A lot of people are talking about how Trump's idiotic war on renewables for weird identity politics reasons is going to backfire when everyone starts having to deal with soaring electric bills and [gulps] rolling blackouts next summer: https://x.com/SiegelScribe/status/1957429460367528340
Wake me up when it happens after the empty shelves that were supposedly already priced into the shipping schedules in, like, April seem to never have materialized.
The freakout in April was definitely an overreaction (though the craziest tariffs from the posterboard never went into effect) but tariffs currently look like they are going to shave about .5% off GDP as long as they are in effect which would be considered an absolutely disastrous policy in any other context..
I mean he did do the whole TACO thing which allowed shipping containers to resume and also transshipments have gone up like crazy and China tariffs are on hold (and unlikely to resume?). So the predicate for empty shelves was removed almost immediately. But price hikes seem to be happening, so we shall see.
Coffee at Target went from $7 a jar in November to $11 today, so there's that, to pick one example. (I made a point of remembering how much this brand of coffee was right after the election)
We have a voluntary program where the power company will give you $25 bucks to modify your smart thermostat setting when they are trying to reduce strain on the grid. You can override the modification, so it's totally voluntary. You have no idea how mad this makes people though.
I feel like I hear this claim a lot and it strikes me as something of a category error. Here's how I think about the electorate:
1 There's a big heterogenous anti-Trump coalition of people from Zohran and the left to David French on the right that just doesn't like Trump, that's like 48% of the electorate.
2. There's MAGA base that will probably never turn on him, that's something like 30 to 35% of the electorate
3. Then there's a third group of people who are open to Trump and willing to vote for him but aren't total MAGA heads. That's like 15-25% of the electorate.
Group 2 may never abandon Trump but group 3 will if things get bad, like they did in 2020, that's the folks anti-Trump world should be focusing on by pointing out things like Trump hasn't made things cheaper and your electrical bill just keeps getting higher and higher because of his stupid and shortsighted policies.
I think you’re underestimating the degree to which the third group is largely culturally captured by the second.
My experience is that Fox News has (1) made the second group “loud and proud” about their beliefs, while (2) arming them with shitty-but-effective talking points, such that (3) they can browbeat the third group into submitting to SOME of those talking points (4) in a way that our purple-hair set simply is incapable of doing as effectively.
It is of course true that the GOP enjoys much higher cultural legitimacy with group 3 but that edge is not new and we have always paid the price for having various out-groups of all kinds in the liberal coalition. When the GOP messes up group 3 voters stay home as happened under Obama 2008 and Trump 2020. In 2024 some of Biden's 2020 voters stayed home instead. So Dems won't win if Trump gets a passing grade but on current course the chance of that is not high.
It’s because the purple hairs have much more hatred for normies. That is something I have never experienced really from in life MAGAs. But then again I am very midwestern. A lot of this comes from “these people aren’t mean to me and those people are.”
What annoys you and what doesn't is 100% about cultural programming and so is who gets defined as normie in the first place. A normie by definition is a member of the cultural in-group. Normie justifications for why they hate out groups should be taken with a truckload of salt.
What the third group lack in regularity, the second group makes up in just being that loud asshole at the end of the bar who bitches about libtards all the fucking time.
The third group are generally stupid and easily influenced by the loudest asshole around.
Indeed, assuming Trump continues to punch himself in the face and is not bailed out by an AI productivity boom (unlikely if energy is expensive) then the next election will be won by people in group 1 showing up big and those in group 2 and 3 showing up less than they did in 2024. We don't need a lot of people to switch their votes, only for enough Trump-2024 group 3 voters to stay home.
Where do the Finance Guys and Tech Bros fit? They are for djt for loosening or canceling restrictions and regulations. Many of them don’t “like” Trump but vote Republican as long as it helps their bottom lines.
Electorally they don’t matter at all. There aren’t that many of them and they live in solid blue states. Culturally tech bros matter a little bit though.
Point related to the “moderation wars” argument— as a data guy, if I were trying to do stuff in the world, I would prefer to look at Lakshya Jain’s model rather than G Elliot Morris’s, because Morris’s is more complicated, less interpretable, and doesn’t have enough non-correlated backtestable events to give you much confidence about model fit despite that complexity and interpretation difficulty. When you do that, you seriously jack up your risk of coming to noise-driven conclusions.
I think there’s some room for nuance in the discussion involving what *kinds* of moderation are most likely to deliver overperformance, but it seems pretty clear that whatever the younger Blue Dog cluster members are doing works very well, and that seeking good fit with the specific preferences of voters in your district is a good idea.
For winning the primary, I think? But that take seems less data-driven than the WAR models. (FWIW, I don’t think that Beshear’s chances of winning the primary are super high— but that’s a shame; for GE electorates, he clearly has the juice.)
I think that from a pure “just win, baby” standpoint, Whitmer, Beshear, Shapiro, Ossoff, and Gallego all have good cases to make— as would some of the other red/purple state overperformers who haven’t yet expressed interest in running.
I like four of those five. I get serious glass jaw vibes from Whitmer, but I admit I could be totally wrong, and she's generally won convincingly in a state that presents challenges to Democrats, so...
"We ran 7.5 points ahead of the national ticket. And I go back to Democrats over the last 30 years — essentially since NAFTA."
"But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.
I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers]. They expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to support the rich. But we don’t expect that from my party — and that’s my future in this party — to focus on helping the Democratic Party and my colleagues understand how important it is that we talk to workers and we make decisions with workers at the table."
I find it so crazy that there's smart people who think NAFTA caused the fall of American manufacturing. "Black Monday" in Youngstown was in 1977! Youngstown peaked in population in 1930 and has been in rapid decline since 1960. Youngstown/the Mahoning Valley's initial advantage as a steel manufacturing location was due to localized ore deposits which were exhausted a long time ago... how much effort needs to be put into maintaining an industry that no longer has any geographical advantage? Of course people should be treated with empathy and government should help with transition or assistance as needed but there is absolutely no industrial policy that could have brought back Ohio's steel mills.
Ohio cities with more diversified economies are doing fine, Cleveland now has a stable population and slightly above average unemployment and Columbus is growing. There are a lot of car parts manufacturers in Ohio too who are part of an integrated supply chain that would be hurt by tariffs.
So I get that people believe this stuff about NAFTA but it's basically not true.
1.) A decent chunk of people say "NAFTA" when they really mean "the deindustrialization of America since the 60s with a lack of replacement of well-paid secure service jobs for non-college educated people."
2.) In a lot of places, NAFTA was the final domino that took their city or town from "hanging on" to "a total black hole only people who are old or have zero prospects stay," so it takes the blame.
“1.) A decent chunk of people say "NAFTA" when they really mean "the deindustrialization of America since the 60s with a lack of replacement of well-paid secure service jobs for non-college educated people."
Synecdoche is good as a literary device, and obviously it’s very common in everyday speech.
But I think it is important to be correct and precise about things. Maybe not in politics - precision is anathema to political discourse - but just, like, as a virtue.
This is like Americans using “lockdown” to mean “a complex patchwork of mostly local, some state and a few federal restrictions on activities and mobility, that in no way shape or form resembles the actual lockdowns that parts of Europe experienced.” Sure, it’s common parlance. But it’s wrong and it sucks and I hate it.
...or the restaurant in which I was a minor investor shut down and went bankrupt and I lost my investment. But yeah, I guess it means different things to different people.
I don't know the specifics of your situation, and I'm not trying to throw salt in the wound, but ... this is one of those scenarios where I think a counterfactual analysis is useful.
What would've been the effect on the bottom line of your restaurant if there had been a global pandemic but in your particular locale, there weren't whatever local policies got implemented? Probably massively bad, right? Tons of folks weren't eating out regardless of whatever policies were in place. Even if there's literally no government restrictions, places like restaurants are gonna get hit really hard.
Certainly there are some restaurants that were marginal cases where government policies were the difference between life and death, (maybe yours was one such!) but most of the closures that folks like to attribute to "lockdowns" would've happened under any policy regime during a global pandemic.
My understanding is that the period when restrictions were strongest actually had a significant *decline* in the suicide rate. In any case, there was no time in any location in the United States at which “lockdown” is an accurate description of what the restrictions were.
My theory is the key tipping point for this was in the 80s (that’s when Springsteen was doing all the “mill closed down” stuff) but the political valence has shifted such that you need to find a democrat to blame.
Idk, if we had kept the rest of the world dirt poor and dependent on us, it might have kept an American steel industry alive. It was a mistake letting Asia move up the value chain.
I think there where two big union busting waves for manufacturing employment: (1) northern / rust belt factories to the right to work states in the 80s - 90s and (2) post-NAFTA outsourcing, primarily to Mexico in the late 90s - mid-2000s. If you're in the rust belt both hurt but from a US perspective, total manufacturing employment was ~ constant from 1970 - 2000: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
I think this chart is the chart people think about when they think about the decline of US manufacturing. It's the 90,000 factories that closed and the loss of ~ 3m jobs.
As Democrats, I think we also all just believed Obama when he said on the campaign trail: "One million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 jobs here in Ohio. And yet, ten years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America. Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America - and I never have."
The #1 reason to transfer production was to break the union. We didn't lower prices, we just expanded margin and returned capital to shareholders. That the core Republican laissez faire capitalism. Fuck that. We can do better.
“We expect the Red team to screw us over, but not the Blue team, so when Blue team doesn’t help us/listen to us enough, we’ll punish them by… voting for the Red team, which we expect to screw us over!”
That only works if you have some sort of credible threshold for doing it, and I think once you do defect you’re now meaningless as a political player, except for helping your opponents.
Excellent Eric Levitz article from this morning that obviously hits some of the same points Matt makes. Also a section near the end that I found pretty sad/poignant, because I think he's pretty obviously talking about himself with the section about people who find the electoral case for moderation compelling even while personally having more progressive politics, and the alienation from his political community that that leads to.
"I of course think Eric Levitz makes a ton of good points here, but fundamentally I am pretty sympathetic to John Ganz's skepticism of empirical approaches — I just don't think the upshot is necessarily one he'd like.
The thing you have to remember when trying to do politics more intuitively is that the electorate is mostly white, mostly old, mostly didn't go to college, and mostly composed of people living in the unfashionable suburbs of unfashionable cities.
If you can keep those broad empirical facts about who the voters are in your mind, I think you could skip a lot of quibbling about the many many many contestable ways to argue about issue polling.
It's just likely to lead you to the important truth. [link to today's article]"
Just to throw everyone for a loop, i thought middle-aged and older white voters were the one demographic that shifted *toward* Harris in 2024 relative to Biden in 2020?
It’s also unfortunate because like Matt I enjoy a lot of Ganz’s writing. I think he’s just falling into the trap of motivated reasoning and self-projection.
"The Argument" sounds amazing! I've read some great pieces by Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic. I'll probably end up subscribing, thanks for the heads up!
Does Sherrod Brown need small donor money or is the DSCC submerging him and his consultants in ridiculous amounts of cash which they are going to burn through on TV ads and lose (again)? (Sorry I posted this on the other thread but here seems more apt).
TBF to Brown, he did over perform in the election he lost, and as somebody w/ a known name against an empty suit in a likely pro-Democratic midterm, that might be enough to make up that last few percent.
There are so many eager young Dem candidates asking for donations both small dollar funders and the National Committees are almost tapped out. Unfortunately, there is no organization that directs potential candidates to only ask donors who support their place on the political spectrum. It’s a Wild West of messy texts and many of us are fed up!
Yeah it's just insane! Most of the people that text me shouldn't need the money as they are in blue places so I try to ignore them and only focus on genuine swing elections. Beyond that I just give to the DLCC/DCCC/DSCC and trust that they will not waste the money too much because I do not have the bandwidth to track each individual candidate before I give.
Omg omg omg, I was wondering where Jerusalem was going after her fantastic podcast, Good on Paper, ended and I'm so excited to find out here! Thanks Halina!
I knew that would come up even before actually typing out my reply, but I couldn't resist because the Soup Nazi thing was too on point given Substack's resistance since Day One of operations to offering any sort of cross discounts or subscription bundling options.
From Jerusalem Demsas' introduction to The Argument: "We are not agnostic between all possible lives — our commitment to individual liberties is not an excuse to wash our hands of judgment or devolve into moral relativism. There are better and worse kinds of lives, better and worse ways to conduct ourselves, better and worse decisions."
I might subscribe just to see if this is a throwaway line or actually something that comes through the posts and articles.
Re: The Argument— I saw an interesting line of conversation on twitter where Kelsey Piper favorably cited an exchange where Jerusalem said that American liberals “weren’t just temporarily embarrassed communists” when explaining some of her excitement about the project, and the remark seemed to produce a lot of blowback from people somewhat to her right— sole interlocutors objecting in the general case, and Alex Godofsky raising a specific objection because The Argument includes Matt Breunig.
I do find myself kind of wondering where you have to draw the intellectual boundaries of “temporarily embarrassed communist” for this objection to really make sense. One commenter did say that they saw liberals as “having the same ultimate values and ends as communists, only disagreeing on means and timing.” Maybe there’s sort of a point there— I’m a social democrat (and would consider myself a “liberal” in the US sense), but could imagine counterfactuals where say, technology was very different than it is now or I just had very different “positive” views on economics where I would have the same basic core values but be a communist. But this feels like it proves too much— it maybe implies that everybody whose economic policy views are consequentialist and account for the diminishing marginal utility of wealth is a “communist except on means and timing.” But that’s very different from how most humans have used that word for the past couple of centuries.
At a very high level, liberalism and communism share a distaste for traditional hierarchy and are both diametrically opposed to the right-wing idea discussed in the Argument “that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to.” If that’s the main dimension of politics, which many right-wing people believe, then yes liberals and communists are on the same side.
The main difference between liberalism and communism is that liberalism puts much more emphasis on individual liberty while communists want government control. Neither individual liberty nor government control is inherently incompatible with the idea that people are more than what they came from and shouldn’t just be judged based on the average characteristics of their group.
"...communism share a distaste for traditional hierarchy..."
Amazing how an ideology with a "distaste for traditional hierarchy" resulted in some of the most hierarchical, authoritarian, and oppressive societies in world history, like Stalin's USSR and Mao's China. Depends on your definition of "traditional," I guess? "We slaughter the old elites [the bourgeoisie, kulaks, the educated] and put a new elite on top, so that makes it okay"?
There are still limited resources after the communist revolution (usually way more so). Getting rid of your traditional system of laws for distributing resources and power just means they both get distributed according to who has power.
The best thing is to have no oppression, but oppression where the people at the top rotate is at least better than oppression where the people at the top are always the same.
Communists are more violent than liberals (although liberals can commit violence too, see the French Revolution), but were still less brutal than their opponents in most left vs. right civil war scenarios. This is why most liberals sided with the communists in the Spanish Civil War and even John McCain wrote a touching eulogy about them. And even the Chinese Civil War began with the Shanghai Massacre when the KMT murdered thousands of communist supporters, and American observers noted during World War II that Mao’s troops were much less corrupt and respectful of civilians than the KMT. And of course Hitler was much worse than Stalin which is why all the civilized democracies except Finland were on the Soviet side. At the end of the day liberals and communists still have common cause to make against fascists.
The contention that communism is "diametrically opposed to the right-wing idea discussed in the Argument 'that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to'” seems contrary to the central emphasis on "class" in communist analysis.
I don’t think communism treat “class” as an essential and inalienable feature of an individual. It’s a relationship to the means of production, and it seems natural that this can change for a person over their lifetime. Surely a peasant who becomes a proletariat would have been a familiar concept in Marx’s time, as well as movement between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.
"..that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to.”
Liberals and progressives obviously believe this. It's the heart of racial and sex identity politics that you can look at a group and make judgements about individuals who share that characteristics.
Liberalism was always anti hierarchical, I agree. But I don't see any evidence that your quote is a right-wing specific position.
The point of racial and sex “identity politics” is to liberate people from being constrained by the group they are born into. On sex, liberals most commonly believe that men should be able to do traditionally womanly things, women should be able to do traditionally manly things, and you should even be allowed to change your sex if you want. On race, many liberals and progressives hold the idea that historically disadvantaged groups should be given a leg up, but I don’t see this as people being “held to account” which implies constraining them, but instead liberating them from the constraints imposed on them by history. Like holding people to account would be like saying black people on average have lower IQs so individual black people should be excluded from high-IQ professions. Even if you disagree with affirmative action (and I disagree with affirmative action in zero-sum contexts like college admissions, but not in non-zero-sum contexts), it’s the opposite of that.
Nothing you said contradicts what I said. It's still the idea that where you come from is the most important thing, and that your group identity can be used to determine things about you. It's trivially easy to see this being used to hold people to account for their race, even in progressive ideas. "White people need to/Because I'm Black" is being held to account because of your race, for instance.
It doesn't really matter if your rhetoric is liberatory or what, you're deploying the same analysis. The idea that liberals and progressives don't do it is silly, just accept it and make your argument while knowing that you treat individual members of a group as having shared characteristics just like conservatives do. Liberals and Progs lose a lot of credibility when they deny obvious things like sex differences and class/culture differences. You don't actually need to apologize for it, and stop acting like it's an evil thing that only hard right conservative MAGA fascists do.
"..that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to.”
What the heck? I'm a liberal, and I don't believe this! Liberalism values the individual.
So I really don't have time for a long conversation on race policy in America, I have to get to work, but here's what I've got:
1. I believe that people should be judged as individuals, not as "he/she is Black/White, so he/she must be [insert stereotypical trait]"
2. At the same time, there's no denying that Black people in America had gotten an absolutely shitty deal, what with slavery followed by lynching and Jim Crow, so compensation in the form of affirmative action made sense at one time. Not sure if it makes sense anymore, especially as today's Black population in America includes more recent African immigrants as opposed to descendants of slaves.
3. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to right-wingers if their opposition to DEI/wokeness were in good faith rather than a cover for "we want to be old-fashionedly racist and not called out on it." Look at certain corners of the interwebs and social media today, you'll see some absolutely hideous racism.
I am not a theorist but it seems to me that communism is only compatible with liberalism in a world without material scarcity (which itself is a fuzzy definition) but lets set that aside.
Empirically, it seems like imposing communism before solving scarcity will not lead to eventual plenty as humans are both greedy and lazy at the same time.
But if technology solves scarcity first then imposing the power structure of capitalism beyond that seems unnecessary.
Perhaps “means and timing” is vague and its more a disagreement about "order of operations".
Yeah, the failure to take economics and incentives into account is a fatal flaw of communism, even according to its own terms. Like Mao probably delayed Chinese economic growth by 10-20 years, which also increased global economic inequality and delayed the decline of the existing world hierarchy—exactly contrary to communism’s goals.
In the future if we have AI-driven abundance these human incentives will be less important though. If we really get to a world where the wealth is mostly created with AI and robots and then the political debate will be less about incentives and more over distribution—do we want something like the movie Elysium where only a small elite enjoys that technology and wealth, or will it be shared more broadly even if this means the environment is placed under more strain and the existing rich lose status and relative power.
A future with AI sufficiently capable to handle the economy is one in which humans no have no economic value and compete for atoms, space, and energy with said AIs. This doesn’t end well for the humans, who are by hypothesis less capable than the AI with which they are competing.
That gets into alignment problems, I don’t see evidence yet of AI adopting a mind of its own and going rogue paperclip maximizing so my base case is that AI will still be controlled by at least some subset of humans. The alignment problem I’m more worried about is whether that subset of humans is going to share.
The alignment problem exists by default. Any kind of open-ended goal subject to optimization pressure with an optimization engine more powerful than humans is presumptively unaligned to human wellbeing absent strong proof the contrary. It’s the instrumental convergence prpblem. And we have *lots* of evidence of existing models displaying unaligned behaviors.
I agree about the tech thing, but the core challenge is actually the difficulty of solving the resource allocation math problem (for a good dramatization, read “Red Plenty”); governments are quite capable of coming up with incentives for greedy and lazy humans.
I strongly suspect that properly regulated markets are straight up more equitable than any hypothetical resource allocation machine due to the utility lost from having to maintain such a machine. Computation isn't free. Every transaction would need to be monitored and processed to update the utility calculations. This represents an enormous computational workload that isn't generating any utility. There's also inevitable inefficiencies introduced as that information takes time to propagate through the network before any updates to utility calculations can take effect.
Whereas in a market, the transactions themselves are the information signal and the buyer/seller can immediately update their utility preferences without waiting for a central planning computer. In fact, maybe it's best to conceive of the market itself as one big resource allocation machine. Constructing another one just to observe itself is a reduplication of effort.
I think that your analysis is missing transaction costs— which frequently make it efficient for significant sub-components of the economy (large firms) to operate in a command-and-control way. Read Ronald Coase or Alfred Chandler.
Thanks, I will look into it. Hypothetically, if a government could "come up with incentives for greedy and lazy humans" to make technological progress which said humans would not perceive as being more coercive than capitalism, then as a liberal I suppose that is fine by me. So maybe building the computer that can solve resource allocation problems is the correct technological tipping point and not solving material scarcity, but I am not sure which is easier.
I don't know how you compute all of the secondary factors like people not wanting to eat asparagus and enjoying some art more than others. Is there still a secondary market where I can trade my disgusting allotment of capers for delicious broccoli?
How do you calculate demand for different raw materials given that there's no pricing anymore to tell you what goods people want?
Nationalist movements tend toward communism/command economies and communist movements tend toward nationalism because both worship the power of the state to do things in one country. Which means that to be anti-nationalist or anti-communist one should not worship power and/or the state. That is at least one intellectual boundary.
This is kinda my beef with modern internet political ideology discussions. It's all just naming conventions and hyperfine gradations. Who cares if Bruenig is a communist or a democratic-socialist or whatever? The man is a Texan with a Catholic wife lmao. I pay 80 bucks to the Atlantic and I like what she writes there. Wtf, he's a part of America's material splendor to the max.
Ideas don't really matter anymore; the nation is dominated by "liberals." Some parts of the GOP want to repeal the 19th, and some parts of the Dem coalition would like to guillotine Elon Musk, but it's not really meaningful. There's no political will for this stuff. Looking for the eschatology or teleological in our philosophies is fun in person and completely pointless on the internet.
What matters is what parts of the welfare state are means tested, what is the particular rate of a tariff, where does the EITC phase out, when will they extend the child tax credit?
It's boring but small ball is where the left has been getting butchered by the right for like 10 years now.
17 As Jesus was starting out on his way to Jerusalem, a man came running up to him, knelt down, and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
18 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked. “Only God is truly good. 19 But to answer your question, you know the commandments: ‘You must not murder. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not testify falsely. You must not cheat anyone. Honor your father and mother.’”
20 “Teacher,” the man replied, “I’ve obeyed all these commandments since I was young.”
21 Looking at the man, Jesus felt genuine love for him. “There is still one thing you haven’t done,” he told him. “Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
The reality is many even supposedly reasonable and smart right-leaning people essentially consider anything to the left of Joe Manchin as basically socialism, with the serial numbers filed off.
Now part of this is social democrats like me, actual socialists and communists and center-left liberals like most of the people writing for The Argument have and have had many overlapping goals, some of which the means to get there are ageed on and others where they aren't. OTOH, there's plenty of stuff where there aren't overlapping goals.
I honestly think some of this comes from the fact that within actual conservative ideological punditry (as opposed to the actual 'base'), there actually weren't non-overlapping goals between the evangelicals, the Chamber of Commerce types, the neocons, and so on for decades, so they just assume its the same, and don't truly understand that there are places where even Zohran, Matt, and even a radical Commie would agree on the policy on something, but of course, disagree on many other things.
Even today, in the post-Trump era, the other thing is even if there are parts of the right-wing that disagree, they disagree where they don't even agree on what is a problem or not (see immigration, Israel, free trade, etc.) so even though they all back Daddy Trump, it feels like there's more of a difference (within the Right) between right-wing factions, as opposed to the left, which may seem like everybody is some form of socialist, because basically everybody wants universal health care, a larger welfare state, and a progressive tax system, plus some other things.
"“having the same ultimate values and ends as communists, only disagreeing on means and timing" --> Sounds like someone who believes values don't matter to "means," which is kind of a disturbing thing to believe if you think about it.
The way I see it is that both liberals and communists believe in egalitarianism. The problem is that perfect egalitarianism is impossible because it's internally contradictory. When you give political equality to the masses, you soon discover that a significant percentage of the masses don't entirely support egalitarian policies and will vote against them. So you have to choose which aspects of egalitarianism are the highest priority. Communists think that economic equality is paramount, and that empowering the masses politically is impossible because of false consciousness, so we need a dictatorship of the proletariat. Liberals think that political equality, while not the be-all, is more important, while economic equality remains a good aspiration but is negotiable. So we give everyone the vote, but we try our best to put safeguards around the process so majorities can't vote to oppress minorities or whatever, and we work to mitigate economic inequality, but not to eliminate it altogether since that isn't what the people want (which in turn is partly because radical steps toward economic equality would make the pie smaller).
I love Sherrod Brown, but the man hit me up for a tenner twice in 5 minutes.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeit, I’ll take any motherf***er’s money if he giving it away!
Another Yglesias sub! We need an Yglesias Substack Bundle (SB/Politix/Argument) for the Substack Poors!
Can’t wait for Freddie to bomb The A’s comments section.
I would love to see a Freddie vs. Matt B. face off on who is the one true leftist to lead them all.
One Billion Subscriptions.
Genuinely this is right.
A lot of people are talking about how Trump's idiotic war on renewables for weird identity politics reasons is going to backfire when everyone starts having to deal with soaring electric bills and [gulps] rolling blackouts next summer: https://x.com/SiegelScribe/status/1957429460367528340
Wake me up when it happens after the empty shelves that were supposedly already priced into the shipping schedules in, like, April seem to never have materialized.
The freakout in April was definitely an overreaction (though the craziest tariffs from the posterboard never went into effect) but tariffs currently look like they are going to shave about .5% off GDP as long as they are in effect which would be considered an absolutely disastrous policy in any other context..
I mean he did do the whole TACO thing which allowed shipping containers to resume and also transshipments have gone up like crazy and China tariffs are on hold (and unlikely to resume?). So the predicate for empty shelves was removed almost immediately. But price hikes seem to be happening, so we shall see.
Coffee at Target went from $7 a jar in November to $11 today, so there's that, to pick one example. (I made a point of remembering how much this brand of coffee was right after the election)
If you’re in the PC hobbyist space prices have shot up as well. A part that I bought for $50 last fall is now $75
Trump’s war on Gamerz!
People seem mad about high prices these days...
I’m in the States this summer after 18 months abroad and restaurant prices are…something.
Once you get an awesome new job in a sock factory you'll be able to afford Chic-fil-a again
I'm in southern spain on vacation, and prices are somrthing else...
Groceries…it's an old-fashioned word.
We have a voluntary program where the power company will give you $25 bucks to modify your smart thermostat setting when they are trying to reduce strain on the grid. You can override the modification, so it's totally voluntary. You have no idea how mad this makes people though.
With the ridiculous pricing that Con Edison gets, I’m wondering what they’re doing with all the money they’re bringing in.
Meh? If I were a lib-hating bro, I’d just regurgitate the lies about battery fires and then claim we needed more of Orange Caesar’s glorious nuclear.
I feel like I hear this claim a lot and it strikes me as something of a category error. Here's how I think about the electorate:
1 There's a big heterogenous anti-Trump coalition of people from Zohran and the left to David French on the right that just doesn't like Trump, that's like 48% of the electorate.
2. There's MAGA base that will probably never turn on him, that's something like 30 to 35% of the electorate
3. Then there's a third group of people who are open to Trump and willing to vote for him but aren't total MAGA heads. That's like 15-25% of the electorate.
Group 2 may never abandon Trump but group 3 will if things get bad, like they did in 2020, that's the folks anti-Trump world should be focusing on by pointing out things like Trump hasn't made things cheaper and your electrical bill just keeps getting higher and higher because of his stupid and shortsighted policies.
I think you’re underestimating the degree to which the third group is largely culturally captured by the second.
My experience is that Fox News has (1) made the second group “loud and proud” about their beliefs, while (2) arming them with shitty-but-effective talking points, such that (3) they can browbeat the third group into submitting to SOME of those talking points (4) in a way that our purple-hair set simply is incapable of doing as effectively.
It is of course true that the GOP enjoys much higher cultural legitimacy with group 3 but that edge is not new and we have always paid the price for having various out-groups of all kinds in the liberal coalition. When the GOP messes up group 3 voters stay home as happened under Obama 2008 and Trump 2020. In 2024 some of Biden's 2020 voters stayed home instead. So Dems won't win if Trump gets a passing grade but on current course the chance of that is not high.
It’s because the purple hairs have much more hatred for normies. That is something I have never experienced really from in life MAGAs. But then again I am very midwestern. A lot of this comes from “these people aren’t mean to me and those people are.”
What annoys you and what doesn't is 100% about cultural programming and so is who gets defined as normie in the first place. A normie by definition is a member of the cultural in-group. Normie justifications for why they hate out groups should be taken with a truckload of salt.
What? The 3rd group are not regular voters. It doesn't listen to the 2nd group except in Presidential years.
What the third group lack in regularity, the second group makes up in just being that loud asshole at the end of the bar who bitches about libtards all the fucking time.
The third group are generally stupid and easily influenced by the loudest asshole around.
Indeed, assuming Trump continues to punch himself in the face and is not bailed out by an AI productivity boom (unlikely if energy is expensive) then the next election will be won by people in group 1 showing up big and those in group 2 and 3 showing up less than they did in 2024. We don't need a lot of people to switch their votes, only for enough Trump-2024 group 3 voters to stay home.
Perhaps Trump deporting their neighbors and family members will help in that regard.
Reported: Assumes Facts Not In Evidence.
😉
Where do the Finance Guys and Tech Bros fit? They are for djt for loosening or canceling restrictions and regulations. Many of them don’t “like” Trump but vote Republican as long as it helps their bottom lines.
Electorally they don’t matter at all. There aren’t that many of them and they live in solid blue states. Culturally tech bros matter a little bit though.
If I were a climate activist with access to an influencer network, I'd start a rumor that hydrocarbons contain phytoestrogens.
Hired.
I like your thinking!
Just try to repurpose whatever the chemtrail conspiracy is all about...
You know what won't shut down a solar farm in arizona? A swarm of jellyfish.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, episode eleventy.
Point related to the “moderation wars” argument— as a data guy, if I were trying to do stuff in the world, I would prefer to look at Lakshya Jain’s model rather than G Elliot Morris’s, because Morris’s is more complicated, less interpretable, and doesn’t have enough non-correlated backtestable events to give you much confidence about model fit despite that complexity and interpretation difficulty. When you do that, you seriously jack up your risk of coming to noise-driven conclusions.
I think there’s some room for nuance in the discussion involving what *kinds* of moderation are most likely to deliver overperformance, but it seems pretty clear that whatever the younger Blue Dog cluster members are doing works very well, and that seeking good fit with the specific preferences of voters in your district is a good idea.
Jain is very down on Andy Beshear’s chances, I’ve noticed.
For winning the primary, I think? But that take seems less data-driven than the WAR models. (FWIW, I don’t think that Beshear’s chances of winning the primary are super high— but that’s a shame; for GE electorates, he clearly has the juice.)
My current wish list is either Ossoff or Beshear. Also wouldn't mind seeing Gallego on ticket.
I think that from a pure “just win, baby” standpoint, Whitmer, Beshear, Shapiro, Ossoff, and Gallego all have good cases to make— as would some of the other red/purple state overperformers who haven’t yet expressed interest in running.
I like four of those five. I get serious glass jaw vibes from Whitmer, but I admit I could be totally wrong, and she's generally won convincingly in a state that presents challenges to Democrats, so...
Excited for The Argument as a long-time argumentative individual and bona fide Massachusetts liberal!
Can't wait for the meetup in a couple weeks; I'll give you an argument for your money!
Also, I believe I owe you a beer.
In other "things are looking up" news Nick Offerman as Chester A. Arthur? That'll work! https://x.com/PrezWisdom/status/1957430061574819844
I hope there's a scene of Doctor Willard Bliss sticking his grimy fingers into President Garfield's bullet wound.
Apple TV had a TERRIBLE series about chasing Lincoln’s killer. Hope this is better.
(By better I mean, they should include many esoteric details and then have whole scenes about those details)
I think this was former Sen. Brown's first interview post loss and it's a good read / listen. Wish him the best and will 100% donate again.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/16/sherrod-brown-democrats-00189956
Interesting quotes:
"We ran 7.5 points ahead of the national ticket. And I go back to Democrats over the last 30 years — essentially since NAFTA."
"But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.
I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers]. They expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to support the rich. But we don’t expect that from my party — and that’s my future in this party — to focus on helping the Democratic Party and my colleagues understand how important it is that we talk to workers and we make decisions with workers at the table."
I find it so crazy that there's smart people who think NAFTA caused the fall of American manufacturing. "Black Monday" in Youngstown was in 1977! Youngstown peaked in population in 1930 and has been in rapid decline since 1960. Youngstown/the Mahoning Valley's initial advantage as a steel manufacturing location was due to localized ore deposits which were exhausted a long time ago... how much effort needs to be put into maintaining an industry that no longer has any geographical advantage? Of course people should be treated with empathy and government should help with transition or assistance as needed but there is absolutely no industrial policy that could have brought back Ohio's steel mills.
Ohio cities with more diversified economies are doing fine, Cleveland now has a stable population and slightly above average unemployment and Columbus is growing. There are a lot of car parts manufacturers in Ohio too who are part of an integrated supply chain that would be hurt by tariffs.
So I get that people believe this stuff about NAFTA but it's basically not true.
Two things -
1.) A decent chunk of people say "NAFTA" when they really mean "the deindustrialization of America since the 60s with a lack of replacement of well-paid secure service jobs for non-college educated people."
2.) In a lot of places, NAFTA was the final domino that took their city or town from "hanging on" to "a total black hole only people who are old or have zero prospects stay," so it takes the blame.
“1.) A decent chunk of people say "NAFTA" when they really mean "the deindustrialization of America since the 60s with a lack of replacement of well-paid secure service jobs for non-college educated people."
Synecdoche is good as a literary device, and obviously it’s very common in everyday speech.
But I think it is important to be correct and precise about things. Maybe not in politics - precision is anathema to political discourse - but just, like, as a virtue.
This is like Americans using “lockdown” to mean “a complex patchwork of mostly local, some state and a few federal restrictions on activities and mobility, that in no way shape or form resembles the actual lockdowns that parts of Europe experienced.” Sure, it’s common parlance. But it’s wrong and it sucks and I hate it.
“Lockdown” means that I heard someone talking about how it would be good for people to wear masks and it made me angry.
...or the restaurant in which I was a minor investor shut down and went bankrupt and I lost my investment. But yeah, I guess it means different things to different people.
I don't know the specifics of your situation, and I'm not trying to throw salt in the wound, but ... this is one of those scenarios where I think a counterfactual analysis is useful.
What would've been the effect on the bottom line of your restaurant if there had been a global pandemic but in your particular locale, there weren't whatever local policies got implemented? Probably massively bad, right? Tons of folks weren't eating out regardless of whatever policies were in place. Even if there's literally no government restrictions, places like restaurants are gonna get hit really hard.
Certainly there are some restaurants that were marginal cases where government policies were the difference between life and death, (maybe yours was one such!) but most of the closures that folks like to attribute to "lockdowns" would've happened under any policy regime during a global pandemic.
Did that really happen much? I thought small businesses were doing ALL the PPP fraudy fraud
Yeah it means that or it means, you know, friends dying by suicide
My understanding is that the period when restrictions were strongest actually had a significant *decline* in the suicide rate. In any case, there was no time in any location in the United States at which “lockdown” is an accurate description of what the restrictions were.
My theory is the key tipping point for this was in the 80s (that’s when Springsteen was doing all the “mill closed down” stuff) but the political valence has shifted such that you need to find a democrat to blame.
Every bad thing really is Reagan’s fault.
The main reason why people blame NAFTA is that it allows them to blame Mexicans, who make a convenient bad guy.
Idk, if we had kept the rest of the world dirt poor and dependent on us, it might have kept an American steel industry alive. It was a mistake letting Asia move up the value chain.
I think there where two big union busting waves for manufacturing employment: (1) northern / rust belt factories to the right to work states in the 80s - 90s and (2) post-NAFTA outsourcing, primarily to Mexico in the late 90s - mid-2000s. If you're in the rust belt both hurt but from a US perspective, total manufacturing employment was ~ constant from 1970 - 2000: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
I think this chart is the chart people think about when they think about the decline of US manufacturing. It's the 90,000 factories that closed and the loss of ~ 3m jobs.
As Democrats, I think we also all just believed Obama when he said on the campaign trail: "One million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 jobs here in Ohio. And yet, ten years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America. Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America - and I never have."
Just personally, I was part of the team that closed this factory and transferred production to Mexico: https://www.dispatch.com/story/business/2008/11/14/siemens-to-close-plant-434/23875978007/
The #1 reason to transfer production was to break the union. We didn't lower prices, we just expanded margin and returned capital to shareholders. That the core Republican laissez faire capitalism. Fuck that. We can do better.
Here's hoping tariffs and deportations help reverse that (partial) revival.
Human nature be maddening like that, yo.
“We expect the Red team to screw us over, but not the Blue team, so when Blue team doesn’t help us/listen to us enough, we’ll punish them by… voting for the Red team, which we expect to screw us over!”
/facepalms repeatedly
I repeat to myself until I believe it again, "democracy is terrible, but compared to all the other options we've tried...."
Democrats are the worst party, except for all of the others. So why do we keep trying the others?!?
Doesn't the game theory work? If you can never defect then you will gain no advantage from your vote. Obviously thinking of a Scott Alexander piece.
And if you do defect, you end up with Mr. Bigly Tariffs whose Big Beautiful Bill causes your rural hospital to shut down.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I am talking about game theory optimum strategies not the results of the 2024 election.
That only works if you have some sort of credible threshold for doing it, and I think once you do defect you’re now meaningless as a political player, except for helping your opponents.
https://www.vox.com/politics/458175/democrats-polls-immigration-moderation
Excellent Eric Levitz article from this morning that obviously hits some of the same points Matt makes. Also a section near the end that I found pretty sad/poignant, because I think he's pretty obviously talking about himself with the section about people who find the electoral case for moderation compelling even while personally having more progressive politics, and the alienation from his political community that that leads to.
Matt's take: https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1957496693324410940
"I of course think Eric Levitz makes a ton of good points here, but fundamentally I am pretty sympathetic to John Ganz's skepticism of empirical approaches — I just don't think the upshot is necessarily one he'd like.
The thing you have to remember when trying to do politics more intuitively is that the electorate is mostly white, mostly old, mostly didn't go to college, and mostly composed of people living in the unfashionable suburbs of unfashionable cities.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-something
If you can keep those broad empirical facts about who the voters are in your mind, I think you could skip a lot of quibbling about the many many many contestable ways to argue about issue polling.
It's just likely to lead you to the important truth. [link to today's article]"
Just to throw everyone for a loop, i thought middle-aged and older white voters were the one demographic that shifted *toward* Harris in 2024 relative to Biden in 2020?
It’s also unfortunate because like Matt I enjoy a lot of Ganz’s writing. I think he’s just falling into the trap of motivated reasoning and self-projection.
Gantz is a good writer (his series on the dreyfus affair I really enjoyed) but he unfortunately comes off as a pretty huge asshole
I think "good writer but kind of a jerk on Twitter" is a type we here can appreciate.
Good article, ty
"The Argument" sounds amazing! I've read some great pieces by Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic. I'll probably end up subscribing, thanks for the heads up!
She hasn't done any good on paper episodes recently, so i wondered what she had been up to. I guess this answers that.
Does Sherrod Brown need small donor money or is the DSCC submerging him and his consultants in ridiculous amounts of cash which they are going to burn through on TV ads and lose (again)? (Sorry I posted this on the other thread but here seems more apt).
Bro. For real.
If Brown can make fetch happen, then good for him.
But I’m not holding my breath.
I am happy to give him my money if someone who is not one of his consultants can handicap the odds and it's not DOA.
TBF to Brown, he did over perform in the election he lost, and as somebody w/ a known name against an empty suit in a likely pro-Democratic midterm, that might be enough to make up that last few percent.
There are so many eager young Dem candidates asking for donations both small dollar funders and the National Committees are almost tapped out. Unfortunately, there is no organization that directs potential candidates to only ask donors who support their place on the political spectrum. It’s a Wild West of messy texts and many of us are fed up!
Yeah it's just insane! Most of the people that text me shouldn't need the money as they are in blue places so I try to ignore them and only focus on genuine swing elections. Beyond that I just give to the DLCC/DCCC/DSCC and trust that they will not waste the money too much because I do not have the bandwidth to track each individual candidate before I give.
Is The Argument going to do audio, too? If Jerusalem hosts, I can finally use that slow-play feature in Apple Podcasts!
I'm considering subscribing anyway just to support this effort, but if there was a podcast, it wouldn't even be a question.
Edit: subscribed.
Omg omg omg, I was wondering where Jerusalem was going after her fantastic podcast, Good on Paper, ended and I'm so excited to find out here! Thanks Halina!
Love that podcast, hope it's carried over!
Halina, what’s your take on the problem of “moderation” vs. perception of moderation? Is your boss oversimplifying things?
https://www.slowboring.com/p/moderation-is-not-overrated/comment/146583778
Any idea yet as to how often Matt is going to write for The Argument?
And do we get a cross discount?!?
No cross discounts! [/Substack Nazi]
Pfft we already have Nazis on Substack, didn’t Casey Newton tell you?
I knew that would come up even before actually typing out my reply, but I couldn't resist because the Soup Nazi thing was too on point given Substack's resistance since Day One of operations to offering any sort of cross discounts or subscription bundling options.
From Jerusalem Demsas' introduction to The Argument: "We are not agnostic between all possible lives — our commitment to individual liberties is not an excuse to wash our hands of judgment or devolve into moral relativism. There are better and worse kinds of lives, better and worse ways to conduct ourselves, better and worse decisions."
I might subscribe just to see if this is a throwaway line or actually something that comes through the posts and articles.
Re: The Argument— I saw an interesting line of conversation on twitter where Kelsey Piper favorably cited an exchange where Jerusalem said that American liberals “weren’t just temporarily embarrassed communists” when explaining some of her excitement about the project, and the remark seemed to produce a lot of blowback from people somewhat to her right— sole interlocutors objecting in the general case, and Alex Godofsky raising a specific objection because The Argument includes Matt Breunig.
I do find myself kind of wondering where you have to draw the intellectual boundaries of “temporarily embarrassed communist” for this objection to really make sense. One commenter did say that they saw liberals as “having the same ultimate values and ends as communists, only disagreeing on means and timing.” Maybe there’s sort of a point there— I’m a social democrat (and would consider myself a “liberal” in the US sense), but could imagine counterfactuals where say, technology was very different than it is now or I just had very different “positive” views on economics where I would have the same basic core values but be a communist. But this feels like it proves too much— it maybe implies that everybody whose economic policy views are consequentialist and account for the diminishing marginal utility of wealth is a “communist except on means and timing.” But that’s very different from how most humans have used that word for the past couple of centuries.
At a very high level, liberalism and communism share a distaste for traditional hierarchy and are both diametrically opposed to the right-wing idea discussed in the Argument “that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to.” If that’s the main dimension of politics, which many right-wing people believe, then yes liberals and communists are on the same side.
The main difference between liberalism and communism is that liberalism puts much more emphasis on individual liberty while communists want government control. Neither individual liberty nor government control is inherently incompatible with the idea that people are more than what they came from and shouldn’t just be judged based on the average characteristics of their group.
"...communism share a distaste for traditional hierarchy..."
Amazing how an ideology with a "distaste for traditional hierarchy" resulted in some of the most hierarchical, authoritarian, and oppressive societies in world history, like Stalin's USSR and Mao's China. Depends on your definition of "traditional," I guess? "We slaughter the old elites [the bourgeoisie, kulaks, the educated] and put a new elite on top, so that makes it okay"?
There are still limited resources after the communist revolution (usually way more so). Getting rid of your traditional system of laws for distributing resources and power just means they both get distributed according to who has power.
The best thing is to have no oppression, but oppression where the people at the top rotate is at least better than oppression where the people at the top are always the same.
Communists are more violent than liberals (although liberals can commit violence too, see the French Revolution), but were still less brutal than their opponents in most left vs. right civil war scenarios. This is why most liberals sided with the communists in the Spanish Civil War and even John McCain wrote a touching eulogy about them. And even the Chinese Civil War began with the Shanghai Massacre when the KMT murdered thousands of communist supporters, and American observers noted during World War II that Mao’s troops were much less corrupt and respectful of civilians than the KMT. And of course Hitler was much worse than Stalin which is why all the civilized democracies except Finland were on the Soviet side. At the end of the day liberals and communists still have common cause to make against fascists.
Was Hitler really much worse than Stalin, though?
If the Hunger Plan had come to fruition...
The contention that communism is "diametrically opposed to the right-wing idea discussed in the Argument 'that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to'” seems contrary to the central emphasis on "class" in communist analysis.
I don’t think communism treat “class” as an essential and inalienable feature of an individual. It’s a relationship to the means of production, and it seems natural that this can change for a person over their lifetime. Surely a peasant who becomes a proletariat would have been a familiar concept in Marx’s time, as well as movement between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.
Ha, you hit the third note which I missed.
"..that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to.”
Liberals and progressives obviously believe this. It's the heart of racial and sex identity politics that you can look at a group and make judgements about individuals who share that characteristics.
Liberalism was always anti hierarchical, I agree. But I don't see any evidence that your quote is a right-wing specific position.
Progressives are not liberals.
More strongly, for those in back--often, 2020s US progressives are specifically quite illiberal.
Also, sufficiently lefty progressives pride themselves on hating liberals, whom they consider milquetoast sellouts.
Importantly, they resent being called liberals and often view liberals as The Enemy.
The point of racial and sex “identity politics” is to liberate people from being constrained by the group they are born into. On sex, liberals most commonly believe that men should be able to do traditionally womanly things, women should be able to do traditionally manly things, and you should even be allowed to change your sex if you want. On race, many liberals and progressives hold the idea that historically disadvantaged groups should be given a leg up, but I don’t see this as people being “held to account” which implies constraining them, but instead liberating them from the constraints imposed on them by history. Like holding people to account would be like saying black people on average have lower IQs so individual black people should be excluded from high-IQ professions. Even if you disagree with affirmative action (and I disagree with affirmative action in zero-sum contexts like college admissions, but not in non-zero-sum contexts), it’s the opposite of that.
Also it’s not my quote, it’s from the article in the new publication, “the Argument”: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/how-do-we-live-with-each-other
Nothing you said contradicts what I said. It's still the idea that where you come from is the most important thing, and that your group identity can be used to determine things about you. It's trivially easy to see this being used to hold people to account for their race, even in progressive ideas. "White people need to/Because I'm Black" is being held to account because of your race, for instance.
It doesn't really matter if your rhetoric is liberatory or what, you're deploying the same analysis. The idea that liberals and progressives don't do it is silly, just accept it and make your argument while knowing that you treat individual members of a group as having shared characteristics just like conservatives do. Liberals and Progs lose a lot of credibility when they deny obvious things like sex differences and class/culture differences. You don't actually need to apologize for it, and stop acting like it's an evil thing that only hard right conservative MAGA fascists do.
"..that people are nothing more than where they came from; that they can be held to account for the average properties of the groups that they belong to.”
What the heck? I'm a liberal, and I don't believe this! Liberalism values the individual.
If you believe that White and Black are meaningful categories upon to base policy and social interventions, then you believe this.
Ehhhh....
So I really don't have time for a long conversation on race policy in America, I have to get to work, but here's what I've got:
1. I believe that people should be judged as individuals, not as "he/she is Black/White, so he/she must be [insert stereotypical trait]"
2. At the same time, there's no denying that Black people in America had gotten an absolutely shitty deal, what with slavery followed by lynching and Jim Crow, so compensation in the form of affirmative action made sense at one time. Not sure if it makes sense anymore, especially as today's Black population in America includes more recent African immigrants as opposed to descendants of slaves.
3. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to right-wingers if their opposition to DEI/wokeness were in good faith rather than a cover for "we want to be old-fashionedly racist and not called out on it." Look at certain corners of the interwebs and social media today, you'll see some absolutely hideous racism.
I am not a theorist but it seems to me that communism is only compatible with liberalism in a world without material scarcity (which itself is a fuzzy definition) but lets set that aside.
Empirically, it seems like imposing communism before solving scarcity will not lead to eventual plenty as humans are both greedy and lazy at the same time.
But if technology solves scarcity first then imposing the power structure of capitalism beyond that seems unnecessary.
Perhaps “means and timing” is vague and its more a disagreement about "order of operations".
Yeah, the failure to take economics and incentives into account is a fatal flaw of communism, even according to its own terms. Like Mao probably delayed Chinese economic growth by 10-20 years, which also increased global economic inequality and delayed the decline of the existing world hierarchy—exactly contrary to communism’s goals.
In the future if we have AI-driven abundance these human incentives will be less important though. If we really get to a world where the wealth is mostly created with AI and robots and then the political debate will be less about incentives and more over distribution—do we want something like the movie Elysium where only a small elite enjoys that technology and wealth, or will it be shared more broadly even if this means the environment is placed under more strain and the existing rich lose status and relative power.
A future with AI sufficiently capable to handle the economy is one in which humans no have no economic value and compete for atoms, space, and energy with said AIs. This doesn’t end well for the humans, who are by hypothesis less capable than the AI with which they are competing.
That gets into alignment problems, I don’t see evidence yet of AI adopting a mind of its own and going rogue paperclip maximizing so my base case is that AI will still be controlled by at least some subset of humans. The alignment problem I’m more worried about is whether that subset of humans is going to share.
The alignment problem exists by default. Any kind of open-ended goal subject to optimization pressure with an optimization engine more powerful than humans is presumptively unaligned to human wellbeing absent strong proof the contrary. It’s the instrumental convergence prpblem. And we have *lots* of evidence of existing models displaying unaligned behaviors.
I agree about the tech thing, but the core challenge is actually the difficulty of solving the resource allocation math problem (for a good dramatization, read “Red Plenty”); governments are quite capable of coming up with incentives for greedy and lazy humans.
I strongly suspect that properly regulated markets are straight up more equitable than any hypothetical resource allocation machine due to the utility lost from having to maintain such a machine. Computation isn't free. Every transaction would need to be monitored and processed to update the utility calculations. This represents an enormous computational workload that isn't generating any utility. There's also inevitable inefficiencies introduced as that information takes time to propagate through the network before any updates to utility calculations can take effect.
Whereas in a market, the transactions themselves are the information signal and the buyer/seller can immediately update their utility preferences without waiting for a central planning computer. In fact, maybe it's best to conceive of the market itself as one big resource allocation machine. Constructing another one just to observe itself is a reduplication of effort.
I think that your analysis is missing transaction costs— which frequently make it efficient for significant sub-components of the economy (large firms) to operate in a command-and-control way. Read Ronald Coase or Alfred Chandler.
Isn't that a market decision in and of itself? Why run the whole economy that way if the relevant sectors already self-organize that way?
Isn't real Communism Stateless?
Hypothetically, in the long run, yes, but Actually Existing Communism is a very different story.
The state will eventually wither away, Polytropos!
"You may saaaaaay I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one..."
Actually existing Communist Party Governments were simply some variety of Socialist in my reading.
"True Communism™ has never been tried!"
So, what you're saying is socialism has been tried, and failed?"
"True Socialism™ has never been tried!"
Over and over and over.
Thanks, I will look into it. Hypothetically, if a government could "come up with incentives for greedy and lazy humans" to make technological progress which said humans would not perceive as being more coercive than capitalism, then as a liberal I suppose that is fine by me. So maybe building the computer that can solve resource allocation problems is the correct technological tipping point and not solving material scarcity, but I am not sure which is easier.
They are the same basic problem, I think. (Eg: they’re both roughly AGI-complete)
I don't know how you compute all of the secondary factors like people not wanting to eat asparagus and enjoying some art more than others. Is there still a secondary market where I can trade my disgusting allotment of capers for delicious broccoli?
How do you calculate demand for different raw materials given that there's no pricing anymore to tell you what goods people want?
I think this is Engineers Disease.
Considering the right-Maoism of the Trump admin, I’m okay with keeping this as an open discussion.
Nationalist movements tend toward communism/command economies and communist movements tend toward nationalism because both worship the power of the state to do things in one country. Which means that to be anti-nationalist or anti-communist one should not worship power and/or the state. That is at least one intellectual boundary.
This is kinda my beef with modern internet political ideology discussions. It's all just naming conventions and hyperfine gradations. Who cares if Bruenig is a communist or a democratic-socialist or whatever? The man is a Texan with a Catholic wife lmao. I pay 80 bucks to the Atlantic and I like what she writes there. Wtf, he's a part of America's material splendor to the max.
Ideas don't really matter anymore; the nation is dominated by "liberals." Some parts of the GOP want to repeal the 19th, and some parts of the Dem coalition would like to guillotine Elon Musk, but it's not really meaningful. There's no political will for this stuff. Looking for the eschatology or teleological in our philosophies is fun in person and completely pointless on the internet.
What matters is what parts of the welfare state are means tested, what is the particular rate of a tariff, where does the EITC phase out, when will they extend the child tax credit?
It's boring but small ball is where the left has been getting butchered by the right for like 10 years now.
Excerpt from Mark 10:
17 As Jesus was starting out on his way to Jerusalem, a man came running up to him, knelt down, and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
18 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked. “Only God is truly good. 19 But to answer your question, you know the commandments: ‘You must not murder. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not testify falsely. You must not cheat anyone. Honor your father and mother.’”
20 “Teacher,” the man replied, “I’ve obeyed all these commandments since I was young.”
21 Looking at the man, Jesus felt genuine love for him. “There is still one thing you haven’t done,” he told him. “Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
The reality is many even supposedly reasonable and smart right-leaning people essentially consider anything to the left of Joe Manchin as basically socialism, with the serial numbers filed off.
Now part of this is social democrats like me, actual socialists and communists and center-left liberals like most of the people writing for The Argument have and have had many overlapping goals, some of which the means to get there are ageed on and others where they aren't. OTOH, there's plenty of stuff where there aren't overlapping goals.
I honestly think some of this comes from the fact that within actual conservative ideological punditry (as opposed to the actual 'base'), there actually weren't non-overlapping goals between the evangelicals, the Chamber of Commerce types, the neocons, and so on for decades, so they just assume its the same, and don't truly understand that there are places where even Zohran, Matt, and even a radical Commie would agree on the policy on something, but of course, disagree on many other things.
Even today, in the post-Trump era, the other thing is even if there are parts of the right-wing that disagree, they disagree where they don't even agree on what is a problem or not (see immigration, Israel, free trade, etc.) so even though they all back Daddy Trump, it feels like there's more of a difference (within the Right) between right-wing factions, as opposed to the left, which may seem like everybody is some form of socialist, because basically everybody wants universal health care, a larger welfare state, and a progressive tax system, plus some other things.
"“having the same ultimate values and ends as communists, only disagreeing on means and timing" --> Sounds like someone who believes values don't matter to "means," which is kind of a disturbing thing to believe if you think about it.
The way I see it is that both liberals and communists believe in egalitarianism. The problem is that perfect egalitarianism is impossible because it's internally contradictory. When you give political equality to the masses, you soon discover that a significant percentage of the masses don't entirely support egalitarian policies and will vote against them. So you have to choose which aspects of egalitarianism are the highest priority. Communists think that economic equality is paramount, and that empowering the masses politically is impossible because of false consciousness, so we need a dictatorship of the proletariat. Liberals think that political equality, while not the be-all, is more important, while economic equality remains a good aspiration but is negotiable. So we give everyone the vote, but we try our best to put safeguards around the process so majorities can't vote to oppress minorities or whatever, and we work to mitigate economic inequality, but not to eliminate it altogether since that isn't what the people want (which in turn is partly because radical steps toward economic equality would make the pie smaller).