100% agree CARES UI was great. I was briefly furloughed in April and my family benefitted personally from it. I would have been fine without it but was better off for it as were many, many others.
The other take I don't see, and it makes me sad, is praise for companies who did NOT fire/furlough their employees due to the pandemic. It seems that so many employers overreacted and pushed up the unemployment rate for what was just a temporary shutdown, then rehired afterwards and went on as before. These businesses got away with it and nobody seems to care how awful and downright stupid this was - we blame the virus instead of American business culture and instead we get hot takes about how Amazon - who were hiring like crazy throughout the peak of the unemployment and pay above-average for most positions - are bad. I think the media is amplifying the wrong message here.
I work for an education non-profit, and Matt's points at the end around politics as a process brings up for me a tension I experience in my work. In my field there's a lot of gesturing at the need to have our work more driven by the voices and perspective of youth. I think this is a good corrective to the field, but the tension I feel is that I think young people are too inexperienced to understand that progress is an incremental process. The kids get frustrated when they don’t see decisive victories, and in some pockets I think there is an over-deference to youth voice and an abdication on the part of adult leaders with real positions of power to do the uncomfortable thing of leveling with the kids around what is actually possible in a given moment.
I mostly agree with this, though I don't get why you exempted the urbanist/yimby crowd from the "sky is falling charge. (Ok, not true, I do know why). But if you listen to them you'd think San Fran and Manhattan (not even all of NYC) were the median housing price experience in the US. Or that places like Boston haven't responded by increasing housing supply in the last ten years.
"even though the NAACP won in court in 1954, real desegregation didn’t happen until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which in turn built upon the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and its predecessor, the Civil Rights Act of 1957."
Actually, real desegregation in the Fort Worth public school system didn't happen until the '70's. My elementary school there in 1965 was still de jure segregated. Our only concession to desegregation was that the African American schools ran against us in the annual spring track meet.
When I graduated from high school in 1972, my class included the school's first two African American graduates, one boy and one girl, each from one of the two junior highs that fed the high school.
After '72, real desegregation happened, soon followed by de facto resegregation. The school is now predominately African American.
I think about this a lot. No matter what you do as political activism, as an average person, you will have an absolutely minuscule effect. If you canvass for a full day, you might convince one or two people to vote for your candidate. Out of millions of votes!
So it’s important to keep that in mind as an average citizen, and not get frustrated. It’s important to remember that millions of other people are making their own tiny contributions, and if you’re lucky, it will add up to a victory. That’s why I love the phrase “blue wave”: it shows the power of a million tiny drops.
HOWEVER. It’s really hard to distinguish between having a teensy tiny effect, and having no effect at all. It doesn’t matter if a million people join you in your pointless effort, as one million times zero is still zero.
As a pragmatist, I get very frustrated with people who see politics as more expressive than consequential. For instance, every time there’s a protest, expecting it to turn into a general strike that ends capitalism seems ridiculous. But if your starting point is, say, voting rights in the South in 1890, any effort must seem pointless.
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.
I agree completely that incrementalism is usually the way to go. We couldn't even predict the consequences of the ACA! And that's a 1000-page law; M4A would need to be at least a few multiples of that.
Being around young people from time to time, one thing I think that I have noticed is that their agitation is in part because they think they have nothing to lose from major structural change. Whereas us olds who already get insurance through our employers and have a growing retirement account are too invested in the system as it exists (from their perspective).
Not to go down a rabbit hole, but re: climate change as an "existential threat to human existence" -- like, how sure are you that it's not? I'd say it's _probably_ not, but if I were going to guess, I'd say it's certainly a _non-zero_ chance that we could have a catastrophe -- like, a huge positive feedback loop from melting permafrost and lowered albedo at the icecaps, plus ocean acidification killing off a huge portion of phytoplankton, plus the Amazon drying out and turning into a savannah. At that point you're talking about potentially something even worse than just human civilizational collapse (with very little chance of ever being reconstituted, because we won't have easy access to near-surface fossil fuels again to start a new industrial revolution). You're talking about kicking out the underpinnings of the entire biosphere as we recognize it, with no idea what comes next. Most likely _some_ kind of life will survive, but there's absolutely no guarantees on what that would look like. The cost of that is so high that it challenges our ability to do any kind of cost-benefit analysis about it. Even if it's a one-in-a-trillion chance, since the cost of that outcome is "the entire value of the future", it has to register in "expected value" terms as being worth spending _something_ on preventing it.
I think we take this kind of risk much _less_ seriously than we should, the same way we take the risk of catastrophic asteroid impact much less seriously than we should. We should as a planet be devoting several billion a year to setting up sentinel satellites and cataloguing every object we can find. Same for nuclear weapons (if you got a complicated war started among various nuclear powers in the eastern hemisphere, we could quite easily get a nice multi-year nuclear winter, complete with radiation poisoning for billions of people and total collapse of agribusiness). Same for the question of whether somebody might be able to engineer a plague that's as contagious as measles, and has a long incubation period, but has the kind of >50% fatality rate of a MERS or Ebola after that. (Both of those are probably not _quite_ existential threats, but they could cause a huge die-off event, on the scale of what the Black Plague did to Europe, and the resulting crisis would pose a challenge for maintaining functionality of basic services like water and power.)
Like, what is even the point of coming together to have a social contract and a government, if it isn't to have _somebody_ projecting, and planning for, this kind of threat?
Replying to Max, I think the tax cuts of 2017 were terrible for the country, much worse than the stimulus checks, whic, although not targeted at the most needy, at least exclude the wealthy. The tax cuts were overwhelmingly directed at those who needed it the least.
It blows my MIND that somehow Democrats failed to brand the CARES Act (which, I 100% agree was phenomenally successful) as a Democratic victory, and instead somehow let Trump and congressional Republicans run on it! We LITERALLY GAVE PEOPLE $1,200 CHECKS AND BOOSTED UI and before it happened everyone thought it was a kooky lefty idea until Mitt Romney said "no that might be cool actually"
I recall reading a take in November that one of the factors in poor Democratic performance in Miami-Dade and south Texas was due in part to voters there giving Trump credit for the economic stimulus provided by the CARES Act. Maybe Democrats thought they needed to cede credit to Trump to get him to sign it? Democrats should have branded them NancyBux or something much more clever and shouted to the hills about how much of a difference it made.
But then again, maybe Democrats didn't want people to feel too good about the economy lest it lifted Trump to a second term?
Anyways...totally agree also that CARES will be a great model to point to in future stimulus/UI program debates. It blows nearly every traditional conservative argument out of the water.
"Maybe Democrats thought they needed to cede credit to Trump to get him to sign it?"
That's the dilemma - Democrats weren't willing to play hardball to get their names on the check, or keep Trump's name off, while Trump and the GOP were (or at least successfully bluffed). I don't know of a way around this except for Democrats to sometimes let good policy fail if it can't be framed in a way such that they can take credit for it.
I got a post 9/11 Stimulus check back in the day and it had "George W. Bush" on it and at the time I thought it was just insane that the President got to put his name on it.
Great work, as was the local news piece. Thanks so much! Regarding the framing of this one, I wonder if foregrounding the positive vision of the close might be even more persuasive. So rather than:
1. progressives complain about everything
2. progressives were wrong to companion about CARES
3. ...
4. the great victories we celebrate were slow processes
Trying:
1. This great victory (Brown v Board) was seen as a moment; in fact it was a process that continues to this day
2. That great victory (Social Security) was blah blah blah
3. CARES looks like the same: here are its antecedents, here is how we can and should build on it
First rate stuff. I would only add an observation that a lot of progressive angst regarding things like CARES is that such bills, the product of compromise, inevitably lack the purity to earn their support. The progressive spelling of compromise is c a v e.
100% agree CARES UI was great. I was briefly furloughed in April and my family benefitted personally from it. I would have been fine without it but was better off for it as were many, many others.
The other take I don't see, and it makes me sad, is praise for companies who did NOT fire/furlough their employees due to the pandemic. It seems that so many employers overreacted and pushed up the unemployment rate for what was just a temporary shutdown, then rehired afterwards and went on as before. These businesses got away with it and nobody seems to care how awful and downright stupid this was - we blame the virus instead of American business culture and instead we get hot takes about how Amazon - who were hiring like crazy throughout the peak of the unemployment and pay above-average for most positions - are bad. I think the media is amplifying the wrong message here.
Hi! Long time listener, first time caller.
I work for an education non-profit, and Matt's points at the end around politics as a process brings up for me a tension I experience in my work. In my field there's a lot of gesturing at the need to have our work more driven by the voices and perspective of youth. I think this is a good corrective to the field, but the tension I feel is that I think young people are too inexperienced to understand that progress is an incremental process. The kids get frustrated when they don’t see decisive victories, and in some pockets I think there is an over-deference to youth voice and an abdication on the part of adult leaders with real positions of power to do the uncomfortable thing of leveling with the kids around what is actually possible in a given moment.
I mostly agree with this, though I don't get why you exempted the urbanist/yimby crowd from the "sky is falling charge. (Ok, not true, I do know why). But if you listen to them you'd think San Fran and Manhattan (not even all of NYC) were the median housing price experience in the US. Or that places like Boston haven't responded by increasing housing supply in the last ten years.
"even though the NAACP won in court in 1954, real desegregation didn’t happen until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which in turn built upon the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and its predecessor, the Civil Rights Act of 1957."
Actually, real desegregation in the Fort Worth public school system didn't happen until the '70's. My elementary school there in 1965 was still de jure segregated. Our only concession to desegregation was that the African American schools ran against us in the annual spring track meet.
When I graduated from high school in 1972, my class included the school's first two African American graduates, one boy and one girl, each from one of the two junior highs that fed the high school.
After '72, real desegregation happened, soon followed by de facto resegregation. The school is now predominately African American.
Nothing ever ends.
"No, no, CARES really was terrible."
"Fine, I'll help you repeal it and claw back that $1200. Ready?"
I think about this a lot. No matter what you do as political activism, as an average person, you will have an absolutely minuscule effect. If you canvass for a full day, you might convince one or two people to vote for your candidate. Out of millions of votes!
So it’s important to keep that in mind as an average citizen, and not get frustrated. It’s important to remember that millions of other people are making their own tiny contributions, and if you’re lucky, it will add up to a victory. That’s why I love the phrase “blue wave”: it shows the power of a million tiny drops.
HOWEVER. It’s really hard to distinguish between having a teensy tiny effect, and having no effect at all. It doesn’t matter if a million people join you in your pointless effort, as one million times zero is still zero.
As a pragmatist, I get very frustrated with people who see politics as more expressive than consequential. For instance, every time there’s a protest, expecting it to turn into a general strike that ends capitalism seems ridiculous. But if your starting point is, say, voting rights in the South in 1890, any effort must seem pointless.
I’m reading Obama’s A Promised Land and this post fits in well with the main ideas of that book.
Very good post. How many weeks of UI did the CARES package cover?
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.
I agree completely that incrementalism is usually the way to go. We couldn't even predict the consequences of the ACA! And that's a 1000-page law; M4A would need to be at least a few multiples of that.
Being around young people from time to time, one thing I think that I have noticed is that their agitation is in part because they think they have nothing to lose from major structural change. Whereas us olds who already get insurance through our employers and have a growing retirement account are too invested in the system as it exists (from their perspective).
Not to go down a rabbit hole, but re: climate change as an "existential threat to human existence" -- like, how sure are you that it's not? I'd say it's _probably_ not, but if I were going to guess, I'd say it's certainly a _non-zero_ chance that we could have a catastrophe -- like, a huge positive feedback loop from melting permafrost and lowered albedo at the icecaps, plus ocean acidification killing off a huge portion of phytoplankton, plus the Amazon drying out and turning into a savannah. At that point you're talking about potentially something even worse than just human civilizational collapse (with very little chance of ever being reconstituted, because we won't have easy access to near-surface fossil fuels again to start a new industrial revolution). You're talking about kicking out the underpinnings of the entire biosphere as we recognize it, with no idea what comes next. Most likely _some_ kind of life will survive, but there's absolutely no guarantees on what that would look like. The cost of that is so high that it challenges our ability to do any kind of cost-benefit analysis about it. Even if it's a one-in-a-trillion chance, since the cost of that outcome is "the entire value of the future", it has to register in "expected value" terms as being worth spending _something_ on preventing it.
I think we take this kind of risk much _less_ seriously than we should, the same way we take the risk of catastrophic asteroid impact much less seriously than we should. We should as a planet be devoting several billion a year to setting up sentinel satellites and cataloguing every object we can find. Same for nuclear weapons (if you got a complicated war started among various nuclear powers in the eastern hemisphere, we could quite easily get a nice multi-year nuclear winter, complete with radiation poisoning for billions of people and total collapse of agribusiness). Same for the question of whether somebody might be able to engineer a plague that's as contagious as measles, and has a long incubation period, but has the kind of >50% fatality rate of a MERS or Ebola after that. (Both of those are probably not _quite_ existential threats, but they could cause a huge die-off event, on the scale of what the Black Plague did to Europe, and the resulting crisis would pose a challenge for maintaining functionality of basic services like water and power.)
Like, what is even the point of coming together to have a social contract and a government, if it isn't to have _somebody_ projecting, and planning for, this kind of threat?
Don't forget the nonzero risk of a zombie apocalypse - who's on lookout for that?
Replying to Max, I think the tax cuts of 2017 were terrible for the country, much worse than the stimulus checks, whic, although not targeted at the most needy, at least exclude the wealthy. The tax cuts were overwhelmingly directed at those who needed it the least.
It blows my MIND that somehow Democrats failed to brand the CARES Act (which, I 100% agree was phenomenally successful) as a Democratic victory, and instead somehow let Trump and congressional Republicans run on it! We LITERALLY GAVE PEOPLE $1,200 CHECKS AND BOOSTED UI and before it happened everyone thought it was a kooky lefty idea until Mitt Romney said "no that might be cool actually"
I recall reading a take in November that one of the factors in poor Democratic performance in Miami-Dade and south Texas was due in part to voters there giving Trump credit for the economic stimulus provided by the CARES Act. Maybe Democrats thought they needed to cede credit to Trump to get him to sign it? Democrats should have branded them NancyBux or something much more clever and shouted to the hills about how much of a difference it made.
But then again, maybe Democrats didn't want people to feel too good about the economy lest it lifted Trump to a second term?
Anyways...totally agree also that CARES will be a great model to point to in future stimulus/UI program debates. It blows nearly every traditional conservative argument out of the water.
Great post!
"Maybe Democrats thought they needed to cede credit to Trump to get him to sign it?"
That's the dilemma - Democrats weren't willing to play hardball to get their names on the check, or keep Trump's name off, while Trump and the GOP were (or at least successfully bluffed). I don't know of a way around this except for Democrats to sometimes let good policy fail if it can't be framed in a way such that they can take credit for it.
I got a post 9/11 Stimulus check back in the day and it had "George W. Bush" on it and at the time I thought it was just insane that the President got to put his name on it.
Shouldn't all 538 members of Congress get to scrawl their names onto the checks as well?!?
It should be only them and not the President - he doesn't get the power of the purse. :-).
Clearly i should have sent my check back as "unconstitutional."
Great work, as was the local news piece. Thanks so much! Regarding the framing of this one, I wonder if foregrounding the positive vision of the close might be even more persuasive. So rather than:
1. progressives complain about everything
2. progressives were wrong to companion about CARES
3. ...
4. the great victories we celebrate were slow processes
Trying:
1. This great victory (Brown v Board) was seen as a moment; in fact it was a process that continues to this day
2. That great victory (Social Security) was blah blah blah
3. CARES looks like the same: here are its antecedents, here is how we can and should build on it
First rate stuff. I would only add an observation that a lot of progressive angst regarding things like CARES is that such bills, the product of compromise, inevitably lack the purity to earn their support. The progressive spelling of compromise is c a v e.
So glad to hear someone calling for celebrating our successes. Tired of all the doom and gloom which often isn’t the whole story.
I love you, Matt Yglesias.