As someone who lived in Texas, it was hard to overstate how much backlash there was among business leaders here because of the LNG terminal pause. Something that flies under the radar in the discussion but it caused a huge backlash, and caused many business leaders to think of democrats as just as erratic and authoritarian as Trump.
So you're saying the literal, actual socialism (state investment in the development of industry) is the most popular part and least vulnerable to backlash among Biden's achievements?
That the environmental groups have this model of politics is well documented and starting to get a little over-covered IMO. I'd welcome an article that engages with what political strategies do exist for overcoming the tragedy of the commons/free rider issue of environmentalism that Slow Boring always alludes to. If all I do is evaluate short-term self-interest, I will always prefer to pay less at the cost of protecting the environment. Combine that with the modern media environment where dry technocratic solutions consistently lose to simplicity and bombast, and it's unclear where to go.
Too few understand the obstacles which must be overcome to change from fossil fuels to other sources of energy. I can recommend Art Berman as a good source of articles help to understand the fossil fuels and how difficult it is to avoid using them. Somewhat akin to convincing enough Americans that our gun culture needs to change and how that can be accomplished. Maybe like banning smoking in so many places and the awareness of the danger of secondhand smoke has led to a largely cigarette smoke free society in many places.
It’s weird to describe the New York ban as a ban on gas stoves - that makes it sound like they were motivated by the study about indoor air quality. What they actually did was a ban on gas hookups in new buildings, which is actually more far reaching than a ban on gas stoves, but is clearly about emissions, not indoor air quality. And this is regulation about new buildings, where this sort of thing makes sense, given that buildings mostly last many decades and should be designed for use cases a decade or two in the future rather than for last year.
First of all, right after I criticize Matt Y in these comments for not paying enough attention to climate, he goes and writes a piece on climate policy! Great, timing, Matt, thank you 😊
Second, how do I say this? None of this is Matt's fault, because he's just observing (accurately) what's going on in our politics. Don't shoot the messenger! But it's just so goddamn depressing. To sum up: the American people are, with rare exceptions, too selfish to pay even the smallest price or inconvenience for the sake of climate, so politicians who care about it must be super brilliant 4D chess masters and tightrope walkers to sneak any kind of climate reform past the electorate, and it must be 100% carrot, 0% stick.
Meanwhile, as someone says, "nature always bats last" and nature doesn't give a fruit fly's fart about our politics or human psychology.
No, I am not one of the extreme "we are ALL GONNA DIEEEEE" doomers, but climate change is going to hurt a lot of people very badly. To any of you who are like "IDGAF about climate change, I'm cool, I'll just turn up my AC!" consider:
1. Do you like eating food? A lot of our staple crops are adapted to fairly narrow temperature ranges (it's not that they'll die outside those temperature ranges, but yields will drop severely). Climate change = food shortages = higher grocery prices, and we know how much American consumers love those!
>By [Bloomberg's] calculations, climate change cost Americans nearly a trillion dollars last year, mainly in skyrocketing insurance premiums, power outages, and cleanup after two massive hurricanes and the LA fires.3 This is more than 3 percent of our GDP. As they put it, this amounts to “a stealth tariff on consumer spending.”
Furthermore,
"Without FEMA, the cost of insurance will soar. Commercial insurance premiums will have to price in the risk of extended disruptions to business and ever-more degraded infrastructure. The soaring premiums will degrade the value of assets like industrial and commercial buildings... Coupled with the rise in the cost of health insurance owing to heat- and smoke-related morbidity and mortality, this is really going to hurt us. This isn’t theoretical; it’s happening already."
3. Any of you concerned about illegal immigration? You're going to absolutely LOVE it when desperately poor people are driven out of their homes in the Global South by the millions due to climate change-related coastal flooding, droughts, heat waves, crop failures, etc., and try to seek shelter in North America and Europe.
Also, I'm one of those bleeding-heart liberals who feels sad about people suffering and dying needlessly, as many poor people in the Global South inevitably will.
It is not per se wrong as too simplistic - remains slightly too doomer as it were.
The underlying point I believe I would second is Doomerism expressed as Planet Saving is essentially wrong as The Planet has gone through much worse. Human civilisation enabling ecoystem stability... another matter. Focusing on the rather more real and immediate that climate change does in fact impact agriculture, and that is no longer abstract, the educated Tree-huggers already Very Concern About the Environment (tm) but concrete.
If one is going to sell adaptation rather than sell it as Save the Planet, focus on "Save agriculture"
Of course many of these things are addressable through technology.
Solar power feed water reclaim (brackish desal, retreatment), genmod seeds for greater tolerances.
And on the other side, higher CO2 concentrations, plants actually love it for growth and it actually boosts respiratory efficiency (i.e. reduces water needs). Of course the trade offs don't necessarily balance but the Enviro Left treating CO2 like a toxic pollutant (erroneously extrapolating from pollution agenda) -it's not it's fundamental to life systems.
There's no "just" about any of it, you're talking about a massive undertaking and it wouldn't happen instantly. Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north" of where the crops currently are? What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."
“ Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north of where the crops currently are?”
Yes.
“What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."”
That will be a fraction of the cost of aggressive decarbonization.
The only trajectory we have left for ourselves now is some combination of
1. Mitigation/adaptation (assuming economic growth in the global south).
2. Some attempts at geo-engineering
3. Mass conflict and death in some parts of the world
Humans are known to react very emotionally to anecdotal tragedy stories affecting individuals but mass death in far away places does not cause the same reaction (maybe for better or worse)
Economic Growth in Developing Countries (stupid Lefty "global south" phrase is stupid, yet enother euphamism on galloping euphamism... for God's sake stop the damn mealy mouthed evasions - poor(er) developing countries) is entirely in scope.
While climate change is a serious serious problem - and a serious threat particularly for geographies with limited water resources (Middle East North Africa, parts of Indian Sub-Con, northern Saharan 'shore' of sub-Saharan Africa -Sahel), solar power makes a wide range of development quite feasible (one can add rising CO2 levels in fact are having impact promoting dryland greening: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-dioxide-climate-change - pure simplistic doomerism is ... simplistic
Is "global south" supposed to be woke terminology now? I've seen it used in economics discussions that no one associates with "progressivism". I personally have no qualms against "developing countries" and am old enough to even use the retrograde "third-world countries" description but I fail to see why "global south" should evoke strong emotions like say "pregnant people". Whose' claim at specialness is being denied when one uses "global south"?
What is frustrating about all these discussions is their limitation to developed world issues and outlooks. The developed world uses 5X per capita the energy of the developing world. Only a massive abundance agenda can address this global inequality. The tragedy is that, for example, huge parts of the developing world continue to usefirewood and brush for cooking and heating with enormous health consequences, but are denied the use of natural gas because supposedly fossil fuels are to be banned.
Essentially no one is "denied" at this time natural gas by being banned.
Development Banks (DFIs) haven't been backing large scale natgas infra certainly but that has about fuck-all to assist with rural developing world access to butane stoves or the like (particularly as large scale infra is almost always export scale oriented). The hand-wringing on this is more prospective than real (and more leveraged than real, relative to the motivated sob-story angles)
Rural developing world replacement of usage of wood/brush with either of natgas or solar or any mix of course would be good.
However the mega constraint is not DFIs or European banks not funding developing world export-oriented gas pipelines or gas fired grid oriented plants (or more happened, new coal), it's rural infrastructure.
Basic rural infrastructure. Roads. Roads. Roads. (also grids). People getting access to small gas canisters for home use requires... roads. to be cost effective. Distribution networks needs roads. Rural roads of high quality that don't wash out on seasonal rains.
Even more good would be urbanisation.
As despite the Lefty obsessions with "small holder farmers" and making small farmers stayin place to picturesquely produce local produce in poverty, large scale small-holder small/mini plot farming is (all things being equal) enormously burdensome on soil - intensive use at high population densities leading to soil exhaustion as well as of course extension to marginal lands than then tend to soil collapse and desertification.
The Americas and Europe did not achieve high agri productivity by keeping mass-scale peasant farming whatever the nostalgic myths many have. Scale & Efficiency.
too many people on the land in photogenic "traditional" production is a path to collapse.
Urbanisation and some forms of industrialiasation or teritary economy
This is where I think Ezra's argument in Abundance is the most accurate. The insanely slow rollout of IRA spending and immense bureaucratic red tape cost us an enormous amount on clean energy progress. The lesson needs to be that you will likely lose the next election and any unspent money will be pulled back. So you need to move your ass and get things done ASAP.
This is basically correct in terms of the Biden administration and progressives more generally often confused approach to energy.
I think the LNG “pause” had a much bigger impact than is understood. This unprecedented political move to do a policy 180 and stop tens of billions of dollars of energy investment, with no discussion or legislation or anything, very clearly led the way for the trump administration to pull similar moves going forward. Not to mention the pretense for the pause was a wildly flawed study that the author retracted a few months later (though the pause continued), and we are seeing the beginnings of similar pretense studies from the Trump administration to justify their own politically driven energy policies.
All these moves make Americans pay more money, make us an unpredictable investment climate, and actually tend to increase emissions by delaying construction of clean new infrastructure including new fossil generation to replace old dirtier plants.
I have no clue how we're going to address climate change. The right proudly doesn't care/doesn't think it's real. The normies care until it costs them a dollar. The left seems to only be interested in the least effective, most annoying interventions. The paper straw thing seems like paying indulgences for libs. I don't get it.
The plastic straw thing is far worse - the ban was ostensibly to stop “ocean plastics.” But ocean plastics are almost entirely the result of their world countries not having a sufficient garbage collection infrastructure so a ton of plastics flow into the ocean. In the US this issue is essentially non-existent as the garbage collection infrastructure ensures the volume in rivers etc. is very low.
The main places I’ve noticed plastic straw bans are in red state oceanfront communities, like Orange Beach Alabama, where they actually care about plastic in the water where people are swimming, and not about microplastic.
Why can't performative bullshit libs do be stuff that isn't intentionally inconvenient? I'm tired of these straws falling apart half way through drinking something.
I can’t stand your pieces on climate issues because you clearly have zero concern for protecting fragile ecosystems. Ironically, I just paid for a month subscription to say this. Capitalists who think it is somehow impossible to change the logic of could never give two shits about wildlife or indigenous communities or pristine landscapes of which there are a vanishing few. Plus, on the environmental justice front, there is significant contamination of waterways and air pollution which cause horrific illnesses to the poor people or anyone but often poor and of color living nearby (otherwise the community would get up and protest the hell out of shit happening on their property). If Iglesias cared at ALL, he would mention these costs. I am not so extreme as to not see the benefits of seeing the big picture, but with environmental issues, there are permanent and long-lasting damages that you should always very seriously consider. I think it is possible through inspirational leadership and messaging to change people's minds so their less expedient priorities become visible to them, and they are smart enough to weigh those costs and choose a more ideal if not utopian solution.
Primo: there are no "permanent" damage. We humans are a geological blip and the planet itself via its own nothing-to-do-with-humans events - mega volcanic eruptions, geologic ice ages etc regularly engages in mass ecosystem destruction. It is human romanticism to see our current moment as someting to freeze.
Secundo: if one wants to save ecosystems, one needs to have either (A) mass human death or (B) scaled and intensified efficiency of economic production as otherwise intensive use in developing countries is going to continue to spread to more and more marginal lands as traditional / existing modes of production are intensive - deforestation drivers are not simply the evil corporates capitalists, it is farmers of expanding families seeking as humans have done for thousands of years new lands to clear - and then intensively use in picturesque traditional poverty until soil collapse happens.
That's "indigenous communities" (an absurd phrase as all one is doing is freezing in time the population of Spot X at the moment of European documentation - typically a 19th century snapshot - as The Indigenous, which is both afactually ahistoric and really nothing more than updated Romantic Noble Savagism)
That is reality.
Now since you're in Touchy Feely land, you doubtless get all verflempt about mass death of photogenically poor in 'global south' - you presumably also don't want millions of deaths.
Ergo economic efficiency and growth.
(or you can go Oxfam style photogenic poverty caring so much about the poors so long so long as they remain photogenically poor)
Like liberalism itself, the propensity to worry about long term risks and the welfare of things outside your immediate tribe/group is an elite condition (not just in the USA but everywhere). So the population as a whole is not predisposed to think about the welfare of "others".
But even among elite liberals like Yglesias, one can use utilitarian arguments to get around any moral objections to local exploitation/pollution by saying you are using the fruits of said exploitation/pollution to relieve the suffering of someone far away like say in Africa. It's like the secular version of the burglar who steals gold from the merchant but donates some fraction of it to the church.
So I see no way out of our current predicament. The seductive promise of future growth and prosperity overrides all considerations of justice in the near term. That is the consensus we have settled on.
well, I mean, the more you pay attention to this stuff, the worse it seems, and thus the more selfish and callous some perspectives are. I do apologize for some of my phrasing and intended to edit it immediately but I hit a limit on my phone and had to move to my computer. however, arguably, someone this persuasive to many cognoscenti should think seriously about presenting the downsides to this argument because that is arguably much less polite de facto to the people who will be harmed and other lives and stuff at stake. https://environmentamerica.org/articles/fracking-is-an-environmental-disaster/#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20activities%20needed,Fossil%20fuel%20pollution
I literally could not care any less about “pristine landscapes” when people are living on the street because we won’t allow any new houses to be built.
While humans live on boxes and tents so the precious and comfortable enjoy their pristine landscapes.
Sort of like the old aristocracy who would dedicate vast lands to gardens so they’d have something pretty to look at - while the poor starved for a lackey arable land.
who is "they"? the government doesn't. corporations are not forced to clean up and don't. there is so much deregulation going on via the EPA and other things. my mom probably died of parkinson's because of oversight, because we had a place in a small rural neighborhood in WVA where there was a toxic polluting Kodak (formerly military-plane-building) factory nearby. if you read about these neighborhoods, like in a book I recently read on "environmental justice" (in the US), I guarantee you will be horrified, and many of these impacts will be faced for very long amounts of time with no way to fix them. it would be insane to knowingly live in many parts of the country. i am not talking about india at all, but india is so screwed on climate that we really should care way more about doing way more sooner rather than later, imho.
I agree with you! I'm an urbanist at heart, I love dense, walkable, mixed-use communities.
Unfortunately, urbanism is lefty-coded in America, and if you're trying to convince the median American to give up their suburban house and big-ass SUV (or aspirations toward same), you are pushing up a very, very steep cultural gradient.
FWIW, I'm a European-born naturalized American citizen, so I'm used to living in apartments and densely populated cities from the time I was born.
Almost every Matt Y piece these days descends into the following general pattern
1. Only "the groups (that don't control any actual votes)" have agency. Dem electeds are little flower petals who should not be "forced" into making bad decisions.
2. Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly? The only plausible reason for not doing symbolic things is because your communications suck. But that is not Matt Y's criticism.
3. Because delusional Biden let in millions upon millions of migrants and created chaos in low income communities and also had his brain fall out on live TV, thus losing the election, Democrats should basically abandon all their previous normative claims in every other sphere.
"Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly?"
Because optics matter. People can clearly see where Biden's priorities lie. And it wasn't bringing down the costs of gas, or increasing fossil fuel production.
If optics mattered, Trump wouldn't have won in 2024. His optics were downright shitty unless you were a teenage boy who thinks it's hilarious when the presidential candidate pretends to give a blow job to a mic at a campaign event.
I'll grant you one time when Trump's optics were genuinely impressive: when he stood up and raised his fist right after being shot. That was truly great optics and the one exception I can think of to what was otherwise a cesspool.
You and I both agree that Trump is bad (despite some other disagreements on optimal policy mix).
But I think voters took Biden's signals on stuff like oil and gas (and even more on immigration) as what his administration cared about, and they just really disagreed (I will note I did to).
I'm a right leaning person that does think climate change is real. But while I'm not against investment to boost green R&D, I'm also not one of the ones willing to pay a bunch extra to go green.
For example, I would be happy to put solar on my house if it actually saved me money.
But by far my bigger focus is getting down my $500k a month electric bill.
"Optics matter" is just another way of saying "My communication sucks".
On the one hand we are saying Trump can try to cut Obamacare, blow up the deficit, break all kinds of criminal statutes, get convicted of crimes, and nothing matters because the median voter is too uninformed to care because those things do not affect them tangibly on the ground.
On the other hand we are saying "Optics matter" for Biden because even if something does not cause any tangible change on the ground, the same uninformed median voter is able to anticipate the second and third order effects of Biden's "symbolic" moves far into the future and react negatively.
Democrats and Republicans are held to wildly different standards by voters, also water is wet, Trump's makeup is orange, the bear defecates in the woods, nothing to see here, move along.
Part of this is centrists who are supposedly Democrats loudly agree w/ Republican arguments that Democrats suck on issue x in a way that never happens with Republican's attacking other Republican's, at least ones that stay in good standing.
This is also true of the Left, see anytime somewhat positive news about Biden's economy was shown, but while it was annoying on Twitter, there weren't a lot of left-wingers on cable or network TV slamming Democrat's.
For 40 years, every single Republican basically says, "Democrat's are evil weirdos who hate America" and that message bleeds through to even non-political people and honestly, a lot of Democrat's who are in more conservative spaces, especially when a "hey, Democrats are actually good" message is basically nowhere, even on spaces supposedly friendly to Democrat's.
Obviously, another part is that while the media as a whole to be liberal-leaning, the Beltway Political Media is right-leaning on economics at a minimum and politics in general and has bent over backwards for the GOP on TV for as long as I've been alive.
Obviously this isn't true of the Democratic party as a whole. But just as obvious there are vocal segments of the Democratic coalition that have an anti-Western/anti-American world view. Particularly at elite institutions.
So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment.
The solution (for both parties) is to continually push back and say those values aren't are values.
"So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment."
The penalty (if any) that the GOP pays for the so called "a small segment of racists in their group" is next to nothing compared to the gigantic penalty Dems pay for hosting out-groups in their coalition.
The median voter may not be racist herself but she experiences much more cognitive discomfort when she sees an out-group member somewhere in an inner city shouting Anti-American slogans on FoX than when she sees her own uncle at Thanksgiving saying wildly racist things.
The situation is not symmetric at all. We see the same dynamic play out in many multi-ethnic democracies in the world.
Except the definition of 'evil weirdo who hates America' to the median Republican isn't the 1% of people who want to give it back to the Native American's, it's any person who has a more liberal social view than they do.
Sorry, this view from centrists that they just join in the hippie punching enough, you won't get called an evil leftist who hates America because you want a slightly higher tax rate on rich people and that 45% of the country won't believe the GOP when they say it has never been true.
Notice Republican's never say, "well, those open Gropyers who we put in actual charge of things are bad people." They just ignore they exist and attack, attack, attack all while every centrist Democratic pathetically is ready to genuflect and say, "yes, so many of people who vote for me are weirdos who I dislike. Please accept my apologies and the fact I don't like them either, just like you."
Also, reactionaries are the Republican base. 25-30% of America wants basically a pre-Civil Rights/Women's Lib/etc. America, with some exceptions for non-white people or women they personally think are OK. This isn't some fantasy, this is truth. Meanwhile, even the vast majority of Bernie votes just want a larger social welfare state and maybe some more liberal social policy than you may agree with.
Exactly! We should acknowledge this obvious asymmetry and try to figure out a way to concretely deal with it.
My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups.
We should work on lowering the cultural legitimacy deficit if we wish to deliver better material outcomes for the people we say we care about without just parroting what the GOP is already doing along all policy fronts.
"My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups."
definitely some truth to that.
But I submit policies do matter to. Voters don't want open borders, nor do they want to give up their gas stoves or cars. And they want that gas to be cheap.
Voters want many things: High paying jobs but also low costs. Low taxes and also good benefits (for themselves). Clean air/water where they live but also chemical plants spewing pollution. Beach front properties in Miami but also low insurance costs.
I remember back when the GOP was calling for "personal responsibility" that it used to be the "cool and serious" thing among the DNC pundit class but since Trump gutted the Obama+Hillary+Biden version of the Dem party now the "cool and serious" things seems to be to say "shut up and give the voters what they want now now now!".
Y'know... good points all over the place, Matt. But I find it hard to focus on the climate policy specifics when my main takeaway is the two graphs, and what they represent:
Republican propaganda being really, really effective.
All the other political decisions in here are quibbling on the margins. The issue is that when Republicans want to make something unpopular, they CAN.
I find it hard to muster a lot of enthusiasm for political projects that aren't centered around discrediting and crushing the right-wing misinformation machine, because any other strategy will be swept aside by it. Even taking our "big tent" dreams to their furthest extremes, do we really think that Fox & Co. couldn't make people like Jared Golden and MGP unpopular by making disingenuous and even left-coded arguments, when they have a coordinated messaging machine of limitless value?
Yeah, they're great, talented politicians who get their districts. But while Aaron Judge is great at hitting. maybe better than anybody ever, he's still probably going to make an out when he's facing Paul Skenes like he did in the first inning last night. So it goes with our top stars and the RWM machine.
Curious if you have any thoughts on how to crush the right wing disinformation machine? Matt's thesis is essentially - give them less objectionable stuff to work with. I'm guessing you'd say we need to be better at correcting the record, but just loudly shouting about the veracity of our version of the facts hasn't worked so far. Maybe a liberal Joe Rogan would be more able to connect with low information voters, but they'd actually have to be Rogan-esque and hold a bunch of heterogeneous views to make the liberal parts palatable. More and more, I think dems have to stop being such earnest scolds if they want to connect with voters. What do you think?
It’s a really good question and I wish I had more ideas than I do.
I will say, if we’re talking about “liberal Joe Rogan” then we’re already off base, because Joe Rogan is genuinely not ideological; he is a symptom of the right wing messaging machine, not a part of it. I really think people who see Rogan as some kind of conscious malign actor and not a charismatic communicator of broad lowbrow opinion are misunderstanding him REALLY badly.
All we can do really is try stuff. We can look at stuff that ISN’T working.
Our partisan media is worse than useless for advocacy, because all they can do is navel gaze and criticize Democrats. It’s pathological, their inability to focus on issue contrast for 10 seconds, their inability to resist indulging right wing narratives. The party should stop conferring insider status to that class of pundit and promote people who take more of a Lawrence O’Donnell approach.
Basically we need pundits who are trying to actually message, and not entertain either themselves or people who are extremely invested in Democratic politics… they have no interest in recapping the failures of Republicans because it bores them. It bores them. But by the time they’re bored of a Republican sin and stop talking about it, 90% of the public still hasn’t heard about it. Nobody wants to repeat themselves even though it is the core of persuasive messaging, especially among such a… distracted… electorate.
Since the intellectual liberal temperament seems deeply uninterested in actually advocating for itself, the party ought to pay people to do it. Like, liberal Joe Rogan? It’s been 20 years since we last gave “liberal Sean Hannity” a try, maybe let’s throw that fastball down the middle for a strike.
Paging Dr. Franken…
I also think, in terms of things the party can control more directly, the Democrats should get way, way more aggressive in attacking the “legacy” media. People think the media is aligned with Democrats not because the media acts that way, but because DEMOCRATS act that way. Tell Jake Tapper to fuck himself, already.
You don't need Republican propaganda to convince people that they should care about cost and energy reliability. And that policies that push other things aren't not in the voters interest.
Republican propaganda is effective because their politician's true beliefs on big ticket items are in line with their stated beliefs. The GOP loves to cut taxes for the rich and take bribes from rich people but this is built upon a coherent foundational belief system of social Darwinism cloaked either in religion and/or ethnicity.
DLC Dem propaganda is in-effective because individual DLC Dem politicians' true beliefs often conflict with their stated beliefs. DLC Dems love to take bribes from the rich (just like the GOP) and ride the gravy train but they profess to be worried about poor people. Their inauthenticity and need to constantly triangulate on everything is the source of their weakness.
Its a free country and stating that you disagree without explaining why is fine but I don't have to take that seriously.
Surely you are not naive enough to think that just because the "DLC" disbanded in 2011 the mindset it cultivated is gone. I don't know what to make of that level of silly thinking.
The entire issue with Democrats is efficacy. Does your plan pencil out? What aren't you considering? What were the results? Who is accountable and how will you change your thinking and actions in light of what you now know? It seems like they are always living the definition of insanity and hide behind "I'm just the idea guy" or "Well we have to do SOMETHING (even if it makes things worse)"
“They pocketed enormous amounts of spending, then pushed Democrats to use every regulatory means at their disposal to curtail fossil fuel use and fossil fuel production.”
I’m curious as to the details of this, what money was pocketed? The green banks stuff? It was written as though the reader should already know or as something not worth expanding upon, but seems directly tied to how successful the intent of the IRA ended up being.
My gratitude for a really precise and thorough column on a topic where I tend to object to Matt's commentary. And if you haven't read the linked review from 2008(!) it holds up very well.
As someone who lived in Texas, it was hard to overstate how much backlash there was among business leaders here because of the LNG terminal pause. Something that flies under the radar in the discussion but it caused a huge backlash, and caused many business leaders to think of democrats as just as erratic and authoritarian as Trump.
So you're saying the literal, actual socialism (state investment in the development of industry) is the most popular part and least vulnerable to backlash among Biden's achievements?
That the environmental groups have this model of politics is well documented and starting to get a little over-covered IMO. I'd welcome an article that engages with what political strategies do exist for overcoming the tragedy of the commons/free rider issue of environmentalism that Slow Boring always alludes to. If all I do is evaluate short-term self-interest, I will always prefer to pay less at the cost of protecting the environment. Combine that with the modern media environment where dry technocratic solutions consistently lose to simplicity and bombast, and it's unclear where to go.
Too few understand the obstacles which must be overcome to change from fossil fuels to other sources of energy. I can recommend Art Berman as a good source of articles help to understand the fossil fuels and how difficult it is to avoid using them. Somewhat akin to convincing enough Americans that our gun culture needs to change and how that can be accomplished. Maybe like banning smoking in so many places and the awareness of the danger of secondhand smoke has led to a largely cigarette smoke free society in many places.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/
It’s weird to describe the New York ban as a ban on gas stoves - that makes it sound like they were motivated by the study about indoor air quality. What they actually did was a ban on gas hookups in new buildings, which is actually more far reaching than a ban on gas stoves, but is clearly about emissions, not indoor air quality. And this is regulation about new buildings, where this sort of thing makes sense, given that buildings mostly last many decades and should be designed for use cases a decade or two in the future rather than for last year.
I have LOTS OF THOUGHTS on this!
First of all, right after I criticize Matt Y in these comments for not paying enough attention to climate, he goes and writes a piece on climate policy! Great, timing, Matt, thank you 😊
Second, how do I say this? None of this is Matt's fault, because he's just observing (accurately) what's going on in our politics. Don't shoot the messenger! But it's just so goddamn depressing. To sum up: the American people are, with rare exceptions, too selfish to pay even the smallest price or inconvenience for the sake of climate, so politicians who care about it must be super brilliant 4D chess masters and tightrope walkers to sneak any kind of climate reform past the electorate, and it must be 100% carrot, 0% stick.
Meanwhile, as someone says, "nature always bats last" and nature doesn't give a fruit fly's fart about our politics or human psychology.
No, I am not one of the extreme "we are ALL GONNA DIEEEEE" doomers, but climate change is going to hurt a lot of people very badly. To any of you who are like "IDGAF about climate change, I'm cool, I'll just turn up my AC!" consider:
1. Do you like eating food? A lot of our staple crops are adapted to fairly narrow temperature ranges (it's not that they'll die outside those temperature ranges, but yields will drop severely). Climate change = food shortages = higher grocery prices, and we know how much American consumers love those!
2. From Claire Berlinski's Substack, the combination of more climate disasters plus Trump effing over FEMA = badness: https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/in-heat
>By [Bloomberg's] calculations, climate change cost Americans nearly a trillion dollars last year, mainly in skyrocketing insurance premiums, power outages, and cleanup after two massive hurricanes and the LA fires.3 This is more than 3 percent of our GDP. As they put it, this amounts to “a stealth tariff on consumer spending.”
Furthermore,
"Without FEMA, the cost of insurance will soar. Commercial insurance premiums will have to price in the risk of extended disruptions to business and ever-more degraded infrastructure. The soaring premiums will degrade the value of assets like industrial and commercial buildings... Coupled with the rise in the cost of health insurance owing to heat- and smoke-related morbidity and mortality, this is really going to hurt us. This isn’t theoretical; it’s happening already."
3. Any of you concerned about illegal immigration? You're going to absolutely LOVE it when desperately poor people are driven out of their homes in the Global South by the millions due to climate change-related coastal flooding, droughts, heat waves, crop failures, etc., and try to seek shelter in North America and Europe.
Also, I'm one of those bleeding-heart liberals who feels sad about people suffering and dying needlessly, as many poor people in the Global South inevitably will.
1. Is wrong - at least in the US, staple crops would just move a few degrees north.
It is not per se wrong as too simplistic - remains slightly too doomer as it were.
The underlying point I believe I would second is Doomerism expressed as Planet Saving is essentially wrong as The Planet has gone through much worse. Human civilisation enabling ecoystem stability... another matter. Focusing on the rather more real and immediate that climate change does in fact impact agriculture, and that is no longer abstract, the educated Tree-huggers already Very Concern About the Environment (tm) but concrete.
If one is going to sell adaptation rather than sell it as Save the Planet, focus on "Save agriculture"
Of course many of these things are addressable through technology.
Solar power feed water reclaim (brackish desal, retreatment), genmod seeds for greater tolerances.
And on the other side, higher CO2 concentrations, plants actually love it for growth and it actually boosts respiratory efficiency (i.e. reduces water needs). Of course the trade offs don't necessarily balance but the Enviro Left treating CO2 like a toxic pollutant (erroneously extrapolating from pollution agenda) -it's not it's fundamental to life systems.
There's no "just" about any of it, you're talking about a massive undertaking and it wouldn't happen instantly. Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north" of where the crops currently are? What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."
“ Is there plentiful arable soil "a few degrees north of where the crops currently are?”
Yes.
“What about irrigation and the whole infrastructure related to harvesting and transporting the crops? Someone would have to rebuild it "a few degrees north."”
That will be a fraction of the cost of aggressive decarbonization.
Equally speaking there are modes of adaptation for many systems in place - irrigation certainly can be improved, and solar powered.
Lefty Greeny dropping their ideological hostility to genetic modification of plants for higher tolerances.
etc.
The only trajectory we have left for ourselves now is some combination of
1. Mitigation/adaptation (assuming economic growth in the global south).
2. Some attempts at geo-engineering
3. Mass conflict and death in some parts of the world
Humans are known to react very emotionally to anecdotal tragedy stories affecting individuals but mass death in far away places does not cause the same reaction (maybe for better or worse)
Economic Growth in Developing Countries (stupid Lefty "global south" phrase is stupid, yet enother euphamism on galloping euphamism... for God's sake stop the damn mealy mouthed evasions - poor(er) developing countries) is entirely in scope.
While climate change is a serious serious problem - and a serious threat particularly for geographies with limited water resources (Middle East North Africa, parts of Indian Sub-Con, northern Saharan 'shore' of sub-Saharan Africa -Sahel), solar power makes a wide range of development quite feasible (one can add rising CO2 levels in fact are having impact promoting dryland greening: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-dioxide-climate-change - pure simplistic doomerism is ... simplistic
Is "global south" supposed to be woke terminology now? I've seen it used in economics discussions that no one associates with "progressivism". I personally have no qualms against "developing countries" and am old enough to even use the retrograde "third-world countries" description but I fail to see why "global south" should evoke strong emotions like say "pregnant people". Whose' claim at specialness is being denied when one uses "global south"?
What is frustrating about all these discussions is their limitation to developed world issues and outlooks. The developed world uses 5X per capita the energy of the developing world. Only a massive abundance agenda can address this global inequality. The tragedy is that, for example, huge parts of the developing world continue to usefirewood and brush for cooking and heating with enormous health consequences, but are denied the use of natural gas because supposedly fossil fuels are to be banned.
Essentially no one is "denied" at this time natural gas by being banned.
Development Banks (DFIs) haven't been backing large scale natgas infra certainly but that has about fuck-all to assist with rural developing world access to butane stoves or the like (particularly as large scale infra is almost always export scale oriented). The hand-wringing on this is more prospective than real (and more leveraged than real, relative to the motivated sob-story angles)
Rural developing world replacement of usage of wood/brush with either of natgas or solar or any mix of course would be good.
However the mega constraint is not DFIs or European banks not funding developing world export-oriented gas pipelines or gas fired grid oriented plants (or more happened, new coal), it's rural infrastructure.
Basic rural infrastructure. Roads. Roads. Roads. (also grids). People getting access to small gas canisters for home use requires... roads. to be cost effective. Distribution networks needs roads. Rural roads of high quality that don't wash out on seasonal rains.
Even more good would be urbanisation.
As despite the Lefty obsessions with "small holder farmers" and making small farmers stayin place to picturesquely produce local produce in poverty, large scale small-holder small/mini plot farming is (all things being equal) enormously burdensome on soil - intensive use at high population densities leading to soil exhaustion as well as of course extension to marginal lands than then tend to soil collapse and desertification.
The Americas and Europe did not achieve high agri productivity by keeping mass-scale peasant farming whatever the nostalgic myths many have. Scale & Efficiency.
too many people on the land in photogenic "traditional" production is a path to collapse.
Urbanisation and some forms of industrialiasation or teritary economy
This is where I think Ezra's argument in Abundance is the most accurate. The insanely slow rollout of IRA spending and immense bureaucratic red tape cost us an enormous amount on clean energy progress. The lesson needs to be that you will likely lose the next election and any unspent money will be pulled back. So you need to move your ass and get things done ASAP.
This is basically correct in terms of the Biden administration and progressives more generally often confused approach to energy.
I think the LNG “pause” had a much bigger impact than is understood. This unprecedented political move to do a policy 180 and stop tens of billions of dollars of energy investment, with no discussion or legislation or anything, very clearly led the way for the trump administration to pull similar moves going forward. Not to mention the pretense for the pause was a wildly flawed study that the author retracted a few months later (though the pause continued), and we are seeing the beginnings of similar pretense studies from the Trump administration to justify their own politically driven energy policies.
All these moves make Americans pay more money, make us an unpredictable investment climate, and actually tend to increase emissions by delaying construction of clean new infrastructure including new fossil generation to replace old dirtier plants.
I have no clue how we're going to address climate change. The right proudly doesn't care/doesn't think it's real. The normies care until it costs them a dollar. The left seems to only be interested in the least effective, most annoying interventions. The paper straw thing seems like paying indulgences for libs. I don't get it.
Indeed. Collective action problems are hard. The sad part is that our generation is a case study in how humans fail spectacularly at them.
At this point the "growth will lead us out of every problem" approach will work or we will face forced decompression.
The plastic straw thing is far worse - the ban was ostensibly to stop “ocean plastics.” But ocean plastics are almost entirely the result of their world countries not having a sufficient garbage collection infrastructure so a ton of plastics flow into the ocean. In the US this issue is essentially non-existent as the garbage collection infrastructure ensures the volume in rivers etc. is very low.
The main places I’ve noticed plastic straw bans are in red state oceanfront communities, like Orange Beach Alabama, where they actually care about plastic in the water where people are swimming, and not about microplastic.
Why can't performative bullshit libs do be stuff that isn't intentionally inconvenient? I'm tired of these straws falling apart half way through drinking something.
Because the inconvenience is a large part of the appeal . It makes feel like they are doing something.
I can’t stand your pieces on climate issues because you clearly have zero concern for protecting fragile ecosystems. Ironically, I just paid for a month subscription to say this. Capitalists who think it is somehow impossible to change the logic of could never give two shits about wildlife or indigenous communities or pristine landscapes of which there are a vanishing few. Plus, on the environmental justice front, there is significant contamination of waterways and air pollution which cause horrific illnesses to the poor people or anyone but often poor and of color living nearby (otherwise the community would get up and protest the hell out of shit happening on their property). If Iglesias cared at ALL, he would mention these costs. I am not so extreme as to not see the benefits of seeing the big picture, but with environmental issues, there are permanent and long-lasting damages that you should always very seriously consider. I think it is possible through inspirational leadership and messaging to change people's minds so their less expedient priorities become visible to them, and they are smart enough to weigh those costs and choose a more ideal if not utopian solution.
Primo: there are no "permanent" damage. We humans are a geological blip and the planet itself via its own nothing-to-do-with-humans events - mega volcanic eruptions, geologic ice ages etc regularly engages in mass ecosystem destruction. It is human romanticism to see our current moment as someting to freeze.
Secundo: if one wants to save ecosystems, one needs to have either (A) mass human death or (B) scaled and intensified efficiency of economic production as otherwise intensive use in developing countries is going to continue to spread to more and more marginal lands as traditional / existing modes of production are intensive - deforestation drivers are not simply the evil corporates capitalists, it is farmers of expanding families seeking as humans have done for thousands of years new lands to clear - and then intensively use in picturesque traditional poverty until soil collapse happens.
That's "indigenous communities" (an absurd phrase as all one is doing is freezing in time the population of Spot X at the moment of European documentation - typically a 19th century snapshot - as The Indigenous, which is both afactually ahistoric and really nothing more than updated Romantic Noble Savagism)
That is reality.
Now since you're in Touchy Feely land, you doubtless get all verflempt about mass death of photogenically poor in 'global south' - you presumably also don't want millions of deaths.
Ergo economic efficiency and growth.
(or you can go Oxfam style photogenic poverty caring so much about the poors so long so long as they remain photogenically poor)
Like liberalism itself, the propensity to worry about long term risks and the welfare of things outside your immediate tribe/group is an elite condition (not just in the USA but everywhere). So the population as a whole is not predisposed to think about the welfare of "others".
But even among elite liberals like Yglesias, one can use utilitarian arguments to get around any moral objections to local exploitation/pollution by saying you are using the fruits of said exploitation/pollution to relieve the suffering of someone far away like say in Africa. It's like the secular version of the burglar who steals gold from the merchant but donates some fraction of it to the church.
So I see no way out of our current predicament. The seductive promise of future growth and prosperity overrides all considerations of justice in the near term. That is the consensus we have settled on.
This is a polite Substack and comment section and we don’t insult our host.
That said, I too grieve over the destruction of ecosystems and extinction of species. I wish people were less selfish. Alas.
well, I mean, the more you pay attention to this stuff, the worse it seems, and thus the more selfish and callous some perspectives are. I do apologize for some of my phrasing and intended to edit it immediately but I hit a limit on my phone and had to move to my computer. however, arguably, someone this persuasive to many cognoscenti should think seriously about presenting the downsides to this argument because that is arguably much less polite de facto to the people who will be harmed and other lives and stuff at stake. https://environmentamerica.org/articles/fracking-is-an-environmental-disaster/#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20activities%20needed,Fossil%20fuel%20pollution
I literally could not care any less about “pristine landscapes” when people are living on the street because we won’t allow any new houses to be built.
"I literally could not care any less about pristine landscapes"
Damn, didn't realize Captain Planet villains were subscribed to this substack.
While humans live on boxes and tents so the precious and comfortable enjoy their pristine landscapes.
Sort of like the old aristocracy who would dedicate vast lands to gardens so they’d have something pretty to look at - while the poor starved for a lackey arable land.
Homeless aren't staking out National Parks & Forests. Urban infill doesn't have anything to do with protecting pristine landscapes.
Urban infill is unpopular. Best to build new housing in more pristine areas. Or is your goal
to make the perfect the enemy of the good?
Tent cities are literally urban infill.
it's not just the non-humans https://environmentamerica.org/articles/fracking-is-an-environmental-disaster/#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20activities%20needed,Fossil%20fuel%20pollution
the air and water contamination causes horrific diseases for low-income people living nearby as well...
Because they don’t build adequate sanitation. Look at the Indian governments “poo in the loo” effort to end open defecation.
who is "they"? the government doesn't. corporations are not forced to clean up and don't. there is so much deregulation going on via the EPA and other things. my mom probably died of parkinson's because of oversight, because we had a place in a small rural neighborhood in WVA where there was a toxic polluting Kodak (formerly military-plane-building) factory nearby. if you read about these neighborhoods, like in a book I recently read on "environmental justice" (in the US), I guarantee you will be horrified, and many of these impacts will be faced for very long amounts of time with no way to fix them. it would be insane to knowingly live in many parts of the country. i am not talking about india at all, but india is so screwed on climate that we really should care way more about doing way more sooner rather than later, imho.
I’m certainly not arguing that we don’t need regulations to ensure waste is properly treated.
You’re the one arguing we need to make people live in a tent rather than despoil our “pristine landscapes.”
False dichotomy. You don’t pave over pristine landscapes to make homes for homeless people; you upzone existing cities/metro areas.
How about we not get so particular? It seems very selfish to me to insist someone lives in a box so you can enjoy a pristine landscape.
way more people should live in apartments
I agree with you! I'm an urbanist at heart, I love dense, walkable, mixed-use communities.
Unfortunately, urbanism is lefty-coded in America, and if you're trying to convince the median American to give up their suburban house and big-ass SUV (or aspirations toward same), you are pushing up a very, very steep cultural gradient.
FWIW, I'm a European-born naturalized American citizen, so I'm used to living in apartments and densely populated cities from the time I was born.
besides the fact that so many vacancies exist that are just ridiculously expensive
“ besides the fact that so many vacancies exist that are just ridiculously expensive”
You’ll definitely have to explain the logic of that statement.
Almost every Matt Y piece these days descends into the following general pattern
1. Only "the groups (that don't control any actual votes)" have agency. Dem electeds are little flower petals who should not be "forced" into making bad decisions.
2. Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly? The only plausible reason for not doing symbolic things is because your communications suck. But that is not Matt Y's criticism.
3. Because delusional Biden let in millions upon millions of migrants and created chaos in low income communities and also had his brain fall out on live TV, thus losing the election, Democrats should basically abandon all their previous normative claims in every other sphere.
"Biden did a bunch of symbolic things which had no immediate impact on the price of gas or anything tangible but he should not have done this. Why exactly?"
Because optics matter. People can clearly see where Biden's priorities lie. And it wasn't bringing down the costs of gas, or increasing fossil fuel production.
Voters disagree.
If optics mattered, Trump wouldn't have won in 2024. His optics were downright shitty unless you were a teenage boy who thinks it's hilarious when the presidential candidate pretends to give a blow job to a mic at a campaign event.
I'll grant you one time when Trump's optics were genuinely impressive: when he stood up and raised his fist right after being shot. That was truly great optics and the one exception I can think of to what was otherwise a cesspool.
You and I both agree that Trump is bad (despite some other disagreements on optimal policy mix).
But I think voters took Biden's signals on stuff like oil and gas (and even more on immigration) as what his administration cared about, and they just really disagreed (I will note I did to).
I'm a right leaning person that does think climate change is real. But while I'm not against investment to boost green R&D, I'm also not one of the ones willing to pay a bunch extra to go green.
For example, I would be happy to put solar on my house if it actually saved me money.
But by far my bigger focus is getting down my $500k a month electric bill.
>$500k a month electric bill
Got a data center under the ranch, there, hoss? Maybe a reverse osmosis plant?
Three meters, two shops, and 200 amp service to the house. I also put the AC at 56 at night. I like it cold when I sleep otherwise I sweat.
>AC at 56 at night
Now that's living like a king. Unfortunately I would be the victim of immediate regicide if I tried that in my house.
"Optics matter" is just another way of saying "My communication sucks".
On the one hand we are saying Trump can try to cut Obamacare, blow up the deficit, break all kinds of criminal statutes, get convicted of crimes, and nothing matters because the median voter is too uninformed to care because those things do not affect them tangibly on the ground.
On the other hand we are saying "Optics matter" for Biden because even if something does not cause any tangible change on the ground, the same uninformed median voter is able to anticipate the second and third order effects of Biden's "symbolic" moves far into the future and react negatively.
This is clearly some eight dimensional chess.
Democrats and Republicans are held to wildly different standards by voters, also water is wet, Trump's makeup is orange, the bear defecates in the woods, nothing to see here, move along.
Part of this is centrists who are supposedly Democrats loudly agree w/ Republican arguments that Democrats suck on issue x in a way that never happens with Republican's attacking other Republican's, at least ones that stay in good standing.
This is also true of the Left, see anytime somewhat positive news about Biden's economy was shown, but while it was annoying on Twitter, there weren't a lot of left-wingers on cable or network TV slamming Democrat's.
For 40 years, every single Republican basically says, "Democrat's are evil weirdos who hate America" and that message bleeds through to even non-political people and honestly, a lot of Democrat's who are in more conservative spaces, especially when a "hey, Democrats are actually good" message is basically nowhere, even on spaces supposedly friendly to Democrat's.
Obviously, another part is that while the media as a whole to be liberal-leaning, the Beltway Political Media is right-leaning on economics at a minimum and politics in general and has bent over backwards for the GOP on TV for as long as I've been alive.
""Democrat's are evil weirdos who hate America""
Obviously this isn't true of the Democratic party as a whole. But just as obvious there are vocal segments of the Democratic coalition that have an anti-Western/anti-American world view. Particularly at elite institutions.
So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment.
The solution (for both parties) is to continually push back and say those values aren't are values.
"So just like Republicans get tarred when there are a small segment of racists in their group. Democrats get tarred with the anti-American segment."
The penalty (if any) that the GOP pays for the so called "a small segment of racists in their group" is next to nothing compared to the gigantic penalty Dems pay for hosting out-groups in their coalition.
The median voter may not be racist herself but she experiences much more cognitive discomfort when she sees an out-group member somewhere in an inner city shouting Anti-American slogans on FoX than when she sees her own uncle at Thanksgiving saying wildly racist things.
The situation is not symmetric at all. We see the same dynamic play out in many multi-ethnic democracies in the world.
Except the definition of 'evil weirdo who hates America' to the median Republican isn't the 1% of people who want to give it back to the Native American's, it's any person who has a more liberal social view than they do.
Sorry, this view from centrists that they just join in the hippie punching enough, you won't get called an evil leftist who hates America because you want a slightly higher tax rate on rich people and that 45% of the country won't believe the GOP when they say it has never been true.
Notice Republican's never say, "well, those open Gropyers who we put in actual charge of things are bad people." They just ignore they exist and attack, attack, attack all while every centrist Democratic pathetically is ready to genuflect and say, "yes, so many of people who vote for me are weirdos who I dislike. Please accept my apologies and the fact I don't like them either, just like you."
Also, reactionaries are the Republican base. 25-30% of America wants basically a pre-Civil Rights/Women's Lib/etc. America, with some exceptions for non-white people or women they personally think are OK. This isn't some fantasy, this is truth. Meanwhile, even the vast majority of Bernie votes just want a larger social welfare state and maybe some more liberal social policy than you may agree with.
Exactly! We should acknowledge this obvious asymmetry and try to figure out a way to concretely deal with it.
My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups.
We should work on lowering the cultural legitimacy deficit if we wish to deliver better material outcomes for the people we say we care about without just parroting what the GOP is already doing along all policy fronts.
"My hypothesis is that the Democrats lack in-group legitimacy with the median voter because the median voter as of 2025 is still a cultural conservative where as Dems are a gaggle of racial/cultural out-groups."
definitely some truth to that.
But I submit policies do matter to. Voters don't want open borders, nor do they want to give up their gas stoves or cars. And they want that gas to be cheap.
Voters want many things: High paying jobs but also low costs. Low taxes and also good benefits (for themselves). Clean air/water where they live but also chemical plants spewing pollution. Beach front properties in Miami but also low insurance costs.
I remember back when the GOP was calling for "personal responsibility" that it used to be the "cool and serious" thing among the DNC pundit class but since Trump gutted the Obama+Hillary+Biden version of the Dem party now the "cool and serious" things seems to be to say "shut up and give the voters what they want now now now!".
+100
Y'know... good points all over the place, Matt. But I find it hard to focus on the climate policy specifics when my main takeaway is the two graphs, and what they represent:
Republican propaganda being really, really effective.
All the other political decisions in here are quibbling on the margins. The issue is that when Republicans want to make something unpopular, they CAN.
I find it hard to muster a lot of enthusiasm for political projects that aren't centered around discrediting and crushing the right-wing misinformation machine, because any other strategy will be swept aside by it. Even taking our "big tent" dreams to their furthest extremes, do we really think that Fox & Co. couldn't make people like Jared Golden and MGP unpopular by making disingenuous and even left-coded arguments, when they have a coordinated messaging machine of limitless value?
Yeah, they're great, talented politicians who get their districts. But while Aaron Judge is great at hitting. maybe better than anybody ever, he's still probably going to make an out when he's facing Paul Skenes like he did in the first inning last night. So it goes with our top stars and the RWM machine.
Curious if you have any thoughts on how to crush the right wing disinformation machine? Matt's thesis is essentially - give them less objectionable stuff to work with. I'm guessing you'd say we need to be better at correcting the record, but just loudly shouting about the veracity of our version of the facts hasn't worked so far. Maybe a liberal Joe Rogan would be more able to connect with low information voters, but they'd actually have to be Rogan-esque and hold a bunch of heterogeneous views to make the liberal parts palatable. More and more, I think dems have to stop being such earnest scolds if they want to connect with voters. What do you think?
It’s a really good question and I wish I had more ideas than I do.
I will say, if we’re talking about “liberal Joe Rogan” then we’re already off base, because Joe Rogan is genuinely not ideological; he is a symptom of the right wing messaging machine, not a part of it. I really think people who see Rogan as some kind of conscious malign actor and not a charismatic communicator of broad lowbrow opinion are misunderstanding him REALLY badly.
All we can do really is try stuff. We can look at stuff that ISN’T working.
Our partisan media is worse than useless for advocacy, because all they can do is navel gaze and criticize Democrats. It’s pathological, their inability to focus on issue contrast for 10 seconds, their inability to resist indulging right wing narratives. The party should stop conferring insider status to that class of pundit and promote people who take more of a Lawrence O’Donnell approach.
Basically we need pundits who are trying to actually message, and not entertain either themselves or people who are extremely invested in Democratic politics… they have no interest in recapping the failures of Republicans because it bores them. It bores them. But by the time they’re bored of a Republican sin and stop talking about it, 90% of the public still hasn’t heard about it. Nobody wants to repeat themselves even though it is the core of persuasive messaging, especially among such a… distracted… electorate.
Since the intellectual liberal temperament seems deeply uninterested in actually advocating for itself, the party ought to pay people to do it. Like, liberal Joe Rogan? It’s been 20 years since we last gave “liberal Sean Hannity” a try, maybe let’s throw that fastball down the middle for a strike.
Paging Dr. Franken…
I also think, in terms of things the party can control more directly, the Democrats should get way, way more aggressive in attacking the “legacy” media. People think the media is aligned with Democrats not because the media acts that way, but because DEMOCRATS act that way. Tell Jake Tapper to fuck himself, already.
You don't need Republican propaganda to convince people that they should care about cost and energy reliability. And that policies that push other things aren't not in the voters interest.
Republican propaganda is effective because their politician's true beliefs on big ticket items are in line with their stated beliefs. The GOP loves to cut taxes for the rich and take bribes from rich people but this is built upon a coherent foundational belief system of social Darwinism cloaked either in religion and/or ethnicity.
DLC Dem propaganda is in-effective because individual DLC Dem politicians' true beliefs often conflict with their stated beliefs. DLC Dems love to take bribes from the rich (just like the GOP) and ride the gravy train but they profess to be worried about poor people. Their inauthenticity and need to constantly triangulate on everything is the source of their weakness.
You are deciding that the problem is what you want it to be. You are not describing how the Republicans operate AT ALL.
Like, seriously execrable analysis, I wish I could be more constructive but it’s just flawed from the start.
Oh and the DLC disbanded in 2011 so maybe update your shibboleths?
Its a free country and stating that you disagree without explaining why is fine but I don't have to take that seriously.
Surely you are not naive enough to think that just because the "DLC" disbanded in 2011 the mindset it cultivated is gone. I don't know what to make of that level of silly thinking.
The entire issue with Democrats is efficacy. Does your plan pencil out? What aren't you considering? What were the results? Who is accountable and how will you change your thinking and actions in light of what you now know? It seems like they are always living the definition of insanity and hide behind "I'm just the idea guy" or "Well we have to do SOMETHING (even if it makes things worse)"
“They pocketed enormous amounts of spending, then pushed Democrats to use every regulatory means at their disposal to curtail fossil fuel use and fossil fuel production.”
I’m curious as to the details of this, what money was pocketed? The green banks stuff? It was written as though the reader should already know or as something not worth expanding upon, but seems directly tied to how successful the intent of the IRA ended up being.
My gratitude for a really precise and thorough column on a topic where I tend to object to Matt's commentary. And if you haven't read the linked review from 2008(!) it holds up very well.