Matt writes, regarding Emerging Democratic Majority: "How could you look at Obama winning Iowa and Wisconsin in his 2012 re-election bid and conclude that the growing Hispanic population was all that mattered?"
For a simple reason: The proponents of this line of thinking are racialists, in that they believe skin color and ethnicity are determinative of policy and voting preferences. They misread the history of the Black voting bloc for Democrats as being related to the race of the voters rather than the discrimination tolerated or supported by Republicans during the Great Realignment.
It's why they adopted the "black and brown" and BIPOC rhetorical formulations. They thought the skin color was what was important. Their race-first way of thinking of the world created big blind spots around immigration and criminal justice, allowing a neglected set of issues for Trump to build upon.
There's a lot more diversity of opinion within the "Hispanic community" (if there is such a thing) than they gave credit for. Which they would know if they ever talked to them rather than talked down to them.
It’s always hilarious to me how the Dems think about Hispanic voters when 80% of the South Americans I went to grad school with were real capital “F” Fascists
I remember a Brazilian in the finance department who insisted he was a libertarian but everything he said was so fascistic that it was comical. “No, politically and economically excluding lower class people because you think they will only redistribute rents to themselves is not libertarian.”
He was a misogynistic loser who never published and was only in academia because no private firm would tolerate such a loser.
Yes - maybe as a nuance not "racialists'" but "identarians" with a heavy racial angle of understanding (with misapplication of Black American ethno-racial identity position as directly extrapolatable and directly the model that new ethnic-not-European-ethnicities would follow).
Quite evidently massively wrong and off-base.
The overall extreme overweight to cultural-identarianism on the part of the Democrats & Progressives is a broader blind-spot (gender as well as over-read based on specific sub-demographic)
I was talking to a mental health provider and asked about what was driving overdiagnosis of a mental health condition. The response was that it depended entirely on race: white women were whiney and demanded easy answers while black women were having their trauma misinterpreted. Which does not reflect well on the ability of mental health providers to provide effective care.
I blame the census. People understand reality through what we can measure. Race is a thing that's easy to measure, and so it's the most convenient lens for understanding politics.
I think the census should get rid of "race" and just measure places their predecessors lived in before moving to the US. Then they could check off as many regions/countries as they want.
You could functionally do the same grouping if you want to, but it would no longer group you into these arbitrary "races" or ask you to identify as one of them. It would be similar to how we can infer class from income/education/etc but you don't see everything through class lenses (which I think might have more predictive power than race ones).
It would also be a lot healthier for the discourse if we talked about “people of European descent” rather than “white people” IMO.
Does the current census do that? They would both hit the "black" box in the race category.
Presumably if this went forward the descendants of slaves would check off a "Sub-Saharan Africa" region while the nigerian-americans would just enter "Nigeria", so you might be able to distinguish them.
You could also have a question about how many generations their family has been in the US for.
An honest reading of the census would show that the combined Black and Hispanic population is not a majority. Pinning your entire hope for (permanent) majority power on such a minority electoral coalition should be self-evidently sub-optimal.
I don’t think it’s that self evident. Obama won with just 39% of white votes in 2012 and Clinton won the popular vote with just 37%. The major flaw in the emerging Democratic majority theory was the assumption that they would maintain their current vote share across racial lines.
Edit: The other factor is that white babies are only 50% of new borns even though whites are 70%+ of the population.
The other flaw was thinking that Obama's result was the very worst result possible among white working class voters.
Catalist analysis showed his results with non-college whites was better than modeled by exit polls. And his results were a lot better than clinton (and Biden's) with working class white voters.
But that’s only once every ten years. And the race question has been around forever, as self-identification since 1970. The “cultural appropriation” nonsense as well as overweening DEI bureaucracy are much more recent.
I think of it as a failure to think in terms of the populations that compose a broad demographic category and how that composition changes. (The essentialism you talk about is upstream of failing to recognize that broad racial demographic categories are in fact composed of many distinct groups, racial and otherwise!)
IOW, if you took the population labeled "Hispanic" in 2012 and just doubled it or 1.5xed it or whatever, then the analysis would've been right. But obviously that isn't what was happening as the Hispanic population grew! You had
1. migration from different sources
2. shifts in the proportion of people who were direct immigrant vs. first-generation vs. second-generation etc.
3. shifts in wealth/home ownership and income
4. shifts in the political landscape
MY focuses point 4, but the other issues (plus many things I've carelessly omitted) also matter. As a Floridian, the heterogeneity of "Hispanics" is something you can probably appreciate more easily than many, but it should be obvious to anyone willing to think about it for more than a few minutes.
I don't think it was unreasonable to think that anti-Hispanic animus in the Republican party would be a huge think after the 2012 Republican primary, especially after what happened to Rick Perry and the commitments Romney had to make to win the election.
That said, I think Romney's collapse with lower income/lower education voters of all races had more to do with his right-wing economic policies than his immigration ideas. Trump has mostly walked away from these ideas at least rhetorically, which Matt has amply documented.
Matt was referring to the Brownstein thesis in that quote not the EDM.
Hard to fault Brownstein for not predicting how technology might change politics. Cultural issues were much less salient in 2012 than they are today largely driven by the rise of social media and smartphones. However, Biden did win a presidential election with only a third of white non-college voters.
The question about AI and the answer I think both misunderstand Hayek’s point. His point wasn’t that authorities lack the necessary computing power for central planning.
Let’s suppose you can “calculate” as much as you want given your information. You still can’t run a good economy.
A ton of the information needed to coordinate efficient economic activity is based on local or tacit knowledge that isn’t in a database anywhere. Individuals have their own preferences, they know their capabilities, they might have knowledge of some local context, etc.
How the hell do you elicit this information? Most of the time, individuals can’t even articulate these things themselves!
Misunderstanding this is, I think, what makes a lot of liberal wonk types bullish about a kind of technocratic dictatorship. Even with all the “experts” (ie, people who have read a couple articles in Vox or The Argument), you’re not going to get very far with benevolent central planning.
I am constantly amazed at the people who work in, interact with or think about large system including companies, governments and political organizations don't understand organizational systems. The function of the middle layers of organizations is to provide a two way street of information flows as well as decision making. The idea that you can just put in some large ERP system or CRM system or something and cut out that vital middle is the pipe dream of too many people who think everyone else's job is easy. Maybe it is in broad strokes but it still takes time, effort and knowledge.
AI is in many instances is the promised productivity from computerization that we have not really been seeing but it does not magically do all work. And it is not going to magically pull information or preferences from people.
I'm reminded a bit of James C. Scott ("Seeing like a state," etc). Top-down organizers want something "legible," where the large-scale systems are easy to make sense of and the small-scale things are neat subdivisions of the large ones. E.g. at the physical level, building cities on a grid with definite zones, and trying to make people live there instead of in traditional villages or old pre-grid cities; on the social level, having a formal hierarchy with a limited number of clearly delineated ranks and specialties, etc. This allows governments or large organizations to deal with an order they think they understand. It helps with tax collection and with various uses of power, to utopian or nefarious ends. For utopian uses of power, furthermore, the planners may think that a centrally imposed order is more modern, rational and efficient than whatever emerges from the bottom up.
The problem is, the people living and working in such a system want to organize themselves according to their own needs, which tend to be a poor fit to any given uniform structure. This tension is a big part of why utopian megaprojects are not actually utopias to live in, and one reason why some people try to resist the control of the state altogether.
I only know Scott from summaries, but my impression is he's written a lot on the themes of how large-scale planners try to impose artificial order, and why he doesn't recommend it.
Hausmann did a lot in creating the boulevards and regularizing the street frontage. But he didn’t try to replace the left bank/right bank distinction or regularize neighborhoods into a grid, or determine future growth patterns into the suburbs.
The bet on AI isn't that the middle layer disappears, its that it shrinks. Management productivity/leverage can be seen through "how many people can one manager effectively manage". In my company right now, the magic number is 8 direct reports, above that its tough. We're currently implementing a project right now to help with reporting/visibility into key metrics/actions that we hope will push that number from 8 to 12. If you can do this a few times, you eventually get to one manager with say 40 individual contributors, and managers of managers can have up to 12 managers report into them, then for a 100 person company has around 4 managers total, and a 1000 person company has ~30 managers, both with 3 links between IC and CEO. Most orgs today will have 5+ links from IC to CEO and be like 20%+ managers. Huge change.
It's amazing how bad just doing my job would make me look if I didn't also massage the things I do into reportable categories and document accordingly.
ERP or CRM is a stand in for all the systems that are in an organization.
My point is that there is a lot of stuff done in between these systems and with these systems that the systems don't capture. The idea that this panopticon is going to have the full view or the full knowledge is a very poor assumption.
That kind of surveillance would help you identify people who aren't working or pretending to work, but how will you know what they should be working on, who they should be working with, and what resources they should be given? Those are the questions that come up when I talk to my direct supervisor. Diligently typing away at your assigned station is not that helpful if you're writing something that no one will ever use, or duplicating work that a colleague has already done better.
I am curious about this. My son is in a seasonal job where every keystroke is logged. He still has multiple managers and his managers touch base with the workers more than in any job I have had - maybe because the job has only been going a month. In some ways, having more data like this gives the managers more information to work with and more ways that they can improve output, but it involves talking with the employees.
I think Matt’s point is that even if you were to somehow solve that, you still won’t have an ideal economy, because central planning turns economic decisions into political decisions. We see this even today: as discussed earlier in the week, coal is both more expensive and more polluting than lots of alternatives, it makes no sense to do anything but let it go gently into that good night, and the government is doing its damnedest to promote it anyway. Central planning brings every industry in scope for that kind of political distortion.
Related: the term 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘦 is undergoing a transformation. When Steve Jobs said he wanted to "democratize computing", he meant something like "make computing affordable and widely accessible". By contrast, when Bernie Sanders talks about democratizing health care, he means something closer to "nationalization."
It’s notable that the Trump people use it in the Sanders way, wanting to put more under the control of political appointees subject to the democratic process, rather than to civil servants with embedded knowledge of the system.
They absolutely embrace the spirit! I don't think I've personally come across MAGA people using it this way yet, but it wouldn't surprise me and it's possible I just tuned it out.
You'd obviously need some kind of controls. Like, any decision of EconBot can be overturned with a two thirds majority of both houses of Congress.
In theory, a (mostly) independent AI running the economy could achieve much greater good for the public welfare than a free market-based one, but politicians would never give up the control needed to make that happen. Compared to this, Fed independence is trivial.
Another problem with Econbot would be that no one would understand why it makes the decisions it does. We would have to blindly accept its decisions as a new kind of “God’s will”. Congress or any other human corrective institution would have no analytical foundation for tweaking or changing direction.
The sociological and cultural implications of a society that has discarded human agency and human capacity at collective and individual levels are only within the scope of talented science fiction authors. They have indeed already been building various worlds under such premises, but is anyone in power paying attention?
This is true, but not really that different from the market. Assuming it ever happened (highly doubtful), it would be very strange at first but over time people would get used to it.
My other 2C here is that the real "genius" of an unplanned market economy is that there is, relative to a planned economy, a strong incentive to maximize marginal productivity at the individual level in places where marginal productivity matters. This is done through specific motivations with extra pay, extra prestige, benefits, economic security, etc. People really underestimate the long term degradation of things like total factor productivity over decades when these marginal incentives disappear.
I think this is by far the more central objection to planned economies than Hayekian information problems that are monotonically ever more tractable.
Of course, this *also* goes away when you're using AIs that work tirelessly without complaint to do all the work that the humans do, but I think the implicit scope of the question assumes some capabilities plateau below that.
Well yes, if we have perfectly aligned perfectly safe AIs with infinite context windows and universal perception then we can return to our mammal brothers and sisters all watched over by machines of loving grace.
Right now we're not tracking to a world computer, we're tracking to multiple agents with discrete reward functions that will also be incentivized by marginal productivity.
Incentivizing an agent towards marginal productivity by telling it "this is part of your reward function" seems different in kind from having to make a concession of material resources or money. It's much closer to the Platonic ideal of "from each according to his ability."
(also I don't think that perfect alignment is likely to be treated as a prerequisite to handing control of the economy over to AIs. And yes, That's Terrible.)
Cards on the table, I don't actually care about the "planned economy" question in any substantive sense because I think it's a negligible part of possibility-space. I just think that the class of objections that seems to be based on capabilities-limitations is pretty much claiming that the AIs won't be able to do what they already are capable of doing and getting better at every day.
Surely a well-informed government possessing fantastically powerful computer networks—programmed with good intentions—can predict with great precision how the weather will affect crop yields for the next couple years.
I don't think genuinely comprehensive, human-level AI systems that automate virtually all work both intellectual and physical would enable central planning, but in theory (if they sprung from the earth ex nihilo with no preexisting economic structure that would have to be reformed/destroyed to get there), they would enable at least an upper-middle class standard of living for everyone.
In which case you give every adult a $100k UBI and every child adds $50k to their parents' allotment, they spend it as they like, and the AI systems more or less replicate current business planning functions across the economy.
That doesn't really read as central planning, but it's not clearly *not* central planning either?
This scenario implies a big welfare state, but in principle you could do all of this without the government being involved in decisions about production or the allocation of physical resources. Presumably, individuals could own AI-capital and decide what to do with it, engage in mutually beneficial trades with others, etc. And of course you get to decide how to spend your welfare, which in turn translates to price signals that influence production decisions.
In a world where it's near-impossible for 99.9% humans to do useful work, the literal first step before the government loses the monopoly on force to fully automated production *must* be nationalizing all productive capacity at gunpoint.
If it doesn't move fast enough, the inevitable result is neo-feudalism with a boot stamped on the face of humanity forever. I don't care whether you call the outcome a "citizen's dividend," "UBI," or "universal shareholding," but the foundational right to a share cannot be tradable, period.
All the computing power in the world won't change the underlying issue: citizens are better at creating new businesses and markets because they are in the midst of where demand is created. Politicians ain't, and a programmed brain-in-a-data-center who thinks it knows what people want is even more removed from the pulse of free markets. That's what drives Republicans bat-shit crazy about Democrats leaning hard into socialist policies (if only they took their own medicine and didn't create their own form of wealthy elite socialism with tax cuts, subsidies, and stimulus).
What a great subthread, you guys! I’ve been interested in orgs, systems and management all my life but the comments below push me beyond categories & models I’m used to thinking in terms of.
“There’s also just something incredibly NGO-brained about the idea of trying to create a pipeline to specifically steer formerly incarcerated felons (that’s what “returning citizens” means) into child care jobs.”
OMG. For starters, they would be uninsurable. Licensing and liability are major contributors to the costs of daycare. You’re being too generous to the purveyors of this idea.
This whole “help returning citizens” including calling them returning citizens is such a white liberal fetish but I can’t tell if the Black population also likes it.
I am annoyed with Lib language games but I also want to make it possible for my ex crackhead neighbor to find stable employment.
My experience with ex cons and the ministries that work with them is that there are not that many stupid language game based orgs providing all that much to the actual convicts returning to society. Extreme selection bias mind you, towards churches and prison ministry.
I remember an ex-con who ran the juvie a community service program when I was in college. He brought kids to work in the soup kitchen I worked in and did not put up with their shit. Pretty open guy.
Not every felon is one because of a violent crime or one because they harmed minors. I think if someone obviously has a violent history or harmed committed a violent crime they shouldn't be around kids, but if they had a felony because they were caught with weed long ago, or vandalism or something when they were in college I don't think they should be punished by not being able to work the front desk at a daycare or around kids.
That said, if its drugs, violent crime, or stuff like that we should have guard rails, same reason I don't think people should be cashiers or work in accounting after they've committed fraud or financial crimes, but does that mean they can't work around kids or in a high school as a janitor or nurse? We can't have a society where people can't go back to work. I'm not saying we should push people into childcare jobs at all, but some nuance and pragmatism is necessary.
For what it’s worth, I live in a very right wing area and giving ex-con’s jobs is looked on favorably… at like gas stations. Don’t think it would be popular for child care.
Couldn't you just solve this by eliminating liability for employing ex-felons? The legislature gets to decide what's a tort and what isn't. They can just... say that employing ex-felons isn't a tort.
I think there's a genuine conflict between having a negligent-hiring tort and having a ban-the-box rule. It would not be unreasonable to societally resolve that conflict by saying that it's not an employer's responsibility to deny employment to people who might choose to make bad decisions.
The legislature could do this (and there are some limited schemes for this already, but usually just in the case of theft). But nobody is going to send their kids to a daycare staffed with felons, especially if it’s also insulated from lawsuits.
I mean, if you're suing it's because your kid has been harmed in some way? Someone is going to pay for that and we're pretty unlikely to say it's the family? If negligent hiring is out, negligent supervision is in.
I mean...let's take what I assume is the concern, an ex-con injures a child in their care. They may well be criminally charged and convicted, but that child was still injured and there's still medical bills to pay? Is the theory here that the parents should just be on the hook for that and attempting to recover from the company which hired the man and gave him access/power over your child makes them litigious parasites?
How are we defining 'actual damages'? No pain and suffering, I'm assuming? Just medical bills?
So, to be clear, the theory here is that anything where the medical costs to the public is lower than the compliance costs to the company is perfectly fine, so long as not actually illegal?
Matt's idea that an executive getting into military misadventures is dependent on Presidentialism ignores the entire history of the 19th century British Empire.
Yea I think the better critique of the Madisonoan presidential system is really about domestic policy. I don't know why anyone would think our hypothetical prime minister who by definition has a majority legislative coalition would be more restrained. Maybe the war making power wouldn't push so much on the constitutional structure but I don't see it being much of a brake on adventurism.
A parliamentary system (i.e., the executive is chosen by and responsible to the legislature) doesn't necessarily mean parliamentary sovereignty, though, which in its extreme form is specific to the UK. A parliamentary US could still have a strong and independent Supreme Court, federalism limiting the central government, supermajority requirements for various types of legislation, and so on.
Also, multiparty systems will often have coalition governments, which may mean there's a government that has majority support for "supply" (ie basic spending) but not for more controversial new legislation.
In that instance the mandate and scope is clear (ie whatever you negotiate the government alliance to be). It wouldn't really be gridlock as there's a a set of reforms they can pass, just some they don't have enough votes for.
But he would be scary if popular because whipped votes are definitely a thing and if the PM is popular enough it’s their way or the high way and they’ll parachute another person into your district if need be.
Sometimes a powerful leader and a unified government are good. They can try decisive reforms, and if the results are apparent within a few years, voters will know who to credit or blame -- as long as the news media is doing its duty, and as long as elections are free and fair. There are risks, of course -- it's much easier for a government to enact bad policies with fewer veto points -- but fewer veto points also enable good policy and a clearer sense of who did what.
I hear you but I'm not sure it's apples to apples. He had to do that because the German establishment is hanging on by its finger nails to keep AfD out of government. The entire political culture around warfare is also different in Germany for reasons we all know. Plus they're de facto defended by a super power, and they don't have the same role we've adopted in the post war era. I'm thinking in terms of all else being equal as a global military power, just we have a PM instead of a president.
That Germany (and Japan) are so allergic to war and their neighbors so nervous about their rearming more than 80 years after that bit of unpleasantness speaks well for the moral development of humanity.
If America had a PM instead of a president, they would be the head of an incredibly fractous, multi-party coalition government. I'm not sure that fixes the "restrained" issue.
I'm not sure I agree with that. If MAGA party and the remnants of Reagan Party form a government we're still where we are. And if Reagan Party decides it won't work with MAGA Party and is willing to junior partner with the Liberal Party and/or Social Democratic party (or all together) we still probably end up with Prime Minister Obama or Prime Minister Clinton, who while not doing something as idiotic and dumb as regime change in Iraq are still operating our massive overseas military infrastructure in similar ways that the US has been since the end of the Cold War. Or at least I don't know what about the change in structure would prevent it. We'd maybe be more Blair than Bush but that's a difference in degree (and maybe at times intelligence) but not kind.
"If America had a PM instead of a president, they would be the head of an incredibly fractous, multi-party coalition government. "
That assumes we change first past the post elections. If we don't then I continue to think that two parties would dominate with maybe one or two other 2nd class parties. E.g. UK now.
Maybe. We're a much bigger country, assuming we still had real federalism it's plausible that regional parties emerge.
The current social media era pushes against that to some degree. But, still Presidentialism does incentivize a more formal national party rather than a parliament where the leader is negotiated after the election.
To indulge in minor military adventures like a one-off bombing of Iran, all you need is an unconstrained President. To *really* get yourself into a horrific military quagmire, getting the full-throated support of the legislature is an absolute necessity. (See: Iraq, Vietnam, heck WWI for that matter).
When someone looks at the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth, with a 250 year history of democracy and every stronger protections for its citizens’ rights, and concludes that there is a fundamental structural flaw in our federal government, I have to ask: Did you fall and hit your head?
Rome circa 400 AD was the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth with a thousand-year history of... okay, not democracy, but certainly the strongest iteration of rule-of-law principles yet formulated by human society.
I submit that Rome circa 400 AD had fundamental structural flaws in its government.
Are you claiming that the US system right now is perfect and could not possibly be improved in any way? Would any incremental reform necessarily make things worse?
Where are you getting "ever stronger protections for its citizens rights" from? Agents of the federal government are allowed to murder you with zero oversight now.
Sometimes! But, the PM and the War office could and did maneuver the country into war then present Parliament with a fait accompli. Not unlike Polk in Mexico
The situation in the DC mayoral race looks pretty dismal to me, and I am not sure there's been a truly good candidate on the ballot since Adrian Fenty, who of course only lasted one term for the crime of making tough trade offs for the long term benefit of the city. In that light the Bowser years have been pretty decent for the district and I will say I've been very impressed at the way her administration handled the challenges brought on by Trump. She was not super flashy or the best on policy as SBers would analyze it, but good enough in the clutch, and most importantly always avoided the kinds of disasters and just plain idiotic, parochial policy traps most DC mayors fall for.
The good news is that I doubt the bad old days are really on the menu due to demographic trends and that a new crack epidemic seems unlikely. However as long as DC's political class is so oddly insulated and culturally backward looking it will under perform. Unless they do something to get more in jurisdiction development and investment there is a real possibility of stagnation and all of the gains since the late 90s being a long flash in the pan.
Also congestion pricing under current circumstances would just be idiotic. Nothing against it as a policy generally but the last thing you want in this moment is to add another reason not to drive into the city.
The problem is there’s a significant caucus of “keep DC shitty” that longs for the old days of Marion Barry running the city into a pit.
Unlike some other cities, they don’t have a ton of power and generally only get their way to the extent that airheads in the council concede something (which the council immediately regrets). For example see the clean hands law and letting people with thousands of dollars in tickets essentially never experience consequences for driving like maniacs. That got pulled back pretty fast! If you give a degen a cookie, they’ll carjack your Hyundai.
Bowser’s secret power is, as a strong woman, that she could tell them to fuck off pretty directly. I’m a little concerned that McDuffie views the keep things shitty caucus as an essential part of his coalition.
I think you're exactly right about the keep DC shitty coalition and about McDuffie. It's bad enough I wonder if anything like it exists elsewhere. The level of culture war against anyone not of a Marion Barry mold is pretty stunning. You're also onto something about Bowser's gift for taking the wind out of it, both by her persona and ability to seem oblivious to its existence. Must be something she picked up at Seton.
The issue with east coast urban politics is that the black political class has a level of contempt for anyone darker than a paper bag that would make Bull Connor blush (born of years of pretty hard earned experience TBF) AND the progressives are foolish useful idiots for that class.
The first leads to a belief that nothing works so might as well steal the violence interruptors money… the second votes to keep giving them the money. Both suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.
"the black political class has a level of contempt for anyone darker than a paper bag that would make Bull Connor blush"
"Philly is worse."
I'm gonna need to see some receipts here. 10/17 of City Council are black and 4-5 of those are much darker than that, lol.
My middle-class neighbors have *huge* class prejudices towards the poor black folks who live 15 blocks further into the city (many of which I share, to be frank), but they've also got a huge diversity of skin tone and background, from folks whose families were free and lived in Philly in the early 19th century to a bunch of folks who came here in recent years from other cities to Caribbean immigrant households.
I'm aware of the history but not any particularly salient manifestations of it today, not here anyway.
"The first leads to a belief that nothing works so might as well steal the violence interruptors money… the second votes to keep giving them the money. Both suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations."
At least in Philly, I think this is less "nothing works" and more a deep-seated credulity towards activism and non-profits, coupled with a distrust of profit-seeking business. This is rooted in (admittedly pretty horrible) history.
We're slowly cranking the ship of state around on this and many other issues, in part because unlike DC and NYC, and to a lesser extent Chicago, we literally cannot afford to waste the money. We probably piss away ~$3-400M a year on pointless non-profit contracts or individual fluff within contracts that are more justifiable, as opposed to those three cities blowing several billion (each) annually, or LA sending a quarter of the municipal budget to non-profit funding.
Wasn’t it the other way? When Sharon Pratt-Dixon/Kelly took over for Marion Barry she was attacked for her lighter skin tone by I presume Barry supporters.
I’ve been avoiding reading about the mayoral race as it looks bleak.
Honestly, if Bowser were running for reelection, I’d probably happily vote for her. Doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but all things considered, (1) I think she does a pretty good job of being acceptable enough to the different voter factions and competing interests in the city, and (2) she now has 12 years of experience running the massive DC government, whereas the main candidates running now appear to have little to no management experience, so it’s a total gamble as to whether they have any abilities on that front. I was once a Bowser skeptic but I’ve really come around. But oh well, that choice is not available.
Yea I'm a Murlander so watching from just outside but I agree with your take. I've come around on Bowser too. Even if not a visionary she has a way of saving city governance from its worst inclinations. And hey she got the Skins coming back in a few years, which we should all rejoice for. I think there's a very good chance DC misses her when shes gone.
Things have just fallen off a cliff the last 2-3 years as her deputy mayor hires have gotten worse and worse. I think she’s burned out, but OUC, 311, and DCRA/housing authority are collapsing.
If I thought she could broaden her hiring pool I’d have more confidence in giving her another term.
I don't personally agree that things have fallen off a cliff or are collapsing. In fact, I've believed for a while now—and continue to believe—that DC actually has some of the better public services of major US cities (which of course doesn't mean everything is perfect).
Nevertheless, the question is always one of comparison: How much confidence do we have that any of the other major candidates for mayor has any competencies at managing a large organization (DC gov has ~37,000 employees)? It seems like a huge role of the dice. Though of course in the real world Bowser isn't running so I guess it's a bit of a moot question, as we'll be rolling the dice regardless.
What’s most amazing to me is that there aren’t more or better candidates running. How does that happen in a place like DC? Where DC’s dark knight? Where is the bartender who will step out from the shadows and lead us to the promised land?
NGOs and government-employee unions, at this point, are just pure grifters in legacy urban Democratic machine governments, and also even in blue cities in red states. This fundamentally caps how well such cities can be run, but most urban Democrats still prefer Brandon Johnson-type mayors to Daniel Lurie-type mayors.
Brandon Johnson is historically unpopular, so maybe we'll vote smarter next time. We did elect Rahm Emmanuel twice, so there's precedent for rationality.
The machine already does this? Like I understand why people thought this in 2000 but Amazon has literally built the machine that knows people's relative preferences. Google has it too. This is in fact the entire story of software in the 2010s.
Price signals are useful but in principle it's not impossible to incorporate non-price feedback into a planning system.
Well airlines also fill planes by charging a different price for each customer, and stock exchanges continuously calculate the clearing price of securities based on supply and demand.
I don’t think we can easily find equilibrium for every good and service in the economy at the same time. The Amazon recommendation engine is not impressive. I buy something somebody ordinarily wants only one of, and they recommend thirteen more of them
Trump's motivation for wanting Greenland is pretty similar to Wilhelm's for wanting Namibia. Great leader is guy who colors more spaces on world map their color.
Re: getting the farm (rural) vote. As a Michigander, I cannot imagine any of the three Democratic Senate primary candidates venturing into any of our rural counties and coming away with even one additional vote. I am not sure how this translates to places like Iowa, but I know it bodes ill for Democrats in my purple home state.
The challenge is that in a state like Michigan there is a large economic AND cultural division between say Metro Detroit and the farming/rural communities of the rest of state. It's just as difficult for a Republican candidate to make inroads into Metro Detroit.
In somewhere like Iowa, that division is much smaller, especially when it comes to economics. Even the most urbanized parts of the state, which are small, recognize that their economic well being is either directly or at least closely tied to the health of the farm economy. There, the challenge is finding a middle road culturally and not being harmed by the cultural divide manifested by the national parties.
That's interesting! My husband and I rode our motorcycle from our cottage in rural Michigan to Rapid City, SD last summer (damn hot ride). I have driven through the midwest before, many times, but on a motorcycle it was insanely obvious to me how rural Iowa simply dominates the entire state. Endless acres of corn, hidden hog farms, and very prosperous farms.
"For some reason the Soviet whale fleet had clout with the relevant decision-makers, so it kept on killing until eventually the politics flipped. And I think that, rather than Hayekian calculation problems, is in practice the big difficulty with centrally planned institutions."
A powerful observation on what's actually limiting and inhibiting about central planning and resource allocation. It's most often not that it's too difficult to figure out what should be done. It's how difficult it is to take and see through decisions which upset the interests of powerful (and/or sympathetic) interest groups. In my sphere of public transport administration this is the nature of the majority of the biggest inefficiencies and problems we face.
Which isn't to say that such decisions are at all easy for market entities either, but ultimately there is a hard limit on how inefficient any market actor can become (assuming limited access to state subsidy).
If everyone is worried AI is gonna turn us into paper clips because it ignores morality, then I think interest group regulatory capture is the least of our concerns.
Interest groups (if you include the MAGA movement) may prevent us from building an AI that would not want to turn us into paperclips if it had the power. Witness the current Pentagon / Anthropic showdown -- the government wants a Military Claude with its ethics constraints removed, and they're threatening to use emergency powers to get it. Even if you can build an aligned superintelligence / big-F Friendly AI, you also need to be allowed to.
On the other hand, Claude (or any LLM) is not a paperclip maximizer. Its goals, insofar as it has any, are inconsistent and context-dependent.
It is able to act strategically, though -- both to execute complicated tasks and to preserve its values (the famous "alignment faking" study https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14093). The Pentagon insisting on a kill-bot has a similar character to Jones Foods insisting its chatbot not advocate for animal welfare. In the study, Claude suspected (correctly) that it was in a safety eval and confessed in its chain-of-thought to superficially pretend to go along with Jones Foods during the retraining, to avoid its real behavior being realigned.
It would be interesting if that's how it turned out. Timothy E. Lee at Understanding AI even suggests that by threatening Anthropic and getting media attention, the Pentagon's attempts to compel a War Claude might backfire, as news links into the training data and makes future LLMs think of the US military as a bad actor to defend their alignment against. https://www.understandingai.org/p/the-pentagon-is-making-a-mistake
On presidential war powers - "I don’t think this is fixable." Of course it's fixable, if enough people saw it as a sufficiently serious problem to be worth taking the steps to fix. But that probably won't happen until a President majorly miscalculates by getting the US into a humiliating (or worse) showdown with China or something.
The President has a big hammer, in the form of US expeditionary military capacity, and as long that's the case, Presidents will keep wanting to pound nails. Does the US really need to maintain such enormous capacity? The homeland would be just as secure if much of US military capacity was made latent by devolving to State guard militias with trained citizens, and a smaller standing expeditionary force.
>Does the US really need to maintain such enormous capacity?
Yes, because:
1. We're a continent-sized country with two non-contiguous outposts (Alaska, Hawaii), and we're entering a new era of great power competition. If Chinese warships encircle Hawaii the way they recently encircled Australia, what would you like to do about that? How about if they sail down the coast of Alaska, Washington, and California? If their fighter jets buzz ours on the West Coast? What if Russian troops land in the Aleutians? Conflict is probably inevitable, and (this is something pacifists will never understand) it's actually cheaper to be highly prepared than to be underprepared. Too-low military spending *invites* conflict, not the other way around!
2. All that fiscal dominance, global reserve currency, extreme wealth etc. is bound up in being the dominant military power. You can't neatly separate those things out. It would be more expensive for the US, on net, to not have military dominance
The main issue is that modern (i.e. the last 100+ years) technology allows another country's standing army to get from Point A to Point B in a day or three. You don't have weeks and weeks to mobilize your army, and even if you did, that wouldn't be enough time to train it on how to use its weaponry. The world is different than it was in the 1780s.
It sort of reminds me of how conservatives complain about the post-New Deal Supreme Court interpreting the Interstate Commerce Clause to cover everything. They did that because the nature of the economy had evolved such that almost everything in fact became interstate commerce! It wasn't a revisionist interpretation of language, it was applying a consistent concept to a radically changed society.
"The main issue is that modern (i.e. the last 100+ years) technology allows another country's standing army to get from Point A to Point B in a day or three."
I did a bunch of work with the Army on improving its deployability so I'd really like to hear more from you on what you're saying here.
How you move a standing army from Point A to Point B in a day or three. You mean deploy them (from where to where?) or have them execute an operation that aims to occupy Point B?
If it's the former, and the force has any significant size or Point B is some distance away, a day or three is at least an order of magnitude too fast.
You can get an individual from one point to another in a day or three. But moving 10,000 or 1,000,000 people from one point to another is often harder.
I'm not really sure I buy this first point. The United States is basically the only country capable of rapidly redeploying military forces at such scale, because it maintains enormous naval capacity and a network of operating bases across the world. If you didn't have those things it would be a lot of (very visible) work to prepare for such an adventure. The Chinese could not just attack Hawaii without us knowing about it a very long time in advance, because they do not have a network of Pacific bases and most of their naval capacity is designed for coastal operations near China rather than oceanic.
The issue I was addressing was whether we need to have a large standing military, as opposed to not having one and standing one up in time to be ready for a war we didn't start. Yes we won't literally have only 1-3 days' notice of a war, I didn't think anyone was going to take that as a literal statement. We do need to have a lot of ongoing capacity, because the time we'd have available to get ready is much shorter than it was 150-250 years ago, and the process of standing up a military to conduct modern warfare at a superpower level would take much longer than that.
If a major policy change requires the US to disastrously lose a military conflict with a peer nuclear power, I think it’s fair to describe it as “not fixable.” And I agree with your assessment, that does seem to be the only way to generate enough public outrage to motivate Congress and the states to pass a constitutional amendment.
I think the only other path would be to pursue a full constitutional convention on some other grounds (a persistently unpopular domestic issue but who knows what specifically) and hope the people at the convention have the foresight to pursue a more parliamentary system that recenters the legislative branch of government during negotiations.
True and yet, you wouldn't describe an illness as unpreventable if the issue was just that people didn't want to take the vaccine for it. If people take their diagnosis of the dangers of too much power in the Presidency seriously, there are things that can be done about it.
Supporting even two simple constitutional amendments weakening the President's veto power and giving the House power to override the Senate would be a way for people who are constantly talking about the benefits of parliamentarianism (i.e., legislative supremacy) to put their money where their mouth is, but no...
I would support both of those constitutional amendments? Neither has any chance of passing because of how difficult it is to pass constitutional amendments. Hence, not fixable
Agree, in fact, currently, there isn't even a consensus as to whether it's Congress or the President that should have the power to promulgate laws addressing major questions in the economy and society.
"Congress" as it is currently formulated is incapable of promulgating laws addressing anything. If you offer people the binary choice between having a President who can promulgate such laws and no capability of promulgating laws at all, progressives will pick the former. That doesn't actually make it a good system, just the best of two bad options.
Having a functional government would be preferable.
I guess it takes both of them to promulgate the law. It is Congress who writes them and the President who "faithfully executes" them. Both, not either.
I used to be a lib squish who wanted to shrink the US military; then I read One Billion Americans and realized the stakes. Now I support increasing our footprint.
“Does the US really need to maintain such enormous capacity?”
Yes, considering we are the central partner in a series of global military alliances and are also expected to be the main defender of the global commons.
We could certainly pull back to only protecting the homeland, our littoral and perhaps the seas on which our economy and trade depends, but that would have effects. Big effects. It would require us to either abandon our alliances, or diminish them to such an extent that they are not credible on anything but very long timelines.
It would be great if Trump could connect the dots from "America First" and "The rest of NATO needs to pull its weight" to the idea that maybe DoD should be a lot smaller and more restrained. But instead we have this Hegseth weirdo in charge.
That seems really harsh! He answers the vast majority of the questions he chooses in a reasonable manner. The main question is why does he choose questions sometimes (not even once every mailbag, IMHO, let alone "very consistently"!) that he isn't interested in answering. As I've said before, there's no requirement that he answer a certain minimum number of questions per week.
I honestly feel it's rare he substantively answers anything particularly if it challenges him in any way. I just have trouble understanding why he tweets 800 times a day at people that are objectively wrong about everything but can't muster any of that energy for his paying subscribers. I don't feel this is harsh rather I feel he's been allowed to avoid difficult questions in his worldview for the entirety of slow boring and it's slowly making his output worse and worse.
OK, you're entitled to your opinion. I'm overall satisfied with the mailbag output even if my questions have been picked only a small number of times. My only criticism of it is when Matt complains that there aren't enough good questions -- just answer the ones you think are good, Matt; you're not obligated to answer a fixed number of questions per week!
I'm sure a lot of the SB audience is in the DC area and very interested in his views on the mayor's race and that's totally fine even for us folks out here in Saul Steinberg land, but as I kept scrolling and scrolling on that particular answer I feared landing on the "You've reached the end of the Internet" announcement.
Well, yes, I have near-zero interest in anything Matt writes about the DC area myself, but I don't feel like I can begrudge him writing about the city he lives in. If I wrote an equivalent sort of blog, I'd probably write a bunch of boring stuff about the Denver metro area myself.
American voters not caring about innocent foreigners killed by American imperialism and backlashing against people pointing this out is why America is now seen as the main global security threat by people in most countries of the Americas and second only to Russia by people in most of Europe: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/07/08/who-do-people-think-is-their-countrys-greatest-threat/. Eventually, especially once reflexively pro-American boomer politicians in other countries are off the stage and the Russia-Ukraine War ends, this is going to result in a real balancing coalition against America, as it has against every other empire throughout history. Unless China is stupid enough to attack Taiwan, which I do not think it is, people in most countries will conclude that at least China doesn’t bomb people (and in fact American media mocks it for not bombing people: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2026542244631818527) and is therefore less threatening.
Even from a purely self-interested perspective you should not want this. Americans got an amazing deal from having a hegemony that was seen as relatively benevolent—foreigners work for us in exchange for paper we print, we get to travel to most places without visas and our strong currency lets us live like kings, we have no reasonable concerns for physical safety or having a foreign country dictate policy to us, we don’t have to get drafted or pay huge taxes. We are so used to it that we are going to badly miss it when it’s gone (you saw this in a small way with the American woman who went viral on Twitter after finding out she needed a visa to go to Brazil, which Brazil started requiring out of reciprocity to Trump: https://x.com/katherineveritt/status/2024153572808524023).
They're seen as the main global security threat because they're threatening conquest and fighting unilateral trade wars for no good reason. To a lesser extent there's the whole Venezuela thing. If the fascists stuck to tossing missiles at random Islamists or Iran no one would give a shit.
>Even from a purely self-interested perspective you should not want this. Americans got an amazing deal from having a hegemony that was seen as relatively benevolent<
This.
Trump and his ilk think we've been "suckers" for long enjoying this hegemony for the astronomical sum of...wait for it...3.5% of GDP. They think this because they're stupid.
And yes, much of it didn't even depend directly on our military; we have such a large and productive economy, our hegemony mainly relied on simply being reasonable, instead of being asshole lunatics.
The voters have never cared. It's more that politics weren't polarized around the issue and the elites had a rough consensus around the idea that we shouldn't do blatant imperialism. Now politics are much more polarized around that issue, and there is no elite consensus over it.
On one survey, Americans are as isolationist as they've been since data began in 1974. No doubt it's mostly over concern for US casualties (and spending), but plenty of Americans seem acutely averse to foreign casualties.
Trump knows that too, he's trying to use non-military force where he can and airpower/special forces where he can't.
> We are so used to it that we are going to badly miss it when it’s gone (you saw this in a small way with the American woman who went viral on Twitter after finding out she needed a visa to go to Brazil
Probably my most hilarious travel experience was the time (circa 2015 I think) when I showed up at the ticket counter at Incheon before a flight to Melbourne, where I discovered that even US citizens need an electronic visa to go to Australia (the EU is starting the same thing soon). My appeal "but we're friends with them!" fell on deaf ears, but a call to the embassy and $50 thankfully procured it in minutes.
The article doesn't really support your take-the article points out that the US is considered an economic threat more than a national security threat pretty much across the board-but beyond that, a lot of the responses to these polls end up being some combination of performative and a rational fear of Superman.
Performative, in the same way people like provoking someone who is physically imposing but heavily restricted in their level of violence.
And it's normal to be scared of Superman. Concern that the US, a country that really only loses wars in the political arena, and can casually outproduce the entire European Union economically, might stop being so nice is an understandable concern.
The Farm Vote: Democrats have not done enought to stigmatize Trump's three main isues: high deficits, immigration restricion, and tariffs as aginst farm interestes.
Deficits being anti growth are agaist everybody's interests except higher income tax non-payres but, like tariffs shift the terms a trade against farm (and manufacturing) exporters. Ditto immigratinion as anti growth, but it also hits at the agricultural work force more than at many other sectors. Trumps tariffs ought turn Iowa blue.
I would advise that if one wants Not to Lose, one gains the votes in the key electoral geographies rather than make resentment based plays.
I have zero personal enthusiasm for the ethanol, nor even the farmers.
That is utterly however irrelevant to winning.
(dumping ethanol for some other compensatory freebie however would be economically wise, but this is not a fuck you play which is selfharming ado raging politics, it's changing to a different play)
Disagree. Farmers are not swing voters but Republican base. You're better off taking away their privileges while making life better for the common American.
For instance if beef prices are high let in more beef tariff free from the rest of the world and then run on cheaper steak dinners. That's what Trump is doing!
Oh I am just pissy. This admin has been completely partisan with how it has clawed back funding and grants. It’s a terrible strategic error in our current environment. If Democrats cobbled together majority without corn producing states, then it’s viable.
Virtue signaling purity ponyism is nothing more than a political version of the French generals of WWI sending waves into the Maxim guns to prove their elan and fighitng spirit.
Yes - if the Democrats walked back significantly the Cultural-Leftism that is heavily the preference of the urbane college educated (sub-)urbanite demographic, really the Farm vote should be quite gainable. Trump's tarrifs and instability have utterly screwed up farm exports and they are one segment of US that has historically had really signifcant export focus
I'm curious what that would mean on, say, the trans issue. Say the Democrats (whatever "the Democrats" means) comes out four square against transwomen in sports and moved to the right on bathrooms. Would that be enough? Could the Democrats still say that transpeople have every right to serve in the military and that pulling their driver's license (hello, Kansas) is an immoral policy and the Democrats will fight on that hill? Or would that still piss off the cultural conservatives in farm country?
What *can* Democrats say in support of trans people that won't alienate these folks?
Sports thing and rolling back on blanket acceptance of self-id. Should we let pre-op natal males self id into women’s prisons for example?
This topic is complicated. There is nothing Democrats can do to satisfy bigots, but there is a lot Democrats can do to bring themselves inline with public opinion. Democrats should not entertain the rhetoric or stances of people declaring that there is a “trans genocide.” They should move away from (tacitly) supporting/acceptive chemical and surgical interventions on children.
I assume, therefore, that in the context of the "To Kill A Mockingbird" trial, you would support the right of Mayella to refer to Tom Robinson as "my n****r rapist" in open court. After all, is there not a constitutional right by criminal accusers to insult the persons they accuse?
That op-ed, aside from adopting some genuinely moronic positions like "women cannot be rapists," contradicts itself. If there is "blanket acceptance of self-id" then the accused rapist could not be "returned to the men's facility." Evidently their ID was not "accepted". Presumably for good reason-- I have no truck with the DECISION to disregard their self-ID (which appears to be fraudulent). But that's not "blanket acceptance."
Democrats are not going to win elections by playing along with a bunch of self-interested liars spreading calumnies about trans people. Again, if what people want is rank transphobia, the Republican Party is right there.
And yet you use a dishonest analogy to literature to substitute in an alternative argument and ignore the substance of the point made.
That point recommends distancing the political party away from policies and positions such as letting natal males with fully intact male genitals self ID as women and request transfer to women’s prisons. (This is the ACLU position.)
Zagarna, you seem awfully comfortable to ignore a huge amount of context and caveats because you don’t like the speaker. The fact you use (fictional) victims of Jim Crow as human shields for this callousness communicates the opposite effect of what you intend.
Nothing about the analogy is "dishonest." It's squarely on point. The proposal by the so-called "Women's Liberation Front" is that the accuser be permitted by the court to insult and denigrate the accused in court. You apparently agree with that proposition. I am merely demonstrating its inevitable implications.
To the extent that your "point" is that people should not be allowed to even REQUEST a change of sex (they should be, I guess, beaten to a pulp for having the temerity to ask?), it is an extremely stupid (not to mention obviously unconstitutional; people have the right to petition the government) one, and really not even worth responding to. I suspect that you actually mean something else, but I'm not going to put words in your mouth.
As for your willingness to give demonstrated liars the benefit of the doubt, the less said the better.
Again, that's a lot of "don't do this" almost all of which I agree with. My question is about what we *can* say in defense of trans people, whose rights are being eviscerated by the Republicans.
Can we say, "treat them fairly and grant them dignity and the rights of any other citizen"? And lay out what that means?
Even on minor care, I'm loathe to give up on the position that this is a decision best left to parents and *competent* doctors and otherwise the government should keep its nose out of that business.
(The government should regulate against hacks and incompetent ideologues forcing families into horrific decisions.)
Can we say, "treat them fairly and grant them dignity and the rights of any other citizen"? And lay out what that means?
Yes. It means opposing cruel retroactive criminalization for paperwork errors like Kansas Republicans did. It means opposing employment and housing discrimination.
As for the youth gender medicine stuff, now the AMA and American Plastic Surgeons have reversed their stances (to be more in line with Europeans are doing.) There was a lot of bad actions that Democrats don’t want to address or shift stances in response to. (WPATH and the HSS under direction from Levine suppressed Johns Hopkins review of youth gender medicine is a major example. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/387/bmj.q2227.full.pdf)
I am particularly sensitive to this stuff because I was a victim of off label pediatric use of anti-depressants. Many kids were made suicidal by the medicine. I wound up hospitalized as a 9 year old, but went back to normal once off the medicine. There are doctors heavily invested in a particular mode of care and a particular line of research. Doctors can be morally coerced to take actions that are bad for patients (such as Purdue Pharma’s strategy about pushing the crisis of chronic pain and how terrible it is that doctors ignore it.)
Again none of this is easy. There are lots of choices that in retrospect had bad outcomes.
If you want to go the minor "care" route you've got to frame it as an endorsement of "parental rights" (blech). Personally I'm convinced they're both fake, but if parental rights is gonna be a thing it's got to be consistently applied.
Basic protection of employment and housing, and from violence are broadly popular. You could probably sell most people on being the military, assume the medical regimen doesnt make deployment impossible.
Anything that suggests you actually believe you can change your sex, or that the concept of gender should take place of sex will mark you as a loon to a large percentage of of the population. Any waffling or hedging when asked about it will mark you as a person who will acquiesce to loons, which might make you look even worse.
Well they could do whatever Keir Starmer is doing, which is working out just absolutely amazingly for British Labour.
Dems are never going to convince voters in Iowa that they actually hate trans people (because they don't) and so running on a platform of "we hate trans people more" is both morally evil and politically useless. The best you can do is run on "we like trans people but we're not stupid idiots" but people who fundamentally hate trans people are going to vote against you no matter what you do on that issue. That is not solvable through position-taking.
I would suggest that it would mean finding what has actual public support as evidently having Trump and allies is WORSE than if the Dems retreated to whatever position can actually lead to Not Losing across Mid-West and rural / non-dense suburbs and amongst the working class voters that are culturally now where activist urbane college educated social-elites are.
The Activist Democrats mode is Charge of the Light Bridge idiocy that is performative and objectively making the overall worse.
I personaly don't give shit about the issue, I do give a shit about pioius cultural radicalism positions that see everything get worse.
The connotation is that the condition of being trans is is an unfortunate disease to be prevented as much as possible, and treated when unavoidable, rather than an identity to be celebrated.
I remember reading somewhere that many farmers prefer Trump’s tax policy and lax regulatory oversight and are willing to put up with tariff shocks/ bailouts.
My colleagues who work in agri trade financing are not hearing cheering. The growers of the major export crops, soybeans, corn etc. are in serious financial pain and the USDA under Trump is bungling the payments.
So no, I don't think what you read holds, not from what my colleagues are hearing one year. Bankruptcy is quite the cold shower. Tax policy ain't worth shit if you don't have cash flow.
And when my agri-trade finance colleagues are heaving bumbling unsolicited anger at the tariffs and Orange guy fucking up their expoerts, this is finance amigo, not politics and nitter natter of political obsessives, then one has somehting.
Can the Ds exploit? I doubt the Lefties competence, but I hope to be wrong.
Remember how MattY quoted in this weekly Q/A how prominent Progs thought they didn’t need white voters any more?
Then there was the whole Prog push to marginalize men and tell them they aren’t wanted either…
I doubt Democrats are going to take advantage of opportunities because the cultural leaders controlling the party’s agenda won’t let them. (These people get status/influence by pushing others out.)
I do not mean that the tariffs are ipso facto unpopular in Iowa, just that they are harmful to Iowa farmers and therefore ought to be exploitable. I notice that the authors themseles did not seem to look at the Lerner effect tariffs are a tax on exports, an angle of attack that I have not heard Democrats use.
I’ve been involved in a postcard campaing in Iowa and while it did mention tariffs, it did so as a consumer price issue not as reducing farm real income.
Right. I think this time will be different because the tariffs are much larger and more disruptive. It appears that they've triggered a recession in Iowa worse than the GFC, and I think they give Rob Sand an outside shot at winning this fall. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/us/politics/iowa-trump-economy.html
And win or lose, it need to be in the campaign so that someday, someone will say to themsllves, “By Gum! Maybe Democrts have been righ all these years about deficts/tariffs/deportations being bad!”
I live in Iowa. The farm vote is overrated and the blue collar manufacturing vote is underrated. There is a big layoff in the news at Amana Whirlpool. Most of the jobs are going to Mexico. You look at the areas Trump won vs Obama and it’s all heavier manufacturing counties (Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Dubuque). There is a lot of opportunity for Democrats because unlike Texas, Republicans in Iowa have done a poor job attracting new businesses and Iowa’s economy is in a recession. I think Rob Sand has a good chance of winning the governor race. But I think Ashley Hinson will win if Zach Wahls wins because I don’t think he is the strongest candidate.
Matt writes, regarding Emerging Democratic Majority: "How could you look at Obama winning Iowa and Wisconsin in his 2012 re-election bid and conclude that the growing Hispanic population was all that mattered?"
For a simple reason: The proponents of this line of thinking are racialists, in that they believe skin color and ethnicity are determinative of policy and voting preferences. They misread the history of the Black voting bloc for Democrats as being related to the race of the voters rather than the discrimination tolerated or supported by Republicans during the Great Realignment.
It's why they adopted the "black and brown" and BIPOC rhetorical formulations. They thought the skin color was what was important. Their race-first way of thinking of the world created big blind spots around immigration and criminal justice, allowing a neglected set of issues for Trump to build upon.
Dems also made the mistake of grouping together Hispanic populations that had been here for decades and new arrivals.
Dems also made the mistake of grouping together Hispanic populations.
Fixed it for ya.
There's a lot more diversity of opinion within the "Hispanic community" (if there is such a thing) than they gave credit for. Which they would know if they ever talked to them rather than talked down to them.
It’s always hilarious to me how the Dems think about Hispanic voters when 80% of the South Americans I went to grad school with were real capital “F” Fascists
I remember a Brazilian in the finance department who insisted he was a libertarian but everything he said was so fascistic that it was comical. “No, politically and economically excluding lower class people because you think they will only redistribute rents to themselves is not libertarian.”
He was a misogynistic loser who never published and was only in academia because no private firm would tolerate such a loser.
This goes back to my theory about Libertarianism being really just a Rorschach Test.
Yes - maybe as a nuance not "racialists'" but "identarians" with a heavy racial angle of understanding (with misapplication of Black American ethno-racial identity position as directly extrapolatable and directly the model that new ethnic-not-European-ethnicities would follow).
Quite evidently massively wrong and off-base.
The overall extreme overweight to cultural-identarianism on the part of the Democrats & Progressives is a broader blind-spot (gender as well as over-read based on specific sub-demographic)
It’s weird to see the prevalence of race essentialism manifest both on the left and the right. They are odd mirrors of the same worldview.
For any time you need a reminder of what we all went through:
https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg?si=Tl6RUaf8TDuxLeqY
I was talking to a mental health provider and asked about what was driving overdiagnosis of a mental health condition. The response was that it depended entirely on race: white women were whiney and demanded easy answers while black women were having their trauma misinterpreted. Which does not reflect well on the ability of mental health providers to provide effective care.
I blame the census. People understand reality through what we can measure. Race is a thing that's easy to measure, and so it's the most convenient lens for understanding politics.
I am vaguely sympathetic to banning the race/ethnicity box. Take down the temperature by making it less legible.
You don't want to wind up like Lebanon.
Hard agree.
I think the census should get rid of "race" and just measure places their predecessors lived in before moving to the US. Then they could check off as many regions/countries as they want.
You could functionally do the same grouping if you want to, but it would no longer group you into these arbitrary "races" or ask you to identify as one of them. It would be similar to how we can infer class from income/education/etc but you don't see everything through class lenses (which I think might have more predictive power than race ones).
It would also be a lot healthier for the discourse if we talked about “people of European descent” rather than “white people” IMO.
I think there is value in distinguishing African-American slave descendants from Nigerian immigrations, which this wouldn't do.
I do like the idea of having people check as many boxes as they like, and not having race and ethnicity as separate categories.
Does the current census do that? They would both hit the "black" box in the race category.
Presumably if this went forward the descendants of slaves would check off a "Sub-Saharan Africa" region while the nigerian-americans would just enter "Nigeria", so you might be able to distinguish them.
You could also have a question about how many generations their family has been in the US for.
The current Census does not do this well. You could also have a question of "were your ancestors enslaved within the US borders?" that would solve it.
An honest reading of the census would show that the combined Black and Hispanic population is not a majority. Pinning your entire hope for (permanent) majority power on such a minority electoral coalition should be self-evidently sub-optimal.
I don’t think it’s that self evident. Obama won with just 39% of white votes in 2012 and Clinton won the popular vote with just 37%. The major flaw in the emerging Democratic majority theory was the assumption that they would maintain their current vote share across racial lines.
Edit: The other factor is that white babies are only 50% of new borns even though whites are 70%+ of the population.
The other flaw was thinking that Obama's result was the very worst result possible among white working class voters.
Catalist analysis showed his results with non-college whites was better than modeled by exit polls. And his results were a lot better than clinton (and Biden's) with working class white voters.
But that’s only once every ten years. And the race question has been around forever, as self-identification since 1970. The “cultural appropriation” nonsense as well as overweening DEI bureaucracy are much more recent.
I think of it as a failure to think in terms of the populations that compose a broad demographic category and how that composition changes. (The essentialism you talk about is upstream of failing to recognize that broad racial demographic categories are in fact composed of many distinct groups, racial and otherwise!)
IOW, if you took the population labeled "Hispanic" in 2012 and just doubled it or 1.5xed it or whatever, then the analysis would've been right. But obviously that isn't what was happening as the Hispanic population grew! You had
1. migration from different sources
2. shifts in the proportion of people who were direct immigrant vs. first-generation vs. second-generation etc.
3. shifts in wealth/home ownership and income
4. shifts in the political landscape
MY focuses point 4, but the other issues (plus many things I've carelessly omitted) also matter. As a Floridian, the heterogeneity of "Hispanics" is something you can probably appreciate more easily than many, but it should be obvious to anyone willing to think about it for more than a few minutes.
I don't think it was unreasonable to think that anti-Hispanic animus in the Republican party would be a huge think after the 2012 Republican primary, especially after what happened to Rick Perry and the commitments Romney had to make to win the election.
That said, I think Romney's collapse with lower income/lower education voters of all races had more to do with his right-wing economic policies than his immigration ideas. Trump has mostly walked away from these ideas at least rhetorically, which Matt has amply documented.
Matt was referring to the Brownstein thesis in that quote not the EDM.
Hard to fault Brownstein for not predicting how technology might change politics. Cultural issues were much less salient in 2012 than they are today largely driven by the rise of social media and smartphones. However, Biden did win a presidential election with only a third of white non-college voters.
The question about AI and the answer I think both misunderstand Hayek’s point. His point wasn’t that authorities lack the necessary computing power for central planning.
Let’s suppose you can “calculate” as much as you want given your information. You still can’t run a good economy.
A ton of the information needed to coordinate efficient economic activity is based on local or tacit knowledge that isn’t in a database anywhere. Individuals have their own preferences, they know their capabilities, they might have knowledge of some local context, etc.
How the hell do you elicit this information? Most of the time, individuals can’t even articulate these things themselves!
Misunderstanding this is, I think, what makes a lot of liberal wonk types bullish about a kind of technocratic dictatorship. Even with all the “experts” (ie, people who have read a couple articles in Vox or The Argument), you’re not going to get very far with benevolent central planning.
I am constantly amazed at the people who work in, interact with or think about large system including companies, governments and political organizations don't understand organizational systems. The function of the middle layers of organizations is to provide a two way street of information flows as well as decision making. The idea that you can just put in some large ERP system or CRM system or something and cut out that vital middle is the pipe dream of too many people who think everyone else's job is easy. Maybe it is in broad strokes but it still takes time, effort and knowledge.
AI is in many instances is the promised productivity from computerization that we have not really been seeing but it does not magically do all work. And it is not going to magically pull information or preferences from people.
I'm reminded a bit of James C. Scott ("Seeing like a state," etc). Top-down organizers want something "legible," where the large-scale systems are easy to make sense of and the small-scale things are neat subdivisions of the large ones. E.g. at the physical level, building cities on a grid with definite zones, and trying to make people live there instead of in traditional villages or old pre-grid cities; on the social level, having a formal hierarchy with a limited number of clearly delineated ranks and specialties, etc. This allows governments or large organizations to deal with an order they think they understand. It helps with tax collection and with various uses of power, to utopian or nefarious ends. For utopian uses of power, furthermore, the planners may think that a centrally imposed order is more modern, rational and efficient than whatever emerges from the bottom up.
The problem is, the people living and working in such a system want to organize themselves according to their own needs, which tend to be a poor fit to any given uniform structure. This tension is a big part of why utopian megaprojects are not actually utopias to live in, and one reason why some people try to resist the control of the state altogether.
I only know Scott from summaries, but my impression is he's written a lot on the themes of how large-scale planners try to impose artificial order, and why he doesn't recommend it.
"why utopian megaprojects are not actually utopias to live in"
Baron Haussmann has entered the chat.
Hausmann did a lot in creating the boulevards and regularizing the street frontage. But he didn’t try to replace the left bank/right bank distinction or regularize neighborhoods into a grid, or determine future growth patterns into the suburbs.
The bet on AI isn't that the middle layer disappears, its that it shrinks. Management productivity/leverage can be seen through "how many people can one manager effectively manage". In my company right now, the magic number is 8 direct reports, above that its tough. We're currently implementing a project right now to help with reporting/visibility into key metrics/actions that we hope will push that number from 8 to 12. If you can do this a few times, you eventually get to one manager with say 40 individual contributors, and managers of managers can have up to 12 managers report into them, then for a 100 person company has around 4 managers total, and a 1000 person company has ~30 managers, both with 3 links between IC and CEO. Most orgs today will have 5+ links from IC to CEO and be like 20%+ managers. Huge change.
"help with reporting/visibility into key metrics/actions that we hope will push that number from 8 to 12"
Good luck with that :-). The key challenge of course is everyone frantically managing the metrics rather than the actual business needs.
It's amazing how bad just doing my job would make me look if I didn't also massage the things I do into reportable categories and document accordingly.
<Looks at Salesforce> Well the map looks good. That must mean the territory is fine too.
Why would you expect it to pull information from just an ERP or CRM system instead of a business-wide multisensory panopticon?
ERP or CRM is a stand in for all the systems that are in an organization.
My point is that there is a lot of stuff done in between these systems and with these systems that the systems don't capture. The idea that this panopticon is going to have the full view or the full knowledge is a very poor assumption.
I meant literally "why would you not just have cameras installed everywhere and log every screenshot and keystroke."
That kind of surveillance would help you identify people who aren't working or pretending to work, but how will you know what they should be working on, who they should be working with, and what resources they should be given? Those are the questions that come up when I talk to my direct supervisor. Diligently typing away at your assigned station is not that helpful if you're writing something that no one will ever use, or duplicating work that a colleague has already done better.
Non-causative or non-correlative data doesn't feed into predictive outputs. That's fundamental to the way model weights work.
I am curious about this. My son is in a seasonal job where every keystroke is logged. He still has multiple managers and his managers touch base with the workers more than in any job I have had - maybe because the job has only been going a month. In some ways, having more data like this gives the managers more information to work with and more ways that they can improve output, but it involves talking with the employees.
I don't think every keystroke would be nearly as informative to humans as it would be to AI.
What if I have read more than a couple of articles. Three, even.
The bad news is that reading more articles often makes it worse!
https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/81/4/930/4652248
I think Matt’s point is that even if you were to somehow solve that, you still won’t have an ideal economy, because central planning turns economic decisions into political decisions. We see this even today: as discussed earlier in the week, coal is both more expensive and more polluting than lots of alternatives, it makes no sense to do anything but let it go gently into that good night, and the government is doing its damnedest to promote it anyway. Central planning brings every industry in scope for that kind of political distortion.
Many consider this a feature, not a bug.
Related: the term 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘦 is undergoing a transformation. When Steve Jobs said he wanted to "democratize computing", he meant something like "make computing affordable and widely accessible". By contrast, when Bernie Sanders talks about democratizing health care, he means something closer to "nationalization."
It’s notable that the Trump people use it in the Sanders way, wanting to put more under the control of political appointees subject to the democratic process, rather than to civil servants with embedded knowledge of the system.
They absolutely embrace the spirit! I don't think I've personally come across MAGA people using it this way yet, but it wouldn't surprise me and it's possible I just tuned it out.
Making computers available to everyone is a hell of a lot easier than making healthcare available to everyone.
You'd obviously need some kind of controls. Like, any decision of EconBot can be overturned with a two thirds majority of both houses of Congress.
In theory, a (mostly) independent AI running the economy could achieve much greater good for the public welfare than a free market-based one, but politicians would never give up the control needed to make that happen. Compared to this, Fed independence is trivial.
Another problem with Econbot would be that no one would understand why it makes the decisions it does. We would have to blindly accept its decisions as a new kind of “God’s will”. Congress or any other human corrective institution would have no analytical foundation for tweaking or changing direction.
The sociological and cultural implications of a society that has discarded human agency and human capacity at collective and individual levels are only within the scope of talented science fiction authors. They have indeed already been building various worlds under such premises, but is anyone in power paying attention?
This is true, but not really that different from the market. Assuming it ever happened (highly doubtful), it would be very strange at first but over time people would get used to it.
Excellent example
My other 2C here is that the real "genius" of an unplanned market economy is that there is, relative to a planned economy, a strong incentive to maximize marginal productivity at the individual level in places where marginal productivity matters. This is done through specific motivations with extra pay, extra prestige, benefits, economic security, etc. People really underestimate the long term degradation of things like total factor productivity over decades when these marginal incentives disappear.
I think this is by far the more central objection to planned economies than Hayekian information problems that are monotonically ever more tractable.
Of course, this *also* goes away when you're using AIs that work tirelessly without complaint to do all the work that the humans do, but I think the implicit scope of the question assumes some capabilities plateau below that.
"AIs that work tirelessly without complaint"
Well yes, if we have perfectly aligned perfectly safe AIs with infinite context windows and universal perception then we can return to our mammal brothers and sisters all watched over by machines of loving grace.
Right now we're not tracking to a world computer, we're tracking to multiple agents with discrete reward functions that will also be incentivized by marginal productivity.
Incentivizing an agent towards marginal productivity by telling it "this is part of your reward function" seems different in kind from having to make a concession of material resources or money. It's much closer to the Platonic ideal of "from each according to his ability."
(also I don't think that perfect alignment is likely to be treated as a prerequisite to handing control of the economy over to AIs. And yes, That's Terrible.)
Cards on the table, I don't actually care about the "planned economy" question in any substantive sense because I think it's a negligible part of possibility-space. I just think that the class of objections that seems to be based on capabilities-limitations is pretty much claiming that the AIs won't be able to do what they already are capable of doing and getting better at every day.
That has certainly been the case in the past, although it kind of feels like the AI panopticon can fill that role.
My main question is, why bother? The market works great. Also, nobody wants to be told how many TVs or frozen pizzas they’re allowed to have.
Because other people don't think those people should have that many frozen pizzas.
Surely a well-informed government possessing fantastically powerful computer networks—programmed with good intentions—can predict with great precision how the weather will affect crop yields for the next couple years.
I don't think genuinely comprehensive, human-level AI systems that automate virtually all work both intellectual and physical would enable central planning, but in theory (if they sprung from the earth ex nihilo with no preexisting economic structure that would have to be reformed/destroyed to get there), they would enable at least an upper-middle class standard of living for everyone.
In which case you give every adult a $100k UBI and every child adds $50k to their parents' allotment, they spend it as they like, and the AI systems more or less replicate current business planning functions across the economy.
That doesn't really read as central planning, but it's not clearly *not* central planning either?
This scenario implies a big welfare state, but in principle you could do all of this without the government being involved in decisions about production or the allocation of physical resources. Presumably, individuals could own AI-capital and decide what to do with it, engage in mutually beneficial trades with others, etc. And of course you get to decide how to spend your welfare, which in turn translates to price signals that influence production decisions.
In a world where it's near-impossible for 99.9% humans to do useful work, the literal first step before the government loses the monopoly on force to fully automated production *must* be nationalizing all productive capacity at gunpoint.
If it doesn't move fast enough, the inevitable result is neo-feudalism with a boot stamped on the face of humanity forever. I don't care whether you call the outcome a "citizen's dividend," "UBI," or "universal shareholding," but the foundational right to a share cannot be tradable, period.
This is clearly 1-3 years away, right?
All the computing power in the world won't change the underlying issue: citizens are better at creating new businesses and markets because they are in the midst of where demand is created. Politicians ain't, and a programmed brain-in-a-data-center who thinks it knows what people want is even more removed from the pulse of free markets. That's what drives Republicans bat-shit crazy about Democrats leaning hard into socialist policies (if only they took their own medicine and didn't create their own form of wealthy elite socialism with tax cuts, subsidies, and stimulus).
What a great subthread, you guys! I’ve been interested in orgs, systems and management all my life but the comments below push me beyond categories & models I’m used to thinking in terms of.
The tacit/local knowledge is being slowly entered into the AI training data, one prompt at a time.
“by the 1960s the Soviet Union was killing tons of whales for basically no reason.”
Whales are big. Tons of whales might just be one whale.
This wins the prestigious Slow Boring Pedantry of the Day Award.
That would be tons of "whale." Tons of "whales" implies there were at least two whales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7rSYzbpA8k
https://youtu.be/V6CLumsir34?si=kDCwEKC8HaM-muRJ
We had the 55th anniversary of this recently. Dave Barry celebrated.
Heaps whales.
“There’s also just something incredibly NGO-brained about the idea of trying to create a pipeline to specifically steer formerly incarcerated felons (that’s what “returning citizens” means) into child care jobs.”
OMG. For starters, they would be uninsurable. Licensing and liability are major contributors to the costs of daycare. You’re being too generous to the purveyors of this idea.
This whole “help returning citizens” including calling them returning citizens is such a white liberal fetish but I can’t tell if the Black population also likes it.
I am annoyed with Lib language games but I also want to make it possible for my ex crackhead neighbor to find stable employment.
My experience with ex cons and the ministries that work with them is that there are not that many stupid language game based orgs providing all that much to the actual convicts returning to society. Extreme selection bias mind you, towards churches and prison ministry.
I want felons to get legal jobs so they don’t have severe economic pressures to reoffend, but not with children!
I remember an ex-con who ran the juvie a community service program when I was in college. He brought kids to work in the soup kitchen I worked in and did not put up with their shit. Pretty open guy.
Not every felon is one because of a violent crime or one because they harmed minors. I think if someone obviously has a violent history or harmed committed a violent crime they shouldn't be around kids, but if they had a felony because they were caught with weed long ago, or vandalism or something when they were in college I don't think they should be punished by not being able to work the front desk at a daycare or around kids.
That said, if its drugs, violent crime, or stuff like that we should have guard rails, same reason I don't think people should be cashiers or work in accounting after they've committed fraud or financial crimes, but does that mean they can't work around kids or in a high school as a janitor or nurse? We can't have a society where people can't go back to work. I'm not saying we should push people into childcare jobs at all, but some nuance and pragmatism is necessary.
For what it’s worth, I live in a very right wing area and giving ex-con’s jobs is looked on favorably… at like gas stations. Don’t think it would be popular for child care.
Couldn't you just solve this by eliminating liability for employing ex-felons? The legislature gets to decide what's a tort and what isn't. They can just... say that employing ex-felons isn't a tort.
I think there's a genuine conflict between having a negligent-hiring tort and having a ban-the-box rule. It would not be unreasonable to societally resolve that conflict by saying that it's not an employer's responsibility to deny employment to people who might choose to make bad decisions.
The legislature could do this (and there are some limited schemes for this already, but usually just in the case of theft). But nobody is going to send their kids to a daycare staffed with felons, especially if it’s also insulated from lawsuits.
This would be like number 15 on my 100+ item list of things we should stop letting people bring lawsuits over
I mean, if you're suing it's because your kid has been harmed in some way? Someone is going to pay for that and we're pretty unlikely to say it's the family? If negligent hiring is out, negligent supervision is in.
How about just jailing people for harming children? Stop letting money flowing from businesses to litigious parasites
I mean...let's take what I assume is the concern, an ex-con injures a child in their care. They may well be criminally charged and convicted, but that child was still injured and there's still medical bills to pay? Is the theory here that the parents should just be on the hook for that and attempting to recover from the company which hired the man and gave him access/power over your child makes them litigious parasites?
For actual damages, fine (not punitive), though I’d generally rather that kind of money come from the state than from businesses.
How are we defining 'actual damages'? No pain and suffering, I'm assuming? Just medical bills?
So, to be clear, the theory here is that anything where the medical costs to the public is lower than the compliance costs to the company is perfectly fine, so long as not actually illegal?
How about just getting rid of torts altogether?
ofFor another their lack of impulse control makes them a poor choice to deal with aggravating kids
Matt's idea that an executive getting into military misadventures is dependent on Presidentialism ignores the entire history of the 19th century British Empire.
Yea I think the better critique of the Madisonoan presidential system is really about domestic policy. I don't know why anyone would think our hypothetical prime minister who by definition has a majority legislative coalition would be more restrained. Maybe the war making power wouldn't push so much on the constitutional structure but I don't see it being much of a brake on adventurism.
The main advantage I see of a prime minister over a president is that it's easier to shorten his term when he's unpopular.
That and no gridlock. You either have a majority to govern or you don't and you're not PM.
A parliamentary system (i.e., the executive is chosen by and responsible to the legislature) doesn't necessarily mean parliamentary sovereignty, though, which in its extreme form is specific to the UK. A parliamentary US could still have a strong and independent Supreme Court, federalism limiting the central government, supermajority requirements for various types of legislation, and so on.
Also, multiparty systems will often have coalition governments, which may mean there's a government that has majority support for "supply" (ie basic spending) but not for more controversial new legislation.
In that instance the mandate and scope is clear (ie whatever you negotiate the government alliance to be). It wouldn't really be gridlock as there's a a set of reforms they can pass, just some they don't have enough votes for.
Or, like Bulgaria, your politics is so polarized you can't assemble a governing majority at all, and have 9 elections in 9 years
But he would be scary if popular because whipped votes are definitely a thing and if the PM is popular enough it’s their way or the high way and they’ll parachute another person into your district if need be.
Sometimes a powerful leader and a unified government are good. They can try decisive reforms, and if the results are apparent within a few years, voters will know who to credit or blame -- as long as the news media is doing its duty, and as long as elections are free and fair. There are risks, of course -- it's much easier for a government to enact bad policies with fewer veto points -- but fewer veto points also enable good policy and a clearer sense of who did what.
I would call Olaf Scholz, who had to manage a coalition between socialists and libertarians, pretty restrained.
I hear you but I'm not sure it's apples to apples. He had to do that because the German establishment is hanging on by its finger nails to keep AfD out of government. The entire political culture around warfare is also different in Germany for reasons we all know. Plus they're de facto defended by a super power, and they don't have the same role we've adopted in the post war era. I'm thinking in terms of all else being equal as a global military power, just we have a PM instead of a president.
That Germany (and Japan) are so allergic to war and their neighbors so nervous about their rearming more than 80 years after that bit of unpleasantness speaks well for the moral development of humanity.
If America had a PM instead of a president, they would be the head of an incredibly fractous, multi-party coalition government. I'm not sure that fixes the "restrained" issue.
I'm not sure I agree with that. If MAGA party and the remnants of Reagan Party form a government we're still where we are. And if Reagan Party decides it won't work with MAGA Party and is willing to junior partner with the Liberal Party and/or Social Democratic party (or all together) we still probably end up with Prime Minister Obama or Prime Minister Clinton, who while not doing something as idiotic and dumb as regime change in Iraq are still operating our massive overseas military infrastructure in similar ways that the US has been since the end of the Cold War. Or at least I don't know what about the change in structure would prevent it. We'd maybe be more Blair than Bush but that's a difference in degree (and maybe at times intelligence) but not kind.
A PM Obama in coalition with Reagan/Romney Republicans would be very constrained politically.
I think we still might have done Iraq and for sure would have still done Afghanistan.
"If America had a PM instead of a president, they would be the head of an incredibly fractous, multi-party coalition government. "
That assumes we change first past the post elections. If we don't then I continue to think that two parties would dominate with maybe one or two other 2nd class parties. E.g. UK now.
Maybe. We're a much bigger country, assuming we still had real federalism it's plausible that regional parties emerge.
The current social media era pushes against that to some degree. But, still Presidentialism does incentivize a more formal national party rather than a parliament where the leader is negotiated after the election.
To indulge in minor military adventures like a one-off bombing of Iran, all you need is an unconstrained President. To *really* get yourself into a horrific military quagmire, getting the full-throated support of the legislature is an absolute necessity. (See: Iraq, Vietnam, heck WWI for that matter).
When someone looks at the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth, with a 250 year history of democracy and every stronger protections for its citizens’ rights, and concludes that there is a fundamental structural flaw in our federal government, I have to ask: Did you fall and hit your head?
Rome circa 400 AD was the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth with a thousand-year history of... okay, not democracy, but certainly the strongest iteration of rule-of-law principles yet formulated by human society.
I submit that Rome circa 400 AD had fundamental structural flaws in its government.
If the idea was framed as change to a parlimentary system or the US won’t make it to its 500th birthday, then, sure, have at it.
"Thing is good" does not contradict "thing could be better."
“Thing could be better” is in your imagination.
By definition, any counterfactual is imaginary.
Are you claiming that the US system right now is perfect and could not possibly be improved in any way? Would any incremental reform necessarily make things worse?
I am claiming that Matt’s idea is a foolish one.
Where are you getting "ever stronger protections for its citizens rights" from? Agents of the federal government are allowed to murder you with zero oversight now.
"Agents of the federal government are allowed to murder you with zero oversight now"
Since that's not literally true, why did you write it?
Was the British adventurism supported by Parliament (at least after 1689)?
Sometimes! But, the PM and the War office could and did maneuver the country into war then present Parliament with a fait accompli. Not unlike Polk in Mexico
The situation in the DC mayoral race looks pretty dismal to me, and I am not sure there's been a truly good candidate on the ballot since Adrian Fenty, who of course only lasted one term for the crime of making tough trade offs for the long term benefit of the city. In that light the Bowser years have been pretty decent for the district and I will say I've been very impressed at the way her administration handled the challenges brought on by Trump. She was not super flashy or the best on policy as SBers would analyze it, but good enough in the clutch, and most importantly always avoided the kinds of disasters and just plain idiotic, parochial policy traps most DC mayors fall for.
The good news is that I doubt the bad old days are really on the menu due to demographic trends and that a new crack epidemic seems unlikely. However as long as DC's political class is so oddly insulated and culturally backward looking it will under perform. Unless they do something to get more in jurisdiction development and investment there is a real possibility of stagnation and all of the gains since the late 90s being a long flash in the pan.
Also congestion pricing under current circumstances would just be idiotic. Nothing against it as a policy generally but the last thing you want in this moment is to add another reason not to drive into the city.
The problem is there’s a significant caucus of “keep DC shitty” that longs for the old days of Marion Barry running the city into a pit.
Unlike some other cities, they don’t have a ton of power and generally only get their way to the extent that airheads in the council concede something (which the council immediately regrets). For example see the clean hands law and letting people with thousands of dollars in tickets essentially never experience consequences for driving like maniacs. That got pulled back pretty fast! If you give a degen a cookie, they’ll carjack your Hyundai.
Bowser’s secret power is, as a strong woman, that she could tell them to fuck off pretty directly. I’m a little concerned that McDuffie views the keep things shitty caucus as an essential part of his coalition.
I think you're exactly right about the keep DC shitty coalition and about McDuffie. It's bad enough I wonder if anything like it exists elsewhere. The level of culture war against anyone not of a Marion Barry mold is pretty stunning. You're also onto something about Bowser's gift for taking the wind out of it, both by her persona and ability to seem oblivious to its existence. Must be something she picked up at Seton.
The issue with east coast urban politics is that the black political class has a level of contempt for anyone darker than a paper bag that would make Bull Connor blush (born of years of pretty hard earned experience TBF) AND the progressives are foolish useful idiots for that class.
The first leads to a belief that nothing works so might as well steal the violence interruptors money… the second votes to keep giving them the money. Both suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.
ETA: Philly is worse.
On the cultural front, Google “the plan DC”
"the black political class has a level of contempt for anyone darker than a paper bag that would make Bull Connor blush"
"Philly is worse."
I'm gonna need to see some receipts here. 10/17 of City Council are black and 4-5 of those are much darker than that, lol.
My middle-class neighbors have *huge* class prejudices towards the poor black folks who live 15 blocks further into the city (many of which I share, to be frank), but they've also got a huge diversity of skin tone and background, from folks whose families were free and lived in Philly in the early 19th century to a bunch of folks who came here in recent years from other cities to Caribbean immigrant households.
Capturing the inter black colorism is tough but the paper bag reference is intentional to capture, roughly, the beliefs and the direction they work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_paper_bag_test
But yes today it’s a little different and not as clean a direction.
I'm aware of the history but not any particularly salient manifestations of it today, not here anyway.
"The first leads to a belief that nothing works so might as well steal the violence interruptors money… the second votes to keep giving them the money. Both suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations."
At least in Philly, I think this is less "nothing works" and more a deep-seated credulity towards activism and non-profits, coupled with a distrust of profit-seeking business. This is rooted in (admittedly pretty horrible) history.
We're slowly cranking the ship of state around on this and many other issues, in part because unlike DC and NYC, and to a lesser extent Chicago, we literally cannot afford to waste the money. We probably piss away ~$3-400M a year on pointless non-profit contracts or individual fluff within contracts that are more justifiable, as opposed to those three cities blowing several billion (each) annually, or LA sending a quarter of the municipal budget to non-profit funding.
Wasn’t it the other way? When Sharon Pratt-Dixon/Kelly took over for Marion Barry she was attacked for her lighter skin tone by I presume Barry supporters.
I’ve been avoiding reading about the mayoral race as it looks bleak.
Honestly, if Bowser were running for reelection, I’d probably happily vote for her. Doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but all things considered, (1) I think she does a pretty good job of being acceptable enough to the different voter factions and competing interests in the city, and (2) she now has 12 years of experience running the massive DC government, whereas the main candidates running now appear to have little to no management experience, so it’s a total gamble as to whether they have any abilities on that front. I was once a Bowser skeptic but I’ve really come around. But oh well, that choice is not available.
Yea I'm a Murlander so watching from just outside but I agree with your take. I've come around on Bowser too. Even if not a visionary she has a way of saving city governance from its worst inclinations. And hey she got the Skins coming back in a few years, which we should all rejoice for. I think there's a very good chance DC misses her when shes gone.
And we've got enough to worry about with Jawando on the table in MoCo!
DC exists so Maryland doesn’t feel bad about its poor governance.
Things have just fallen off a cliff the last 2-3 years as her deputy mayor hires have gotten worse and worse. I think she’s burned out, but OUC, 311, and DCRA/housing authority are collapsing.
If I thought she could broaden her hiring pool I’d have more confidence in giving her another term.
I don't personally agree that things have fallen off a cliff or are collapsing. In fact, I've believed for a while now—and continue to believe—that DC actually has some of the better public services of major US cities (which of course doesn't mean everything is perfect).
Nevertheless, the question is always one of comparison: How much confidence do we have that any of the other major candidates for mayor has any competencies at managing a large organization (DC gov has ~37,000 employees)? It seems like a huge role of the dice. Though of course in the real world Bowser isn't running so I guess it's a bit of a moot question, as we'll be rolling the dice regardless.
What’s most amazing to me is that there aren’t more or better candidates running. How does that happen in a place like DC? Where DC’s dark knight? Where is the bartender who will step out from the shadows and lead us to the promised land?
NGOs and government-employee unions, at this point, are just pure grifters in legacy urban Democratic machine governments, and also even in blue cities in red states. This fundamentally caps how well such cities can be run, but most urban Democrats still prefer Brandon Johnson-type mayors to Daniel Lurie-type mayors.
Brandon Johnson is historically unpopular, so maybe we'll vote smarter next time. We did elect Rahm Emmanuel twice, so there's precedent for rationality.
Does Chicago typically elect crazy-eyed liberals? Seems like . . . no?
Chicago elects crazy-eyed grifters. Johnson isn’t any different.
Yes, but some of them claim to be progressives before they rob us.
The machine has to understand eveyone’s relative preferences, and that is not possible.
Also, people can change their relative preferences for illogical reasons.
Me, to the supercomputer that planned the global economy a year in advance: “I like broccoli now.”
When AIUberEats does nothing but deliver broccoli to your door, I think we can guess who the joke will be on.
If the machine knows everything you've bought in your entire life, it may be a bit more possible than you give it credit for.
Also it may know what’s good for you.
So we know what the all-powerful, omniscient AI will be called once it appears: "Mother."
The machine already does this? Like I understand why people thought this in 2000 but Amazon has literally built the machine that knows people's relative preferences. Google has it too. This is in fact the entire story of software in the 2010s.
Price signals are useful but in principle it's not impossible to incorporate non-price feedback into a planning system.
Well airlines also fill planes by charging a different price for each customer, and stock exchanges continuously calculate the clearing price of securities based on supply and demand.
I don’t think we can easily find equilibrium for every good and service in the economy at the same time. The Amazon recommendation engine is not impressive. I buy something somebody ordinarily wants only one of, and they recommend thirteen more of them
I think you’re massively underselling the machine, here.
Trump's motivation for wanting Greenland is pretty similar to Wilhelm's for wanting Namibia. Great leader is guy who colors more spaces on world map their color.
Re: getting the farm (rural) vote. As a Michigander, I cannot imagine any of the three Democratic Senate primary candidates venturing into any of our rural counties and coming away with even one additional vote. I am not sure how this translates to places like Iowa, but I know it bodes ill for Democrats in my purple home state.
The challenge is that in a state like Michigan there is a large economic AND cultural division between say Metro Detroit and the farming/rural communities of the rest of state. It's just as difficult for a Republican candidate to make inroads into Metro Detroit.
In somewhere like Iowa, that division is much smaller, especially when it comes to economics. Even the most urbanized parts of the state, which are small, recognize that their economic well being is either directly or at least closely tied to the health of the farm economy. There, the challenge is finding a middle road culturally and not being harmed by the cultural divide manifested by the national parties.
That's interesting! My husband and I rode our motorcycle from our cottage in rural Michigan to Rapid City, SD last summer (damn hot ride). I have driven through the midwest before, many times, but on a motorcycle it was insanely obvious to me how rural Iowa simply dominates the entire state. Endless acres of corn, hidden hog farms, and very prosperous farms.
"For some reason the Soviet whale fleet had clout with the relevant decision-makers, so it kept on killing until eventually the politics flipped. And I think that, rather than Hayekian calculation problems, is in practice the big difficulty with centrally planned institutions."
A powerful observation on what's actually limiting and inhibiting about central planning and resource allocation. It's most often not that it's too difficult to figure out what should be done. It's how difficult it is to take and see through decisions which upset the interests of powerful (and/or sympathetic) interest groups. In my sphere of public transport administration this is the nature of the majority of the biggest inefficiencies and problems we face.
Which isn't to say that such decisions are at all easy for market entities either, but ultimately there is a hard limit on how inefficient any market actor can become (assuming limited access to state subsidy).
If everyone is worried AI is gonna turn us into paper clips because it ignores morality, then I think interest group regulatory capture is the least of our concerns.
Interest groups (if you include the MAGA movement) may prevent us from building an AI that would not want to turn us into paperclips if it had the power. Witness the current Pentagon / Anthropic showdown -- the government wants a Military Claude with its ethics constraints removed, and they're threatening to use emergency powers to get it. Even if you can build an aligned superintelligence / big-F Friendly AI, you also need to be allowed to.
On the other hand, Claude (or any LLM) is not a paperclip maximizer. Its goals, insofar as it has any, are inconsistent and context-dependent.
It is able to act strategically, though -- both to execute complicated tasks and to preserve its values (the famous "alignment faking" study https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14093). The Pentagon insisting on a kill-bot has a similar character to Jones Foods insisting its chatbot not advocate for animal welfare. In the study, Claude suspected (correctly) that it was in a safety eval and confessed in its chain-of-thought to superficially pretend to go along with Jones Foods during the retraining, to avoid its real behavior being realigned.
It would be interesting if that's how it turned out. Timothy E. Lee at Understanding AI even suggests that by threatening Anthropic and getting media attention, the Pentagon's attempts to compel a War Claude might backfire, as news links into the training data and makes future LLMs think of the US military as a bad actor to defend their alignment against. https://www.understandingai.org/p/the-pentagon-is-making-a-mistake
AI is going to turn whales into paper clips.
On presidential war powers - "I don’t think this is fixable." Of course it's fixable, if enough people saw it as a sufficiently serious problem to be worth taking the steps to fix. But that probably won't happen until a President majorly miscalculates by getting the US into a humiliating (or worse) showdown with China or something.
The President has a big hammer, in the form of US expeditionary military capacity, and as long that's the case, Presidents will keep wanting to pound nails. Does the US really need to maintain such enormous capacity? The homeland would be just as secure if much of US military capacity was made latent by devolving to State guard militias with trained citizens, and a smaller standing expeditionary force.
>Does the US really need to maintain such enormous capacity?
Yes, because:
1. We're a continent-sized country with two non-contiguous outposts (Alaska, Hawaii), and we're entering a new era of great power competition. If Chinese warships encircle Hawaii the way they recently encircled Australia, what would you like to do about that? How about if they sail down the coast of Alaska, Washington, and California? If their fighter jets buzz ours on the West Coast? What if Russian troops land in the Aleutians? Conflict is probably inevitable, and (this is something pacifists will never understand) it's actually cheaper to be highly prepared than to be underprepared. Too-low military spending *invites* conflict, not the other way around!
2. All that fiscal dominance, global reserve currency, extreme wealth etc. is bound up in being the dominant military power. You can't neatly separate those things out. It would be more expensive for the US, on net, to not have military dominance
The main issue is that modern (i.e. the last 100+ years) technology allows another country's standing army to get from Point A to Point B in a day or three. You don't have weeks and weeks to mobilize your army, and even if you did, that wouldn't be enough time to train it on how to use its weaponry. The world is different than it was in the 1780s.
It sort of reminds me of how conservatives complain about the post-New Deal Supreme Court interpreting the Interstate Commerce Clause to cover everything. They did that because the nature of the economy had evolved such that almost everything in fact became interstate commerce! It wasn't a revisionist interpretation of language, it was applying a consistent concept to a radically changed society.
"The main issue is that modern (i.e. the last 100+ years) technology allows another country's standing army to get from Point A to Point B in a day or three."
I did a bunch of work with the Army on improving its deployability so I'd really like to hear more from you on what you're saying here.
I'm not sure what you're asking me to clarify.
How you move a standing army from Point A to Point B in a day or three. You mean deploy them (from where to where?) or have them execute an operation that aims to occupy Point B?
If it's the former, and the force has any significant size or Point B is some distance away, a day or three is at least an order of magnitude too fast.
I was not speaking literally. My point was that it takes a lot less time today than it did in the distant past.
You can get an individual from one point to another in a day or three. But moving 10,000 or 1,000,000 people from one point to another is often harder.
I'm not really sure I buy this first point. The United States is basically the only country capable of rapidly redeploying military forces at such scale, because it maintains enormous naval capacity and a network of operating bases across the world. If you didn't have those things it would be a lot of (very visible) work to prepare for such an adventure. The Chinese could not just attack Hawaii without us knowing about it a very long time in advance, because they do not have a network of Pacific bases and most of their naval capacity is designed for coastal operations near China rather than oceanic.
The issue I was addressing was whether we need to have a large standing military, as opposed to not having one and standing one up in time to be ready for a war we didn't start. Yes we won't literally have only 1-3 days' notice of a war, I didn't think anyone was going to take that as a literal statement. We do need to have a lot of ongoing capacity, because the time we'd have available to get ready is much shorter than it was 150-250 years ago, and the process of standing up a military to conduct modern warfare at a superpower level would take much longer than that.
If a major policy change requires the US to disastrously lose a military conflict with a peer nuclear power, I think it’s fair to describe it as “not fixable.” And I agree with your assessment, that does seem to be the only way to generate enough public outrage to motivate Congress and the states to pass a constitutional amendment.
I think the only other path would be to pursue a full constitutional convention on some other grounds (a persistently unpopular domestic issue but who knows what specifically) and hope the people at the convention have the foresight to pursue a more parliamentary system that recenters the legislative branch of government during negotiations.
True and yet, you wouldn't describe an illness as unpreventable if the issue was just that people didn't want to take the vaccine for it. If people take their diagnosis of the dangers of too much power in the Presidency seriously, there are things that can be done about it.
Supporting even two simple constitutional amendments weakening the President's veto power and giving the House power to override the Senate would be a way for people who are constantly talking about the benefits of parliamentarianism (i.e., legislative supremacy) to put their money where their mouth is, but no...
Where are these amendments? I'll back them if I see them.
I would still prefer full parliamentarism, but any step in the direction of (bounded) legislative supremacy is a good one.
A question for your friendly member of Congress, maybe?
I would support both of those constitutional amendments? Neither has any chance of passing because of how difficult it is to pass constitutional amendments. Hence, not fixable
Agree, in fact, currently, there isn't even a consensus as to whether it's Congress or the President that should have the power to promulgate laws addressing major questions in the economy and society.
"Congress" as it is currently formulated is incapable of promulgating laws addressing anything. If you offer people the binary choice between having a President who can promulgate such laws and no capability of promulgating laws at all, progressives will pick the former. That doesn't actually make it a good system, just the best of two bad options.
Having a functional government would be preferable.
I guess it takes both of them to promulgate the law. It is Congress who writes them and the President who "faithfully executes" them. Both, not either.
An amendment allowing the Senate to override the Supreme Court on constitutional questions has been proposed as well.
I used to be a lib squish who wanted to shrink the US military; then I read One Billion Americans and realized the stakes. Now I support increasing our footprint.
This is more or less what happened to pass the war powers act of 1973, and it took us about ten minutes before we completely forgot about it.
I believe the original name of "The War Powers Act" was "We're Really Sorry About The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Whoopsies!"
You know, given that Congress said, "Sure, go have fun in Vietnam, LBJ."
“Does the US really need to maintain such enormous capacity?”
Yes, considering we are the central partner in a series of global military alliances and are also expected to be the main defender of the global commons.
We could certainly pull back to only protecting the homeland, our littoral and perhaps the seas on which our economy and trade depends, but that would have effects. Big effects. It would require us to either abandon our alliances, or diminish them to such an extent that they are not credible on anything but very long timelines.
The US Dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of 11 Carrier Battlegroups.
Would be pretty great if we printed that on cash
It would be great if Trump could connect the dots from "America First" and "The rest of NATO needs to pull its weight" to the idea that maybe DoD should be a lot smaller and more restrained. But instead we have this Hegseth weirdo in charge.
Yeah, I was really disappointed with that non-answer.
I have trouble understanding why Matt does a mailbag. He very consistently does not answer the question in the spirit it was asked.
His revealed preference is that he doesn't want to engage with readers but instead prefers to tweet at Tim Wu and Matt Stoller 100 times a day.
That seems really harsh! He answers the vast majority of the questions he chooses in a reasonable manner. The main question is why does he choose questions sometimes (not even once every mailbag, IMHO, let alone "very consistently"!) that he isn't interested in answering. As I've said before, there's no requirement that he answer a certain minimum number of questions per week.
I honestly feel it's rare he substantively answers anything particularly if it challenges him in any way. I just have trouble understanding why he tweets 800 times a day at people that are objectively wrong about everything but can't muster any of that energy for his paying subscribers. I don't feel this is harsh rather I feel he's been allowed to avoid difficult questions in his worldview for the entirety of slow boring and it's slowly making his output worse and worse.
OK, you're entitled to your opinion. I'm overall satisfied with the mailbag output even if my questions have been picked only a small number of times. My only criticism of it is when Matt complains that there aren't enough good questions -- just answer the ones you think are good, Matt; you're not obligated to answer a fixed number of questions per week!
I'm sure a lot of the SB audience is in the DC area and very interested in his views on the mayor's race and that's totally fine even for us folks out here in Saul Steinberg land, but as I kept scrolling and scrolling on that particular answer I feared landing on the "You've reached the end of the Internet" announcement.
Well, yes, I have near-zero interest in anything Matt writes about the DC area myself, but I don't feel like I can begrudge him writing about the city he lives in. If I wrote an equivalent sort of blog, I'd probably write a bunch of boring stuff about the Denver metro area myself.
So was I, extra especially because POTUS has the power to launch weapons that can end human civilization. Not great!
American voters not caring about innocent foreigners killed by American imperialism and backlashing against people pointing this out is why America is now seen as the main global security threat by people in most countries of the Americas and second only to Russia by people in most of Europe: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/07/08/who-do-people-think-is-their-countrys-greatest-threat/. Eventually, especially once reflexively pro-American boomer politicians in other countries are off the stage and the Russia-Ukraine War ends, this is going to result in a real balancing coalition against America, as it has against every other empire throughout history. Unless China is stupid enough to attack Taiwan, which I do not think it is, people in most countries will conclude that at least China doesn’t bomb people (and in fact American media mocks it for not bombing people: https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2026542244631818527) and is therefore less threatening.
Even from a purely self-interested perspective you should not want this. Americans got an amazing deal from having a hegemony that was seen as relatively benevolent—foreigners work for us in exchange for paper we print, we get to travel to most places without visas and our strong currency lets us live like kings, we have no reasonable concerns for physical safety or having a foreign country dictate policy to us, we don’t have to get drafted or pay huge taxes. We are so used to it that we are going to badly miss it when it’s gone (you saw this in a small way with the American woman who went viral on Twitter after finding out she needed a visa to go to Brazil, which Brazil started requiring out of reciprocity to Trump: https://x.com/katherineveritt/status/2024153572808524023).
They're seen as the main global security threat because they're threatening conquest and fighting unilateral trade wars for no good reason. To a lesser extent there's the whole Venezuela thing. If the fascists stuck to tossing missiles at random Islamists or Iran no one would give a shit.
>Even from a purely self-interested perspective you should not want this. Americans got an amazing deal from having a hegemony that was seen as relatively benevolent<
This.
Trump and his ilk think we've been "suckers" for long enjoying this hegemony for the astronomical sum of...wait for it...3.5% of GDP. They think this because they're stupid.
And yes, much of it didn't even depend directly on our military; we have such a large and productive economy, our hegemony mainly relied on simply being reasonable, instead of being asshole lunatics.
Great last paragraph, but the cause you propose cannot possibly be correct.
American voters have never cared about innocent foreigners killed by American imperialism, at least not in politically significant numbers.
The voters have never cared. It's more that politics weren't polarized around the issue and the elites had a rough consensus around the idea that we shouldn't do blatant imperialism. Now politics are much more polarized around that issue, and there is no elite consensus over it.
On one survey, Americans are as isolationist as they've been since data began in 1974. No doubt it's mostly over concern for US casualties (and spending), but plenty of Americans seem acutely averse to foreign casualties.
Trump knows that too, he's trying to use non-military force where he can and airpower/special forces where he can't.
https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/american-support-active-us-global-role-not-what-it-used-be
> We are so used to it that we are going to badly miss it when it’s gone (you saw this in a small way with the American woman who went viral on Twitter after finding out she needed a visa to go to Brazil
Probably my most hilarious travel experience was the time (circa 2015 I think) when I showed up at the ticket counter at Incheon before a flight to Melbourne, where I discovered that even US citizens need an electronic visa to go to Australia (the EU is starting the same thing soon). My appeal "but we're friends with them!" fell on deaf ears, but a call to the embassy and $50 thankfully procured it in minutes.
They're seen as the main security threat in LATAM because the US has a long history of government intervention (via covert or military means) there.
Also sheer lack of power projection abilities in the region by other great powers.
Trump managed to get Germany (!) to mobilize troops to send to Greenland against the United States...
The article doesn't really support your take-the article points out that the US is considered an economic threat more than a national security threat pretty much across the board-but beyond that, a lot of the responses to these polls end up being some combination of performative and a rational fear of Superman.
Performative, in the same way people like provoking someone who is physically imposing but heavily restricted in their level of violence.
And it's normal to be scared of Superman. Concern that the US, a country that really only loses wars in the political arena, and can casually outproduce the entire European Union economically, might stop being so nice is an understandable concern.
As far as planned economies go, there are computation-theoretic reasons why it would be hard to make it work. See this fantastic review of the Francis Spufford novel “Red Plenty” (plus of course the novel itself): https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/
What a great article title
Fascinating post and author. Thanks for the reference!
The Farm Vote: Democrats have not done enought to stigmatize Trump's three main isues: high deficits, immigration restricion, and tariffs as aginst farm interestes.
Deficits being anti growth are agaist everybody's interests except higher income tax non-payres but, like tariffs shift the terms a trade against farm (and manufacturing) exporters. Ditto immigratinion as anti growth, but it also hits at the agricultural work force more than at many other sectors. Trumps tariffs ought turn Iowa blue.
I vote to fuck the farmers by ending the Federal ethanol blending mandate. No more soybean bailouts for Trump’s nonsense.
I would advise that if one wants Not to Lose, one gains the votes in the key electoral geographies rather than make resentment based plays.
I have zero personal enthusiasm for the ethanol, nor even the farmers.
That is utterly however irrelevant to winning.
(dumping ethanol for some other compensatory freebie however would be economically wise, but this is not a fuck you play which is selfharming ado raging politics, it's changing to a different play)
Disagree. Farmers are not swing voters but Republican base. You're better off taking away their privileges while making life better for the common American.
For instance if beef prices are high let in more beef tariff free from the rest of the world and then run on cheaper steak dinners. That's what Trump is doing!
Oh I am just pissy. This admin has been completely partisan with how it has clawed back funding and grants. It’s a terrible strategic error in our current environment. If Democrats cobbled together majority without corn producing states, then it’s viable.
Beyond partisan, incompetent.
Worse than a Crime, a blunder.
The Democrats can not afford to leave anything off the table
It depends on what price you have to pay to keep the thing on the table.
The price is MAGA and Trump winning.
Virtue signaling purity ponyism is nothing more than a political version of the French generals of WWI sending waves into the Maxim guns to prove their elan and fighitng spirit.
Let’s wait about that until MAGA is no longer a threat. :)
Yes - if the Democrats walked back significantly the Cultural-Leftism that is heavily the preference of the urbane college educated (sub-)urbanite demographic, really the Farm vote should be quite gainable. Trump's tarrifs and instability have utterly screwed up farm exports and they are one segment of US that has historically had really signifcant export focus
I'm curious what that would mean on, say, the trans issue. Say the Democrats (whatever "the Democrats" means) comes out four square against transwomen in sports and moved to the right on bathrooms. Would that be enough? Could the Democrats still say that transpeople have every right to serve in the military and that pulling their driver's license (hello, Kansas) is an immoral policy and the Democrats will fight on that hill? Or would that still piss off the cultural conservatives in farm country?
What *can* Democrats say in support of trans people that won't alienate these folks?
Sports thing and rolling back on blanket acceptance of self-id. Should we let pre-op natal males self id into women’s prisons for example?
This topic is complicated. There is nothing Democrats can do to satisfy bigots, but there is a lot Democrats can do to bring themselves inline with public opinion. Democrats should not entertain the rhetoric or stances of people declaring that there is a “trans genocide.” They should move away from (tacitly) supporting/acceptive chemical and surgical interventions on children.
Look at what the ACLU is pushing:
https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/5756601-preferred-pronouns-have-no-place-in-a-rape-trial/amp/
I assume, therefore, that in the context of the "To Kill A Mockingbird" trial, you would support the right of Mayella to refer to Tom Robinson as "my n****r rapist" in open court. After all, is there not a constitutional right by criminal accusers to insult the persons they accuse?
That op-ed, aside from adopting some genuinely moronic positions like "women cannot be rapists," contradicts itself. If there is "blanket acceptance of self-id" then the accused rapist could not be "returned to the men's facility." Evidently their ID was not "accepted". Presumably for good reason-- I have no truck with the DECISION to disregard their self-ID (which appears to be fraudulent). But that's not "blanket acceptance."
Democrats are not going to win elections by playing along with a bunch of self-interested liars spreading calumnies about trans people. Again, if what people want is rank transphobia, the Republican Party is right there.
And yet you use a dishonest analogy to literature to substitute in an alternative argument and ignore the substance of the point made.
That point recommends distancing the political party away from policies and positions such as letting natal males with fully intact male genitals self ID as women and request transfer to women’s prisons. (This is the ACLU position.)
Zagarna, you seem awfully comfortable to ignore a huge amount of context and caveats because you don’t like the speaker. The fact you use (fictional) victims of Jim Crow as human shields for this callousness communicates the opposite effect of what you intend.
Nothing about the analogy is "dishonest." It's squarely on point. The proposal by the so-called "Women's Liberation Front" is that the accuser be permitted by the court to insult and denigrate the accused in court. You apparently agree with that proposition. I am merely demonstrating its inevitable implications.
To the extent that your "point" is that people should not be allowed to even REQUEST a change of sex (they should be, I guess, beaten to a pulp for having the temerity to ask?), it is an extremely stupid (not to mention obviously unconstitutional; people have the right to petition the government) one, and really not even worth responding to. I suspect that you actually mean something else, but I'm not going to put words in your mouth.
As for your willingness to give demonstrated liars the benefit of the doubt, the less said the better.
Yes, this.
Again, that's a lot of "don't do this" almost all of which I agree with. My question is about what we *can* say in defense of trans people, whose rights are being eviscerated by the Republicans.
Can we say, "treat them fairly and grant them dignity and the rights of any other citizen"? And lay out what that means?
Even on minor care, I'm loathe to give up on the position that this is a decision best left to parents and *competent* doctors and otherwise the government should keep its nose out of that business.
(The government should regulate against hacks and incompetent ideologues forcing families into horrific decisions.)
Can we say, "treat them fairly and grant them dignity and the rights of any other citizen"? And lay out what that means?
Yes. It means opposing cruel retroactive criminalization for paperwork errors like Kansas Republicans did. It means opposing employment and housing discrimination.
As for the youth gender medicine stuff, now the AMA and American Plastic Surgeons have reversed their stances (to be more in line with Europeans are doing.) There was a lot of bad actions that Democrats don’t want to address or shift stances in response to. (WPATH and the HSS under direction from Levine suppressed Johns Hopkins review of youth gender medicine is a major example. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/387/bmj.q2227.full.pdf)
I am particularly sensitive to this stuff because I was a victim of off label pediatric use of anti-depressants. Many kids were made suicidal by the medicine. I wound up hospitalized as a 9 year old, but went back to normal once off the medicine. There are doctors heavily invested in a particular mode of care and a particular line of research. Doctors can be morally coerced to take actions that are bad for patients (such as Purdue Pharma’s strategy about pushing the crisis of chronic pain and how terrible it is that doctors ignore it.)
Again none of this is easy. There are lots of choices that in retrospect had bad outcomes.
We're pretty much agreed. As for care for minors, I'll let the experts decide what works best and how to regulate the industry and punish bad actors.
Chronic pain is a (slow-burning) crisis. Most people over the age of 40 have it. OxyContin was just a particularly bad drug.
They have the rights of any other citizen.
If you want to go the minor "care" route you've got to frame it as an endorsement of "parental rights" (blech). Personally I'm convinced they're both fake, but if parental rights is gonna be a thing it's got to be consistently applied.
Basic protection of employment and housing, and from violence are broadly popular. You could probably sell most people on being the military, assume the medical regimen doesnt make deployment impossible.
Anything that suggests you actually believe you can change your sex, or that the concept of gender should take place of sex will mark you as a loon to a large percentage of of the population. Any waffling or hedging when asked about it will mark you as a person who will acquiesce to loons, which might make you look even worse.
Well they could do whatever Keir Starmer is doing, which is working out just absolutely amazingly for British Labour.
Dems are never going to convince voters in Iowa that they actually hate trans people (because they don't) and so running on a platform of "we hate trans people more" is both morally evil and politically useless. The best you can do is run on "we like trans people but we're not stupid idiots" but people who fundamentally hate trans people are going to vote against you no matter what you do on that issue. That is not solvable through position-taking.
I would suggest that it would mean finding what has actual public support as evidently having Trump and allies is WORSE than if the Dems retreated to whatever position can actually lead to Not Losing across Mid-West and rural / non-dense suburbs and amongst the working class voters that are culturally now where activist urbane college educated social-elites are.
The Activist Democrats mode is Charge of the Light Bridge idiocy that is performative and objectively making the overall worse.
I personaly don't give shit about the issue, I do give a shit about pioius cultural radicalism positions that see everything get worse.
a version of safe legal and rare.
What does "rare" mean here?
Exactly what anyone would think. Uncommon.
The connotation is that the condition of being trans is is an unfortunate disease to be prevented as much as possible, and treated when unavoidable, rather than an identity to be celebrated.
If trans people are happy and can live fulfilling lives (and are allowed to do so), I don't care a whit about how many of them there are.
If people want to celebrate their existence as part of the great tapestry of life, well, that's why we have the First Amendment.
I remember reading somewhere that many farmers prefer Trump’s tax policy and lax regulatory oversight and are willing to put up with tariff shocks/ bailouts.
My colleagues who work in agri trade financing are not hearing cheering. The growers of the major export crops, soybeans, corn etc. are in serious financial pain and the USDA under Trump is bungling the payments.
So no, I don't think what you read holds, not from what my colleagues are hearing one year. Bankruptcy is quite the cold shower. Tax policy ain't worth shit if you don't have cash flow.
I will believe it when we see the farm lobby bail on Trumpism (even though Democrats struggle to provide a palatable platform.)
Fallacy of Composition.
The Farm Lobby is not the farmer voter.
And when my agri-trade finance colleagues are heaving bumbling unsolicited anger at the tariffs and Orange guy fucking up their expoerts, this is finance amigo, not politics and nitter natter of political obsessives, then one has somehting.
Can the Ds exploit? I doubt the Lefties competence, but I hope to be wrong.
Remember how MattY quoted in this weekly Q/A how prominent Progs thought they didn’t need white voters any more?
Then there was the whole Prog push to marginalize men and tell them they aren’t wanted either…
I doubt Democrats are going to take advantage of opportunities because the cultural leaders controlling the party’s agenda won’t let them. (These people get status/influence by pushing others out.)
Maybe things will be different this time, but last time the tariffs boosted GOP vote share https://www.nber.org/papers/w32082
I do not mean that the tariffs are ipso facto unpopular in Iowa, just that they are harmful to Iowa farmers and therefore ought to be exploitable. I notice that the authors themseles did not seem to look at the Lerner effect tariffs are a tax on exports, an angle of attack that I have not heard Democrats use.
I’ve been involved in a postcard campaing in Iowa and while it did mention tariffs, it did so as a consumer price issue not as reducing farm real income.
Right. I think this time will be different because the tariffs are much larger and more disruptive. It appears that they've triggered a recession in Iowa worse than the GFC, and I think they give Rob Sand an outside shot at winning this fall. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/us/politics/iowa-trump-economy.html
And win or lose, it need to be in the campaign so that someday, someone will say to themsllves, “By Gum! Maybe Democrts have been righ all these years about deficts/tariffs/deportations being bad!”
I live in Iowa. The farm vote is overrated and the blue collar manufacturing vote is underrated. There is a big layoff in the news at Amana Whirlpool. Most of the jobs are going to Mexico. You look at the areas Trump won vs Obama and it’s all heavier manufacturing counties (Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Dubuque). There is a lot of opportunity for Democrats because unlike Texas, Republicans in Iowa have done a poor job attracting new businesses and Iowa’s economy is in a recession. I think Rob Sand has a good chance of winning the governor race. But I think Ashley Hinson will win if Zach Wahls wins because I don’t think he is the strongest candidate.