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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Iowans like to think of themselves as farmers but in an age of factory farms people who make a living off their farms are not a particularly large group of people right? And we’re talking about your typical small landed gentry if not a smaller set of multi multi millionaires who got accounting degrees at the local state flagship (I’m thinking of someone I know very specifically). Going for the farm vote sounds like going for doctors or financial service professionals at a minimum, not exactly “guy who walked out of a depression style photograph”
Mainly, the Tax facts. DC runs surpluses. Those surpluses are driven by an increase in the wealthy and decrease in the poor populations. The next mayor should do their damndest to keep that going.
DC is, compared to other cities, disproportionately dependent on income taxes and not really commercial taxes. This surprises some people, but apparently that’s always been true.
Also Matt isn’t nearly hard enough on Bowser and the absolute cratering of city services in her last term, driven by a truly terrible run of hiring in the vice mayor positions. She’s been a good mayor, she only hires friends for roles, and she’s run out of competent friends. She’s also vindictive- not petty- but she holds a grudge for forever and is pretty effective about withholding resources, so McDuffie is right not to cross her.
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.
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.
The Farm Vote: Democrats have not done enought to stigmatize Ttump'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)
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.
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 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.)
Re Democrats positioning, and doing worse vs 2018, it seems to me one has to be disciplined and try to be data driven (quality data) and look at where the Ds have major negatives on trust in polling (vs just jumping on one's own hobby horse that may or may not be explanatory).
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Why would you expect it to pull information from just an ERP or CRM system instead of a business-wide multisensory panopticon?
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
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.”
I think you’re massively underselling the machine, here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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”
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.
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.
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.
Iowans like to think of themselves as farmers but in an age of factory farms people who make a living off their farms are not a particularly large group of people right? And we’re talking about your typical small landed gentry if not a smaller set of multi multi millionaires who got accounting degrees at the local state flagship (I’m thinking of someone I know very specifically). Going for the farm vote sounds like going for doctors or financial service professionals at a minimum, not exactly “guy who walked out of a depression style photograph”
On the DC mayoral election, and the DC economy, Matt and others need to read the CFO reports: https://cfo.dc.gov/page/revenue-reports
Mainly, the Tax facts. DC runs surpluses. Those surpluses are driven by an increase in the wealthy and decrease in the poor populations. The next mayor should do their damndest to keep that going.
DC is, compared to other cities, disproportionately dependent on income taxes and not really commercial taxes. This surprises some people, but apparently that’s always been true.
Also Matt isn’t nearly hard enough on Bowser and the absolute cratering of city services in her last term, driven by a truly terrible run of hiring in the vice mayor positions. She’s been a good mayor, she only hires friends for roles, and she’s run out of competent friends. She’s also vindictive- not petty- but she holds a grudge for forever and is pretty effective about withholding resources, so McDuffie is right not to cross her.
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.
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
Trump managed to get Germany (!) to mobilize troops to send to Greenland against the United States...
The Farm Vote: Democrats have not done enought to stigmatize Ttump'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)
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
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 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.)
“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.
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/
Fascinating post and author. Thanks for the reference!
Re Democrats positioning, and doing worse vs 2018, it seems to me one has to be disciplined and try to be data driven (quality data) and look at where the Ds have major negatives on trust in polling (vs just jumping on one's own hobby horse that may or may not be explanatory).