I still have no clue where Matt gets this idea that *all* problems with shoddy media coverage are downstream of problems with the audience. (Obviously, *some* problems are responses to financial incentives provided by the audience.)
There's an obvious alternative, isn't there? Shoddy coverage could arise due to bad norms among journalists. The meltdown at the NYT over the Cotton op-ed, for instance, was driven by employees. I doubt subscribers were particularly angry about the op-ed, and refusing to print those types of essays may have even been financially detrimental.
Similarly, I doubt that too many Americans want to see presumably neutral newspapers present coverage with some sort of anti-Israel bias. I certainly don't think it was financially beneficial for the NYT to print ISRAEL BOMBS AL-AHLI HOSPITAL (oops, nvm). Why should I think these trends aren't driven by norms among extremely left-leaning employees (in spite of financial incentives)?
I actually kinda love Matt's the "the audience is the problem" take.
I mean yes, at a surface level NYT getting some serious left-bias is due to staff. But if audiences cared about this, NYT would see real financial disincentives and either change course or fall on financial hardship.
The counterargument here is that journalists should behave irrationally to their financial incentives and produce content that isn't what their audience wants, but is better in some civic way. But the whole point of a competitive media landscape is that inefficient firms that don't produce things their customers want cease to exist, and we definitely have a competitive media landscape today.
But Matt has also talked about how the labor market for journalists affects coverage. Most journalists are left-wing and want to write left-wing articles, so to get either centrist or right-wing articles, you have to either pay a premium or accept lower-quality journalism. That's an example of a supply problem that could potentially be overcome with enough demand, but it is still a problem.
I've been somewhat frustrated by Matt's take that "we are the problem" as well. Probably in part bc this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think. But I also agree with you that some of this is the journalists' own biases. It's hard not to think that some of WaPo's problems, for example, are due to it NOT delivering what a broader audience wants - which I believe is partly due to the fixations of its journalists being out of step with a broader audience. Not sure I have much more than a hunch on that though.
“this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think”
This is true to some extent. But this audience is also self-selected to be people who already think that blue-aiming media just tells blue people what they already think, and we often love it when Matt repeats this back to us.
Yeah true - or at least true for those who comment most often. I try to be aware when I'm getting a little too eager for another shot of the good stuff. lol. But Matt doesn't feed that overmuch, IMO. He seems very aware of avoiding that.
From today's piece: "If you’re convinced the government should be tackling border security or CO2 emissions with more alacrity, you’ll be disinclined to scold people for making overstated or false claims about these issues as long as they align with you directionally. "
On the one hand, my quirky, mostly misunderstood tendency is to scold people "on my side" for extreme claims because extreme rhetoric inevitably leads to backlash and straw-manning from the other side. The result is not just polarization (which will perhaps end our democracy) but also the rejection of any potentially useful ideas from the conversation.
On the other hand, I click on stories that tend in this direction (for example, in the NYT) precisely so that I can make this point in the NYT Comments and argue with those who "align" with my opinions.
The big NYT takedown piece in the Economist by Bennett was trying to make this argument, that the Times shifted because of a change in the composition of the employees.
But I think a close reading reveals that this, too, is downstream of the audience. Bennett points out that the reason the employees changed from the contrarian weirdo beat-journalist type of person to more of an extroverted, over-socialized internet-poisoned lefty is because the NYT was making a strategic pivot to be a digital media publication, because they recognized the old model was no longer going to be financially viable.
Crucially, this was in fact the correct move. The NYT is a very successful business in an era where legacy media companies have generally done extremely poorly.
Also if u read the times the way I do, pretty much the front page and Wordle, u don’t see near the level of outright bias. The cover page on the app is generally so good. I think they are so big they can look totally different depending on which angle u look at them from.
But where do these left-leaning employees come from? I would expect the NYT hired them at some point, it’s prestigious enough that they had considerable choice in the matter of whom to hire, so these employees apparently come from the same culture as the company itself. I would also note, as one who (too often) reads comment sections, that plenty of readers objected to the Cotton editorial and probably threatened to cancel over it (though it’s rare for a particular incident like that to influence editorial or personnel policy).
One thing about the NYTimes, everyone has a complaint, but they seem to be very successfully navigating a rough environment for journalism, not pleasing anyone but consistently making a profit, which seems to be the hardest part these days. If subscribers really didn’t like what their employees were turning out, I don’t think that would be the case.
I wonder whether they actually have a choice to hire more centrist or right-leaning reporters. I don't know for sure whether this is the case, but my best guess would be that Columbia Journalism School probably has more Maoists than Trump supporters. As far as I can tell, basically *all* reputable publications have left-leaning news reporters.
This is correct. I was easily the most right-wing person in the Vox.com newsroom and I definitely did not vote for Trump. The most right-wing mainstream publications are probably the Wall Street Journal (which has right-wing opinion writers but still a left-leaning hard news operation) and the Economist (which is centrist noeliberal but far from Trumpy).
College graduates skew left in general, and journalism disproportionately attracts people who are willing to take a significant pay cut in exchange for prestige, intellectual stimulation, and/or a positive impact on the world. Those people tend to be more left-wing than the average college graduate.
The Wall Street Journal is an interesting example because I think it's particularly hard to attract an ideologically diverse workforce for straight news jobs covering things other than politics (like business or science or fashion or whatever). When you're hiring for those jobs, you're not supposed to take ideology into consideration, since it's not directly relevant. But when the applicant pool is 95 percent liberal, that leads to a newsroom that's 95 percent liberal. The WSJ goes out of its way to hire right-wing people for its opinion section so they can churn out right-wing columns. But the newsroom just tries to hire the best reporters independent of ideology and that leads to a newsroom that looks a lot like other publications.
I don't think I've written anything about it in the kind of depth Matt does there. I generally enjoyed working there and learned a ton. The original Vox team had a ton of talented people, many of whom went on to the New York Times. To this day I think of what I do as writing Vox-style explainers.
Like most other digital-native publications around this time I think we leaned too much into chasing traffic. I think Ezra, Matt, and other editorial leaders genuinely did not intend to create such a left-leaning organization, and I don't think any of us appreciated how much pressure to maximize traffic would translate into pressure to write predictably left-wing content. But to get traffic in 2014 you needed to write stuff people will share on Facebook, and if you start out with a left-wing audience then predictably left-wing content is going to out-perform other kinds of content.
I felt a little bit out of place there and left in 2017, but it actually wasn't mainly for ideological reasons. I was basically the only business or tech reporter. There wasn't a dedicated business or tech team, so they lumped me in with the policy and politics team, and I reported to several different editors over the three years I was there. It sometimes seemed like my managers didn't know what to do with me, since they were focused on covering elections or what was happening on Capitol Hill or whatever.
Also I wrote last year [https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/im-a-professional-dad-who-leaned] that after I had a kid in late 2015 I found it more difficult to keep up with the workaholic culture of the Vox newsroom. People worked a lot of nights and weekends the first few years and once I had a baby I suddenly couldn't do that any more. Nobody explicitly complained about this (the formal policies were very kid-friendly) but putting fewer hours in just meant my output wasn't as compelling, and I think my editors started to notice. (I'm told it's a much chiller place to work now—especially after the writers unionized.)
After Trump won the 2016 election, Vox intensified its anti-Trump coverage. And while I'm not in any sense a Trump supporter I thought we were going a bit overboard. This was one reason I started looking for a new job in 2017 but it wasn't the main reason by any means.
Big chunk of the latter in Chinese domestic politics. Most of the same stereotypes we associate with 30-something basement-dwelling incels here in the US and (presumably?) the UK.
One of my friends (okay, friend's brother) wears a little Mao hat everywhere he goes.
Fitting with the stereotype, he's a 36 year old psychology professor that cannot manage his own life or affairs in the slightest and has never had a girlfriend, and has never had a job outside of academia.
He seems to be a genuine believer, somehow. Or if not, he has at least been committed to the bit for a decade+.
They have the Crossword, and Spelling Bee, and Wordle. They figured out how to make many of the best online infographics. That’s all going to help them profit regardless of the choppiness of the seas of reader opinion.
Naw, the readership of the Times is very liberal and subscriber anger over the Cotton op-ed was absolutely a factor in Bennet's firing. Left-wing Times reporters know this and it gives them extra leverage in intra-newsroom fights.
I think it would probably be in the Times's financial interest to fire all of their conservative columnists, but they continue publishing them because the Sulzberger family is committed to the Times opinion page having some ideological diversity.
Something I heard from a Times reporter in 2020 was that a major source of leftward pressure (over the Cotton op-ed and similar controveries) came from the IT staff. In many cases, these were people who could make more money at Google or Facebook but joined the Times because they wanted to have a positive impact on the world. And one way they tried to do that was by lobbying for a more left-wing approach in the newsroom.
Obviously Times coders and Times readers are different groups of people, but I bet they have pretty similar demographics in terms of education and ideology. I think most Times reporters—and especially Times reporters who cover policy and politics—tend to have a more nuanced understanding of political issues than the normie liberals who buy New York Times subscriptions. There's also a vocal minority of reporters that's very left-wing and pulled the whole paper to the left in 2020, but that minority had as much power as they did because a lot of paying subscribers agreed with them.
Times digital operation is solid. Maintaining a fleet of apps across all platforms and doing it in house is not easy. Plus all the dataviz stuff... no other news org has that kind of talent.
I think the NYT audience is better classified as educated FIRST than left-wing. Most articles in the NYT are definitely not as left-leaning as those in Vox (which I basically stopped reading after all the original crew left). From the comments in articles, I sense that a lot of the readers crave centrist and even simply non-crazy conservative views (e.g., French, whose views I particularly appreciate). Being to the left of MAGA is not really left wing.
The overall tendency is very clearly about the audience and the Al-Ahli Hospital debacle is a good example that's also a blast from the past where being first, or at least early, with the hottest news (scoops, I believe they were once called) was a key audience demand before stories circulated faster than people care to know about them.
I'm not so sure it's entirely about the audience. Consider the following thought experiment: you wave a magic wand and it turns all NYT, WSJ, CNN, etc. reporters into right-wingers.
Would the slant of news coverage at these places change? The "financial incentives" theory predicts that it shouldn't. These outlets are primarily motivated to pursue profits, so management makes sure that reporters keep pushing left-wing content to please their liberal readers.
The "bad norms" theory, on the other hand, predicts that coverage would change dramatically. Reporters would cover stories primarily from a right-wing angle and strictly enforce a set of norms that forces others to do the same. Management would be powerless to stop this, since the staff would threaten to revolt.
Clearly, these scenarios are exaggerated. But the second sounds much more plausible to me than the first.
The WSJ might be a counterexample here: their news coverage is actually really good and informative. Their Opinion section (which I would ceteris paribus expect to better reflect ownership norms and the general institutional tenor of the paper. No one thinks of the WSJ as a left-wing rag) is what I would call a "garbage fire" except that it would be insulting to garbage fires.
I think both effects are real. But the financial incentives one seems to me like the bigger first-order effect while the type of employees one seems like the smaller second-order effect. (But maybe I have it backwards? Perhaps the type of employees is partially driven by the financial incentives?)
This is like the nature versus nurture debate in evolutionary psychology. Audience taste and journalists’ biases are both important. They interact in both obvious and subtle ways. Few conservatives go into print journalism because there isn’t much of an audience for it. Most Fox personalities seem to be chosen more for their looks than erudition, it’s not as if a plain young woman could land a gig there by going to the right school.
The use of the passive voice can be frustrating. The NYT comment section would not deride you; they would would be mostly agreeing with you with nuanced discussion and genteel attacks on the more simplistic comments.
Eventually it seems like the opinion columnists moderate their opinions but I don't track them closely enough to really know.
In the meantime, keep up pushing back on those whose ideology in these matters is still immature and not thought out.
I try to read the NYT headline every morning and if they switch up to an interesting different headline story in the afternoon I try to read it too. These tend to be really good informative articles and don’t greatly pander to far left or anything, mostly. The Israel and Claudine gay coverage has been pretty non-pandering from this reading algorithm. But the fact is if u also pepper the paper with less rigorous clickbaity stuff it’ll go viral more often and attract more subscribers and generate revenue. Even if the core readers are really interested in quality it will still be true that bad articles will be tempting and overall may be more profitable I don’t think it is the same as being the readerships fault but just a structural problem of the market. I used to spend a lot of my time watching sports and was really excited in the early 2000s as advanced metrics became more and more popular. I was annoyed watching ESPN coverage refuse to get in the weeds on this stuff but they will make more money broadening their audience and trying to go viral i think it is a numbers issue more than a problem with the customers.
Yes, in the short term, journalistic norms matter. In the long term, however, these would have been repeatedly punished by capitalism and Matt's explanation of, "downstream of the audience," becomes more and more true.
What bothers me is that even taking him at face value it's just not an excuse he would accept in a ton of other arenas. We don't let fossil fuel companies off the hook for climate change despite it being in their financial interest to lie about it. Ben just wrote an article arguing for cracking down on sports gambling despite ease and convenience being exactly what their customers are asking for. Matt doesn't even like it when software engineers work for Facebook!
I don’t think he’s asking people to let journalism companies off the hook. He’s asking them to understand what all the relevant points of leverage are if you want to demand change. (No one sensible thinks you can address the harms of fossil fuel companies while ignoring consumer demand for fossil fuels.)
I think I half agree with you here. I agree that understanding the points of leverage is critical to trying to fix things. If that's all he's saying then I don't have a problem with it. I'm just not convinced it is.
Regarding Long Island, speaking as a native who has lived across the country but returns frequently: the core of it are all of the members of the NYPD and NYFD who live in souther Nassau County. Traditionally they have an anti-city / anti-Democrat (and pro-Guiliani) bias. These are the people who made Staten Island Republican because there was a time when that had to live within city limits.
That then forms a core for other blue collar professionals ties to the city who don't particularly like the city. My father and brother were/are union electricians who lived in Nassau and worked in the city. They did NOT share this view, but many of their brethren did. This blue collar contingent lives south of the LIE, in the same places as the cops and firefighters, and the temperature has turned up.
I think the final driver is the fact that much of central Nassau has really changed from a combination of eastward migration of second and third-generation immigrants from Queens, and a change in immigration patterns where new immigrants skip the five burroughs entirely and land in central Nassau. The rapidly changing demographics of, say, East Meadow, has made many of these people uneasy. NYC has historically played fairly unique as a catch basic for international immigration, Queens in particular, so as you mention "once your family has committed to moving out of NYC to the east"... that's Nassau county, and it does not have the capacity for sprawl that Souther California does, as you aslo note.
Finally there is the fact that Long Island is quite dysfunctional. Every public service has a different map and the boders only sometimes align: there is the county, which has courts and parks, but your trash is pickup up by the three TOWNS that comprise Nassau country. The many school districts are not contiguous with the water boards, etc. If you manage to organize over one issue, the polity that you put together is non-transferrable to another issue because half the people are under a different map. So it's broken and there has been a long-time sense that it is broken.
And NIMBYism is rampant because Nassau county's core value is that it's "not the city", so the resistance to density, which could help address some of the stress, is almost genetic, going back to Levittown.
This has all long been true. But in Nassau, Trump made it acceptable for the most vocal to be all the MORE vocal.
I lived on the south shore for four years after spending the previous four years in rural eastern Kentucky and growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta. My family is super racist. Yet, I witnessed more obvious outward racism in my short time on Long Island than anywhere else I've lived. While I am quite aware that there are many prejudices hidden just under the surface of some southerners, I never saw a bartender refuse to serve a black patron (a friend of mine visiting me from the city) or had a potential landlord tell me he was relieved I wasn't black. But on Strong Island, just... wow. My neighbors came up, knocked on my door, and flat out told me not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows. And my wife has some stories from a hospital there about how little regard the staff had for anyone they labeled Mexicans. It was constantly shocking to us just how bigoted the people around us were.
Wow, just wow. I am in New York State, and, when planning statewide events we have a saying about Long Island - no one goes in and no one goes out - people on Long Island tend not to attend events elsewhere in the State and no one from elsewhere tends to go to events on Long Island. The NYC people who don't even own cars are much more likely to come Upstate. So perhaps the Island is much more isolated than it seems? Also Long Island is the main source of aggressive book challenges and "First Amendment audits," in NYS.
It is functionally very isolated! You either have to traverse NYC traffic or else take a boat. Getting from Long Island to, say, a different suburb in NJ is an enormous pain in the ass in a way that getting between, say, two different suburbs of Chicago simply isn't.
"...not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows...."
That's some scary shit.
It's times like these when I thank god that all Americans are protected from this sort of vigilante violence by our even-handed, fair-minded, politically neutral, law enforcement professionals.
You'll have to take my word for it but this is all true. That landlord was a special kind of scumbag. One day the home behind ours burned down and the fire was so hot it melted the plastic siding off the separated garage of home we were renting. I called, and he came over, furious with me that I hadn't done anything to stop it melting, I guess? I had actually been out there with a garden hose putting out any flareups caused by the embers dropping onto the lawn. Not good enough! Anyway, then he went over to the people picking through the rubble of their home and asked them to pay for repairs in cash because he didn't want to report the damage to his insurer because he worried it would make his premiums go up. They told him to go away, and a shouting match ensued. Just a real class act.
And yeah, what does it say about me that we still rented a house from the guy after he was super racist? Location, location, location, I suppose.
That's a terrible story, not everyone in LI is like that, not by a long shot, but I have met a couple in my day that I wish hadn't. They are more present there then you would expect.
As a fellow LI native, I agree with this. Everyone in my parents' generation is a retired government employee living on a government pension who hates the government.
To over-generalize, my college-educated peers chose Northern NJ or Westchester when it was time to raise a family. My non-college peers mostly chose to stay in Nassau County. I think that explains the political divide.
I was going to say something along these lines, NYC has three very distinct suburbs (LI to the east, NJ to the west and south, Westchester/CT to the North) that are quite isolated from each other and there is a fair bit of self sorting when people move to the burbs. I live in the part of Brooklyn that's filled with journalists and lawyers and everyone (literally, everyone) I know who moved to the burbs when they had kids moved to either NJ or Westchester/CT. Those are the places that are culturally familiar to the wealthy professionals whose growing numbers have helped to turn those suburbs (and others elsewhere) blue. They're also both much less isolated from the rest of the country than Long Island is, which gives them a base level of appeal that other suburbs have (if you want to go skiing or whatever from LI you have to drive *through* NYC). It's always surprised me that there aren't one or two towns on LI that have broken this mold, but even the fancier ones that some of my friends grew up in just don't see to hold any appeal for young people beyond a few that move back to where their families are from.
I find the whole density/politics situation a bit odd. Why should people who like to walk to a coffee shop every morning be less concerned with crime that someone who drives 50 minutes to work? Why should an Iowa resident prefer tax cuts for the rich and deficits?
If you live at high density, there’s a lot of things that make more sense to organize communally through taxes and collective provision, and you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction. If you live at low density, it makes a lot more sense to have a small government and be self-reliant (including having your own firearms), and outsiders are naturally more unusual and suspicious.
"you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction."
I'm going to push back here. My wife grew up in and lived in not great parts of Chicago for many years, and she tells a lot of stories about being challenged about what neighborhood she was from, what street even, while doing mundane things like walking dogs. I don't think people in dense areas have higher stranger-trust by default, I think it's SES related.
I've seen fairly convincing evidence suggesting the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment happens to be found in the parts of the country with the smallest numbers of immigrants. And certainly the diverse parts of the country tend *not* to send the loudest America Firsters to Congress.
Anti immigration sentiment is very different (being theoretical) than how people treat actual strangers they meet. "Strangers from strange places" might be "people from outside my neighborhood" or it could be "people from the city" or it might be "people from another country".
In America, it can easily be all of these at once, or not. When I was in Taos, people were suspicious because I was white and northern, for instance, and white northern people are always showing up to build ugly houses and generally ruin the artsy native scene. I think suspicion of outsiders is extremely natural. When I travel abroad, it certainly is. I think your opinion about my wife's experience is, on a world scale, very unusual.
Thank you! This is the more in depth answer I was looking for; I appreciate Matt taking the time to respond and think there's something to his relative density theory. But his analysis doesn't explain why Nassau is different from the New Jersey suburbs (where I live), which are also lower density relative to the city -- though, he might say, they're also higher than the outlying counties. These sorts of population and government dynamics make a lot of sense to me and contrast with NJ, where some of the counties are pretty well run (all things considered). Appreciate you responding!
I think his analysis does explain why Long Island is different from New Jersey. In New Jersey there is always farther you could go (into the pine barrens or into northeastern Pennsylvania, if you really want to go far out) so the parts that function like suburbs are selected differently from the farther out parts that function like exurbs. But in Long Island you can’t go farther than Montauk.
Western LI is very much an exurb of NYC, though. And while I don't claim to be an expert on LI dynamics I'm pretty sure that no one actually commutes from Montauk notwithstanding the fact that the LIRR does in fact go that far, given that it's a 3 hour train ride.
The relevant conceptual dividing line seems less likely to be purely geographic and more about maximum tenable commute-shed for city workers versus those whose livelihoods are more geographically localized.
Oh I see. So Long Island “traps” people who like the proximity to the city but have politics that would favor low density. And New Jersey’s commuter suburbs don’t. Is that right? I take your point!
Another component is the fact that all of the dynamics that have caused societal stress that are now nation wide, all started on Long Island generations ago becasue New York has traditionally been high wage / high cost of living. The pot has been simmering a long time, for blue collar workers in particular:
- Globalization: manufacturing left Long Island for the American South in the 60s and 70s, long before it moved to the "global south".
- Housing Affordability Crisis: this really took off in the late 1990s / early 2000s in a way that many communities elsewhere in the nation only started to see in the last 5-10 years.
- Exurbinazation: began in the 90s as Suffolk county got built out, but has already run its course when it ran into NIMBY limits in the early 2000s (see: affordability)
- Traffic: true for the entire tri-state region, but particulalry bad given Long Island geography as the center of gravity moved further east that is still trying to commute due west.
And the final nail: that who are inclined to leave (like me) moved into the city starting in the late 1990s. Urbanism is all the rage everywhere now, but when I was a kid no one in their right mind wanted to live in Manhattan (much less Brooklyn)... until around 1995 when EVERYONE who graduated from HS would LOVE to, if they could. Those that could afford to live there on their own, did so. That dynamic has been stronger culturally and running longer in NYC than other urban areas of the country, depriving Nassau county in particular, of native "blue votes". And when those young people grow up and have families, they first try Brooklyn, if they can affort it, and if then can't, Westchester and Norther NJ are more attractice alternatives than moving back to Nassau. NYC has very unique suburbanizaiton patterns due to its geography and its mass transit setup.
It's also partly sheer geography: suburban Long Island abuts Queens and Brooklyn, and is thus *filled* with transplants (by now going back multiple generations) from those two boroughs, both of which were home to a lot of culturally moderate to conservative white people. In the early days of white flight and suburbanization, city folk heading for the suburbs tended to head to suburban areas close to where they grew up. For Brooklynites and Queensites, that often meant Long Island.
I was wondering if Matt would get into the housing affordability issue. It’s really bad on LI, despite a relatively strong commuter rail system and tons of room to develop around stations.
>But the perfect time to change the natural born citizen rule is right now, when there’s no specific Arnold Schwarzenegger figure who would benefit.<
Back when Schwarzenegger was prominent politically, George Will used to make a pithy argument to the effect that "It's bad that our constitution allows Paris Hilton to serve as president and forbids Henry Kissinger." Something like that (he probably used a different "vapid celebrity" example, but I couldn't find the exact quote).
Anyway, that line has always stuck with me. I wasn't the biggest Kissinger fanboi on the planet (nor his biggest detractor: his was a complicated legacy). But Will had a good point. It really is self-defeating and unjust that America doesn't allow immigrants to become president, even after a lengthy period of citizenship.
PS—People absolutely would bring up Elon Musk's name if we tried to amend the constitution right now, Matt. Just sayin.
The main reason America is the best country is that when you're an immigrant who becomes a citizen, you become just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Changing the president eligibility rules will help reinforce that idea.
But yeah the person who people will think about here is Elon Musk...which honestly would be a good thing given that he's right-coded but changing the rule is left-coded.
I really can't stand Musk, I'll admit. But the more I think about this issue in the context of EM, the more I conclude it's really not any argument at all in favor of the ban on immigrant presidents. The most obvious reason why is: you can't make constitutional policy based on narrow examples. The less obvious reason is: there are plenty of great immigrants who might make excellent presidents. No sense cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Also, if we ever get around to changing this part of article 2, I'd have no problem with a perfectly lengthly interlude between citizenship and presidential eligibility (say, 30 years).
If you schedule the rule change to take place January 1st, 2025 you're probably fine. You're talking about someone 4 years out from running, so you're not talking about any particular election.
When California tried to pass a rule saying that presidential candidates should be required to release their tax returns, the governor vetoed it saying it was too divisive / seemed politically motivated - i.e. it was _clearly_ aimed at candidate Trump (for re-election). On the one hand I agreed, but I wish they had, in 2017, passed it for the 2024 election, when it presumably _wouldn't_ have been Trump (since at the time he would either have won re-election and been disqualified or lost and.... presumably not run again... more fool me)
If I was rewriting the clauses that limit who can run for various offices, I'd abolish the attempt at a cursus honorum (House at 25, Senate at 30, President at 35) and say that no person may be elected to any federal office if they are beneath the age of criminal responsibility at the date they first file for candidacy, require all candidates to be citizens of the United States, and require that they have been residents of the United States for a reasonable period (the last five years, perhaps) - with an exception for those who have resided outside the US in the service of the United States, (e.g. ambassadors, military service) and that they reside in the appropriate state at the time of election and throughout their term in office. I'd also add, rather than a requirement that naturalized citizens be citizens for a period of time, instead that naturalized citizens must have renounced the other nationality they held before naturalization (or made a reasonable effort to do so if another country is being unreasonable about releasing them). Naturalization is a much lengthier process now than it was in 1788, so requiring you to have been a citizen for seven or nine years back then was measuring from basically as soon as you got off the boat, while now it's measuring from five to ten years after you came to live in the US.
The voters are not going to elect literal children, unless there are extraordinary circumstances - but if there are extraordinary circumstances, then why not entrust the voters to make that decision at the time? If a ten-year-old can win the voters over in both primary and general election, then why not?
As a practical matter, "on principle, we should change the rules to allow this crazy hypothetical, because it will never come to pass so why not"... I don't find this persuasive.
One of the advantages of this being an internet comment that has no real chance of becoming law is that I can say what I actually believe rather than being bound by political constraints.
Do we need some kind of lower legal limit? Yes, because the way that various election laws are enforced is by applying criminal liability to the candidate for what their campaign does, and having a candidate below the age of criminal responsibility would allow them to break all sorts of laws with impunity (and that candidate would not need to win for this to create a problem).
Is there, in general, a problem with a candidate who is utterly unsuited to office, provided they lose? No, the position of candidate (as distinct from the holder of elected office) is of no power so long as they comply with electoral laws.
If you set an age, are you saying that everyone or even most people of that age are suitable? No, you are saying that at least one person of that age is good enough to hold the least important elected office. If you set the age limit at 18 (the same as that to vote), then you're saying that no 17-year-old ever will be able to be the most junior member of the House. I don't think that's sound: I've met some remarkably mature 17-year-olds who would make excellent Congresspeople. Why shouldn't they run at 17? And you can keep arguing the age down quite a long way - I think the youngest person I've met who I'd think could be a junior legislator was about 13/14 at the time. So I'm picking 10 partly because it's the age of criminal responsibility, and partly because it's an age where I can safely say that even the most extraordinarily mature and capable person will still be at least 10.
This is why I think that the age of candidature should generally be lower than the age of the franchise. When you set a minimum age to vote, you want the majority of the people of that age who vote to do so responsibly; that means that you're asking how mature and responsible the median person of that age will be (if a minority of the very youngest age group are irresponsible, that's such a small fraction of the voters that it will have little effect - voting just isn't that precise an instrument). When you set a minimum age to be a candidate, you want to not exclude someone who would be capable of doing the job of holding elected office, so you're asking not about the capabilities of the median person of that age, but about the capabilities of the most mature, capable, responsible person of that age.
Do you want a separate age limit for President? Maybe. I can see an argument for that. Honestly, it'd be simpler to just have a single age, but I'm OK with a separate rule for President. I'd want a safety margin, ie set it well below whatever you think the youngest plausible candidate could be. But for President/VP, that could easily be 18 or 21. Mind you, it's not like anyone has really been kept out by the 35 year limit - JFK (youngest when elected) could have stood in 1952, two elections before he became President. The only VP who could not have stood the election before the one in which he won was Breckinridge.
I still have no clue where Matt gets this idea that *all* problems with shoddy media coverage are downstream of problems with the audience. (Obviously, *some* problems are responses to financial incentives provided by the audience.)
There's an obvious alternative, isn't there? Shoddy coverage could arise due to bad norms among journalists. The meltdown at the NYT over the Cotton op-ed, for instance, was driven by employees. I doubt subscribers were particularly angry about the op-ed, and refusing to print those types of essays may have even been financially detrimental.
Similarly, I doubt that too many Americans want to see presumably neutral newspapers present coverage with some sort of anti-Israel bias. I certainly don't think it was financially beneficial for the NYT to print ISRAEL BOMBS AL-AHLI HOSPITAL (oops, nvm). Why should I think these trends aren't driven by norms among extremely left-leaning employees (in spite of financial incentives)?
I actually kinda love Matt's the "the audience is the problem" take.
I mean yes, at a surface level NYT getting some serious left-bias is due to staff. But if audiences cared about this, NYT would see real financial disincentives and either change course or fall on financial hardship.
The counterargument here is that journalists should behave irrationally to their financial incentives and produce content that isn't what their audience wants, but is better in some civic way. But the whole point of a competitive media landscape is that inefficient firms that don't produce things their customers want cease to exist, and we definitely have a competitive media landscape today.
But Matt has also talked about how the labor market for journalists affects coverage. Most journalists are left-wing and want to write left-wing articles, so to get either centrist or right-wing articles, you have to either pay a premium or accept lower-quality journalism. That's an example of a supply problem that could potentially be overcome with enough demand, but it is still a problem.
I've been somewhat frustrated by Matt's take that "we are the problem" as well. Probably in part bc this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think. But I also agree with you that some of this is the journalists' own biases. It's hard not to think that some of WaPo's problems, for example, are due to it NOT delivering what a broader audience wants - which I believe is partly due to the fixations of its journalists being out of step with a broader audience. Not sure I have much more than a hunch on that though.
“this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think”
This is true to some extent. But this audience is also self-selected to be people who already think that blue-aiming media just tells blue people what they already think, and we often love it when Matt repeats this back to us.
Everyone likes confirmation bias.
The hard part is, after you get the little endorphin rush, do you then read and think about the dissenting voices in the comment section?
We're fortunate enough to have them, here.
Well said
Yeah true - or at least true for those who comment most often. I try to be aware when I'm getting a little too eager for another shot of the good stuff. lol. But Matt doesn't feed that overmuch, IMO. He seems very aware of avoiding that.
From today's piece: "If you’re convinced the government should be tackling border security or CO2 emissions with more alacrity, you’ll be disinclined to scold people for making overstated or false claims about these issues as long as they align with you directionally. "
On the one hand, my quirky, mostly misunderstood tendency is to scold people "on my side" for extreme claims because extreme rhetoric inevitably leads to backlash and straw-manning from the other side. The result is not just polarization (which will perhaps end our democracy) but also the rejection of any potentially useful ideas from the conversation.
On the other hand, I click on stories that tend in this direction (for example, in the NYT) precisely so that I can make this point in the NYT Comments and argue with those who "align" with my opinions.
Same! I’m always worried that it’s being interpreted as approval!
The big NYT takedown piece in the Economist by Bennett was trying to make this argument, that the Times shifted because of a change in the composition of the employees.
But I think a close reading reveals that this, too, is downstream of the audience. Bennett points out that the reason the employees changed from the contrarian weirdo beat-journalist type of person to more of an extroverted, over-socialized internet-poisoned lefty is because the NYT was making a strategic pivot to be a digital media publication, because they recognized the old model was no longer going to be financially viable.
Crucially, this was in fact the correct move. The NYT is a very successful business in an era where legacy media companies have generally done extremely poorly.
Also if u read the times the way I do, pretty much the front page and Wordle, u don’t see near the level of outright bias. The cover page on the app is generally so good. I think they are so big they can look totally different depending on which angle u look at them from.
But where do these left-leaning employees come from? I would expect the NYT hired them at some point, it’s prestigious enough that they had considerable choice in the matter of whom to hire, so these employees apparently come from the same culture as the company itself. I would also note, as one who (too often) reads comment sections, that plenty of readers objected to the Cotton editorial and probably threatened to cancel over it (though it’s rare for a particular incident like that to influence editorial or personnel policy).
One thing about the NYTimes, everyone has a complaint, but they seem to be very successfully navigating a rough environment for journalism, not pleasing anyone but consistently making a profit, which seems to be the hardest part these days. If subscribers really didn’t like what their employees were turning out, I don’t think that would be the case.
I wonder whether they actually have a choice to hire more centrist or right-leaning reporters. I don't know for sure whether this is the case, but my best guess would be that Columbia Journalism School probably has more Maoists than Trump supporters. As far as I can tell, basically *all* reputable publications have left-leaning news reporters.
This is correct. I was easily the most right-wing person in the Vox.com newsroom and I definitely did not vote for Trump. The most right-wing mainstream publications are probably the Wall Street Journal (which has right-wing opinion writers but still a left-leaning hard news operation) and the Economist (which is centrist noeliberal but far from Trumpy).
College graduates skew left in general, and journalism disproportionately attracts people who are willing to take a significant pay cut in exchange for prestige, intellectual stimulation, and/or a positive impact on the world. Those people tend to be more left-wing than the average college graduate.
The Wall Street Journal is an interesting example because I think it's particularly hard to attract an ideologically diverse workforce for straight news jobs covering things other than politics (like business or science or fashion or whatever). When you're hiring for those jobs, you're not supposed to take ideology into consideration, since it's not directly relevant. But when the applicant pool is 95 percent liberal, that leads to a newsroom that's 95 percent liberal. The WSJ goes out of its way to hire right-wing people for its opinion section so they can churn out right-wing columns. But the newsroom just tries to hire the best reporters independent of ideology and that leads to a newsroom that looks a lot like other publications.
Have you ever written at all about your time at Vox, similar to how Matt has? [https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-i-learned-co-founding-vox] It'd be fascinating to learn more from your perspective given what you said here.
I don't think I've written anything about it in the kind of depth Matt does there. I generally enjoyed working there and learned a ton. The original Vox team had a ton of talented people, many of whom went on to the New York Times. To this day I think of what I do as writing Vox-style explainers.
Like most other digital-native publications around this time I think we leaned too much into chasing traffic. I think Ezra, Matt, and other editorial leaders genuinely did not intend to create such a left-leaning organization, and I don't think any of us appreciated how much pressure to maximize traffic would translate into pressure to write predictably left-wing content. But to get traffic in 2014 you needed to write stuff people will share on Facebook, and if you start out with a left-wing audience then predictably left-wing content is going to out-perform other kinds of content.
I felt a little bit out of place there and left in 2017, but it actually wasn't mainly for ideological reasons. I was basically the only business or tech reporter. There wasn't a dedicated business or tech team, so they lumped me in with the policy and politics team, and I reported to several different editors over the three years I was there. It sometimes seemed like my managers didn't know what to do with me, since they were focused on covering elections or what was happening on Capitol Hill or whatever.
Also I wrote last year [https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/im-a-professional-dad-who-leaned] that after I had a kid in late 2015 I found it more difficult to keep up with the workaholic culture of the Vox newsroom. People worked a lot of nights and weekends the first few years and once I had a baby I suddenly couldn't do that any more. Nobody explicitly complained about this (the formal policies were very kid-friendly) but putting fewer hours in just meant my output wasn't as compelling, and I think my editors started to notice. (I'm told it's a much chiller place to work now—especially after the writers unionized.)
After Trump won the 2016 election, Vox intensified its anti-Trump coverage. And while I'm not in any sense a Trump supporter I thought we were going a bit overboard. This was one reason I started looking for a new job in 2017 but it wasn't the main reason by any means.
Thank you very much for this!
Maoists? Is that still a thing?
I'd call them "pro-China tankies" at this stage, but they definitely exist.
Maoists in the sense of "anti-Dengists", not so much.
Big chunk of the latter in Chinese domestic politics. Most of the same stereotypes we associate with 30-something basement-dwelling incels here in the US and (presumably?) the UK.
One of my friends (okay, friend's brother) wears a little Mao hat everywhere he goes.
Fitting with the stereotype, he's a 36 year old psychology professor that cannot manage his own life or affairs in the slightest and has never had a girlfriend, and has never had a job outside of academia.
He seems to be a genuine believer, somehow. Or if not, he has at least been committed to the bit for a decade+.
They have the Crossword, and Spelling Bee, and Wordle. They figured out how to make many of the best online infographics. That’s all going to help them profit regardless of the choppiness of the seas of reader opinion.
Yeah it's a bonkers take and it seems so obviously motivated by his personal biases and blindspots. Incredibly disappointing.
Naw, the readership of the Times is very liberal and subscriber anger over the Cotton op-ed was absolutely a factor in Bennet's firing. Left-wing Times reporters know this and it gives them extra leverage in intra-newsroom fights.
I think it would probably be in the Times's financial interest to fire all of their conservative columnists, but they continue publishing them because the Sulzberger family is committed to the Times opinion page having some ideological diversity.
Something I heard from a Times reporter in 2020 was that a major source of leftward pressure (over the Cotton op-ed and similar controveries) came from the IT staff. In many cases, these were people who could make more money at Google or Facebook but joined the Times because they wanted to have a positive impact on the world. And one way they tried to do that was by lobbying for a more left-wing approach in the newsroom.
Obviously Times coders and Times readers are different groups of people, but I bet they have pretty similar demographics in terms of education and ideology. I think most Times reporters—and especially Times reporters who cover policy and politics—tend to have a more nuanced understanding of political issues than the normie liberals who buy New York Times subscriptions. There's also a vocal minority of reporters that's very left-wing and pulled the whole paper to the left in 2020, but that minority had as much power as they did because a lot of paying subscribers agreed with them.
What gave IT workers so much leverage at the NYT?
If I had to guess what the times's most impressive tech is...idk, a neat-o probability slider on 538?
Times digital operation is solid. Maintaining a fleet of apps across all platforms and doing it in house is not easy. Plus all the dataviz stuff... no other news org has that kind of talent.
I think the NYT audience is better classified as educated FIRST than left-wing. Most articles in the NYT are definitely not as left-leaning as those in Vox (which I basically stopped reading after all the original crew left). From the comments in articles, I sense that a lot of the readers crave centrist and even simply non-crazy conservative views (e.g., French, whose views I particularly appreciate). Being to the left of MAGA is not really left wing.
The overall tendency is very clearly about the audience and the Al-Ahli Hospital debacle is a good example that's also a blast from the past where being first, or at least early, with the hottest news (scoops, I believe they were once called) was a key audience demand before stories circulated faster than people care to know about them.
I'm not so sure it's entirely about the audience. Consider the following thought experiment: you wave a magic wand and it turns all NYT, WSJ, CNN, etc. reporters into right-wingers.
Would the slant of news coverage at these places change? The "financial incentives" theory predicts that it shouldn't. These outlets are primarily motivated to pursue profits, so management makes sure that reporters keep pushing left-wing content to please their liberal readers.
The "bad norms" theory, on the other hand, predicts that coverage would change dramatically. Reporters would cover stories primarily from a right-wing angle and strictly enforce a set of norms that forces others to do the same. Management would be powerless to stop this, since the staff would threaten to revolt.
Clearly, these scenarios are exaggerated. But the second sounds much more plausible to me than the first.
The WSJ might be a counterexample here: their news coverage is actually really good and informative. Their Opinion section (which I would ceteris paribus expect to better reflect ownership norms and the general institutional tenor of the paper. No one thinks of the WSJ as a left-wing rag) is what I would call a "garbage fire" except that it would be insulting to garbage fires.
I think both effects are real. But the financial incentives one seems to me like the bigger first-order effect while the type of employees one seems like the smaller second-order effect. (But maybe I have it backwards? Perhaps the type of employees is partially driven by the financial incentives?)
This is like the nature versus nurture debate in evolutionary psychology. Audience taste and journalists’ biases are both important. They interact in both obvious and subtle ways. Few conservatives go into print journalism because there isn’t much of an audience for it. Most Fox personalities seem to be chosen more for their looks than erudition, it’s not as if a plain young woman could land a gig there by going to the right school.
They 100% are driven by the left-leaning employees.
I don't think "left-leaning" does the situation justice. I mean, *I'm* left-leaning by any conceivable non-internet, non-media US definition.
as am I. and yet i’ve been derided as a bigot for not wanting gender dysphoric men to play women’s sports. circular firing squad ftw!
The use of the passive voice can be frustrating. The NYT comment section would not deride you; they would would be mostly agreeing with you with nuanced discussion and genteel attacks on the more simplistic comments.
Eventually it seems like the opinion columnists moderate their opinions but I don't track them closely enough to really know.
In the meantime, keep up pushing back on those whose ideology in these matters is still immature and not thought out.
@Francis Begbie - I just noticed your name and avi. Bold choice. Remind me not to piss you off :-)
I try to read the NYT headline every morning and if they switch up to an interesting different headline story in the afternoon I try to read it too. These tend to be really good informative articles and don’t greatly pander to far left or anything, mostly. The Israel and Claudine gay coverage has been pretty non-pandering from this reading algorithm. But the fact is if u also pepper the paper with less rigorous clickbaity stuff it’ll go viral more often and attract more subscribers and generate revenue. Even if the core readers are really interested in quality it will still be true that bad articles will be tempting and overall may be more profitable I don’t think it is the same as being the readerships fault but just a structural problem of the market. I used to spend a lot of my time watching sports and was really excited in the early 2000s as advanced metrics became more and more popular. I was annoyed watching ESPN coverage refuse to get in the weeds on this stuff but they will make more money broadening their audience and trying to go viral i think it is a numbers issue more than a problem with the customers.
Yes, in the short term, journalistic norms matter. In the long term, however, these would have been repeatedly punished by capitalism and Matt's explanation of, "downstream of the audience," becomes more and more true.
What bothers me is that even taking him at face value it's just not an excuse he would accept in a ton of other arenas. We don't let fossil fuel companies off the hook for climate change despite it being in their financial interest to lie about it. Ben just wrote an article arguing for cracking down on sports gambling despite ease and convenience being exactly what their customers are asking for. Matt doesn't even like it when software engineers work for Facebook!
I don’t think he’s asking people to let journalism companies off the hook. He’s asking them to understand what all the relevant points of leverage are if you want to demand change. (No one sensible thinks you can address the harms of fossil fuel companies while ignoring consumer demand for fossil fuels.)
Though many *do* think that, which is not in disagreement with what you said!
I think I half agree with you here. I agree that understanding the points of leverage is critical to trying to fix things. If that's all he's saying then I don't have a problem with it. I'm just not convinced it is.
"We don't let fossil fuel companies off the hook for climate change despite it being in their financial interest to lie about it"
Yeah, we do. They're responsible for their lies, but not for climate change.
I think that only works if you consider the two to be unrelated to each other.
The relationship, if any, is tenuous.
Regarding Long Island, speaking as a native who has lived across the country but returns frequently: the core of it are all of the members of the NYPD and NYFD who live in souther Nassau County. Traditionally they have an anti-city / anti-Democrat (and pro-Guiliani) bias. These are the people who made Staten Island Republican because there was a time when that had to live within city limits.
That then forms a core for other blue collar professionals ties to the city who don't particularly like the city. My father and brother were/are union electricians who lived in Nassau and worked in the city. They did NOT share this view, but many of their brethren did. This blue collar contingent lives south of the LIE, in the same places as the cops and firefighters, and the temperature has turned up.
I think the final driver is the fact that much of central Nassau has really changed from a combination of eastward migration of second and third-generation immigrants from Queens, and a change in immigration patterns where new immigrants skip the five burroughs entirely and land in central Nassau. The rapidly changing demographics of, say, East Meadow, has made many of these people uneasy. NYC has historically played fairly unique as a catch basic for international immigration, Queens in particular, so as you mention "once your family has committed to moving out of NYC to the east"... that's Nassau county, and it does not have the capacity for sprawl that Souther California does, as you aslo note.
Finally there is the fact that Long Island is quite dysfunctional. Every public service has a different map and the boders only sometimes align: there is the county, which has courts and parks, but your trash is pickup up by the three TOWNS that comprise Nassau country. The many school districts are not contiguous with the water boards, etc. If you manage to organize over one issue, the polity that you put together is non-transferrable to another issue because half the people are under a different map. So it's broken and there has been a long-time sense that it is broken.
And NIMBYism is rampant because Nassau county's core value is that it's "not the city", so the resistance to density, which could help address some of the stress, is almost genetic, going back to Levittown.
This has all long been true. But in Nassau, Trump made it acceptable for the most vocal to be all the MORE vocal.
I lived on the south shore for four years after spending the previous four years in rural eastern Kentucky and growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta. My family is super racist. Yet, I witnessed more obvious outward racism in my short time on Long Island than anywhere else I've lived. While I am quite aware that there are many prejudices hidden just under the surface of some southerners, I never saw a bartender refuse to serve a black patron (a friend of mine visiting me from the city) or had a potential landlord tell me he was relieved I wasn't black. But on Strong Island, just... wow. My neighbors came up, knocked on my door, and flat out told me not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows. And my wife has some stories from a hospital there about how little regard the staff had for anyone they labeled Mexicans. It was constantly shocking to us just how bigoted the people around us were.
Wow, just wow. I am in New York State, and, when planning statewide events we have a saying about Long Island - no one goes in and no one goes out - people on Long Island tend not to attend events elsewhere in the State and no one from elsewhere tends to go to events on Long Island. The NYC people who don't even own cars are much more likely to come Upstate. So perhaps the Island is much more isolated than it seems? Also Long Island is the main source of aggressive book challenges and "First Amendment audits," in NYS.
Long Island is one of the few suburban areas in the United States that lacks a beltway to bypass its center city if you want to go to the other side.
Throgs Neck Bridge _almost_ bypasses the city, but not quite.
It is functionally very isolated! You either have to traverse NYC traffic or else take a boat. Getting from Long Island to, say, a different suburb in NJ is an enormous pain in the ass in a way that getting between, say, two different suburbs of Chicago simply isn't.
"...not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows...."
That's some scary shit.
It's times like these when I thank god that all Americans are protected from this sort of vigilante violence by our even-handed, fair-minded, politically neutral, law enforcement professionals.
There are racists A-holes everywhere, including Long Island, NY, but your anecdotes aren't data.
You'll have to take my word for it but this is all true. That landlord was a special kind of scumbag. One day the home behind ours burned down and the fire was so hot it melted the plastic siding off the separated garage of home we were renting. I called, and he came over, furious with me that I hadn't done anything to stop it melting, I guess? I had actually been out there with a garden hose putting out any flareups caused by the embers dropping onto the lawn. Not good enough! Anyway, then he went over to the people picking through the rubble of their home and asked them to pay for repairs in cash because he didn't want to report the damage to his insurer because he worried it would make his premiums go up. They told him to go away, and a shouting match ensued. Just a real class act.
And yeah, what does it say about me that we still rented a house from the guy after he was super racist? Location, location, location, I suppose.
That's a terrible story, not everyone in LI is like that, not by a long shot, but I have met a couple in my day that I wish hadn't. They are more present there then you would expect.
As a fellow LI native, I agree with this. Everyone in my parents' generation is a retired government employee living on a government pension who hates the government.
To over-generalize, my college-educated peers chose Northern NJ or Westchester when it was time to raise a family. My non-college peers mostly chose to stay in Nassau County. I think that explains the political divide.
I was going to say something along these lines, NYC has three very distinct suburbs (LI to the east, NJ to the west and south, Westchester/CT to the North) that are quite isolated from each other and there is a fair bit of self sorting when people move to the burbs. I live in the part of Brooklyn that's filled with journalists and lawyers and everyone (literally, everyone) I know who moved to the burbs when they had kids moved to either NJ or Westchester/CT. Those are the places that are culturally familiar to the wealthy professionals whose growing numbers have helped to turn those suburbs (and others elsewhere) blue. They're also both much less isolated from the rest of the country than Long Island is, which gives them a base level of appeal that other suburbs have (if you want to go skiing or whatever from LI you have to drive *through* NYC). It's always surprised me that there aren't one or two towns on LI that have broken this mold, but even the fancier ones that some of my friends grew up in just don't see to hold any appeal for young people beyond a few that move back to where their families are from.
Montauk and the Hamptons though in the summer can be fun, but it's all NYC people there anyway.
I find the whole density/politics situation a bit odd. Why should people who like to walk to a coffee shop every morning be less concerned with crime that someone who drives 50 minutes to work? Why should an Iowa resident prefer tax cuts for the rich and deficits?
If you live at high density, there’s a lot of things that make more sense to organize communally through taxes and collective provision, and you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction. If you live at low density, it makes a lot more sense to have a small government and be self-reliant (including having your own firearms), and outsiders are naturally more unusual and suspicious.
"you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction."
I'm going to push back here. My wife grew up in and lived in not great parts of Chicago for many years, and she tells a lot of stories about being challenged about what neighborhood she was from, what street even, while doing mundane things like walking dogs. I don't think people in dense areas have higher stranger-trust by default, I think it's SES related.
I've seen fairly convincing evidence suggesting the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment happens to be found in the parts of the country with the smallest numbers of immigrants. And certainly the diverse parts of the country tend *not* to send the loudest America Firsters to Congress.
Your wife's experience doesn't very typical.
Anti immigration sentiment is very different (being theoretical) than how people treat actual strangers they meet. "Strangers from strange places" might be "people from outside my neighborhood" or it could be "people from the city" or it might be "people from another country".
In America, it can easily be all of these at once, or not. When I was in Taos, people were suspicious because I was white and northern, for instance, and white northern people are always showing up to build ugly houses and generally ruin the artsy native scene. I think suspicion of outsiders is extremely natural. When I travel abroad, it certainly is. I think your opinion about my wife's experience is, on a world scale, very unusual.
[Deleted - wrong Kenny E. comment to respond to, sorry].
Self-sorting
Political tribalism
Thank you! This is the more in depth answer I was looking for; I appreciate Matt taking the time to respond and think there's something to his relative density theory. But his analysis doesn't explain why Nassau is different from the New Jersey suburbs (where I live), which are also lower density relative to the city -- though, he might say, they're also higher than the outlying counties. These sorts of population and government dynamics make a lot of sense to me and contrast with NJ, where some of the counties are pretty well run (all things considered). Appreciate you responding!
I think his analysis does explain why Long Island is different from New Jersey. In New Jersey there is always farther you could go (into the pine barrens or into northeastern Pennsylvania, if you really want to go far out) so the parts that function like suburbs are selected differently from the farther out parts that function like exurbs. But in Long Island you can’t go farther than Montauk.
Really anything further east than Ronkonkoma is untenable if you have to commute to the city for work.
Western LI is very much an exurb of NYC, though. And while I don't claim to be an expert on LI dynamics I'm pretty sure that no one actually commutes from Montauk notwithstanding the fact that the LIRR does in fact go that far, given that it's a 3 hour train ride.
The relevant conceptual dividing line seems less likely to be purely geographic and more about maximum tenable commute-shed for city workers versus those whose livelihoods are more geographically localized.
Oh I see. So Long Island “traps” people who like the proximity to the city but have politics that would favor low density. And New Jersey’s commuter suburbs don’t. Is that right? I take your point!
That was my understanding of his claim, though see the other replies to me for challenges.
Another component is the fact that all of the dynamics that have caused societal stress that are now nation wide, all started on Long Island generations ago becasue New York has traditionally been high wage / high cost of living. The pot has been simmering a long time, for blue collar workers in particular:
- Globalization: manufacturing left Long Island for the American South in the 60s and 70s, long before it moved to the "global south".
- Housing Affordability Crisis: this really took off in the late 1990s / early 2000s in a way that many communities elsewhere in the nation only started to see in the last 5-10 years.
- Exurbinazation: began in the 90s as Suffolk county got built out, but has already run its course when it ran into NIMBY limits in the early 2000s (see: affordability)
- Traffic: true for the entire tri-state region, but particulalry bad given Long Island geography as the center of gravity moved further east that is still trying to commute due west.
And the final nail: that who are inclined to leave (like me) moved into the city starting in the late 1990s. Urbanism is all the rage everywhere now, but when I was a kid no one in their right mind wanted to live in Manhattan (much less Brooklyn)... until around 1995 when EVERYONE who graduated from HS would LOVE to, if they could. Those that could afford to live there on their own, did so. That dynamic has been stronger culturally and running longer in NYC than other urban areas of the country, depriving Nassau county in particular, of native "blue votes". And when those young people grow up and have families, they first try Brooklyn, if they can affort it, and if then can't, Westchester and Norther NJ are more attractice alternatives than moving back to Nassau. NYC has very unique suburbanizaiton patterns due to its geography and its mass transit setup.
It's also partly sheer geography: suburban Long Island abuts Queens and Brooklyn, and is thus *filled* with transplants (by now going back multiple generations) from those two boroughs, both of which were home to a lot of culturally moderate to conservative white people. In the early days of white flight and suburbanization, city folk heading for the suburbs tended to head to suburban areas close to where they grew up. For Brooklynites and Queensites, that often meant Long Island.
I was wondering if Matt would get into the housing affordability issue. It’s really bad on LI, despite a relatively strong commuter rail system and tons of room to develop around stations.
Its because Trump is the most culturally Italian-American president we've ever had.
>But the perfect time to change the natural born citizen rule is right now, when there’s no specific Arnold Schwarzenegger figure who would benefit.<
Back when Schwarzenegger was prominent politically, George Will used to make a pithy argument to the effect that "It's bad that our constitution allows Paris Hilton to serve as president and forbids Henry Kissinger." Something like that (he probably used a different "vapid celebrity" example, but I couldn't find the exact quote).
Anyway, that line has always stuck with me. I wasn't the biggest Kissinger fanboi on the planet (nor his biggest detractor: his was a complicated legacy). But Will had a good point. It really is self-defeating and unjust that America doesn't allow immigrants to become president, even after a lengthy period of citizenship.
PS—People absolutely would bring up Elon Musk's name if we tried to amend the constitution right now, Matt. Just sayin.
The main reason America is the best country is that when you're an immigrant who becomes a citizen, you become just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Changing the president eligibility rules will help reinforce that idea.
But yeah the person who people will think about here is Elon Musk...which honestly would be a good thing given that he's right-coded but changing the rule is left-coded.
I really can't stand Musk, I'll admit. But the more I think about this issue in the context of EM, the more I conclude it's really not any argument at all in favor of the ban on immigrant presidents. The most obvious reason why is: you can't make constitutional policy based on narrow examples. The less obvious reason is: there are plenty of great immigrants who might make excellent presidents. No sense cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Also, if we ever get around to changing this part of article 2, I'd have no problem with a perfectly lengthly interlude between citizenship and presidential eligibility (say, 30 years).
If you schedule the rule change to take place January 1st, 2025 you're probably fine. You're talking about someone 4 years out from running, so you're not talking about any particular election.
When California tried to pass a rule saying that presidential candidates should be required to release their tax returns, the governor vetoed it saying it was too divisive / seemed politically motivated - i.e. it was _clearly_ aimed at candidate Trump (for re-election). On the one hand I agreed, but I wish they had, in 2017, passed it for the 2024 election, when it presumably _wouldn't_ have been Trump (since at the time he would either have won re-election and been disqualified or lost and.... presumably not run again... more fool me)
If I was rewriting the clauses that limit who can run for various offices, I'd abolish the attempt at a cursus honorum (House at 25, Senate at 30, President at 35) and say that no person may be elected to any federal office if they are beneath the age of criminal responsibility at the date they first file for candidacy, require all candidates to be citizens of the United States, and require that they have been residents of the United States for a reasonable period (the last five years, perhaps) - with an exception for those who have resided outside the US in the service of the United States, (e.g. ambassadors, military service) and that they reside in the appropriate state at the time of election and throughout their term in office. I'd also add, rather than a requirement that naturalized citizens be citizens for a period of time, instead that naturalized citizens must have renounced the other nationality they held before naturalization (or made a reasonable effort to do so if another country is being unreasonable about releasing them). Naturalization is a much lengthier process now than it was in 1788, so requiring you to have been a citizen for seven or nine years back then was measuring from basically as soon as you got off the boat, while now it's measuring from five to ten years after you came to live in the US.
The voters are not going to elect literal children, unless there are extraordinary circumstances - but if there are extraordinary circumstances, then why not entrust the voters to make that decision at the time? If a ten-year-old can win the voters over in both primary and general election, then why not?
"If a ten-year-old can win the voters over in both primary and general election, then why not?"
Richard, your faith in the wisdom of American voters is charming but dangerous.
I'm fine with a few guardrails to constrain the not always well thought out exuberance of the American electorate.
Though I'd take a ten year old over Trump.
As a practical matter, "on principle, we should change the rules to allow this crazy hypothetical, because it will never come to pass so why not"... I don't find this persuasive.
One of the advantages of this being an internet comment that has no real chance of becoming law is that I can say what I actually believe rather than being bound by political constraints.
Do we need some kind of lower legal limit? Yes, because the way that various election laws are enforced is by applying criminal liability to the candidate for what their campaign does, and having a candidate below the age of criminal responsibility would allow them to break all sorts of laws with impunity (and that candidate would not need to win for this to create a problem).
Is there, in general, a problem with a candidate who is utterly unsuited to office, provided they lose? No, the position of candidate (as distinct from the holder of elected office) is of no power so long as they comply with electoral laws.
If you set an age, are you saying that everyone or even most people of that age are suitable? No, you are saying that at least one person of that age is good enough to hold the least important elected office. If you set the age limit at 18 (the same as that to vote), then you're saying that no 17-year-old ever will be able to be the most junior member of the House. I don't think that's sound: I've met some remarkably mature 17-year-olds who would make excellent Congresspeople. Why shouldn't they run at 17? And you can keep arguing the age down quite a long way - I think the youngest person I've met who I'd think could be a junior legislator was about 13/14 at the time. So I'm picking 10 partly because it's the age of criminal responsibility, and partly because it's an age where I can safely say that even the most extraordinarily mature and capable person will still be at least 10.
This is why I think that the age of candidature should generally be lower than the age of the franchise. When you set a minimum age to vote, you want the majority of the people of that age who vote to do so responsibly; that means that you're asking how mature and responsible the median person of that age will be (if a minority of the very youngest age group are irresponsible, that's such a small fraction of the voters that it will have little effect - voting just isn't that precise an instrument). When you set a minimum age to be a candidate, you want to not exclude someone who would be capable of doing the job of holding elected office, so you're asking not about the capabilities of the median person of that age, but about the capabilities of the most mature, capable, responsible person of that age.
Do you want a separate age limit for President? Maybe. I can see an argument for that. Honestly, it'd be simpler to just have a single age, but I'm OK with a separate rule for President. I'd want a safety margin, ie set it well below whatever you think the youngest plausible candidate could be. But for President/VP, that could easily be 18 or 21. Mind you, it's not like anyone has really been kept out by the 35 year limit - JFK (youngest when elected) could have stood in 1952, two elections before he became President. The only VP who could not have stood the election before the one in which he won was Breckinridge.