Mailbag: Negativity has consequences

Plus Alternate Hillarys, things it's smart to downplay, and movements without leaders

I did a whole post on this last week, but even though plenty right-of-center elites are aware that Donald Trump’s instincts on trade policy are bad, I find that many of them still assume that everything else he’s doing is probably good.

And, look, if you are a committed cultural conservative, I’m not going to try to talk you out of the reality that this administration shares your views.

But in terms of practical policy consequences, I’m urging everyone to remember that the stock market’s responsiveness to trade policy means that Trump is getting much more concrete feedback on the wisdom of his policy choices in his arena than anywhere else. But as far as we can tell, the decisions are equally erratic and careless everywhere. Why is he gutting the Forest Service, for example? Which is not to say that the wildfire status quo was fine (there are big problems with how this is handled), but there’s a good bipartisan bill from Tim Sheehy and Alex Padilla to address this issues, legislation the White House could be supporting in the interest of actually improving things. But they seem wildly uninterested in governing the country as it’s been conventionally understood.

Some questions! And it’s the last Friday of the month, so we’re starting with three questions from GiveDirectly donors.

---

Anonymous: Can you please explain why leftists seemingly cannot grasp the value of winning? It is genuinely hard for me to grasp how given this (*waves hands at everything*), they can care about whether a candidate publicly supports a policy that will never happen (eg M4A) or not? And even on the issues they care most about, what is worse for transpeople and kids, a moderate Dem who agrees with the burgeoning European consensus or Trump/Vance? As a follow up, do you agree with my pet theory that Warnock / Booker are the candidate best suited to ignore the left (I think they would be queasy about attacking a black man)?

A prominent Bernie endorser and someone who was involved in his 2020 campaign and in some of the 2025 oligarchy rallies told me that he’s perfectly aware that no matter who wins a presidential election, we’re not going to get the Medicare for All legislation that Sanders campaigned on. But he says that to him and to the movement, M4A is a shibboleth. Signing onto it shows that you’re a fearless opponent of the insurance industry and other private interests, and that you can therefore be trusted to fight as hard as possible for as much as possible, in terms of public option or Medicare buy-in or whatever other changes are actually achievable.

On the one hand, I think this is kind of dumb.

On the other hand, I think it reflects the reality that it’s not that the left doesn’t care about winning, it’s that the left is very focused on winning factional power inside the Democratic Party.

They’re not impressed by things like Joe Biden running on a platform that’s to the left of Hillary Clinton, whose platform was to the left of Barack Obama’s, which in turn was to the left of Bill Clinton’s. They see, not without reason, a lot of continuity in personnel between 1990s Democratic Party politics the Biden administration. Hillary is literally Bill’s wife. Biden was a major legislative player on the 1990s crime legislation and deficit reduction bills. Obama was the chance for a break with that trajectory, but he brought back Larry Summers and made Clinton Secretary of State and his designated successor.

The left’s view is that these people (“the establishment”) are bad, and they want to beat them so they can be in charge instead. Consequently, a $15/hour minimum wage was an incredibly important issue in the 2016 primary when Clinton was against it and Sanders was for it, but stopped being important when it stopped being a factional controversy. The Palestinian cause became super important during the Biden administration, because it was the issue on which he most clearly broke with the left.

On basically all fronts, I would argue that in practice, the way to shift public policy to the left is to help moderate Democrats beat conservative Republicans in red-leaning states and districts. And it would make much more sense to focus on the many, many causes that unite Democrats and divide them from Republicans than to focus on purity testing over anti-majoritarian causes that can’t pass. But I don’t think that focus on divisiveness is really an analytical error; it’s a decision to prioritize the factional fight over concrete policy progress.

David: Men seem to me less frustrated about the closing gender wage gap, more frustrated with an increasingly feminized professional culture — one too controlled by HR, too sensitive to feelings, not sensitive enough to productivity. For instance, men are not mad online at the Australian skin care women because they make too much money, but because they have an office culture built around self-affirming dance routines. Do these mad online men have a point buried somewhere under their anger? Men and women are different, and there may be some inevitable tradeoff between a professional culture’s friendliness to men and women. What role should the federal government and courts take in regulating university and workplace cultures?

I think what you see in your question is that men aren’t entirely sure what they’re angry about.

This concern about a “feminized” white collar workplace — in which women are negatively stereotyped into HR-type roles rather than those focused on mission-critical profit and loss — is something that I hear a lot. And like most men, my basic preference is for a somewhat more direct and abrasive communications style than most women prefer. But also, there are a lot of people mad at the tbh Skincare TikTok. The “Gen Z boss and a mini” woman from that video isn’t some random HR flunky, she’s the very successful founder of the company — a company that relies on viral content marketing as a sales strategy. And I think there’s actually not a coherent complaint here at all, it’s just people getting mad online because people enjoy getting mad online.

But to be clear, I don’t think many men are consciously upset about the increased earnings power of women. What they’re upset about is the declining relative social status of middling men.

I keep trying not to do too many “Matt reads old books” takes, but one thing that you clearly see if you read old novels is that most people have always cared a lot about relative social status. There’s a sense in which even the wealthiest 19th century landowner lived a life of desperate material poverty by the standards of 2025. He had no antibiotics, no Netflix, no quick tropical getaway during the winter, no fridge, no zippers, and none of dozens of other things that a normal middle class American takes for granted. But there’s also something silly and literal-minded about a take like “Actually, Mr. Knightly was very poor if you consider the value of new technology.” Mr. Knightly was a big shot accorded deference and respect by those around him. If you transported him to 2025 to work as an assistant manager at Chipotle, he would be dazzled by modern technology but, I think, also feel a very real blow to his psychological well-being.

Going from a world in which women are largely financially dependent on men to one in which they are not has cost men something non-material, even as it’s contributed to making everyone better off. But that’s a shitty thing to say, so it feels more virtuous to get angry about useless HR ladies with useless email jobs, even when the ladies you’re mad at are actually successful startup founders.

Jay S: How often do you intentionally click on a digital ad on your phone, laptop, etc.? How often does that click lead to a purchase that you would not otherwise have made? If not you, or me — then who is doing the clicking and buying? Anyone you personally know? Or maybe it's just children, the elderly, and the underclass? Or maybe advertisers actually aren't getting a good return on their digital ad spend? Could they ever get wise to this? What would happen to Google and Meta? Could digital advertising be a massive popular delusion? These actually work?! On who?!

I think this take is wrong. You can always make the case that generic brand advertising — like the car ads that I see watching the NBA playoffs — are a waste of money because truly almost nobody sees a car ad and then rushes out the door to buy a new vehicle. But the whole point of the kind of direct response ads that are so common on Instagram is that the company knows exactly what they’re getting in exchange for their spend.

I would also just say that for me, I would ask this question the other way around. My wallet was purchased thanks to an online ad. So were all my socks. And my three highest usage neckties. And the jeans that I am wearing right now. And the Christmas present that I bought for Kate last year. I don’t click through and purchase things all that frequently mostly because I don’t actually buy durable goods very frequently. But I find that the ad targeting algorithms are pretty good at understanding what kinds of durable goods I might be in the market for, and showing me brands that fit into my lifestyle and self-conception reasonably well.

David J: What would cause you to consider leaving the U.S.?