In praise of commercial culture

Plus when I’d vote for a Republican, the case for generalists, and why live theater is weird now

A vintage postage stamp depicting the popular musical. (Image by SunChan via Getty Images)

Someone told me the other day that I should become safety-pilled about artificial intelligence.

I will admit that I don’t write about this topic all that frequently because I don’t think it necessarily lends itself to a ton of interesting articles, but I want to assure everyone that I am quite concerned that A.I. will kill everyone. In particular, I think that just as depicted in the “Terminator” films, the U.S.-China geopolitical rivalry creates bad incentives for both countries to facilitate excessively aggressive and excessively reckless deployment of technologies whose real workings and capabilities they don’t understand very well. There is a view on the left that everything about A.I. is terrible except for the existential risk, which is dismissed as just hype designed to inflate a financial bubble, and I think that’s crazy. There is also a libertarian techno-optimist’s fallacy of inferring “every technological advancement is good” from the observation that “technological progress has been very good on average.”

So let’s not have any doubt, I think, that this is a big problem. It’s why Alex Bores was on the November donation recommendations list and Manny Rutinel is on the updated one and housing is not the only reason I’m looking forward to Scott Wiener making it to Congress this fall.

On to our regularly scheduled Mailbag!

BBDC: What is the most realistic scenario for you supporting a Republican presidential candidate in 2028 or 2032? Or a Republican Governor of a large, important state?

I think it’s pretty easy to imagine a scenario where I’d prefer a YIMBY-pilled Republican gubernatorial candidate to a left-wing Democratic candidate in a blue state where the policy status quo is already pretty progressive. That’s basically how Phil Scott keeps winning in Vermont.

The trick with pulling it off in a “large, important state” is that the surge of gerrymandering activity that Donald Trump has orchestrated combined with January 6 and election denial means that I now come to state races with a lot of federal concerns. It’s very notable to me that Republicans have a trifecta in New Hampshire and are not using it to redraw the state’s House maps to try and create a G.O.P. seat. That’s savvy of them and reduces the pressure on moderates in the state to vote them out. But looking ahead to the 2028 cycle, I think it’s actually quite important that blue states like Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Colorado engage in retaliatory gerrymandering. Right now the median House seat is way to the right of the national average because the intra-census gerrymandering has been so asymmetrical. It’s very hard to imagine recommending a Republican candidate in those situations because it’s hard for me to imagine a Republican promising to do a pro-Dem gerrymander.

That being said, the real moral of this story is that gerrymandering isn’t just bad on its own terms — it’s that gerrymandering has negative downstream consequences. It is very bad for the state of Wisconsin to have lots of people who don’t live in Wisconsin be invested in the outcome of its state races based entirely on their impact on the House map. If we had a national ban on gerrymandering, that would make Congress work a little bit better. But I think that ban would potentially make state politics work a lot better by simply creating a situation where only people who live in Maryland actually care what happens in Maryland politics, allowing the debates to focus more on the actual specific issues facing the state.

Joe Saia: You’ve talked about the how foreign policy and energy/climate policy were on different tracks in the Biden white house, even though there were clear win-win opportunities to increase domestic energy production and reduce climate emissions by focusing on reducing Russian oil exports. Seems like there is a similar dichotomy around animal welfare and traditional environmental review where we tolerate horrible factory farming practices but entirely block development to avoid disturbing a couple turtles. I realize a lot of environmental review is not really about protecting the environment but should there be some pressure on various groups to focus more on improving animal welfare by limiting factory farming practices and less on blocking development to avoid inconveniencing turtles?

For those who missed the post that Saia is talking about, the point I was making is that the Biden administration treated sanctions enforcement as a balancing act between the economic benefits of cheap oil and the foreign-policy benefits of cracking down on Russian and Iranian production.

At the same time, the administration treated domestic drilling as a balancing act between the economic benefits of cheap oil and the environmental negatives of fossil fuel production. If you had integrated across these two policy silos, you could have gotten an outcome that was better for the environment, better for the American economy, and better for American foreign-policy objectives. But that would have required an integrated look at the whole board rather than a narrow set of responses to interest group and activist pressure.

I think this is, in general, the virtue of being a generalist.

And the point about animal welfare speaks to the same issue. People have a lot of different reasons for being interested in animal habitat loss. Some of that is just enjoying a litigation hook. Some of it is good-faith concern with the idea that there is special sacred value in preserving rare species as such. But clearly some of it is a generalized concern about animal welfare. Habitat loss causes suffering, and people are reasonably bothered by that suffering. But to the extent that animal welfare is the hook that matters for you, it’s clearly the case that it’s possible to achieve more suffering-alleviation at dramatically lower economic cost by focusing on very small changes to how farm animals are treated. The simple fact that there are so many farm animals means that very incremental low-cost improvements in their well-being have huge benefits.

But to see that, you have to think across policy domains.

Nik Gupta: I remember you called the Iran war “A precision strike to take out pro-Israel democrats” on twitter. I do notice that the more recent Democratic primaries since the war has started have taken a very different turn that the earlier part of the year. There are a multitude of factors, including the states involved, but has the Iran war been boosting anti-Israel democrats?

I think this is a very underrated factor. AIPAC, going back to Obama’s second term and the nuclear deal with Iran, has tried to set the bar for being pro-Israel extremely high.

To them, it’s not good enough to be anti-anti-Zionist and respect Israel’s right to exist or to oppose the B.D.S. movement or an arms embargo on Israel. It’s not even good enough to support generous financial assistance to Israel. AIPAC has wanted politicians to support orienting American foreign policy in the broader region around Israel’s views of Iran. That’s a ridiculous thing to ask of people. It’s a bar that very few Democrats meet, and once they ended up getting the war they wanted, it instantly became super-unpopular due to the negative impact on Americans’ economic well-being. The fact that this is all bad and terrible does not logically mean that the right course of action is to flip all the way around to totalizing investment in Palestinian nationalism. But most people’s level of engagement with specific issues is a lot fuzzier than that, and the war has just totally torched the brand image of “pro-Israel” in part because the custodians of that brand spent the past 15 years pitching this insane Iran policy.

Brian from Beaverton: You mentioned in your most recent mailbag that you find live theatre weird. As someone who does it professionally, I found that intriguing! What do you find weird about it?

I’ve had a theory for a while that a big reason behind the struggles of theatre as a whole right now (at least in the U.S.) is that we as theatre artists have gotten too far away from the tastes of the people who regularly attend theatre. We’re artists, and it takes a particular brand of crazy to choose this particular art, so we constantly want to push the boundaries. That’s all well and good in small doses, but when 75% of the shows are like that, as are 75% of the choices within those shows (even the 25% of “normal” shows), it can become alienating to a lot of people. I’m not arguing that every show be a revival of Oklahoma, but I think we need more balance than we’ve had, especially post-2020.

This is definitely part of it.

Different art forms go through different phases and trajectories. In the 19th century, literary fiction was a commercially vibrant form of mass entertainment. That’s not to say that every successful novel had high literary value or that every great work of literature was a commercial success. But publishing novels was a mainstream business endeavor and the writers who are today considered to be the great masters of their time were operating in a commercial framework. This ends up being something that you need to incorporate into critical assessment of them. The major works of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky were published in serialized form, so some of the literary choices being made about pace and structure were really commercial dictates.

This isn’t really what fiction is like today. There are certainly mass-market authors, but they exist in a niche that is siloed off from seriously literary fiction. Literary fiction, in turn, is a small niche that’s not expected to generate big sales and that participates in a somewhat incestuous circle of favor-granting. It’s important to be in the right writers’ workshops and have the right connections and be in the right circles because it’s not really a mainstream business.

Live theater, obviously, was a totally commercial business for hundreds of years.

Works of incredible literary merit were generated by the commercial mass-market theater. Shakespeare’s plays were staged to make money by selling tickets to a mainstream audience. But the rise of movie theaters and especially television largely killed that off. Of course you can see “The Lion King” on Broadway and people stage crowd-pleasing things like the “Oklahoma!” revival. But I was talking about living right near the Studio Theatre in D.C. and basically never going. What they put on there is more serious than adaptations of Disney cartoons and more original than revivals of the greatest hits of the American theatrical tradition. But there’s no expectation that an original play is going to be a hit success with mainstream audiences. As a result, they’re not really trying. You end up doing stuff that’s supposed to be interesting to a fairly insular world of theater enthusiasts.

In other fields this can sometimes be addressed differently. The normal structure of a show at the National Symphony is that before the big famous piece that everyone is really there to see, you get the performance of some contemporary composition that 90 percent of people don’t care about. That’s more elegant than the theater situation, but it’s still quite different from a commercial medium. If you go to a rock show at the 9:30 Club or The Anthem, the opening act will be less famous and less interesting than the headliner. But there is a good-faith belief that the audience will genuinely enjoy the opener. I’ll always remember going to see The Walkmen play at the 9:30 Club in 2004 and being blown away by the opening act, a Canadian band called Metric that I’d never heard of. Over the years they’ve become one of my absolute favorites and more successful and longer-lasting than The Walkmen. That’s not going to happen at the Kennedy Center.

To me, part of what’s interesting and vital about movies is that while you certainly have arthouse fare that almost nobody sees (“Train Dreams”) and pure cynical cash grabs (live-action “Moana,” “Super Mario Galaxy”), there are real artistic aspirations behind “Project Hail Mary,” “Obsession,” or “The Odyssey” but also real commercial aspirations. Part of the deal with the career of a successful director or a big movie star is that a track record of securing profits for a movie studio earns them some running room to pursue ideas that they believe in. They’re not begging for grant money or trying to appeal to a narrow in-group. Sometimes, of course, commercial imperatives incentivize people to make dreck. Oftentimes, commercial imperatives limit artists’ creativity in ways that they find annoying. But the ability to achieve commercial success is also freeing — over and above the fact that it means artists have the opportunity to connect with mass audiences.

Goose: Would love some thoughts on the first mover penalty for breaking from/against the groups. If Dem politicians en masse move against them, it’d work, but the first few to do so will likely just end up with bad reputations I would think.

This is why I said in my “how the center-left can come back” piece that it’s really all about the 2028 primary.

The Republican Party didn’t execute its MAGA pivot toward the right on immigration but toward the middle on Social Security and retirement programs via dozens of separate downballot primaries. Trump won a presidential primary and redefined the party. Bernie Sanders lost in 2016, but he did well enough on the basis of a clear enough message to lay the groundwork for what became a durable factional enterprise. In 2028, there will be a chance for people to run high-impact primary campaigns and we’ll have to see what happens.

Mathew: With playstation customers losing digital movies that they had purchased after playstation lost licensing agreements.

Do you support legislation preventing that from happening? Basically, if you purchased a digital copy, it doesn’t matter if they lose a licensing agreement, you get the movie forever.

We should always remember that all aspects of intellectual property law are pure legislative and judicial contrivances that are supposed to advance the general interest. And I would say the current situation in which a purchase isn’t really a purchase does not serve the public interest well. I hear people saying that if you really want to own a film and be sure you’ll have access to it, you have to buy it on physical media. That sounds insane, but it’s also true.

But it shouldn’t be true! Digital clearly has a lot of beneficial properties compared with physical discs. There should be a legal status whereby a digital purchase can entail the kind of irrevocable rights that we associate with ownership. I don’t know exactly what the details should look like, but this should be a solvable problem.

Max Haas: I’m wondering if you think there’s any way we can get someone like Marie Glusenkamp Perez to run to run for president. An actual Blue Dog Democrat but who sort of presents in a way that millennial progressives don’t find alienating. And if you think her (or someone like her) would have any hope at all.

This is what I’m praying for, at least.

I respect and cherish all of my Blue Dog caucus overperformers. As presidential candidates, I don’t think it works because one thing the primary electorate definitely demands is feisty and aggressive partisanship, and if you’re representing a district Trump won repeatedly, it’s not smart politics to deliver feisty and aggressive partisanship. The advantage a first-term senator like Elissa Slotkin or Ruben Gallego has is that they can do feisty partisanship through 2028 and then if necessary shift into dealmaking mode in time for 2030.