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There’s a lot of Barack Obama talk in this week’s Mailbag, which reminded me of something that I think tends to get forgotten in assessments of Trump-era politics: It was Mitt Romney, not Donald Trump, who made a hard break with the Bush-McCain interest in some form of “comprehensive immigration reform” with a path to citizenship for the majority of long-resident undocumented immigrants. It’s true that Trump in his 2016 campaign amped up the rhetoric somewhat from where Romney was, but the actual policy gap between Trump and Romney on immigration was modest compared with the very large gaps between Romney and McCain on immigration or between Romney and Trump on Social Security or Medicare or marriage equality.
I bring this up because I think in a lot of ways the core difference between the Slow Boring worldview and the conventional wisdom among Democrats is that most Democrats see Trump’s success as a counterexample to the idea that moderation has political benefits while I see Trump as an illustration of the principle. He is dragged down by a lot of personal misconduct but boosted by having moved to the center to neutralize Obama’s best attacks on Romney. His immigration politics is way to the right of where Bush and McCain were but only modestly to the right of where Romney was.
Conversely, a lot of Republicans are convinced that Trump won where Romney lost because Trump is a scumbag and Romney was an honorable and decent man. This serves to rationalize all kinds of scumbag behavior when the simple truth is that Romney — or some other honorable and decent person — could easily have won if he had Trump’s views on Social Security and Medicare.
Greg M: Given that the least hospitable place on earth is 1000x more hospitable, manageable, more easily constructed, resourced, and populated than literally anywhere else NOT on earth, why the obsession with colonizing the moon or another planet?
Who is this question directed toward? I’m not moving to the moon, I’m with you.
I mentioned this in a totally different context in last week’s Mailbag, but I think your question is a great example of a topic where what I really want is a clearer index of what the conventional wisdom is. Are there a lot of people obsessed with colonizing other planets? Obviously Elon Musk specifically is very interested in this, but my sense is that he’s pretty idiosyncratic in this regard, just as you don’t see a lot of people who combine hard-right politics with enthusiasm for solar energy. But I might be wrong and tons of people are obsessed with colonizing Mars when they should really be thinking about why nobody wants to live in northern Canada instead.
Romulus Augustus: Could you suss out a bit on how Obama post 2014 election disappointed you? I feel the same way because I think he veered into a “proto Woke” policies on the sort of Kendist view that any disparity in school discipline was evidence of racism and his unliberal view on due process for young men accused of sexual assault on college campuses. I would also suggest he gave too much credence to the BLM narrative about the police at times during these years.
Are there other issues you had a problem with during those years and how do you rate him overall?
I might quibble on the margin, but I think the way the Obama administration handled B.L.M. was basically fine. Where I criticize late-Obamaism is on three fronts — all of which ended up making it a lot harder for Hillary Clinton to win in 2016.