The only thing I'd add to this terrific column is how, by contrast, untethered the Right generally has become from any "take accountability" of its own. Even by the standards of the 2000s, or certainly of the 90s/80s, today's MAGA-fied Right really has descended further into nihilism, nonsense and inconsistency. So while the educated liberal set (overrepresented in subscribers here) tend to bemoan the excesses of the Left, this is partly simply because absolutely no one expects the Right to meet the same standards, because it sets none for itself. We are having this (healthy) conversation at all. The other guys do not.
This is objectively true, but it also has to do with the fact that bad lefty ideas have a more concrete impact on mine (and I'm guessing a lot of SB subscribers) day-to-day lives than Republican ideas due to affluent liberal clustering in deep blue cities and states.
Obviously this changes if Trump wins a second term, but as of now with Biden as President, the impact of the far right is fairly negligible on my daily life. On the other hand, the insane "progressive" anti-rule of law ethos has made my quality of life as a resident of Washington DC materially much worse.
Similar to Matt's above point about how people care about climate change but more stridently care about low energy prices, I'm concerned about the spectre of Trump 2.0, but the day-to-day impact of bad leftwing policies is a more tangible threat at this moment.
Also helps that if you live in a blue city in a blue state, you are especially insulated from SCOTUS and district court decisions. Like, I truly think the 5th circuit is full of truly genuine lunatics and have rulings that have terrible negative impact on millions of people who live in the south. Those rulings affect me not at all living in NYC (and perhaps more importantly for national discourse, don’t directly effect national reporters who live in NYC).
I’ve remarked many times why I think GOP over-performed most in NYC metro over any other part of the country. One of those reasons is almost certainly that abortion wasn’t on the ballot in NY like it was in many other states. I think I can say in pretty good confidence that NYC didn’t suddenly shift to the right of Kansas when it comes to abortion rights.
Yeah, the GOP overachieved in places where there's no chance an anti-choice extremist or somebody who wanted to overturn the election would be in charge, so it's safe for the small business owner in Queens to vote for the local Republican. Also, the NY Democratic Party is so bad, I kind of understand why so many NY leftists are actually just anti-Democratic Party.
I'm a big believer that GOP basically owes its House majority to 1) New York Post 2) Mayor Adams practically repeating the most absurd GOP talking points 3) national media being based in NYC and overhyping any and all "NYC crime is out of control" story. I've litigated in this past and just want to state again that crime really did increase in NYC like it did everywhere and I did very much notice.
But news coverage being what it is, you'd think NYC had reverted back to 1977 or something. It was absurd how over the top it was with New York Post front and center (you can't walk into a 7/11 without at least seeing NYPost headlines).
All a big run up to a data point that I've brought up multiple times before but bears repeating as it is absolutely fascinating. The one district in PA where GOP overpeformed is this PA district in the NYC media market. And there is pretty decent evidence that exposure to NYC media shifted 2022 voting significantly rightward. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/the-nyc-media-might-have-cost-democrats-the-house.html
Door knocking in Orange County (CA) last year, this is 100% the case. I spoke with MULTIPLE swing voters who scoffed at the pitch that Michelle Steel was anti-choice; I was point blank told that there was zero chance of that affecting their families in California and it was flat out disrespectful of Democrats to push that narrative here. (Obviously there's major flaws in that logic, but that's how folks were voting). She was reelected in a Biden district and Rs turned back the tide in OC after decades of Democratic progress.
Honest question: can you give a few examples of how bad left ideas have had a concrete impact on your life? I am not saying you're wrong; I'm generally curious.
I thought about that for my own life and have trouble coming up with examples. The city (of LA, where I live) is going to convert a parking lot a few doors down from me into a bridge housing for the homeless and that will definitely impact my life (and, crassly, my property value) but it's the #1 issue facing LA, I voted for increased taxes for such housing, and the housing has to go somewhere. I can't say I'm wild about it, but I also can't say this is an example of lefty politics being out of control, despite what my enraged neighbors say.
Carjacking is up roughly 600% in DC, which is likely thanks in large part to the city council banning police pursuits. People focus on our surging murder rate, but for average citizens the real threat is being carjacked, which we're currently on pace to have 1,000+ of this year. Most are committed by juveniles who even when they're caught are not held, and immediately go back to committing more carjackings.
The city judiciary, which are federal judges but come from a list recommended by the city, does not believe in holding people accountable for violent crimes. Two guys had a shootout in the alley behind my house. One guy got no jailtime, the other guy got 12 months. Not years, months. We have small kids, I had to run into their room and double check them to make sure they hadn't taken a stray.
Thanks to the city ending their drug-free anti loitering zones, the area immediately in front of where my kid takes Karate is an open air drug market with both sellers and addicts loitering. I don't know whether its Fentanyl or PCP, but whatever it is, on more than one occasian we've seen partially or fully nude addicts walking or writhing around on the sidewalk. Not great for a nine year old to have to deal with.
Every single person I know in the city who owns a Kia or Hyundai has either had their car stolen, or attempted to be stolen. No accountability for the perpetrators, and again they won't chase them when they're eventually used in robbery sprees. Our middle school where my kids will matriculate had multiple students robbed at gun point by kids in a stolen hyundai recently. Our friends whose kids used to walk to school now get driven.
They decriminalized fare evasion on the train and bus. Consequently, no one pays for the bus anymore. The bus that goes to my kids' school had an 8 year old get shot this year when a fare jumped got into a fight with someone on the bus. We drive the kids instead.
They also allow people with multiple traffic tickets, including reckless driving, renew their licenses out of "equity concerns". Road deaths are at a 10 year high. Walking is extremely hazardous because people blow through stop signs and red lights with zero consequence.
There are other, non-crime ones, but this list hits the issues that really make life less enjoyable here.
Sort of a reminder that if there is a place in America that is most afflicted by bad far left policy; DC might be top of the list. Like I don’t thinks a mistake that DC is one of the few major cities in America where crime has continued to rise. Most places in the country have thankfully seen pretty big crime drops.
Curious if you agree or not but I don’t think it’s an accident that DC has one of the highest rates of WFH in 2023.
Despite the high % of WFH, downtown DC feels busy during the day. My trains downtown are full in the morning, I have to wait in line to get a sandwich at Bub and Pops, happy hours still seem busy. It's when the sun goes down that downtown starts to feel significantly different from pre-COVID.
For whatever it's worth, while DC's lefty electeds have been a major source of the issues, they're not the only source. DC is uniquely disadvantaged by its status as a federal district, with multiple contributing factors. I like to use the metaphor that our crime crisis is akin to when a modern airliner crashes. It's not just one point of failure, there are multiple redundancies that failed that got us here, some under the control of the local government, some not. To wit:
Our version of a local district attorney is an unelected federal prosecutor who has zero accountability to the local government. Turns out his office has declined to prosecute 67% of arrests and 50% of felony arrests over the last few years. This has been a major source of continued crime since even if you're arrested, chances are you won't face jailtime.
Related, in the convictions his office DOES get, they love pleading down even slam dunk cases that minimize or eliminate jail time. Something like 20% of armed robbery subjects arrested are charged and convicted of armed robbery. Often its plead down and they're back at it immediately.
Congressional meddling also plays a part. The city legalized weed possession but Congress explicitly bars its sale by licensed stores. So we have these gray area stores that sell weed that aren't regulated, don't pay taxes, and aren't shut down by the city. Then you get groups of dudes loitering around them selling and smoking weed on the sidewalk which occasionally get robbed at gunpoint for the all-cash sales and all their inventory. A comprehensive failure all around.
DC doesn't have a sheriffs office, so our warrants are enforced by federal US Marshalls who are unaccountable and opaque in their processes to the city. What we do know is that they don't enforce most warrants, probation violations, or people non-compliant with house arrest and/or GPS monitoring. Criminals know it too, and continue to commit crimes while under these restrictions because there will be no follow up or repercussions.
Oh don't have to convince me that DC's unique government is a BIG part of this and has been for decades/generations. My biases probably showing for sure, but so much of this is result of Congress having too much power and GOP having very specific incentives to not solve this bureaucratic nightmare.
The article makes a big point about this whole situation taking 5 hour to resolve and how a number of commuters were angry at how long it all took. Had a friend of mine in college who told me some more of the backstory of why this all occurred the way it did. Apparently what this article is leaving out is that it wasn't just Alexandria and DC police who showed up. It was VA state troopers, Maryland state troopers but probably most confusing at all is the bridge is close enough to various Federal agencies that their own police/security showed up as well. Like a true nightmare "who has jurisdiction" scenario which was apparently a huge part of the reason why this took so long to resolve and a perfect encapsulation of the challenges DC governance faces.
America and Australia are super similar in many regards, but I will never understand how American’s tolerate this kind of crime and lunacy in their cities. It is truly inconceivable to imagine anything near this happening in Aus.
I think that the impact of higher crime rates is generally understated. America has about 9x the intentional homicide rate of Australia, but both countries have about the same number of police officers per capita. American police officers are simply stretched further, so they triage to the most serious crimes and a lot of other stuff is neglected.
Doesn't that raise the question of why there is more crime? I was under the impression US police departments were understaffed after the Summer of Love etc. But if Aus is making do with the same number...
Americans live in the shadow of the moral abomination of slavery the way Germans live in the shadow of the Holocaust. Incarceration for this type of behavior reproduced chattel slavery on an only marginally smaller scale, with something like one in three Black men doing a stint behind bars at some point in his life. Urban liberals once made aware of this weren’t going to keep voting for it to be done in their name.
DC’s crime problems are the result of the DC city council enacting a hiring freeze on police in 2020 when they could enact a “defund” agenda. All those retirements did not get backfilled. Then the crime lab lost accreditation. And then the DC city council wanted to make a bunch of misdemeanor offenses require trials by jury.
I don’t want to go into a whole Covid debate again but the lefty embrace of Covid maximalism had a definite negative impact on aspects of my life. And I second the comments re DC’s car jacking problem.
I have a few…just off the top of my head I had to move out of the county I was in at least partially because taxes had gotten to be the second worst in the nation behind NYC, however the they kicked in at about $125k (250 for a couple), I also had to sell a property I was going to use as a rental to fund my wife’s retirement (it was a small property with two houses at I had a3% mortgage) because a combination of anti eviction policies and rent increase caps made it too risky, I was living in Portland and they completely destroyed the city, turning it from a great place to a complete dumb (the other part of the reason I left) and more recently I had to dial up my side hustle due to inflation. While I think it’s fair to argue who’s fault inflation is overall I am sure Team Transitory slowed the response making it worse.
I don’t think this is just a Democrat issue and Republicans are attacking
our rights in other equally bad ways. That said there is a reason many left leaning but not leftist people are fleeing to more conservative locations. Where I live is adjacent to a moderately liberal (I just call sane) city but you still see bumper stickers reminding us transplants not to vote for the policies that drove us here.
To the extent that bad left ideas increase rent (CEQA making it harder to build housing fits the "good left intent gone too far" description Matt points to), that affects most everyone in a major city. Hence the YIMBY movement.
Education is also a hot topic. CA's new math guidelines discourage tracking and taking Algebra before the 9th grade and deemphasizes AP Calculus in the interest of equity. Which, if you had a kid who's really good at math, is a negative.
If you're taking the DC Metro, you have to actively search out the types of problems seen on the subways in California. There are definitely problems (infrequent service, fare jumpers, service interruptions), but I haven't seen the types of anti-social behavior on the DC Metro post-Covid that I've seen in San Francisco. That's a bit California-specific.
You mean LA Metro? Sure, I take it all the time. Some routes are kinda grotty with some sad cases on them and others are OK. Nothing has stopped me personally from using the trains.
(If you can't get past the paywall, it's by a German transportation expert reporting on how he and various European colleagues were in LA for a week and just used Metro and found to their surprise that it was totally fine.)
This is just myopia. The line from progressive ideas on public safety to our wellbeing is very clear, but its magnitude is much smaller than the huge negative impacts to us of conservative tax cuts for the rich, failure to support child tax credit, impeding infra and green tech funding, etc etc etc
Thought exercise - how would your life change if Trump was president again? I lived in Austin for both Trump and Biden's presidencies. I would say the Trump administration had zero material impact on my life despite my being an Indian-American woman (the assumption being that minorities will suffer under Trump). The progressive city government and council has had a far more material impact (negative, because crime has increased and there are homeless people in an encampment down the street) on my life than the Trump administration had, unless you want to count tax cuts. I ask this because people in my peer group, specifically women, speak in apocalyptic tones about the previous administration and hyperbolically, in my opinion, about the possibility of another. That is not to say I'm denying the possibility that Trump himself would have a sizable negative impact on someone's life, but our daily lives certainly seem more at the whims of our city and state governments than the federal. I suppose if I had qualified for student loan forgiveness or the covid relief checks, Biden may have had a material impact. Otherwise.....negligible.
I'm curious if someone here can point to sizable negative impacts that came directly from the federal government during the Trump administration (not mediated by state or local government).
I suppose it depends on how direct you want to attribute thing to either the federal government or Trump himself, but a couple of examples:
1. My wife and I decided to have another kid. She had several miscarriages in the past. Due to post-Dobbs landscape, we basically considered Republican led states to be no-go zones for her pregnancy in case she miscarried and needed a D&C.
2. As mentioned above, we live in DC, so the post-Floyd riots where Trump sent in the feds to crack skulls had a reverberating effect on the city, all of it negative. In the post-crackdown chaos, people looted our local Walgreens, which shut down for months to fix, briefly re-opened, and then closed permanently. It's a Family Dollar now. How much blame directly you want to assign to Trump may vary, but it sucks nonetheless.
3. January 6th was not the most fun day we've ever had. The city actually set a curfew that day as things got out of hand, so I had to rush home from work in the middle of the afternoon. We didn't have any groceries in the house, so I had to stop and try to buy in case things got worse and we were stuck at home for days. Things receded obviously but there was a lot of anxiety that afternoon because none of us knew how bad things could potentially escalate, and how it would affect us.
4. There's a shitty motel near my house, and its used with some frequency by people visiting the J6 "political prisoners" at the DC Jail. They park their shitbox vans out front with their insane MAGA/Qanon billboards on it, which I have to see frequently when I drive by. Not an existential threat, but still tangibly annoying.
I mean, the reality, is as a middle-class-ish white guy in a blue state, life doesn't actually change that much if Biden or Trump is in charge, but I have friends, family, co-workers, and such, whose lives will be demonstrably worse if Republican's are in charge, and that matters to more more than some annoying homeless people on the bus to work.
But, I'm a terrible left-wing extremist according some in this comment section (despite most of what I do on another message board is talk down people who truly despise the Democrat's).
Was here to say something like this. I’m reading this post and my first thought is “you know there is a whole other political party and movement that’s a factor in what you’re describing here?” I think the flaw in Matt’s piece is he chose a bad example in trying to make the point he was trying to make with offshore wind farms. Another case where talking about “blue state” and “red state” is obscures rather than elucidates. A huge portion of the pushback against coastal wind farms is coming from wealthy centrists or right wingers who have houses on the shore.
I actually think Matt makes a decent point that due to the general shift to the left over the last 25 years, the fringe left is a) is slightly larger than it used to be and b) in particular industries like higher Ed or non-profit world can exert real influence in a way they couldn’t 25 years ago. But I think because this group is one who goes after people like Matt and Josh on Twitter the most this has led both to overemphasize far left excess and over emphasize just how big and powerful this faction of people really is.
This is why I made sure to make a comparison with conspiratorial corners of the right. Progressives have a Q-like propensity to fit the world into their ideological Procrustean bed, which is to say they ignore inconvenient facts and invent convenient ones. They just put it in college-educated language, whereas the Q types say it in the language of the Wal-Mart-shopping plebs that they generally are.
And the fact that Trump is the most prominent politician to talk like he didn't go to college is sufficient to get a lot of people from the appropriate demographic really emotionally on board with him. Turns out that works the other way around too.
Edit to clarify: I used "progressives" when I meant "wokies", the average In This House We Believe sign-putter-upper isn't as nutty as the average Q acolyte.
The most pernicious idea out there is that there is no truth or objective reality. This manifests itself in different ways on the right and left but it's the same factor animating both MAGA conservatism and illiberal leftism (or 'woke' or whatever).
I think the Left and Right extremes are pretty similar. The difference which we must always keep in mind is that the Right extremes have infected the highest reaches of power in the Republican party in a way that is totally not matched with the Democrats.
Also the right extreme has gotten to the point where it's literally willing to dismantle democracy to gain/maintain power. As annoying as the left extreme can be, it isn't there (yet).
Do they actually believe in objective truth, or are “objective truth” just words that they think of as belonging to their team, with no understanding of what it would actually take?
" Progressives have a Q-like propensity to fit the world into their ideological Procrustean bed, which is to say they ignore inconvenient facts and invent convenient ones"
Can you please describe what on the left is as crazy and wildly held as the Q theory on the right? And oh yeah, a theory that is given oxygen by President Biden? This is some Peter Baker level "both siderism" here.
First off, there's nothing about my comment that implies both-sidesism about Biden and Trump.
Second: climate doomerism, gender blank-slateism, Trumputin as already stated, and a lot of denial of basic facts of economics up to and including how supply and demand works. (Go ask a representative sample of progressives if they support making it harder to build luxury apartments in order to make housing cheaper!)
If you have polling indicating 51% or more Democrats believe there is no gender, by all means share. In the meantime, to get into another nutso conspiracy theory. Check out how many Republicans believe Trump won 2020 election
I'm not sure what you mean by "yada yada past Trump," but I'm not trying to deny that he has a dangerous coterie of unconditional and deluded followers. I'm also not going to engage in a poll-slinging contest, which has only slightly more epistemological value than a literal dick-measuring contest. (Statistical points require statistical reasoning, which, robustly tackled, takes more time than either of us probably have for this comment section.)
My actual both-sides point is that, well, both sides have a politically significant group of people who have motivatedly-reasoned themselves into a worldview that is divorced from reality. It's not that they're symmetric: the D version (true believers in wokeism, which believe it or not do exist) has lots of power in education, unelected governmental positions, legacy media and HR. The R version (Q idiots and company) has a lot of the GOP by the balls because they all go vote in primaries and hold their politicians to ridiculous purity tests, and also once put on an effectively aimless but frightening and bad-precedent-setting display of simian behavior at the US Capitol.
Both are dangerous in their own ways, and discussing who is worse in aggregate usually devolves into partisan mudslinging. Also see my edit above.
Chait and Maddow getting over their skis with the "Russia stuff" is not the same as saying there is nothing there in regards to Trump and Russia. As always with this stuff, please read David Farenthold's reporting
Please point to the time President Biden has given oxygen to this theory. You can't yada yada yada past Trump; he's the former President, clear front runner and has an iron grip on majority of GOP electorate.
Colin, my man, people here say all manner of things about the political right and sometimes they make my ears burn. Sometimes they make me want to defend my honor, and sometimes that impulse is correct and sometimes it's not. Sometimes they're absolutely spot on and I chime in and say so.
But as to claims about what's happening on the political right, whether something worse is happening on the political left is as a general matter neither here nor there. If somebody says conservatives have a woke-like propensity to pre-divide the world into favored and disfavored groups and interpret particular disputes accordingly before learning the facts, then that's either true or it's not. That the woke-like propensity may be somewhat stronger among the woke themselves is (a) irrelevant and (b) frankly unsurprising.
I say this simply because "you're missing the fact that it's so much worse on the other side" seems to be a really strong part of your brand. And I just find it to be a total argumentative dead end.
I don’t hate Trump because he talks like he never went to college; I hate him because he freaking tried to overturn an election and steal our democracy.
I'm talking about why a lot of plebby people are bizarrely loyal to his person even though he's obviously a crook and a scoundrel who couldn't give a shit for the common man. There are all sorts of rational reasons to dislike the guy, which is why most people do. (He wouldn't have a hope of winning anything without the fact that a lot of people who are in fact put off by his behavior vote for him anyway.)
Agreed, Colin. The Indian Point plant closing seemed to be representing something else. If experts are saying that New York could achieve its decarbonization goals even with its closing and they turn out to be wrong, that's very different from blindly ideological leftists forcing through stupid policies.
The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that for the former, their crazies are like a malignant tumor in one of their appendages and that removing it would be painful but not fatal, whereas the extremists/crazies on the Republican side are like a metastatic set of tumors invading all the vital organs. When the extremist Left features a President and a Speaker the equivalent of Trump and Johnson, then I'll know that the Democratic party is lost.
This has sort of been my take as well. But I'd say it more like the Far Left is trying to emulate the success of the Tea Party (and later the Alt-Right) of dragging the discourse farther in their direction.
I think one of the interesting differences that they don't recognize is that Leftist movements (speaking very generally) represent coalitions of groups who are left behind in the current system. Whereas Rightist movements represent the status quo. A Tea Party-like movement on the Right can successfully dig their feet in and win elections with their viewpoints because at the end of the day their base will go out and vote no matter what to stop what they view as dangerous change to their way of life. On the other hand, an extremist group on the Left is doomed to failure, as the coalition will never completely agree on what actually constitutes positive change. The more extreme the Left gets, the more people will leave (or be pushed) out of the tent.
In some ways, this is a built-in safety mechanism on the Left. Just look at who wins the Democratic Presidential Primary to see this in action.
What many on the Far Left are ignoring is that the pool of people who identify as conservative is 50% larger than the pool of people that identify as liberal/progressive--the Right starts out with a giant head start. As a result of this imbalance, Republicans just have to win around 1/3 of self-identified moderates to be competitive--Democrats need to win self-identified moderates in a double-digit landslide to be competitive. This fundamental imbalance in basic political self-identification is why the Tea Party or now MAGA can be much more powerful within the Republican Party than the Progressive Caucus--the Republican Party simply needs fewer moderate voters as it is more monolithically conservative than the Democrats are liberal, and so unsurprisingly the Republicans select fewer moderate candidates to represent themselves. Whereas the Dems need a lot of moderate politicians to win in order to get a majority--much to the consternation of leftists that view said moderates as "corporatist sellouts" or whatever.
Using NY State's energy fuckup as framing tells me this is more in the vein of needing to make Blue America Great Again, which has been a theme in the past. Blue states need to be growing and prosperous as a precondition for keeping the US on track, and right now they're more often falling prey to the fuckups described here (shutting down nuclear, COVID school closers, bad permitting laws that prevent new housing and energy transmission, etc). Red states are just growing faster than Blue states on balance and are not fucking up in the same way. I think they are about to - the dismantling of their higher Ed systems is a strong indicator of that. But still. Blue states can be doing a lot more .
I've been thinking about how this mirrors the Israel/Palestinian conflict. In a certain way, it's better to totally give up any pretense of following rules, norms and reasonableness, it becomes baked in and the focus moves to your opponent who should "know better."
I have heard I think dinesh D’Souza rail against the institutional capture the left has achieved in Hollywood and educational institutions. A lot of denial on that side of the most damaging form of institutional capture an extreme political movement can achieve which is capturing the dominant political party on their side. The right has done this the left is electing moderate presidents.
Dave Graeber wrote a semi famous book called dawn of humanity which I read. It was ok a bit too peppered with political commentary but I liked the word he used a lot: schismognesis. This idea of defining oneself to differentiate against someone or something else. Siblings do this a lot but he was referring to societies and groups. I really think the far left and far right are drifting further in each direction bc they define themselves as the total opposite of what the other guy is. I’m not sure how prevalent this is since I am just way more exposed to the worst and most extreme ideas in either direction than almost anyone in history has ever been before.
I agree. I have always identified as a liberal and progressive. I am a big fan of scandi style democratic socialism. I am a Quaker and, thus, a pacifist and have worked and volunteers in the areas of LGBTQ rights and social equity since I was young in part because I am the third generation in my family to do so and it is an inherent part of my identity. But I am definitely seen my tribe take some seemingly irrational stances in the last 8 years and in ways it does seem like the motivation is to define themselves in opposition to Trump by holding the mirror opposite views of this supporters. I can emotionally sympathize. I can see the deep emotional appeal in looking at the guys hold tiki torches in Charlottesville and thinking "Yep, whatever that guy thinks I am going to think the exact opposite." But the danger there is the the more extreme and whacky that guys goes the more danger there is that the mirror opposite is going also be a bit deranged especially if that guys isn't particularly committed to being morally or ideologically consistent. The fact that Trump people thought "masks give you Covid and Covid isn't a big deal anyway because you can just take horse dewormer and you will be fine" is batshit but that doesn't mean that reversing it to say "We should mask up forever and bans on all imperson events or school closures should be open ended even if the local population is almost 100% vaccinated because Covid is still out there" isn't also nuts. But masks are still mostly required in all Quaker Meetings and most are still hybrid because many folks still won't to in person gatherings despite the fact that those communities are all vaccinated. Even more preversly, the fact that the guys with the tiki torch can comfortably hold the view that "jews shall not replace us" as domestic national policy and also "Israel needs to hold the entirely of the holy lands so we can trigger the rapture and so we need to give them our unwavering military support and encourage their illegal settlements in the West Bank" doesn't mean that you can just do the opposite and try to be both non-anti-semitic and a Hamas supporter when Hamas's goal is ethnically cleansing Israel/Palastine. The enemy of my enemy is my friend has always been a bad policy to blindly follow. I actually disagree with Matt here. I don't think the Left has gotten more nuts on the edges because Liberal policy has gotten more successful. I think the edges have gotten more dangerously extreme and grown in size because there are so many people wanting to define themselves as the opposite of Right that has full on lost their minds. For many of us progressives who actually did the work to get progressive social and legislative victories, we have always been annoyed at the guy from the International Socialist group who wants to join the coalition and participate in the protest but also thinks that success is hopeless and ultimately counterproductive in bringing the revolution and also he is going to bring his own totally off-topic sign and try to get in every media photo. The fact that there are more of them and they have gotten harder to ignore or are sucking more airspace from folks trying to actually achieve some progressive solutions is a problem. I am still a lot less worried that the students at UC Berkley are going actually end democracy than the rioters on January 6th. And those rioters at January 6th did really did move the goal post on what protest might look like i a way that isn't good for anyone.
I have no idea where to place you on simple one or two dimensional charts. You are just Just some guy, with the singularly unique Just some guy ideology. I like it even when we disagree, and there's a higher proportion of those type of people here than anywhere else I've found.
I was always opposed to traditional conservatism but you rightly say, jsg, that it stood for something and may have even been right at times!
Today's Republicans and "conservatives"? I'm not seeing it. It's mostly just punching down, vitriol and vengeance.
But it boils down to one simple thing. Rick Perlstein, if you're listening and want a title for your no doubt upcoming book on how Trump and the crazies remade the Republican party, I have the title for that book: "The Triumph of the Id."
It’s interesting to see. My mom is quite conservative both temperamentally and politically, she never voted for a Democrat since Carter until 2016, except maybe for Blue Dog Phil Bredesen for TN governor in the aughts. She was all about Reagan, Daddy Bush, McCain, and Romney. But now she pretty much votes for the most moderate in Republican primaries then Blue no matter who in the general, but it’s Mississippi these days so it’s not like AOC is running.
As someone who generally agrees with the left on issues from climate change to race to inequality and health care, and as someone who is also on the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of the new left’s venom and hate (as a Jew), I find what is going on quite disturbing.
This all brings to mind something a rabbi /PhD and mentor of mine (may he rest on peace) once sadly said to me a few weeks before he took part as an outside reader on my PhD defense, “his sadness was that he couldn’t pray with the people he spoke with, and he couldn’t talk with the people he prayed with.” His comment was a reference to his being personally Orthodox Jewish, which was incompatible with many of his academic ideas and personal liberal values. This is how I feel today.
Also speaking as a Jew, I don’t want to devalue your lived experience, but I really think this overstates how much anti-Semitism / anti-Jewish “venom and hate” is actually happening.
For example, in NYC, the number of antisemitic hate crimes rose from 16 in September to 69 in October, per Axios. Obviously that’s not good, and obviously not all anti-semitism rises to the level of a “hate crime” or reported to police. But the underlying rates are just incredibly low. There are something like 1.6M Jews in NYC vs 69 incidents! That’s just not a significant number.
And while there might be additional vitriol online, there have always been crazies online. We just always ignored them. I’m not really convinced they are harder to ignore now. Most people I’ve engaged with, even those who clearly support the Palestinian cause, remain quite thoughtful about and respectful of individual Jewish people (even as they disagree with the Israeli government).
Agreed. As a Jew, living in a an area with a lot of Jews, I see much more fear than is warranted.
A lot of Jewish people around me use the following logic: 1. Not being as pro-Israel as I am right now is a sign of antisemitism. 2. I see a lot of people who are not as pro-Israel as I am. 3. I’m surrounded by anti-semites.
There’s obviously still anti-semitism, but it all reminds me of the post-Floyd “white supremacy is everywhere” stuff.
I worry that some American Jews full throated conflation of Jewishness with Israel is what actually make Jews less safe.
I think that old-fashioned WASP antisemitism (Jewish quotas at universities, country club and suburb exclusion) is recent enough in the memory of older Jewish Americans that there is a sentiment of fear that the gentiles of America could one day go mad with antisemitism, as in Germany.
I also think that that's extremely unlikely. Even very liberal and Israel-supporting Europeans today speak about the Jewish population of their countries in a way that shows that they are clearly seen as "other" (even though as an "other" that must be protected to the death rather than fought against) in a way that is a fringe ideology in secular, polysemous America. American Jews aren't "our Jews," they're us.
Also, the idea that Israel is some sort of ultimate guarantor of the survival of the Jewish people is just bull. In some insane hypothetical where America goes antisemitic, Israel becomes a pariah state hiding behind a nuclear arsenal. In a more likely hypothetical where some regional actor puts paid to Israel, they're not going to invade America next.
I understand why this seems paranoid to you. America has been a wonderful country - probably the best in history - for Jews. But I encourage you to try to see things from the perspective of people who've been chased all over the world for 2000 years. My family has lived in a lot of places, and felt comfortable in some of those places, and yet they all ended badly. Antisemitism is a virus, and when it awakens, individual prosperity and assimilation don't matter.
Israel may not be a complete guarantor of Jewish survival, but having a state is better than not having one. Nobody took Jewish refugees before, and we can't trust anyone to do so in the future. Learned that the hard way.
This antisemitism is a virus talk seems pretty paranoid from my admittedly gentile perspective. If America goes nuts and starts massacring minorities Jews will be close to least likely to be targeted.
Vastly more likely to turn anti Chinese or even Muslim than anti Jew, at least as far as state violence goes. France, on the other hand…
I don’t understand what makes you say Jews would be the least likely to be targeted, when they are probably among the most frequent targets of hate crimes now.
While I appreciate your logic generally, I think you’re wrong in this specific instance. The Jews are viewed as oppressors and
colonists. For some people that warrants a violent response.
I was in a building set in fire in Portland because I was an “oppressor.” I watched people barricade a couple other occupied buildings and set them on fire (also
because oppressive police were inside). While no one’s lives were truly threatened it was an eye opening experience. Despite my relative ability to defend myself and being a part of the dominant group this still changed my view of the left in America. Not because of the crazies (they are always there) but because I thought rational left
leaning individuals would realize that these actions were unacceptable. When the mainstream left seemed to ignore them (except Black Clergy who called out the actions for what they were), I became very nervous about the long term prospects of America.
I can completely see why Jews might fear for their safety in America. We still have out mobs and they are more than able to justify pretty bad action. They just paint their
violence in the language of resisting oppression.
I am not even Jewish and I get nervous when I see the mobs forming and talking about river to sea or celebrating the violence. I have actually been surprised at the main stream left’s condemnation of the antisemitism. It
Might not seem that way if your Jewish but at least high profile liberals are speaking out.
I understand. Just know that Jews come by our paranoia honestly, based on a very long and depressing history. It's not some sort of overwrought ploy for sympathy.
(The virus metaphor isn't my own - it's a common one. I actually find it pretty optimistic, especially compared to the DNA metaphor. Viruses can be inoculated against and treated, even if they can't be killed. You can't do anything about DNA.)
Without the US, Israel would be forced to either significantly moderate on the Palestinian issue or become a Middle Eastern North Korea. The US and its massive Jewish population in particular, but the existence of the New World in general, are the guarantors of Jewish survival in the modern world, not a truculent militaristic state located in the world's ethnic warfare capital since the dawn of recorded history.
I do understand things from that perspective, and my point of contention is the New World-Old World distinction. All* of these horrors occurred on the other side of the Atlantic. I agree with your characterization of antisemitism as a mind virus, but its natural reservoir is over there.
*Certain actions of the Spaniards notwithstanding, but they definitely count as European for these purposes.
(1) Echoing Leora in this thread, it's happened before that the rug has been pulled out from beneath the feet of Jews who thought they'd assimilated to the point that the notion of their neighbors turning on them seemed inconceivable. (Warning against that sort of complacency is the actual theme of Hanukkah, before it got turned into the sort of Bizarro Santa holiday for Jews.)
(2) The fear that an antisemitic backlash in the US would come in the form of violence and confinement on the 1930s-40s German/Soviet pattern seems to me highly implausible and sort of annoying. The returns to physical confrontation in developed commercial republics are ever-diminishing, and there's no Hamas-like foe here in a position to see a pogrom as strategically exploitable.
(3) What I would worry about, if generational turnover and the political cycle ever coincide to produce a full-on woke regime, is some kind of economic and social ultimatum to Jews to renounce Judaism, at best to the extent it implies support or even acceptance of the existence of Israel, at worst to the extent of renouncing the whole project as mere white supremacism.
(4) The scenario described in (3) currently seems to me far-fetched. But not necessarily more far-fetched than the Final Solution would've seemed to German Jews in 1910 or 1920.
I think that there's no world in which (3) happens in which Christianity is not also proscribed. But I also think that the idea of a woke coup is becoming more and more out-there fringe each day.
Agreed as to your second sentence, and for those of us who had our obligatory freakout about the woke coup scenario back in 2020, all of this is old hat. But many of the liberal Jews suddenly noticing that people they thought were part of their coalition actually hate them haven't thought through this before. And while the overall probability of a woke coup continues to diminish, the likelihood that such a coup, if it were someday to happen, would involve a substantial antisemitic component seems higher in light of recent events.
As to your first sentence, never underestimate the potency of the move whereby Jews can be made to take the fall for complaints against the majority to which they've assimilated, which it'd be politically untenable to prosecute against that majority itself.
Tbh I could gaf about Israel but I despise the Israel lobby bc unconditional support of Israel is against US interests. Feel the same way about the Saudi and Gulf States’ lobbies that get us to take their side against Iran. I’m not an isolationist but where we get involved it should be for our interests or at least neutral to our interests and unambiguously the morally right thing to do, and in the case of Israel they have the power so they are the oppressor. The Palestinians were there first unless you count pre-diaspora, and I don’t because I don’t count the self-serving myth that skydaddy gave Canaan to the Jews’ forebears to be a deed with clean title. If God gave them the land then let God get it back for them like in the OT and leave the US out of it, we’ve got bigger enemies like Russia and China without provoking another 9/11 through putting our dick in that sticky wicket.
But I have no animosity at all against the median US Jew, because the vast majority are secular and most non-fundies are cool in my book. You can miss me with the Hasidic folks bringing back polio to NYC though…
We also saw this with anti-asian bias a few years ago. It gets in the news for some reason and that a) causes it to happen somewhat more because it normalizes it a bit and b) makes people notice it more. See also, fake anthrax attacks post 9/11.
I think it's one of those things that is worse online if you are in a more progressive/left bubble on social media. I won't discount that and it bothers me (especially since a lot of "the left" seems to be backing themselves into a corner and being more pro-Hamas and boosting messages about how Israeli Jews should f off and "go back where they came from") but it's also worth trying to keep in mind these people are a fringe despite what they think.
This reminds me of the supposed "anti-Asian" wave we had. Similarly, the raw numbers were pretty low. While it's true that sometimes "it doesn't take many", there really wasn't even any decent *circumstantial* evidence that the attacks were racially targeted. Moreover, hypervigilant libs and activists completely ignored that their hyperbolic treatment ran the risk of exacerbating the social contagion of copycat incidents.
As the Halloween candy discourse last week pointed out, sometimes all it takes is a myth -- EVEN when there was no actual crime behind it -- in order for copycats to do bad things. We should, y'know, avoid that, regardless of which side of the spectrum the moral panic is coming from.
Asian people in New York, at least, were very quick to point out that there was nothing new about a certain subset of old-stock Americans being violently racist towards them, and then quite dismayed at the fact that it got buried once it was realized that nobody was buying the insinuation that it was a bunch of MAGAs doing this in response to Trump's Choyna Virus speech.
You're correct that the incessant media coverage of it probably provoked a lot of copycat incidents. It's similar to school shooting coverage, normal people hear "oh no," crazy people hear "now that's an idea!"
It didn't help that the panic was branded as "AAPI hate," when any actual haters hadn't the faintest inkling what an AAPI was, much less whether they hated it.
I had to think for like a full min as to what that means. Also, putting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the same group renders it a pretty meaningless label like BIPOC which always makes me think bisexual at first
No, it's idiotic. Analytically useless and also I imagine insulting to the people lumped into the acronym, who have no more in common with each other than Finns have with Bengalis.
Am I the only one who sees BIPOC and every time initially thinks bisexuals and people of color, realizes that’s really nonsensical, remembers what it is and only realizes that’s only a hair less nonsensical?
That does speak to the rather artificial nature of the label. Like, I'm sure that it's useful in some esoteric contexts. It's NOT useful as a mass-political label.
Personally I was never worried about an increase in numbers of anti Asian incidents or currently antisemitic incidents. What has concerned me is what “feels” like increased normalization of antisemitism. Sometimes it is just an increased exposure to the sentiment that was always there, so hard to gauge statistically. For example for the first time I am having discussions with really nice people about “how they feel about Jewish people.” A subject I’ve never really discussed before. Now all of a sudden I’m realizing some of their views are a little cooky.
Indeed. That normalization is what freaked me out about, for instance, all the Trump-era incidents where high school students directed racist chants at opposing teams. Those things have a way of coming back and haunting a society.
I'm reminded of the Dreyfus affair, when basically all of French society (and the broader European and Western society in general) were all of a sudden forced to have takes on Jews, many of which were, as you put it, "cooky".
It seems worse to me. A Jewish man in LA was just killed by pro-Palestinian protesters, in an incident eerily reminiscent of the Charlottesville killing.
I think there two things that should be distinguished. At least some protests about the war are becoming unpleasant, which is dangerous and extremely sad, and I think one should think carefully about such events.
A different question is whether the average Jew should start living a more fearful life. I think the bar for that is extremely high, to some extent that is literally what terrorists want, and so my view is no.
This exactly. As one small example, I know people who normally give out candy for Halloween but who didn’t this year, because they were afraid they could be a target if someone noticed the mezuzah on their door when approaching. That’s just such a crazy way to live your life. And of course a news search post-Halloween turned up exactly zero anti-Semitic incidents of the type they feared.
My friend attended a *charity fundraiser for disadvantaged kids (of all backgrounds)* that was apparently guarded like a a fortress. Nothing untoward happened. But they still spent money on security that could've gone to the kids!
This is bad, but I suspect it will quiet down. After 9/11, everyone everywhere thought that terrorists were going to blow up their buildings. I vaguely recall post offices in Montana setting up guards to prevent an al Qaeda attack.
I'm sure it's beefed up at the moment, but Jewish institutions all have security, especially at events. I recently went to a bar mitzvah and passed three off-duty cops on my way in.
Classical accounts of the virtues are quite clear that the ability to refrain from acting or being scared even when your circumstances have become objectively scarier is admirable and crucially important. This seems to be something we occasionally lose sight of today.
Is there any video of the LA incident? It seems like it could have been this sort of freak accident:
- A scuffle occurred between the dueling protest crowds outside the local Palestinian chicken restaurant
- A guy was punched, pushed or something in between
- That guy fell back, hit his head, and became the latest addition to the list of casualties of bipedalism
- That guy was on the pro-Israel side, and was Jewish.
The reason I am interested in seeing if there is a video is to determine the context of whatever physical altercation there was, including the possibility that it was totally unprovoked. I think the null hypothesis is that it was an unexpected tragic result of a yelling-and-shoving match involving an elderly person, not a targeted hate crime. Descriptions of the incident that led me to this assumption are below:
"Witnesses told deputies that Kessler was involved in a physical altercation with a counter-protester or protesters, officials said Monday night. Kessler fell backward during the altercation, authorities said, hitting his head on the ground." (AP)
"Kessler was involved in a physical altercation between counter-protesters, the sheriff's office said, citing witness accounts. It did not specify which side instigated the altercation." (Reuters)
Please don't go extrapolating stuff from this statement, there is no hidden subtext. It just doesn't look like it is necessarily a targeted attack from the information we have so far, and so I will be withholding my verdict for at least 24 hours.
This reminds me of my favorite weird chicken experience - there's a place run by a Muslim family from Dagestan in my small New England city, and I can't remember the original name but it was "[Arabic word]" chicken. Then the Boston Marathon bombing happened. They closed down for a day and re-opened as USA Chicken and Biscuit, festooned with American flags and red white and blue everywhere.
I hope it was all preventative and no one actually gave them crap for being from Dagestan, those guys make some amazing fried chicken.
I will say it's cool that an immigrant CAN credibly brand as USA Chicken like that. My culture was made for appropriation, baby! But, of course, it's terrible if that's a real or perceived MUST.
"Battery causing serious injury" and "involuntary manslaughter" are about what I would have charged him with if I were prosecutor. These also seem like what you'd charge someone with if they went too far in a bar fight and killed someone with a punch to the head.
Note, moreover, how little media attention this got, and how lamely it was framed. When a black person is killed by a white person, the media is very quick to prejudge it as racist, even when there is not particular reason to think so. When a Jew is killed by a gentile, the media goes out of its way to rule out antisemitism, even in context like this where there is every reason to think so.
Likewise, when the rabbi in Detroit (Samatha Woll) was murdered two weeks ago, the "no evidence of anti-semitism" line was used immediately. No killer has been found as of yet, but they are very sure it wasn't because of her religion?
"No evidence of antisemitism" and "very sure it wasn't because of her religion" are very different things.
WRT to Samantha Woll, I think that antisemitism was addressed because of the circumstances: middle-aged women and religious leaders are unusual murder victims, and it took place during very high Israel/Gaza tension. My first thought when I saw a headline about the situation was that this was probably an antisemitic crime.
I think it is likely it is just another murder in Detroit and not due to her status as a Jew and Rabbi. I just find it the reporting and reaction notably different than other situations.
I saw that and it’s obviously horrific. But of course the man was at a pro-Palestinian protest. I don’t think that speaks to the overall safety or acceptance of Jews in North America in any material way.
What about the person in Indianapolis that drove their car into the Black Hebrew Israelite building? We all laugh about it because of the mistaken target, but what if it was a JCC or Jewish day school?
I’m an academic and I work on a university campus. Things are a bit different in that atmosphere. My synagogue has also been subject to some vandalism.
Most people I encounter are thoughtful as well. But that’s if small solace. And to be honest, while I support what Israel has to do, I also have great empathy for the Palestinians. I blame both Hamas and Bibi for their efforts to slow down any momentum towards peace, while recognizing the difference between Hamas’ murder aggressiveness and Bibi’s (more but not entirely) passive aggressive efforts.
"For example, in NYC, the number of antisemitic hate crimes rose from 16 in September to 69 in October, per Axios. Obviously that’s not good, and obviously not all anti-semitism rises to the level of a “hate crime” or reported to police. But the underlying rates are just incredibly low."
I agree that's mostly the case in the USA, but some of the shit going on in Europe looks much worse. Hot take here, but spray painting Stars of David on houses and business is really bad!
1. North America really is different from Europe but I think it’s easy to conflate the two because of how things spread on social media (though tbh I really don’t think seeing a swastika painted somewhere is all that meaningful or scary - my view is that people with no power to really impact your life doing dumb stuff generally shouldn’t worry you. We’re not talking about governments passing laws here.)
2. In recent years, to the extent there has been anti-semitism (especially online), it’s largely been from the right. For all we know, anti-Semitic vandalism could still be from people on the right who now think it’s normalized. But the idea that Jews should suddenly make common cause with the right just because a small number of people on the left take their pro-Palestinian sentiments too far doesn’t strike me as a reasonable reaction.
If that paint isn’t threatening, I don’t know what is.
“In recent years, to the extent there has been anti-semitism (especially online), it’s largely been from the right.”
[Edit: the following text is for Europe, which is the area being discussed in this thread.]
Has it? From what I can tell, it’s more immigrants from Muslim countries (and their descendants) than home-grown right wingers. (Not to say that right wingers don’t do it — they do, but they have larger concerns, like the aforementioned immigrants.)
What is the “threat” from the paint exactly? Of course it’s unpleasant to be subject to hate and I don’t wish it on anyone. But is someone’s material or physical wellbeing truly threatened by it? Is it part of an organized campaign? Is it condoned?
If the people doing the tagging had wanted to attack the occupants of the houses, presumably they could have. But they didn’t. Which I’d say dials down the implied threat. (Meanwhile there does appear to be a Jewish woman in Lyon who was stabbed at her doorstep - that’s obviously much worse and should be regarded as such. But I just can’t get my hackles raised too much about some idiots with a spray bottle.)
Are we using different definitions of threat? Obviously the paint itself isn't going to attack anyone, but at least some of these stars were put on the houses of Jews (see second article), and clearly indicates "I know where you live and I don't like you". Whether or not it's part of an organized campaign or if it's condoned is irrelevant.
That's clearly less harmful that stabbing someone, but stabbing someone isn't a threat; it's a violent action! (Whether or not it's part of an organized campaign or if it's condoned is --- again --- irrelevant.) Of course threats are less bad than actions. If someone, for example, walks up to you a says "I'm going to knife you", then no physical harm has been done yet, but a reasonable person can interpret that as a threat. Not everyone is Crocodile Dundee, who can shrug it off as kids being kids. (That's not a knife...) The combination of "I know where you live and I don't like you" with the fact that Jews have indeed been attacked makes the spray paint a threat.
Anyhow, at the point an internet argument comes down to arguing over definitions, it's not worth continuing it, so I'll stop arguing about what is and isn't a threat.
Here you just seem obtuse, I’m sorry to say. Imagine saying “so they sent me a photo of my child playing in the park; why is that a threat? If they wanted to hurt my child they could have done it when they snapped the picture.”
Jews are more likely than any other ethnic, racial or religious group to be victims of hate crimes, per FBIs consistent data year after year (included the latest published data, 2022). Beyond the actual abnormally high incidence of hate cirmes, their is the institutionalization of antisemitism , refelcted in the exceptional high bar which institutions such as unviersities accord to it, the reluctance of mainstream media to report these incidence (contra the focus on islamophobia, which fbi statistics show is much much rarer) , and of course the fact that it's the only hate were non-member of the group feel very comfortable rejecting members of group compalints of hand. And I haven't even mentioned the far far worse situation in contemporary Europe or the uniquely bad history.
P.S.
I don't have studies of this, but one should also note that sterotypically negarive portrayal of Jews persist in the American media, whereaas positive portrayals are far more rare. It wasa notable that in the recent Selma movie I believe the outsized Jewish contribution was left unmentioned. In "The Wire" the positive character Rodna Pearlman may have been "coded" Jewish but the only very explicitly Jewish character, whose Jewishness was repeatedly refereed t direclty was the crooked, greedy, lawyer character, i.e. an antisemitic caricutre if there ever was one [1]. This was rather jarring in a show otherwise excpetional nuanced and humane portrayal of all characters. To give an exmaple from a different genre, the recent show Harley Quinln engaged in blatant antisemetici steiorypes and super negative portrayal of Jews while ignoring the Jews portrayed sympathetically in the original comics [2]. My sense is that this is very common suggesting systemic bias in ppoular media. But again, I wish someone studied this.
I would question the premise that hate crimes against Jews are “abnormally high”. They are objectively very rare. Are Jews disproportionately targeted? Sure, but again we are talking about incredibly low base rates.
There’s a joke about how Jews are neurotic because we descend from the people who, over the past 500+ years, were the ones that said “the vibes are bad, let’s go.” And I get it, we are always going to be something of an “other.” But truly, contemporary North America is probably the safest time and place in history to be a Jew, and I think we should act like it instead of being continually fearful.
I do agree with you that people should listen to Jews about what constitutes anti-semitism the same way we’d let other groups self-define their oppression - although then you get into areas where there is no clear Jewish consensus, like whether “anti-Zionism” is anti-semitism, so I’m honestly not sure what outsiders are supposed to do.
"But truly, contemporary North America is probably the safest time and place in history to be a Jew, and I think we should act like it instead of being continually fearful."
I agree with this to an extent. But on the other hand, 2023 is also the best year in American history to be Black, and there would be tons of pushback if someone said what you just said, but about Black people. Which again gets to the heart of what is so frustrating here, the double standards where Jews are always treated worse than other minorities.
Media produced by black people specifically for black people is much more positive about being black: a culture to celebrate, historical figures to revere, etc. just like any other people. Media produced by white guilt types always somehow makes it seem like being black is the worst thing in the world, to the point where it can come off as insulting.
David Simon (who is Jewish) gave a response on the Levy thing, and it was wack beyond belief. It basically amounted to, “You gotta admit, some of us really are conniving bloodsuckers.”
I’m not Jewish, and I also agree with your points here overall, but are you sure you’re not under-indexing the effects of an increase in harassment and obnoxious comments, not must online but in person?
Possibly - but I guess I just don’t get too worked up over “obnoxious comments” without any material or physical impact, even if there are somewhat more of them than there were a month ago.
Well, the Charlottesville protests didn’t have any material impacts either, until someone ran over some people with his car. But beyond those things being on a spectrum, I also take people seriously when they say hateful comments are extremely upsetting to them.
Fair enough, and I get it, I’ve been on the receiving end of antisemitic comments too.
But the thing to do is ignore and move on. Ultimately this isn’t Nazi Germany or Medieval Spain. These actions aren’t condoned and codified by law. It’s random lunatics. I see a lot of Jewish people I know posting things like “never again is now” and I just can’t really believe they really believe that. Inflamed rhetoric about what the community is actually facing helps no one.
To echo another user here, social media is bad. You can go on it and convince yourself that there's about to be a Holocaust in America, that there's a slow white genocide in America, that the atmosphere will parboil everyone like a lobster in 50 years, that mass killings of gays are imminent in Florida, that a strange 4Chan anon is posting secrets about the real US/world government, and so on and so forth.
It seems to me that if you take the sort of justification for e.g. a thumb on the scale in favor of blacks & Hispanics in university admissions that's framed as historically oppressed people vs. beneficiaries of historical oppression, and you put Jews on the beneficiary side, you're forced into taking one of two positions.
Either Jews were never really victims of oppression, and the appearance that they were is a sort of optical illusion, possibly perpetrated by Jews themselves. Or else Jews were indeed historically oppressed at one time, but upon arrival in America they were able to access a sort of cheat code or hidden power-up not available to blacks or Hispanics (and more secret/invisible than the overt discrimination in favor of blacks/Hispanics/Native Americans going back to the early 1970s).
Stated like that, either option is *obviously* continuous with the most virulent claims of historical antisemitism. But young people today have generally grown up with the default assumption that Jews do indeed fall on the beneficiary side of the beneficiary/victim line. It's hard to see how they can vindicate that assumption without sounding straight-up antisemitic.
Antisemitism exposes the flaws in that reductive binary framework. Persecution of Jews has long been premised on the theory that Jews have too much power. Putting Jews on the oppressor axis is actually straight out of an ancient antisemitic playbook.
I think a lot of young, politically-engaged left-leaning people have been exposed to enough stuff like B'Tselem and Jewish Voice for Peace (college campuses, everyone) that they consider anti-Israel sentiment almost totally orthogonal to antisemitism.
Of course, the people that are in it for the antisemitism are also going to these protests. It is incorrect to deny that. But "I despise the state of Israel for its actions towards the Palestinians, but hold no negative sentiment towards Jews" is an internally consistent position.
It boggles the mind that people think that it will reduce antisemitism if enough people act like antisemitism means not supporting bombing Gaza into rubble.
It's a nonexistent position de facto. You cant' despise the Jewish state without despising Jews. To wit, nobody "despises China" you can despise it regime, but not the actual state, ditto Russia. The Anti-Israel crowed has an ideology that is qualitatively different from critcizing Israel as yuo would the US, or Canada or even Russia or China.
You can't despise the Afrikaner state without despising Afrikaners. The blacks want them dead or expelled and they have no other homeland, plus the Janse von Rensburg massacre back in the 1830s proves that they've always been irrationally hated. In theory I would be for a binational state, but Afrikaners would be massacred in large numbers in such a circumstance, and so that's impossible. Plus, do you really think it's possible to negotiate with Umkhonto we Sizwe? And in any case, there are tons of black Africans being oppressed by other black Africans, and the reason for the outsize attention paid to this conflict is just because people hate whites in general.
I'm not doing this to morally equate apartheid South Africa with modern Israel, I'm doing this to demonstrate how bizarre moral logic gets when you consider a polity inseparable from a people. At some point, you just have to admit that other people have a totally different vantage point on the issue than you do.
The takeaway from this is that it's a bad thing for Israel to portray itself to the world as "The Jews," and it's especially bad as well as totally ridiculous when that happens in the only other country with a millions-strong Jewish population and one of the only countries (all are in the New World except Israel) where being Jewish isn't by default considered some sort of quasi-foreign status distinct from simply being a minority religious/ethnic group.
German-Americans and Jewish Americans fighting side by side for their mutual homeland against Nazi Germany in WWII is probably the best possible example of how Old World ethnostatism just doesn't apply here.
You're right about the cluelessness from Middle America, which is again why it's really bad for the media (particularly Fox and so on) to pump into their brains a sort of pro-Israel sentiment that can translate to dual-loyalty slander.
I think you’re both right. Doesn’t this speak to the need for things like more Holocaust education when kids are younger instead of spending so much effort on winning propaganda wars today?
Accurate. My perspective is different and similar to yours, because growing up in the NYC suburbs, a number of classmates were either Jewish, or had grandparents who were Holocaust survivors. One other thing I've noticed locally is the reflex among young Muslim-Americans to defend Palestine and the Palestinian cause, even though Hamas is raping and killing innocent people. I'm extremely skeptical that countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh teach the history of the Holocaust accurately, or if it's even covered at all, lest anyone is accused of being an apologist for Zionism and Israel.
It's not just about the history. Jews are still more vulnerable to hate than almost all groups in the US, and far far more than any other group in Europe. Few live anywhere else (except Israel) precisely due to persecution. The protrayal of Jews as the perpetrators of the very evils from which they suffered more than anyone else is in itself a deeply sinister antisemitic move.
The optimal level of antisemitism in America from the Israeli perspective is just enough to rally American Jews around Israel but not enough to turn the aid spigot off.
The optimal level of antisemitism in America from the American perspective is zero. That's the difference.
I often feel like this about being a Buddhist. Western Zen isn't exactly highly represented, so it's hard to share concepts that deeply inform my perspective on politics and the world more generally.
Scott, thanks for sharing and I’m so sorry this ugly hate has reared its head on the left too. I hope you know those antisemitic and pro terrorist views remain a small minority on the left and totally incompatible with liberal values. These are left authoritarian as well as nationalist and fundamentalist sentiments. So please don’t feel conflicted in ideology - liberalism is still consistent and functional. Its a faction among far left progressivism that seems to have lost its way, at least as far as I can tell.
Milton Friedman has this idea of quadrants of money, you spend your money on yourself most carefully and someone else’s money on someone else least carefully.
It seems to me a lot of left wing ideas are that kind of sloppy because they’re ideas for other people for the most part.
During this latest war in Israel it has felt like a lot of people are treating it like a debating competition. 100% focus on what language to use, 0% focus on how to improve the situation.
I've become increasingly cranky with all the focus on language stuff (what do you call the homeless, what specific words do you use to describe transgender people/ideas, the whole latinx debacle, the anti-racist redefinition of "racism," etc) because I think that what's going on there is mainly status-seeking and bullying.
That is: when you are part of some clique who has enough status to propose a terminology change, you can do so and then just kind of trip up anyone who you're talking to and call them bad people because they aren't conforming to your new language, and gain status by claiming to be safeguarding some principle. And then you can do it again and again!
My wife works in affordable housing, so I've watched in realtime as we went from calling homeless people, "homeless" to "people experiencing homelessness," to "unhoused," with a few epicycles along the way.
Who the fuck cares if we call that guy "homeless" or "unhoused"? There is just transparently no difference in those terms. That guy has not been helped one iota by this language change. But people in the world of affordable housing have been able to score lots of cheap, petty points by policing language. That draws bullies who like to score cheap, petty points. And I've come to believe that basically any time you indulge this kind of branding stuff, what you're overwhelmingly doing is hurting normal people and helping bullies, and nothing else.
I have the same thought about naming, with one more thought. I don’t think it’s just about bullying and exclusion. I think there can be a germ of a better idea there - trying to avoid names that seem to be stigmatizing, in the hope that the public would look again at “the homeless” and see them as people who deserve empathy or compassion. However, I don’t think you can generate empathy or compassion by changing names this way, and there’s a real risk that making the name change will stand in for changing actual conditions - like the people who put up “all are welcome here” signs outside their big single-family homes and go all out to prevent upzoning. You might direct good feelings at the unhoused, and while that feels like doing something it’s really almost nothing. And then comes the bullying for those who don’t signal the right attitudes in the right way.
I think the basic idea that some terms are vicious and cause some kind of psychic toll or stigma is an intuitive one, and I'm not sure I'd be against policing language if the language still being policed were like the difference between the n-word and "black." But I feel very strongly that the difference between "black" and "Black" has reduced racism not even the tiniest bit ever at all, and has exclusively been used to raise the status of bullies.
"Bum" -> "homeless." Maybe that was productive. Maybe! I think it's worth casting a critical eye here and questioning the basic intuition. But "homeless" -> "unhoused"? Didn't change the stigma of being homeless at all, ever, for anyone.
I've been trying to bring back the word bum to distinguish between the various types of homeless people, so that more sympathetic cases don't get conflated with less sympathetic ones.
The issue always come back to "what is the intent of the word". If the whole reason a word exists is to insult or a degrade a group of people then sure, change it (this is the category the n-word falls into). But if the word itself is simply a descriptor of some condition that people find sympathetic or are concerned that others will attack the person for then the word isn't the issue, it's the fact that people will attack them for it that's the issue. Changing the term won't change that. Homeless is no more stigmatizing than unhoused- they both describe clearly the condition that the person is in, and some people will, unfortunately, negatively judge the person who is experiencing that condition, regardless of the term that is used. Same with things like retarded or midget- the terms become associated with negative connotations not because the words are problematic but because some people will use them problematically. If you change the word that is used to describe the condition the same problematic people will just adapt and in 15 years time the newly anointed non-problematic word will then be problematic and in need of changing.
Descriptive words being constantly altered is utterly useless, and altering them is, as you say, just a silly excuse to police boundaries and define in-vs-out groups. We should move away from words whose initial intent was to insult and degrade, but otherwise we should just accept that language is open to interpretation in ways that mean that some people will find ways to use any language in an insulting and demeaning way.
Not the same thing, but my winner in the pantheon of hollow, useless gestures of the last three years is that helmets and end zones in the NFL still say inane things like "end racism".
There's a well-described principle, the name for which momentarily escapes me (euphemism treadmill or something), that we try to de-stigmatize something by changing its name, as if it's the name (and not the condition/situation) that causes the stigma. Then the new name eventually carries the stigma, so we do it again. See crippled=>handicapped=>disabled=>differently abled (gag) or the various names for people who are well below average intelligence ("retarded" used to be the polite euphemism).
No, not snark. Steven Pinker came up with euphemism treadmill (I've since looked it up). Dysphemistic treadmill would be the other way to describe it, I suppose.
This has been frustrating to me because it seems to put much of the focus on those of us here, away from the conflict, rather than on those actually suffering. I am afraid that I have mostly refrained from talking about the conflict at all because of this.
Often it seems the difference between a liberal and a leftist is the former’s personal willingness to pay additional taxes to support policy changes they want.
I mean there’s that. There’s also the politics of other people’s lives. Someone who went to Princeton who is very sure how a school should handle it when I get assaulted by a 9 year old and is more concerned with the school to prison pipeline than the safety of people in the room.
There’s just a lot of people with an awful lot of opinions on shit that will never effect them.
That doesn't seem a particular left-wing problem. Remember, Republicans hate (or sorta or used to) same sex marriage as it never affects them. Excepted it affected VP Cheney bc of his other daughter. Same idea with native Americans (somehow it affects justice Gorsuch). Republicans believe racism doesn't exist (maybe they're affected by positive discrimination though). Etc.
on the left? I mean you basically described everything wrong with social conservatism. If my personal behavior doesn’t effect you in any way why do you care so much?
I think there is a subtle difference here (not one that defends conservative obsessions with what happens in people’s bed rooms and the like).
A lot of progressives are obsessed with solving problems for other communities by implementing solutions they think are cost benefit positive because they have tunnel vision on costs and benefits. They look only to the benefits to one group (or really that addresses specific problems among that group) they want to help and don’t care much about the costs to third parties. But they have convinced themselves this is objective analysis. And they honestly believe they deserve credit for caring despite it not directly affecting their own communities. Some to the extent that they’ve developed martyrdom complexes around communities that aren’t their own.
Conservatives seem irrationally obsessed with infiltration of their communities. In the 1990s, they feared people convincing their children to become gay, etc. Today, they fear crime spreading from urban areas to their neighborhoods. Their concerns are still mostly grounded in their own lives, they just have wholly irrational ideas about what is bad in some case, or the likelihood of something happening somewhere else spreading to their community. They view themselves as heroes protecting their community.
Maybe there’s an overlap between (some) lefties and conservatives? The lefties that we used to call limousine liberals, with the “all are welcome” and “love is love” signs, probably want to protect their communities from infiltration too. Just trying getting permission for a halfway house or an apartment building in the neighborhood. But they don’t quite see it or acknowledge that’s what they’re doing.
The “tax the rich” step does a lot more to mitigate inequality than the “provision services” step, just mechanically, and inequality is a lot more viscerally exciting the trains or sewers or durable medical equipment or whatever. Taken to an extreme, a cost efficient public sector could enable a satisfying level of public service provision even amidst a highly unequal and capitalistic economy, which to a certain political orientation is horrifying.
I am pro-social spending but I don’t think this is a good response to what Andrew is saying. The examples you gave are all of self-sacrifice, which is kind of the opposite of “spending other people’s money.”
My comment was intentionally snide (and perhaps I should have marked it so). The whole spending other peoples money thing though feels like typical fiscal conservative orthodoxy with no basis in fact and thus it didn't feel totally unreasonable to reply in the same vein. (I'll edit a \S into my previous post)
My comments were intended to make one roll their eyes as a way of holding up a mirror to the absurdity of the original comment. As if to say, (to the original comment) "this comment is unworthy of serious rebuttal." This was apparently less successful than I had hoped.
While I agree with parts of this column, overall it reflects IMO what I've long thought is the biggest blind spot in the Slow Boring worldview. Matt tends to interpret any discussion of politics and political culture, in the broad sense of differing ideologies of public order, as if it were really about policymaking -- and relatively near-term policymaking at that -- or as if it in all seriousness ought to be. Often this tendency leads to novel insights and gains in analytic rigor. But occasionally I think it leads Matt simply to miss the level of analysis his interlocutors are interested in.
The trends Barro is talking about don't manifest primarily in terms of things one might lobby elected officials to do. Their most immediate effect is on the everyday assessment of interpersonal interactions, modeled in larger-scale terms not by a legislative agenda but by the evaluation of historical events or happenings in faraway countries.
Where the new ideology assumes the mantle of power, it tends to be in the form of case-by-case administrative decision-making, like assigning fault in a particular campus dispute. To borrow a distinction from administrative law, its primary vector is adjudication, not rulemaking. But even that overstates its orientation to concrete policy outcomes. What we are really talking about is a shift in modes of thought, forms of argument, symbols and styles of deportment.
At that level, it does seem as if something quite new has been happening since about 2014, to an extent that can't be explained as simply a leftward shifting of some preset curve. If that impression is wrong, it needs to be rebutted at its own level. It can't be explained away as just another instance of a more or less stochastic tendency to "take things too far."
It is certainly true that many voters, both conservatives and progressives, care more about confronting the correct enemies than policy outcomes. Hanania is very worth reading, in part because he understands the id of the Republican party in a way that Yglesias just doesn’t.
However, Matt’s focus on policy outcomes over the discourse is not only a refreshing way of differentiating his writing, it’s also the most useful frame. Unless you are public intellectual trolling for clicks, you are more affected by policy outcomes than the discourse. The CARES act profoundly affected my family. The twitter outrage du jour rarely does. Divorced from policy outcomes, the discourse would be no more important than reality TV.
Co-sign the recommendation to read Hanania, who is indeed well chosen as a foil to Yglesias in this regard. Grossly deficient where Matt abounds, superabundant where Matt is lacking. In a previous Slow Boring exchange, I described reading Hanania as like shaving with sandpaper, insofar as one might be rubbed the wrong way. Once you realize that and accept that you're there for the local insights on offer, not for the whole gestalt, I stand by my view that Hanania is a uniquely valuable writer today.
Why isn’t it just another instance of a more or less stochastic tendency to “take things too far”? His point is that bad things of various sorts happen when people take things too far, and people have always done that sort of thing, but as public opinions shift left, a larger fraction of the things taken too far will be left ones?
I understand what Matt's point is, I just don't agree in this instance.
Of course one could at a first approximation describe most "things" as a normal curve with certain outliers going "too far." Vis-a-vis the "thing" at issue, one could point to e.g. the Hamline University implosion over "studying masterpieces of Islamic art = Islamophobia," which produced a backlash even from the sort of people usually inclined to acquiesce in that sort of thing that clearly caught the administrators responsible off guard. That's an example of a more or less stochastic tendency relative to some central mean.
But if the "thing" generating a normal distribution with some outliers inviting pushback is itself unprecedented, that's different. And the eruption of pro-Hamas sentiment, to take one example, seems too broad-based and too rooted in durable, widely shared attitudes to be described as a mere outlier.
Coming from a different framework, I also tend to look at the “illiberal left” from a more abstract level (like the Chait article referenced here.) “Taking things too far” perhaps cannot happen without serious collective cognitive disfunction, failure of nuanced critical thinking or some combination of philosophical shortcomings. The movement arising in 2014 (or whenever) raised important points. Looking at individual experience and identity adds richness to our cultural discussion and understanding. Acknowledging the widespread influence of the dominant culture is necessary.
But when the illiberal left applies these concepts absolutely as the single hammer for all issues, instead of adding them to a nicely calibrated toolset, we run into problems. My hobby throughout the Covid years has been exploring all the ways the illiberal left can go wrong, from philosophical, theological and psychological viewpoints. Intellectually satisfying, but probably ineffective, since the more moderate left understands these excesses instinctively anyway.
"...but overriding racial justice maximalism when it came to keeping public schools open."
If you recall, there was a huge hand-wave of this with the idea that somehow reopening schools earlier than later would lead to a genocide-by-virus of marginalized Black and Latinx youth:
Nobody can produce an accurate analysis of this 'movement' without realizing that they're only slightly more committed to intellectual rigor/consistency than talk radio conspiracy types. There's always a way by which anyone who opposes your policy proposals is literally eating BIPOC babies.
I saw a New York Times article not an hour ago ago about 22% of black voters polling for Trump over Biden, with black men being almost 1/3 Trump.
This will probably simmer down a bit after Echo Chamber Trump returns to the general public eye and puts people off with displays of craziness and encroaching senility, and the Blob Ministry of Internal Affairs encourages polarizing street episodes in summer '24.
It's impossible to frame this both accurately and politely, so I'll go for the former: there's honestly just a limit to the amount of gay shit (literal sense) that the median black, male voter will take*. Couple that with the totally hollow promises of 2020 and you have a recipe for a slow decline in black support for the Democratic Party.
This will, of course, turn out well for the black populace in general. Not because Republican policies or messaging is in any way benevolent, but because the Dem leadership will need to pay more than lip service to the specific concerns of the black electorate.
*For those who this will put in a tizzy, look at Democratic cultural messaging and tell me it's any way compatible with traditional views of masculinity, which are culturally important for proles of all races. I'm also not suggesting that there exists an objective category of "gay shit," I refer to cultural perception.
I think if more Blacks migrate to the Republican party while more traditionally Republican white suburban voters migrate to the Democratic party, that would be a good thing for the overall health of the polity, even if the original cause of that change is stupid behavior by the two parties.
With key emphasis on "immutable" and those immutable identities getting codified into law (let alone into the constitution).
Best case counterexample there has to be Switzerland, although from what little I know Flemish/Walloon political conflict is rather less salient over the last 2-3 decades than it historically has been. Thanks, EU!
I'd be happy (and astonished) to see the political salience of being Black* decrease, and I suppose a slightly greater R fraction of the Black vote might help a bit there.
* I am an American person of pallor who has spent a moderate chunk of my life going to schools and/or living in neighborhoods that were majority non-white, but the majority or plurality ethnoracial group in those cases has never been Black/AfAm. Closest I ever came was working for a little while in a plurality Dominican part of Washington Heights.
But more important IMHO, and nearly impossible (also IMHO) as long as Trumpolatry and MAGA have a controlling interest in the Republican Party, is for the Republicans to continue to fight for local level political power in the top 10-20 metros (as opposed to having a few congresscritters elected from the metros remaining R-leaning or swing districts; and in a few cases still controlling the county level government).
There is Eric Johnson, the Black Republican (Democrat until 9/22/23) mayor of Dallas (also the only large city with a Republican mayor and > 20% Black population - until this July Jacksonville had a R mayor for most of the time since 1993).
Otherwise you have to go to Mattie Parker (lifetime R AFAIK) in Ft Worth.
I understand (though I disagree) why the Dems are largely willing to sacrifice the rurals for the suburbs/exurbs (to paraphrase Willie Sutton, that's where the votes are), and that's a pretty consistent trend in most of the developed world, but "we" (heterodox liberals like Matt and me) should at least try to fight the trend.
My suspicion is that it is less about “gay-shit” and more about uncontrolled immigration. I live in New York City, and I suspect that a lot of working class Black people are pissed off about large numbers of immigrants being put up (for free) in nice hotels while they continue to struggle to make rent.
You're correct to some extent but that's largely NYC-specific as far as I can tell. The cultural backlash against the gender-sexuality portion of wokery among prole-class black and Hispanic males is huge everywhere, but for obvious reasons legacy media outlets don't go around Mott Haven asking 20-30-something-year-old dudes what they think about transgenderism and displaying the results to their readership/viewership.
Remember, gender-ideology stuff has been in urban public schools long enough now that a lot of people who ordinarily couldn't give a shit either way have been exposed to it and decided they dislike it.
(Also, in my personal estimation, NYC has a higher rate of college attendance or at least interest in higher education among the urban proletariat than just about anywhere else in the country. The ranks of our underclass are thin and tend towards subway loons rather than people simply suffering from excruciating generational poverty and trapped in a potential well because of that.)
“but for obvious reasons legacy media outlets don't go around Mott Haven asking 20-30-something-year-old dudes what they think about transgenderism and displaying the results to their readership/viewership.”
Yeah, but the article I think you’re referencing did have a quote from a Jamaican immigrant who was complaining about “porn in schools”. I was honestly kind of (pleasantly) shocked to see that, and I really don’t think we would have seen that (a quote like that being incorporated) a year or even six months ago.
Yes, the New York Times has been putting on an impressive showing of honesty recently. I'm pretty sure that what happened is the old guard deciding that they would prefer to rein in the Buzzfeed millennials and TikTok zoomers and thus maintain their place as the country's newspaper of record rather than go the way of the Washington Post and base their business model on feel-good media for #resist soccer moms and disillusioned former Bush Republicans in Stamford, CT. (Now the WaPo's financial fortunes are tied to Trump's electoral success, which is hysterical.)
A concise way of summing up the minority social conservative backlash is this: there are a lot of people who are receptive to progressive messaging about racial issues but strongly against progressive views on gender and sexuality, and progressives have done a great job of blowing their credibility on the former and making their insanity on the latter very visible, especially via public education, which almost every person in the middle-middle-class or below goes through.
That is a big local story in Chicago as well; "you have to pay more taxes to cover the predictable cost of Biden's asylum policy" is infuriating to a lot of people working long hours who do not vote GOP.
- People blame the sitting president for random stuff his political side does, which is analytically dubious but basically inevitable.
- D messaging on the school library issue-plex is only persuasive to people who are all-in on Defend Trans Kids!, or who are partisan enough and lacking enough in personal connection to the issue to uncritically believe stuff like "Ron DeSantis doesn't want kids to know who MLK was."
Or in crass summary, the messaging on this issue falls flat among concerned prole mothers but does great with Pajama Boy. This is because "parents without graduate degrees should have zero say in public school curricula" is an unpopular policy outside of sectors of the professional-managerial class and the Bushwickariat.
It's interesting to compare and contrast these later WH statements back to those Day 1 Exec. Actions. Still surprised they went so aggressively on Day 1 (e.g., the "stop boarder wall construction" is one they should have known better would come back to bite them later).
I kind of disagree, black Americans socially conservative enough to prioritize disliking gay rights and feminist activism over other social and economic issues are probably already voting Republican? I bet the future of the young Black male vote growing more GOP goes with tax and money, where Republicans can start pointing out the Democratic party policies that made used cars get more expensive. That is much more likely to swing people who don't currently vote GOP.
Historically, Democrats were with good reason perceived to be way better on racial issues, and non-race-related culture war issues were much less relevant. The cracks in those two walls are what, if anything, will cause the Democrats to lose their guarantee of 90% of black voters' ballots.
It is pretty funny reading that NYT poll story about young voters being unenthused for Biden, it's like hearing a fellow Republican mad about Georgia senate races. "Oh the insane lies you told the voters are now making them not turn out for you because they think the world sucks and is beyond their control? Terrible, I wonder who discouraged them!"
Oh explaining away the minority vote shift will be easy - it's internalized White Supremacy, those voters suffer from false consciousness just like everyone who disagrees with us 🙄
Municipal elections are often less of an ideological referendum, and I think those guys have a strategy of mobilizing low-information voters with a combination of race hustling (which conveniently works on the "In This House We Believe..." people too) and appeals to local concerns. This doesn't work in national elections.
Also, a part of what's happening is that the paroxysm of 2020 yielded no real positive results for the people it was ostensibly intended to help, and au contraire elite expectations, they figured that out. I predict that political-machine race hustling is going to become a much less successful strategy for municipal elections in the future.
I'm also glad you didn't mention Eric Adams, because he was the NYC pro-crime coalition's worst enemy. Chicago has a very strong coalition of lakefront liberals and a large voting underclass, which explains a lot of what goes on there politically, but NYC has a comparatively bigger voting largely-non-white working class and a comparatively smaller voting underclass. Adams split the former from the champagne socialists and won on that.
This faction list is very bizarre but makes sense if you read it as "people seriously involved in politics" and not "voters". Here's mine for broad voter categories (keep in mind that the organized Republican Party is marginal enough that "R" here is more of a loose values signifier).
1: PMC + hipsters/gentrifiers (funny enough the most ethnically diverse coalition, D except for some Wall Street Journal Republicans)
2: Working-class usually-not-white (the swing demographic, relatively socially conservative)
4: Generational underclass (very small fraction of voters)
The NYC winning coalition for progressives was based primarily on the first two, which is the reason it was bound to fracture. {2, 3} beats {1, 4} in New York because 4 is proportionally small compared to in other cities. I think Chicago proper doesn't have enough slightly-bigoted Polish firemen and worried-sick Jamaican grandmothers to beat out the underclass-PMC coalition. The Krassner-Foxx-Johnson types will hold on the longest in places like Chicago.
I've also said this already but there were a lot of "shy Tory" Adams voters motivated by subway safety, because people who would be driving to and from their subdivision elsewhere in the country are exposed to the general public in NYC.
Carving Staten Island, which physically and culturally is obviously New Jersey, into NYC was sort of a genius move -- even though it's only about 5-6% of the City -- in introducing a moderating counterforce into City politics.
Krasner didn't have a serious challenger during the reelection, whether primary or general. And Philly then elected by far the most "tough on crime" mayoral candidate, with more support from black neighborhoods than anywhere else.
re the point on charter schools and unions: the Barro take about leftwing positioning to be strictly about identity is mostly right, but I'd add that that identitarian deference only applies to people already on the team.
Like, a leftwing Black woman who works for a university or nonprofit will never be criticized, but Condoleezza Rice absolutely will (and often more harshly, as apostates are the worst sinners)
Right, so in that case a charge of hypocrisy isn't very interesting is it? Especially if your actual point is 'identitarianism is bad', in which case it actually dilutes your argument to find an example where you think anti-identitarianism has been correctly applied (this is the 'the food here is awful, and such small portions' joke as an argument structure).
I don’t know that “I already agree this principle is being inconsistently applied, so there” is a killer comeback. Or did you think someone was actually calling for Rice not to be criticized?
The hard left of twenty years ago is basically all the current establishment types who are huge Kamala stans, the very ones who all but forced Biden to select her.
The campus left and police abolitionists absolutely hate her for being a former prosecutor, but trust that they’ll turn on a dime and fierily condemn Biden, America, and even God Almighty Himself if they get a whiff of her getting forced out for a more palatable running mate like Whitmer.
Thank you for the interesting and insightful analysis. What you’re saying makes a lot of sense to me.
On top of that, I think that politics, on significant parts of the left (particularly NGO’s and activist groups) and most of the right has expressed the shift towards greater tribalism as essentially a switch from an a la carte menu to a fixed price one. Been reading your work since Vox, and I think your experience was pretty good evidence of that. It isn’t enough to share most ideas when membership in a group requires subscription to an orthodoxy. I think this has taken a lot of room for ideological disagreement out, further reinforcing the tribalism aspect and allowing said orthodoxies to become less and less tethered to reality by removing voices that disagree on any of the idea considered sacrosanct.
I am not paying for the ten course tasting menu when 4 of the courses suck and the portions of the ones I like are way too small. But I will totally go to a tapas bar and order five things I like.
If you think about Vox as 50s National Review, it's totally reasonable to make an outlet that supports a set of thinkers who have very controversial ideas about politics. What would be unreasonable is producing a primary system to the point that you get someone with Henry Wallace-esque views vs Barry Goldwater instead of LBJ vs Barry Goldwater. So media is overrated and how parties select people is underrated, imo.
The polarization and tribalism is very real and toxic. I feel it started with 9-11 and the rift has continued to widen and crack, also driven by silo’d internet communications and social media, as well as splintered news media.
Then there is purposeful messing with our political culture from enemies foreign and domestic. Mike Flynn published a book recently on so called 5G warfare. In a chapter titled “How to make people kill people” there is a simple chart…
The first thing I thought of when I read this article were my thoughts about intersectionality. I've always liked the concept, as it seems correct to me in an almost banal manner that the intersections of 2+ identities can create unique personalities and views that should be observed more.
But it's unfortunate that the most prominent people who preach the multidimensional nature of intersectionality use it to reconstruct a one dimensional Oppression Olympics chart, in only focusing on the intersections that make a person exceptionally oppressed, or exceptionally the oppressor. But in almost all cases, the intersections will create classes that are simultaneously oppressed and are the oppressor. Any Palestine/Israel debate is the largest fly trap in this regard: it's clear that both sides have heavily taken on both roles, but so many want to devolve it into that oversimplified one dimensional chart and pick a side they feel is most oppressed.
Humans in general just really struggle with comprehending nuance.
Yes, and the intersectional identities sometimes interact in ways that are counter to the “Oppression Olympics.” Black people are worse off than white people and women are worse off than men, so how come Black women are doing so much better than Black men in many ways?
Right, the Black man/White woman dichotomy is perhaps the most classic example of lack of clarity. The competing claims in participation in women's sports is another. Whether or not to inject income and wealth as an additional dimension has always been quite controversial among the set that wants to heavily focus on race, sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Then there's other aspects like geographic origin and current residency, educational attainment, and so on. I could go on all day listing intersecting dimensions and how they're important, so I should probably end this comment now.
This is the great tragedy of left-wing academia in the modern age. The people doing the academic work often come up with quite sound and reasonable concepts and notions but then they repeatedly choose to allow/help them to be used in perverse ways rather than risk rocking the ideological boat (not to say their aren't dumb idiotic ideas as well).
A great example here is academic feminism. Once you get past the dumb choice of terms (calling pressure to conform to gender roles patriarchy) it's often reasonably talking about how both men and women can suffer from pressure to conform to gender roles and explaining how it often comes from other women and in friendly guises.
But the academics just shut up and march when the movement wants to focus on how evil men at corporations are keeping women down. Even when their theory would logically suggest that maybe men feel greater social pressure to succeed at jobs and that they might be working more than they'd like because they are victims of social expectations.
It's infuriating because there is very much something wrong but it's hard to point to or fix.
If my understanding is correct, the concept of intersectionality was originally basically about affirmative action (and similar governmental initiatives aimed at boosting particular groups). The idea was that if you, say, institute a policy of hiring blacks that's meant to counterbalance employers' bias in favor of hiring whites, and also institute a policy of hiring women that's meant to counterbalance employers' bias in favor of hiring men, those biases' continued existence would lead to hiring of a lot of black men and white women, with black women still getting the shaft.
"Intersectionality" was meant to be an argument for addressing the policy lacuna created by the lack of programs targeted at narrower subgroups, and for defusing the legal objection that such programs would be go beyond the acceptable limits of affirmative action. It was never supposed to be a sociological claim that e.g. black women were "more oppressed" in some broader sense than that.
I don't think I've ever, even once, seen the term deployed in the wild in a way that involved doing some kind of intersectional analysis. People just sort of say "this whole thing is really intersectional" and then they move on to whatever else they were going to say.
My semi-serious joke related to this is "have you considered the intersection of X identity with people who have had to wield power responsibly within a pluralistic democracy?" Like if ones positionality determines an arguments validity--that knowing anything requires personal experience--than how can the powerless be trusted with power?
The point of intersectionality is not a claim to authority. The point is that different dimensions of an individual's identity 'intersect' creating unique combinations of both advantage and disadvantage. Elsewhere someone provided the canonical example of affirmative action hiring practices favouring black people and women that could nevertheless lead to black women remaining uniquely disadvantaged, and this is the core insight. It has nothing to do with one's positionality determining an argument's validity (which is already called standpoint epistemology).
You likely hear people who over-use the term "intersectionality" commiting the sin of standpoint epistemology (hell, I know I do), but they are conceptually very distinct.
I guess I find the normative nature of most intersectionality discourse to push the concept fully within the definition of standpoint epistemology, but your point is fair! Maybe why nobody really finds its funny...
I think the problems on both left and right are more readily explained by the rise of modes of thinking rooted in illiberalism, as opposed to the particular position of the center of the political spectrum on the left-right axis at this moment in time.
There are lots of factors feeding that rise, including the rise of the right’s propaganda arm, the hard left building a bureaucratic DEI motte within higher education’s bailey, a decline in analytical rigor about the people paid to think about issues in favor of self-dealing, and social media leveling the playing field for every nutjob and idiot to shout catchy slogans out into the void.
Not sure how to stuff everything back in Pandora’s box, however.
Before social media, a town might have 30 morons who believed incredibly stupid things. They didn't much matter. After social media, those 30 morons found their compatriots in towns and cities all over the nation and world, so they are a much stronger force.
The good side of that is that 30 people with a weird hobby could (a) find each other and (b) find their compatriots in towns and cities all over the nation and the world.
Combine this with streaming video meaning than an audience of 10,000 is sufficient to make for a profitable business, and there are a lot of niche hobbies and interests that are having booms that they have never touched before. To pick ones I'm vaguely aware of: both Chess and Dungeons and Dragons are vastly more successful as businesses and in terms of audience than ever (for D&D) or than since Bobby Fischer (for Chess).
But there are literally dozens of others. I ran into a YouTube channel of someone who is a professional jigsaw puzzle solver. Yes, really. People watch her solve jigsaws. For hours. No, I don't get it either.
There are *lots* of other hobbies and activities where the niche has got a lot bigger as people with a mild interest find it much easier to hook into a broader, internet-based community and then build off that into person-to-person meetups.
I'm still not sure it's worth the negative impact on politics of niche politics becoming bigger. Most niche politics is bad.
Might make a case that topic-oriented rather than person-oriented media is better for the good use and worse for the bad.
That is, something like a forum or a subreddit or a blog comments section (or, for those of you old enough to remember, a Usenet group) tends to stick to a specific subject, making it more effective at bringing together people, but it's not inclined to trap people into a group. In social media, if you have a strong political opinion, you quickly drive off everyone who disagrees ... and then you're trapped in a bubble.
But if you're on a local forum for your town and forums for three of your hobbies, and you're on Stormfront, then people in the first four don't know that you're on Stormfront, and you retain a connection to people who aren't fascists. If you're on Facebook or Twitter and talking to fascists, you get blocked by people, even when those people share a hobby, because they can't follow "just the things this person says about hobby X".
Martin Gurri's 2014 book "The Revolt of the Public" explains the rise of illiberalism (and nihilism) as social media has degraded institutional authority and fostered negation politics. He suggests we need to reform or replace our institutions to be more descriptive and less prescriptive, and to be more frank about uncertainty.
Eg, rather than demanding a COVID shutdown, the FDA, CDC, and other medical institutions would explain their current understanding of the virus and estimate the impact of various interventions. They would regularly update the public as their understanding evolves. They would recognize there are non-medical considerations, such as the economics of a shutdown, and leave it to the public and their elected representatives to determine the course of action.
It seems the primary system is more to blame than an ideology. America is as small-l liberal as ever. But creating bureaucracies of unelected experts to call more of the shots and low turnout elections to determine party nominees (like Trump) means taking away power from the median voter. The median voter hasn't changed, but what he is allowed to determine for himself as a citizen has significantly narrowed.
I think this is a failure to hold the voters accountable. They're the problem. You can't win a primary without people voting for you, no matter how many dynamics are in place that nudge people away from participation in primaries.
People only make it through primaries if they win more votes than their opponents. If people want different results in primaries, they need to spend the money and manpower to recruit better candidates in strong partisan districts and turn out voters to vote for those better candidates.
One of the stupidest things about federal politics is how everyone spends all their time and money on battleground races for the general election. There are dozens of primary races that could shape the character of both parties if motivated donors put their money into them.
Well right, motivated donors pour money into candidates who are *further* from the median voter and the parties pour money into ratf--king their opponents with candidates even further from the median voter. But I agree juicing turnout is important, if we could get more voters overall participating, we would generally improve the quality of candidates nominated by both parties.
The one irony is Trump, of course; he did better with both very right-wing and very moderate voters in the 2016 primary. He got a higher share in open primary states. I suspect that's just marginal; if you increased the margin of voters participating further, it would go down, it's just the people who were immediately on the fence to turnout GOP were uniquely well-targeted by Trump.
Sorry for the rant, it's just so frustrating to watch such low-hanging fruit (primaries are way cheaper than general election races, which are basically unwinnable for one party or the other in a bunch of states) remain unpicked as crazier and crazier people end up in DC.
re: Trump, I think that people still don't understand/aren't willing to admit the boost he got from being a known celebrity figure who continually dabbled in political antics for over 40 years, and having 15 seasons of a hit national TV show that positioned him as the embodiment of masculine executive authority, and having his name be synonymous with "flashy luxury" in pop culture. You can't buy that kind of juice. It explains so much about his weird appeal.
I agree, basically every single person in America was aware that this guy was running in a GOP presidential primary all the way back in the fall of 2015; that is extremely weird!
After work I'm going to have to swallow my pride and vote blue for the Arlington county board since I want the missing middle plan and or similar up-zoning to go through. It's so annoying this local GOP guy is right on crime but wrong on the up-zoning plan. Fortunately, the equilibrium on policing is way more reasonable here than in DC. Gonna vote GOP for state senate race, but that guy has no chance here sadly.
Only one race for me to vote on today, but it's for mayor!
I wish I could vote for some councilors as well, but the overlords in the state legislature forced upon us evil geographic single member districts instead. What's ironic is that even though they're butthurt about Boise going what they think is way too universally left wing, if they instead forced upon us proportional representation there would almost certainly be at least one right wing councilor elected.
We have the worst of both worlds... we have a 15-member council with 5 at-large members that basically ensure the majority party gets to hold a 5-seat majority at all times. It's like taking everything bad about winner-take-all single-seats and making it even worse.
And I say that as someone ostensibly aligned with the majority party, the Democrats. The problem is that our Dems don't have any real accountability, so they just chase the Boomer/Xer zeitgeist fighting their own little culture war while everyone else just kind of gets screwed. It's quite absurd.
It was a tough one this year though...so many local positions that I felt a little ill-informed on, even after browsing the pamphlet with the candidate statements. Non-partisan positions are tough all right.
Yeah, what’s always tough for me every year is knowing that my municipal elections are basically a rubber stamp for a political machine whose values I generally share but goes about them in the most corrupt ways possible.
A major constraint on the left is internal migration. People are moving away from big blue cities and towards red or purple suburbs. They might spout leftist ideology in their 20s and early 30s, but once their children reach school age, it’s better to chose a school system run by chamber of commerce Republicans than teachers unions.
I never thought I would like the leafy suburbs so much. I moved during the pandemic mainly because my wife switched jobs after Delta laid off all its contractors. I’m so glad we did. I am far more comfortable socially and physically living in a precinct that Trump won by 18 points than one Obama won by 90 points. It disgusts me that so many of my neighbors support a man who incited a mob to storm the Capitol after he lost an election. Yet they are nice people and good neighbors, so much so that these days I only go to Atlanta for court.
A lot of the sort of circumstantial advantages of cities become irrelevant for most people once they have little kids. "Are there any hot concert venues in the suburbs?" Who gives a shit, I've been to like one concert in the past five years. "But they're not walkable, you can't just spontaneously pop down to the Zagat-rated corner bistro for an early dinner." I never just pop down to anywhere anymore; it's called date night, the sitter is lined up weeks in advance, and at that point you just drive to wherever, within reason.
Some people are still going to like living in cities regardless. But stripping away all those amenities really forces you to confront the question of which kind of built environment makes you more comfortable in and of itself. Unsurprisingly, for a lot of people the answer turns out to be one with big yards and big trees.
In which I yet again comment on how terribly sad I find this middle class American idea that “”small children and cities don’t mix.”
I was born in Europe, where people *routinely* raise young children in cities and it works and it’s perfectly fine. Nobody is like, “oh noes, how can you subject your child to this, don’t you want to move to a nice suburb?!?”
Personally, I loved living in Boston with my young son ( we had to move away for work, sadly). We could walk to his elementary school, we would take public transit to the Museum of Science, it was great! And we had one car in our household, mostly used for weekend trips to New Hampshire and such.
This is why we liberals ought to push for more order and safety in cities: so that families with children will be willing to live there.
I'm not convinced it's as much order and safety as it is room and space. My kids are now in their 20s, but when they were little I could go outside and play with them, but mostly I just kicked them outside into our fenced suburban yard when they were young --- sandbox, trees, swing set and eventually pool all there. As they got older they could leave the yard and go play in the neighbors yard, although sadly not as often as they should have because kids, mostly the neighbors' not mine, became over scheduled. We had friends with same age kids living in the city, the neighborhood was at least as safe as ours, but for their kids to get outside was an all hands adventure and three block walk to the nearest park.
What if American cities had more quad buildings? I don’t know the right term for it in English. That’s what many of us lived in back in Europe.
A quad building is four apartment buildings arranged around a central open space where children can play. You kick your kids out of the apartment/condo and they play in the shared open space with your neighbors’ kids, and you can sit on the balcony and sip your tea and keep an eye on them. It works great!
I've lived in those kinds of buildings in Berlin and in Rome. They're nice and do have the advantages you describe. But I they don't quite have the feeling of being *outside* that I suspect feels critical to a lot of American suburbanites. You can't rake the leaves into a giant pile and jump in it. You don't find that a rabbit's made a burrow in spring and had babies in it, or get to watch a hawk try to swoop at them.
And as far as other kids, I gather you're sort of stuck with whomever happens to be living in the building at the time. You can't just walk down the street to wherever your favorite age-mates are and ride bikes together around their cul-de-sac.
I suspect, but can't say definitively that today most European cities and their suburbs and most American cities and their suburbs are just so different in design, usage, and cultural perception that they are not going to merge into mirror images of each other in any foreseeable future.
Why do you think Europeans didn't and don't migrate out to the suburbs? Why does the lore of bigger yards and bigger houses not call out to the European middle and upper middle class in the same way?
Two words: expensive gasoline. For all that American b*tch about expensive gasoline, it’s vastly cheaper here than in Europe, and that enables big sprawling suburbs.
Guilty as charged. Though I can't agree enough with ML's post in this thread explaining that it's not so much "order and safety as it is room and space."
I suspect a lot of it also comes back to the stickiness of expectations based on one's own childhood memories. I grew up not even in the suburbs but in rural farm country. And while I've had many happy years living in cities as an adult, I still can't really wrap my head around the idea of what it'd be like to be a kid there. I think parents have a mostly salutary bias toward wanting to give their kids the same kinds of experiences they remember from growing up, which leads them to seek out physical spaces that at least make those experiences possible.
Are your kids very little? Because I raised my kids in a small city and once they get to about age 10 or 11, it is SO much easier than living in the suburbs. They can go to many places by themselves - school, library, stores, fast food less than 10 minute walk away. They can take public transit to most school, extracurricular activities, and friends' houses. When I hear the stories about pick up lines at schools and being a "taxi" for kids' activities, it sounds like a drag. Also, around mid-elementary or so, the kids start to like trying different restaurants, going to some cultural events like outdoor concerts, art exhibits, etc. , and just being able to walk or take a short bus ride to them means that the family is more likely to take advantage than if they had to drive 30 minutes, find a parking space, etc.
And now that my kids are mostly off at college, I don't have the same worries as other parents. They learned how to handle themselves when they still had me by their side, they know what/who to avoid and what warning signs are, and they aren't freaked out getting slapped by an obviously unstable person in a fast food restaurant - something that happened recently to my kid at college in Chicago - while everyone else sees it as a sign of the coming apocalypse. (I'm not saying that this sort of thing SHOULD happen or to be nonchalant about it, but also not to be afraid to go outside or to do anything when such things do happen.)
I know I am an outlier among people in the US, but I think raising your kids in a city is extremely positive.
Fair enough, and a genuine thanks for the countervailing perspective. My kids are indeed relatively little, though not so little that the factors you're describing don't come into play.
The post you're directly replying to was about parents' own adult preferences for cities becoming weaker after the changes to their schedule and style of social interaction that come with having kids. But I've definitely come down on the "suburbs good for kids themselves" side of things in other posts in this thread.
I do think a lot of it comes down to priors set by your own experiences as a kid. I hear you about kids taking the bus to a show or whatever, and that sounds great. But my own memories of being 16 revolve around getting a car and joyriding like idiots with my friends. I'd be pretty hard put to defend the latter on the merits, but it's what I know and it still feels to me like a key step to adulthood in some ineffable way.
Ha, that's a good point. It's all what you are used to. My kids say they don't want to live someplace where they have to have a car because it burns up so much money. As someone who will likely go car shopping very soon because the repairs have become too frequent and expensive, I currently think they have a point. Although I live in the city, I work in the suburbs. I can and do sometimes take public transit there, but it is a long and convoluted route, which is probably why I see way fewer kids on those buses than on the ones I see in town.
most of my neighbors would recoil at the thought of a 10 year old riding public transit on his own. i’m a badass for thinking my 9 year old is capable enough to bike 3/4 of a mile to his grandparents house without being helicoptered
It's how they have to get to school starting in 6th grade, so it's more normalized around here. And you raise a good point - when everyone is doing it as part of school, parents start to accept it as a rite of passage.
For me personally, one of the advantages of a city (aside from environmental benefits and clustering effects for professional jobs) is not the proximity of hot bistros or concert venues; it's the sensation of walking down a street with lots of pedestrians and shops and cafes - it's lively and feels like civilization. In contrast, suburbs feel so dead. There's no life, no activity, everyone is hidden in their houses or their cars. That's my personal feeling, YMMV.
The biggest disadvantage of a city (for me personally) is the presence of too many other people.
It just seems miserable and exhausting to have so many potential interactions if you step out of your front door.
And then to later the uncertainty and chaos over *who* you will be interacting with from a cosmopolitan or (especially) homelessness/public safety standpoint...
For me it's the opposite, when the kids are in a good mood it's awesome to be able to spontaneously decide to hit up the brewery/pizzeria at 4:00 pm, the Parents Hour, when all the moms and dads are enjoying two light beers before walking the kids back home when the twentysomethings show up.
I absolutely detest the suburbs and suburban living on a personal level, but I understand why the school situation and safety draw people in who might otherwise prefer urban life.
Which sucks, because geographic manipulation/segregation is a very bad thing for society overall. "Sorry, poors, you have to deal with egregious public disorder, I'm fine because I have my subdivision house and Tesla." Talk about "fuck you, I've got mine!"
Every day I see another confirmation of my prior that New York suffers less from public disorder than West Coast cities because the upper-middle class and above aren't totally insulated from reality.
I mean....that's quite extreme of a swing, though, from 90 to 18. I don't wanna live anywhere that is that far in either direction (the 90). Where I work is R+13 and where I live is D+12, and the R+13 area is much more obnoxious about culture was issues.
I don’t think libertarianism contributes much to the debate that a sensible moderate Republican couldn’t. I just get frustrated with libertarian intellectuals because it always comes back to the heroin at 7-11 stuff and I ain’t got time for that.
Libertarianism is just a political religion of selfishness that pretends anarchy is actually a species of socialism.
An argument I've heard is that you should always want a libertarian on the team, but never want them to be in charge. It's good to have someone who asks, should we even be doing this? It's helpful to have people who are good at spotting potential problems before you start.
Another thing about libertarians is they tend to punch above their weight since they're willing to work with anybody. They'll team up with left wing people to argue for open borders or right wing people for no gun control.
Yeah but I find many moderate republicans (as long as they are not captured by the religious right) hold the same good ideas about sensible deregulation and individual liberty that libertarians have without all the "I should be able to buy an ICBM" stuff.
In my experience, the thing that makes moderate Republicans more moderate is their libertarian leanings. It's the facet that pulls the party away from traditionalist and reactionary forms of conservatism.
Libertarianism suffers from the fact that it practices what it preaches and as such has zero message discipline. Thus the legacy media as well as the "Fox media," which are both totally unsympathetic to it, always have a buffoon to parade in front of the masses.
I agree that libertarianism, taken to its ideological culmination, produces terrible policy, but so do most other ideologies, which is why taking ideology too seriously is bad. The best selling point of libertarianism is simple, though: nobody has ever lined up families in front of ditches in the name of individualism.
This is why the only political axis I would claim to be at an extreme of is the individualism-pragmatism vs. collectivism-utopianism axis, pretty much entirely for the reason that politicide and genocide are invariably the results of the latter.
It's also really easy to come up with a totally new collectivist ideology and get people to kill for their utopia in great numbers and with horrible cruelty, ex. Hutu Power (which is an ideology, not a group).
"The best selling point of libertarianism is simple, though: nobody has ever lined up families in front of ditches in the name of individualism."
Not so obvious to me that this is true. If you look at the British casus belli for the Boer War -- infamous for the sadistic intensity of its treatment of noncombatants -- it looks a lot like straight up libertarianism: open borders, abolition of government monopolies and restrictive licensing schemes, etc. The British Empire inflicted a fair amount of collateral damage on civilian populations fighting wars in the name of free trade.
You can no-true-Scotsman all of that by saying *real* libertarians wouldn't have resorted to state action, or try to claim that the overt justifications were pretexts for "nationalism" or something, but I think both arguments prove too much. I'd take that history more as evidence for your first point, that like anything else "libertarianism, taken to its ideological culmination, produces terrible policy."
I don't think it's a no true Scotsman argument to argue that the British Empire was not libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term, let alone to argue that it treated the Boers as individuals.
However, actions against foreign enemies are the weakness of an individualist setup because there is always a collective friend and a collective foe in such cases. I should have clarified that I was talking about situations where a government commits atrocities against populations already under its control (excluding separatist regions by definition), e. g. the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, Armenian genocide, all the Communist politicides, the genocidal purges of Suharto, et cetera.
The British Empire, to the best of my limited historical understanding, pursued a consistent policy of pushing the status quo wherever its reach extended in the direction of more free trade/free markets/open borders. It was directionally oriented, to the extent any polity can be across a wide range of geopolitical circumstances and a long period of time, toward ideological commitments that are fundamental to modern libertarianism.
Libertarianism, like most pure ideologies, have a five minute problem. In that, yes, their arguments sound great, until you get five minutes in, and they're talking about seat belt laws or age of consent. Like Communism, it's a pretty good ideology for a group of a couple of hundred secluded people, not a modern nation state.
Libertarianism, just like any other top level ideology, is so broad and diverse with thoughts that it's difficult to just completely disregard it. Like others, it has some good ideas and some bad ideas, and I'm glad that Matt has been opening to learning about it and incorporating ideas within it that he thinks are good.
To me, libertarianism is like communism. Sure, it’s interesting as an intellectual exercise but it’s dangerous as an idea for government. I want those people far away from the levers of power.
I volunteered for the Ron Paul campaign back in 2008. I was a libertarian for a little under a decade. It was that experience that soured me on libertarianism.
Libertarianism gets the focus on individual liberty right, and so very many things about human beings and culture wrong. Coming from someone who worked on the Ron Paul campaign in 2008, just like you, being with libertarians for a decade plus soured me on the prospects for it working as a governing philosophy for a huge country.
Although tbh it would be better if heroin were sold at 7/11 with age and quality of product restrictions than having it sold by street dealers and international cartels under the total lack of regulation that is prohibition 🤷♂️ I'm not sure why that's such a laugh line.
Now consensual cannibalism/slavery, that is where libertarianism falls apart for me...
I've never considered myself a libertarian even when agreeing with some common libertarian planks, so I almost feel I'm in an inverted position to you. I see Coffin just posted so maybe he has better insight.
So there is a little tangent in here I think is worth interrogating. Matt seems to think, here and on twitter, that a shift in Democrat identification from "moderate" to "liberal" is leftward movement in the electorate... which I think is dubious. The articles he is responding to here are specifically to the rise of the illiberal left. "Liberal" is a dirty word on the left. Democrats who are embracing liberalism are specifically rejecting the leftward movement of the coalition. The same shit is happening on the right. I'm a libertarian who's far more likely to identify as "liberal" these days than any time before, because the Mises Caucus "Libertarian" party assholes are illiberal Trumpist shills.. The bipartisan shift from moderation to liberalism is people across the spectrum rejecting the broad populist/identitarian turn in our national politics, not at all a shift left.
I really wish we were like most of the rest of the world in using liberal as something that is completely distinct from "being more left wing". If we had that here, I might be willing to say, similar to you, that I agree with quite many liberal ideas.
When you start to explain this distinction to a normal person you immediately sound like a bit of weirdo, but it's so difficult to get into the weeds on a lot of topics without differentiating between the two.
Yeah--normal American. My understanding is that other countries tend to use the old timey definition, where "as liberal as possible" would be something like libertarianism rather than communism.
It's funny, it's a mirror of the posture that people like Phil Ochs and other "movement" people took in the 60s - see "Love me I'm a Liberal" for an example. So much of the illiberalism today is an exact mirror image from the "revolutionary" movements of the 60s and 70s.
And of course on the right we have Patrick Deneen et al fighting against liberalism as well.
The liberal project of treating every person as an individual with rights rather than an avatar of some group or social class is just too much to bear for a lot of people, I guess.
I'd love to see a licensing regime that gives a period of exclusivity tied to actual development costs - for some medications it might be as short at 5 years, for others, as much as 30 - those drugs for orphan illnesses would benefit from a longer period of monopoly.
I think patents in general are ill fitting for medication and software.
I have a general idea we need IP law reform however, of which patents and copyright are tied up in that.
Europe isn't paying more for drugs in response to Medicare's cuts, so big pharma revenue is decreasing. If you don't believe lower revenues will lead to less R&D you are naive.
Thanks for bringing this up. We need to discourage politicians from slashing Medicare's most cost-effective features while mindlessly expanding services reimbursed that do far less than drug research to extend human flourishing per dollar and bloat spending. Young Americans deserve a lot better than less drug R&D and less future income.
FWIW, this is a bit of a special case* because the drug is already approved for one indication and the clock before price controls can kick in is already ticking. But it also shows they apparently didn't consider it when writing the law.
Crooked Media's "do-something progressivism" is something I think the Slow Boring community should really be aware of. They are always taking and encouraging action whether that's voting, running for office, campaigning, organising or donating, and they consistently discourage "shouting into the void" whether on social media or anonymously to journalists. Pod Save America I think gets a couple million listeners a week and they have a load of other podcasts as well now.
This article and comments section is yet another episode of "Slow Boring wants progressives to be more constructive", and while the criticisms are valid, there are progressives doing the right thing and I think that should be recognised. "Not all leftists" take things too far.
I haven't listened to them in a while, but one thing I always enjoyed about Crooked stuff is that they are always pushing people to action, and the hosts themselves will go to battleground races and canvas, make calls, etc.
The only thing I'd add to this terrific column is how, by contrast, untethered the Right generally has become from any "take accountability" of its own. Even by the standards of the 2000s, or certainly of the 90s/80s, today's MAGA-fied Right really has descended further into nihilism, nonsense and inconsistency. So while the educated liberal set (overrepresented in subscribers here) tend to bemoan the excesses of the Left, this is partly simply because absolutely no one expects the Right to meet the same standards, because it sets none for itself. We are having this (healthy) conversation at all. The other guys do not.
This is objectively true, but it also has to do with the fact that bad lefty ideas have a more concrete impact on mine (and I'm guessing a lot of SB subscribers) day-to-day lives than Republican ideas due to affluent liberal clustering in deep blue cities and states.
Obviously this changes if Trump wins a second term, but as of now with Biden as President, the impact of the far right is fairly negligible on my daily life. On the other hand, the insane "progressive" anti-rule of law ethos has made my quality of life as a resident of Washington DC materially much worse.
Similar to Matt's above point about how people care about climate change but more stridently care about low energy prices, I'm concerned about the spectre of Trump 2.0, but the day-to-day impact of bad leftwing policies is a more tangible threat at this moment.
Also helps that if you live in a blue city in a blue state, you are especially insulated from SCOTUS and district court decisions. Like, I truly think the 5th circuit is full of truly genuine lunatics and have rulings that have terrible negative impact on millions of people who live in the south. Those rulings affect me not at all living in NYC (and perhaps more importantly for national discourse, don’t directly effect national reporters who live in NYC).
I’ve remarked many times why I think GOP over-performed most in NYC metro over any other part of the country. One of those reasons is almost certainly that abortion wasn’t on the ballot in NY like it was in many other states. I think I can say in pretty good confidence that NYC didn’t suddenly shift to the right of Kansas when it comes to abortion rights.
Yeah, the GOP overachieved in places where there's no chance an anti-choice extremist or somebody who wanted to overturn the election would be in charge, so it's safe for the small business owner in Queens to vote for the local Republican. Also, the NY Democratic Party is so bad, I kind of understand why so many NY leftists are actually just anti-Democratic Party.
I'm a big believer that GOP basically owes its House majority to 1) New York Post 2) Mayor Adams practically repeating the most absurd GOP talking points 3) national media being based in NYC and overhyping any and all "NYC crime is out of control" story. I've litigated in this past and just want to state again that crime really did increase in NYC like it did everywhere and I did very much notice.
But news coverage being what it is, you'd think NYC had reverted back to 1977 or something. It was absurd how over the top it was with New York Post front and center (you can't walk into a 7/11 without at least seeing NYPost headlines).
All a big run up to a data point that I've brought up multiple times before but bears repeating as it is absolutely fascinating. The one district in PA where GOP overpeformed is this PA district in the NYC media market. And there is pretty decent evidence that exposure to NYC media shifted 2022 voting significantly rightward. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/the-nyc-media-might-have-cost-democrats-the-house.html
Thanks for the link. Also, NYC - not New York State - was still safer than 30 states based on the 2021 per capita murder rate.
Maybe but don't forget the local Republican in Queens is George Santos.
Door knocking in Orange County (CA) last year, this is 100% the case. I spoke with MULTIPLE swing voters who scoffed at the pitch that Michelle Steel was anti-choice; I was point blank told that there was zero chance of that affecting their families in California and it was flat out disrespectful of Democrats to push that narrative here. (Obviously there's major flaws in that logic, but that's how folks were voting). She was reelected in a Biden district and Rs turned back the tide in OC after decades of Democratic progress.
Honest question: can you give a few examples of how bad left ideas have had a concrete impact on your life? I am not saying you're wrong; I'm generally curious.
I thought about that for my own life and have trouble coming up with examples. The city (of LA, where I live) is going to convert a parking lot a few doors down from me into a bridge housing for the homeless and that will definitely impact my life (and, crassly, my property value) but it's the #1 issue facing LA, I voted for increased taxes for such housing, and the housing has to go somewhere. I can't say I'm wild about it, but I also can't say this is an example of lefty politics being out of control, despite what my enraged neighbors say.
Carjacking is up roughly 600% in DC, which is likely thanks in large part to the city council banning police pursuits. People focus on our surging murder rate, but for average citizens the real threat is being carjacked, which we're currently on pace to have 1,000+ of this year. Most are committed by juveniles who even when they're caught are not held, and immediately go back to committing more carjackings.
The city judiciary, which are federal judges but come from a list recommended by the city, does not believe in holding people accountable for violent crimes. Two guys had a shootout in the alley behind my house. One guy got no jailtime, the other guy got 12 months. Not years, months. We have small kids, I had to run into their room and double check them to make sure they hadn't taken a stray.
Thanks to the city ending their drug-free anti loitering zones, the area immediately in front of where my kid takes Karate is an open air drug market with both sellers and addicts loitering. I don't know whether its Fentanyl or PCP, but whatever it is, on more than one occasian we've seen partially or fully nude addicts walking or writhing around on the sidewalk. Not great for a nine year old to have to deal with.
Every single person I know in the city who owns a Kia or Hyundai has either had their car stolen, or attempted to be stolen. No accountability for the perpetrators, and again they won't chase them when they're eventually used in robbery sprees. Our middle school where my kids will matriculate had multiple students robbed at gun point by kids in a stolen hyundai recently. Our friends whose kids used to walk to school now get driven.
They decriminalized fare evasion on the train and bus. Consequently, no one pays for the bus anymore. The bus that goes to my kids' school had an 8 year old get shot this year when a fare jumped got into a fight with someone on the bus. We drive the kids instead.
They also allow people with multiple traffic tickets, including reckless driving, renew their licenses out of "equity concerns". Road deaths are at a 10 year high. Walking is extremely hazardous because people blow through stop signs and red lights with zero consequence.
There are other, non-crime ones, but this list hits the issues that really make life less enjoyable here.
Sort of a reminder that if there is a place in America that is most afflicted by bad far left policy; DC might be top of the list. Like I don’t thinks a mistake that DC is one of the few major cities in America where crime has continued to rise. Most places in the country have thankfully seen pretty big crime drops.
Curious if you agree or not but I don’t think it’s an accident that DC has one of the highest rates of WFH in 2023.
Despite the high % of WFH, downtown DC feels busy during the day. My trains downtown are full in the morning, I have to wait in line to get a sandwich at Bub and Pops, happy hours still seem busy. It's when the sun goes down that downtown starts to feel significantly different from pre-COVID.
For whatever it's worth, while DC's lefty electeds have been a major source of the issues, they're not the only source. DC is uniquely disadvantaged by its status as a federal district, with multiple contributing factors. I like to use the metaphor that our crime crisis is akin to when a modern airliner crashes. It's not just one point of failure, there are multiple redundancies that failed that got us here, some under the control of the local government, some not. To wit:
Our version of a local district attorney is an unelected federal prosecutor who has zero accountability to the local government. Turns out his office has declined to prosecute 67% of arrests and 50% of felony arrests over the last few years. This has been a major source of continued crime since even if you're arrested, chances are you won't face jailtime.
Related, in the convictions his office DOES get, they love pleading down even slam dunk cases that minimize or eliminate jail time. Something like 20% of armed robbery subjects arrested are charged and convicted of armed robbery. Often its plead down and they're back at it immediately.
Congressional meddling also plays a part. The city legalized weed possession but Congress explicitly bars its sale by licensed stores. So we have these gray area stores that sell weed that aren't regulated, don't pay taxes, and aren't shut down by the city. Then you get groups of dudes loitering around them selling and smoking weed on the sidewalk which occasionally get robbed at gunpoint for the all-cash sales and all their inventory. A comprehensive failure all around.
DC doesn't have a sheriffs office, so our warrants are enforced by federal US Marshalls who are unaccountable and opaque in their processes to the city. What we do know is that they don't enforce most warrants, probation violations, or people non-compliant with house arrest and/or GPS monitoring. Criminals know it too, and continue to commit crimes while under these restrictions because there will be no follow up or repercussions.
Oh don't have to convince me that DC's unique government is a BIG part of this and has been for decades/generations. My biases probably showing for sure, but so much of this is result of Congress having too much power and GOP having very specific incentives to not solve this bureaucratic nightmare.
Anecdote that's not really partisan to prove my point. This article is from 1998 and is about a jumper on the Woodrow Wilson bridge. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/11/05/jumper-on-wilson-bridge-throws-area-into-gridlock/bbc9ad66-0478-437f-8533-c5d363c26bf7/
The article makes a big point about this whole situation taking 5 hour to resolve and how a number of commuters were angry at how long it all took. Had a friend of mine in college who told me some more of the backstory of why this all occurred the way it did. Apparently what this article is leaving out is that it wasn't just Alexandria and DC police who showed up. It was VA state troopers, Maryland state troopers but probably most confusing at all is the bridge is close enough to various Federal agencies that their own police/security showed up as well. Like a true nightmare "who has jurisdiction" scenario which was apparently a huge part of the reason why this took so long to resolve and a perfect encapsulation of the challenges DC governance faces.
You didn’t ask me but I definitely think so!
America and Australia are super similar in many regards, but I will never understand how American’s tolerate this kind of crime and lunacy in their cities. It is truly inconceivable to imagine anything near this happening in Aus.
I think that the impact of higher crime rates is generally understated. America has about 9x the intentional homicide rate of Australia, but both countries have about the same number of police officers per capita. American police officers are simply stretched further, so they triage to the most serious crimes and a lot of other stuff is neglected.
Doesn't that raise the question of why there is more crime? I was under the impression US police departments were understaffed after the Summer of Love etc. But if Aus is making do with the same number...
Americans live in the shadow of the moral abomination of slavery the way Germans live in the shadow of the Holocaust. Incarceration for this type of behavior reproduced chattel slavery on an only marginally smaller scale, with something like one in three Black men doing a stint behind bars at some point in his life. Urban liberals once made aware of this weren’t going to keep voting for it to be done in their name.
I bet George Santos jumps over turnstiles too.
DC’s crime problems are the result of the DC city council enacting a hiring freeze on police in 2020 when they could enact a “defund” agenda. All those retirements did not get backfilled. Then the crime lab lost accreditation. And then the DC city council wanted to make a bunch of misdemeanor offenses require trials by jury.
He and Lauren Boebert are the BEST GOP congresscritters ever!
That's really bad
I don’t want to go into a whole Covid debate again but the lefty embrace of Covid maximalism had a definite negative impact on aspects of my life. And I second the comments re DC’s car jacking problem.
I have a few…just off the top of my head I had to move out of the county I was in at least partially because taxes had gotten to be the second worst in the nation behind NYC, however the they kicked in at about $125k (250 for a couple), I also had to sell a property I was going to use as a rental to fund my wife’s retirement (it was a small property with two houses at I had a3% mortgage) because a combination of anti eviction policies and rent increase caps made it too risky, I was living in Portland and they completely destroyed the city, turning it from a great place to a complete dumb (the other part of the reason I left) and more recently I had to dial up my side hustle due to inflation. While I think it’s fair to argue who’s fault inflation is overall I am sure Team Transitory slowed the response making it worse.
I don’t think this is just a Democrat issue and Republicans are attacking
our rights in other equally bad ways. That said there is a reason many left leaning but not leftist people are fleeing to more conservative locations. Where I live is adjacent to a moderately liberal (I just call sane) city but you still see bumper stickers reminding us transplants not to vote for the policies that drove us here.
To the extent that bad left ideas increase rent (CEQA making it harder to build housing fits the "good left intent gone too far" description Matt points to), that affects most everyone in a major city. Hence the YIMBY movement.
Education is also a hot topic. CA's new math guidelines discourage tracking and taking Algebra before the 9th grade and deemphasizes AP Calculus in the interest of equity. Which, if you had a kid who's really good at math, is a negative.
Have you had to take a train somewhere in the past three to five years?
If you're taking the DC Metro, you have to actively search out the types of problems seen on the subways in California. There are definitely problems (infrequent service, fare jumpers, service interruptions), but I haven't seen the types of anti-social behavior on the DC Metro post-Covid that I've seen in San Francisco. That's a bit California-specific.
You mean LA Metro? Sure, I take it all the time. Some routes are kinda grotty with some sad cases on them and others are OK. Nothing has stopped me personally from using the trains.
A recent LA Times article may be of interest: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-11-03/los-angeles-public-transportation-metro-bus-train
(If you can't get past the paywall, it's by a German transportation expert reporting on how he and various European colleagues were in LA for a week and just used Metro and found to their surprise that it was totally fine.)
I'm happy you're having a good experience.
Thank you!
This is just myopia. The line from progressive ideas on public safety to our wellbeing is very clear, but its magnitude is much smaller than the huge negative impacts to us of conservative tax cuts for the rich, failure to support child tax credit, impeding infra and green tech funding, etc etc etc
Thought exercise - how would your life change if Trump was president again? I lived in Austin for both Trump and Biden's presidencies. I would say the Trump administration had zero material impact on my life despite my being an Indian-American woman (the assumption being that minorities will suffer under Trump). The progressive city government and council has had a far more material impact (negative, because crime has increased and there are homeless people in an encampment down the street) on my life than the Trump administration had, unless you want to count tax cuts. I ask this because people in my peer group, specifically women, speak in apocalyptic tones about the previous administration and hyperbolically, in my opinion, about the possibility of another. That is not to say I'm denying the possibility that Trump himself would have a sizable negative impact on someone's life, but our daily lives certainly seem more at the whims of our city and state governments than the federal. I suppose if I had qualified for student loan forgiveness or the covid relief checks, Biden may have had a material impact. Otherwise.....negligible.
I'm curious if someone here can point to sizable negative impacts that came directly from the federal government during the Trump administration (not mediated by state or local government).
I suppose it depends on how direct you want to attribute thing to either the federal government or Trump himself, but a couple of examples:
1. My wife and I decided to have another kid. She had several miscarriages in the past. Due to post-Dobbs landscape, we basically considered Republican led states to be no-go zones for her pregnancy in case she miscarried and needed a D&C.
2. As mentioned above, we live in DC, so the post-Floyd riots where Trump sent in the feds to crack skulls had a reverberating effect on the city, all of it negative. In the post-crackdown chaos, people looted our local Walgreens, which shut down for months to fix, briefly re-opened, and then closed permanently. It's a Family Dollar now. How much blame directly you want to assign to Trump may vary, but it sucks nonetheless.
3. January 6th was not the most fun day we've ever had. The city actually set a curfew that day as things got out of hand, so I had to rush home from work in the middle of the afternoon. We didn't have any groceries in the house, so I had to stop and try to buy in case things got worse and we were stuck at home for days. Things receded obviously but there was a lot of anxiety that afternoon because none of us knew how bad things could potentially escalate, and how it would affect us.
4. There's a shitty motel near my house, and its used with some frequency by people visiting the J6 "political prisoners" at the DC Jail. They park their shitbox vans out front with their insane MAGA/Qanon billboards on it, which I have to see frequently when I drive by. Not an existential threat, but still tangibly annoying.
I mean, the reality, is as a middle-class-ish white guy in a blue state, life doesn't actually change that much if Biden or Trump is in charge, but I have friends, family, co-workers, and such, whose lives will be demonstrably worse if Republican's are in charge, and that matters to more more than some annoying homeless people on the bus to work.
But, I'm a terrible left-wing extremist according some in this comment section (despite most of what I do on another message board is talk down people who truly despise the Democrat's).
Was here to say something like this. I’m reading this post and my first thought is “you know there is a whole other political party and movement that’s a factor in what you’re describing here?” I think the flaw in Matt’s piece is he chose a bad example in trying to make the point he was trying to make with offshore wind farms. Another case where talking about “blue state” and “red state” is obscures rather than elucidates. A huge portion of the pushback against coastal wind farms is coming from wealthy centrists or right wingers who have houses on the shore.
I’m sorry, if you think Jeff Van Drew is cheering cancellation of offshore wind farms because he’s trying to cater to the far left than I have a bridge to sell you. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4287900-donald-trump-republicans-cheer-cancellation-new-jersey-offshore-wind-projects/amp/
I actually think Matt makes a decent point that due to the general shift to the left over the last 25 years, the fringe left is a) is slightly larger than it used to be and b) in particular industries like higher Ed or non-profit world can exert real influence in a way they couldn’t 25 years ago. But I think because this group is one who goes after people like Matt and Josh on Twitter the most this has led both to overemphasize far left excess and over emphasize just how big and powerful this faction of people really is.
This is why I made sure to make a comparison with conspiratorial corners of the right. Progressives have a Q-like propensity to fit the world into their ideological Procrustean bed, which is to say they ignore inconvenient facts and invent convenient ones. They just put it in college-educated language, whereas the Q types say it in the language of the Wal-Mart-shopping plebs that they generally are.
And the fact that Trump is the most prominent politician to talk like he didn't go to college is sufficient to get a lot of people from the appropriate demographic really emotionally on board with him. Turns out that works the other way around too.
Edit to clarify: I used "progressives" when I meant "wokies", the average In This House We Believe sign-putter-upper isn't as nutty as the average Q acolyte.
The most pernicious idea out there is that there is no truth or objective reality. This manifests itself in different ways on the right and left but it's the same factor animating both MAGA conservatism and illiberal leftism (or 'woke' or whatever).
I think the Left and Right extremes are pretty similar. The difference which we must always keep in mind is that the Right extremes have infected the highest reaches of power in the Republican party in a way that is totally not matched with the Democrats.
Also the right extreme has gotten to the point where it's literally willing to dismantle democracy to gain/maintain power. As annoying as the left extreme can be, it isn't there (yet).
Do they actually believe in objective truth, or are “objective truth” just words that they think of as belonging to their team, with no understanding of what it would actually take?
" Progressives have a Q-like propensity to fit the world into their ideological Procrustean bed, which is to say they ignore inconvenient facts and invent convenient ones"
Can you please describe what on the left is as crazy and wildly held as the Q theory on the right? And oh yeah, a theory that is given oxygen by President Biden? This is some Peter Baker level "both siderism" here.
First off, there's nothing about my comment that implies both-sidesism about Biden and Trump.
Second: climate doomerism, gender blank-slateism, Trumputin as already stated, and a lot of denial of basic facts of economics up to and including how supply and demand works. (Go ask a representative sample of progressives if they support making it harder to build luxury apartments in order to make housing cheaper!)
You can't yada yada yada past Trump. Gender blank-slateism? This gallup poll I'm linking to is merely asking whether birth gender should determine sports participation. Something I feel quite certain is not nearly as extreme as arguing there is no gender. https://news.gallup.com/poll/507023/say-birth-gender-dictate-sports-participation.aspx
If you have polling indicating 51% or more Democrats believe there is no gender, by all means share. In the meantime, to get into another nutso conspiracy theory. Check out how many Republicans believe Trump won 2020 election
I'm not sure what you mean by "yada yada past Trump," but I'm not trying to deny that he has a dangerous coterie of unconditional and deluded followers. I'm also not going to engage in a poll-slinging contest, which has only slightly more epistemological value than a literal dick-measuring contest. (Statistical points require statistical reasoning, which, robustly tackled, takes more time than either of us probably have for this comment section.)
My actual both-sides point is that, well, both sides have a politically significant group of people who have motivatedly-reasoned themselves into a worldview that is divorced from reality. It's not that they're symmetric: the D version (true believers in wokeism, which believe it or not do exist) has lots of power in education, unelected governmental positions, legacy media and HR. The R version (Q idiots and company) has a lot of the GOP by the balls because they all go vote in primaries and hold their politicians to ridiculous purity tests, and also once put on an effectively aimless but frightening and bad-precedent-setting display of simian behavior at the US Capitol.
Both are dangerous in their own ways, and discussing who is worse in aggregate usually devolves into partisan mudslinging. Also see my edit above.
”Can you please describe what on the left is as crazy and wildly held as the Q theory on the right?"
"Trump is a Russian agent, and beholden to Putin because of compromat..."
Chait and Maddow getting over their skis with the "Russia stuff" is not the same as saying there is nothing there in regards to Trump and Russia. As always with this stuff, please read David Farenthold's reporting
I'll read Farenthold if you read Eli Lake.
Please point to the time President Biden has given oxygen to this theory. You can't yada yada yada past Trump; he's the former President, clear front runner and has an iron grip on majority of GOP electorate.
No, you're right: Trump is as pure as the driven snow when it comes to loving and giving favor to Putin.
But a paid agent? No, and the few people on the Left who said that engaged in hyperbole. But a useful idiot for the Russians? Oh, most definitely.
So this is not exactly a damning take against anti-Trump folks.
Colin, my man, people here say all manner of things about the political right and sometimes they make my ears burn. Sometimes they make me want to defend my honor, and sometimes that impulse is correct and sometimes it's not. Sometimes they're absolutely spot on and I chime in and say so.
But as to claims about what's happening on the political right, whether something worse is happening on the political left is as a general matter neither here nor there. If somebody says conservatives have a woke-like propensity to pre-divide the world into favored and disfavored groups and interpret particular disputes accordingly before learning the facts, then that's either true or it's not. That the woke-like propensity may be somewhat stronger among the woke themselves is (a) irrelevant and (b) frankly unsurprising.
I say this simply because "you're missing the fact that it's so much worse on the other side" seems to be a really strong part of your brand. And I just find it to be a total argumentative dead end.
I don’t hate Trump because he talks like he never went to college; I hate him because he freaking tried to overturn an election and steal our democracy.
Substance over style, always!
I'm talking about why a lot of plebby people are bizarrely loyal to his person even though he's obviously a crook and a scoundrel who couldn't give a shit for the common man. There are all sorts of rational reasons to dislike the guy, which is why most people do. (He wouldn't have a hope of winning anything without the fact that a lot of people who are in fact put off by his behavior vote for him anyway.)
Agreed, Colin. The Indian Point plant closing seemed to be representing something else. If experts are saying that New York could achieve its decarbonization goals even with its closing and they turn out to be wrong, that's very different from blindly ideological leftists forcing through stupid policies.
The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that for the former, their crazies are like a malignant tumor in one of their appendages and that removing it would be painful but not fatal, whereas the extremists/crazies on the Republican side are like a metastatic set of tumors invading all the vital organs. When the extremist Left features a President and a Speaker the equivalent of Trump and Johnson, then I'll know that the Democratic party is lost.
Without vigilence on our part, that could be coming, though.
It could, but I think Democrats are too disorganized to let the crazies take over and rule. But a big yes on vigilance.
I have been saying the left has been emulating the GOP since the 2016 primary.
This has sort of been my take as well. But I'd say it more like the Far Left is trying to emulate the success of the Tea Party (and later the Alt-Right) of dragging the discourse farther in their direction.
I think one of the interesting differences that they don't recognize is that Leftist movements (speaking very generally) represent coalitions of groups who are left behind in the current system. Whereas Rightist movements represent the status quo. A Tea Party-like movement on the Right can successfully dig their feet in and win elections with their viewpoints because at the end of the day their base will go out and vote no matter what to stop what they view as dangerous change to their way of life. On the other hand, an extremist group on the Left is doomed to failure, as the coalition will never completely agree on what actually constitutes positive change. The more extreme the Left gets, the more people will leave (or be pushed) out of the tent.
In some ways, this is a built-in safety mechanism on the Left. Just look at who wins the Democratic Presidential Primary to see this in action.
What many on the Far Left are ignoring is that the pool of people who identify as conservative is 50% larger than the pool of people that identify as liberal/progressive--the Right starts out with a giant head start. As a result of this imbalance, Republicans just have to win around 1/3 of self-identified moderates to be competitive--Democrats need to win self-identified moderates in a double-digit landslide to be competitive. This fundamental imbalance in basic political self-identification is why the Tea Party or now MAGA can be much more powerful within the Republican Party than the Progressive Caucus--the Republican Party simply needs fewer moderate voters as it is more monolithically conservative than the Democrats are liberal, and so unsurprisingly the Republicans select fewer moderate candidates to represent themselves. Whereas the Dems need a lot of moderate politicians to win in order to get a majority--much to the consternation of leftists that view said moderates as "corporatist sellouts" or whatever.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-steady-conservatives-moderates-tie.aspx
Using NY State's energy fuckup as framing tells me this is more in the vein of needing to make Blue America Great Again, which has been a theme in the past. Blue states need to be growing and prosperous as a precondition for keeping the US on track, and right now they're more often falling prey to the fuckups described here (shutting down nuclear, COVID school closers, bad permitting laws that prevent new housing and energy transmission, etc). Red states are just growing faster than Blue states on balance and are not fucking up in the same way. I think they are about to - the dismantling of their higher Ed systems is a strong indicator of that. But still. Blue states can be doing a lot more .
Exactly
I've been thinking about how this mirrors the Israel/Palestinian conflict. In a certain way, it's better to totally give up any pretense of following rules, norms and reasonableness, it becomes baked in and the focus moves to your opponent who should "know better."
I have heard I think dinesh D’Souza rail against the institutional capture the left has achieved in Hollywood and educational institutions. A lot of denial on that side of the most damaging form of institutional capture an extreme political movement can achieve which is capturing the dominant political party on their side. The right has done this the left is electing moderate presidents.
Dave Graeber wrote a semi famous book called dawn of humanity which I read. It was ok a bit too peppered with political commentary but I liked the word he used a lot: schismognesis. This idea of defining oneself to differentiate against someone or something else. Siblings do this a lot but he was referring to societies and groups. I really think the far left and far right are drifting further in each direction bc they define themselves as the total opposite of what the other guy is. I’m not sure how prevalent this is since I am just way more exposed to the worst and most extreme ideas in either direction than almost anyone in history has ever been before.
I agree. I have always identified as a liberal and progressive. I am a big fan of scandi style democratic socialism. I am a Quaker and, thus, a pacifist and have worked and volunteers in the areas of LGBTQ rights and social equity since I was young in part because I am the third generation in my family to do so and it is an inherent part of my identity. But I am definitely seen my tribe take some seemingly irrational stances in the last 8 years and in ways it does seem like the motivation is to define themselves in opposition to Trump by holding the mirror opposite views of this supporters. I can emotionally sympathize. I can see the deep emotional appeal in looking at the guys hold tiki torches in Charlottesville and thinking "Yep, whatever that guy thinks I am going to think the exact opposite." But the danger there is the the more extreme and whacky that guys goes the more danger there is that the mirror opposite is going also be a bit deranged especially if that guys isn't particularly committed to being morally or ideologically consistent. The fact that Trump people thought "masks give you Covid and Covid isn't a big deal anyway because you can just take horse dewormer and you will be fine" is batshit but that doesn't mean that reversing it to say "We should mask up forever and bans on all imperson events or school closures should be open ended even if the local population is almost 100% vaccinated because Covid is still out there" isn't also nuts. But masks are still mostly required in all Quaker Meetings and most are still hybrid because many folks still won't to in person gatherings despite the fact that those communities are all vaccinated. Even more preversly, the fact that the guys with the tiki torch can comfortably hold the view that "jews shall not replace us" as domestic national policy and also "Israel needs to hold the entirely of the holy lands so we can trigger the rapture and so we need to give them our unwavering military support and encourage their illegal settlements in the West Bank" doesn't mean that you can just do the opposite and try to be both non-anti-semitic and a Hamas supporter when Hamas's goal is ethnically cleansing Israel/Palastine. The enemy of my enemy is my friend has always been a bad policy to blindly follow. I actually disagree with Matt here. I don't think the Left has gotten more nuts on the edges because Liberal policy has gotten more successful. I think the edges have gotten more dangerously extreme and grown in size because there are so many people wanting to define themselves as the opposite of Right that has full on lost their minds. For many of us progressives who actually did the work to get progressive social and legislative victories, we have always been annoyed at the guy from the International Socialist group who wants to join the coalition and participate in the protest but also thinks that success is hopeless and ultimately counterproductive in bringing the revolution and also he is going to bring his own totally off-topic sign and try to get in every media photo. The fact that there are more of them and they have gotten harder to ignore or are sucking more airspace from folks trying to actually achieve some progressive solutions is a problem. I am still a lot less worried that the students at UC Berkley are going actually end democracy than the rioters on January 6th. And those rioters at January 6th did really did move the goal post on what protest might look like i a way that isn't good for anyone.
Are you not familiar with places like The Dispatch that push b k against the rights excesses?
I have no idea where to place you on simple one or two dimensional charts. You are just Just some guy, with the singularly unique Just some guy ideology. I like it even when we disagree, and there's a higher proportion of those type of people here than anywhere else I've found.
I was always opposed to traditional conservatism but you rightly say, jsg, that it stood for something and may have even been right at times!
Today's Republicans and "conservatives"? I'm not seeing it. It's mostly just punching down, vitriol and vengeance.
But it boils down to one simple thing. Rick Perlstein, if you're listening and want a title for your no doubt upcoming book on how Trump and the crazies remade the Republican party, I have the title for that book: "The Triumph of the Id."
I still know plenty of conservatives in real life that I can have meaningful political discussions with.
But online it is just a wasteland. Any conservative forum has such a poor signal-to-noise ratio that it is generally not worth the effort.
There are always too many of the stupid(er) MAGA folks showing up and sh***ing on everything.
It’s interesting to see. My mom is quite conservative both temperamentally and politically, she never voted for a Democrat since Carter until 2016, except maybe for Blue Dog Phil Bredesen for TN governor in the aughts. She was all about Reagan, Daddy Bush, McCain, and Romney. But now she pretty much votes for the most moderate in Republican primaries then Blue no matter who in the general, but it’s Mississippi these days so it’s not like AOC is running.
Facts, research, citing expert opinion, who do you think you are?? Are you sure you're not one of the sheeple?? I kid, I kid...
As someone who generally agrees with the left on issues from climate change to race to inequality and health care, and as someone who is also on the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of the new left’s venom and hate (as a Jew), I find what is going on quite disturbing.
This all brings to mind something a rabbi /PhD and mentor of mine (may he rest on peace) once sadly said to me a few weeks before he took part as an outside reader on my PhD defense, “his sadness was that he couldn’t pray with the people he spoke with, and he couldn’t talk with the people he prayed with.” His comment was a reference to his being personally Orthodox Jewish, which was incompatible with many of his academic ideas and personal liberal values. This is how I feel today.
Also speaking as a Jew, I don’t want to devalue your lived experience, but I really think this overstates how much anti-Semitism / anti-Jewish “venom and hate” is actually happening.
For example, in NYC, the number of antisemitic hate crimes rose from 16 in September to 69 in October, per Axios. Obviously that’s not good, and obviously not all anti-semitism rises to the level of a “hate crime” or reported to police. But the underlying rates are just incredibly low. There are something like 1.6M Jews in NYC vs 69 incidents! That’s just not a significant number.
And while there might be additional vitriol online, there have always been crazies online. We just always ignored them. I’m not really convinced they are harder to ignore now. Most people I’ve engaged with, even those who clearly support the Palestinian cause, remain quite thoughtful about and respectful of individual Jewish people (even as they disagree with the Israeli government).
Agreed. As a Jew, living in a an area with a lot of Jews, I see much more fear than is warranted.
A lot of Jewish people around me use the following logic: 1. Not being as pro-Israel as I am right now is a sign of antisemitism. 2. I see a lot of people who are not as pro-Israel as I am. 3. I’m surrounded by anti-semites.
There’s obviously still anti-semitism, but it all reminds me of the post-Floyd “white supremacy is everywhere” stuff.
I worry that some American Jews full throated conflation of Jewishness with Israel is what actually make Jews less safe.
I think that old-fashioned WASP antisemitism (Jewish quotas at universities, country club and suburb exclusion) is recent enough in the memory of older Jewish Americans that there is a sentiment of fear that the gentiles of America could one day go mad with antisemitism, as in Germany.
I also think that that's extremely unlikely. Even very liberal and Israel-supporting Europeans today speak about the Jewish population of their countries in a way that shows that they are clearly seen as "other" (even though as an "other" that must be protected to the death rather than fought against) in a way that is a fringe ideology in secular, polysemous America. American Jews aren't "our Jews," they're us.
Also, the idea that Israel is some sort of ultimate guarantor of the survival of the Jewish people is just bull. In some insane hypothetical where America goes antisemitic, Israel becomes a pariah state hiding behind a nuclear arsenal. In a more likely hypothetical where some regional actor puts paid to Israel, they're not going to invade America next.
I understand why this seems paranoid to you. America has been a wonderful country - probably the best in history - for Jews. But I encourage you to try to see things from the perspective of people who've been chased all over the world for 2000 years. My family has lived in a lot of places, and felt comfortable in some of those places, and yet they all ended badly. Antisemitism is a virus, and when it awakens, individual prosperity and assimilation don't matter.
Israel may not be a complete guarantor of Jewish survival, but having a state is better than not having one. Nobody took Jewish refugees before, and we can't trust anyone to do so in the future. Learned that the hard way.
This antisemitism is a virus talk seems pretty paranoid from my admittedly gentile perspective. If America goes nuts and starts massacring minorities Jews will be close to least likely to be targeted.
Vastly more likely to turn anti Chinese or even Muslim than anti Jew, at least as far as state violence goes. France, on the other hand…
Class based violence vastly more likely also.
I don’t understand what makes you say Jews would be the least likely to be targeted, when they are probably among the most frequent targets of hate crimes now.
It would be black people, almost certainly. Antisemitism is Europe's stain, racism towards black people is ours.
While I appreciate your logic generally, I think you’re wrong in this specific instance. The Jews are viewed as oppressors and
colonists. For some people that warrants a violent response.
I was in a building set in fire in Portland because I was an “oppressor.” I watched people barricade a couple other occupied buildings and set them on fire (also
because oppressive police were inside). While no one’s lives were truly threatened it was an eye opening experience. Despite my relative ability to defend myself and being a part of the dominant group this still changed my view of the left in America. Not because of the crazies (they are always there) but because I thought rational left
leaning individuals would realize that these actions were unacceptable. When the mainstream left seemed to ignore them (except Black Clergy who called out the actions for what they were), I became very nervous about the long term prospects of America.
I can completely see why Jews might fear for their safety in America. We still have out mobs and they are more than able to justify pretty bad action. They just paint their
violence in the language of resisting oppression.
I am not even Jewish and I get nervous when I see the mobs forming and talking about river to sea or celebrating the violence. I have actually been surprised at the main stream left’s condemnation of the antisemitism. It
Might not seem that way if your Jewish but at least high profile liberals are speaking out.
I understand. Just know that Jews come by our paranoia honestly, based on a very long and depressing history. It's not some sort of overwrought ploy for sympathy.
(The virus metaphor isn't my own - it's a common one. I actually find it pretty optimistic, especially compared to the DNA metaphor. Viruses can be inoculated against and treated, even if they can't be killed. You can't do anything about DNA.)
Without the US, Israel would be forced to either significantly moderate on the Palestinian issue or become a Middle Eastern North Korea. The US and its massive Jewish population in particular, but the existence of the New World in general, are the guarantors of Jewish survival in the modern world, not a truculent militaristic state located in the world's ethnic warfare capital since the dawn of recorded history.
I do understand things from that perspective, and my point of contention is the New World-Old World distinction. All* of these horrors occurred on the other side of the Atlantic. I agree with your characterization of antisemitism as a mind virus, but its natural reservoir is over there.
*Certain actions of the Spaniards notwithstanding, but they definitely count as European for these purposes.
These are some of my priors in this area:
(1) Echoing Leora in this thread, it's happened before that the rug has been pulled out from beneath the feet of Jews who thought they'd assimilated to the point that the notion of their neighbors turning on them seemed inconceivable. (Warning against that sort of complacency is the actual theme of Hanukkah, before it got turned into the sort of Bizarro Santa holiday for Jews.)
(2) The fear that an antisemitic backlash in the US would come in the form of violence and confinement on the 1930s-40s German/Soviet pattern seems to me highly implausible and sort of annoying. The returns to physical confrontation in developed commercial republics are ever-diminishing, and there's no Hamas-like foe here in a position to see a pogrom as strategically exploitable.
(3) What I would worry about, if generational turnover and the political cycle ever coincide to produce a full-on woke regime, is some kind of economic and social ultimatum to Jews to renounce Judaism, at best to the extent it implies support or even acceptance of the existence of Israel, at worst to the extent of renouncing the whole project as mere white supremacism.
(4) The scenario described in (3) currently seems to me far-fetched. But not necessarily more far-fetched than the Final Solution would've seemed to German Jews in 1910 or 1920.
I think that there's no world in which (3) happens in which Christianity is not also proscribed. But I also think that the idea of a woke coup is becoming more and more out-there fringe each day.
Agreed as to your second sentence, and for those of us who had our obligatory freakout about the woke coup scenario back in 2020, all of this is old hat. But many of the liberal Jews suddenly noticing that people they thought were part of their coalition actually hate them haven't thought through this before. And while the overall probability of a woke coup continues to diminish, the likelihood that such a coup, if it were someday to happen, would involve a substantial antisemitic component seems higher in light of recent events.
As to your first sentence, never underestimate the potency of the move whereby Jews can be made to take the fall for complaints against the majority to which they've assimilated, which it'd be politically untenable to prosecute against that majority itself.
Tbh I could gaf about Israel but I despise the Israel lobby bc unconditional support of Israel is against US interests. Feel the same way about the Saudi and Gulf States’ lobbies that get us to take their side against Iran. I’m not an isolationist but where we get involved it should be for our interests or at least neutral to our interests and unambiguously the morally right thing to do, and in the case of Israel they have the power so they are the oppressor. The Palestinians were there first unless you count pre-diaspora, and I don’t because I don’t count the self-serving myth that skydaddy gave Canaan to the Jews’ forebears to be a deed with clean title. If God gave them the land then let God get it back for them like in the OT and leave the US out of it, we’ve got bigger enemies like Russia and China without provoking another 9/11 through putting our dick in that sticky wicket.
But I have no animosity at all against the median US Jew, because the vast majority are secular and most non-fundies are cool in my book. You can miss me with the Hasidic folks bringing back polio to NYC though…
> I worry that some American Jews full throated conflation of Jewishness with Israel is what actually make Jews less safe.
Yup
And the huge coterie of gentiles who do the same thing.
We also saw this with anti-asian bias a few years ago. It gets in the news for some reason and that a) causes it to happen somewhat more because it normalizes it a bit and b) makes people notice it more. See also, fake anthrax attacks post 9/11.
I think it's one of those things that is worse online if you are in a more progressive/left bubble on social media. I won't discount that and it bothers me (especially since a lot of "the left" seems to be backing themselves into a corner and being more pro-Hamas and boosting messages about how Israeli Jews should f off and "go back where they came from") but it's also worth trying to keep in mind these people are a fringe despite what they think.
This reminds me of the supposed "anti-Asian" wave we had. Similarly, the raw numbers were pretty low. While it's true that sometimes "it doesn't take many", there really wasn't even any decent *circumstantial* evidence that the attacks were racially targeted. Moreover, hypervigilant libs and activists completely ignored that their hyperbolic treatment ran the risk of exacerbating the social contagion of copycat incidents.
As the Halloween candy discourse last week pointed out, sometimes all it takes is a myth -- EVEN when there was no actual crime behind it -- in order for copycats to do bad things. We should, y'know, avoid that, regardless of which side of the spectrum the moral panic is coming from.
Asian people in New York, at least, were very quick to point out that there was nothing new about a certain subset of old-stock Americans being violently racist towards them, and then quite dismayed at the fact that it got buried once it was realized that nobody was buying the insinuation that it was a bunch of MAGAs doing this in response to Trump's Choyna Virus speech.
You're correct that the incessant media coverage of it probably provoked a lot of copycat incidents. It's similar to school shooting coverage, normal people hear "oh no," crazy people hear "now that's an idea!"
It didn't help that the panic was branded as "AAPI hate," when any actual haters hadn't the faintest inkling what an AAPI was, much less whether they hated it.
I had to think for like a full min as to what that means. Also, putting Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in the same group renders it a pretty meaningless label like BIPOC which always makes me think bisexual at first
No, it's idiotic. Analytically useless and also I imagine insulting to the people lumped into the acronym, who have no more in common with each other than Finns have with Bengalis.
Am I the only one who sees BIPOC and every time initially thinks bisexuals and people of color, realizes that’s really nonsensical, remembers what it is and only realizes that’s only a hair less nonsensical?
But less in common than Finns have with Koreans.
That does speak to the rather artificial nature of the label. Like, I'm sure that it's useful in some esoteric contexts. It's NOT useful as a mass-political label.
Personally I was never worried about an increase in numbers of anti Asian incidents or currently antisemitic incidents. What has concerned me is what “feels” like increased normalization of antisemitism. Sometimes it is just an increased exposure to the sentiment that was always there, so hard to gauge statistically. For example for the first time I am having discussions with really nice people about “how they feel about Jewish people.” A subject I’ve never really discussed before. Now all of a sudden I’m realizing some of their views are a little cooky.
Indeed. That normalization is what freaked me out about, for instance, all the Trump-era incidents where high school students directed racist chants at opposing teams. Those things have a way of coming back and haunting a society.
I'm reminded of the Dreyfus affair, when basically all of French society (and the broader European and Western society in general) were all of a sudden forced to have takes on Jews, many of which were, as you put it, "cooky".
It seems worse to me. A Jewish man in LA was just killed by pro-Palestinian protesters, in an incident eerily reminiscent of the Charlottesville killing.
I think there two things that should be distinguished. At least some protests about the war are becoming unpleasant, which is dangerous and extremely sad, and I think one should think carefully about such events.
A different question is whether the average Jew should start living a more fearful life. I think the bar for that is extremely high, to some extent that is literally what terrorists want, and so my view is no.
This exactly. As one small example, I know people who normally give out candy for Halloween but who didn’t this year, because they were afraid they could be a target if someone noticed the mezuzah on their door when approaching. That’s just such a crazy way to live your life. And of course a news search post-Halloween turned up exactly zero anti-Semitic incidents of the type they feared.
My friend attended a *charity fundraiser for disadvantaged kids (of all backgrounds)* that was apparently guarded like a a fortress. Nothing untoward happened. But they still spent money on security that could've gone to the kids!
This is bad, but I suspect it will quiet down. After 9/11, everyone everywhere thought that terrorists were going to blow up their buildings. I vaguely recall post offices in Montana setting up guards to prevent an al Qaeda attack.
I'm sure it's beefed up at the moment, but Jewish institutions all have security, especially at events. I recently went to a bar mitzvah and passed three off-duty cops on my way in.
My issue with the Pro-Palestinian protestors is that so many of them wear masks. It just signals they are preparing for violence when they do that.
Those are probably the antifa/antifa-adjacent people that use political protests as their American replacement for football hooliganism.
Or they don’t want to be doxxed like the kids at Harvard
Classical accounts of the virtues are quite clear that the ability to refrain from acting or being scared even when your circumstances have become objectively scarier is admirable and crucially important. This seems to be something we occasionally lose sight of today.
Is there any video of the LA incident? It seems like it could have been this sort of freak accident:
- A scuffle occurred between the dueling protest crowds outside the local Palestinian chicken restaurant
- A guy was punched, pushed or something in between
- That guy fell back, hit his head, and became the latest addition to the list of casualties of bipedalism
- That guy was on the pro-Israel side, and was Jewish.
The reason I am interested in seeing if there is a video is to determine the context of whatever physical altercation there was, including the possibility that it was totally unprovoked. I think the null hypothesis is that it was an unexpected tragic result of a yelling-and-shoving match involving an elderly person, not a targeted hate crime. Descriptions of the incident that led me to this assumption are below:
"Witnesses told deputies that Kessler was involved in a physical altercation with a counter-protester or protesters, officials said Monday night. Kessler fell backward during the altercation, authorities said, hitting his head on the ground." (AP)
"Kessler was involved in a physical altercation between counter-protesters, the sheriff's office said, citing witness accounts. It did not specify which side instigated the altercation." (Reuters)
Please don't go extrapolating stuff from this statement, there is no hidden subtext. It just doesn't look like it is necessarily a targeted attack from the information we have so far, and so I will be withholding my verdict for at least 24 hours.
"local Palestinian chicken restaurant"
Keffiyeh Fried Chicken?
This reminds me of my favorite weird chicken experience - there's a place run by a Muslim family from Dagestan in my small New England city, and I can't remember the original name but it was "[Arabic word]" chicken. Then the Boston Marathon bombing happened. They closed down for a day and re-opened as USA Chicken and Biscuit, festooned with American flags and red white and blue everywhere.
I hope it was all preventative and no one actually gave them crap for being from Dagestan, those guys make some amazing fried chicken.
I will say it's cool that an immigrant CAN credibly brand as USA Chicken like that. My culture was made for appropriation, baby! But, of course, it's terrible if that's a real or perceived MUST.
It's funny that they might have thought that so much as one in fifty Americans know that Dagestan is next to Chechnya.
https://youtu.be/4WznZbYxwmY
https://youtu.be/I_OA_TU_XD0
Angry upvote
Wonder if you are updating your view based on the arrest of Loay Al Naji today?
"Battery causing serious injury" and "involuntary manslaughter" are about what I would have charged him with if I were prosecutor. These also seem like what you'd charge someone with if they went too far in a bar fight and killed someone with a punch to the head.
Note, moreover, how little media attention this got, and how lamely it was framed. When a black person is killed by a white person, the media is very quick to prejudge it as racist, even when there is not particular reason to think so. When a Jew is killed by a gentile, the media goes out of its way to rule out antisemitism, even in context like this where there is every reason to think so.
Likewise, when the rabbi in Detroit (Samatha Woll) was murdered two weeks ago, the "no evidence of anti-semitism" line was used immediately. No killer has been found as of yet, but they are very sure it wasn't because of her religion?
"No evidence of antisemitism" and "very sure it wasn't because of her religion" are very different things.
WRT to Samantha Woll, I think that antisemitism was addressed because of the circumstances: middle-aged women and religious leaders are unusual murder victims, and it took place during very high Israel/Gaza tension. My first thought when I saw a headline about the situation was that this was probably an antisemitic crime.
I think it is likely it is just another murder in Detroit and not due to her status as a Jew and Rabbi. I just find it the reporting and reaction notably different than other situations.
And a Palestinian 6 year old was murdered by their Fox News addled landlord outside of Chicago
I saw that and it’s obviously horrific. But of course the man was at a pro-Palestinian protest. I don’t think that speaks to the overall safety or acceptance of Jews in North America in any material way.
Yeah, the Charlottesville guy had a story about how he was scared for his life and just trying to get away too.
What about the person in Indianapolis that drove their car into the Black Hebrew Israelite building? We all laugh about it because of the mistaken target, but what if it was a JCC or Jewish day school?
I’m an academic and I work on a university campus. Things are a bit different in that atmosphere. My synagogue has also been subject to some vandalism.
Most people I encounter are thoughtful as well. But that’s if small solace. And to be honest, while I support what Israel has to do, I also have great empathy for the Palestinians. I blame both Hamas and Bibi for their efforts to slow down any momentum towards peace, while recognizing the difference between Hamas’ murder aggressiveness and Bibi’s (more but not entirely) passive aggressive efforts.
"For example, in NYC, the number of antisemitic hate crimes rose from 16 in September to 69 in October, per Axios. Obviously that’s not good, and obviously not all anti-semitism rises to the level of a “hate crime” or reported to police. But the underlying rates are just incredibly low."
I agree that's mostly the case in the USA, but some of the shit going on in Europe looks much worse. Hot take here, but spray painting Stars of David on houses and business is really bad!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12692853/Stars-David-spray-painted-buildings-Paris.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/antisemitism-berlin-germany-star-of-david-b2430330.html
Some of the shit going on at protests is also really scary.
Granted, it's not clear how much of this is coming from "the left" and how much it's coming from other places, but either way, it's not good.
This is a great point on two fronts:
1. North America really is different from Europe but I think it’s easy to conflate the two because of how things spread on social media (though tbh I really don’t think seeing a swastika painted somewhere is all that meaningful or scary - my view is that people with no power to really impact your life doing dumb stuff generally shouldn’t worry you. We’re not talking about governments passing laws here.)
2. In recent years, to the extent there has been anti-semitism (especially online), it’s largely been from the right. For all we know, anti-Semitic vandalism could still be from people on the right who now think it’s normalized. But the idea that Jews should suddenly make common cause with the right just because a small number of people on the left take their pro-Palestinian sentiments too far doesn’t strike me as a reasonable reaction.
If that paint isn’t threatening, I don’t know what is.
“In recent years, to the extent there has been anti-semitism (especially online), it’s largely been from the right.”
[Edit: the following text is for Europe, which is the area being discussed in this thread.]
Has it? From what I can tell, it’s more immigrants from Muslim countries (and their descendants) than home-grown right wingers. (Not to say that right wingers don’t do it — they do, but they have larger concerns, like the aforementioned immigrants.)
What is the “threat” from the paint exactly? Of course it’s unpleasant to be subject to hate and I don’t wish it on anyone. But is someone’s material or physical wellbeing truly threatened by it? Is it part of an organized campaign? Is it condoned?
If the people doing the tagging had wanted to attack the occupants of the houses, presumably they could have. But they didn’t. Which I’d say dials down the implied threat. (Meanwhile there does appear to be a Jewish woman in Lyon who was stabbed at her doorstep - that’s obviously much worse and should be regarded as such. But I just can’t get my hackles raised too much about some idiots with a spray bottle.)
Are we using different definitions of threat? Obviously the paint itself isn't going to attack anyone, but at least some of these stars were put on the houses of Jews (see second article), and clearly indicates "I know where you live and I don't like you". Whether or not it's part of an organized campaign or if it's condoned is irrelevant.
That's clearly less harmful that stabbing someone, but stabbing someone isn't a threat; it's a violent action! (Whether or not it's part of an organized campaign or if it's condoned is --- again --- irrelevant.) Of course threats are less bad than actions. If someone, for example, walks up to you a says "I'm going to knife you", then no physical harm has been done yet, but a reasonable person can interpret that as a threat. Not everyone is Crocodile Dundee, who can shrug it off as kids being kids. (That's not a knife...) The combination of "I know where you live and I don't like you" with the fact that Jews have indeed been attacked makes the spray paint a threat.
Anyhow, at the point an internet argument comes down to arguing over definitions, it's not worth continuing it, so I'll stop arguing about what is and isn't a threat.
Here you just seem obtuse, I’m sorry to say. Imagine saying “so they sent me a photo of my child playing in the park; why is that a threat? If they wanted to hurt my child they could have done it when they snapped the picture.”
True about the US. I was writing about Europe, but that may not have been clear. I’ll edit to clarify.
Jews are more likely than any other ethnic, racial or religious group to be victims of hate crimes, per FBIs consistent data year after year (included the latest published data, 2022). Beyond the actual abnormally high incidence of hate cirmes, their is the institutionalization of antisemitism , refelcted in the exceptional high bar which institutions such as unviersities accord to it, the reluctance of mainstream media to report these incidence (contra the focus on islamophobia, which fbi statistics show is much much rarer) , and of course the fact that it's the only hate were non-member of the group feel very comfortable rejecting members of group compalints of hand. And I haven't even mentioned the far far worse situation in contemporary Europe or the uniquely bad history.
P.S.
I don't have studies of this, but one should also note that sterotypically negarive portrayal of Jews persist in the American media, whereaas positive portrayals are far more rare. It wasa notable that in the recent Selma movie I believe the outsized Jewish contribution was left unmentioned. In "The Wire" the positive character Rodna Pearlman may have been "coded" Jewish but the only very explicitly Jewish character, whose Jewishness was repeatedly refereed t direclty was the crooked, greedy, lawyer character, i.e. an antisemitic caricutre if there ever was one [1]. This was rather jarring in a show otherwise excpetional nuanced and humane portrayal of all characters. To give an exmaple from a different genre, the recent show Harley Quinln engaged in blatant antisemetici steiorypes and super negative portrayal of Jews while ignoring the Jews portrayed sympathetically in the original comics [2]. My sense is that this is very common suggesting systemic bias in ppoular media. But again, I wish someone studied this.
[1] tons of stuff on this. one example : https://crasstalk.com/2011/07/is-the-wire-anti-semitic/
[2] Harley Quinn e..g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL-4GSrUcv4 (with links to articles in the description).Cf. Aversoin of DC generally to portray canonically jewish superheroes as jewish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB5TGDGxhWM
I would question the premise that hate crimes against Jews are “abnormally high”. They are objectively very rare. Are Jews disproportionately targeted? Sure, but again we are talking about incredibly low base rates.
There’s a joke about how Jews are neurotic because we descend from the people who, over the past 500+ years, were the ones that said “the vibes are bad, let’s go.” And I get it, we are always going to be something of an “other.” But truly, contemporary North America is probably the safest time and place in history to be a Jew, and I think we should act like it instead of being continually fearful.
I do agree with you that people should listen to Jews about what constitutes anti-semitism the same way we’d let other groups self-define their oppression - although then you get into areas where there is no clear Jewish consensus, like whether “anti-Zionism” is anti-semitism, so I’m honestly not sure what outsiders are supposed to do.
"But truly, contemporary North America is probably the safest time and place in history to be a Jew, and I think we should act like it instead of being continually fearful."
I agree with this to an extent. But on the other hand, 2023 is also the best year in American history to be Black, and there would be tons of pushback if someone said what you just said, but about Black people. Which again gets to the heart of what is so frustrating here, the double standards where Jews are always treated worse than other minorities.
Media produced by black people specifically for black people is much more positive about being black: a culture to celebrate, historical figures to revere, etc. just like any other people. Media produced by white guilt types always somehow makes it seem like being black is the worst thing in the world, to the point where it can come off as insulting.
David Simon (who is Jewish) gave a response on the Levy thing, and it was wack beyond belief. It basically amounted to, “You gotta admit, some of us really are conniving bloodsuckers.”
I don't know, I wouldn't be enthused about wearing a skull cap around now if I was Jewish. Would not be shocked to be confronted.
I’m not Jewish, and I also agree with your points here overall, but are you sure you’re not under-indexing the effects of an increase in harassment and obnoxious comments, not must online but in person?
Possibly - but I guess I just don’t get too worked up over “obnoxious comments” without any material or physical impact, even if there are somewhat more of them than there were a month ago.
Well, the Charlottesville protests didn’t have any material impacts either, until someone ran over some people with his car. But beyond those things being on a spectrum, I also take people seriously when they say hateful comments are extremely upsetting to them.
Fair enough, and I get it, I’ve been on the receiving end of antisemitic comments too.
But the thing to do is ignore and move on. Ultimately this isn’t Nazi Germany or Medieval Spain. These actions aren’t condoned and codified by law. It’s random lunatics. I see a lot of Jewish people I know posting things like “never again is now” and I just can’t really believe they really believe that. Inflamed rhetoric about what the community is actually facing helps no one.
To echo another user here, social media is bad. You can go on it and convince yourself that there's about to be a Holocaust in America, that there's a slow white genocide in America, that the atmosphere will parboil everyone like a lobster in 50 years, that mass killings of gays are imminent in Florida, that a strange 4Chan anon is posting secrets about the real US/world government, and so on and so forth.
It seems to me that if you take the sort of justification for e.g. a thumb on the scale in favor of blacks & Hispanics in university admissions that's framed as historically oppressed people vs. beneficiaries of historical oppression, and you put Jews on the beneficiary side, you're forced into taking one of two positions.
Either Jews were never really victims of oppression, and the appearance that they were is a sort of optical illusion, possibly perpetrated by Jews themselves. Or else Jews were indeed historically oppressed at one time, but upon arrival in America they were able to access a sort of cheat code or hidden power-up not available to blacks or Hispanics (and more secret/invisible than the overt discrimination in favor of blacks/Hispanics/Native Americans going back to the early 1970s).
Stated like that, either option is *obviously* continuous with the most virulent claims of historical antisemitism. But young people today have generally grown up with the default assumption that Jews do indeed fall on the beneficiary side of the beneficiary/victim line. It's hard to see how they can vindicate that assumption without sounding straight-up antisemitic.
Antisemitism exposes the flaws in that reductive binary framework. Persecution of Jews has long been premised on the theory that Jews have too much power. Putting Jews on the oppressor axis is actually straight out of an ancient antisemitic playbook.
Spot on! I agree with every word except replacing "sounding" with "being" in the last sentence.
I think a lot of young, politically-engaged left-leaning people have been exposed to enough stuff like B'Tselem and Jewish Voice for Peace (college campuses, everyone) that they consider anti-Israel sentiment almost totally orthogonal to antisemitism.
Of course, the people that are in it for the antisemitism are also going to these protests. It is incorrect to deny that. But "I despise the state of Israel for its actions towards the Palestinians, but hold no negative sentiment towards Jews" is an internally consistent position.
It is 100% orthogonal to anti-Semitism, and those who conflate the two are liable to engender anti-Semitism rather than reduce it.
It boggles the mind that people think that it will reduce antisemitism if enough people act like antisemitism means not supporting bombing Gaza into rubble.
It's a nonexistent position de facto. You cant' despise the Jewish state without despising Jews. To wit, nobody "despises China" you can despise it regime, but not the actual state, ditto Russia. The Anti-Israel crowed has an ideology that is qualitatively different from critcizing Israel as yuo would the US, or Canada or even Russia or China.
Set the scene to 1980:
You can't despise the Afrikaner state without despising Afrikaners. The blacks want them dead or expelled and they have no other homeland, plus the Janse von Rensburg massacre back in the 1830s proves that they've always been irrationally hated. In theory I would be for a binational state, but Afrikaners would be massacred in large numbers in such a circumstance, and so that's impossible. Plus, do you really think it's possible to negotiate with Umkhonto we Sizwe? And in any case, there are tons of black Africans being oppressed by other black Africans, and the reason for the outsize attention paid to this conflict is just because people hate whites in general.
I'm not doing this to morally equate apartheid South Africa with modern Israel, I'm doing this to demonstrate how bizarre moral logic gets when you consider a polity inseparable from a people. At some point, you just have to admit that other people have a totally different vantage point on the issue than you do.
The takeaway from this is that it's a bad thing for Israel to portray itself to the world as "The Jews," and it's especially bad as well as totally ridiculous when that happens in the only other country with a millions-strong Jewish population and one of the only countries (all are in the New World except Israel) where being Jewish isn't by default considered some sort of quasi-foreign status distinct from simply being a minority religious/ethnic group.
German-Americans and Jewish Americans fighting side by side for their mutual homeland against Nazi Germany in WWII is probably the best possible example of how Old World ethnostatism just doesn't apply here.
You're right about the cluelessness from Middle America, which is again why it's really bad for the media (particularly Fox and so on) to pump into their brains a sort of pro-Israel sentiment that can translate to dual-loyalty slander.
I think you’re both right. Doesn’t this speak to the need for things like more Holocaust education when kids are younger instead of spending so much effort on winning propaganda wars today?
Accurate. My perspective is different and similar to yours, because growing up in the NYC suburbs, a number of classmates were either Jewish, or had grandparents who were Holocaust survivors. One other thing I've noticed locally is the reflex among young Muslim-Americans to defend Palestine and the Palestinian cause, even though Hamas is raping and killing innocent people. I'm extremely skeptical that countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh teach the history of the Holocaust accurately, or if it's even covered at all, lest anyone is accused of being an apologist for Zionism and Israel.
It's not just about the history. Jews are still more vulnerable to hate than almost all groups in the US, and far far more than any other group in Europe. Few live anywhere else (except Israel) precisely due to persecution. The protrayal of Jews as the perpetrators of the very evils from which they suffered more than anyone else is in itself a deeply sinister antisemitic move.
Antisemitism can be a result of ignorance. It's still antisemitism.
The optimal level of antisemitism in America from the Israeli perspective is just enough to rally American Jews around Israel but not enough to turn the aid spigot off.
The optimal level of antisemitism in America from the American perspective is zero. That's the difference.
Are you in Summer Lee's district?
I often feel like this about being a Buddhist. Western Zen isn't exactly highly represented, so it's hard to share concepts that deeply inform my perspective on politics and the world more generally.
Scott, thanks for sharing and I’m so sorry this ugly hate has reared its head on the left too. I hope you know those antisemitic and pro terrorist views remain a small minority on the left and totally incompatible with liberal values. These are left authoritarian as well as nationalist and fundamentalist sentiments. So please don’t feel conflicted in ideology - liberalism is still consistent and functional. Its a faction among far left progressivism that seems to have lost its way, at least as far as I can tell.
Cheers
Milton Friedman has this idea of quadrants of money, you spend your money on yourself most carefully and someone else’s money on someone else least carefully.
It seems to me a lot of left wing ideas are that kind of sloppy because they’re ideas for other people for the most part.
During this latest war in Israel it has felt like a lot of people are treating it like a debating competition. 100% focus on what language to use, 0% focus on how to improve the situation.
I've become increasingly cranky with all the focus on language stuff (what do you call the homeless, what specific words do you use to describe transgender people/ideas, the whole latinx debacle, the anti-racist redefinition of "racism," etc) because I think that what's going on there is mainly status-seeking and bullying.
That is: when you are part of some clique who has enough status to propose a terminology change, you can do so and then just kind of trip up anyone who you're talking to and call them bad people because they aren't conforming to your new language, and gain status by claiming to be safeguarding some principle. And then you can do it again and again!
My wife works in affordable housing, so I've watched in realtime as we went from calling homeless people, "homeless" to "people experiencing homelessness," to "unhoused," with a few epicycles along the way.
Who the fuck cares if we call that guy "homeless" or "unhoused"? There is just transparently no difference in those terms. That guy has not been helped one iota by this language change. But people in the world of affordable housing have been able to score lots of cheap, petty points by policing language. That draws bullies who like to score cheap, petty points. And I've come to believe that basically any time you indulge this kind of branding stuff, what you're overwhelmingly doing is hurting normal people and helping bullies, and nothing else.
I have the same thought about naming, with one more thought. I don’t think it’s just about bullying and exclusion. I think there can be a germ of a better idea there - trying to avoid names that seem to be stigmatizing, in the hope that the public would look again at “the homeless” and see them as people who deserve empathy or compassion. However, I don’t think you can generate empathy or compassion by changing names this way, and there’s a real risk that making the name change will stand in for changing actual conditions - like the people who put up “all are welcome here” signs outside their big single-family homes and go all out to prevent upzoning. You might direct good feelings at the unhoused, and while that feels like doing something it’s really almost nothing. And then comes the bullying for those who don’t signal the right attitudes in the right way.
I think the basic idea that some terms are vicious and cause some kind of psychic toll or stigma is an intuitive one, and I'm not sure I'd be against policing language if the language still being policed were like the difference between the n-word and "black." But I feel very strongly that the difference between "black" and "Black" has reduced racism not even the tiniest bit ever at all, and has exclusively been used to raise the status of bullies.
"Bum" -> "homeless." Maybe that was productive. Maybe! I think it's worth casting a critical eye here and questioning the basic intuition. But "homeless" -> "unhoused"? Didn't change the stigma of being homeless at all, ever, for anyone.
I've been trying to bring back the word bum to distinguish between the various types of homeless people, so that more sympathetic cases don't get conflated with less sympathetic ones.
I'm going with "vagrant," because "bum" can also be used to mean a lazy or unsuccessful person regardless of housing status.
The issue always come back to "what is the intent of the word". If the whole reason a word exists is to insult or a degrade a group of people then sure, change it (this is the category the n-word falls into). But if the word itself is simply a descriptor of some condition that people find sympathetic or are concerned that others will attack the person for then the word isn't the issue, it's the fact that people will attack them for it that's the issue. Changing the term won't change that. Homeless is no more stigmatizing than unhoused- they both describe clearly the condition that the person is in, and some people will, unfortunately, negatively judge the person who is experiencing that condition, regardless of the term that is used. Same with things like retarded or midget- the terms become associated with negative connotations not because the words are problematic but because some people will use them problematically. If you change the word that is used to describe the condition the same problematic people will just adapt and in 15 years time the newly anointed non-problematic word will then be problematic and in need of changing.
Descriptive words being constantly altered is utterly useless, and altering them is, as you say, just a silly excuse to police boundaries and define in-vs-out groups. We should move away from words whose initial intent was to insult and degrade, but otherwise we should just accept that language is open to interpretation in ways that mean that some people will find ways to use any language in an insulting and demeaning way.
Not the same thing, but my winner in the pantheon of hollow, useless gestures of the last three years is that helmets and end zones in the NFL still say inane things like "end racism".
There's a well-described principle, the name for which momentarily escapes me (euphemism treadmill or something), that we try to de-stigmatize something by changing its name, as if it's the name (and not the condition/situation) that causes the stigma. Then the new name eventually carries the stigma, so we do it again. See crippled=>handicapped=>disabled=>differently abled (gag) or the various names for people who are well below average intelligence ("retarded" used to be the polite euphemism).
"There's a well-described principle, the name for which momentarily escapes me (euphemism treadmill or something)"
Is this snark? Dysphemistic Treadmill comments here all the time.
No, not snark. Steven Pinker came up with euphemism treadmill (I've since looked it up). Dysphemistic treadmill would be the other way to describe it, I suppose.
I encountered dysphemistic treadmill on here before I had even heard of Pinker's euphemism treadmill.
Good point; some words are so strongly associated with hate that you really probably need to shift them. But mostly that’s not what’s going on.
The Other is always The Other no matter the language used.
I've learned that most people don't want to solve problems, they want to prove that they were right and are blameless for the situation at hand.
This has been frustrating to me because it seems to put much of the focus on those of us here, away from the conflict, rather than on those actually suffering. I am afraid that I have mostly refrained from talking about the conflict at all because of this.
Often it seems the difference between a liberal and a leftist is the former’s personal willingness to pay additional taxes to support policy changes they want.
I mean there’s that. There’s also the politics of other people’s lives. Someone who went to Princeton who is very sure how a school should handle it when I get assaulted by a 9 year old and is more concerned with the school to prison pipeline than the safety of people in the room.
There’s just a lot of people with an awful lot of opinions on shit that will never effect them.
That doesn't seem a particular left-wing problem. Remember, Republicans hate (or sorta or used to) same sex marriage as it never affects them. Excepted it affected VP Cheney bc of his other daughter. Same idea with native Americans (somehow it affects justice Gorsuch). Republicans believe racism doesn't exist (maybe they're affected by positive discrimination though). Etc.
How is this only a problem
on the left? I mean you basically described everything wrong with social conservatism. If my personal behavior doesn’t effect you in any way why do you care so much?
I think there is a subtle difference here (not one that defends conservative obsessions with what happens in people’s bed rooms and the like).
A lot of progressives are obsessed with solving problems for other communities by implementing solutions they think are cost benefit positive because they have tunnel vision on costs and benefits. They look only to the benefits to one group (or really that addresses specific problems among that group) they want to help and don’t care much about the costs to third parties. But they have convinced themselves this is objective analysis. And they honestly believe they deserve credit for caring despite it not directly affecting their own communities. Some to the extent that they’ve developed martyrdom complexes around communities that aren’t their own.
Conservatives seem irrationally obsessed with infiltration of their communities. In the 1990s, they feared people convincing their children to become gay, etc. Today, they fear crime spreading from urban areas to their neighborhoods. Their concerns are still mostly grounded in their own lives, they just have wholly irrational ideas about what is bad in some case, or the likelihood of something happening somewhere else spreading to their community. They view themselves as heroes protecting their community.
Maybe there’s an overlap between (some) lefties and conservatives? The lefties that we used to call limousine liberals, with the “all are welcome” and “love is love” signs, probably want to protect their communities from infiltration too. Just trying getting permission for a halfway house or an apartment building in the neighborhood. But they don’t quite see it or acknowledge that’s what they’re doing.
Oh sure, everyone is a hypocrite in their own way. But I think the difference is how they view their activism, not their everyday behavior.
I mean I don’t really disagree. Republicans do bad thing sometimes too is a bad defense and feels very grade school.
I call Republican ideas bad all the time and sometimes Democrats have bad ideas and we shouldn’t be afraid to say so.
The “tax the rich” step does a lot more to mitigate inequality than the “provision services” step, just mechanically, and inequality is a lot more viscerally exciting the trains or sewers or durable medical equipment or whatever. Taken to an extreme, a cost efficient public sector could enable a satisfying level of public service provision even amidst a highly unequal and capitalistic economy, which to a certain political orientation is horrifying.
The absurdity of doing things to help other people, like fighting in a war to help your country, or motherly love, or Jesus..... \S
I am pro-social spending but I don’t think this is a good response to what Andrew is saying. The examples you gave are all of self-sacrifice, which is kind of the opposite of “spending other people’s money.”
My comment was intentionally snide (and perhaps I should have marked it so). The whole spending other peoples money thing though feels like typical fiscal conservative orthodoxy with no basis in fact and thus it didn't feel totally unreasonable to reply in the same vein. (I'll edit a \S into my previous post)
The problem isn't that I didn't know you were being sarcastic—I did. The problem is that your examples aren't apropos.
My comments were intended to make one roll their eyes as a way of holding up a mirror to the absurdity of the original comment. As if to say, (to the original comment) "this comment is unworthy of serious rebuttal." This was apparently less successful than I had hoped.
Wish I could upvote this more than once!
While I agree with parts of this column, overall it reflects IMO what I've long thought is the biggest blind spot in the Slow Boring worldview. Matt tends to interpret any discussion of politics and political culture, in the broad sense of differing ideologies of public order, as if it were really about policymaking -- and relatively near-term policymaking at that -- or as if it in all seriousness ought to be. Often this tendency leads to novel insights and gains in analytic rigor. But occasionally I think it leads Matt simply to miss the level of analysis his interlocutors are interested in.
The trends Barro is talking about don't manifest primarily in terms of things one might lobby elected officials to do. Their most immediate effect is on the everyday assessment of interpersonal interactions, modeled in larger-scale terms not by a legislative agenda but by the evaluation of historical events or happenings in faraway countries.
Where the new ideology assumes the mantle of power, it tends to be in the form of case-by-case administrative decision-making, like assigning fault in a particular campus dispute. To borrow a distinction from administrative law, its primary vector is adjudication, not rulemaking. But even that overstates its orientation to concrete policy outcomes. What we are really talking about is a shift in modes of thought, forms of argument, symbols and styles of deportment.
At that level, it does seem as if something quite new has been happening since about 2014, to an extent that can't be explained as simply a leftward shifting of some preset curve. If that impression is wrong, it needs to be rebutted at its own level. It can't be explained away as just another instance of a more or less stochastic tendency to "take things too far."
It is certainly true that many voters, both conservatives and progressives, care more about confronting the correct enemies than policy outcomes. Hanania is very worth reading, in part because he understands the id of the Republican party in a way that Yglesias just doesn’t.
However, Matt’s focus on policy outcomes over the discourse is not only a refreshing way of differentiating his writing, it’s also the most useful frame. Unless you are public intellectual trolling for clicks, you are more affected by policy outcomes than the discourse. The CARES act profoundly affected my family. The twitter outrage du jour rarely does. Divorced from policy outcomes, the discourse would be no more important than reality TV.
Co-sign the recommendation to read Hanania, who is indeed well chosen as a foil to Yglesias in this regard. Grossly deficient where Matt abounds, superabundant where Matt is lacking. In a previous Slow Boring exchange, I described reading Hanania as like shaving with sandpaper, insofar as one might be rubbed the wrong way. Once you realize that and accept that you're there for the local insights on offer, not for the whole gestalt, I stand by my view that Hanania is a uniquely valuable writer today.
Why isn’t it just another instance of a more or less stochastic tendency to “take things too far”? His point is that bad things of various sorts happen when people take things too far, and people have always done that sort of thing, but as public opinions shift left, a larger fraction of the things taken too far will be left ones?
I understand what Matt's point is, I just don't agree in this instance.
Of course one could at a first approximation describe most "things" as a normal curve with certain outliers going "too far." Vis-a-vis the "thing" at issue, one could point to e.g. the Hamline University implosion over "studying masterpieces of Islamic art = Islamophobia," which produced a backlash even from the sort of people usually inclined to acquiesce in that sort of thing that clearly caught the administrators responsible off guard. That's an example of a more or less stochastic tendency relative to some central mean.
But if the "thing" generating a normal distribution with some outliers inviting pushback is itself unprecedented, that's different. And the eruption of pro-Hamas sentiment, to take one example, seems too broad-based and too rooted in durable, widely shared attitudes to be described as a mere outlier.
Coming from a different framework, I also tend to look at the “illiberal left” from a more abstract level (like the Chait article referenced here.) “Taking things too far” perhaps cannot happen without serious collective cognitive disfunction, failure of nuanced critical thinking or some combination of philosophical shortcomings. The movement arising in 2014 (or whenever) raised important points. Looking at individual experience and identity adds richness to our cultural discussion and understanding. Acknowledging the widespread influence of the dominant culture is necessary.
But when the illiberal left applies these concepts absolutely as the single hammer for all issues, instead of adding them to a nicely calibrated toolset, we run into problems. My hobby throughout the Covid years has been exploring all the ways the illiberal left can go wrong, from philosophical, theological and psychological viewpoints. Intellectually satisfying, but probably ineffective, since the more moderate left understands these excesses instinctively anyway.
"...but overriding racial justice maximalism when it came to keeping public schools open."
If you recall, there was a huge hand-wave of this with the idea that somehow reopening schools earlier than later would lead to a genocide-by-virus of marginalized Black and Latinx youth:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/why-black-parents-arent-joining-the-push-to-reopen-schools/ for one example.
Nobody can produce an accurate analysis of this 'movement' without realizing that they're only slightly more committed to intellectual rigor/consistency than talk radio conspiracy types. There's always a way by which anyone who opposes your policy proposals is literally eating BIPOC babies.
It will be so amusing watching them eventually have to equivocate around the fact that they’ve lost the minority vote.
Sure, they’ll play off at least Hispanic and Asian vote shares as “they’re white now,” ignoring the implications for the “BIPOC” formulation.
But what about when they’ve finally succeeding in pissing off black voters enough to struggle to break 50%?
I saw a New York Times article not an hour ago ago about 22% of black voters polling for Trump over Biden, with black men being almost 1/3 Trump.
This will probably simmer down a bit after Echo Chamber Trump returns to the general public eye and puts people off with displays of craziness and encroaching senility, and the Blob Ministry of Internal Affairs encourages polarizing street episodes in summer '24.
It's impossible to frame this both accurately and politely, so I'll go for the former: there's honestly just a limit to the amount of gay shit (literal sense) that the median black, male voter will take*. Couple that with the totally hollow promises of 2020 and you have a recipe for a slow decline in black support for the Democratic Party.
This will, of course, turn out well for the black populace in general. Not because Republican policies or messaging is in any way benevolent, but because the Dem leadership will need to pay more than lip service to the specific concerns of the black electorate.
*For those who this will put in a tizzy, look at Democratic cultural messaging and tell me it's any way compatible with traditional views of masculinity, which are culturally important for proles of all races. I'm also not suggesting that there exists an objective category of "gay shit," I refer to cultural perception.
I think if more Blacks migrate to the Republican party while more traditionally Republican white suburban voters migrate to the Democratic party, that would be a good thing for the overall health of the polity, even if the original cause of that change is stupid behavior by the two parties.
Decreasing racial polarization is always a good thing for the health of a polyethnic nation.
With key emphasis on "immutable" and those immutable identities getting codified into law (let alone into the constitution).
Best case counterexample there has to be Switzerland, although from what little I know Flemish/Walloon political conflict is rather less salient over the last 2-3 decades than it historically has been. Thanks, EU!
I'd be happy (and astonished) to see the political salience of being Black* decrease, and I suppose a slightly greater R fraction of the Black vote might help a bit there.
* I am an American person of pallor who has spent a moderate chunk of my life going to schools and/or living in neighborhoods that were majority non-white, but the majority or plurality ethnoracial group in those cases has never been Black/AfAm. Closest I ever came was working for a little while in a plurality Dominican part of Washington Heights.
But more important IMHO, and nearly impossible (also IMHO) as long as Trumpolatry and MAGA have a controlling interest in the Republican Party, is for the Republicans to continue to fight for local level political power in the top 10-20 metros (as opposed to having a few congresscritters elected from the metros remaining R-leaning or swing districts; and in a few cases still controlling the county level government).
There is Eric Johnson, the Black Republican (Democrat until 9/22/23) mayor of Dallas (also the only large city with a Republican mayor and > 20% Black population - until this July Jacksonville had a R mayor for most of the time since 1993).
Otherwise you have to go to Mattie Parker (lifetime R AFAIK) in Ft Worth.
I understand (though I disagree) why the Dems are largely willing to sacrifice the rurals for the suburbs/exurbs (to paraphrase Willie Sutton, that's where the votes are), and that's a pretty consistent trend in most of the developed world, but "we" (heterodox liberals like Matt and me) should at least try to fight the trend.
My suspicion is that it is less about “gay-shit” and more about uncontrolled immigration. I live in New York City, and I suspect that a lot of working class Black people are pissed off about large numbers of immigrants being put up (for free) in nice hotels while they continue to struggle to make rent.
You're correct to some extent but that's largely NYC-specific as far as I can tell. The cultural backlash against the gender-sexuality portion of wokery among prole-class black and Hispanic males is huge everywhere, but for obvious reasons legacy media outlets don't go around Mott Haven asking 20-30-something-year-old dudes what they think about transgenderism and displaying the results to their readership/viewership.
Remember, gender-ideology stuff has been in urban public schools long enough now that a lot of people who ordinarily couldn't give a shit either way have been exposed to it and decided they dislike it.
(Also, in my personal estimation, NYC has a higher rate of college attendance or at least interest in higher education among the urban proletariat than just about anywhere else in the country. The ranks of our underclass are thin and tend towards subway loons rather than people simply suffering from excruciating generational poverty and trapped in a potential well because of that.)
“but for obvious reasons legacy media outlets don't go around Mott Haven asking 20-30-something-year-old dudes what they think about transgenderism and displaying the results to their readership/viewership.”
Yeah, but the article I think you’re referencing did have a quote from a Jamaican immigrant who was complaining about “porn in schools”. I was honestly kind of (pleasantly) shocked to see that, and I really don’t think we would have seen that (a quote like that being incorporated) a year or even six months ago.
Yes, the New York Times has been putting on an impressive showing of honesty recently. I'm pretty sure that what happened is the old guard deciding that they would prefer to rein in the Buzzfeed millennials and TikTok zoomers and thus maintain their place as the country's newspaper of record rather than go the way of the Washington Post and base their business model on feel-good media for #resist soccer moms and disillusioned former Bush Republicans in Stamford, CT. (Now the WaPo's financial fortunes are tied to Trump's electoral success, which is hysterical.)
A concise way of summing up the minority social conservative backlash is this: there are a lot of people who are receptive to progressive messaging about racial issues but strongly against progressive views on gender and sexuality, and progressives have done a great job of blowing their credibility on the former and making their insanity on the latter very visible, especially via public education, which almost every person in the middle-middle-class or below goes through.
That is a big local story in Chicago as well; "you have to pay more taxes to cover the predictable cost of Biden's asylum policy" is infuriating to a lot of people working long hours who do not vote GOP.
I read that piece. Apparently pornography in children’s books is also Biden’s fault.
There are two things here:
- People blame the sitting president for random stuff his political side does, which is analytically dubious but basically inevitable.
- D messaging on the school library issue-plex is only persuasive to people who are all-in on Defend Trans Kids!, or who are partisan enough and lacking enough in personal connection to the issue to uncritically believe stuff like "Ron DeSantis doesn't want kids to know who MLK was."
Or in crass summary, the messaging on this issue falls flat among concerned prole mothers but does great with Pajama Boy. This is because "parents without graduate degrees should have zero say in public school curricula" is an unpopular policy outside of sectors of the professional-managerial class and the Bushwickariat.
You’re right- it’s not fair. But one way to deal with it is to hippy-punch and Biden refuses to do that.
He did fund the police but no doubt there were more opportunities like this that weren’t even addressed with rhetoric https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/08/01/fact-sheet-president-bidens-safer-america-plan-2/
It's interesting to compare and contrast these later WH statements back to those Day 1 Exec. Actions. Still surprised they went so aggressively on Day 1 (e.g., the "stop boarder wall construction" is one they should have known better would come back to bite them later).
I kind of disagree, black Americans socially conservative enough to prioritize disliking gay rights and feminist activism over other social and economic issues are probably already voting Republican? I bet the future of the young Black male vote growing more GOP goes with tax and money, where Republicans can start pointing out the Democratic party policies that made used cars get more expensive. That is much more likely to swing people who don't currently vote GOP.
Historically, Democrats were with good reason perceived to be way better on racial issues, and non-race-related culture war issues were much less relevant. The cracks in those two walls are what, if anything, will cause the Democrats to lose their guarantee of 90% of black voters' ballots.
It is pretty funny reading that NYT poll story about young voters being unenthused for Biden, it's like hearing a fellow Republican mad about Georgia senate races. "Oh the insane lies you told the voters are now making them not turn out for you because they think the world sucks and is beyond their control? Terrible, I wonder who discouraged them!"
Oh explaining away the minority vote shift will be easy - it's internalized White Supremacy, those voters suffer from false consciousness just like everyone who disagrees with us 🙄
Municipal elections are often less of an ideological referendum, and I think those guys have a strategy of mobilizing low-information voters with a combination of race hustling (which conveniently works on the "In This House We Believe..." people too) and appeals to local concerns. This doesn't work in national elections.
Also, a part of what's happening is that the paroxysm of 2020 yielded no real positive results for the people it was ostensibly intended to help, and au contraire elite expectations, they figured that out. I predict that political-machine race hustling is going to become a much less successful strategy for municipal elections in the future.
I'm also glad you didn't mention Eric Adams, because he was the NYC pro-crime coalition's worst enemy. Chicago has a very strong coalition of lakefront liberals and a large voting underclass, which explains a lot of what goes on there politically, but NYC has a comparatively bigger voting largely-non-white working class and a comparatively smaller voting underclass. Adams split the former from the champagne socialists and won on that.
This faction list is very bizarre but makes sense if you read it as "people seriously involved in politics" and not "voters". Here's mine for broad voter categories (keep in mind that the organized Republican Party is marginal enough that "R" here is more of a loose values signifier).
1: PMC + hipsters/gentrifiers (funny enough the most ethnically diverse coalition, D except for some Wall Street Journal Republicans)
2: Working-class usually-not-white (the swing demographic, relatively socially conservative)
3: EYYYYY TONY/the cop-fireman-teamster demographic (solid R)
4: Generational underclass (very small fraction of voters)
The NYC winning coalition for progressives was based primarily on the first two, which is the reason it was bound to fracture. {2, 3} beats {1, 4} in New York because 4 is proportionally small compared to in other cities. I think Chicago proper doesn't have enough slightly-bigoted Polish firemen and worried-sick Jamaican grandmothers to beat out the underclass-PMC coalition. The Krassner-Foxx-Johnson types will hold on the longest in places like Chicago.
I've also said this already but there were a lot of "shy Tory" Adams voters motivated by subway safety, because people who would be driving to and from their subdivision elsewhere in the country are exposed to the general public in NYC.
"EYYYYY TONY/the cop-fireman-teamster demographic (solid R)"
Carving Staten Island, which physically and culturally is obviously New Jersey, into NYC was sort of a genius move -- even though it's only about 5-6% of the City -- in introducing a moderating counterforce into City politics.
Literally laughed out loud at “EYYYYYY TONY”
Krasner didn't have a serious challenger during the reelection, whether primary or general. And Philly then elected by far the most "tough on crime" mayoral candidate, with more support from black neighborhoods than anywhere else.
Yes, I was surprised that Matt overlooked the issue of teachers union officials claiming that reopening schools during COVID would be a racist act.
Wish I had read this before posting my sort of redundant comment 😂
re the point on charter schools and unions: the Barro take about leftwing positioning to be strictly about identity is mostly right, but I'd add that that identitarian deference only applies to people already on the team.
Like, a leftwing Black woman who works for a university or nonprofit will never be criticized, but Condoleezza Rice absolutely will (and often more harshly, as apostates are the worst sinners)
Why would you expect anyone left-of-centre to abstain from criticising Condoleezza Rice?
because of the explicit "Listen 👏 to 👏 Black 👏 Women" refrains
Well that seems like a very silly expectation on your part.
No one actually expects hyper-polarized people to be intellectually consistent
Right, so in that case a charge of hypocrisy isn't very interesting is it? Especially if your actual point is 'identitarianism is bad', in which case it actually dilutes your argument to find an example where you think anti-identitarianism has been correctly applied (this is the 'the food here is awful, and such small portions' joke as an argument structure).
I don’t know that “I already agree this principle is being inconsistently applied, so there” is a killer comeback. Or did you think someone was actually calling for Rice not to be criticized?
I think this is overplayed a bit. The left certainly isn’t bowing down to Kamala - at least not after the little bit of a honeymoon period she had
Depends on which left you’re talking about.
The hard left of twenty years ago is basically all the current establishment types who are huge Kamala stans, the very ones who all but forced Biden to select her.
The campus left and police abolitionists absolutely hate her for being a former prosecutor, but trust that they’ll turn on a dime and fierily condemn Biden, America, and even God Almighty Himself if they get a whiff of her getting forced out for a more palatable running mate like Whitmer.
Matt,
Thank you for the interesting and insightful analysis. What you’re saying makes a lot of sense to me.
On top of that, I think that politics, on significant parts of the left (particularly NGO’s and activist groups) and most of the right has expressed the shift towards greater tribalism as essentially a switch from an a la carte menu to a fixed price one. Been reading your work since Vox, and I think your experience was pretty good evidence of that. It isn’t enough to share most ideas when membership in a group requires subscription to an orthodoxy. I think this has taken a lot of room for ideological disagreement out, further reinforcing the tribalism aspect and allowing said orthodoxies to become less and less tethered to reality by removing voices that disagree on any of the idea considered sacrosanct.
The concept of a la carte versus a fixed price menu is really insightful.
actually I thia
I thia six days a week and twice on Sunday.
I am not paying for the ten course tasting menu when 4 of the courses suck and the portions of the ones I like are way too small. But I will totally go to a tapas bar and order five things I like.
If you think about Vox as 50s National Review, it's totally reasonable to make an outlet that supports a set of thinkers who have very controversial ideas about politics. What would be unreasonable is producing a primary system to the point that you get someone with Henry Wallace-esque views vs Barry Goldwater instead of LBJ vs Barry Goldwater. So media is overrated and how parties select people is underrated, imo.
Great points.
The polarization and tribalism is very real and toxic. I feel it started with 9-11 and the rift has continued to widen and crack, also driven by silo’d internet communications and social media, as well as splintered news media.
Then there is purposeful messing with our political culture from enemies foreign and domestic. Mike Flynn published a book recently on so called 5G warfare. In a chapter titled “How to make people kill people” there is a simple chart…
Polarization->tribalism->dehumanization->killing
https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1643673851166093312/photo/1
You might appreciate this https://youtu.be/yHv009kiIug?si=Y5B5uwDGQqpGQv0M
The first thing I thought of when I read this article were my thoughts about intersectionality. I've always liked the concept, as it seems correct to me in an almost banal manner that the intersections of 2+ identities can create unique personalities and views that should be observed more.
But it's unfortunate that the most prominent people who preach the multidimensional nature of intersectionality use it to reconstruct a one dimensional Oppression Olympics chart, in only focusing on the intersections that make a person exceptionally oppressed, or exceptionally the oppressor. But in almost all cases, the intersections will create classes that are simultaneously oppressed and are the oppressor. Any Palestine/Israel debate is the largest fly trap in this regard: it's clear that both sides have heavily taken on both roles, but so many want to devolve it into that oversimplified one dimensional chart and pick a side they feel is most oppressed.
Humans in general just really struggle with comprehending nuance.
Yes, and the intersectional identities sometimes interact in ways that are counter to the “Oppression Olympics.” Black people are worse off than white people and women are worse off than men, so how come Black women are doing so much better than Black men in many ways?
Right, the Black man/White woman dichotomy is perhaps the most classic example of lack of clarity. The competing claims in participation in women's sports is another. Whether or not to inject income and wealth as an additional dimension has always been quite controversial among the set that wants to heavily focus on race, sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Then there's other aspects like geographic origin and current residency, educational attainment, and so on. I could go on all day listing intersecting dimensions and how they're important, so I should probably end this comment now.
This is the great tragedy of left-wing academia in the modern age. The people doing the academic work often come up with quite sound and reasonable concepts and notions but then they repeatedly choose to allow/help them to be used in perverse ways rather than risk rocking the ideological boat (not to say their aren't dumb idiotic ideas as well).
A great example here is academic feminism. Once you get past the dumb choice of terms (calling pressure to conform to gender roles patriarchy) it's often reasonably talking about how both men and women can suffer from pressure to conform to gender roles and explaining how it often comes from other women and in friendly guises.
But the academics just shut up and march when the movement wants to focus on how evil men at corporations are keeping women down. Even when their theory would logically suggest that maybe men feel greater social pressure to succeed at jobs and that they might be working more than they'd like because they are victims of social expectations.
It's infuriating because there is very much something wrong but it's hard to point to or fix.
If my understanding is correct, the concept of intersectionality was originally basically about affirmative action (and similar governmental initiatives aimed at boosting particular groups). The idea was that if you, say, institute a policy of hiring blacks that's meant to counterbalance employers' bias in favor of hiring whites, and also institute a policy of hiring women that's meant to counterbalance employers' bias in favor of hiring men, those biases' continued existence would lead to hiring of a lot of black men and white women, with black women still getting the shaft.
"Intersectionality" was meant to be an argument for addressing the policy lacuna created by the lack of programs targeted at narrower subgroups, and for defusing the legal objection that such programs would be go beyond the acceptable limits of affirmative action. It was never supposed to be a sociological claim that e.g. black women were "more oppressed" in some broader sense than that.
I don't think I've ever, even once, seen the term deployed in the wild in a way that involved doing some kind of intersectional analysis. People just sort of say "this whole thing is really intersectional" and then they move on to whatever else they were going to say.
My semi-serious joke related to this is "have you considered the intersection of X identity with people who have had to wield power responsibly within a pluralistic democracy?" Like if ones positionality determines an arguments validity--that knowing anything requires personal experience--than how can the powerless be trusted with power?
I think your joke conflates intersectionality with standpoint epistemology.
Its sorta the same thing though, since intersectionality is meaningless unless you think it gives you insight into some knowledge.
The point of intersectionality is not a claim to authority. The point is that different dimensions of an individual's identity 'intersect' creating unique combinations of both advantage and disadvantage. Elsewhere someone provided the canonical example of affirmative action hiring practices favouring black people and women that could nevertheless lead to black women remaining uniquely disadvantaged, and this is the core insight. It has nothing to do with one's positionality determining an argument's validity (which is already called standpoint epistemology).
You likely hear people who over-use the term "intersectionality" commiting the sin of standpoint epistemology (hell, I know I do), but they are conceptually very distinct.
I guess I find the normative nature of most intersectionality discourse to push the concept fully within the definition of standpoint epistemology, but your point is fair! Maybe why nobody really finds its funny...
I think the problems on both left and right are more readily explained by the rise of modes of thinking rooted in illiberalism, as opposed to the particular position of the center of the political spectrum on the left-right axis at this moment in time.
There are lots of factors feeding that rise, including the rise of the right’s propaganda arm, the hard left building a bureaucratic DEI motte within higher education’s bailey, a decline in analytical rigor about the people paid to think about issues in favor of self-dealing, and social media leveling the playing field for every nutjob and idiot to shout catchy slogans out into the void.
Not sure how to stuff everything back in Pandora’s box, however.
Before social media, a town might have 30 morons who believed incredibly stupid things. They didn't much matter. After social media, those 30 morons found their compatriots in towns and cities all over the nation and world, so they are a much stronger force.
Exhibit # I’ve-lost-count: social media is still bad.
The good side of that is that 30 people with a weird hobby could (a) find each other and (b) find their compatriots in towns and cities all over the nation and the world.
Combine this with streaming video meaning than an audience of 10,000 is sufficient to make for a profitable business, and there are a lot of niche hobbies and interests that are having booms that they have never touched before. To pick ones I'm vaguely aware of: both Chess and Dungeons and Dragons are vastly more successful as businesses and in terms of audience than ever (for D&D) or than since Bobby Fischer (for Chess).
But there are literally dozens of others. I ran into a YouTube channel of someone who is a professional jigsaw puzzle solver. Yes, really. People watch her solve jigsaws. For hours. No, I don't get it either.
There are *lots* of other hobbies and activities where the niche has got a lot bigger as people with a mild interest find it much easier to hook into a broader, internet-based community and then build off that into person-to-person meetups.
I'm still not sure it's worth the negative impact on politics of niche politics becoming bigger. Most niche politics is bad.
Might make a case that topic-oriented rather than person-oriented media is better for the good use and worse for the bad.
That is, something like a forum or a subreddit or a blog comments section (or, for those of you old enough to remember, a Usenet group) tends to stick to a specific subject, making it more effective at bringing together people, but it's not inclined to trap people into a group. In social media, if you have a strong political opinion, you quickly drive off everyone who disagrees ... and then you're trapped in a bubble.
But if you're on a local forum for your town and forums for three of your hobbies, and you're on Stormfront, then people in the first four don't know that you're on Stormfront, and you retain a connection to people who aren't fascists. If you're on Facebook or Twitter and talking to fascists, you get blocked by people, even when those people share a hobby, because they can't follow "just the things this person says about hobby X".
Martin Gurri's 2014 book "The Revolt of the Public" explains the rise of illiberalism (and nihilism) as social media has degraded institutional authority and fostered negation politics. He suggests we need to reform or replace our institutions to be more descriptive and less prescriptive, and to be more frank about uncertainty.
Eg, rather than demanding a COVID shutdown, the FDA, CDC, and other medical institutions would explain their current understanding of the virus and estimate the impact of various interventions. They would regularly update the public as their understanding evolves. They would recognize there are non-medical considerations, such as the economics of a shutdown, and leave it to the public and their elected representatives to determine the course of action.
Just want to +1 Revolt of the Public. A incredibly prescient book.
Prescient indeed. When Martin Gurri wrote that book our sucky populist future was already here, but not evenly distributed.
It seems the primary system is more to blame than an ideology. America is as small-l liberal as ever. But creating bureaucracies of unelected experts to call more of the shots and low turnout elections to determine party nominees (like Trump) means taking away power from the median voter. The median voter hasn't changed, but what he is allowed to determine for himself as a citizen has significantly narrowed.
I think this is a failure to hold the voters accountable. They're the problem. You can't win a primary without people voting for you, no matter how many dynamics are in place that nudge people away from participation in primaries.
People only make it through primaries if they win more votes than their opponents. If people want different results in primaries, they need to spend the money and manpower to recruit better candidates in strong partisan districts and turn out voters to vote for those better candidates.
One of the stupidest things about federal politics is how everyone spends all their time and money on battleground races for the general election. There are dozens of primary races that could shape the character of both parties if motivated donors put their money into them.
Well right, motivated donors pour money into candidates who are *further* from the median voter and the parties pour money into ratf--king their opponents with candidates even further from the median voter. But I agree juicing turnout is important, if we could get more voters overall participating, we would generally improve the quality of candidates nominated by both parties.
The one irony is Trump, of course; he did better with both very right-wing and very moderate voters in the 2016 primary. He got a higher share in open primary states. I suspect that's just marginal; if you increased the margin of voters participating further, it would go down, it's just the people who were immediately on the fence to turnout GOP were uniquely well-targeted by Trump.
Sorry for the rant, it's just so frustrating to watch such low-hanging fruit (primaries are way cheaper than general election races, which are basically unwinnable for one party or the other in a bunch of states) remain unpicked as crazier and crazier people end up in DC.
re: Trump, I think that people still don't understand/aren't willing to admit the boost he got from being a known celebrity figure who continually dabbled in political antics for over 40 years, and having 15 seasons of a hit national TV show that positioned him as the embodiment of masculine executive authority, and having his name be synonymous with "flashy luxury" in pop culture. You can't buy that kind of juice. It explains so much about his weird appeal.
I agree, basically every single person in America was aware that this guy was running in a GOP presidential primary all the way back in the fall of 2015; that is extremely weird!
Just a reminder, everyone go vote today!
After work I'm going to have to swallow my pride and vote blue for the Arlington county board since I want the missing middle plan and or similar up-zoning to go through. It's so annoying this local GOP guy is right on crime but wrong on the up-zoning plan. Fortunately, the equilibrium on policing is way more reasonable here than in DC. Gonna vote GOP for state senate race, but that guy has no chance here sadly.
Only one race for me to vote on today, but it's for mayor!
I wish I could vote for some councilors as well, but the overlords in the state legislature forced upon us evil geographic single member districts instead. What's ironic is that even though they're butthurt about Boise going what they think is way too universally left wing, if they instead forced upon us proportional representation there would almost certainly be at least one right wing councilor elected.
We have the worst of both worlds... we have a 15-member council with 5 at-large members that basically ensure the majority party gets to hold a 5-seat majority at all times. It's like taking everything bad about winner-take-all single-seats and making it even worse.
And I say that as someone ostensibly aligned with the majority party, the Democrats. The problem is that our Dems don't have any real accountability, so they just chase the Boomer/Xer zeitgeist fighting their own little culture war while everyone else just kind of gets screwed. It's quite absurd.
Dropping off my ballot on the way home from work!
It was a tough one this year though...so many local positions that I felt a little ill-informed on, even after browsing the pamphlet with the candidate statements. Non-partisan positions are tough all right.
Yeah, what’s always tough for me every year is knowing that my municipal elections are basically a rubber stamp for a political machine whose values I generally share but goes about them in the most corrupt ways possible.
About to head to the poll in Ohio, wish me luck, I don’t usually vote in the evening 😬
A major constraint on the left is internal migration. People are moving away from big blue cities and towards red or purple suburbs. They might spout leftist ideology in their 20s and early 30s, but once their children reach school age, it’s better to chose a school system run by chamber of commerce Republicans than teachers unions.
I never thought I would like the leafy suburbs so much. I moved during the pandemic mainly because my wife switched jobs after Delta laid off all its contractors. I’m so glad we did. I am far more comfortable socially and physically living in a precinct that Trump won by 18 points than one Obama won by 90 points. It disgusts me that so many of my neighbors support a man who incited a mob to storm the Capitol after he lost an election. Yet they are nice people and good neighbors, so much so that these days I only go to Atlanta for court.
A lot of the sort of circumstantial advantages of cities become irrelevant for most people once they have little kids. "Are there any hot concert venues in the suburbs?" Who gives a shit, I've been to like one concert in the past five years. "But they're not walkable, you can't just spontaneously pop down to the Zagat-rated corner bistro for an early dinner." I never just pop down to anywhere anymore; it's called date night, the sitter is lined up weeks in advance, and at that point you just drive to wherever, within reason.
Some people are still going to like living in cities regardless. But stripping away all those amenities really forces you to confront the question of which kind of built environment makes you more comfortable in and of itself. Unsurprisingly, for a lot of people the answer turns out to be one with big yards and big trees.
In which I yet again comment on how terribly sad I find this middle class American idea that “”small children and cities don’t mix.”
I was born in Europe, where people *routinely* raise young children in cities and it works and it’s perfectly fine. Nobody is like, “oh noes, how can you subject your child to this, don’t you want to move to a nice suburb?!?”
Personally, I loved living in Boston with my young son ( we had to move away for work, sadly). We could walk to his elementary school, we would take public transit to the Museum of Science, it was great! And we had one car in our household, mostly used for weekend trips to New Hampshire and such.
This is why we liberals ought to push for more order and safety in cities: so that families with children will be willing to live there.
I'm not convinced it's as much order and safety as it is room and space. My kids are now in their 20s, but when they were little I could go outside and play with them, but mostly I just kicked them outside into our fenced suburban yard when they were young --- sandbox, trees, swing set and eventually pool all there. As they got older they could leave the yard and go play in the neighbors yard, although sadly not as often as they should have because kids, mostly the neighbors' not mine, became over scheduled. We had friends with same age kids living in the city, the neighborhood was at least as safe as ours, but for their kids to get outside was an all hands adventure and three block walk to the nearest park.
What if American cities had more quad buildings? I don’t know the right term for it in English. That’s what many of us lived in back in Europe.
A quad building is four apartment buildings arranged around a central open space where children can play. You kick your kids out of the apartment/condo and they play in the shared open space with your neighbors’ kids, and you can sit on the balcony and sip your tea and keep an eye on them. It works great!
I've lived in those kinds of buildings in Berlin and in Rome. They're nice and do have the advantages you describe. But I they don't quite have the feeling of being *outside* that I suspect feels critical to a lot of American suburbanites. You can't rake the leaves into a giant pile and jump in it. You don't find that a rabbit's made a burrow in spring and had babies in it, or get to watch a hawk try to swoop at them.
And as far as other kids, I gather you're sort of stuck with whomever happens to be living in the building at the time. You can't just walk down the street to wherever your favorite age-mates are and ride bikes together around their cul-de-sac.
Grass is underrated.
Matt wrote a whole piece praising those. https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-praise-of-courtyard-apartments
I suspect, but can't say definitively that today most European cities and their suburbs and most American cities and their suburbs are just so different in design, usage, and cultural perception that they are not going to merge into mirror images of each other in any foreseeable future.
Why do you think Europeans didn't and don't migrate out to the suburbs? Why does the lore of bigger yards and bigger houses not call out to the European middle and upper middle class in the same way?
Two words: expensive gasoline. For all that American b*tch about expensive gasoline, it’s vastly cheaper here than in Europe, and that enables big sprawling suburbs.
Guilty as charged. Though I can't agree enough with ML's post in this thread explaining that it's not so much "order and safety as it is room and space."
I suspect a lot of it also comes back to the stickiness of expectations based on one's own childhood memories. I grew up not even in the suburbs but in rural farm country. And while I've had many happy years living in cities as an adult, I still can't really wrap my head around the idea of what it'd be like to be a kid there. I think parents have a mostly salutary bias toward wanting to give their kids the same kinds of experiences they remember from growing up, which leads them to seek out physical spaces that at least make those experiences possible.
because the villages are destitute and backwards and all that is affluent and sophisticated is also urban
Are your kids very little? Because I raised my kids in a small city and once they get to about age 10 or 11, it is SO much easier than living in the suburbs. They can go to many places by themselves - school, library, stores, fast food less than 10 minute walk away. They can take public transit to most school, extracurricular activities, and friends' houses. When I hear the stories about pick up lines at schools and being a "taxi" for kids' activities, it sounds like a drag. Also, around mid-elementary or so, the kids start to like trying different restaurants, going to some cultural events like outdoor concerts, art exhibits, etc. , and just being able to walk or take a short bus ride to them means that the family is more likely to take advantage than if they had to drive 30 minutes, find a parking space, etc.
And now that my kids are mostly off at college, I don't have the same worries as other parents. They learned how to handle themselves when they still had me by their side, they know what/who to avoid and what warning signs are, and they aren't freaked out getting slapped by an obviously unstable person in a fast food restaurant - something that happened recently to my kid at college in Chicago - while everyone else sees it as a sign of the coming apocalypse. (I'm not saying that this sort of thing SHOULD happen or to be nonchalant about it, but also not to be afraid to go outside or to do anything when such things do happen.)
I know I am an outlier among people in the US, but I think raising your kids in a city is extremely positive.
Fair enough, and a genuine thanks for the countervailing perspective. My kids are indeed relatively little, though not so little that the factors you're describing don't come into play.
The post you're directly replying to was about parents' own adult preferences for cities becoming weaker after the changes to their schedule and style of social interaction that come with having kids. But I've definitely come down on the "suburbs good for kids themselves" side of things in other posts in this thread.
I do think a lot of it comes down to priors set by your own experiences as a kid. I hear you about kids taking the bus to a show or whatever, and that sounds great. But my own memories of being 16 revolve around getting a car and joyriding like idiots with my friends. I'd be pretty hard put to defend the latter on the merits, but it's what I know and it still feels to me like a key step to adulthood in some ineffable way.
Ha, that's a good point. It's all what you are used to. My kids say they don't want to live someplace where they have to have a car because it burns up so much money. As someone who will likely go car shopping very soon because the repairs have become too frequent and expensive, I currently think they have a point. Although I live in the city, I work in the suburbs. I can and do sometimes take public transit there, but it is a long and convoluted route, which is probably why I see way fewer kids on those buses than on the ones I see in town.
most of my neighbors would recoil at the thought of a 10 year old riding public transit on his own. i’m a badass for thinking my 9 year old is capable enough to bike 3/4 of a mile to his grandparents house without being helicoptered
It's how they have to get to school starting in 6th grade, so it's more normalized around here. And you raise a good point - when everyone is doing it as part of school, parents start to accept it as a rite of passage.
For me personally, one of the advantages of a city (aside from environmental benefits and clustering effects for professional jobs) is not the proximity of hot bistros or concert venues; it's the sensation of walking down a street with lots of pedestrians and shops and cafes - it's lively and feels like civilization. In contrast, suburbs feel so dead. There's no life, no activity, everyone is hidden in their houses or their cars. That's my personal feeling, YMMV.
The biggest disadvantage of a city (for me personally) is the presence of too many other people.
It just seems miserable and exhausting to have so many potential interactions if you step out of your front door.
And then to later the uncertainty and chaos over *who* you will be interacting with from a cosmopolitan or (especially) homelessness/public safety standpoint...
For me it's the opposite, when the kids are in a good mood it's awesome to be able to spontaneously decide to hit up the brewery/pizzeria at 4:00 pm, the Parents Hour, when all the moms and dads are enjoying two light beers before walking the kids back home when the twentysomethings show up.
I absolutely detest the suburbs and suburban living on a personal level, but I understand why the school situation and safety draw people in who might otherwise prefer urban life.
Which sucks, because geographic manipulation/segregation is a very bad thing for society overall. "Sorry, poors, you have to deal with egregious public disorder, I'm fine because I have my subdivision house and Tesla." Talk about "fuck you, I've got mine!"
Every day I see another confirmation of my prior that New York suffers less from public disorder than West Coast cities because the upper-middle class and above aren't totally insulated from reality.
I mean....that's quite extreme of a swing, though, from 90 to 18. I don't wanna live anywhere that is that far in either direction (the 90). Where I work is R+13 and where I live is D+12, and the R+13 area is much more obnoxious about culture was issues.
D+90 is a lot more sane when under 10 percent are white Democrats, as in my neighborhood.
I could see that. Matches my experience.
I don’t think libertarianism contributes much to the debate that a sensible moderate Republican couldn’t. I just get frustrated with libertarian intellectuals because it always comes back to the heroin at 7-11 stuff and I ain’t got time for that.
Libertarianism is just a political religion of selfishness that pretends anarchy is actually a species of socialism.
An argument I've heard is that you should always want a libertarian on the team, but never want them to be in charge. It's good to have someone who asks, should we even be doing this? It's helpful to have people who are good at spotting potential problems before you start.
Another thing about libertarians is they tend to punch above their weight since they're willing to work with anybody. They'll team up with left wing people to argue for open borders or right wing people for no gun control.
Yeah but I find many moderate republicans (as long as they are not captured by the religious right) hold the same good ideas about sensible deregulation and individual liberty that libertarians have without all the "I should be able to buy an ICBM" stuff.
In my experience, the thing that makes moderate Republicans more moderate is their libertarian leanings. It's the facet that pulls the party away from traditionalist and reactionary forms of conservatism.
Libertarianism suffers from the fact that it practices what it preaches and as such has zero message discipline. Thus the legacy media as well as the "Fox media," which are both totally unsympathetic to it, always have a buffoon to parade in front of the masses.
I agree that libertarianism, taken to its ideological culmination, produces terrible policy, but so do most other ideologies, which is why taking ideology too seriously is bad. The best selling point of libertarianism is simple, though: nobody has ever lined up families in front of ditches in the name of individualism.
This is why the only political axis I would claim to be at an extreme of is the individualism-pragmatism vs. collectivism-utopianism axis, pretty much entirely for the reason that politicide and genocide are invariably the results of the latter.
It's also really easy to come up with a totally new collectivist ideology and get people to kill for their utopia in great numbers and with horrible cruelty, ex. Hutu Power (which is an ideology, not a group).
"The best selling point of libertarianism is simple, though: nobody has ever lined up families in front of ditches in the name of individualism."
Not so obvious to me that this is true. If you look at the British casus belli for the Boer War -- infamous for the sadistic intensity of its treatment of noncombatants -- it looks a lot like straight up libertarianism: open borders, abolition of government monopolies and restrictive licensing schemes, etc. The British Empire inflicted a fair amount of collateral damage on civilian populations fighting wars in the name of free trade.
You can no-true-Scotsman all of that by saying *real* libertarians wouldn't have resorted to state action, or try to claim that the overt justifications were pretexts for "nationalism" or something, but I think both arguments prove too much. I'd take that history more as evidence for your first point, that like anything else "libertarianism, taken to its ideological culmination, produces terrible policy."
I don't think it's a no true Scotsman argument to argue that the British Empire was not libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term, let alone to argue that it treated the Boers as individuals.
However, actions against foreign enemies are the weakness of an individualist setup because there is always a collective friend and a collective foe in such cases. I should have clarified that I was talking about situations where a government commits atrocities against populations already under its control (excluding separatist regions by definition), e. g. the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, Armenian genocide, all the Communist politicides, the genocidal purges of Suharto, et cetera.
The British Empire, to the best of my limited historical understanding, pursued a consistent policy of pushing the status quo wherever its reach extended in the direction of more free trade/free markets/open borders. It was directionally oriented, to the extent any polity can be across a wide range of geopolitical circumstances and a long period of time, toward ideological commitments that are fundamental to modern libertarianism.
Libertarianism, like most pure ideologies, have a five minute problem. In that, yes, their arguments sound great, until you get five minutes in, and they're talking about seat belt laws or age of consent. Like Communism, it's a pretty good ideology for a group of a couple of hundred secluded people, not a modern nation state.
Libertarianism, just like any other top level ideology, is so broad and diverse with thoughts that it's difficult to just completely disregard it. Like others, it has some good ideas and some bad ideas, and I'm glad that Matt has been opening to learning about it and incorporating ideas within it that he thinks are good.
To me, libertarianism is like communism. Sure, it’s interesting as an intellectual exercise but it’s dangerous as an idea for government. I want those people far away from the levers of power.
I volunteered for the Ron Paul campaign back in 2008. I was a libertarian for a little under a decade. It was that experience that soured me on libertarianism.
Libertarianism gets the focus on individual liberty right, and so very many things about human beings and culture wrong. Coming from someone who worked on the Ron Paul campaign in 2008, just like you, being with libertarians for a decade plus soured me on the prospects for it working as a governing philosophy for a huge country.
Although tbh it would be better if heroin were sold at 7/11 with age and quality of product restrictions than having it sold by street dealers and international cartels under the total lack of regulation that is prohibition 🤷♂️ I'm not sure why that's such a laugh line.
Now consensual cannibalism/slavery, that is where libertarianism falls apart for me...
Total freedom of contract leads to some really wacky, bad places, and it's places that still require government intervention to enforce.
I've never considered myself a libertarian even when agreeing with some common libertarian planks, so I almost feel I'm in an inverted position to you. I see Coffin just posted so maybe he has better insight.
So there is a little tangent in here I think is worth interrogating. Matt seems to think, here and on twitter, that a shift in Democrat identification from "moderate" to "liberal" is leftward movement in the electorate... which I think is dubious. The articles he is responding to here are specifically to the rise of the illiberal left. "Liberal" is a dirty word on the left. Democrats who are embracing liberalism are specifically rejecting the leftward movement of the coalition. The same shit is happening on the right. I'm a libertarian who's far more likely to identify as "liberal" these days than any time before, because the Mises Caucus "Libertarian" party assholes are illiberal Trumpist shills.. The bipartisan shift from moderation to liberalism is people across the spectrum rejecting the broad populist/identitarian turn in our national politics, not at all a shift left.
I really wish we were like most of the rest of the world in using liberal as something that is completely distinct from "being more left wing". If we had that here, I might be willing to say, similar to you, that I agree with quite many liberal ideas.
When you start to explain this distinction to a normal person you immediately sound like a bit of weirdo, but it's so difficult to get into the weeds on a lot of topics without differentiating between the two.
Is it just a normal American, though? Non-Americans, does that weirdness not exist where you are?
Yeah--normal American. My understanding is that other countries tend to use the old timey definition, where "as liberal as possible" would be something like libertarianism rather than communism.
It's funny, it's a mirror of the posture that people like Phil Ochs and other "movement" people took in the 60s - see "Love me I'm a Liberal" for an example. So much of the illiberalism today is an exact mirror image from the "revolutionary" movements of the 60s and 70s.
And of course on the right we have Patrick Deneen et al fighting against liberalism as well.
The liberal project of treating every person as an individual with rights rather than an avatar of some group or social class is just too much to bear for a lot of people, I guess.
I came very close to citing that Phil Ochs song in my initial reply to this subthread.
Biden's "better prescription drug coverage" you love to tout is already leading to fewer drugs in the pipeline: https://www.wsj.com/articles/seagen-david-epstein-cancer-drug-study-inflation-reduction-act-biden-price-controls-231ee740?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content
Price controls are bad and have bad outcomes.
Agree they should just cut patents to 10 years instead
I'd love to see a licensing regime that gives a period of exclusivity tied to actual development costs - for some medications it might be as short at 5 years, for others, as much as 30 - those drugs for orphan illnesses would benefit from a longer period of monopoly.
I think patents in general are ill fitting for medication and software.
I have a general idea we need IP law reform however, of which patents and copyright are tied up in that.
Do you have any evidence that this would do anything effective?
Given that it can take ~10 years to actually bring a drug to market, this would be a disaster.
I don't like evergreening.
What do you think evergreening is?
I never believe anybody's stated reasoning for why something is uneconomical. The incentives to lie and blame policy you don't like are too great
Europe isn't paying more for drugs in response to Medicare's cuts, so big pharma revenue is decreasing. If you don't believe lower revenues will lead to less R&D you are naive.
In the abstract, sure, but "this specific policy led to this specific drug R&D being cut" is too specific for me to give it any credence.
Thanks for bringing this up. We need to discourage politicians from slashing Medicare's most cost-effective features while mindlessly expanding services reimbursed that do far less than drug research to extend human flourishing per dollar and bloat spending. Young Americans deserve a lot better than less drug R&D and less future income.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/congress-innovation-killing-drug-habit
FWIW, this is a bit of a special case* because the drug is already approved for one indication and the clock before price controls can kick in is already ticking. But it also shows they apparently didn't consider it when writing the law.
*I actually have no idea how common this is.
Crooked Media's "do-something progressivism" is something I think the Slow Boring community should really be aware of. They are always taking and encouraging action whether that's voting, running for office, campaigning, organising or donating, and they consistently discourage "shouting into the void" whether on social media or anonymously to journalists. Pod Save America I think gets a couple million listeners a week and they have a load of other podcasts as well now.
This article and comments section is yet another episode of "Slow Boring wants progressives to be more constructive", and while the criticisms are valid, there are progressives doing the right thing and I think that should be recognised. "Not all leftists" take things too far.
I haven't listened to them in a while, but one thing I always enjoyed about Crooked stuff is that they are always pushing people to action, and the hosts themselves will go to battleground races and canvas, make calls, etc.
My theory of the left: movements built on opposition to mainstream ideas (eg critical theory, etc) are abysmal at adapting to their own success.