part is the *reason* why it's irreversible, which is that the American people proved, collectively speaking, that we don't really care about democracy, human rights, freedom, international cooperation, the rule of law, or any of the rest of it. 2016 (and 2004) could plausibly be explained away as mistakes, but this time it is undeniable that we went into the election with open eyes and decided that those things were very low on our priority list. Trump's beliefs may be especially bad and not representative, but even when he's long gone, no one in the rest of the world should ever trust the American people again.
Exactly. Even if we elect President Buttigieg in 2028, and he says and does all the right things, our allies will rightly be like "ok that's nice, but how do we know the American people won't get pissed off about the price of eggs in 2032 and vote for President Vance/Don Jr.?"
This seems overstated. I think that its much less likely "that the American people proved, collectively speaking, that we don't really care about democracy, human rights, freedom, international cooperation, the rule of law, or any of the rest of it" and much more likely that the American people take those things for granted.
The latter can be just as disastrous as the former, but its substantively different. I would compare it to Europe's unwillingness to fund their military despite Russia's multiple invasions of Ukraine over the last decade. Do the people of Europe not care if Russia invades and conquers them? Or is it more likely they are simply complacent. I think the latter.
No. That poll does not show factual disagreement as to which candidate supported which ideas. What it shows is that different people have different views about what "democracy" entails and what principles are important to its maintenance. If it makes it easier to understand, you can call my definition of democracy "Democracy-A" and their definition of democracy "Democracy-B," in which case you can amend my first statement to say that the American people showed that they don't care about "Democracy-A." Maybe we can have a longer conversation at some point about which concepts and principles are essential to "Democracy-A" vs. which concepts and principles are essential to "Democracy-B."
No, he's referring to an issue poll that asked voters who they thought was the bigger threat to democracy, and more people said Harris. I remember seeing it too, but I don't remember who the pollster was.
American democracy will probably survive Trump. The destruction wreaked on federal government institutions can be repaired over time.
But it looks like the events of last week put paid to America's post-WW2 role in maintaining a peaceful and prosperous world order. We've entered a strange new land where everything is now uncertain and a new, possibly very dangerous, world is yet to be born. That's bad enough of course, but the disgusting betrayal of Ukraine and the way the administration is pursuing it is one of the most evil, immoral things I've ever witnessed.
There's very little Americans do other than express our concern and opposition. It's hard to change the foreign policy course an administration has chosen. Europe has to step up and realize it can no longer comfortably hide behind the American shield. And probably they, along with our East Asian "allies" (we no longer deserve democratic allies) should get nukes.
I think the Europe situation is worse than most people realize. I worry that US presence in European affairs has been key to Europe's post-WWII stability and without it, the differing interests between European nations will become much more apparent.
That is very possible. But perhaps the shock of America’s immoral betrayal of Ukraine and the continent will force them into collective actions. The German election, and the position of its new chancellor, is a hopeful sign of that. But, yes, history is not encouraging here.
I'm also concerned this will lead to an acceleration of Anti-American sentiment (and EU-level actions). The EU regulatory apparatus has been laser focused on kneecapping US tech companies, and I see that accelerating. People are going to feel this in their retirement accounts - there's a reason why you try to maintain good relations with your allies.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think most voters feel like the US ending military support for Ukraine is an "immoral betrayal". Trump is definitely a lying asshole who is throwing Zelensky under the bus, but it is a huge failure of US and European leadership that there was no articulated exit strategy other than continuing to throw money at Ukraine and hoping that Putin gets tired of the fight. This opened the window for Trump to "solve the problem".
I can’t speak for most voters. I feel that it is a moral betrayal. Apparently I differ from people who hold that we are “throwing” money at Zelensky and the Ukrainians.
Yes they do have all the necessary advantages. And I hope they do. They don’t have as much military equipment as the US, but it’s time to empty the larder and send everything to Ukraine.
I just hope the Russians don’t get this great battlefield advantage when the Trump folks start feeding them targeting information on Ukrainian units
Totally agree re: Europe. It’s been true for ages and it’s deeply aggravating. Each time there’s a crisis here (where I live) I think it’s going to finally give itself a shake and get it together. Even now - the biggest shock yet - I’m really not sure I have any faith in the Europeans, who can’t even whip a bastard like Orban into line.
What news outlets have you been looking at where this isn't big news? Trump's stupid fights with Mexico/Canada and the recent UN vote have been all over US media.
The main point of my post is that the “effective altruist” approach might assign greater weight to events outside the U.S. But, I’ll say that U.S. reporting doesn’t quite seem to capture how Trump is being received elsewhere. I dunno… it just doesn’t quite seem to capture it. Other commenters seem to agree. Anyway, my thinking is maybe Americans are used to just shrugging this stuff off by now, but there really has been a step change vis a vis the rest of the world. Maybe it’s just the self assuredness of this group? The USMCA felt different 6 years ago than it does now in North America, e.g. anyway I get it’s mostly vibes, I’m just giving the perspective from outside the US 🤷♂️
Somehow, among intelligent people, we've seen the following evolution:
1. Trump is immoral
2. Trump voters are immoral
3. Spending too much time writing about things besides "Orange Man Bad" is immoral.
I'm not exaggerating, being uncharitable, or making the last point up: it's from the comments here.
Apart from any other problems I might have with that position, it's demanding writers sacrifice their standing among people who might make a difference, which is madness.
It's not resentment, it's seeing things (voters) for what they are and not shying away from the ugly reality. They vote for a fascist (and rapist and insurrectionist etc), they get fascism and someone shitting all over the US constitution, they don't care. Am I supposed to just shrug my shoulders and sing kumbaya? A good portion of American voters have proven to be fascist nuts who don't care about fundamental American political values. Can we mourn? Can we be angry?
One can characterize “Trump aligns with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine at UN” as Orange Man Bad but doesn’t it also have real world historical implications that people should be aware of and that their representatives and elite opinion-makers should address clearly and forcefully?
I can’t get in the mind of an American swing voter but switching from Team Freedom to Team Dictatorship at any point never mind mid-war seems like a material event that might persuade me to reconsider my political choices.
Orange man is in fact bad. I have no problem with making the case, especially on specifics.
I 𝘥𝘰 object to demanding that people say it constantly. Above all, it's an own-goal. Thanks to rigid coalition-management, everyone to the right of Mayor Pete assumes that leading with "orange man bad" means you aggressively endorse a long list of ideas, most of which they don't agree with. Because of that, and the long history of crying wolf, it's a demand that people disqualify themselves in the eyes of persuadable voters.
The most depressing part about the history of crying wolf is that he was, in fact, a wolf. He just hadn't made it past the fence into the sheep pen yet. Maybe we should have spent our time talking about the fence instead of the wolf.
Well, I think the folks at the Bulwark are much, much more on board with Orange Man Bad than some dipshit leftists are, in spite of having fewer grievances with actual policy.
2. ~Trump voters are immoral~ American stupidity has reached critical mass. [Sorry, don't know how to do strikethrough text on Substack.]
^^It's unkind, but if I'm being honest, this is what Trump 2024 did to me.
I'm not so worried about 3; I think the bigger issue - also raised frequently around SB - is that the Democrats need to be less fucking annoying to (at least) 50% of the population. The journalism bit is mostly to do with how people choose to entertain themselves, realistically.
When I saw the headline in my email, I almost didn't click on it, with the basic response of "please just do it less, you are a very highly differentiated outlet and one of your areas of least differentiation is correctly pointing out that Donald Trump is awful, lawless, etc. etc. ad nauseum".
So, obviously I was pleasantly surprised that I did choose to click through.
The vast majority of Trump voters aren't immoral. The result of their voluntary actions is immoral. We should spend just the right amount of time exploring that fact, but no more.
I didn't link the source because I'm reluctant to make this personal. In the past when I've quoted other comments, people got pretty angry, which is reasonable given how weak Substack's alerting is. If you drag someone it can be days before they realize it, and it sucks not being able to defend yourself.
But yes, it was one person, last I checked, but the logical endpoint of a common point of view.
I'll update this when I'm at my computer with the number of upvotes it got. [Update: 9]
I think this is just partisanship, and the comments section is always going to draw from a particular slice of readers. Check out Ross Douthat or Tyler Cowen's comment sections, even the most ecumenical center-right writers attract much less interesting comments.
I agree on all counts*, but I'd like to take the opportunity to make the case that demands for public partisan consensus actively undermine the connection with swing voters (for reasons I elaborated on in my reply to Jason).
* Though I would never expect much from the NYT comments, which are 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 worse. Sadly, Cowen's comments are usually disappointing, to the point that I don't read them unless he or someone trustworthy calls attention to something specific.
I think the average quality of journalism has really collapsed over my lifetime. You get very surface level catastrophizing because that is easy to write and parrot.
Creating original insights or pointing out material consequences takes effort and knowledge but incentives don’t compensate for that usually.
I was convinced that Musk was not paying his child support by all the "deadbeat dad" headlines, but no one has even accused him of not paying what the court said he had to pay.
The actual story is that Grimes keeps messaging him openly on Twitter saying he's not answering texts and DMs about their shared child's time-sensitive health issues. Assuming she's not just lying, that seems to somewhat justify calling him a "deadbeat dad."
And I'm pretty sure she's not lying given Musk's litigiousness. Seems likely he'd sue her for defamation if she was.
- listen to right-wing media to hear the rumors being passed around
- craft clear, concise, fact-based arguments against the worst points
I was amazed and horrified by how badly Democrats did in this last cycle.
If you want to win those swing voters, the people on the left need to be aware of the right-wing stories being passed around because those are the ones reaching swing voters and changing minds.
If you were a casual Joe Rogan listener over the last 4 years, you saw him getting slowly red-pilled because his right wing guests would spread crazy stories and there was nobody to set him straight. There could have been moments of "Joe, remember that story they told you? Here is what really happened..."
These moments, executed well, are powerful. And there's only so much Mayor Pete to go around.
If a smart person with an audience wants a high-leverage position, arming people with the best arguments to win these day-to-day rhetorical fight is a job worth doing.
There seems to be a problem where Democrats decide to talk to the groups rather than look at polls, focus groups or talk to their own constituents. It is political malpractice and means their messages are really badly crafted.
The dumbest political trope is people getting mad at democrats for listening to "focus groups" or being too "poll tested." THATS EXACTLY WHAT WE SHOULD FRICKIN WANT!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH
Indeed, the problem is that the Democratic political consulting class seems to have no idea what normal people are like.
I wonder if this is, to some degree, an effect of the gradual shift away from having volunteer and low-level campaign staff knock undecided doors and toward having them knock the doors of probable Democratic voters who just might not vote.
VAN has been an amazing tool, but it's also really changed who the average low-level Democratic political operative talks to on a daily basis.
I agree that correcting the misinformation environment is very important but people are already very much trying that. Dems getting more Butigiegs will help, but I think the larger issue is that social media algorithms themselves actively prefer misinformation and rightwing content over informative content of the same popularity. I don't know how we fix it but I think it is important to acknowledge what has been tried and that failing doesn't necessarily mean that good efforts haven't been made.
I think the ITN framework is valuable, and I agree that there's plenty of stuff out there about Trump and Fascism (read John Ganz) or about Trump and American History (read Jamelle Bouie) and writing more of that wouldn't help.
But I think the SB coverage has been changed less by the actual content of Trump 2.0 than I expected. With the exception of the piece about Tesla, it's focused primarily on winning elections by moderating and the significance of budget choices. Which are both regular themes here and important. But there's been less on what the implications are for federalism or for the structure of the civil service or how we should pursue regulation in the future or what moderate D legislators should be doing to oppose Trump and Musk, compared to what I would have expected.
I attribute this to the fact that the shitstorm is shape-shifting every day. The implications and the best available actions aren’t necessarily immediately clear.
I do think that there should be someone out there who is taking this moment to open up their thinking about what structures we want to build after the shitstorm passes. We don’t have to rebuild exactly the way it was built before.
I'd like to do that but it's really hard in the present moment. It's like discussing what Pacific Palisades and Altadena should look like in the future one day into the fire.
We're just going to have this thing play out for a while, see how vast the damage is, and go from there.
Agree completely! I would guess that many of us here are trying to be open-minded in this way (I am trying, though having this be even worse than I expected has been challenging, as has the fact that many people I know are directly affected by losing their jobs or bracing for that possibility). I just think that SB, with its specific and policy-oriented focus, isn't ideally suited to spitballing.
Agreed. Sometimes I almost feel like Matt is in denial and wants to pretend Trump is just a normal Republican president who only cares about cutting taxes. I think that was the correct take on Trump's first term pre-covid, but it's quickly become clear Trump 2.0 is a different animal.
Like it's crazy to me that he's only written one piece about anything directly related to what Musk is doing with DOGE. This seems like a huge deal even from a non-alarmist, technocratic perspective.
I find all of the “is Elon Musk smart?” discourse pretty silly because it ignores some key facts we know about him! He’s taking a ton of drugs, most notably ketamine, but also LCD, cocaine, ecstasy, etc. and he’s not sleeping very much, potentially related to the drug use. Regardless of how smart you are, drug abuse and sleep deprivation often make people act erratically.
> At the same time, to the frustration of some, the general tenor of Slow Boring coverage is not focused on maximum alarmism about every event.
Maybe you got some comments like this but honestly I don't think there are many. My comment earlier in the week was quite a bit different and I don't think this piece really grapples with the range of responses here to the events of the past few weeks.
In another piece you said "politics is always the slow boring of hard boards". This seems plainly false to me. Did Trump bore hard boards to get to where he is? Setting Trump aside, Augustus might've bored some boards but Caligula clearly did not. There's a point where political rules don't apply because you're not playing the same sport.
Being alarmist is one thing, but I really don't think most slow boring commenters are that alarmist by nature. I think some people are questioning if the slow boring approach has much to say about the current political moment. You can be as moderate or as disciplined as you want but if the house is on fire you need to take action. It's fine if you Matt think the right action is to keep doing the same exact things you've been doing for 100 years or whatever, but I don't think it's crazy or out of line for people to wonder if the political moment is different here.
I think the Yglesias Thought take is that Trump 100% did get here by the Slow Boring of Hard Boards. In 2016 he deliberately moderated on the 2000's and early 2010's GOP's most toxic issue positions, Cutting Entitlements, Middle East adventurism, Free Trade absolutism, opposition to gay marriage, moderating on Abortion. By doing all of this he coded as a different kind of republican and accordingly won different kinds of voters.
Assuming you're just Matty Y in a funny hat, I'll say that that is a pretty soft take.
My take [supported by my even more impressive career as a blogger, journalist and editor, of course] is that Trump is basically the symptom of a rot that set in in American culture. He's not a hard worker. He didn't work hard to develop his talents. He was lucky to be the right man for the moment and rode that to the white house without any thoughtful innovation or departure from what he (and practically every other mediocre intelligence over 70) already thought or would otherwise have been capable of.
There are no boards bored in this story; the US, and the Republican Party, had a diminished immune system, and he is the virus (sorry for mixing metaphors) who enters the system via these weaknesses (which also include the GOP's toxic shibboleths).
I think both can be true! For Trump to have risen within the GOP is certainly a reflection of rot in our politics. But for Trump to have squeezed out two narrow victories in the general election is, in fact, the boring of hard boards. He just wouldn't have won if he didn't moderate on medicare/medicaid and centralized pro-life rhetoric in his campaign.
Thanks for responding. I guess what I don't understand is what constitutes the "slow boring" (God, we're beating this to death eh?) involved in moderating positions he didn't feel very strongly about in the first place in order to find the sweet spot of public opinion re: medicare/medicaid and abortion.
But, maybe I don't understand what slow boring really is. I am imagining the unglamorous work of trying to *change* public opinion, build coalitions, build institutions, expand networks, find small victories, engage in local politics, etc.
Trump moderating here seems very unlike any of the above - it seems more in line with "popularism", i.e. picking and highlighting popular stances whilee downplaying unpopular ones, than difficult work.
Do we disagree on how Trump eked out his 2016 win, or do I just misunderstand Matt Yglesias Thought (with Boring Characteristics)?
Not to go too deep in diagraming the thought of this publication, but I think popularism helps explain how you can accomplish slow boring policy victories.
Take congestion pricing for example. I don't actually hate Hochul for being weary of pushing congestion pricing during an election cycle, and her flip flopping probably held a few House seats for Dems.
The eventual passage of Obamacare after many failed attempts and after many smaller victories (like CHIP) is an example of slow boring. And then followed by many efforts to protect it and slowly expand and improve it.
Except that tariffs weren't even a "right" thing for several decades. (For most of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century, protectionism was primarily pushed by Democrats, not Republicans.)
What's actually disturbing, of course, is how much the "reflection of rot in our politics" is not unique to America and seems to be prevalent throughout advanced democracies and even some not-so-advanced (Argentina, which has way more valid reasons to be frustrated with traditional pols.)
Trump is an opportunistic infection that invaded the American body politic because its immune system had been deeply compromised over many years, due to a confluence of events, actions, and reactions. He's the nation's Kaposi sarcoma. He took over because we had weakened ourselves. Both sides are to blame for the rot in our system, although the right takes pride of place for welcoming him in.
"Trump is basically the symptom of a rot that set in in American culture. He's not a hard worker. He didn't work hard to develop his talents. He was lucky to be the right man for the moment and rode that to the white house without any thoughtful innovation or departure from what he (and practically every other mediocre intelligence over 70) already thought or would otherwise have been capable of."
Trump in 2016 claimed to be worth billions, but at the very least was worth a couple of hundred million. If I was worth a couple of hundred million dollars, I would not run for president because running for president is a lot of work. And he's done it 3 times. Its clear he enjoys it immensely, but that doesn't change that its a lot of work.
I would say the same about Musk who is worth hundreds of billions. He could sit back and do whatever he wanted, including nothing at all, for the rest of his life. But he's pushing hard on all kinds of things.
None of this suggests that what Trump or Musk is doing is good here. But Matt's point that because we don't like something, doesn't mean they are stupid also applies to them not being lazy. Just say that the thing they are working to do is bad.
What do you mean when you say "slow boring of hard boards"? The GOP was completely undisciplined in developing its platform and doing hard work of convincing marginal voters. That is my point.
I really don't see at all what you're referring to. Can you actually point out to me any of the hard work he did? What persuasion was he doing? What policy work was he hammering out to find compromises? He took vaguely held... not even positions, but like, *dispositions*... and he ran with those, scarcely even thinking he would win. He played the same character he's always played on TV, and if the mood in the country had been different (or if the Democrats hadn't gone with Clinton) he would very likely have lost and would have had no capacity to sense that loss or adapt to it.
My central point is this: HE is not responsible for the change in US political culture (among non-politicians). He is downstream of it. He is consequential because he, benefitting from the societal frustrations, sharing them, and having an intuition (that he did nothing to develop) for how to push the right emotional buttons - he hijacked the Republican party apparatus and now he and his sycophants run the show.
But, this is not the same thing as a theory of politics wherein you achieve change via the Slow Boring of Hard Boards (assuming this is what you're trying to say that he did).
Look I'm not saying this take is 100% false but I'm definitely saying it's not 100% true. Trump won by moderating his message and being a disciplined politician is a bit of a strange idea. I do think moderation is part of what he is doing and MattY has a lot to say about that. But there's a lot more going on and Matt doesn't seem to acknowledge that and he definitely doesn't have a satisfactory account of it.
I do know that's his take. It's not his most persuasive. I think the disagreements there are probably more interesting than whoever is criticizing him for not being alarmist enough.
Yea it's interesting. The recurring Yglesias critique from Brian or more acutely Will Stencil is Matt over indexes the public's policy literacy. Not that Matt thinks they are literally reading about ACA subsidy expiration, but his detractors often assert that even just that the idea that public even notices any salient differences in policy is contestable if not wrong. And given *gestures broadly* I get it. That being said, The evidence can be made to comport with Matt's theory too. And if you assume many Voters put all the rest of Trump's antics into a bucket of "he's an asshole but he is our asshole," the circle can be squared. It's a Draymond Green theory of elections. The problem is rather than winning championships this Draymond may take down the entire Association.
You can be a Trump without any slow boring. But the aftermath of being a Trump is completely opaque even to Trump. Some of his impacts will surely be permanent, but he can’t predict which, and they likely aren’t going to include the construction of new government systems that achieve some goal.
If you have long term goals that you want to achieve (which might include the blocking of future Trumpian individuals from unleashing chaos at this level) it takes slow boring to reliably bring them about. But if you just want to shake things up, you can surf a wave and maybe get into position to do some shaking.
But other commenters seem insistent that Trump is engaged in the slow boring! It strikes me that 10 years into Trump, intelligent, informed followers of American politics don't have a clear account of Trump's success or what he represents. Also attempts to intellectualize his appeal always fall pathetically flat, but his normie supporters have no problem coming up with coherent reasons that they like him (bad reasons but easy to understand), because Trump is not operating on the same axis.
I think Matt has under-explored what is actually happening here by focusing on factors that conform to his priors. I also don't think Will Stancil or Brian Beutler have a convincing account, but they are at least grasping at something real that Matt is willfully ignoring.
One possible modification of that statement is that successful *liberal* politics is always the slow boring of hard boards, while antiliberal politics isn't.
I guess it depends on what you mean by liberal politics - does it only include enacting policy within a liberal democratic structure, or does it also include moving your government's structure in a liberal democratic direction? I tend to think both require the slow boring of hard boards but that's just an initial reaction.
That one is just false on its face though. Slow boring only makes any kind of sense in electoral politics. Without elections the strongest person can just take power and make any policy they want.
on-target as usual, thanks. I think many past efforts to deal with Mr. Trump were notable for their counterproductivity. Two that come to my mind are Trump's first (2019) impeachment (which was perhaps factually wrong and could never have possibly succeeded), and Alvin Bragg's decision to try Trump on a seemingly bizarre felony charge (which "succeeded" at the cost of antagonizing much of the country and validating the concept of anti-Trump Lawfare.)
That's an interesting counterfactual to examine - if Democrats held fire on impeachment number 1, would the Jan 6 impeachment effort have been more likely to succeed? Seems plausible.
I think quite likely yes but the real issue with Impeachment 2.0 was a desire to run a more formalized process that extended beyond Jan 20, raising a novel constitutional question. Impeachment is not a legal process. Nothing stopped the House from Impeaching trump the second they finished the electoral count act obligations on the evening of Jan 6/7th while the capitol was still smoldering. Support would never have been higher than that moment. We would have had POTUS Pence for 13 days. But death by proceduralism fetish once again.
Everyone was in the room that evening. A lot of time and energy passed in the week between J6 and January 13 when the Impeachment vote happened in the house and the 25th when the charges were brought to the Senate. There were literally zero evidentiary questions at issue, nor where they legally required, nor would they even be answered until the J6 Commission months later. Everyone justifiably believed he simply would go away in a few days and couldn't possibly be elected again so it wouldn't matter. Belts and Suspenders would have been warranted here. Speed was of the essence.
If it took just two weeks to dissipate the energy necessary to react properly to the first ever violent attempt to overturn the results of an American election then probably the energy wasn't really there at the moment either.
If I'm being brutally honest, a decision with the enormity of something like removing the President is probably suspect if it requires the passion of a moment that would otherwise pass away in two weeks.
So I doubt the counterfactual that it would have happened, and most importantly think impeachment is only possible when the opposition already has a sufficient majority to do it on their own. No Congressional majority is ever going to remove their party's POTUS.
Exactly, the articles of impeachment should have been next day, two at the MOST.
AND, they should have tapped some republicans like Liz Chenney to draft them, make them palatable to republicans, not put crap from pre election in there.
I disagree with Mr. Weinberg that there was a problem with the facts of Impeachment I -- Alexander Vindman's and Fiona Hill's testimony and willingness to bring down the wrath of TrumpWorld on themselves, as well as Trump's own attempts to violate the law by burying the whistleblower report, were enough to convince me. But over and above that, no one at the time that Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine had any idea that a few years later he was going to try for a violent overthrow of the government and deserve Impeachment II, so each impeachment should stand on its own. Yes, he was acquitted, but I think that history will recognize his guilt.
I think there is a somewhat vexing strategic question of how an opposition party should use Impeachment in the context of extremely low odds of successful removal. The initial Ukraine-gate (i have been saying since 2017 we need to retire Watergate as the default suffix for scandals and replace it with "-A-Lago"), was very bad, but there were like 10 other equally "impeachable" events on which dems never hit on. That isn't to say they should have impeached him 10x, quite the opposite, I think J6 Genuinely merited such action and had non trivial odds of success. Contingent on Dems winning the house in 2026, I think the liberal desire to impeach Trump for god knows what will be quite high, but it is entirely pointless and isn't the sole method by which oversight and political accountability can be achieved.
Watergate is the original Watergate. I found the proceedings deeply offensive, an early step in our crazed venture into Politics by Personal Destruction. The current era makes me feel like I'm living in the late stages of the Roman Republic.
I wasn't around but I think I would have been more offended by the crimes of the Nixon administration, crimes which involved a great deal of personal destruction.
I think Trump's guilt for the crimes alleged at the first impeachment is debatable. More importantly, it was obvious before the impeachment that he would not be convicted. Appealing to notions of "historical record" or "judgment of posterity" sounds pretty fuzzy to me.
The old saying is that you don't try to overthrow the king unless you will win. In contemporary terms, beyond the brief happiness of Trump-haters, the impeachment achieved nothing but to further poison an already toxic political atmosphere in the country.
I have blocked Impeachment #1 out of my mind, and hardly remember the issues. The "Steele Dossier," originally claimed as smoking-gun evidence, turned out to be questionable and perhaps fictitious. I think several witnesses at the hearing gave compelling testimony, but I never had the sense that the credible evidence was even close to cause for removal from office. To me the whole thing was motivated by anger toward Trump, plus a sense of incredulity that he could have won an election honestly.
With all possible respect, I think you should not make factual claims about things you don’t understand. The Steele Dossier had absolutely nothing to do with Trump’s first impeachment. Saying that it did is the equivalent of saying that the Watergate hearings were factually wrong because it turned out we really DID land on the moon. Trump’s first impeachment was about his refusing to disburse aid to Ukraine, aid which Congress had authorized, unless Zelenskyy announced a bogus investigation of Joe Biden. None of this was disputed at all once it came to light.
In fairness, you’re not the only person I’ve seen who confused “Russiagate” with Trump’s first impeachment—Michael Dougherty of the National Review made this mistake too. Obviously that’s way worse because he’s a national commentator, but seriously—next time, Google it!
No. I thought the committee did excellent work, leading to a (to me) compelling narrative. I don't know why my reaction was so different, but Impeachment Offense #2 was far more serious than #1, and the Select Committee didn't seem to be packed with media-hungry politicians waiting for the opportunity for their TV lines.
I agree. I think that the Mueller Report, the Managers' Reports for both impeachments, the January 6 Report, and Jack Smith's Reports will be key documentary evidence for evaluating the first Trump presidency, and I'm glad that they exist and will be difficult if not impossible to hunt down and destroy, even for Deputy President Musk.
Since at least the second Clinton Administration, I've been concerned that an increasing number of Presidential records only exist electronically, and that future historians may be confronted with more and more lacunae in the record as time goes on and storage media become unreadable. Fortunately for them, Trump has been so egregious that he's left lots and lots of durable tracks and, thanks to this blizzard of ill-intentioned, semi-legal, and outright illegal Executive Orders and the resulting court cases, his second term will be at least as comprehensively documented as his first.
Holy crap, first.
Anyway, thank you for this. At the risk of sounding overly laudatory, SB has been really important in my own intellectual journey from “replacement-level lefty postmodern-ish social scientist” to “maybe-still-replacement-level but much better informed center-left social scientist skeptical of postmodernist intellectual movements, while still seeing their value in some limited respects.” It’s challenged me to be more empirically rigorous in a way that my PhD program did not (to its detriment). So thank you - part of my job is to think about the meaning of “vibe shifts”, but I really appreciate this as a venue for challenging me to think more practically and concretely.
This is an amazing compliment to the SB mission!
A big part of my experience here is the truly excellent comment section. At the risk of unintentional omissions and in no particular order, all 45 of the Davids and counting, Dan Quail, drosophilist, Casey, John from FL, Kenny Easwaran, Sharty, Binya, SD, ATX Jake, Colin Chaudhuri, Tired PhD Student, Lapsed Pacifist, Randall, lindamc, Bo, Jean, Bronx Zoo Cobra, Wigan, FrigidWind, Mariana Trench, Deadpan Troglodyte, City of Trees, Matt Hagy, Avery James, THpacis, SomeGuy, Lisa J, srynerson, Tom Hitchner, Richard Gadsden, A.D., Casey, Helikitty, disinterested, and dysphemic treadmill, you’re all great and have helped me think better. I am definitely forgetting people, so please don’t take not appearing on this list as a snub!
Edit: I can’t believe I forgot SB folk hero Rory Hester. He is truly a first among equals in the comments section. He doesn’t come around often, but when he does - it’s going to be good.
You think too highly of a middle aged man who routinely chases ducks.
Same! I *always* learn things here.
(and thanks for the h/t!)
You're a pretty fine commenter too--thanks for contributing!
Thank you! Your (incomplete!) list is a great reminder of how many quality posters there are, and makes me feel bad that I occasionally get frustrated by them.
(Edit: by "them" I meant "the comments section", not specific posters, though of course that happens too.)
Aw, thank you for the shout-out! 😊
Wow, I made the list! Thank you very much!
You are one of the bright shining stars of the SB commentariat 😊
Awww, thank you! You are too!
Yes. It is too bad that other sites do not have equally good comments sections, in part becasue Substack does not permit authors to offer single post/small batches to encourage comments from people who do not subscribe.
Thanks C-man, I love this comments section.
Thanks so much for the shout and thank you for your contributions!
Wait, I was called out and I missed it! I appreciate it so much and absolutely agree with everything you said about the comment section. Thank you!
I sometimes want to shake postmodernists and tell them to get their heads out of their asses.
But it’s so warm in there
No no no you don't understand, putting your head up your ass was conceived by the State in order to create methods of self-surveillance and convince people to ink the law upon their own soul.
(JK I love Foucault.)
The ass is the ultimate panopticon.
One of the more exotic papers I read in my first-year grad school seminar “Queer Geographies” was called, I shit (ahem) you not, “Is the anus a grave?”
It made sense in context.
Edit: It was “Is the rectum a grave?” by Leo Bersani.
"The ass is the ultimate panopticon."
Congratulations on winning SB's prestigious Combination of Words I Never Thought I Would See Award.
Betteridges Law suggests that the answer is ‘no’.
I actually think Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison is both accurate and correct. Great book, 10/10, would participate in the discovery and ordering of a modern society again.
I've found Betteridge's Law to be breaking down quite severely as the world gets more and more bonkers.
Agreed; Foucault is a convenient target for anti-postmodernist sentiment because he’s the one most educated people have heard of, but a lot of what he says about power is…basically correct. A very important corrective to some of the coarser marxist theories about hegemony, domination and so on.
Of course, like any big thinker, his thought has been taken in directions that are a bit of a stretch, but that's not really due to shortcomings in his thought as such. He had bad takes (defending pedophilia, celebrating the Iranian Revolution) for sure, but, well, so have a lot of major thinkers.
As someone who is diagnosed with ADHD, I've also grappled with his critique of psychiatric medicine, because there sure is a lot of tension to resolve between the utility of naming and categorizing, and the existence of a range of capacity and ability in humans who are nominally equal in society.
"It’s challenged me to be more empirically rigorous in a way that my PhD program did not"
It's things like this that make me realise there are some small saving graces to the Trump presidency.
Hi there, I'm curious to learn more by exactly what you meant by: "replacement-level lefty postmodern-ish social scientist" ?
What does this mean in layperson terms?
Interestingly enough, "replacement-level" is a term I learned hanging around here. It basically means "unremarkable" - someone who's nothing special, perfectly ordinary.
The "lefty postmodern-ish" is basically proto-woke (i.e. woke before the term was widespread). I didn't have many strong opinions when I went to grad school, so I sort of marinated in the general anti-capitalist (and I mean that literally, not as an insult) social justice-y atmosphere and didn't really question it. As a result I actually didn't really learn much about the world, which you'd think a PhD program would teach you about (if anyone wants to take that as an indictment of elite universities or PhD programs in general, I think that's more or less fair, but I would say the fault was at least half with me).
"Postmodern" here is just a sort of blanket term for "vaguely left-wing criticism of capitalism." It's actually more complicated than that, and there is postmodernist theory that's worth a damn in some contexts, but that would be a long and boring discussion.
In even more layperson terms, I basically used to be a totally unoriginal thinker and I think I'm at least a more creative and bright now.
Thanks for this explanation. I thought this is what you meant but just wanted to clarify. A theme that is top-of-mind for me is persuasion and how people change ideologically. I’m also interested in how people see past their echo chamber (e.g., you eventually seeing past the post-modern critique of the campus; me drifting left after growing up in a very conservative setting).
Just want to say I am 2/2 this week on Slow Boring action. Yesterday I emailed my state rep about modifying CT's EV tax credit system. Today I set up recurring weekly donations until 4/1 for the WI Supreme Court race. I will say your calls to action are much more convincing to me personally because of the ITN framework laid out here.
Genuinely appreciate it.
Matt should have a free article listing 5 things you can do right now if you're pissed off about Trump from a big tent perspective.
I live in the northeast and see a ton of people interested in protesting or somehow showing their disapproval of Trump. They have a lot of well meaning intent but I don't think the headline "Bostonians don't like Trump" is going to be news to anyone, so would like to push them in a more productive direction.
Yes, and the "don't buy anything on Day X" is sad. But at least it's not counterproductive as, for example publicly opposing (the more public the worse) fossil fuel production and transportation projects were and one can imagine some "Anti-Trump" protests could be.
Things like the Women's March in 2017 was good as a reminder that Trump lost the popular vote; that same would not be the case now. A public protest over SNAP cuts could be.
It's Machiavellian, but I'm going to hold off on protesting until kids kicked off their meds by the dissolution of PEPFAR to start dying. I really hope there are investigative journalists on the ground in Malawi and Eswatini recording their stories.
You want an effective protest? Put forty people outside the White house or Capitol, every one of us with a different big glossy sign of a smiling kid Trump killed to save a nickel.
I really don't think protests *work* as well as many (especially on the left) wish.
Americans just don't like hippies.
Protests are most useful for pressuring the Democrats to do things, since they need to be, at a minimum, sympathetic to any vaguely left-wing mass protest movement.
Personally, I actually quite like hippies, LSD, the dead, drag queens, whatever, but I abhor protests. A mob of people mindlessly chanting slogans while intentionally making bystanders lives unpleasant by blocking traffic, vandalizing public spaces, making lots of noise, etc. Ugh. Why would any of this be remotely persuasive to the not already converted?
I think the fact that various policy positions became popular (anti-Vietnam, LGBT, climate) alongside protest movements doesn't at all suggest the protests were helpful in achieving those goals. It seems to be more just a social gathering for like-minded people to feel superior to others.
Dems want to start riots now that they lost an election? Hmm... sounds familiar.
Evidence suggests that focused, reasonable, well-attended protests about specific issues that aren't already dominating the news can be quite effective because they draw attention to their foci and create an impression in viewers' monkey brains that the protestors' position is socially desirable.
The problem is that unfocused, unreasonable, and poorly-attended protests (particularly those that just generally say "down with the other tribe"!) can have a negative effect greater than the positive effect of more responsible protests.
I agree about that kind of protest, of things that only the most strongly committed MAGA supporter could defend.
Now for the pitch: :)
Hi
As you are not already a subscriber, may I inviteyou to subscribe (for free) to my substack,"Radical Centrist?" file:///C:/Users/Thomas/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml
I write mainly about US monetary policy,US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which USpolitical party is least bad and theyare not hard to figure out, but Itry to keep my analysis of the issuesnon-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I want to be that scribbler.
Thanks,
I constructed a letter I'm going to send to a lot of democratic politiciansand orgs advocating for them to consider the common sense Democrat manifesto.
Just need to start sending it.
Also donating to the WI Supreme Court race.
I think in terms of actually get people's eyes on it, I would recommend trying to find the email of the head of the organization.
Fair point.
Can you post a link to the letter plz?! Would love to send around as well!
Yes but definitely tweak it, even if with ChatGPT
ChatGPT as an editor is so awesome. I had a letter to my state representatives where my first draft was basically "Knock it off, you white supremacist assholes" and ChatGPT refined it into a polite, five-bullet-point letter that was much more persuasive, even to me!
Is there a way to create a ChatGPT prompt that will always yield a slightly different result? Like ask it to use the timestamp in some RND() function to perturb the output? Would be cool to supply a prompt for people to generate guaranteed unique variants of this kind of thing...
Oh my God just write a letter like a human. I promise it won't hurt you.
It absolutely does hurt to sit down and spend time drafting text that you think will strike the right emotional balance and clearly state the main points you want it to state - and then to write another version of the same thing that is different but still has to strike the same balance and make the same points.
There is no more value in suffering through this multiple times than there is in multiplying two eight digit numbers by hand without using a calculator.
is it really so important for you to be holier than thou that you demean someone who's trying to help your cause?
lies, I hate hand cramps!
With the way chatgpt works, it should always generate a slightly different result. if using the api, you can tweak temperature to make it more "creative" as in give more different results.
I think it'd be fine just asking chat to
"please rewrite this"
if you want to reuse someone's letter
Just ask chatgpt to modify it slightly so it doesn't look like the same person wrote it. It's really good at that.
Senator Kaine
Contact Form
https://www.kaine.senate.gov/contact/share-your-opinion
Contacted?: No
Senator Warner
Contact Form
https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contactpage
Contacted?: No
Representative Bobby Scott
Contact Form
https://bobbyscott.house.gov/contact
Contacted?: No
Mayor
(State Delegate)
Contacted?: No
City Democratic Committee
Contacted?: No
DPVA
Contact Form
https://vademocrats.org/contact-us/
Contact?: No
Hon. Susan Swecker, chair@vademocrats.org
https://vademocrats.org/your-party/state-steering-committee/
Contacted?: No
DSCC
Contact Form
https://www.dscc.org/contact/
Contacted?: No
DGA
Contact Form
https://democraticgovernors.org/contact/
Contacted?: No
DLCC
Contact Form
https://dlcc.org/contact/
Contacted?: No
DNC
Contact Form
https://democrats.org/contact-us/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Contacted?: No
DCCC
Contact Form
https://dccc.org/contact/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Contacted?: No
---------------------------------------------------------
Dear [Elected Official’s Name],
I’m a Democrat who wants Democrats to win more elections. I worry that the party has become too influenced by an academic, left-wing politics disconnected from working- and middle-class concerns. If Democrats want to win, they must focus on broad, common-sense principles rather than niche ideological debates.
I urge you to consider the nine tenets outlined by Matthew Yglesias in his Common Sense Democrat Manifesto (www.slowboring.com/p/a-common-sense-democrat-manifesto), which presents a vision for an electorally successful and effective Democratic Party:
1) Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.
2) The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.
3) Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.
4) We should judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. Democrats must stop thinking of Americans primarily through a racial lens. Americans are individuals and should be thought of as such.
5) Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.
6) Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.
7) Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.
8) Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.
9) All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.
Democrats succeed when they champion economic fairness, personal freedom, and good governance. But too often, they allow their agenda to be shaped by academic fads and performative virtue-signaling instead of what ordinary voters actually care about. This alienates the working-class Americans who should be the party’s core constituency.
Democrats must be a big-tent coalition that wins in Maine, Michigan, and Montana—not just elite urban enclaves. This means governing effectively, rejecting left-wing ideological litmus tests, and being willing to move right when necessary to win elections.
Yglesias’ work lays out a pragmatic roadmap for a Democratic Party that can win and govern effectively. I hope you will read his Common Sense Democrat Manifesto and take these principles seriously.
Democrats cannot govern if they do not win. Let’s focus on a vision that can win elections, deliver real results, and secure lasting progress.
Thank you for your time and service.
Sincerely,
Name
Email
Address
And I approve of the donation (I've done the same) even though I did not agree with your message to the State Rep. :)
Can't win em all
I’m a tough grader. :)
I get that your comparative advantage is in writing about policy issues rather than, say, the avenues that Trump could use to defy the courts and the likelihood that he'll succeed.
But I think you're underrating something important: there are very, very few center-left commentators who are as trustworthy as you are. Most of them spend 99% of their time writing about how this or that thing that Trump did will be fascism/the apocalypse/etc.
So, despite the fact that there's indeed no shortage of analysis of Trump defying norms and breaking laws, I think many of us simply tune it out because the people writing those articles have cried wolf so much in the past.
At the margin, there may be some value in SB inviting a non-hysterical legal analyst to write some articles. This may be more valuable than, for example, the 100th article whose general gist is
"Trump's economic policy will be inflationary and will increase the deficit, resulting in higher mortgage rates" or "Republicans are cutting benefits for poor people" (I love this blog, but there are *a lot* of these articles! We get it!).
I love Matt so much, but I do wish there was a legal equivalent to Slow Boring sometimes. Often it is understandably a blind spot of his. Unfortunately some of the better legal bloggers completely lack a Slow Boring of Hard Boards ethos when it comes to politics and lend themselves to the kind of alarmist catastrophizing (popehat) criticized here. Or are just are much further left than I want (5-4, Strict Scrutiny etc). Currently the best I can get is David French, but if anyone has recommendations let me know!
Advisory Opinions is kinda handling this the best of anyone doing opinion right now.
Thank you for the Advisory Opinions recommendation. I've been searching for legal coverage that fits the SB balance of wonky enough to be real, not so wonky that it's just for practitioners, not so partisan that it forgoes rational analysis, and broad in its coverage.
I tend to enjoy the free Preet Bahara podcasts, but just can't add another subscription as I'm not fully utilizing what I already pay for. I like Lawfare quite a bit, but the national security focus is too narrow. And, they are sometimes so "of the system" that they aren't able to conceive of structural issues in how law is practiced.
Agreed. Akil Amar's podcast is also good
Advisory Opinions is what I thought of when I saw Matt’s meme for the “Trump does not want to be a dictator” center right.
Their presumption of good faith from the Supreme Court strains credulity too much for me.
Totally agree.
The Volokh Conspiracy is very good. It's full libertarian, but their perspective is out in the open, and I think it's pretty easy to mentally adjust for the obvious blindspots (to get my bias in the open, I'm sympathetic but not remotely dogmatic or philosophically libertarian).
I was going to mention VC too, but as you say, they are (as their byline says) often libertarian, which isn't exactly the type of ideology the top level commenter was looking for.
There's also some high variance among the writers. I think the best and most thoughtful are Volokh himself, Ilya Somin, and Jonathan Adler. Orin Kerr too, but I don't know if he writes there much anymore.
They'll occasionally interact with Matt's work, too. One of my favorites was this one by Somin replying to Matt citing him regarding the Takings Clause with regard to zoning--especially the last paragraph responding to Matt's contention that ConLaw involves making stuff up: https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/13/matt-yglesias-on-the-takings-clause-and-curbing-exclusionary-zoning/
Another Somin piece that was really good is this one scrutinizing Matt's defense of the single right/left dimension: https://reason.com/volokh/2024/04/14/what-differentiates-political-left-and-right/
The Volokh Conspiracy is pretty good, especially people like Orin Kerr, Eugene Volokh himself, Sam Bray, and Will Baude, but Josh Blackman, its most frequent poster, is widely regarded as a clown in legal circles. Volokh should have kicked him out years ago but aims for a "big tent."
Yeah, the law subreddit is way more doomer than anyone I've come across. For instance, go to that subreddit and suggest that there will be a midterm election in 2026.
I will say the "move fast and break things" model is exactly the wrong way to implement an autocracy. There's a reason why it's called democratic "backsliding" and not democratic "move fast and break shit."
Yea that Sub is to Lawyers the way the NFL sub is to NFL Players lol
That sub is a bunch of people who have only a rudimentary understanding of “rule of law.”
If you want to hear actual lawyers discuss legal issues, the best public subreddit I've found is /r/legaladviceofftopic. It's full of actual lawyers banned from /r/legaladvice for correcting the mods/the mods' favorites, and it's mostly composed of threads discussing topical hypothetical questions.
If you're a lawyer you can join /r/Lawyers, which is awesome, but that's obviously not an option for most people here.
Reddit is a really bad place to get legal news. All of the subreddits either (1) have a lot of pop-political news, in which case they are nearly entirely non-lawyers (e.g. /r/law), or (2) focus on legal inside baseball, in which case they are nearly entirely lawyers but discussing subjects the public doesn't care about (e.g. /r/lawyertalk, /r/biglaw).
The thing about lawyers online is that public defenders and Biglaw attorneys are wildly overrepresented and that effectively means that any perspectives on the law tend to skew in those directions.
I have found the many lawfare podcasts and articles really informative
I got to sit in for a bit to conversations among my sister's in-law lawyers. They were analyzing legal approaches to Supreme Court cases (this was before the inauguration.) Their solid background in law gives them a leg up in quickly analyzing legal issues and moving towards creative responses. Some of have done pro-bono work for the Democratic party in the past (saw my brother-in-law on CNN working on one of the lesser-known Florida cases iin 2000.)
One of my hopeful fantasies is that lawyers like them all over the country are getting together, strategizing, and filing lawsuits and/or and providing legal advice for state, local and federal elected officials and their staffs.
I'm a lawyer. Advisory Opinions is the only outlet I know of that is popular both among the public and among lawyers. Just understand that it's right-leaning, and that Sarah Isgur in particular is unusually sympathetic to the Trump administration for a lawyer.
Strict Scrutiny will quite possibly actively make you less informed about the law than if you just didn't listen to anything. I haven't listened to 5-4, but I imagine it's similar. It's irritating that there isn't a decent liberal alternative to Advisory Opinions. That whole space (including blogging) gets really overwhelmed with outrage-bait over analysis.
For more of a hard-law angle, Divided Argument is easily the best Supreme Court podcast, but is much more technical and also only records intermittently. David Lat and Steve Vladeck's Substacks are also solid. Some people like Akhil Amar, but he's an infamous egomaniac, which turns many off him.
Adam Liptak, the New York Times's primary Supreme Court reporter, is very good at what he does, but it's more objective news than commentary.
Check out One First by Steve Vladeck, I think it combined with the advisory opinions podcast will give you an SB-but-law level of understanding.
I like Preet Bharara’s podcast for legal discussions. His interviews are hit or miss due the bland guests, but his legal discussions with Joyce Vance are really informative and fair.
Yeah, it’s a challenge though because the nature of things makes it hard for someone to legitimately know enough to contribute. I could spend days and days talking about financial regulation, a moderate amount of time speaking about first amendment, constitutional separation of powers issues, the APA, but it would take a lot of time to dig into any specific legal questions simply because this stuff is harder than it looks. You really do have to have the right subject matter expert for the right issue if it isn’t someone working full time.
Agreed. I've come to appreciate the depth and nuances of these and other fields, particularly history, from my one streaming subscription: The Great Courses on Amazon Prime. For $8/mo, get access to 100's of high-quality lecture series from reputable and passionate professors. Each is generally 15 to 40 lectures, each of 30 minutes.
As examples, here the 10 most recent series I've watched over the last year or so.
- Books That Matter: The Federalist Papers
- The Vietnam War
- World War I: The Great War
- A Historian Goes to the Movies: Ancient Rome
- Western Civilization II
- History of the United States
- The U.S. Constitution Through History
- The Middle East in the 20th Century
- The Industrial Revolution
- Understanding the New Testament
For several, I've only watched one or two lectures. Others, notably "Western Civilization II" and "The Industrial Revolution", I watched multiple times. Even got the audio book for those two for additional consumption on walks. I highly recommend the general offering of The Great Courses for engaging content to help us better appreciate the depth of various topics of interests as well as to build some high level understanding.
love this recommendation TY
Take this same analysis to right wing leaders. How trustworthy are any of them? What do they spend their time doing?
I think it is fair that many think writing should be to whip up support. That is all they have seen from their opposition for well over 20 years. And it has been working.
I think this take ignores the fundamental conservative-liberal asymmetry. When one party, on a basic philosophical level, is understood by nearly everyone to be arguing for moving backward (i.e. into known territory) and the other party is understood to be arguing for moving forward (i.e. into unknown territory), people are always going to require more trustworthiness and more competence from the latter before they're willing to vote for them.
Between 2005 and 2023, Democrats did quite well in large part because we spent most of that period widely perceived as the more competent and fact-oriented party. But we totally squandered that advantage, at least temporarily, by failing to live up to our ideals and have (or even permit) robust internal debates on things like whether DEI programs actually work and what supporting trans rights actually requires in a policy sense.
I think your timeline is off—Democrats did pretty well in 2006 and 2008, mainly because they were able to take advantage of major disasters for the GOP (the Iraq war and the global financial meltdown, respectively). Since 2010, Democrats have done poorly, totally giving up gains made since the 1930s.
The major disasters definitely helped turn us into the party of perceived competence and greatly accelerated (alongside the global warming issue) our total capture of the institutions that have traditionally been arbiters of truth (the media, scientists, etc...).
We then road that perception of competence and truth-orientation to nearly two decades of national electoral success (at least compared to the immediately preceding two decades) while those captured institutions self-censored and atrophied until the general public ceased trusting them and, soon thereafter, ceased trusting us.
Hard for me to seriously think we did good at Democrats between 2005 and 2023 more than Republicans just really dropped the ball hard right before. This timeframe literally includes Trump getting elected...
Don't get me too wrong. I'm wanting to be the things you describe. I also don't feel too surprised by a lot of the flailing. I further doubt too much could be immediately done to course correct. It will take time. And our general landscape is largely to wait for the next implosion from Republicans.
I do not like that last point. And it is a straight line from how radically different their strategies are to what Democrats think have to be done.
I get your skepticism about saying Democrats did well, but the period covers four successive presidential elections during which Republicans never got closer to winning the popular vote than a -2.1% margin and averaged nearly -4.5%.
Two parties flooding the zone with shit is a great way to end up as Argentina or Brazil. If we're not going to care about the truth, it's not going to make much difference whether we're in power or Republicans are--we're going to get bad policy either way.
Relentless, tribalistic partisanship cannot continue increasing indefinitely without ruining the country and making everyone worse off. And it will be the marginalized who suffer worst from this, as usual.
I largely agree there. I just don't think we have a viable path without fixing at least most relevant actors, though. And I don't see any advice here that actually does that. All it does is near victim blame for why Democrats got beat at the presidential vote. And that is largely from not being in control of the national discourse. Which, again, none of this advice addresses.
At the end of the day, the only way for any of us on here to contribute to changing the culture of the party is to start behaving like the culture is different.
To that end, when I'm in a left-leaning space and get made to feel like I'm in a Portlandia sketch by all the handwringing, I've made it my policy to say so. And more generally, I spend more energy both playing devil's advocate and supporting others' efforts to play devil's advocate in intra-left discussions. If you're looking for action items from me, I'd suggest those.
There are a multitude of articles, podcasts, and video reports on these legal and economic topics on Bloomberg. There is also thoughtful analysis and forecasting on geopolitics and global markets. Moreover, to avoid further marketing my preferred product, I imagine WSJ, FT, and other publications have similar offerings.
A recurring theme in such reporting and analysis is uncertainty and competing narratives. That has been true for the last few years I’ve been paying attention, as well as in earlier contemporary reporting on past events. Even between two Democratic Harvard econ professors—Summers and Furman—there can be substantial differences despite broad agreement.
Moreover, overly confident predictions without sufficient consideration of uncertainty and alternative theories risk credibility. Fully appreciating this as an individual can require a significant time commitment over multi-year scales in my experience.
And of course, there are numerous AI products that could generate individualized studies of contemporary events through different lenses. Hence, I doubt SB-commissioned articles would be useful beyond recommending further resources and self-study for motivated individuals.
Example from my morning reading, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-24/elon-musk-s-doge-budget-cut-plans-aren-t-convincing-the-bond-market
The Bond Market Isn't Fully Buying
What Musk's DOGE Is Selling
- US Treasury yields offer a scorecard for the White House's cost-cutting vows
It was a little after midnight on Feb. 3, and Elon Musk was reveling in the first big trophy from his rapid-fire campaign through Washington to slash government spending. He had just engineered, not even two weeks into President Donald Trump's new term, the sudden shuttering of the US Agency for International Development. But then Musk recognized that the ultimate scorekeepers of the success of his small band of cost-cutters were 200 miles away - on Wall Street. There, bond investors had pushed up yields sharply in the run-up to, and aftermath of, Trump's election and were now refusing to bid them back down.
For completion, ChatGPT summarization that personalizes this to my interests and preferred format, https://gist.github.com/matthagy/01d48b36872bfa7d433e310ddb6899b7
Summary of "US Bond Yields Remain High Despite Musk's DOGE Efforts" (Bloomberg)
Key Takeaway:
Despite Elon Musk's aggressive cost-cutting through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), bond markets remain skeptical. US Treasury yields stay elevated, reflecting doubts about the sustainability and effectiveness of the administration’s deficit-reduction efforts. Investors fear that tax cuts and tariffs could counteract spending cuts, fueling inflation.
---
1. Bond Markets Are Not Buying DOGE’s Narrative
- Musk’s spending cuts (~$55B claimed, likely far less) have failed to reassure investors.
- 10-year Treasury yields remain high (~4.4-4.7%), up from 4.3% pre-election.
- Bond markets demand tangible, sustained deficit reduction, not just rhetoric.
2. Limited Impact of Spending Cuts
- DOGE’s cuts:
- Shuttered USAID and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
- Many savings blocked by lawsuits.
- Even if DOGE achieves $500B in annual cuts, Trump’s tax cuts and tariffs could erase gains.
- Annual deficit is still ~$1.8T, making current cuts too small to matter.
3. Inflation & Federal Reserve’s Role
- Inflation hit 3% in January, pressuring the Fed to keep rates high.
- Trump’s tariffs & tax cuts risk further inflation, preventing rate cuts.
- Higher bond yields = more expensive borrowing, slowing growth.
4. Market Sentiment: Skepticism & Small Signs of Hope
- Investors see Trump’s policies as inflationary, betting on higher long-term rates.
- Some treasury outperformance vs. swaps suggests mild optimism about deficit cuts.
- Bessent (Treasury Secretary) aims for:
- 3% GDP deficit target by 2028.
- 3% economic growth.
- 3M barrels/day more oil production to ease inflation.
5. The Bigger Debt Crisis Looming
- Debt-to-GDP now 99%, triple 2001 levels.
- Without sustained spending discipline, the US risks a debt spiral.
- Bond markets demand hard evidence, not promises—a lesson learned in the Clinton era.
---
Conclusion:
Musk’s cost-cutting blitz through DOGE has not convinced markets. Structural issues—tax cuts, tariffs, and lawsuits—limit its effectiveness, keeping yields high. Unless the administration proves its ability to shrink deficits sustainably, investors will continue demanding higher returns, tightening financial conditions.
Post is actually a bit out dated. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10Y?qfsearchterm=
Largely because of very real signs of economic slowdown with one measure today showing "red alert" signs which is consumer confidence. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/25/february-consumer-confidence-comes-in-lighter-than-expected-in-latest-sign-of-slowing-economy.html
The crazy part? The best course of action for Trump to pursue economically....is to do absolutely nothing. Stop threatening tariffs, scale back mass deportations (early signs to me is that this will be more bark than bite. But still too early to tell), don't pass a massive regressive (and inflationary) tax cut.
Seriously, if he does absolutely nothing all signs are that he should be able to ride the wave of lower interest rates and popularity....which would make him more dangerous given that the public backlash to all of his dangerously unlawful moves will be more mooted if economy is humming.
"We" may get it, but the important thing is to get _that_ message instead of "Trump and Musk are bad hombres" to people who might vote differently in the future. This could also apply to a pithy message about why it's bad to break the law even to do something good like, for the sake of argument, reduce spending on a low or negative value activities.
Definitively I [of INT] but how T and definitively not N.
What do I as a letter writer/voter/social media participant/Substack writer _do_ with the legal analysis.
This approach is refreshing. As a liberal it's exhausting to have my entire news feed and group chats with liberal friends taken over by "oh my god look what trump did" alarmism without any aim toward controllable actions. I can't even use certain subreddits anymore because they're taken over by the most surface level political "jokes." I've set up recurring donations for the Wisconsin supreme Court. That feels a lot more practical than belly aching over the latest outrage of the day the next time I meet up with friends
Something weird happened to reddit post election. It's like they turned up the dial on liberal and also turned up the dial on stupid. Entire site is unreadable now.
I think this is largely because of the cross-promotion reddit does now, showing you posts from subreddits you might be interested in (FYI, you can disable this). This tends to homogenize the site. FWIW, I’m still having a good time in my niche subs, despite the discussions sometimes veering off into surface-level leftism (eg don’t buy from this nail art company because the owner shut down discussion about Dobbs on the brand’s fb page and refused to say if they’re pro-choice)
> eg don’t buy from this nail art company because the owner shut down discussion about Dobbs on the brand’s fb page and refused to say if they’re pro-choice
If people weren't getting nailed, the Dobbs problem would solve itself.
It's so so sad. I was literally trying to just get news on my local hockey team and the sub got brigaded during the whole "remove x links" thing. Literally just wanted to read about hockey and see some dumb Simpsons memes and it's all Musk outrage.
Silver lining for me it's basically broken my reddit addiction
Same. I deleted the app off my phone around early January as it just got unusable.
I still occasionally check local subreddits of places I care about on desktop.
You are witnessing the zoomerfication of the internet. This is what happens when you raise a bunch of children on IPads.
I'm quite certain I'm not the only Technology Connections viewer around these here parts (a fine YouTube channel), and his most recent bit about people casually opting out of online agency was really eye-opening.
Maybe eye-opening in part because the only social media account I have (I don't count Substack) is a very dormant LinkedIn profile.
The only reddits I engage with now are like the walled garden forums of 2003. Most social media is dumb.
It's several years ago now, but the Atlantic ran a really good piece about the evolution of social *networks* (thefacebook.com, .edu's only, you see your friends' updates chronologically and nothing from anyone else) to social *media* (every day Twitter has one main character, and the goal is to never be it).
I authentically miss mid-2000s Facebook! It turned into something utterly unrecognizable.
Zuck has said he wants to bring back OG Facebook. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe it'll work
https://fortune.com/2025/01/30/zuckerberg-growing-facebook-cultural-influence-getting-back-og-facebook-meta-earnings-ai/
Well, there's the Severance subreddit. I skip the plot theories and focus in on interesting details people have noticed in the episodes.
Right. They act like you have to be angry all the time or you aren't paying attention. Doom is social currency.
sure but it doesn't explain why it completely changed overnight
You have a mass of parrots who are trying to repeat the popular zeitgeist for internet points. Trump getting elected is a focusing event for such behavior that brought together disparate groups of babbling morons.
A big reason is Google's search results now emphasize reddit a lot. I work in the SEO Space and there are all kinds of articles and studies on this, Google saw people wanted the community feedback experience so Reddit is now emphasized in search results. It makes me think a lot of people joined because of this and also maybe it going public
Thanks for this info. I have noticed this in my search results, and I thought it was because I was looking for local information (e.g. people's reaction to a public library seceding from their system - don't do this. It will make users angry and cost taxpayers money.)
"First gradually, then all at once" seems to explain more and more these days.
It makes sense that the vibe shift around the election and again at the start of the new administration would catalyze transitions in community culture, especially if there are longer trends that could just be accelerated. (I don’t know how much I believe the specific claim about Zoomerfication.)
I think the other comments about specific changes to reddit's algorithm as well as google prioritizing it are the most satisfactory explanation
I've noticed this too, even despite Reddit having a very decentralized structure for social media. All the bans on Twitter links are the most frustrating, as it's impeding the flow of good information. Most places seem to be already relenting with unneeded extra step workarounds like allowing screenshots or xcancel links.
I hate Twitter links because people without accounts can’t see replies or threads, so it often looks even worse than the first paragraph of an article above a paywall.
The challenge is that sometime Twitter's the only place news is getting broken.
Yes. If you read Zvi Mowshowitz's substack about AI, he finds all the tweets from the top AI developers/users, and puts it all together to make a very useful blog. That's why I maintain a Twitter account, even though it's true that it's mostly a sewer.
Similar to me: I narrowly tailor it to the straight dope I want to see, and leave the rest of the sewer alone.
Add it to the list of "Things Ruined by Gen Z". I'm only about 60% serious.
I haven't noticed a single issue in r/CookbookLovers or r/Vietnam or r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk or r/HobbyDrama or r/Daddit.
Maybe you could dial back the histrionic claims that the entire site is unusable. There are thousands of subreddits that never come within a million miles of politics.
My hyperlocal subreddit, one of the few I use, became like 50% national politics overnight. This is a real phenomenon even though it hasn't spread to the other niche subreddits I read (which involve sports).
Yeah that's very different from the original claim that the ENTIRE site is UNREADABLE.
OP cried about exhausting alarmism while being exhaustingly alarmist.
I'm good with my take. As another user mentioned, Reddit is aggressively pushing related subreddits in front of you now, so no matter where you are everything starts to sound the same. It's a god awful site full of delusional people and it's absolutely unusable
Literally none of that is on my front page.
Don't blame the algorithm for the stuff you engage with.
What do you work at reddit or something. Weirdly defensive reaction
The insistence of some lefties that Elon Musk is dumb--and this also applies to Trump, definitely going back to Dubya as well, and who knows, maybe even Reagan--is starting to strike me as some sort of smug cope that these figures aren't really that accomplished, and that if we just keep yelling at all the things they get wrong and expose them as ordinary dummies, it'll somehow enlighten everyone to take the truly wise path of what their worldview prescribes.
I've already issued my take [https://www.slowboring.com/p/sunday-thread-mailbag-125/comment/95634115] on the narrow question of Musk's intelligence. But Matt has it right: he and others are all pursuing value judgments on what they want the government to do and not do. It's good to say that these things are bad, but explaining to those that are willing to listen as to why those would see it as bad has a better chance of being persuasive than getting bogged down into some meaningless argument about cognitive ability.
I think the problem with the discussion around Musk's smarts is that his public image is not just around being smart, but around being a super genius. He's banking off the image of being so smart, that he can wade into any problem that he's vaguely interested in and see solutions that no one else can. Occasionally, he has some interesting ideas, often given to him by smart underlings, but he isn't that smart. See his handling of DoGE and the constant, unearned arrogance that comes from him just straight up not understanding how much of government works. Part of this is just being smart and having decent first principles not being a replacement for experience. Although, everything I've seen suggests that he's very good at some things, but his skills are limited.
What's Elon's IQ? I don't give a shit, but he's not Tony Stark.
Tony Stark isn’t real. Even our current narratives around past actual geniuses likely obscure their very real limitations. At most, we get some apocryphal story about Einstein struggling with math as a student or Feynman scoring at below genius level on some IQ test.
Regardless, I doubt we’re going to break the cult of Musk by debating the nuances of his aptitudes across various dimensions and general intelligence. Moreover, lazy and erroneous attempts to downplay his very real accomplishments only brand us as disingenuous critics who can be easily dismissed.
At most, we can focus on the durable harms attributable to Musk and DOGE that are felt by electorally relevant sections of the public as they materialize over the next few months. Then, those individuals can increasingly reject Musk and Trump using whatever narratives resonate with them—e.g., branding Musk as a moron or a genius who fell to hubris. They can use whatever story they want, as long as it justifies a Democratic vote.
I think there is another axis to criticize Musk. We should criticize him also on the level of operational morals and ethics. His treatment of his own children is not praiseworthy, his treatment of his employees is terrible, and that has implications for how he views federal employees and members of the US public. He also makes a lot of promises that he doesn't meet, over and over and over again.
Also his insane slanderous stuff, like calling that Thai cave rescuer a pedophile for no reason
I don't see why we can't acknowledge both. He's accomplished a lot in ways that show significant skill and foresight, he's currently blowing gaping security holes all over our most critical government systems, firing people without looking into whether they protect fucking missile silos, and is saying literally incomprehensible technobabble that shows an inability to learn the systems he is working with. While that nuance won't convince everyone it absolutely has destroyed many people's opinions of Musk already.
Yes, I agree we can acknowledge both. My concern is around focus and narrative. Over the last decade, I’ve seen numerous critics focus on Musk’s very real weaknesses and personality flaws, then project the failure of his projects—including Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter—based on those narratives. Moreover, they attempted to convince others of the futility of these projects. They were repeatedly proven wrong.
I’m concerned that Democrats are falling into this same trap in addressing Musk and DOGE. Musk already has a long track record of personal and professional issues (to say the least), and I doubt highlighting additional, more recent examples will be particularly convincing to anyone. At best, we need to tie his flaws and failings back to real issues experienced by electorally relevant segments of voters.
Moreover, there’s a very real risk that we’ll fail to do that and instead distract ourselves with our own visceral, obsessive dislike of Musk. We should acknowledge both his personality flaws and our own fascination with them, while recognizing the risk of distraction if we don’t move beyond our personal frame of reference. Many people either don’t care or have different narratives. Hence, defeating Musk through electoral politics will require us to focus on framing that is electorally productive.
I think Musk is more fun to think about if you think he's Cave Johnson rather than Tony Stark.
The real thing to do is to read Musk tweets in Wheatley's voice.
I love this comment.
Elon Musk could be smarter than nineteen people out of every twenty on the street, and he still runs big and sophisticated enough outfits that five colleagues a day should make him feel every so slightly like a dope.
DOGE is pretty much going according to an Elon playbook. The moves are rapid, draconian and designed to cut too much and build back what turns out to be essential. There is a difference between disagreeing with DOGE actions and those actions failing at their objective.
For all the mockery, Elon achieved his goals at Twitter in that is now modestly profitable and much less left wing. X will maintain a spot in the ecosystem and build back revenue. Elon has little filter, but his business and engineering acumen are generational.
He paid $44 billion to buy a company that, after his own radical changes, is a modestly profitable company that is worth $5-$10billion or so. And much of its modest profitability is because there are a lot of large advertisers who spend money on X precisely and only because they fear Musk's political power and want to stay out of his crosshairs (this is similar to the reasons that people spend money at Trump's resort).
I agree that he is very smart, and is likely an organizational genius. But holding up X as an example isn't the way to prove it. You can say that he "succeeded" because he doesn't care about the money. That might be true, but it also seems like a convenient way to move the goalposts such that failure isn't possible.
He definitely overpaid for platform. There is a non monetary value to a media platform. If advertising normalizes due to time or different leadership, that will increase revenue.
Also, let's zoom in on his overpaying for Twitter.
Between when he made the offer and when the deal completed, the NASDAQ dropped like 25% and Meta dropped 50%. This was a big tech market crash that, like, sure, Musk didn't anticipate, but neither did anyone else. As it started to happen, Musk tried to back out of the deal, but was legally blocked for it.
That was basically bad luck, not stupidity.
How much would Twitter have fallen without Musk there? I mean, it was a social media company, like Meta, but a smaller and much more troubled one than Meta. Meta's stock tanked despite having strong net earnings all through this period. Twitter was running a loss.
If we look at Earth 2, exactly like our Earth except Musk never offered to buy Twitter, it is absurd to imagine that in that world Twitter was going along great at high $30B's range.
None of this is to say that Musk didn't overpay for Twitter, but let's be clear that the majority of the loss of Twitter's value in that time was exogenous market conditions, not something that Musk did.
Nobody forced Musk to buy at an unsustainable valuation.
"Other tech stocks were also overvalued" is somewhat true, although they rebounded to an extent X has not. And part of having "generational business acumen" means not walking into situations like that.
That said, I think that's the wrong way to look at the deal. He didn't buy Twitter to make a bunch of money, he bought Twitter to send a message, and that message was sent and received.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/20/tech/elon-musk-x-valuation/index.html
("Bloomberg on Wednesday reported that X is in talks to raise money that would value the company at $44 billion")
Well considering how haphazard the cuts have been, the misunderstandings around things like Social Security, and the like, I'm not impressed. Just the obsession of treating government like a business, speaks to his ignorance.
Do we know that Twitter is profitable now?
Yeah i'm not really sure Elon is suing advertisers for not being on twitter if twitter actually makes money.
I suspect another common thread between the constitutional President and the acting President is that both of them love TALKING about filing lawsuits. The number of lawsuits actually filed.... eh, many people are saying.
He is already suing advertisers
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsuit-advertisers-boycott-new
And threatening to use the government to punish others
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-linda-yaccarino-x-twitter-threaten-advertisers-government-ipg-2025-02
He's also threatening to use the government against them
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-linda-yaccarino-x-twitter-threaten-advertisers-government-ipg-2025-02
Even though the evidence is clear that Musk has definitively misrepresented his talent and intelligence over and over again, including about the most trivial of things, like his global Diablo IV ranking, we can still grant that he's obviously of considerably above average intelligence.
But it doesn't matter. We can't just trust him because he's smart, or has had past successes. We're watching him publicly binge on drugs and indiscriminately take a chainsaw to the civil service. A population whose salaries represent a fragment of a a drop in the bucket of the federal budget, but do play a considerable role in regulating his companies interests. And those employees, at USAID, at CFPB, at the NIH were targeted first.
This cult of genius just has to stop. First, because he isn't the scientific genius he claims to be, not even close. And second, because he's a proven pathological liar, and is lying to the public about his motives while making those motives absolutely crystal clear to anyone paying attention.
Really depends one why you think the goals are! Elon has said publicly he’s going to use DOGE to cut the deficit by $1T this year. DOGE has made very little progress towards that and is extremely unlikely to achieve that. Now maybe he’s lying about that and has other goals, but making assumptions like that starts to enter 4d chess territory very quickly.
He's not dumb but he has become reckless.
Drugs tend to do that.
Elon is clearly intelligent but also believes some very dumb shit. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Indeed, which aligns well with the comment I linked.
Since IQ isn’t real and doesn’t matter who is to say who is dumb and who is smart?
/s
This, but unironically. I think “intelligence” is a useful concept, but trying to get a one-dimensional measure of it obscures more than it reveals. It’s often a good idea to talk about whether individual decisions or actions were smart or stupid, but every person (or machine, or animal) does a range of different things of different levels of intelligence, and trying to assign a single level to the whole being is going to make you miss some of the smart or stupid things they are going to do.
There's also a strong time and context dependence to performing intelligence. Is Elon Musk going to do smart things when he's sober and being challenged to solve engineering problems that are important to him? Undoubtedly. Is he also going to act like a smart person while on steroids and ketamine manipulating the levers of federal power and when his main objective function seems to be "marinate in online right-wing conspiracy theories"?
IQ is the most validated concept in all of social science and your explanation here just reveals ignorance of the concept’s history and predictive utility.
Nothing about having a high IQ prevents any given individual from doing bad or stupid things. For instance, here I am arguing on the internet with someone who holds roughly the same level of belief that the world is flat instead of doing things I need to.
You probably also think GDP is a flawed measure.
Here are some more validated concepts in social science: language, money, law, religion. IQ is much more like power.
GDP is a great concept that doesn’t do everything we want it to do, but I think there is better understanding of what it does and doesn’t do than with IQ.
Pardon me, I should have specified “statistical measure.”
But actually IQ is far more straightforward and validated as a specific concept than broad categories like “religion” and “law.”
“Power” is not itself a defined concept and it’s hilarious you think something as rigorously defined and tested as IQ is in the same vague category.
Go learn about psychometrics
The very measurement of GDP is a hugely contentious topic, and it has easily understood flaws depending on the specific feature of an economy or personal/household well-being you're trying to understand.
So... yes, basically anyone who actually understands anything about economics understands GDP to be a flawed measure.
Come on man don’t fall for obvious bait.
GDP correlates at like .9 with basically everything good we care about.
Obviously it’s an imperfect measure of an imperfect concept. But its utility is robust and beats anything else we can measure.
I've wondered whether Musk is actually really smart, or mainly charismatic and the beneficiary of a snowball effect. Meaning, charisma and luck got him into an initial successful venture (PayPal?). And then the influence that gained him, combined with his charisma and ability to identify good big-picture ideas (EVs, space), let him motivate and associate with truly smart people, who actually executed on those big ideas.
On a more-micro nitty-gritty level, has he demonstrated any particular brilliance? Like could he even do a coding project or solve a physics or engineering problem? Maybe the answer is yes, but I don't know.
If you read accounts from the time, no, he can't code. He apparently had some self-taught ability, but reports are that they had to hire real programmers back when PayPal was still x.com to fix his shitty glue code.
He also has no engineering qualifications or any patents, nor any real hard-science background at all.
I think we can give him credit for being talented at playing the eccentric genius and drumming up public enthusiasm for Big Science.
Reminds me of the story of Steve Jobs talking to Bill Gates and Bill said, “Steve, you can’t even code.” And Steve responded, “I have people for that.”
I wonder about an even slightly higher level: does he even understand the physics/engineering/coding problems (even if they're too specialized for him to solve himself)? Like, does he know that a spacecraft not only has to reach its destination; it has to accelerate and then decelerate and then match the velocity (speed and trajectory) of the destination. Or does he just think, we've got to collide an object with Mars, and I'll let the engineers figure out how.
I know that's a very simple example, but I wonder how simple his big-picture understanding is. (And, again, it might be that his understanding isn't simple at all.)
Probably an understanding at the level of a bright undergrad, which is the extent of his formal education. Plus some bonus osmosis from working with actual engineers.
He is good at communicating about these ideas at a level that is publicly consumable, but still gives the illusion of greater depth. But then he starts talking about hyperloops and nuking Mars, and you realize he's really just another run of the mill dorm room philosopher, but with infinite money and drugs.
He definitely suffers from 60 Minutes Syndrome, where he sounds very learned and articulate about a topic unless you, yourself, know something about that topic and instantly realize there's a lot of word salad being tossed.
Ah yes, the TedX effect.
I'm not hating on him, but I wonder whether a simplified formula is
Money + charisma + drugs + friends with money, charisma, and drugs = Musk
Don't forget the childhood trauma of being born to another philandering narcissistic cutthroat capitalist, and basically having infinite money since birth, but not much paternal warmth.
Same story with Trump, too.
This is just crazy. Yes, Elon Musk understands Newton's laws of motion.
Like, is he a generational supergenius? No idea. Does he understand Newton's laws of motion? Yes, of course he does. Is he a uniquely capable engineering talent? No idea, probably not. Does he understand enough that it's not just like "you idiot, everyone who spends five minutes on this knows more than you," of course he does! It's insane how people talk themselves into ignoring massive evidence here.
At this point I feel like he's probably tamping down public enthusiasm for Big Science, but especially his obsessions with dumb, scammy shit like crypto and replacing frederal workers with AI.
He has considerable reputation from SpaceX and Tesla of being able to delve into specific hardware engineering problems on short notice. It’s not just high-level management and hiring/motivating people.
The detail-oriented part of his skillset might not extend to Twitter, however, although the cost reductions there seem reasonably impressive, so I’m not very sure.
This reputation is... polished, at least on the SpaceX side. I can't tell you much about auto manufacture, but the "sub-10 micron panel accuracy" of the cheese wedge "truck" should not inspire confidence.
I give Musk credit for jumpstarting some very important enterprises (commercial rockets, EVs). That kind of thing isn't easy to do, or even we SB commenters would have succeeded in like fashion.
How does he compare to, say, Steve Jobs? Not favorably. Not only did Jobs build Apple from nothing and turn it into a lasting behemoth, but he also was behind other incredibly creative enterprises (like Pixar). SpaceX is great, and all credit to Musk, but I don't think it compares to what Jobs did, and as for Tesla, I give it a gold watch for what it did over the years, but the brilliant leader Musk is now presiding over the beginning of its demise. Jobs never had a blight like that on his record, even NeXT.
“ Jobs never had a blight like that on his record, even NeXT.”
He got fired from Apple when the Mac was a bust. That was a pretty epic fail.
And was never heard from again.
That wasn’t your point.
If businessmen don't have some epic fails on their record, they're probably not trying hard enough. I think James Comey made a similar point about prosecutors never having lost a case -- that's actually bad (or was, in his view).
I think the way you are using the word “charisma” is how I would use the word “intelligence”. It’s some sort of skill that the person has that enables them to do special things, but we shouldn’t identify it with any easy-to-classify skill. I don’t think Musk has the same sort of charisma that Ellen Degeneres or Bill Clinton or Kevin Spacey has, any more than he has the same sort of intelligence as the top coders or engineers at his companies.
I mean "charisma" as the ability to motivate others to pursue shared goals.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2011/10/10/a-sociology-of-steve-jobs/
I think it is important to differentiate "Musk is dumb and has never been successful" from "Musk keeps saying dumb, probably wrong things about the systems he is working with". The latter gives color to the specific destructive dangers that Musk poses while at DOGE. Some people approve of what Musk is doing because they think he is making smart decisions and using advanced algorithms to find fraud. That he doesn't even know what SQL is when looking at databases, that he hired unvetted neo-nazi hackers, and that he keeps believing obviously false bullshit all point to him being very dumb in ways that put us all in danger. He's just like every other techbro that thinks because they understand programming they can conquer any complex thing. They're smart in one way, but their stupidity more than makes up for it.
The policy ideas Trump's admin proposes to are going to hurt a lot of Americans, including a great many who seem sympathetic to normie, working-to-upper-middle-class audiences; if the media can cover those issues with that focus the backlash will at least see the worst parts of the administration and its pseudo-governmental hangers-on tossed aside and the House back in our hands in 2026.
A great early marker of how serious the Democrats are about winning will be whether the inevitable failure to take the Senate in 2026 is greeted with whining about the map or whether prominent voices in the Party point to the need to widen the coalition and the media actually covers *that* instead of "map unfair."
Sigh.
Look, David, you and I disagree a lot, but I genuinely value your insights and I'm glad we can disagree civilly and rationally.
With that said!
Look at Dan Osborn. The man ran in Nebraska as an Independent, without the dreaded "D" next to his name. I admit I didn't follow his campaign closely, but from what I know, he seemed a genuine moderate who portrayed himself as a regular guy, a man of the people who cares about the working class, not a snooty professor who demands your pronouns and lectures you about white privilege.
And guess what? He freaking lost! To a Republican!
You may say, "Well duh, of course he lost, we're talking deep-red Nebraska here," which is PRECISELY MY POINT and is in direct contradiction to you "Oh Democrats, stop whining about a bad Senate map, just roll up your sleeves and run normie, broadly appealing candidates!" Osborn was normie and broadly appealing, AND HE LOST.
And if Osborn is not convincing enough for you, say hi to former Senators Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester, both broadly liked, both of whom prioritized the working class and bread-and-butter issues over woke bulls hit, both of whom LOST TO MAGA.
What do you say to them? What should/could they have done to be more broadly appealing, or do you concede that, yes, the Democrats really have a disadvantage in the Senate?
I didn't say the Democrats don't have a structural disadvantage in the Senate, I said I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK if the Democrats have a structural disadvantage in the Senate.
That point is completely and utterly irrelevant to winning. If all you want to do is whine, then fine, bitch about the Senate. But it won't change. There is no path to changing it that doesn't lead through a civil war that will kill tens of millions, and there never, ever will be.
If you want to have a reasonable shot at a majority of 53-5 sometime in the 2030's, then yes, hippy punching is the way forward, because it's extraordinarily obvious that the national brand doomed Tester and Brown, and would have doomed Manchin, and caused Casey to narrowly lose, and led to Barnes winning the primary and fucking up in 2022, and probably also Ryan as well.
It does not matter who runs in these states when the Democratic brand nationally is viewed as synonymous with the dysfunction of your home or my northern and eastern neighbors, and with the insanity of the post-liberal left.
We cannot and will not win, excepting occasions when the Republicans preside over utter catastrophe, unless we make the normies understand that we are not the party of cachet-chasing, virtue-signaling hipster leftism and we won't tolerate it.
Ok, that makes sense, but then, how DO we "make the normies understand"? Kamala tried - her 2024 campaign was remarkably free of woke virtue signaling - and it didn't work.
If you're saying that elected Democrats need to exert greater discipline over their colleagues and be like, "ok everyone, beating Trump is priority number one, two and three, so shut up about unpopular culture war issues, always be shutting up about unpopular culture war issues" then sure, I agree with you. Will it be enough? Will enough normies notice?
Because if you're saying "make every lefty activist on social media STFU forever," that's not realistic, what with the First Amendment and all. There will always be woke idiots somewhere on Bluesky for the GOP to nutpick.
"Kamala tried - her 2024 campaign was remarkably free of woke virtue signaling"
It's not just the campaigns that matter, it's the 4 years that come before it. You have to govern like a moderate normie, not just pretend come election season.
The easiest example of course is they should have cracked down on the border in year 1. AND pushed a bi-partisan bill that year. That would have earned them a ton of credibility.
Agree te: they should have pushed hard for a bipartisan immigration bill in year 1.
LBJ. Or Nixon, take your pick.
Destroy the Groups. Destroy the personal and professional lives of their leadership. Make their ground-level employees go door knock in suburban Columbus if they want to get back into politics in any capacity.
Do this loudly. Force as many people from the leftmost several percent that's been engaged in "entryism" into the Democratic Party to either eat shit in perpetuity or leave for the Greens, and then ostracize anyone they manage to elect to Congress, make them sit on the opposition benches with the rightist nutjobs when we take the House, etc.
Fetterman, who you've complained about here, is up 20 points in favorability polling because he's following this playbook and sounding normal and reasonable while he does it. He explicitly told the Hamas-verstehers to get fucked, he's told the left-greens to get fucked, he does it loudly and then when they whine about it online he has his social media people troll the shit out of them.
And if the Democrats ever hold the Senate again he will be a 95% reliable vote on every bread-and-butter issue there is.
If his brand becomes the national brand, we will win most of the time, in all of PA, WI, ME, GA, NC, and AZ. That's a majority already, and places like OH, FL, or IA might be in reach in years when the GOP fucks up.
The electorate's mushy middle does not currently believe there is a sliver of daylight between you and Tema Okun, hell maybe even between me and Tema Okun. That needs to change or we will be a permanent minority party to a greater degree than the GOP in 1944.
"Destroy the Groups. Destroy the personal and professional lives of their leadership"
bruh
It works. You don't like it, but it works, demonstrably in the real world.
And if we'd started the job before 2024 maybe Eastern Europe wouldn't be on its own dealing with Russia and we'd have bought time for Trump to goddamned die already before the GOP managed to sweep back to power.
For years, the GOP publicly disavowed open white supremacists like David Duke. That probably diminished the enthusiasm for "establishment Republicans" in most Louisiana parishes. But presumably, they knew that wouldn't hurt them in contested races where it counted.
Perhaps that is the way forward.
The Bulwark, Sam Harris, and others were gently suggesting that Kamala should contrive a performative Sister Souljah moment on…. something. Anything. She, of course, declined to take a risk of this or any other sort. Obama and Bill Clinton were confident enough to punch left when necessary. Perhaps this has something to do with them winning two terms.
And from a more Machiavellian perspective, there may be the Giorgia Meloni method, or the Reverse Gillibrand. Feign sudden onset fascism for as long as it takes to get that magic autowin “R” next to your name and once you are in, commit to six years of relative sanity before your career ends. As far as I know, no one has tried this. And if a critical mass of such entryists got in, it could actually go some way to fixing America.
"Senators Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester,"
Can you name key large issues where either voted against the Dem majority? Both Senemia and Manchin were vocal about opposing key aspects of the Democrat excesses. Thus buying them credibility.
And Manchin at least used that credibility to win again and again in ruby red WV. You need to take that model and then use in in swing states, where your odds are better.
Moreover, you still need the national brand to moderate. Because they taint everything else.
I basically never make top-level comments, but I'll add a perspective from outside the US.
I find Americans to be a parochial bunch. Not the SB crowd so much, and this is a US-focused blog, so I'm not really faulting you for this.
Nevertheless, a consequence of being a behemoth behind two oceans is that events outside the US can seem less important. I'd like to push SB in the direction of recognising that many of the shifts in US foreign policy - picking fights within the Americas, siding with Russia against Europe and Ukraine... this is BIG NEWS and it has the potential to be far more consequential in the long term than some of the minor domestic aggravations the GOP and Trump are provoking.
What can Americans (and the ~25% of non-American readers) do to push in the right direction? This is also valuable, in my opinion, and not inconsistent with the main argument of the post.
OMG yes. Trump just pissed away 80 years’ worth of alliances and international goodwill. This is irreversible for decades, plural. To say nothing of people in poor countries who will literally die because Melon Husk wrecked USAID.
On behalf of the 48% of Americans who didn’t want any of this shit, I am truly sorry.
The toughest part is the *reason* why it's irreversible, which is that the American people proved, collectively speaking, that we don't really care about democracy, human rights, freedom, international cooperation, the rule of law, or any of the rest of it. 2016 (and 2004) could plausibly be explained away as mistakes, but this time it is undeniable that we went into the election with open eyes and decided that those things were very low on our priority list. Trump's beliefs may be especially bad and not representative, but even when he's long gone, no one in the rest of the world should ever trust the American people again.
Exactly. Even if we elect President Buttigieg in 2028, and he says and does all the right things, our allies will rightly be like "ok that's nice, but how do we know the American people won't get pissed off about the price of eggs in 2032 and vote for President Vance/Don Jr.?"
This seems overstated. I think that its much less likely "that the American people proved, collectively speaking, that we don't really care about democracy, human rights, freedom, international cooperation, the rule of law, or any of the rest of it" and much more likely that the American people take those things for granted.
The latter can be just as disastrous as the former, but its substantively different. I would compare it to Europe's unwillingness to fund their military despite Russia's multiple invasions of Ukraine over the last decade. Do the people of Europe not care if Russia invades and conquers them? Or is it more likely they are simply complacent. I think the latter.
If you ask actual voters they do care about democracy, they just thought Harris was the bigger threat.
Obviously most here would disagree, but that's different than saying they don't care. They just see the issue different
No. That poll does not show factual disagreement as to which candidate supported which ideas. What it shows is that different people have different views about what "democracy" entails and what principles are important to its maintenance. If it makes it easier to understand, you can call my definition of democracy "Democracy-A" and their definition of democracy "Democracy-B," in which case you can amend my first statement to say that the American people showed that they don't care about "Democracy-A." Maybe we can have a longer conversation at some point about which concepts and principles are essential to "Democracy-A" vs. which concepts and principles are essential to "Democracy-B."
seems like hair splitting but fair enough.
I can tell you that Dems musing about court packing sure fired up a lot of people on the right.
"I can tell you that Dems musing about court packing sure fired up a lot of people on the right."
Because they now show that clearly they care about legal principles and democracy. Oh poor things, so upset.
"the poll" = the election?
No, he's referring to an issue poll that asked voters who they thought was the bigger threat to democracy, and more people said Harris. I remember seeing it too, but I don't remember who the pollster was.
Thank you for pointing this out, it's not being hysterical, it's being clear eyed about present depressing reality.
American democracy will probably survive Trump. The destruction wreaked on federal government institutions can be repaired over time.
But it looks like the events of last week put paid to America's post-WW2 role in maintaining a peaceful and prosperous world order. We've entered a strange new land where everything is now uncertain and a new, possibly very dangerous, world is yet to be born. That's bad enough of course, but the disgusting betrayal of Ukraine and the way the administration is pursuing it is one of the most evil, immoral things I've ever witnessed.
There's very little Americans do other than express our concern and opposition. It's hard to change the foreign policy course an administration has chosen. Europe has to step up and realize it can no longer comfortably hide behind the American shield. And probably they, along with our East Asian "allies" (we no longer deserve democratic allies) should get nukes.
I think the Europe situation is worse than most people realize. I worry that US presence in European affairs has been key to Europe's post-WWII stability and without it, the differing interests between European nations will become much more apparent.
That is very possible. But perhaps the shock of America’s immoral betrayal of Ukraine and the continent will force them into collective actions. The German election, and the position of its new chancellor, is a hopeful sign of that. But, yes, history is not encouraging here.
I'm also concerned this will lead to an acceleration of Anti-American sentiment (and EU-level actions). The EU regulatory apparatus has been laser focused on kneecapping US tech companies, and I see that accelerating. People are going to feel this in their retirement accounts - there's a reason why you try to maintain good relations with your allies.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think most voters feel like the US ending military support for Ukraine is an "immoral betrayal". Trump is definitely a lying asshole who is throwing Zelensky under the bus, but it is a huge failure of US and European leadership that there was no articulated exit strategy other than continuing to throw money at Ukraine and hoping that Putin gets tired of the fight. This opened the window for Trump to "solve the problem".
I can’t speak for most voters. I feel that it is a moral betrayal. Apparently I differ from people who hold that we are “throwing” money at Zelensky and the Ukrainians.
On the plus side Europe has more than enough resources to act here, they are just going to have to step up
Yes they do have all the necessary advantages. And I hope they do. They don’t have as much military equipment as the US, but it’s time to empty the larder and send everything to Ukraine.
I just hope the Russians don’t get this great battlefield advantage when the Trump folks start feeding them targeting information on Ukrainian units
Totally agree re: Europe. It’s been true for ages and it’s deeply aggravating. Each time there’s a crisis here (where I live) I think it’s going to finally give itself a shake and get it together. Even now - the biggest shock yet - I’m really not sure I have any faith in the Europeans, who can’t even whip a bastard like Orban into line.
What news outlets have you been looking at where this isn't big news? Trump's stupid fights with Mexico/Canada and the recent UN vote have been all over US media.
The main point of my post is that the “effective altruist” approach might assign greater weight to events outside the U.S. But, I’ll say that U.S. reporting doesn’t quite seem to capture how Trump is being received elsewhere. I dunno… it just doesn’t quite seem to capture it. Other commenters seem to agree. Anyway, my thinking is maybe Americans are used to just shrugging this stuff off by now, but there really has been a step change vis a vis the rest of the world. Maybe it’s just the self assuredness of this group? The USMCA felt different 6 years ago than it does now in North America, e.g. anyway I get it’s mostly vibes, I’m just giving the perspective from outside the US 🤷♂️
Fantastic column.
Somehow, among intelligent people, we've seen the following evolution:
1. Trump is immoral
2. Trump voters are immoral
3. Spending too much time writing about things besides "Orange Man Bad" is immoral.
I'm not exaggerating, being uncharitable, or making the last point up: it's from the comments here.
Apart from any other problems I might have with that position, it's demanding writers sacrifice their standing among people who might make a difference, which is madness.
Resentment makes us worse people. Trump fosters resentment. His presence makes everyone worse.
Trump's superpower is that he makes everything and everyone worse in many ways.
It's not resentment, it's seeing things (voters) for what they are and not shying away from the ugly reality. They vote for a fascist (and rapist and insurrectionist etc), they get fascism and someone shitting all over the US constitution, they don't care. Am I supposed to just shrug my shoulders and sing kumbaya? A good portion of American voters have proven to be fascist nuts who don't care about fundamental American political values. Can we mourn? Can we be angry?
One can characterize “Trump aligns with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine at UN” as Orange Man Bad but doesn’t it also have real world historical implications that people should be aware of and that their representatives and elite opinion-makers should address clearly and forcefully?
I can’t get in the mind of an American swing voter but switching from Team Freedom to Team Dictatorship at any point never mind mid-war seems like a material event that might persuade me to reconsider my political choices.
Orange man is in fact bad. I have no problem with making the case, especially on specifics.
I 𝘥𝘰 object to demanding that people say it constantly. Above all, it's an own-goal. Thanks to rigid coalition-management, everyone to the right of Mayor Pete assumes that leading with "orange man bad" means you aggressively endorse a long list of ideas, most of which they don't agree with. Because of that, and the long history of crying wolf, it's a demand that people disqualify themselves in the eyes of persuadable voters.
The most depressing part about the history of crying wolf is that he was, in fact, a wolf. He just hadn't made it past the fence into the sheep pen yet. Maybe we should have spent our time talking about the fence instead of the wolf.
Semmelweis got credit a century and some-odd later. Being right with no means to prove it doesn't count, haha.
Well, I think the folks at the Bulwark are much, much more on board with Orange Man Bad than some dipshit leftists are, in spite of having fewer grievances with actual policy.
Agree. I do sometimes listen to their podcast to help me fall asleep because they retread the same info a lot, and I drift off.
Ah, understood and agree.
2. ~Trump voters are immoral~ American stupidity has reached critical mass. [Sorry, don't know how to do strikethrough text on Substack.]
^^It's unkind, but if I'm being honest, this is what Trump 2024 did to me.
I'm not so worried about 3; I think the bigger issue - also raised frequently around SB - is that the Democrats need to be less fucking annoying to (at least) 50% of the population. The journalism bit is mostly to do with how people choose to entertain themselves, realistically.
When I saw the headline in my email, I almost didn't click on it, with the basic response of "please just do it less, you are a very highly differentiated outlet and one of your areas of least differentiation is correctly pointing out that Donald Trump is awful, lawless, etc. etc. ad nauseum".
So, obviously I was pleasantly surprised that I did choose to click through.
The vast majority of Trump voters aren't immoral. The result of their voluntary actions is immoral. We should spend just the right amount of time exploring that fact, but no more.
Can you link to the comments saying #3? Guessing it's like 1 person?
Pick just about any Anti-Anti-Trumper with a following. One example of many, The Free Press.
Weiss is such a disappointment
I took the comment to imply a slow boring comment so I don't know why it would be difficult to produce a link to such a comment
Damn, a guy can't go for a run around here!
You read my comment correctly.
I didn't link the source because I'm reluctant to make this personal. In the past when I've quoted other comments, people got pretty angry, which is reasonable given how weak Substack's alerting is. If you drag someone it can be days before they realize it, and it sucks not being able to defend yourself.
But yes, it was one person, last I checked, but the logical endpoint of a common point of view.
I'll update this when I'm at my computer with the number of upvotes it got. [Update: 9]
I think this is just partisanship, and the comments section is always going to draw from a particular slice of readers. Check out Ross Douthat or Tyler Cowen's comment sections, even the most ecumenical center-right writers attract much less interesting comments.
I agree on all counts*, but I'd like to take the opportunity to make the case that demands for public partisan consensus actively undermine the connection with swing voters (for reasons I elaborated on in my reply to Jason).
* Though I would never expect much from the NYT comments, which are 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 worse. Sadly, Cowen's comments are usually disappointing, to the point that I don't read them unless he or someone trustworthy calls attention to something specific.
I think the average quality of journalism has really collapsed over my lifetime. You get very surface level catastrophizing because that is easy to write and parrot.
Creating original insights or pointing out material consequences takes effort and knowledge but incentives don’t compensate for that usually.
I'm amazed that these days I find I have to check the source material for claims I read in the NYT news section!
The sloppiness driven by haste erodes trust.
I was convinced that Musk was not paying his child support by all the "deadbeat dad" headlines, but no one has even accused him of not paying what the court said he had to pay.
The actual story is that Grimes keeps messaging him openly on Twitter saying he's not answering texts and DMs about their shared child's time-sensitive health issues. Assuming she's not just lying, that seems to somewhat justify calling him a "deadbeat dad."
And I'm pretty sure she's not lying given Musk's litigiousness. Seems likely he'd sue her for defamation if she was.
Election coverage before Nate Silver in 2012 was worse. At least journalists today write about polls.
Before 2012 there was so much fact free poltical coverage. Rallies were regulary used to assess the popularity of candidates
Nate Silver was such a breath of fresh air in 2008 when he was still poblano over at Daily Kos explaining how Obama was going to win that primary.
The Democrats need people who will
- listen to right-wing media to hear the rumors being passed around
- craft clear, concise, fact-based arguments against the worst points
I was amazed and horrified by how badly Democrats did in this last cycle.
If you want to win those swing voters, the people on the left need to be aware of the right-wing stories being passed around because those are the ones reaching swing voters and changing minds.
If you were a casual Joe Rogan listener over the last 4 years, you saw him getting slowly red-pilled because his right wing guests would spread crazy stories and there was nobody to set him straight. There could have been moments of "Joe, remember that story they told you? Here is what really happened..."
These moments, executed well, are powerful. And there's only so much Mayor Pete to go around.
If a smart person with an audience wants a high-leverage position, arming people with the best arguments to win these day-to-day rhetorical fight is a job worth doing.
There seems to be a problem where Democrats decide to talk to the groups rather than look at polls, focus groups or talk to their own constituents. It is political malpractice and means their messages are really badly crafted.
The dumbest political trope is people getting mad at democrats for listening to "focus groups" or being too "poll tested." THATS EXACTLY WHAT WE SHOULD FRICKIN WANT!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH
Indeed, the problem is that the Democratic political consulting class seems to have no idea what normal people are like.
I wonder if this is, to some degree, an effect of the gradual shift away from having volunteer and low-level campaign staff knock undecided doors and toward having them knock the doors of probable Democratic voters who just might not vote.
VAN has been an amazing tool, but it's also really changed who the average low-level Democratic political operative talks to on a daily basis.
Joe Rogan pushes back on live fact-checking from his producer, Jamie, eg https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-the-gurus/id1531266667?i=1000694998312&t=1469
(timestamp 24:29)
I agree that correcting the misinformation environment is very important but people are already very much trying that. Dems getting more Butigiegs will help, but I think the larger issue is that social media algorithms themselves actively prefer misinformation and rightwing content over informative content of the same popularity. I don't know how we fix it but I think it is important to acknowledge what has been tried and that failing doesn't necessarily mean that good efforts haven't been made.
This is a really savvy piece about the downstream effects of polarization. We are all in a constant state of being distracted by the shiny objects.
I think the ITN framework is valuable, and I agree that there's plenty of stuff out there about Trump and Fascism (read John Ganz) or about Trump and American History (read Jamelle Bouie) and writing more of that wouldn't help.
But I think the SB coverage has been changed less by the actual content of Trump 2.0 than I expected. With the exception of the piece about Tesla, it's focused primarily on winning elections by moderating and the significance of budget choices. Which are both regular themes here and important. But there's been less on what the implications are for federalism or for the structure of the civil service or how we should pursue regulation in the future or what moderate D legislators should be doing to oppose Trump and Musk, compared to what I would have expected.
I attribute this to the fact that the shitstorm is shape-shifting every day. The implications and the best available actions aren’t necessarily immediately clear.
I do think that there should be someone out there who is taking this moment to open up their thinking about what structures we want to build after the shitstorm passes. We don’t have to rebuild exactly the way it was built before.
I'd like to do that but it's really hard in the present moment. It's like discussing what Pacific Palisades and Altadena should look like in the future one day into the fire.
We're just going to have this thing play out for a while, see how vast the damage is, and go from there.
Agree completely! I would guess that many of us here are trying to be open-minded in this way (I am trying, though having this be even worse than I expected has been challenging, as has the fact that many people I know are directly affected by losing their jobs or bracing for that possibility). I just think that SB, with its specific and policy-oriented focus, isn't ideally suited to spitballing.
I think the author has a small blind spot for how federalism is supposed to work as someone who does not actually have a state government.
I would love to see what a moderate but effective reform of the civil service would look
Agreed. Sometimes I almost feel like Matt is in denial and wants to pretend Trump is just a normal Republican president who only cares about cutting taxes. I think that was the correct take on Trump's first term pre-covid, but it's quickly become clear Trump 2.0 is a different animal.
Like it's crazy to me that he's only written one piece about anything directly related to what Musk is doing with DOGE. This seems like a huge deal even from a non-alarmist, technocratic perspective.
I contributed $5k to Susan Crawford's campaign based on this article. Lighting a candle rather than curse the darkness.
Awesome. This is why I happily subscribe to your Substack.
I contributed a similar percentage of my wealth to her: $100 :-)
I find all of the “is Elon Musk smart?” discourse pretty silly because it ignores some key facts we know about him! He’s taking a ton of drugs, most notably ketamine, but also LCD, cocaine, ecstasy, etc. and he’s not sleeping very much, potentially related to the drug use. Regardless of how smart you are, drug abuse and sleep deprivation often make people act erratically.
> At the same time, to the frustration of some, the general tenor of Slow Boring coverage is not focused on maximum alarmism about every event.
Maybe you got some comments like this but honestly I don't think there are many. My comment earlier in the week was quite a bit different and I don't think this piece really grapples with the range of responses here to the events of the past few weeks.
In another piece you said "politics is always the slow boring of hard boards". This seems plainly false to me. Did Trump bore hard boards to get to where he is? Setting Trump aside, Augustus might've bored some boards but Caligula clearly did not. There's a point where political rules don't apply because you're not playing the same sport.
Being alarmist is one thing, but I really don't think most slow boring commenters are that alarmist by nature. I think some people are questioning if the slow boring approach has much to say about the current political moment. You can be as moderate or as disciplined as you want but if the house is on fire you need to take action. It's fine if you Matt think the right action is to keep doing the same exact things you've been doing for 100 years or whatever, but I don't think it's crazy or out of line for people to wonder if the political moment is different here.
I think the Yglesias Thought take is that Trump 100% did get here by the Slow Boring of Hard Boards. In 2016 he deliberately moderated on the 2000's and early 2010's GOP's most toxic issue positions, Cutting Entitlements, Middle East adventurism, Free Trade absolutism, opposition to gay marriage, moderating on Abortion. By doing all of this he coded as a different kind of republican and accordingly won different kinds of voters.
Assuming you're just Matty Y in a funny hat, I'll say that that is a pretty soft take.
My take [supported by my even more impressive career as a blogger, journalist and editor, of course] is that Trump is basically the symptom of a rot that set in in American culture. He's not a hard worker. He didn't work hard to develop his talents. He was lucky to be the right man for the moment and rode that to the white house without any thoughtful innovation or departure from what he (and practically every other mediocre intelligence over 70) already thought or would otherwise have been capable of.
There are no boards bored in this story; the US, and the Republican Party, had a diminished immune system, and he is the virus (sorry for mixing metaphors) who enters the system via these weaknesses (which also include the GOP's toxic shibboleths).
I think both can be true! For Trump to have risen within the GOP is certainly a reflection of rot in our politics. But for Trump to have squeezed out two narrow victories in the general election is, in fact, the boring of hard boards. He just wouldn't have won if he didn't moderate on medicare/medicaid and centralized pro-life rhetoric in his campaign.
Thanks for responding. I guess what I don't understand is what constitutes the "slow boring" (God, we're beating this to death eh?) involved in moderating positions he didn't feel very strongly about in the first place in order to find the sweet spot of public opinion re: medicare/medicaid and abortion.
But, maybe I don't understand what slow boring really is. I am imagining the unglamorous work of trying to *change* public opinion, build coalitions, build institutions, expand networks, find small victories, engage in local politics, etc.
Trump moderating here seems very unlike any of the above - it seems more in line with "popularism", i.e. picking and highlighting popular stances whilee downplaying unpopular ones, than difficult work.
Do we disagree on how Trump eked out his 2016 win, or do I just misunderstand Matt Yglesias Thought (with Boring Characteristics)?
Not to go too deep in diagraming the thought of this publication, but I think popularism helps explain how you can accomplish slow boring policy victories.
Take congestion pricing for example. I don't actually hate Hochul for being weary of pushing congestion pricing during an election cycle, and her flip flopping probably held a few House seats for Dems.
The eventual passage of Obamacare after many failed attempts and after many smaller victories (like CHIP) is an example of slow boring. And then followed by many efforts to protect it and slowly expand and improve it.
Nitpick warning: please don't let "wary" go the way of "role", I beg you!
I would argue that on two of the core issues that Trump actually seems to REALLY care about, he has pushed public opinion.
Immigration and tariffs. It seems the country is definitely more to the right now on both, than pre 2016.
Of course we might also argue that Biden did more to push the country right on immigration that Trump every did....
Except that tariffs weren't even a "right" thing for several decades. (For most of the 20th Century and the early 21st Century, protectionism was primarily pushed by Democrats, not Republicans.)
What's actually disturbing, of course, is how much the "reflection of rot in our politics" is not unique to America and seems to be prevalent throughout advanced democracies and even some not-so-advanced (Argentina, which has way more valid reasons to be frustrated with traditional pols.)
Honestly, an earlier version of my comment included a reference to exactly that and I deleted it to try to be less long-winded! Totally agree though.
Trump is an opportunistic infection that invaded the American body politic because its immune system had been deeply compromised over many years, due to a confluence of events, actions, and reactions. He's the nation's Kaposi sarcoma. He took over because we had weakened ourselves. Both sides are to blame for the rot in our system, although the right takes pride of place for welcoming him in.
"Trump is basically the symptom of a rot that set in in American culture. He's not a hard worker. He didn't work hard to develop his talents. He was lucky to be the right man for the moment and rode that to the white house without any thoughtful innovation or departure from what he (and practically every other mediocre intelligence over 70) already thought or would otherwise have been capable of."
Trump in 2016 claimed to be worth billions, but at the very least was worth a couple of hundred million. If I was worth a couple of hundred million dollars, I would not run for president because running for president is a lot of work. And he's done it 3 times. Its clear he enjoys it immensely, but that doesn't change that its a lot of work.
I would say the same about Musk who is worth hundreds of billions. He could sit back and do whatever he wanted, including nothing at all, for the rest of his life. But he's pushing hard on all kinds of things.
None of this suggests that what Trump or Musk is doing is good here. But Matt's point that because we don't like something, doesn't mean they are stupid also applies to them not being lazy. Just say that the thing they are working to do is bad.
What do you mean when you say "slow boring of hard boards"? The GOP was completely undisciplined in developing its platform and doing hard work of convincing marginal voters. That is my point.
I really don't see at all what you're referring to. Can you actually point out to me any of the hard work he did? What persuasion was he doing? What policy work was he hammering out to find compromises? He took vaguely held... not even positions, but like, *dispositions*... and he ran with those, scarcely even thinking he would win. He played the same character he's always played on TV, and if the mood in the country had been different (or if the Democrats hadn't gone with Clinton) he would very likely have lost and would have had no capacity to sense that loss or adapt to it.
My central point is this: HE is not responsible for the change in US political culture (among non-politicians). He is downstream of it. He is consequential because he, benefitting from the societal frustrations, sharing them, and having an intuition (that he did nothing to develop) for how to push the right emotional buttons - he hijacked the Republican party apparatus and now he and his sycophants run the show.
But, this is not the same thing as a theory of politics wherein you achieve change via the Slow Boring of Hard Boards (assuming this is what you're trying to say that he did).
Look I'm not saying this take is 100% false but I'm definitely saying it's not 100% true. Trump won by moderating his message and being a disciplined politician is a bit of a strange idea. I do think moderation is part of what he is doing and MattY has a lot to say about that. But there's a lot more going on and Matt doesn't seem to acknowledge that and he definitely doesn't have a satisfactory account of it.
I do know that's his take. It's not his most persuasive. I think the disagreements there are probably more interesting than whoever is criticizing him for not being alarmist enough.
Yea it's interesting. The recurring Yglesias critique from Brian or more acutely Will Stencil is Matt over indexes the public's policy literacy. Not that Matt thinks they are literally reading about ACA subsidy expiration, but his detractors often assert that even just that the idea that public even notices any salient differences in policy is contestable if not wrong. And given *gestures broadly* I get it. That being said, The evidence can be made to comport with Matt's theory too. And if you assume many Voters put all the rest of Trump's antics into a bucket of "he's an asshole but he is our asshole," the circle can be squared. It's a Draymond Green theory of elections. The problem is rather than winning championships this Draymond may take down the entire Association.
You can be a Trump without any slow boring. But the aftermath of being a Trump is completely opaque even to Trump. Some of his impacts will surely be permanent, but he can’t predict which, and they likely aren’t going to include the construction of new government systems that achieve some goal.
If you have long term goals that you want to achieve (which might include the blocking of future Trumpian individuals from unleashing chaos at this level) it takes slow boring to reliably bring them about. But if you just want to shake things up, you can surf a wave and maybe get into position to do some shaking.
But other commenters seem insistent that Trump is engaged in the slow boring! It strikes me that 10 years into Trump, intelligent, informed followers of American politics don't have a clear account of Trump's success or what he represents. Also attempts to intellectualize his appeal always fall pathetically flat, but his normie supporters have no problem coming up with coherent reasons that they like him (bad reasons but easy to understand), because Trump is not operating on the same axis.
I think Matt has under-explored what is actually happening here by focusing on factors that conform to his priors. I also don't think Will Stancil or Brian Beutler have a convincing account, but they are at least grasping at something real that Matt is willfully ignoring.
One possible modification of that statement is that successful *liberal* politics is always the slow boring of hard boards, while antiliberal politics isn't.
Maybe but that really validates the criticism against Matt. He only has advice for the world where liberal politics matters. That world might be dead
I guess it depends on what you mean by liberal politics - does it only include enacting policy within a liberal democratic structure, or does it also include moving your government's structure in a liberal democratic direction? I tend to think both require the slow boring of hard boards but that's just an initial reaction.
It’s more correct to say that policy change (not election politics) is the slow boring
That one is just false on its face though. Slow boring only makes any kind of sense in electoral politics. Without elections the strongest person can just take power and make any policy they want.
on-target as usual, thanks. I think many past efforts to deal with Mr. Trump were notable for their counterproductivity. Two that come to my mind are Trump's first (2019) impeachment (which was perhaps factually wrong and could never have possibly succeeded), and Alvin Bragg's decision to try Trump on a seemingly bizarre felony charge (which "succeeded" at the cost of antagonizing much of the country and validating the concept of anti-Trump Lawfare.)
That's an interesting counterfactual to examine - if Democrats held fire on impeachment number 1, would the Jan 6 impeachment effort have been more likely to succeed? Seems plausible.
I think quite likely yes but the real issue with Impeachment 2.0 was a desire to run a more formalized process that extended beyond Jan 20, raising a novel constitutional question. Impeachment is not a legal process. Nothing stopped the House from Impeaching trump the second they finished the electoral count act obligations on the evening of Jan 6/7th while the capitol was still smoldering. Support would never have been higher than that moment. We would have had POTUS Pence for 13 days. But death by proceduralism fetish once again.
McConnell said the Senate wouldn't reconvene until after Jan 20 so this "it's Pelosi's fault for not rushing it" argument is a moot point.
Everyone was in the room that evening. A lot of time and energy passed in the week between J6 and January 13 when the Impeachment vote happened in the house and the 25th when the charges were brought to the Senate. There were literally zero evidentiary questions at issue, nor where they legally required, nor would they even be answered until the J6 Commission months later. Everyone justifiably believed he simply would go away in a few days and couldn't possibly be elected again so it wouldn't matter. Belts and Suspenders would have been warranted here. Speed was of the essence.
If it took just two weeks to dissipate the energy necessary to react properly to the first ever violent attempt to overturn the results of an American election then probably the energy wasn't really there at the moment either.
If I'm being brutally honest, a decision with the enormity of something like removing the President is probably suspect if it requires the passion of a moment that would otherwise pass away in two weeks.
So I doubt the counterfactual that it would have happened, and most importantly think impeachment is only possible when the opposition already has a sufficient majority to do it on their own. No Congressional majority is ever going to remove their party's POTUS.
Also agree with this
Exactly, the articles of impeachment should have been next day, two at the MOST.
AND, they should have tapped some republicans like Liz Chenney to draft them, make them palatable to republicans, not put crap from pre election in there.
Hard disagree. The last thing we should ever do is bum rush an impeachment and trial through Congress. Now *that* would be a terrible precedent.
I disagree with Mr. Weinberg that there was a problem with the facts of Impeachment I -- Alexander Vindman's and Fiona Hill's testimony and willingness to bring down the wrath of TrumpWorld on themselves, as well as Trump's own attempts to violate the law by burying the whistleblower report, were enough to convince me. But over and above that, no one at the time that Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine had any idea that a few years later he was going to try for a violent overthrow of the government and deserve Impeachment II, so each impeachment should stand on its own. Yes, he was acquitted, but I think that history will recognize his guilt.
I think there is a somewhat vexing strategic question of how an opposition party should use Impeachment in the context of extremely low odds of successful removal. The initial Ukraine-gate (i have been saying since 2017 we need to retire Watergate as the default suffix for scandals and replace it with "-A-Lago"), was very bad, but there were like 10 other equally "impeachable" events on which dems never hit on. That isn't to say they should have impeached him 10x, quite the opposite, I think J6 Genuinely merited such action and had non trivial odds of success. Contingent on Dems winning the house in 2026, I think the liberal desire to impeach Trump for god knows what will be quite high, but it is entirely pointless and isn't the sole method by which oversight and political accountability can be achieved.
Watergate is the original Watergate. I found the proceedings deeply offensive, an early step in our crazed venture into Politics by Personal Destruction. The current era makes me feel like I'm living in the late stages of the Roman Republic.
I wasn't around but I think I would have been more offended by the crimes of the Nixon administration, crimes which involved a great deal of personal destruction.
I think Trump's guilt for the crimes alleged at the first impeachment is debatable. More importantly, it was obvious before the impeachment that he would not be convicted. Appealing to notions of "historical record" or "judgment of posterity" sounds pretty fuzzy to me.
The old saying is that you don't try to overthrow the king unless you will win. In contemporary terms, beyond the brief happiness of Trump-haters, the impeachment achieved nothing but to further poison an already toxic political atmosphere in the country.
What crimes do you think he might not have committed—the request for a quid pro quo, or something else?
I have blocked Impeachment #1 out of my mind, and hardly remember the issues. The "Steele Dossier," originally claimed as smoking-gun evidence, turned out to be questionable and perhaps fictitious. I think several witnesses at the hearing gave compelling testimony, but I never had the sense that the credible evidence was even close to cause for removal from office. To me the whole thing was motivated by anger toward Trump, plus a sense of incredulity that he could have won an election honestly.
With all possible respect, I think you should not make factual claims about things you don’t understand. The Steele Dossier had absolutely nothing to do with Trump’s first impeachment. Saying that it did is the equivalent of saying that the Watergate hearings were factually wrong because it turned out we really DID land on the moon. Trump’s first impeachment was about his refusing to disburse aid to Ukraine, aid which Congress had authorized, unless Zelenskyy announced a bogus investigation of Joe Biden. None of this was disputed at all once it came to light.
In fairness, you’re not the only person I’ve seen who confused “Russiagate” with Trump’s first impeachment—Michael Dougherty of the National Review made this mistake too. Obviously that’s way worse because he’s a national commentator, but seriously—next time, Google it!
Is your opinion of the work of the January 6 Select Committee the same?
No. I thought the committee did excellent work, leading to a (to me) compelling narrative. I don't know why my reaction was so different, but Impeachment Offense #2 was far more serious than #1, and the Select Committee didn't seem to be packed with media-hungry politicians waiting for the opportunity for their TV lines.
I agree. I think that the Mueller Report, the Managers' Reports for both impeachments, the January 6 Report, and Jack Smith's Reports will be key documentary evidence for evaluating the first Trump presidency, and I'm glad that they exist and will be difficult if not impossible to hunt down and destroy, even for Deputy President Musk.
Since at least the second Clinton Administration, I've been concerned that an increasing number of Presidential records only exist electronically, and that future historians may be confronted with more and more lacunae in the record as time goes on and storage media become unreadable. Fortunately for them, Trump has been so egregious that he's left lots and lots of durable tracks and, thanks to this blizzard of ill-intentioned, semi-legal, and outright illegal Executive Orders and the resulting court cases, his second term will be at least as comprehensively documented as his first.
I would second Al Brown’s comment below: what was (or may have been) factually wrong with the first impeachment?
the lack of votes to convict.
I said factually wrong, which he distinguished from the prospect of success.