Midsummer mailbag

J.D. Vance takes, why I won't be HUD Secretary, and the bullet that grazed democracy's ear.

Well, what can I say? I’m glad the RNC is in the rearview mirror.

This continues to be an anxiety-provoking and frankly upsetting time in American politics. But I’m very happy to be able to spend some of that time interacting with readers (I’ve enjoyed our chats the last few weeks!), thinking about the occasional goofy question, and otherwise doing the mailbag.

For any newcomers out there, we like to open these Friday columns with a bit of good news. This week, the stock market keeps surging, abortion rights are getting stronger in Pennsylvania, the ban-the-box backfire effect may not be real, recent immigration has increased working class wages in the United States, and new immunotherapy treatments are making progress against brain cancer. And now for your questions.

harty: Admittedly a total softball question but: Conditioned on 1) thinking Trump is likely to win the election 2) the answer being remotely plausible as someone he would actually have picked (i.e., no Larry Hogan), who would you prefer to have seen tapped as nominee for VP, and why?

I talked about this on Politix earlier this week, but it’s a difficult question to answer. If you think about Mike Pence, the best thing about him is that he refused to go along with the attempt to steal the election. And the worst thing about JD Vance is that he signaled clearly that he would have done what Pence refused to do. At the same time, this is table stakes for the Trump VP selection — it’s not like there is some universe in which he was going to pick someone who made a hard break with him after January 6. So, essentially, we’re left hoping that there’s a person of secret integrity who is only pretending to go along with Trump. Is that person Vance? Was it Doug Burgum?

This question is by definition impossible to evaluate based on politicians’ public records, and if someone was going to secretly signal integrity on this point, they wouldn’t signal it to me. What I can say on Vance’s behalf is that people who work in Congress on real legislative stuff say that Vance is smart and that his team does substantive work over and beyond whatever trolling the boss does in the media. Given the constraints, that is, in fact, the kind of person you want to see rising the ranks.

THPacis: So, JD Vance ... Apocalypse now? An opportunity for Dems to recover their standing a bit? Both?

Polytropos: Is JD Vance a good or bad VP pick from an electoral performance standpoint? (This is one of those cases where I can imagine pretty plausible arguments in both directions, and I don’t have good intuitions about it.)

VP selections just don’t matter that much politically, but viewed in pure electoral terms, I think he’s a weak choice. He underperformed in Ohio in 2022, and beyond that, Vance’s maximum appeal is specifically to people who like Trump a lot more than they like a “generic Republican.” That’s the last kind of voter Trump needs to win over. To me, it’s actually very similar on that level to Biden picking Kamala Harris, a candidate whose main appeal was to people who were definitely going to vote for him anyway.

David_in_Chicago: Building on comments in Friday's tread ... would your rather be in the top 1% of income / status (e.g., a doctor but with very high hours worked expectations and low relative pay) in a developing country or more at the median in a developed country but with objectively a better quality of life (e.g., better housing, better life outcomes, access to better education).

There are two different things in play here that are worth considering somewhat separately.

One is absolute versus relative status. The annual mean wage in the United States is a bit over $65,000, and the job that pays closest to that national average is working in adult basic education. Over in El Salvador, the GDP per capita is about $5,000 per year. So a person who earns $50,000 per year is probably a big shot in his community in the way that an adult education teacher in the United States is not, even though the adult ed teacher probably has a higher material living standard. People in practice care about both relative and absolute status, so it’s not totally obvious which person is better off in a subject sense.

A distinct (but related) issue has to do with local cost of living. Precisely because El Salvador is so poor, a member of the “global middle class” who lives in El Salvador gets to live like a rich person in terms of hiring maids, cooks, drivers, nannies, and other service providers. Conversely, though, in many poor countries, you are also dealing with levels of crime and official corruption that people in rich countries don’t have and that it’s challenging to buy your way out of. Living in a place where you’re confident your kids won’t be kidnapped and held for ransom is a lot better than living in a place where you can afford to hire bodyguards for your kids.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it depends on the exact country and the exact parameters. One point to help structure thinking about this is that happiness seems to increase with the log of absolute income, so going from $50k to $100k has a much larger impact than going from $250k to $300k.

Joseph: Fast-forward to January 20, 2025. Trump and Vance have been sworn in. The GOP has control of the Senate and the House. What is the Democratic Party's path back to relevance? How does one form a new Democratic Leadership Council? How does the moderate grassroots demand such? How will they engage with a new DLC? Who will lead it?

What happens next, after we lose?

This is obviously something that I will write about a lot in the future, if it happens. For now, rather than deliver a huge sermon, I want to note that if Republicans win big, there’s going to be a bit of a tension between two different factional scenarios.

Democrats might bounce back in the mid-terms (as they did in 2018) and then choose a relatively moderate nominee in the presidential primary (as they did in 2020), and hopefully that person is younger and more charismatic than Joe Biden and does a better job of staffing his administration. That’s the kind of de minimus comeback strategy, and since I think it’s better to win elections than to lose them, I am all for it.

That said, the larger project that I’m interested in aims to solve a larger problem than, “How do you beat J.D. Vance in 2028?” What I want is for Democrats to be able to mount viable statewide races in places like Ohio, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina and to be able to enact pro-growth governance reforms in places like California, Maryland, and Massachusetts. That requires a broader program of ideological renewal — something closer to the DLC model — which is hard to pull off in the timeframe of a four-year election cycle and might actually be boosted by Democrats breaking hard left in 2028 and losing.

I do not ever believe in rooting to lose, but my provisional thought is that moderates looking to play in the 2028 cycle should be courageously moderate. My sense of both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden is that they were eager to make concessions to the left rather than risk losing to Bernie Sanders, and as a result, gave up too much of Obama-ism. Next time, I’d like to see more willingness to have a frank difference of opinion, even if that means opening the door to a leftist winning the nomination. I should also say that I don’t necessarily think it would be the worst thing in the world if someone like AOC were to find herself trying to run a campaign aimed at appealing to moderates who are skeptical of her, rather than repeating the Clinton/Biden experience of someone with a moderate brand constantly putting out brushfires on the left.

But if you are interested in factional strategizing, I hope I’ll see you at WelcomeFest.

BDawe: Though I would prefer that Biden step aside, do you think that at some point continuing to harp on this topic is analogous to the “but her emails” journalism that you've mocked from 2016? Afterall, the fact that Old Man is Old is not in any literally sense “news,” and it’s objectively not really all that important in the grand scheme of things.

At some point, maybe. But from now until the convention, it’s literally the most important thing.

And I do think this is different from the emails. As soon as Donald Trump became president, absolutely nobody cared about his team’s IT practices — it was a total bullshit issue. Communicating effectively and forcefully with the public is a bona fide job qualification for president of the United States, though. It’s such a job qualification that 10 years ago, I would have told you that it was overrated, that we remember iconic speeches from JFK, Reagan, Obama, but there is so much more to the presidency than that. We saw with Trump during Covid and then again after George Floyd died, though, that the inability to communicate is a real problem. The fact that Trump is also extremely old, that Trump’s own speaking is often garbled, and that Trump has a limited capacity for doing events or putting in the hours absolutely mitigates the problems with Biden from the standpoint of a pairwise Biden-Trump comparison. But it’s all the more reason to field a younger nominee who could dramatically exceed Trump on these fronts.

Jane Kolb: Should there be an age limit on elected officials or judges?

For judges, there should be either term limits or age limits. For elected officials, I have mixed feelings.

City of Trees: Do you have any takes on how to increase physical exercise in the United States?

A side-benefit of better housing policy is that it would generate additional routine physical activity (walking) in the daily lives of a non-trivial minority of the public, but I wouldn’t characterize that as the reason to do it.

This is an area, I think, where progressives’ instinct is to say that people are facing some barrier to exercise and we should address it. But I don’t think it’s a huge mystery why people don’t exercise as much as they should. The nature of the human animal is that we evolved to benefit greatly from routine vigorous physical activity, but also to be lazy and try to avoid doing vigorous physical activity when possible because the conditions of life were such that vigorous physical activity was often necessary for survival. Daniel Lieberman’s book about this is great. The key to thriving in the modern world is to push against that instinct to be lazy, which is challenging but not some gigantic intellectual puzzle.

AA: In light of the Trump attack, should the media cool it with the “end of democracy” rhetoric?

My main thought on the linkage between these two things is that the experience of a sniper taking a shot at Trump actually clarifies the stakes around Trump’s threat to democracy.

There is a way of looking at what happened that is completely accurate — a bullet grazed Trump’s ear and he was basically unharmed — while also completely missing the point. The problem isn’t that the shooter inflicted an extremely minor injury on Trump. The problem is that any time a sniper gets a decent shot at a presidential candidate, there is a reasonable chance he will, in fact, kill or grievously injure him. And this is precisely the point that 1/6 minimizers consistently miss about the whole series of events that have occurred between Election Day and today. Nothing too terrible happened on January 6, but the situation was pregnant with terrible possibilities. And Trump never apologized for it, never faced accountability for it, and now is going to be in a position to both pardon the perpetrators and staff the judicial and executive branches with people who think he did nothing wrong. That situation is also pregnant with disturbing possibilities. It doesn’t mean “the end of democracy” any more than trying to take a sniper shot at Trump’s head means that you’ll kill him.

But it’s not a safe situation and people should feel comfortable saying that clearly and forcefully. It certainly does not mean that trying to murder Trump is a good idea.

Lost Future: What would the world look like if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed? As I understand it they went through a tough decade with lower oil prices, but prices rebounded in the 2000s which might have saved them. Authoritarian Communist countries have had great resilience in a few cases (Cuba, North Korea, I guess however you want to count China). I'd imagine they would've been forced to move to a bit more of a market system/not pure Communism, but maybe in stages and degrees. They had ethnic tensions but nothing a very strong central state couldn't tamp down. China-USSR relations in the 21st century would be particularly interesting!

In retrospect, “the collapse of the Soviet Union” was a whole bundle of different things. At the time, it seemed like Communism was collapsing because Communism is bad and people wanted democracy and market economics. In retrospect, though, we know that Communist Party regimes have managed to stay in power everywhere from Vietnam to Cuba to China and beyond while implementing a range of economic policies. You would have wanted to see some reforms made to improve economic growth, but note that the USSR in 1989 was about as rich as China in 2013.

What’s more, the actual collapse of the Soviet Union was short-term catastrophic for the local economy. So in principle, sticking on Gorbachev-like reforms could have been not just viable but actually better than the effort to make a sudden transition to a market economy. And of course, the “democracy” part of the story ended up getting rolled back relatively quickly. The big thing that genuinely changed is that a bunch of countries got independence from Moscow. Some of that independence has been rolled back into a Russia-dominated sphere of influence, and obviously there’s a war in Ukraine right now over this. But other countries, like the Baltics, have established clear democracy and integration with the West. And if you ask why the USSR collapsed, but not Communist Cuba or Vietnam, the issue seems to be overwhelmingly the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union, not anything about Communism.

Here, to take up a Russian nationalist point of view for a second, it’s interesting to note that Western policymakers have put a lot of weight over the years on the internal political divisions of the Soviet Union.

In the real world, Stalin was obviously running a highly centralized state. There was no particular reason for him to characterize it as a union of 15 separate republics rather than as a big country with a lot of small Oblast-level administrative subdivisions. And if he’d done it that way, then decades later, something like an Estonian independence movement would have been an example of ethnic separatism on a par with Chechnya. In that case, the West treated the violent suppression of independence movements as something worthy of occasional condemnatory statements, but also as a fundamentally internal matter rather than a huge violation of international norms.

Siddhartha Roychowdhury: Do you still think it’s a good idea for Democrats to pass big complicated bills like Obamacare or the Infrastructure? While policy wonks, politicians and the media seem to make a big deal out of it and enjoy the debates and analysis, I’m yet to see normie voters get excited or reward politicians for stuff that they don't understand. Isn;t it better to pivot to smaller, more targeted bills that can be explained to voters? Even a skilled public speaker like Obama could not sell Obamacare to the public at the time it was passed. It’s only after time had passed and the sky didn't fall on everyone’s head like the Republicans had predicted that it became more popular.

I think the whole Biden era has been haunted by the misconception that voters reward politicians for getting big things done. Voters reward politicians for good outcomes, they reward politicians for abstract position-taking they agree with, and they reward politicians for having vibes of moderation and bipartisanship.

Sometimes these things are in tension, but broadly speaking, the voters like politicians who don’t get very much done (Andy Beshear, Larry Hogan) and those whose legislation is bipartisan and sort of obscure (Bill Clinton), as long as basic events in day-to-day life keep going well. The reason to attempt ambitious pieces of legislation is that you believe in the merits of the underlying cause. One reason that I am perennially annoyed with the people puffing up Biden-era legislation as more consequential than the Obama administration is that I think they’ve made relatively poor choices about what’s actually of durable importance. But whether you’re doing large bills or small bills or important bills or trivial bills, any time you do anything, you are probably spending down political capital. The possible exception to this could be if you do something ideologically unexpected, like Clinton signing welfare reform or Trump doing a criminal justice reform bill.

TheElasticStranger: These days it feels like we might be better off without a Supreme Court. How radical of a change would it be for society if the the principle of strong judicial review were suddenly eliminated? If you were charged with designing a better system, what would it look like and what limits would you place on judicial review?

The thing I always tell people about this is that the enormous (and excessive) power wielded by the federal judiciary isn’t really downstream of the formal powers of judicial review, it’s downstream of the clunky and inefficacious operation of the elected branches of government.

When Trump took over from Obama, he made hundreds of significant policy changes across dozens of federal agencies. Not because Congress was churning out two new laws per week, but because the whole operation of the federal government operates on the idea that Congress mostly will not pass laws and policy change will mostly happen through the use of executive branch discretion. Controlling the courts is then very important, because (do not tell a law professor or federal appellate lawyer) judges are biased human beings whose rulings for or against a use of discretion is massively swayed by the presence or absence of personal sympathy for the people running the executive branch and by agreement or disagreement with their policy aims. In a more parliamentary system, the stakes around an adverse court ruling would be lower because you’d just write a new law. Or if the prime minister was trying to do something that he didn’t have majority support in parliament to do, that would be a really striking situation that might lead to a new election. In America, by contrast, we take for granted that the president will try to do things that Congress doesn’t want to do because we not only have separation of powers, we have bicameralism and the filibuster.

lwdlyndale: Any big theories on Peter Thiel, or is he just another rich guy furious at the idea that he has to pay taxes?

I think the best take on Peter Thiel is actually his own 2009 Cato Unbound essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which he proclaims, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

There are basically two roads for bringing classical liberalism into modernity:

• The sound road is to say that a sustainable free market economy needs strong guardrails and a strong social safety net to ensure that prosperity is broadly shared and that people’s concerns can be addressed through a political process. That’s reconciling markets with democracy, and it leads you in the direction of what Europeans call “social liberalism” as opposed to pure “market liberalism.”

• The unsound road is to seek loopholes or alternatives to democracy because democracy does not generate the correct results.

The annoying thing about Thiel is that he’s quite opaque in terms of what he actually does think. Critics often say that he’s written that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. This is not true; what he wrote was that women having the vote is one of the reasons that it’s impossible to enact optimal policy through democratic means. But if you say, “Hey, this guy wants to stop women from voting,” he’ll deny it and you can’t find any passage in the text where he says that. What does he want? It’s hard to say. But it’s not democracy. And the reason it’s hard to say is precisely because Thiel does not believe in democratic persuasion as the optimal approach, so he’s not going to tell us exactly what he thinks — just that he wants people to give up on my preferred approach.

Andrew J: Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, should any or all of them acquire nuclear weapons? Would it increase world security, if one (or all) they had them? Is it more or less likely in a Trump/Vance Presidency that any of them try to get nuclear weapons?

I think it would be a mistake for any of those countries to think of nuclear weapons as a panacea. In other words, if some kind of Ballistic Missile Submarine Fairy gifted Taiwan with a small deterrent fleet, I would worry not just about proliferation, but about complacency. The fact that Israel has a nuclear arsenal does not deter Iran from backing proxy groups or those groups from attacking Israel. Taiwan needs to worry about possible Chinese efforts to blockade the island, harass shipping, close their airspace, and many other things. They need to be significantly increasing defense spending. Should nuclear weapons be part of that? Maybe. But I would really need a lot more information before I was sure that’s a cost-effective way to go.

The thing Taiwan is doing that is genuinely crazy, though, is phasing out nuclear power for electricity, which is leaving them more dependent on LNG imports, which are much easier for China to blockade.

David Abbott: If Trump offered to appoint you HUD Secretary and promised you could pursue housing abundance, would you accept the portfolio?

Narrowly, no. HUD Secretary does not seem like a fun job to me, and I don’t want the pay cut. If I were to hold some kind of public office, I think a local gig would be more fun because it pairs well with first-party content creation.

But I guess maybe the bigger question here, is suppose that Trump decides to turn over a new leaf and offers the HUD job to some kind of well-known progressive YIMBY with a mandate to pursue housing abundance. Should Scott Wiener take that job? Should Jacob Frey? I’m inclined to say yes. I don’t think stigmatizing the decision to work for Trump is a good idea. That said, I’m really skeptical much good on housing will come out of this administration. Trump was president before and the team he had in place had broadly reasonable ideas on the issue, but Trump himself was the guy who pivoted to “save the suburbs.” It’s not hard to find economists with impeccable Republican credentials who believe that land use regulation is economically costly. What’s hard is finding Republican Party politicians who will stand up to anti-city identity politics.