317 Comments

You are absolutely correct that the Cares Act (and, from my standpoint as a lawyer that advises employers, in particular the PPP) was an absolute success story. What gravels me on the left is the drumbeat of stories saying "I can't believe that Betsy DeVos's sister's company got PPP loan forgiveness!!" (made up example). Stop naming and shaming. Unless these companies committed actual fraud (an defamatory accusation that should not be thrown around lightly), they had their loan forgiven because they actually retained and paid their employees through the worst parts of the pandemic. Whether they work for an employer you like or hate, that is a very good thing, and I know personally of scores of employers that only stayed open and kept paying workers because of this help. When coupled with the expanded UI, it was a godsend that saved our economy. Good news.

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So if Matt is naturally dyspeptic but doesn't share the general progressive tendency to see the glass as half-empty, it must not be a question of personality types. In that case, where does the tendency come from?

As it happens I know one of the people who trashed Matt on Twitter for pointing out that the macroeconomy was in good shape after the CARES Act. In a previous life this person was a blogger and though very progressive, also quite empirically minded. After some personal trauma/drama they've now decided to immerse themselves in far-left activism and their political writing has been reduced to drive-by snark on social media. I wouldn't have said they were sunny before, but now their negativity is so intense that they've changed their position on gun control (because radicals need to arm themselves for the coming civil war).

What motivates people to change this way? I'm guessing that in this case it's a desire to conform to a new group of friends and social contacts who share the negative outlook... but I don't think this kind of negativity was always expected on the left. From what little I know about socialist and communist movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they produced optimism in their members: maybe because the movements were inspired by Marxism and Marxism promises that the workers will win in the end. I don't think the decline of Marxism has been generally bad for progressives, but it does seem possible that it's allowed the left's affect to become more gloomy.

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If lefties hadn't spent eight years shitting all over everything Obama accomplished, surely it would have changed enough votes in 2016 to spare us Trump. That's how criminally irresponsible it is.

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I know someone who got laid off a while back and didn't file for unemployment. They thought it was shameful. I was like, "WTF? It's insurance. You paid the premiums and not you need to make a claim. Your theory would be like walking out and finding that a try had crushed your car and not making an insurance claim because you should have noticed that rotten limb." He was like, "Oh, I never thought about it that way."

I think universality and better marketing would go a long way toward achieving progressive goals. Keeping in mind I mean marketing that appeals to persuadable swing voters not dyed in the wool progressives.

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This is framed as a feature of progressives, or the left. Is it really different than the right? You don't see the Tea Party celebrating 1/2 wins either, they go crazy making sure they get all or nothing.

Idealogues of any belief system measure policy against the ideal and find it wanting.

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founding

Excellent post, especially at a time when so many voices are misrepresenting the current debate over$2,000 for almost everyone.

I predict that the Democrats' embrace of this misguided (because non-targeted) measure will make it that much tougher for Biden to get things done.

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First, and trivially, Konczal's point is silly. It's hard for Democrats/ the Left to run on legislation that was passed by a Republican Senate and signed into law by a Republican President.

More importantly, and in the context of Matt's point, I fear that the underlying problem is that the Democrats/the Left suffer from too much empathy, especially from an electoral point of view. Empathy is a *great* thing from a governing point of view! But I'm afraid it leads to Democrats sending mixed messages to the voting public.

I don't think Democrats could ever run a Reaganesque "Morning in America" campaign, no matter how much good Democratic governing does. It's instinctual for Democrats to *always* remember and note that no matter how much good we've done, some people continue to suffer and others are in danger of being left behind. How many times have we heard Democratic politicians say "Under us, unemployment is down! . . . . However . . . millions continue to worry about how to pay their bills, get enough food to eat etc etc etc."

This empathy is noble and in fact undergirds the Left's ameliorative drive in their policy making, in a way that would never occur to the Right. But I think not acknowledging clear successes without hemming and hawing and adding caveats hurts electorally. Most people don't pay too much attention to politics and tend to follow well-worn grooves in voting. You have to blast a message loudly and clearly for it to get through and change people's minds. I think that's why "Morning in America" approaches really work well, if they're not absurdly out of synch with reality. It's a lesson Democrats need to learn.

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I expect to see the following post combination roughly 100 times on Twitter today:

1. Of course more unemployment is good, Matt is such a hack for saying obvious things.

2. Can't believe we're only gonna get $600 Democrats are the worst.

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I would be happy for people on the left to rediscover the virtues of incrementalism. If we get a public option for the ACA then we can see how efficient it is and judge whether it is outperforming the private market. We can also get a sense of whether it becomes a way to politicize medical care (I think one of the potential pitfalls of MFA that is not talked about is how it might lead to efforts for social conservatives to try and exclude care like gender affirmative care or abortion that are currently covered in many states under employer plans). I guess that I am officially old because I am pretty weary of hearing from young people that only major structural change can improve things. I think that what we learned from the enhanced UI was that a lot of people just don't earn enough from work to get by and if we boosted wages for workers we would all be more secure.

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I think Hoffer's "The True Believer" is a key text for understanding why politics is the way it is these days. A lot of people are frustrated and unhappy, and feel a sense of dread and hopelessness in their personal lives, and they cope by externalizing it into politics. Then they dream of a millenarian movement that will solve the political problem, and also somehow solve their personal problems too.

It feels like we were already hitting a peak of this behavior and then pandemic isolation just completely blew things up.

(It's not just politics either -- politics is really common but the same psychological pressures can be vented into stuff like k-pop or Star Wars fandom too... it's pretty obvious when you see how politically radical teenagers treat esoteric Marxist ideologies as identity markers alongside their favorite media properties.)

My guess is that people who subscribe to this newsletter are way less prone than average to be true believers. They probably have more professional success, and are more able to be contented with modest achievements, and have an easier time with interpersonal relationships than, say, your average Chapo Trap House listener.

Of course the historical analysis in Hoffer's book is pretty terrible. Much of it is either based on inaccurate sources or just obviously wrong. But he really did grasp something about the desperate psychology of frustrated people (I think possibly from personal experience).

I think politics in the US will remain completely insane until this tendency abates. People need community involvement and useful, mundane work they can be proud of -- I think when you give this to someone, political extremism dissipates really quickly. A less tractable problem is that social media amplifies frustrated individuals, simply because they are more willing and have more time to sit and post all day.

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Contemporary rhetoric on the left spends SO much time on intra-elite debates. Thus, you could imagine the biggest result of looking at CARES was that it was followed by increased inequality, as opposed to helping people who are impoverished or would've been. The focus on the rich is fine as a means of taxation, but it does seem to get to obsession level and blurs the goalposts.

On the note of catastrophism as politics: I think the right has a bit to blame for this. They use this technique, and it works with their reactionary voters. The amount of time my conservatives family spends talking about AOC is alarming, you would think she was actually president! Turning up the volume normalizes that, and I think a lot of progressives react in-kind. It's different, because it's issues based, but it's still a kind of thinking that exhausts energy in completely unproductive ways.

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I agree that there is probably a personality type among progressives that insists that everything is awful, but I think there is probably a strategic consideration at play as well. To admit that things got better might undermine the case for additional action. To admit that the CARES act didn’t consist of one $1200 check undermines your standing to fight for $2000 this time, by this measure. In this case it’s probably a bad tactic- the current fight is essentially to continue a successful program that ended too soon- but I think the impulse to never declare victory is embedded in the strategy of preparing for the next battle.

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Your main point -- and it's a good one! -- is that progressives would help their causes by celebrating incremental progress, and by abandoning the attitude that such a celebration entails a lack of concern for the work still to be done.

I.e., we do not need to minimize a problem in order to recognize progress towards its solution.

Applying that model to global warming means, for instance, that we can recognize the brilliant news about reductions in the cost of solar energy, without minimizing the real danger that we face.

Unfortunately, that is not the model you follow in this paragraph. You don't celebrate progress, and you do (inaccurately, I believe) minimize the problem we face:

"And of course you see this on climate change, which is legitimately A Bad Thing but where the most keyed-up activists want you to believe it’s literally an existential threat to continued human existence."

How about, "we can recognize the great progress being made on alternative energy without denying that global warming is a threat to continued human existence."

Because, from what I read, it really is.

So, that paragraph seems discordant with your overall point. But it's a good point!

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Matt You’re going to burn out if you try to maintain 2029’s writing schedule indefinitely! Pace yourself in 2021: two substantial posts a week plus short informal posts about things you see or read.

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Exactly right. And of course by focusing on the UI component of the social safety net you are giving money to those with the greatest marginal propensity to spend. Maximising your bang for the buck.

Not to mention all of the intangibles that arise from this policy (lower crime rates, lower aggregate healthcare costs, etc).

It is a mystery to me too why we didn't make more of the success of this program, though I suspect that it had something to do with the establishment left's seemingly paralysing fear of confronting the GOP's mendacious propaganda around "generous" unemployment payments creating disincentives for people to return to work.

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I’m reading Obama’s A Promised Land and this post fits in well with the main ideas of that book.

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