Mailbag: When to ring the alarm?

Plus Deep Research, what moderates get wrong, and the Bidenomics debate

If you’re anything like me, you could use an occasional break from the onslaught of news, and I really recommend this Phil Edwards video about the history and geography of pizza in the United States.

Pizza is good, right? RFK will probably ban it soon, but for now, enjoy! Among other things, you’ll learn that pepperoni pizza was first attested in 1948, even though pizza had been present in the United States for at least fifty years by then.

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Linus: It seems like the governing ethos of Slow Boring is not to overreact or unduly sound the alarm. But literally day by day, the Right gets more transparently radical, and now Trump has started tweeting about how there is no law for him. Is there some point at which Slow Boring itself will sound the alarm? Is there something you are waiting for?

I think in response to this sort of thing you sometimes say that there are other good writers sounding the ‘fascism’ alarm, and that that’s not Slow Boring's comparative advantage. But at some point it seems like insistence on ‘business as usual’ reporting threatens to make people less alarmed than they ought to be. That other writers write x, y, and z, does not mean that readers who follow Slow Boring will pay attention to them if Slow Boring makes it sound like x, y, and z are not the main issues. Plausibly, encouraging 'normal mindset' in an elite readership amounts to recommending a dangerous complacency.

At what point does it (or would it) stop making sense to persuade a readership to keep their eyes on slow boring through hard boards? Does the slogan make sense when the boards themselves are under attack by arsonists? When they are on fire? Do you have ‘red lines’ in mind, where the tone of coverage would change sharply?

I’m not a very emotional writer. Scenarios arise where some people find that unsatisfying, and I can respect that. My answer to this isn’t just about comparative advantage, though. It’s twofold:

• One: What would sounding the alarm mean in practice? To me, The Free Press editorializing in favor of Danielle Sassoon and sounding the alarm about Trump’s corrupt handling of Eric Adams is meaningful because the Free Press’s overall editorial line is quite sympathetic to Trump. I wish that they were more alarmed than they are. But I am glad they wrote that piece, and I think that if they become increasingly alarmed in the future, that would be a meaningful intervention in the discourse. But I was alarmed by January 6, and incredibly alarmed by Trump pardoning the perpetrators. I am at full alarm! I am also broadly out of sympathy with the policy goals of the Republican Party. And while there are lots of protectionist Democrats who may find some of Trump’s revisions to traditional GOP ideology congenial, that’s not me — I was for free trade back when that was primarily a Republican stance.

• Two: I think that alarm-raising is to, an extent, counterproductive. To me, the most alarming thing about the Trump presidency so far isn’t exactly anything that Trump has done; it’s how preemptively scared of Trump so many influential actors are. During his first term, Trump used the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department to try to punish CNN’s corporate parent, but they fought Trump in court and they won. Trump threatened to attack Amazon to punish The Washington Post, and Jeff Bezos stood up for himself and won. That’s the behavior I want to encourage, which involves not pre-conceding that we are now living under fascism.

More broadly, it is always true that politics is a slow boring of hard boards. It always requires both passion and perspective. Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and FDR during World War II were practicing Weberian politics at times of extreme emergency. You always need to ask whether what you are doing is constructive and helpful or just emoting.

BJ Anders: You wrote about what the right gets right and what the left gets right. You wrote about how you moved from left to nearer the center. Your writing generally focuses on what moderates get right, and with regularity, you write about what the left and right get wrong.

What about what the center gets wrong? What are mistakes moderates make? Are these mistakes tactical, strategic, philosophical?

I would say two big things, one tactical and one that’s really ethical.