>I don’t think it’s a big mystery why progressives keep deluding themselves into thinking that they can use economic policy to avoid the need to come to terms with public opinion on cultural issues — it’s because progressives themselves prioritize cultural issues over economic ones.<
A simple yet profound insight.
Matt really has a gift for unwrapping things that seem obvious after he explains them. But weren't at all obvious the moment before you read the explanation.
In the aughts I was at probably a dozen educated left/center-left social events where people led with "What's the Matter With Kansas," shaking their heads sadly to "Why do working-class people vote against their own economic interests (and against us)?" I pointed out, "But we vote for our values and against our economic self-interest, why wouldn't you expect working class people to do the same?" Over 90% of the time, I got a few seconds blank stare, and then some version of "But it's different because our cultural values are good and theirs are bad." I think very, very few people on the left can get past the framework of "Democrats are for empathy and helping people, while Republicans are selfish and want to limit people." We're still living down "deplorables" and "cling to their guns or religion." I don't know why--maybe because this is the shockingly explicit stereotype you hear from national media and teachers/professors--but I know it's a major barrier to winning a majority.
I mean I was in Colorado when they tried to run a cake baker out of business in a Disney cartoon villain manner, and there will be replies to this comment defending it.
Revealed preference is to shoot the survivors of the defeated enemy in the culture war, and people won’t forget it.
I don't defend the morality of it (it's awful; indeed, I wouldn't knowingly patronize a shop with such a policy) nor the practicality of it (it's a lousy way to run a business) but I do defend the legality of it. Offering a service that involves creative input is fundamentally different from, say, managing apartments, and I believe a first amendment carve-out is appropriate, at least if the business is sufficiently small.
I think we need to very tightly define accommodations so a mob can’t enlist the power of the state to close you if you don’t serve someone who wants to jam kale in their dick hole in the middle of the sales floor.
And I neither will defend the morality of the cake baker nor would I patronize a place, but it’s clear both sides want to make the other side dig their own grave then bury them in it in the cruelest way possible.
Wait, why are you putting your finger on the scale (or something on something) by bringing public indecency into it? The cake customer wasn't trying to commit a public sex act.
I'm still of the opinion that if someone wants you to make a three tiered white cake with pipework it's none of your business what use they put it to and you're obligated to serve them. A dildo cake or writing some sort of "Congratulations Gay Dudes" is where the 1st amendment should be involved.
Along with the freedom of conscience issue (which seems really important to me--as a consultant, am I allowed to refuse to work for a weapons manufacturer or a state prison system or a casino?), there's a bad knock-on effect of these lawsuits: The best argument for a lot of freedom is "no skin off my nose."
"Adam and Steve wanna get married? Ugh, okay, fine, just leave me out of it" is a perfectly fine basis for allowing the freedom of other people to live their lives in ways you don't approve of or understand.
Making it clear that you may be coerced in various ways to take part or go along with it undermines that argument.
>...wants you to make a three tiered white cake with pipework it's none of your business what use they put it to<
Broadly speaking I agree with this, but we're not talking about baking. We're talking about *decorating* —using sugar to write words and messages.
Should a bookstore owned by a fundamentalist Christian with harsh views about homosexuality be obliged to carry titles of interest to LGBT people? After all, refusal to do so undeniably constites descrimination against that community, and a refusal to serve them.
I see no meaningful difference.
Yes, obnoxious people sometimes hold odious views—news at 11.
But our constitution wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on if it protected only the enlightened.
I wouldn't expect them to write anything on it or supply two marzipan groom figures, but it's just a boring ass cake. It could be a birthday cake, it could be a 25th anniversary cake, it could even be something I'm gonna take home and have sex with, who knows? You're not condoning anything, you're making a cake with little flowers on it.
As to the bookstore owner, if you've got a cute little diary with a shiny cover and everything and you don't sell it to me 'cuz you suspect I'm going to write or draw gay stuff in it, this is a problem. You don't have to carry "Genderqueer"...
You are avoiding the issue. If the baker had said, "I don't make sexually explicit cakes," there would not be a problem. But instead, he said that he refused to make any cake for a same-sex wedding.
And let's not pretend that it is an easy question; note that the Supreme Court was unable to come to a decision on the free speech issue.
Another part of the progressive error in accusing working-class Republicans of voting against their own (economic) interests is that the Democratic platform is not good for all working class people. It depends on numerous individual characteristics like what industry a person works in, where they live, if they are white, if they have children etc.
For instance, the Democrats think that every working class person can't wait to be a member of a strongly empowered union, but many working class people know that their business isn't that profitable anyway and would be in competition with non-unionized businesses. For them, the drawbacks of an empowered union might outweigh the benefits, especially if an economy-wide empowerment of unions raises prices. A working class person who has a private-sector job would be correct to oppose empowering public sector workers because that will increase their taxes.
Likewise it depends on someone's industry. If someone works in the hydrocarbon industry, or live in a place that has a strong hydrocarbon industry, voting Republican makes more sense. If someone works for a small business that struggles against government regulation, the Republicans are better. If someone works for a business that has been victimized by aggressive, greedy lawyers whose clients do not have valid cases, the Republicans are better.
Immigration matters too. Working class people may not like huge numbers of migrants arriving where they live and having a very high service load that exceeds the taxes the immigrants pay.
If someone is white, immigration creates some economic downsides because the Democrats believe in affirmative action for many non-white immigrant populations.
There are also basic ethics that progressives don't share. Someone with a job might consider long-term welfare to be immoral. Someone might be angry that able-bodied people can claim Social Security disability and take advantage of financial support meant for people with very serious handicaps. Someone might be outraged that the Democrats want the government to assume the college debts of people who borrowed for useless degrees at overpriced colleges and who now don't have demanding jobs that enable them to pay off their debts.
If someone sends their children in K-12 to a private, religious school, the Republicans are better because they believe in school vouchers. The Democrats unconditionally oppose vouchers.
So it's just unnuanced ignorance to think that every low-income person would benefit from Democratic policies or that Democratic policies are always more ethical than conservative ones.
Yes, there are some working class people who would benefit from Democratic policies, but not all working class people do, and there is nothing wrong with a working class person deciding to prioritize cultural issues.
Indeed yes - the urbane metropolitans Prog. Left although secular to me carries a large dollop of a kind of secular "convert the heathen" quasi religious thinking.
It is definately a major barrier to winning outside of urbane metros where the Ds have increasingly become cantonised.
On the other hand, you never hear these types of stories on the Democratic side to their own voters because the worst thing Democrats do is marginally increase taxes or cost of living for people who can afford it and mostly don’t particularly care. So in that sense Democrats do not vote against their self-interest in a significant way even though they may be willing to sacrifice some amount of personal economic gain to make things better for others.
I dunno, I live in SF and came to deeply regret my Chesa Boudin vote pretty quick. Obviously reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, so it's not like I'm in the lock for Team R now instead, but it was an object lesson in the follies of playing footsie with the soft-on-crime faction smuggled through the lens of anticarceral compassion. Eat my face once, shame on me, eat my face twice...you can't eat my face twice.
I think that’s a different situation because you were not hurt directly by the government but by crime, and were just mistaken about the impacts of various policies on crime. That can happen sure, people can’t predict the empirical impact of all policies in advance and we have to try things out. Not to mention crime has many different causes, only some of which are influenceable by policy. People make mistakes like that all the time and it’s understandable. It’s not voting for the leopard that will eat your face, it’s voting for a conservation policy that has a side effect of increasing the wild leopard population.
This is different from the government directly hurting you where it’d be fine if they just did literally nothing instead.
agree, I think the "leopards eating faces" as applied to Republican voting is mostly in the form of voting for a specific policy that is ostensibly going to be punitive or harmful to "others", but then it's implemented and ends up hurting *you*. Prime examples were Trump voters that supported tariffs only to find, surprise, Trump implemented them in the sloppiest and most careless fashion possible so many Trump voters like farmers and manufacturing workers (as just some of the primarily harmed) have been in the process of getting their faces eaten. Tariffs were supposed to only hurt Chi-nuh right? Another is immigration deportations, where Trump supporters who were voting to have "those illegals" kicked out end up having a family member, neighbor, friend deported too. Or a Trump supporter whose business/value stream depended on immigrant labor "he wasn't supposed to deport the ones working!" ;p
Lots of Democrats in San Francisco have complaints about what "their side" has done to them or their city wrt education and policing and public order. That seems like a parallel case.
This is a very self flattering view of progressive policies and their side effects. It omits things like, say, adding environmental regulations to the point where you cant build environmentally friendly power or public transportation, or not punishing shoplifting to be kind to marginalized groups and then having stores closed due to loss in minority neighborhoods. Its less malicious than when done by the leopards, so maybe a new metaphor is required, but the effects can be equally negative.
Side effects are very different from direct effects. No one can possibly predict all side effects. And the malice really matters—most people found it morally worse when the regime killed Renee Good and Adam Pretti directly than DOGE cuts having side effects that may have killed millions.
The meme of Leopards-Eating-Face-party meme has nothing to do with politicians doing it to voters and everything to do with the claims of not being conservative enough that you use will one day be used against you.
As for the broader point and Democrats never doing that to voters, I know you argue about this every time it comes up, but large numbers of voter feel like Biden did that with Covid restrictions and progressive EOs/legislation leading to inflation.
I don't know why people think covid restrictions were "progressive." Democrat, sure, since it was mostly Red states that didn't do them. And the reaction seems to have been mostly based on Trump's early response politicizing it, rather than treating it as an infection disease we need to take national steps on.
As I recall, the people driving staying open longer were people with lower risk tolerance (like a friend of mine who could not worrying that she'd get sick, see her newborn niece, and kill the niece through transmission) and teachers' unions. Teachers' unions did have more reason to care (teachers get exposes a to illness more than most people), but also not all the other progressives.
The Democrats need more unifying and in-fighting. These stupid blame games are usually cherry-picking to support biases and not helpful when there is a huge problem. Moderates justify this by saying only they can win the election. Progressives justify this by saying only they can win elections. In reality, we need both parts and pulling us together is much more useful than dividing us.
(I might be more salty than normal after Matt's answer to how do we fix corruption was to say progressives got to stop caring about the things they care about, instead of a thoughtful policy answer. That completely dodged what I think is the most important question the Dem's will face if they can win big in November, was sloppy analysis, and divisive. He should have just said, "I dunno, but I like arguing on X.")
The only real COVID restrictions were the travel bans put in by Trump. Everything else was basically advisory at least in my area. Workplaces went to WFH, which honestly I enjoyed for the time (though also glad it’s over); and there was social pressure to do things like masking but none of it was government-mandated or enforced (the worst thing that happened to me, other than people I know trapped in travel bans, was another gym patron yelling at me for not wearing a mask at the gym).
Inflation was unpredictable and had many causes and it was a worthy price to pay for the amazing job market we had at the time—most young people today would’ve loved to have graduated 5 years ago. Downstream effects of policies are very different from the government directly hurting you, which progressives basically never do in a significant way at least to their own base (I agree with the comments about the cake baker in Colorado being treated unfairly but also that was like many years ago and there are not really any more recent examples whereas you can come up with a similarly big injustice by Trump practically every month).
You can make these comments over and over again, but it does not match public perception. At some point, you and other progressives will need to address that disconnect or you will continue to lose the public trust.
There hasn't been a Democratic president as extreme and erratic as Trump, so you have a point there, although it's established that net domestic migration goes from Blue States to Red States, and some of those residents must be Democratic voters who prefer the lower cost of living of whatever Red State they are moving to.
I know that that net-migration to Red States is partly due to housing costs, and not taxes, but I think it's a revealed preference that even a lot of Democratic voters don't like the fruits of Democratic governance. Those dissatisfied ex-Blue Staters are angry about a set of problems that developed over generations, not suddenly like Trump voters now regretting their vote for a single politician.
"Why do the poors vote against their interests?" is a very different question than "Why do the reasonably well-off vote against their interests?". My decidedly more 90s Republican view of that situation is that there might be a reason they're poor...
I imagine the other question is more complicated but still less than virtuous.
This is an important insight that Matt and SB centrists should pay more attention to: insulting the people you want to persuade to support you is a very poor strategy.
The profession mission of SB is persuading people to make better, more pragmatic political choices, but so often the approach is a more detailed version of X, where the subtext is not persuasion but in-group cohesion through defining an external villain you can rally against. Great if you want to get nice vibes about how smart you are or vent frustration at people who prioritize different objectives (or just such at doing politics as much as you) but not good at converting voters and policy makers.
The pitch to progressives is abandon your goals and values because we believe this enormously complex and unpredictable system will have a bad outcome (for us and our goals) if you don’t. Which is far less persuasive than convincing people you’re mostly in agreement with them and can work towards some of their goals if they cooperate.
I think this was pretty clear all along. Americans are extremely rich, no one really cares that much if they are 10% richer or poorer.
Theoretically “cultural” issues should have more room for win-win because they aren’t as zero-sum (if we tax A to fund B, that is zero sum; if we let A get married and don’t put LGBT or immigration related obstacles in the way, that doesn’t actually hurt B or prevent B from also getting married). But a lot of people on cultural issues want to restrict and hurt others *even for no benefit to themselves* like we saw in the debate about people getting green cards to their spouses. If someone is like “I want to tax you more so that I can pay less,” I think people would see that as fine, they understand it’s self-interested and we can compromise. If someone’s like “I want to separate you from your partner/spouse even though I gain no material benefit from doing so but just for lulz” people are much more likely to see that as malicious and evil rather than simply self-interest (even if a zero-sum nature) that they can find ground to compromise with.
It seems the two paragraphs here are in tension. When you write of a conservative saying “I want to separate you from your partner/spouse even though I gain no material benefit from doing so but just for lulz”, the word "material" does a lot of work. The actual conservative presumably cares a great deal about traditional values on sexuality and marriage, and is likely to be skeptical of immigration as well. The fact that allowing something would have no immediate economic cost is not going to override strongly held opinions on cultural issues. Not for a conservative, and not for anyone else for that matter (except possibly a minute number of die hard libertarians).
I mean...money and circumstances often override cultural issues for everyone on the material world? Pro-life folks get abortions, anti-corporate people work for corporations?
It just doesn't usually change their underlying cultural position, or their voting habits.
Well I guess I don't have the same definition of rich. Sure, everybody can be called rich if you pick the right comparison. In my mind to be rich is a social thing so if you are near the bottom of your society you ain't rich. How many Americans are nearer the top than the bottom? How many feel like they have a lot of control?
What's "your society"? If I have the smallest Hamptons summer home among all the partners at my firm, am I poor?
Americans are incredibly rich compared to the vast majority of people alive or who have ever lived. Even if you control for the cost of necessities, Americans lead the pack.
Do they really do this though? Progressives *really* want Medicare for All and talk about it all time. I don't think it's that they prioritize cultural over economic issues; I think it's that they never prioritize anything but want the whole shebang.
They dropped Medicare for All once the Warrenite staffers entered government and it stopped being a factional wedge issue. It's all Israel/Palestine now.
Exactly - the proof that they prioritize cultural over economic issues would be if start saying "we have to reduce the debt and entitlements if we want to secure the suburban upper-middle class as a loyal part of the anti-reactionary alliance"
I think it's important to avoid over-generalizations here. While some progressives may legitimately do prioritize cultural issues over economic ones, there are plenty of others that prioritize economic issues. Lumping every progressive politician into one big bucket, and saying "this is where all their priorities are" is far too simplistic.
On the free speech point, it's important to recognize that Matt, and also his audience, is _also_ more interested in left factional disputes than doing stories about Republicans being bad about free speech. That's why there are numerous stories from moderates at the NYT about left illiberalism on college campuses but fewer about Republicans. That's why the Letter on Justice and Open Debate was signed not just by Matt but also by tons of other free speech types, but there's no comparable letter about Republicans.
Additionally, there is also the point that Matt made on a podcast recently, which is that a big issue that gets censored is criticism of Israel, which most center-left commentators don't want to be vocal about. But to my point, Matt couldn't remember any episodes of this off-hand, while I would be surprised if he struggled similarly with remembering left factional censorship incidents.
If it's the one I'm thinking of, the Banh mi story was IIRC back in ~2016 or so back when "cultural appropriation" was getting into full swing and college campuses seemed to be ground zero for it, and it was called to my attention by a libertarian type who would _also_ of course be talking about the jailed over FB meme now.
The only Oberlin story I remember is how a dumb college administrator endorsed a set of slanderous and defamatory claims against a local bakery by student activists (and endorsed boycotting and cutting school contracts with said business.)
This was after a student of a particular phenotype was confronted for shoplifting a wine bottle, ran, and then was chased by a staff member. The student and his friends beat up the staff member. This was all treated as a racist incident. (My friend who went to Oberlin says Oberlin was in the wrong but the owners were indeed racists. I still can’t get over how stupid the school was in terms of exposing itself to liability .)
"I still can’t get over how stupid the school was in terms of exposing itself to liability."
To me, this is an essential part of understanding the "oppressed by progressives" narrative. While the MAGA view drastically overstates the situation, it's also true that a tremendous number of institutions over the 2010 to 2021 timeframe that had lawyers (and, in the case of law firms, literally were lawyers) and other experts who could advise them increasingly openly acted as though various laws (statutory and common law) didn't apply to them so long as they were pursuing "noble" goals and could dispense with even the fig leaf of impartiality.
It wasn’t until 2022 that I started to realize “oh there is nothing I can do to be good enough in the eyes of these people. I am immutably guilty by phenotype and liable for the transgression committed by other people. Huh?”
I am so glad this type of nonsense is on the decline. It’s just so adversarial and unhelpful (and kind of cover for being mean/bullying.)
I mean, it’s Oberlin. What else would one expect? It’s going to be the farthest left place in America, at least in terms of college campuses, always has been. Taking an example of something that happened at Oberlin and thinking that’s a nationwide phenomenon is usually going to be an erroneous assumption. (I didn’t know about the banh mi issue but I think I did hear about the incident you’re describing, it’s tickling some memory that I had forgotten by properly discounting as being Oberlin nonsense)
I love Obies, I know a surprising number of their class of 04 fairly well; all turned out to be really cool people. But from what I hear it’s certainly a place.
It would have been an awesome place to go to college back in my college years, I think. They have a great network. It may have gone to pot, idk, but everyone I knew that went there turned out to be a pretty awesome and successful person in whatever they did
The banh mi story happened the year before-kind of primed the pump for what came later. Short story is that a Vietnamese student mentioned in class that they disliked that a pulled pork sandwich was being offered as a banh mi by the school dining services. This led to a student newspaper article about poorly made ethnic food, with a headline describing it as cultural appropriation. Which lead to a New York Post article blowing it up, then plenty of more mainstream publications piling on board.
As to how stupid the school was in the bigger incident, that's par for the course.
That's because the Banh Mi story is quite old at this point. But I can't begin to tell you how insane this story or more important how much play it got. And more important an absolutely prime example of why Matt way overemphasizes which stories get play because left of center people are reading about it and underemphasizes stories that become "controversies" because of the power of right wing noise machine. Good summary here https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/oberlin-bnh-m-protests-case-study-of-the-outrage-economy.html
Takeaway is basically this became a "story" because of the New York Post. The headline of the Post story is "Students at Lena Dunham’s college offended by lack of fried chicken" Like I know it's the New York Post, their whole schtick is catchy headlines. But this was when "Girls" was launching a thousand think pieces*, so of course Lena Dunham is shoehorned in. If you read the article I posted, you'll see just how many articles were written about what was really a non-existent story let alone scandal.
I'm sorry, Matt is really mistaken as to how much power the right wing media ecosystem has at setting agendas in mainstream press and I think it's actually a really underrated part of why Trump's scandals and corruption aren't pushing down his popularity even further. What I think unites your median New York Times reader and right wing noise machine is "these kids today!!"...THAT is as much as anything why college "controversies" get an absurd and ludicrous amount of coverage vis a vis their actual importance. That and this cultural veneration of "The 60s!".
** In the realm of non crank or non absurd partisan conservatives do have a point about some things. There may not be a show with a wider gap between it's actual viewership and the amount of articles and commentary written about it. And it's hard not to explain this without acknowledging that the political and cultural leanings of a disproportionate number of culture writers plays a part in this.
Re: the first paragraph, this is true, but I don't think anyone should view it as surprising or hypocritical.
Any reasonable theory of change suggests that center-left writers will have more influence on their own side, and that legal action / support for FIRE is the best way to fight abuses by small-town red state sheriffs.
Sadly, even if the NYT or NPR cared enough to make a big stink about Bushart's shameful mistreatment, they'd risk polarizing it and magnifying the sheriff's support. (They should still report on it, of course, but as partisan organs, they're likely to achieve more if the reporting is restrained).
I don't think that view of the politics is right. Obviously the maga base isn't going to drop their views over this, but they aren't the only people. There are lots of cross pressured people who don't like left wing censoriousness, and who potentially didn't vote for Dems because of it, and who also would dislike right wing censorship if it was widely publicized.
I think your conclusion is correct, but I think the relevant actors have lost the ability publicize these events widely without raising suspicion about the veracity/fairness of their own coverage. Worse, they usually end up converting issues into exclusively leftist causes instead of merely creating broader awareness.
The ICE presence in Minneapolis is probably the strongest counter-example, but that was buttressed by vivid, crowd-sourced social media coverage. It might even be fair to say the numerous social media posts were a bigger factor than the media coverage. Plus the events in MN were ongoing and dramatic in a way that Bushart's jailing was not.
I do not think this is the correct diagnosis. Instead, I think Matt, the NYT Ed board, the Atlantic, etc believe that eg rural Kentucky sherrifs and the Ball State University administration are dumb, uninteresting, and unimportant for the broader direction of the country, and their audience is mostly not interested in their conduct because we don't live in those places, attend those universities, or interact with people on either side of dumb Facebook posts about Charlie Kirk.
There are also many right wing people (MAGA supporters or not) who don't like this kind of crap, just as there are/were a ton of liberals who didn't like the anti-speech excesses of the Great Awokening.
The Left's illiberalism tends to receive more attention than the Right's because the Right has fewer opportunities to exercise illiberalism outside of government. Within government, however, the Right's illiberal tendencies are well documented.
The Right doesn't control important institutions outside of the church; everything else is left-leaning and, the Left has been more willing to marginalize or exclude people who fall outside its ideological orthodoxy.
"outside of government" is very much along the lines of "other than the shooting, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play". As we have seen, control of government lets you control media, universities, scientific research, law firms, etc.
"control of government lets you control media, universities, scientific research, law firms, etc."
This is overstated. The Trump administration has abused its powers, and I don't want to minimize how bad that's been or how bad it could become.
The administration has made institutions think twice before crossing them, and threaten to do worse, but they do not in any sense "control media, universities, law firms, or scientific research in the US." For every organization that succumbed to their bullying, ten have stood up and loudly denounced them.
'Control media' is obviously overstating the case, but I don't think there's ever been a situation quite like this CBS situation before? The US is not Hungary though, I think we can agree.
Lots of people have said mean things about Trump, that's true. But the actual behavior of our leading institutions has been to compromise with the lawless demands made by Trump.
We see it up at the top of society... down here on the ground not so much. Minus the kowtowing that we weren't seeing in Trump 1 things would be pretty bad but non-existential.
I did a little research on law firms and universities to refresh my memory before replying and I think my ratio may be too conservative.
Having said that, a lot depends on how you define the reference class. If you just say "Ivy League Universities", there aren't even ten possibilities. If you restrict yourself to "Ivy+", or the top 20, or the top 50, you get different ratios.
Likewise, law firms: it sucks that Kirkland & Ellis hustled to cut a deal Trump, but it's not like the rest of the legal profession fell into line. There's no one quite as big, but plenty of firms in the same ballpark fought back, and there's a very long tail that just hasn't been affected.
I don't in any way want to minimize how bad the Trump administration's actions have been. Like you said, the chilling effect is bad, even if it's impossible to calculate.
Yes, Larry Bushart is done poking the elephant. On the other hand, it's very easy to find people eager to take his place.
The problem with this is that you can’t possibly actually tell how many entities have changed their behavior out of fear of Trump.
It’s one thing to see which ones have publicly capitulated and which ones haven’t, but you are assuming that everything you haven’t seen should be categorized as resistance.
Except I suspect that, on a day-to-day basis, a very large percentage of Americans feel more oppressed/antagonized by their employer's policies, local community institutions, popular media, etc. than anything "the government" is directly doing to them.
Are we still saying that employers are woke girlbosses unleashing the fearsome demons of HR on their helpless employees? I thought that was so 2018-2022 and is pretty much evaporated by now.
All of which has been well documented and criticized by the center-left. However, Trump is only attacking those organizations because of either Trump's personal vindictiveness or those institutions being biased against the Right.
The reason moderates have been criticizing the Left's illiberalism more is because the Left controls almost every important facet of American life.
It's wild to me that the fact Fortune 500 companies started doing Pride month events a few years ago has been interpreted as the Left completely controls the corporate world.
Well...I mean, if we accept that Trump's personal vindictiveness comes from anyone refusing to sycophanticly beg to suck his dick, what you've just said is, Trump attacks any organization which doesn't agree with him and uses the power of the state to attempt to force them to agree with him...that's a lot worse than even the worst woke excesses, which could indeed be bad. Being fired sucks. Being jailed/deported is worse.
The difference between those two things is that government is the more powerful institution by leaps and bounds. That's the illiberalism that is truly dangerous.
It's also worth noting that illiberalism outside of government action probably isn't even definitionally accurate. Being censorious towards people in the private sector is distasteful but not illegal, it's not actually contrary to free speech. The government censoring someone, or scaring people into censoring themselves is the thing that is the actual breech of the right to which we are all entitled.
There are important issues surrounding free speech that aren't about government action. Like, if it turns out that every employer monitors all your online and public speech and fires you if you support the wrong causes, that will result in a massive decrease in practical freedom of speech (and all the bad things that come with it) even if not a single government employee is involved.
OTOH, government has the power to just shut down speech via sending men with guns to arrest the speakers, which is much worse than any realistic levels of employers policing their employees' speech.
"It's also worth noting that illiberalism outside of government action probably isn't even definitionally accurate. Being censorious towards people in the private sector is distasteful but not illegal, it's not actually contrary to free speech."
This doesn't even make sense on a dictionary level. Whoever said that "illiberalism" was a matter of what is and isn't illegal?
And in the church, not being a little illiberal is a straight path to an empty church. As churches get a little more flexible in their theology, their membership craters.
The biggest irony of all is that was supposed, almost by definition, to be the opposite - the conservatives the party of the civil society and intermediate powers, the progressives the party of the state and of the masses of atomized individuals.
If you think the Left controls corporate America, that's a product of your media diet being stuck in a meme version of 2020, not an accurate reflection of the private sector in America.
This is beyond stupid. Log off and enter the real world. A handful of companies deciding to throw pennies at a handful of DEI programs for temporary PR purposes does not equate into the Left controlling corporate America. If this is really how you think, you've let memes hijack your thought processes.
Various corporations mouthed woke phrases when it seemed profitable to do so, and stopped when it no longer seemed profitable. Many now make the opposite statements.
I'm not at all saying those companies or their management were ever woke. I'm saying most of their public statements were always strategic, trying to say what would please their employees or investors or media covering them or politicians and bureaucrats regulating them. When their perception of what expressed beliefs would be profitable changed, so did their expressed beliefs.
That's not 100% true, of course. Some CEOs and some workforces have genuine political views and values--the folks running Chick-fil-A probably aren't just pretending to be conservative, and the folks running Penzeys Spices aren't just pretending to be liberal. But mostly it's true. Jamie Dimon took a knee for BLM with the same sincerity he did whatever ass-kissing Trump required of him.
Yeah I read that as the premise of the question. FIRE still has a lot of credibility because they point this out. But it’s obvious that anti-Israel is the most censored viewpoint in the US, even for campus deplatforming according to FIRE’s data: https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/under-fire. And there are the anti-boycott laws and people literally thrown in jail or deported for it, which don’t apply to any other viewpoint. People who talk about free speech and ignore this one viewpoint don’t have much credibility, and it’s why a lot of people have stopped listening to centrist “free speech” people who seem to think students complaining about dining hall food is a free speech violation but are fine with the federal government jailing people for writing student paper op-eds critical of Israel.
Right, and to the larger point, it's true that unless it's about Israel, there's less audience interest and less writer interest in questions of free speech from the center as well. Matt clearly has the correct view about this, but also has said that basically he cares more about left wing social pressure at Harvard than right wing explicit censorship at regional universities in red states.
I think it's far from obvious that "anti-Israel is the most censored viewpoint in the US."
Can you think of any college professor at a top-100 school who is as openly hostile to married women in the workplace, or interracial marriage, or the integration movement (aka Civil Rights Movement), as Beshara Doumani (Brown) or Lama Abu-Odeh (Georgetown) are to a Jewish Israel?
It’s interesting I just don’t think people who read the NYT and so on are all that exposed to the right’s illiberalism. Big exception to this is university campuses, where you have state legislators being vexatious litigants against like, Texas A&M. That does seem to get into the news, and it should.
Generally, the sense I get is that if you live in a world where the left controls all the major instutitions that govern your life, it likely means you are extremely upper class and comfortable.
I mean, is it really a major problem that the power grabs of the Trump administration are not being covered mainstream press organs like the NYT and Washington Post?
I'm going to extract this discussion from implicit views of what would be good/bad Dem politics and simply point out that the left factional coverage is more interesting than the Rightist press alternative. Lots of people prefer the partisan coverage, but that doesn't change the quality of the material. The straight partisanship that doesn't acknowledge the issues with their side is just lower quality reporting.
Right, also the people who want to jail everyone who said mean stuff about Charlie Kirk are idiots who have no good arguments and aren't in the social circles of people who read this substack.
I think this is more about the game theory problems with unilateral disarmament. I've been reading Matt's stuff since his Moneybox days and I don't remember pushing back against the factional left being a big deal prior to 2016. It's not like he wasn't writing stuff that was really engaging and cultivated a loyal audience. Nor are the factional posts a majority of his output now.
Just to add to the "some Arab states acted in good faith towards their Jews but outflow happened anyway" endpoint, Tunisia is an even stronger example than Morocco.
Habib Bourguiba, the first president of the Tunisian republic tried to maintain his Jewish population, and his own foreign policy was strikingly "moderate" on Israel (at least compared to Nasser or Gaddafi). He tried to make Jews safe in Tunisia. Also, in 1965, he went to the then Jordanian-controlled West Bank, and urged Arabs there to accept the 1947 partition and negotiate rather than fight, and he was nearly stoned to death for it. He even boycotted the Khartoum conference of the three noes. He even floated that Jordan should be Palestine, which infuriated King Hussein.
None of it mattered. The Tunisian Jews went from over 100K in 1940s to a few thousand by the 1980s, with no formal state expulsion. The drops cluster exactly where you'd expect if Israel was the trigger:
Tunisia had anti-Jewish riots after Suez in 1956, destroying synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish quarters. Tunisia also had attacks on Jewish businesses and the main Tunisian synagogue after the 6 Day war in 1967.
Bourguiba's good faith couldn't hold Tunisian Jews in Tunisia when popular hostility to Zionism ran that hot and Tunisian Jews got the short end of the stick for it.
Some readings on Tunisia if interested:
The Economic & Geopolitical History of Tunisia, Part 2: Banker Imperialism, French Rule, and the Road to Independence
The fact that some arab leaders tried to quell tensions but jews were pogromed out around the Arab world anyway is actually a stronger reason for zionism to exist than the other way around. "Israel being the trigger" only is true because of the violent reaction of the average Arab population deciding to take their anger out on their Jewish neighbors.
In neither of the cases Yaw evokes is there anything like "programs" - the Maghreb was a very different situation
Emmigration to both of Israel and France was something that was materially material - economics and better opportunity, plus certainly living in a stew where you get yelled at and shunned over Israel which you personally may not give any great shits about.
It's not "programs" and the European model, it's shunning, some violance and economic opporutnity - and which given what equally the same non-Jewish social classes facing barriers to emmigration (getting visas) jumped on is a major factor (equally the profiles that didn't emmigrate to either of France or Israel are telling, the Sephardic elite merchant-business owner class that also picked up out-going French colonial's businesses.
In Morocco the riots in Oujda and Jerada killed 44 Jews shortly after the declaration of the State of Israel, going house by house. Peoplee immigranting off of fear is not the same as ‘oh better economics’ when dozens have died and your neighbors are threatening more. In Libya over 140 Jews in Tripoli were murdered and half a dozen synagogues burned in 1945. In 1948 another 13 Jews were killed and nearly 300 houses burned to the ground. Anti Jewish riots continues through 1967! In Egypt there were anti Jewish riots from 1945 also through 1967, 70+ Jews dead, thousands more literally arrested and thrown into camps. Post 1957 Suez crisis literally 25k+ Jews were expelled, assets seized, and given a single suitcase to leave the county. I can go on and on.
The pull of zionism was obvious when your neighbors are killing you, burning your houses down, taking your possessions, and doing it over and over for decades. That is actually a series of extended pogroms, yes.
In fact if you look just at Tunisia, Jews were forced into labor camps during the war, and when it ended and Jews could return home with “protection” what they found was an enforced Arab Islamic state. Rabbinical courts were disbanded, Jewish community counsels were disbanded, Jewish cemeteries were destroyed to make ways for whatever the state wanted to put there, the Bizerte Crisis somehow spilled into waves of populist anti-Jewish violence, arbitrary arrests, and economic boycotts, and by the time we got to the 1967 6day war the Great Synagogue of Tunis was burned, and Jewish shops were looted in riots lasting days. The government told Jews to not go outside for fear of their lives. After that the last remaining Jews fled.
It was a slow rolling pogrom of Jews out of the country, yes. Pretending that it was only pull factors is ridiculous and ahistorical.
Do you know what pogroms are? They are sudden, indiscriminate violence and destruction against Jews by the ethnic majority. This seems like it qualifies.
Very aware of what pograms were, historically, and using Pogrom for this is about the same abuse of terminology as using Genocide to refer to Israeli action in Gaza. Can one make some strained justification of stretching the word because of emotional- political agena, yes. Is it justified no.
The cases of the Maghreb are not the same things. Different than back east.
Ok, so let’s just say that Jews in North Africa suffered occasional bouts of violence, destruction, and dispossession sometimes triggered by external events that the local Jews had nothing to do with. Fair?
Agree with everything you said, it is interesting. But attacking Synagogues of native Jews who don't want to emigrate to Israel isn't hostility to Zionism, calling it pro-Zionism would be odd but accurate.
This is a great point. In this case, anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism for the Tunisian public. They equated Jews and Israel regardless of whether the local Jews were Zionist or not.
There was a strong class-anti-Colonial element to the factor.
The French had favored Jews having Western education so there's something much more going on that anti-Semetism in a European sense, but a toxic mix of anti-Colonialism plus Anti-Israeli plus anti-Minority working together.
At the same time in the Maghreb the established Sephardic merchant families mostly stuck around - quite different from the East
Middle and working class Jews had both social toxicity push plus economic emmigration pull - (and of course Nasser and the Egyptian radio and TV which was reaching the whole region pouring forth fairly nasty incitement across the whole region in name of pan Arabism (lesser impact on other ethnic minorities but still there))
noting that the whole Blame the Co-Religionists reaction is something unfortuantely not out of general experience: see US and 9-11 - luckily US institutions stronger in capacity but that reaction was there.
It’s the same as European anti-Semitism in that sense. The hatred Jews experienced in new countries emerging in Eastern Europe after WW1 had the same flavor.
Matt writes: "There is definitely a difference between climate donors leaning on Chuck Schumer to whip a vote about whether or not to allow California to ban gasoline-powered cars and a member taking an envelope of cash from an oil company to vote a certain way on that measure."
The hypothetical oil company needs a better General Counsel. Envelope of cash went out of fashion decades ago. Do it the right way: Hire associates and others in the member's orbit, buy products & services from the same people, donate to the member's foundation, offer them a lucrative job after they leave office.
C'mon, hypothetical oil company, get with the program and be a little creative!
One funny side plot of this administration is more junior politicals who don’t have DC experience learning there really aren’t just envelopes of cash. Gotta work for a bit before you can get to K street
Some of the new lobby groups are able to play with the straight up extractive groups but it’s telling that none of the traditional firms want to play that game (because lobbyists DO go to prison! Real prison!)
"We're holding a virtual speaker series on January 4th, 2029 - hope you can participate, it comes with a $500,000 speaker fee. Hey, isn't that the day after you leave office? You should be free then!"
The best part is the corruption rube Goldberg machine is what "climate donors leaning on Chuck Schumer" means in reality. Coming to terms with the fact that Democrats and Republicans(the pre Trump variety) are, and always have been, corrupt needs to happen. Just because technocraric corruption is technically legal and has a more legitimate "feel" than hocking shitcoins on Twitter doesn't mean it isnt corruption.
There was a great video from The Onion a few years ago where a Trump voting man admits he made a mistake after reading 800 pages of queer feminist theory. You can understand why progressives try to keep the conversation on economics after watching it.
This is mockable but Democrats really should blow up stories of people voting for Trump for cultural reasons that totally blew up in their faces. Recently there was a “smart” tech guy on Twitter talking about how all the smart tech guys actually support Trump but then he got impacted by the new green card rule and everyone was mocking him for it. There have also been many news stories of Trump supporters who regret their vote after their spouses were deported that we should highlight, but the tech guy one really took the cake on vitality because he’s supposed to be genius yet couldn’t figure out one of the most fundamental facts of US politics.
There should be things like that. When we say people who vote for Trump are doing so against self-interest it should not be thought of as “you have to read 800 pages of arcane feminist theory” to understand, but rather very specific concrete things Trump did to people for no good reason that often impacts his own supporters.
Muslims voting for Trump because they think he's better on Israel (and then being surprised when he deports people for criticizing Israel) are mind-blowing to me.
It's like someone voting for Democrats because abortion is their number issue and they are pro-life, or voting for Republicans because guns are their number issue and they want more gun control.
On a few of the left v center political points here, I think there's a real chance of sleepwalking into disaster for progressive and centrist Dem candidates alike. There's an assumption due to the points MY mentions that Maine is easily winnable. There's an assumption of an anti trump blue wave backlash taking the House and tightening up the Senate. And trump's bungles on tariffs and Iran have dampened conservative enthusiasm, further playing into the narrative.
But I'd frame the issue less as a focus on factional Dem-on-Dem infighting trying to capitalize on that belief, and moreso the risk being that there's no affirmative policy case being made at all. The issue that Dems have to confront going into the summer is they have to make some sort of actual case, and if it's all Israel/billionaires being bad then that's again not an affirmative case about what you actually want to do when you govern. Tax billionaires for what? To fund what? Reform foreign policy commitments to whom? Why? For what purpose? These are unanswered questions in the primary fights thus far.
I don’t get it. Democrats certainly have an affirmative case! Sure, there’s disagreement between the centrists/moderates and progressives, but broadly speaking, the party wants:
1. To improve material conditions for Americans; “abundance”
2. To have a government that isn’t blatantly breaking tons of rules/isn’t run by a guy who denies election results and enriches himself
3. To try to repair our relationships with our allies/our standing in the world.
I dunno, I get just a little suspicious when people say “I just don’t know what the Democrats STAND FOR” when 2024!Trump had zero policy details and a bunch of completely unrealistic promises. Worked for him!
Abundance lip service has been restricted to housing in the primary and other policy prescriptions so far. There's no policy proscription debate abundance has sparked outside of that.
On corruption you're doing the same thing -- corruption is bad, yes. But the policy is beat the bad guy, I've seen no one run on a policy regime to fix the issue long term or make a policy agenda out of it.
On repairing our relationship with allies, what allies? How? Through what means? I've seen nothing here either.
Eventually you have to make an affirmative case rather than HE BAD ME GOOD even if it's after you win. What will they do with power? I think that's actually a dire need to explain, and Dems are getting worse and worse at it, and it has been costing them because then people can apply whatever they want to you. Harris had this exact problem, people saw her much further left wing than she functionally likely actually was. That made her lose and Dems lose down ballot badly. That's my point.
Sure, *you* want more detailed policy proposals and goals from the Democrats. You read and comment on Slow Boring, which makes you very unusual among Americans. The average American DOES NOT CARE about detailed policy proposals. Riddle me this: how many Trump voters do you think could give you *anything* resembling a description of Trump's proposed policies, beyond what would fit on a bumper sticker, like "illegal immigrants out"? I'd be surprised if it was greater than 15%.
Again it's less about policy proposal and more an affirmative case for….anything. trump made quite a lot of affirmative cases - kicking out immigrants is an affirmative case for what you want to do. “Screw that guy who is kicking out immigrants” is definitely a policy I agree with, but then it begs the question of what that candidates stance actually is on the question of immigration. Dems have become a “screw that guy” party, and while that's effective for the base it's less effective for a general election. There must be an affirmative case made, or (as we've seen) trump et al will tell the voters what the affirmative case for Dems is, and Dems will again be left going “nu uh” which is not a good political place to be in
Is any Dem running their campaign on a housing message? Rather than a “yeah we should build more” but as THE central tenant of their campaign like they are with Israel/billionaires/trump bad?
Why isn’t that an actual policy case? The policies that follow are cutting military aid and diplomatic cover to Israel and raising taxes on billionaires. Given the size of the deficit the higher taxes don’t really need to be funding anything else. The why is also blatantly obvious—Israel is doing morally bad things with the money and diplomatic cover we provide, and billionaires have reaped a disproportionate untaxed benefit from our recent stonks-based economy so should pay a fair share.
The question of military aid begs the question of military risk, pretends that we get nothing for the support of allies, and is no different than saying we should not fund Ukraine without any follow up in terms of how an emboldened Russia (or in Israels case terrorist groups) would impact the US. It's treated as an end to the question that it is not, in fact, an end to at all.
Taxing billionaires to get a fair share of what? Who is not getting a fair share, and of what? Do you want to just redistribute their cash to everyone? To fund what? If we liquidated every billionaire in their entirety it to would not put a dent in the overall debt and/of deficit level. Youre begging all the same questions.
You’re just disagreeing on the merits of the first question, which is fine, but I think it’s an argument you’ll lose. No one can seriously look at some nuisance terrorist groups and conclude they are a greater evil than a superpower that has invaded multiple neighbors, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and put millions into concentration camp-like conditions.
Again we all have to pay taxes to support the general operations of the government. We are just saying that billionaires who have achieved a lion’s share of the wealth should pay more. We can paper over disagreements over how the taxes should be spent because even if we can’t reach any agreement on that higher taxes would at least reduce the national debt, which is a worthy goal.
There are over 1000+ connections between Hezbollah and latin American narco terrorist groups. Your problem is your laser focus on Israel has taken you into a place where you are completely ignorant of the wider defense and security issues that they are involved with. It's been a thorn in Dems side to completely ignore immigration as it has been a thorn to pretend terrorism is some "nuisance over there," and so now you've gone from begging the question to pretending that no threats exist. I've seen no Dem answer to these increasingly pressing questions esp as drone warfare heats up, making the domestic case even more urgent.
On billionaires the claim is actually a wealth "tax" aka a taking rather than a tax that's persistent. One one time large taking for what? To do what? Even you cannot answer it! That's my point.
Right. And more broadly, it's not a crazy lesson to draw from the Biden and Trump presidencies that votes want someone who doesn't do any moon shot policies. You can just sit there and manage things!
Yeah literally “does nothing but reverses Trump’s policies, raises taxes on billionaires, and stops funding/diplomacy for Israel” would be a major win. Otherwise just govern competently but forgettably like it’s still 2015. That would unite progressives and most moderates I think.
Many progressives fundamentally care more about winning factional battles than winning power. AOC is a clear exception. Mamdani’s recent betrayal is not a good sign.
Exactly, they know they cant win fights against MAGA or Conservatives so they don't bother. They instead try to beat down the people who try and meet them halfway.
If they want to say inflation is bad then I have yet to see a plan to fight it! Ive actually seen the opposite re talking about affordability while the only policy prescriptions proposed are neobrandisian anti trust which would actually make it worse. 'Abundance' has gotten lip service and some housing specifics but that's about all I've seen on the other side of the factional argument so far.
Again, Democrats need nothing more than "lip service" plans in the midterms. The only time they'll have to sell a credible plan is in 2028 and I'm not sure it has to be all that credible even then.
They don't get to do any of that without the presidency so I'm not sure that that matters right now (and the anti-corruption stuff is really what should be important even then). Running on serving as a check on the arseholes dicking the voters, "I'll try to stop some of the things making your lives harder".
what if the referendum is about Dems with nazi tattoos and who cheat on their wives are just as bad as trump? It would be different if it were trump's first term but this is 10 years in. The voters know who he is and what he stands for by now
I think MY is dead on in the foreign policy opening. I'm a pretty long time skeptic of the way in which the US-Israel relationship has been handled, and while I think it's good that more people are starting to understand the problems with this I just don't think it's the issue people think it is. Foreign policy is a low voter priority and the particulars of Israel/Palestine are an important but also eccentric interest. Hopefully now that the Israelis have finally gotten their dream of dragging America into an unpopular, pointless war this will naturally start to correct.
Meanwhile I think foreign policy is otherwise among the more defensible aspects of the Biden administration. He held NATO together during the biggest crisis in Europe in generations. He kept Ukraine in the fight in the early days when its survival was most in doubt (and really it's a travesty that we've wound down our support). We got out of Afghanistan, which while unfortunately messy, was something the American people had voted for multiple times only to be rebuffed by the blob and undue caution from preceding administrations.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater over the weird affinity a subgroup has for Islamist tinged politics and indeed doing so is probably counter productive in other ways.
Whichever party talks the most about I-P in 2028 is probably going to be primarily defining itself as the annoying party by doing so. Being the less annoying party is going to be an asset in 2028.
Yep, monomaniacal preoccupation with the jews is a major intellectual and political liability whether you're Students for Justice in Palestine, Commentary magazine, or Tucker Carlson.
That's part of it, but it's also the issue that's the most unpleasant to publicly discuss no matter your view. People who like to discuss it are weird and unpleasant.
It’s the student gov party that won’t let you talk about funding club sports because they want endless Palestine motions, and then you end up fucking up and not funding club sports OR the annual spring party, and you have a student revolt and the state government takes all your funding ability away.
>We got out of Afghanistan, which while unfortunately messy,<
It wasn't *that* messy. Seriously.
Given the enormous scale of the operation—and the fact that pullouts (eg Dunkirk, Saigon) inevitably involve elements of chaos—the optics were always going to be messy.
But casualties were remarkably light given that (AFAIK) it was the single largest airborne evacuation in history. It was actually a *triumph* of American logistics capacity and operational expertise under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Mind you, I know what you mean, I truly do. But the Afghanistan departure strikes me as one of the most successful episodes of right wing ref working ever. Why the hell didn't Democrats have Joe's back on this? Why the hell isn't the spin I've just put on it (highly factual spin at that) at least *competing* with the "disaster" meme that got going from day one of that operation.
+1000 I continue to believe the intellectually honest position is that the Afghanistan withdrawal was almost flawlessly executed given the circumstances. The US suffered roughly 6 times as many casualties in the withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975 and that was a more "leisurely" withdrawal in terms of both the timeframe for completing it and the security risks involved.
The most blackpilling moment of my life was watching the old neocon machine spring to life and just savage the best Foreign Policy decision of the last 25 years. I mean, that part was expected. But the way the extremely stupid American populace was just like "Yeah but the *WAY* we left!"
All the sudden I was hearing about local translators and Afghani girl schools again. Is time a flat circle?? Can people truly be this stupid and worthless?
From there, my view on Foreign Policy has permanently shifted. You should always be ratfucking when you're in the oppo. No decision is ever good, and you must have 0 principles ever. Just that the other guy is wrong. Americans are far far too stupid to care in any real way.
1. The Abbey Gate suicide bombing. Absolutely tragic, and some of the servicemembers killed were part of a military unit I had previously served with (I didn't know any of them personally). Abbey Gate happened because it's almost impossible to stop truly determined suicidal fanatics while still accomplishing objectives like getting out people the US government owes a moral debt to.
2. The collapse of the Afghan government. This was always going to happen when the US withdrew. How the US withdrew didn't cause the collapse.
I went into a little more detail in a top level comment but I think we look back on Biden's Ukraine policy far too fondly. He had to get dragged along every step of the way slowly and excruciatingly, and a lot of good men died because he and his administration were staffed by cowards who thought the term "nuclear threat" was a magic incantation that meant they had to stop doing whatever they were doing. Jake Sullivan in particular.
I understand those for whom this is much more directly personal may feel that way, but the responsibility to the American people, its treaty allies, and the role of the US in the global order (or what's left of it) is too big to immediately give on Ukrainian maximalist wishes in such a way. That's particularly the case when NATO members for whom this is all much closer were divided and conflicted.
I'd have been in favor of much more generosity and aggressive support once the Ukrainians showed the world that they were willing to fight for their country (and indeed would be much more aggressive if it were my call currently, on that basis). But responsible statecraft doesn't work that way. Ultimately all people have to secure their own future on their own terms.
I would look at it the opposite way, where American wavering led to the authoritarian regimes of the world- primarily Russia, but notable China and Iran as well- to feel comfortable being much bolder when it came to unilateral changes to the postwar world order. I'm not saying that it would be responsible to start shipping ballistic missiles or stealth fighters to the Ukrainians on day one, or even at all. But the correct response to threats of nuclear deployment isn't to back down, it's to show that those threats are empty and stay the course. Submitting, constantly, to nuclear blackmail only ensures that it'll happen again.
I don't think Biden's approach is beyond criticism but you're taking for granted that there was a consensus at the top level of the NATO alliance from the outset which there wasn't. Of the important members only the UK was all in from the beginning, with Paris and Berlin waffling, and a general strategic dearth of hardware, ammunition and materiel reserves (to say nothing of production) across the continent. Even setting up logistics takes time and the worst thing that could've happened in the moment was fracturing the alliance or members feeling like they were exposed by virtue of giving up their own strategic reserves, which were already down to the bone.
With 20/20 hindsight I think it's fair to say it could've been done better and should have been done much more decisively but (a) that doesn't fall completely on America, and (b) the slow but steady aid to Ukraine was enough to keep them in the fight at the most pivotal moments and buy them important breathing room while they developed their own defense industry. I think the Biden administration is due credit for that and to say otherwise is revisionism, maybe bordering on ingratitude to the US for the help it provided.
I think Biden was too cautious and credulous about Putin's nuclear redlines. But when you're the President you have to be thinking, "are the odds of him following through really that low enough to warrant my being more aggressive?" It's a very heavy responsibility. He may have wound up giving Putin more credit than he deserved but I for one would not have wanted to have made that call.
I would say that the authoritarian-minded leaders of Russia, China, and Iran--and, to some extent, the willingness of those governed--were the primary causal factors of the bold, authoritarian actions of these nations.
The waffling on Himars and other systems made no sense and still doesn’t. Also the pressuring Ukraine to mount a costly tank counter-offensive was a US mistake.
Yes, NATO was arming and training new Ukrainian brigades to resemble NATO type brigades and everyone thought that was the key to success and unfortunately that turned out not to be the case and afterwards no one, including the Ukrainians, has any idea how to launch any successful offensives to take back occupied territory.
That's an incredibly uncharitable characterization. It's true that Joe Biden opposed *particular* proposals with respect to aiding Ukraine. He didn't greenlight every plan, every tactic and every weapons system. And rightly so. The key was to strike a balance: stymying Russia while not getting Nato inserted a hot war with a nuclear state.
But Joe Biden energetically, forcefully and successfully rallied the free world into a multi-faceted defense of Ukraine involving economic aid, large-scale flow of munitions, intelligence sharing, diplomatic efforts, and sanctions against Moscow.
History will look kindly on Joe Biden's role in stopping Putin.
Had Trump won a second term in 2020, Ukraine by now would no longer be a country.
I think both of these things can be largely true. Biden was great at the optics and coalition building aspects of the political angle. Him visiting Kyiv during wartime was genuinely impressive. That said, I think saying that the balance between stymying Russia and not getting NATO into a hot war was well struck is absurd. I've lost count of how many times Russia drew a "nuclear red line" and then quietly did nothing. Things like American weapons not being able to be used on Russian soil despite logistics networks being concentrated there were entirely unforced errors that the US IC itself was screaming about for years. Russia referred to as nuclear red lines, just off the top of my head: providing targeting intel in occupied territories, including all four "annexed" oblasts, providing sat intel within the Russian Federation, providing MANPADs, providing SAM systems, providing armored vehicles, providing tanks, providing ammunition for the Bradleys, providing TOW missiles (which worked, we still don't have them), providing fighter jets, providing spare parts for those jets, providing weapons for the jets, training the pilots in NATO countries, hotlapping the Black Sea with NATO AWACs aircraft, allowing American weapons to be used on Crimea, allowing American weapons to be used on Russian territory, cutting access to SWIFT, cutting Nordstream II (which the Americans didn't even do, lol), detaining shadow fleet tankers, and bombing Russian energy infrastructure. Given that they've followed through on none of it, I think timidity is a very fair charge to level.
Has Trump been worse? 100%. That's why I voted against him twice, having been too young the first time around, and I have much worse things to say about Elbridge Colby than anyone in the Biden admin. But the paragraph I was talking about was centered on the Biden era of this conflict, and I think that era was the one that will ultimately ensure we need to fight a much wider conflict in this decade against emboldened revisionist powers.
I’m very afraid that Israel/Palestine is going to seriously weaken the Democratic Party in the run up to 2028 and I don’t know what to do about it. I think a big problem is that pro-Palestinian activists - the part of that group that are genuinely motivated by sympathy for Palestinian suffering and not just anti-Semitic - really think this is South Africa 2.0 and a relatively small amount of pressure from the world will get Israel to shape up and “do the right thing”. But Israel is not South Africa, it’s way more powerful and what we are actually dealing with is something more akin to China and the Uyghurs. Pro-Israel types will sometimes go around asking “why aren’t the kids protesting China” like it’s some kind of gotcha, but it’s not: it’s not productive to try to mildly pressure a powerful country like China, behavioral change will only come from massive (likely military) pressure or the country itself voluntarily deciding to change course. Unfortunately I think that’s also true with Israel.
I think Matt is right that we should just disengage but even that’s going to be really challenging, with continual, un-productive pressure from activists to keep upping the ante after every move. Cut off the military and financial aid? Ok great now we need to ban all arms sales. Ban the arm sales? Now we need a full on trade ban, etc etc. Meanwhile you have an actual resurgence of capital A anti-semitism doing things like defacing synagogues and other Jewish institutions thousands of miles away from Israel which only serves to empower the Israeli right: “see- the rest of the world hates us. We aren’t safe anywhere but at least here in Israel the military will fight to protect you”.
We’re just going to rip ourselves apart for zero benefit to the Palestinians (arguably an enraged Israel may behave even worse) and open the door to further Republican gains. Someone talk me off the ledge!
The difference between China and the Ughyurs and Israel Palestine is that if China suddenly left the Ughyurs alone I don’t think anything at all happens to the Chinese.
While the Palestinians have clearly been fighting a war against Jews / Israel for over 100 years. Palestinian Nelson Mandela never showed up.
In both cases the oppressed group did terrorism that killed a few thousand people but was never powerful enough to seriously threaten the country.
Mandela Nelson himself was the leader of the armed/terrorist wing of the ANC (and was on US terror ban lists until 2008 or so). He only became peaceful and worked on reconciliation after his side had ultimately won. So you don’t know who the Palestinian Mandela would be because they have never gotten to the stage of reconciliation.
"He only became peaceful and worked on reconciliation after his side had ultimately won."
That is not true. Mandela agreed to a meaningful ceasefire in August 1990. He then worked to bring apartheid to an end over the next few years, successfully, even in the face of ongoing violence against ANC activists.
"In August [1990], Mandela—recognising the ANC's severe military disadvantage—offered a ceasefire, the Pretoria Minute, for which he was widely criticised by MK activists."
“n both cases the oppressed group did terrorism that killed a few thousand people but was never powerful enough to seriously threaten the count”
We only know that in retrospect. The Jews and Israelis certainly thought they were in existential danger from the Arabs for at least 60 years. It was Arab execution that was lacking, not the motivation or means.
I do wonder what would have happened had Israel released Marwan Barghouti from prison and he had replaced Abbas. But Bibi ensured that would never happen.
That metaphor of the "Palestinian Nelson Mandela" is very bad - if the peaceful solution for Israeli-Palestinian conflict was an Israel-from-the-river-to-the-sea, with a new constitution, a new design (distinctly Arabic) flag (even with a legal right to wave to old flag), "one-man, one-vote" (meaning that Jews would be outvoted), affirmative action for Arabs, and a state program of distributing lands of the Jewish Nationak Fund to the Arabs, everybody would (correctly, IMO) call it "the destruction of Israel"
Yes, this is it in a nutshell. This issue is not a priority for 95% of the country, but the hardcore left and right are never going to shut up about it even if events move in their desired direction. It’s a problem.
Let's try UN level sanctions (fairly plausible if the US switches from opposition to energetic support), and once they're at North Korea levels for a few years (perhaps using the same calorie calculators and dual use good standards that Israel has used on Gaza for years), we can see if that impacts Israeli willingness to withdraw fully to 1967 borders.
ETA: To be clear, I would couple this with a general policy of gradual disengagement from the Middle East, and a genuine pivot to Asia, plus increasing pressure on our autocratic Gulf "allies" (as part of a more sincerely pro-democracy foreign policy worldwide)
And Israel is not as powerful as China. If there really were global sanctions it would its prosperity, which depends on global trade. and fold quickly.
I mean…. This is happening in a few places. I think Sri Lanka too! Slow motion ethnic cleansing is something a state can do if they want to try hard enough.
Citation? I googled Uyghur birth rate .3 and didn’t see any results at all. And there are actually Western tourists and media who go to Xinjiang now (while Israel is still not letting foreign media into Gaza and banning it from the West Bank). They talk to Uyghurs and it does seem like a lot of young men are missing, and the ones that are left look very soft and non-threatening, which is bad! But disproves the idea that Uyghurs are being eliminated. Their living conditions seem way better than what’s in Gaza. When I was in Shanghai recently, I went to a Uyghur restaurant run by people who I assume were Uyghurs based on dress and language. They were there, they existed. They might’ve been oppressed or discriminated against but they were not a figment of my imagination. How many Gazans run restaurants in Tel Aviv?
People have stopped talking about the Uyghur situation and polls show consistent improvement in opinions of China globally since 2019 because there’s simply no good evidence for the most outlandish claims (compared to what Israel is doing which can be seen from satellite imagery and social media videos made by Israeli soldiers themselves bragging about it) while it looks like China has closed most of the camps which is what triggered the international outrage.
The big mistake would be thinking advocating less support for Israel should also mean more support for Palestine. Americans are rightly pissed that we're currently crashing the economy for Israel's interests counter to our own. That, along with other things, is a good reason to decouple more from Israel, and Americans understand that. None of which translates to Americans wanting to convert that into support for Palestinians.
To be honest, I'm not even sure that the leftists actually care about the Palestinians either. They seem more interested in using them as a helpless stick to beat Israel over the head with.
Yea I think that's right and also why it's not the issue it seems to be. There's also a lot of risk that the sane path (decoupling) is interpreted as fondness for anti-Israel activism and activists, which then results in elevation of exactly the wrong people into the public perception of who the Democrats are.
Biden’s support for Ukraine was a genuinely great accomplishment but even as a non-interventionist I think the Afghan withdrawal was a mistake. It really is what killed Biden’s popularity and presidency in the polls. There weren’t that many US soldiers there to begin with and they weren’t committing that many war crimes so it wasn’t really that big of a deal compared to later foreign policy crises. Although withdrawal polled well in the abstract, people obviously didn’t like it when they saw the mess. So that’s something popularism needs to take into account—what polling says is not what might actually happen when people see real results.
Biden's fall in popularity was overdetermined. He took a hit with the early (but not continued!) mess of the withdrawal but before people could move on and his numbers bounce back the nation was hit by a historic spike in inflation and *then* by the scourge of Omicron and Delta after they thought COVID was behind them.
So, no, I don't think Afghanistan killed Biden's popularity and presidency. I think it was inflation and COVID, things of infinitely more importance to Americans.
Biden's foreign policy was good. In addition to your examples, under him Japan and South Korea buried their differences and he took the IndoPacific Quad to a new and higher level.
Even if for the sake of argument we concede that it factored in some way into Putin's calculations it still isn't much of an argument for staying. The fact that after 20 years, a couple trillion dollars, and thousands of US and allied lives, the entire thing collapsed within days of our departure tells you all you need to know about the state of the project.
Our staying in Afghanistan would have facilitated Putin's aspirations in Ukraine. For significant portions of the Afghanistan war we were dependent on transit through Russia for sustaining our forces there, especially when Pakistan decided to play games with transit through their country. It would have been very hard to take the actions Biden took against Russia if there was a strong possibility of our forces being held hostage.
This is superficially plausible, but is not correct. Invading Ukraine wasn't a whim. Even if the whole 3 day thing didn't work out, it's a big deal to try to take over another country. Putin's plans were in place in the first Trump administration. It takes a while for everything to come together so that you can just drive in and take over (again, even if that didn't work).
The senator is a good actor. You have to appear sincere and convincing in what you say, truly inhabit the role you are playing, sometimes improvise and go off script.
Like, the idea of bravery I previously subscribed to re Graham would have him keeping his dignity, calling out Trump, and effectively ending his political career and influence. Instead he has chosen to publicly debase himself to retain some influence, and maybe he's doing that knowingly for the good of the country, even though we all think less of him now.
*If* that's true -- and it's a big if -- then that's an incredibly couragous thing to do.
And you don’t NEED to do it to keep your seat in SC. Tim Scott is doing fine! In fact he’s accumulated a ton of power as a guy who is extremely reasonable on financial services in secret Congress.
Uh, it sure seems like he used this influence to get us to go to war with Iran, which is something he's wanted forever and has diminished the US permanently. Courageous?
"And what they are interested in is primarily D-on-D primaries in blue states and districts. They very extensively covered Chris Rabb’s successful primary win in Philadelphia and did a lot to amplify his attacks on his opponent."
I think this is downstream of MY spending too much time on Twitter. I didn't even know Rabb's name before this line, but I had heard about the arrest over the Facebook post. The fallout of 2020 has let MY let the most annoying lefties in media take up too much of his headspace.
>Don’t be a sucker around this stuff. The oligarchy doesn’t care whether or not people pay their bus fare, but it loves when Democrats attract a soft-on-crime reputation that discredits them electorally.<
This can be added to your political yellow sticky collection, next to the one about how the voters you really need to convert are 50-something non-college customer service reps living outside Grand Rapids.
What would really help Democrats is if they got elected a bunch of county judges that didn't keep letting violent and career criminals back out on the streets. Stories about unnecessarily-released criminals committing more crime do a lot of reputational damage.
On the one hand, true; on the other hand, (1) it's a really big country with lots of judges and national media can promote coverage of the wackiest judge they can find and (2) in many of the cases where judges get dinged over releasing people (whether by the right or, much less frequently, by the left, usually in connection with domestic violence and sexual assault cases), my two cents as a (admittedly, non-criminal) lawyer is that the judge actually acted reasonably or at least consistently with the law.
It is an unfortunate reality that if you let out exactly zero people who proceed to reoffend, your policies were needlessly and damagingly harsh. Much as though the "best" amount of fraud in a large, complex system is not exactly zero--you are spending much more to hunt down the last nanofraud than the actual cost of the last nanofraud.
What laws and sentencing guidelines specifically would you like to see changed?
Keep in mind that unless you adopt a system in which nobody gets pretrial release and all convicted criminals are sentenced to life without parole, there are going to be criminals who reoffend after release. We have to balance re-offense risk with the fact that keeping someone incarcerated imposes costs on that person and society broadly.
FWIW I think the key to what I think you actually want (more incarceration, but only for habitual criminals) is more police. If we clear more crimes judges will better be able to distinguish people who habitually commit crimes from people who infrequently commit crimes and make sentencing and bail decisions accordingly.
Have some sort of strike count not just for convictions, but also for arrests, where after X number of arrests there is no pretrial release mandated by law. That way there aren’t criminals with dozens of arrests being released pretrial.
I appreciate that Mamdani tightened the mayors' control over NYC schools at the expense of locals elections. Rather than take the path of throwing up his hands and bleating, "Why are you mad at me that the schools suck ass? I don't control those."
As long as there's one Democratic county judge who doesn't follow that line then we can be sure that will define and taint the Democrats as a party completely.
I keep meaning to ask Matt a question about groups like Redneck Revolution for the same reason. Class warfare doesn't always have good prescriptions for solutions, but some types of suckerism you simply can't easily see without the labour lens. It is so much cheaper to buy off activists with lip service and sinecures compared to actually adjusting taxation rates or whatever. (And the fact that they're often quite happy to settle for such meagre concessions is equally depressing, of course.)
The Israel/Gaza stuff is pure uncut copium, on everyone's part. The far left wants to fantasize that taking a harder line with Israel would have magically turned out the mythical Left Wing Base while not losing votes from the center. The center wants to fantasize that had the dastardly far left just Stayed in Line and Voted Blue No Matter Who they could have beaten Trump through the power of... I dunno, positive thinking? Media? Even though Harris already was like +20 on voters who watch/read traditional media? I think everyone is just mentally refusing to deal with the fact that voters had decided to throw the Dems out of power by early 2024, which requires the fantasy that later choices about who to invite to the DNC or whatever made some key difference. They didn't.
In fact, surveys mostly show Israel ranking toward the bottom of relevant issues. One particularly funny one that I recall showed that voters would have reacted more negatively to either a stronger pro-Israel position OR a stronger pro-Palestinian one. This whole thing is just pundit's fallacy after pundit's fallacy. What voters want is a. to stop wasting money on it and b. for it to go away as an issue. They do not care about your 20-point plan for Middle East peace. Perhaps that's not cosmopolitan of them, but you go to an election with the voters you have, not the ones you want.
Voters may not care about Israeli domestic issues, but they do care about high gas prices caused by the Iran war. I agree with you in the sense that voters just want this issue to go away, but I think it’s rational that voters are swinging against Israel right now (and why it’s been a big issue in these primaries).
Sure, if you want to say that Trump's slavish bootlicking of Netanyahu is having domestic consequences for people's bottom lines, have at it. There's a pretty straight line connection there. Same, on the other hand, with stories about chaos and violence on college campuses.
What I don't want to see is all these bankshot theories about how if Genocide Joe had been non-specifically less genocide-y then he would magically have rolled to reelection.
The left should be fine with “do nothing” here. It will take longer but I think that still leads to good results in the long term. Israel is the most unpopular country in the world according to most polls. If the US just doesn’t get involved either way, other countries will eventually start sanctioning Israel, enforcing ICC warrants against Israelis who participated in war crimes, and that will pressure it to change. Most Israelis like their international travel and modern luxuries and aren’t going to be willing to turn into North Korea just so they can keep stealing land.
One take I heard from Holly Mathnerd was that there actually was a negative impact on reach from pro-Gaza leftists punishing regular Democrats for not being more pro-Gaza. Let me get the exact quote, one sec…
It's a centrist fallacy that " a president has only so much political capital." There are really two guiding models: The bank account, which Democrats generally believe in, where you have to make a deposit in order to have power to do something, and once you do something it's gone.
The Republicans now generally believe that powers like a muscle: the more you use it the more you get.
Of course it's true that you can only get so much done in a couple of years, even with a trifecta (as Trump is discovering).
But the bank account theory of power fundamentally hobbles your ambitions and your results.
Metaphors sometimes matter, and this one matters more than most.
I think the muscle metaphor may be truer than even you think, because muscles can be pulled or torn if they are overused or used in violent, unnatural ways. I can't just roll up to a 24-Hour Fitness, throw 200 pounds on a bench press, and start lifting.
Another similarity is that while regimes (like people) that are getting older can reinforce targeted muscle groups through smart exercise, on average they still weaken over time as they become senile.
I know Matt is framing it this way for applicability but it's wrong to say Trump is showing restraint by not pursuing traditional conservative issues. Trump just doesn't care about those issues. He doesn't want to use his muscle for them because he's lazy and has specific interests.
But Trump has less sway even on the things he does care about. Look at the ballroom, look at the "weaponization fund." Republicans gave him his way for a year and a half, now they're feeling exposed and they're getting tired of it. What is that if not the depletion of Trump's political capital?
I'm not concerned with the metaphor so much. I'm objecting to "not...a lack of constraint" and "deliberate choice." It's true enough that it is a choice insofar as he could choose to golf more, but while Matt wants to draw the parallel to other presidents and their weighing of political priorities, Trump doesn't have a political priority on traditional conservative goals. He just doesn't care about most of that.
Are the Republicans correct? Based on recent weeks it certainly seem like Trump has a lot less power than he did in his first few months of office, both in general and with his coalition.
I think in general they're correct. Of course you can overdo it, and Trump has never missed an opportunity, but I look back to the Bush administrations and Reagan and I think they all were pretty muscular. You didn't hear much talk about political capital being used up.
And it kind of makes sense. Successful political initiatives generate more authority so you can do more. I don't think a successful initiative reduces your capacity to do more.
Of course, the risk is you try to be muscular and you do something stupid. But I don't think that affects the basic point.
I'm not aware of George HW Bush accomplishing anything. George W. Bush did actually refer to the concept of political capital, when he was attempting Social Security reform…and then he didn't get to do Social Security reform! And he didn't get to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court!
"Successful political initiatives generate more authority so you can do more" sounds sensible, but is it true? Lots of successful initiatives (Obamacare is an obvious example) aren't popular until people have gotten to experience the benefits. Obama didn't get any kind of political tailwind from passing Obamacare; he got trounced in the midterms. What examples do you have in mind?
I think the point about how voters view corruption is an important one. A good example is the Obama DOJ settling contestable legal suits against corporate interests and then demanding that the corporate interests pay settlements to various advocacy groups that were often aligned with progressives (e.g. https://www.cato.org/blog/justice-department-revives-slush-fund-settlements). Depending on how you feel about the cases, the settlements, and the groups, this either looks like a "Obama settlement slush fund" or normal operation by an independent DOJ.
Presumably the way for Democrats to address these kinds of corruption issues going forward would be to gore their own ox first and then pass a broader change to the law.
If you go up to a random person on the street and ask them about this, they would respond "what dafuq are you talking about?" Being down a Cato rabbit hole is not a good way of understanding how voters feel about a topic.
I agree that a random person on the street doesn't know about this example, but people have such a wide definition of corruption that if you campaign on an anti-corruption message, you have to tread really lightly. The fact that the Obama stuff didn't blow up doesn't mean that something similar won't blow up in the future --- especially if you're making a big deal about cleaning up corruption.
Where friendly groups sued Obama administration then they just settled to get what they both wanted but thus avoided doing legislation or the Administrative procedures act
So, I've heard about this a lot, got an example of sue and settle that actually evaded the APA/legislation? All the ones I know about just agreed to complete the process by a specific point, not to have a specific outcome?
A lot of left-of-center folks, including Matt, overrate how unified and coordinated conservative media and the conservative base are. Look at Candace Owens attacking Erica Kirk, for one example, or sniping between Ben Shapiro and anti-Israel conservatives.
Electorally, we just had an example of the right shooting itself in the foot with factional infighting in Texas. They knocked out a stronger incumbent for an extremely flawed candidate in Paxton. And Paxton was the favorite in the run-off even before Trump's endorsement, by the way, which signals there's lots of interest among the GOP rank and file for factional infighting in primaries.
I am old enough to remember when the public was outraged we withdrew from Afghanistan in a slightly embarrassing fashion and they were so mad that Biden's presidency never recovered. But starting and losing a war with Iran, shrug.
The problem (as I believe I flagged here at the start of the present Iran conflict), is that, absent a ground invasion, there's no way that the conflict would generate sufficient American casualties and footage of American military personnel suffering to ever be perceived as a "loss" by the general American public. To understand why it's a "loss" requires at least 5 to 10 minutes of learning about the Persian Gulf region and navigation through the Straits of Hormuz and, if you tried to explain that to the average American (especially after them being immersed in almost 50 years of near continuous bipartisan anti-Iran messaging in mainstream media), you're going to get something like the cabinet meeting scene in "Idiocracy" where one of the cabinet members just keeps screaming, "F@ggot!" over and over each time Luke Wilson's character tries to explain why the country's crops are failing.
FWIW I think part of the problem is the word "loss" does legitimately seem inaccurate for a situation in which the US killed Iran's Supreme Leader, had something close to air superiority over Iran, was bombing Iran's military into rubble, and sank an Iranian ship. We think of win and lose as a binary, and I don't think anyone would describe Iran's situation now as winning.
I think it's better to just point out the major negative outcomes of this action, one of which is the Hormuz situation.
I mean, this depends on your goals, right? The US goals, as far as I can tell weren't to do any of those things? They were to overthrow the regime and/or get rid of their nuclear program...neither of which has happened.
Well, what are Iran's goals? I don't really know, but the impression I get is their goal (at least at the elite level) is to survive as a nation under their current form of government, keep their nuclear program, deter future attacks, with a distant fourth being to gain additional control/influence over the Strait. All of those seem to be happening though it's still early days?
If someone attacks you because you're not doing X, and you manage to repel the attackers long enough that they stop demanding X*, is that not a win?
*and this isn't even the sum total of the conditions, since it appears that Iran will be materially better off in some regards in the end, like some sanctions relief.
I mean to be fair Trump is very unpopular now and in the three months of the war his unpopularity has increased at a somewhat higher rate than prior to the war. But the base is the base and will bow down beyond what mere humans think is possible.
I remember when people went crazy about Obama sending Iran $400 million in cash after not losing a war. It's crazy that many people are going to bend over and take it when we hand over even more money after losing a war.
>I don’t think it’s a big mystery why progressives keep deluding themselves into thinking that they can use economic policy to avoid the need to come to terms with public opinion on cultural issues — it’s because progressives themselves prioritize cultural issues over economic ones.<
A simple yet profound insight.
Matt really has a gift for unwrapping things that seem obvious after he explains them. But weren't at all obvious the moment before you read the explanation.
In the aughts I was at probably a dozen educated left/center-left social events where people led with "What's the Matter With Kansas," shaking their heads sadly to "Why do working-class people vote against their own economic interests (and against us)?" I pointed out, "But we vote for our values and against our economic self-interest, why wouldn't you expect working class people to do the same?" Over 90% of the time, I got a few seconds blank stare, and then some version of "But it's different because our cultural values are good and theirs are bad." I think very, very few people on the left can get past the framework of "Democrats are for empathy and helping people, while Republicans are selfish and want to limit people." We're still living down "deplorables" and "cling to their guns or religion." I don't know why--maybe because this is the shockingly explicit stereotype you hear from national media and teachers/professors--but I know it's a major barrier to winning a majority.
I mean I was in Colorado when they tried to run a cake baker out of business in a Disney cartoon villain manner, and there will be replies to this comment defending it.
Revealed preference is to shoot the survivors of the defeated enemy in the culture war, and people won’t forget it.
re: the cake baker
I don't defend the morality of it (it's awful; indeed, I wouldn't knowingly patronize a shop with such a policy) nor the practicality of it (it's a lousy way to run a business) but I do defend the legality of it. Offering a service that involves creative input is fundamentally different from, say, managing apartments, and I believe a first amendment carve-out is appropriate, at least if the business is sufficiently small.
I think we need to very tightly define accommodations so a mob can’t enlist the power of the state to close you if you don’t serve someone who wants to jam kale in their dick hole in the middle of the sales floor.
And I neither will defend the morality of the cake baker nor would I patronize a place, but it’s clear both sides want to make the other side dig their own grave then bury them in it in the cruelest way possible.
Could have gone my whole day without that mental image.
Respectfully, there is a particular anatomical act you can perform on yourself.
(Actually, I mean this quite disrespectfully.)
Whatever you have in mind can't be worse than the kale thing. Geez, what a mental image!
Wait, why are you putting your finger on the scale (or something on something) by bringing public indecency into it? The cake customer wasn't trying to commit a public sex act.
I'm still of the opinion that if someone wants you to make a three tiered white cake with pipework it's none of your business what use they put it to and you're obligated to serve them. A dildo cake or writing some sort of "Congratulations Gay Dudes" is where the 1st amendment should be involved.
Along with the freedom of conscience issue (which seems really important to me--as a consultant, am I allowed to refuse to work for a weapons manufacturer or a state prison system or a casino?), there's a bad knock-on effect of these lawsuits: The best argument for a lot of freedom is "no skin off my nose."
"Adam and Steve wanna get married? Ugh, okay, fine, just leave me out of it" is a perfectly fine basis for allowing the freedom of other people to live their lives in ways you don't approve of or understand.
Making it clear that you may be coerced in various ways to take part or go along with it undermines that argument.
>...wants you to make a three tiered white cake with pipework it's none of your business what use they put it to<
Broadly speaking I agree with this, but we're not talking about baking. We're talking about *decorating* —using sugar to write words and messages.
Should a bookstore owned by a fundamentalist Christian with harsh views about homosexuality be obliged to carry titles of interest to LGBT people? After all, refusal to do so undeniably constites descrimination against that community, and a refusal to serve them.
I see no meaningful difference.
Yes, obnoxious people sometimes hold odious views—news at 11.
But our constitution wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on if it protected only the enlightened.
I wouldn't expect them to write anything on it or supply two marzipan groom figures, but it's just a boring ass cake. It could be a birthday cake, it could be a 25th anniversary cake, it could even be something I'm gonna take home and have sex with, who knows? You're not condoning anything, you're making a cake with little flowers on it.
As to the bookstore owner, if you've got a cute little diary with a shiny cover and everything and you don't sell it to me 'cuz you suspect I'm going to write or draw gay stuff in it, this is a problem. You don't have to carry "Genderqueer"...
The cake baker thing was ridiculous. IIRC one of the major plaintiffs who has gone against him requested a cake that featured Satan licking a sex toy.
You are avoiding the issue. If the baker had said, "I don't make sexually explicit cakes," there would not be a problem. But instead, he said that he refused to make any cake for a same-sex wedding.
And let's not pretend that it is an easy question; note that the Supreme Court was unable to come to a decision on the free speech issue.
I don't think the Satan cake was the same as the cake in the case that went to SCOTUS. I don't think it was even the same plaintiff.
Then what is the point of mentioning it?
That case was a bigger deal than anybody realized in Evangelical circles.
Another part of the progressive error in accusing working-class Republicans of voting against their own (economic) interests is that the Democratic platform is not good for all working class people. It depends on numerous individual characteristics like what industry a person works in, where they live, if they are white, if they have children etc.
For instance, the Democrats think that every working class person can't wait to be a member of a strongly empowered union, but many working class people know that their business isn't that profitable anyway and would be in competition with non-unionized businesses. For them, the drawbacks of an empowered union might outweigh the benefits, especially if an economy-wide empowerment of unions raises prices. A working class person who has a private-sector job would be correct to oppose empowering public sector workers because that will increase their taxes.
Likewise it depends on someone's industry. If someone works in the hydrocarbon industry, or live in a place that has a strong hydrocarbon industry, voting Republican makes more sense. If someone works for a small business that struggles against government regulation, the Republicans are better. If someone works for a business that has been victimized by aggressive, greedy lawyers whose clients do not have valid cases, the Republicans are better.
Immigration matters too. Working class people may not like huge numbers of migrants arriving where they live and having a very high service load that exceeds the taxes the immigrants pay.
If someone is white, immigration creates some economic downsides because the Democrats believe in affirmative action for many non-white immigrant populations.
There are also basic ethics that progressives don't share. Someone with a job might consider long-term welfare to be immoral. Someone might be angry that able-bodied people can claim Social Security disability and take advantage of financial support meant for people with very serious handicaps. Someone might be outraged that the Democrats want the government to assume the college debts of people who borrowed for useless degrees at overpriced colleges and who now don't have demanding jobs that enable them to pay off their debts.
If someone sends their children in K-12 to a private, religious school, the Republicans are better because they believe in school vouchers. The Democrats unconditionally oppose vouchers.
So it's just unnuanced ignorance to think that every low-income person would benefit from Democratic policies or that Democratic policies are always more ethical than conservative ones.
Yes, there are some working class people who would benefit from Democratic policies, but not all working class people do, and there is nothing wrong with a working class person deciding to prioritize cultural issues.
Indeed yes - the urbane metropolitans Prog. Left although secular to me carries a large dollop of a kind of secular "convert the heathen" quasi religious thinking.
It is definately a major barrier to winning outside of urbane metros where the Ds have increasingly become cantonised.
Republicans voting against self-interest doesn’t just mean economic issues but also means things like this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-voter-regrets-ballot-after-fiancees-ice-detention/. There are so many stories of Republicans doing things like this to their own voters that it spawned the whole Leopards-Eating-Faces-Party meme.
On the other hand, you never hear these types of stories on the Democratic side to their own voters because the worst thing Democrats do is marginally increase taxes or cost of living for people who can afford it and mostly don’t particularly care. So in that sense Democrats do not vote against their self-interest in a significant way even though they may be willing to sacrifice some amount of personal economic gain to make things better for others.
I dunno, I live in SF and came to deeply regret my Chesa Boudin vote pretty quick. Obviously reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, so it's not like I'm in the lock for Team R now instead, but it was an object lesson in the follies of playing footsie with the soft-on-crime faction smuggled through the lens of anticarceral compassion. Eat my face once, shame on me, eat my face twice...you can't eat my face twice.
I think that’s a different situation because you were not hurt directly by the government but by crime, and were just mistaken about the impacts of various policies on crime. That can happen sure, people can’t predict the empirical impact of all policies in advance and we have to try things out. Not to mention crime has many different causes, only some of which are influenceable by policy. People make mistakes like that all the time and it’s understandable. It’s not voting for the leopard that will eat your face, it’s voting for a conservation policy that has a side effect of increasing the wild leopard population.
This is different from the government directly hurting you where it’d be fine if they just did literally nothing instead.
agree, I think the "leopards eating faces" as applied to Republican voting is mostly in the form of voting for a specific policy that is ostensibly going to be punitive or harmful to "others", but then it's implemented and ends up hurting *you*. Prime examples were Trump voters that supported tariffs only to find, surprise, Trump implemented them in the sloppiest and most careless fashion possible so many Trump voters like farmers and manufacturing workers (as just some of the primarily harmed) have been in the process of getting their faces eaten. Tariffs were supposed to only hurt Chi-nuh right? Another is immigration deportations, where Trump supporters who were voting to have "those illegals" kicked out end up having a family member, neighbor, friend deported too. Or a Trump supporter whose business/value stream depended on immigrant labor "he wasn't supposed to deport the ones working!" ;p
Lots of Democrats in San Francisco have complaints about what "their side" has done to them or their city wrt education and policing and public order. That seems like a parallel case.
This is a very self flattering view of progressive policies and their side effects. It omits things like, say, adding environmental regulations to the point where you cant build environmentally friendly power or public transportation, or not punishing shoplifting to be kind to marginalized groups and then having stores closed due to loss in minority neighborhoods. Its less malicious than when done by the leopards, so maybe a new metaphor is required, but the effects can be equally negative.
Side effects are very different from direct effects. No one can possibly predict all side effects. And the malice really matters—most people found it morally worse when the regime killed Renee Good and Adam Pretti directly than DOGE cuts having side effects that may have killed millions.
The meme of Leopards-Eating-Face-party meme has nothing to do with politicians doing it to voters and everything to do with the claims of not being conservative enough that you use will one day be used against you.
As for the broader point and Democrats never doing that to voters, I know you argue about this every time it comes up, but large numbers of voter feel like Biden did that with Covid restrictions and progressive EOs/legislation leading to inflation.
I don't know why people think covid restrictions were "progressive." Democrat, sure, since it was mostly Red states that didn't do them. And the reaction seems to have been mostly based on Trump's early response politicizing it, rather than treating it as an infection disease we need to take national steps on.
The groups that were most pro restriction were also typically the most progressive parts of the Democratic coalition...?
As I recall, the people driving staying open longer were people with lower risk tolerance (like a friend of mine who could not worrying that she'd get sick, see her newborn niece, and kill the niece through transmission) and teachers' unions. Teachers' unions did have more reason to care (teachers get exposes a to illness more than most people), but also not all the other progressives.
The Democrats need more unifying and in-fighting. These stupid blame games are usually cherry-picking to support biases and not helpful when there is a huge problem. Moderates justify this by saying only they can win the election. Progressives justify this by saying only they can win elections. In reality, we need both parts and pulling us together is much more useful than dividing us.
(I might be more salty than normal after Matt's answer to how do we fix corruption was to say progressives got to stop caring about the things they care about, instead of a thoughtful policy answer. That completely dodged what I think is the most important question the Dem's will face if they can win big in November, was sloppy analysis, and divisive. He should have just said, "I dunno, but I like arguing on X.")
The only real COVID restrictions were the travel bans put in by Trump. Everything else was basically advisory at least in my area. Workplaces went to WFH, which honestly I enjoyed for the time (though also glad it’s over); and there was social pressure to do things like masking but none of it was government-mandated or enforced (the worst thing that happened to me, other than people I know trapped in travel bans, was another gym patron yelling at me for not wearing a mask at the gym).
Inflation was unpredictable and had many causes and it was a worthy price to pay for the amazing job market we had at the time—most young people today would’ve loved to have graduated 5 years ago. Downstream effects of policies are very different from the government directly hurting you, which progressives basically never do in a significant way at least to their own base (I agree with the comments about the cake baker in Colorado being treated unfairly but also that was like many years ago and there are not really any more recent examples whereas you can come up with a similarly big injustice by Trump practically every month).
You can make these comments over and over again, but it does not match public perception. At some point, you and other progressives will need to address that disconnect or you will continue to lose the public trust.
There hasn't been a Democratic president as extreme and erratic as Trump, so you have a point there, although it's established that net domestic migration goes from Blue States to Red States, and some of those residents must be Democratic voters who prefer the lower cost of living of whatever Red State they are moving to.
I know that that net-migration to Red States is partly due to housing costs, and not taxes, but I think it's a revealed preference that even a lot of Democratic voters don't like the fruits of Democratic governance. Those dissatisfied ex-Blue Staters are angry about a set of problems that developed over generations, not suddenly like Trump voters now regretting their vote for a single politician.
What about on YIMBY/NIMBY issues?
That's a bipartisan problem.
"Why do the poors vote against their interests?" is a very different question than "Why do the reasonably well-off vote against their interests?". My decidedly more 90s Republican view of that situation is that there might be a reason they're poor...
I imagine the other question is more complicated but still less than virtuous.
Yes, I don't think any well-off progressives voting for a higher minimum wage think that will make them richer.
This is an important insight that Matt and SB centrists should pay more attention to: insulting the people you want to persuade to support you is a very poor strategy.
The profession mission of SB is persuading people to make better, more pragmatic political choices, but so often the approach is a more detailed version of X, where the subtext is not persuasion but in-group cohesion through defining an external villain you can rally against. Great if you want to get nice vibes about how smart you are or vent frustration at people who prioritize different objectives (or just such at doing politics as much as you) but not good at converting voters and policy makers.
The pitch to progressives is abandon your goals and values because we believe this enormously complex and unpredictable system will have a bad outcome (for us and our goals) if you don’t. Which is far less persuasive than convincing people you’re mostly in agreement with them and can work towards some of their goals if they cooperate.
I think this was pretty clear all along. Americans are extremely rich, no one really cares that much if they are 10% richer or poorer.
Theoretically “cultural” issues should have more room for win-win because they aren’t as zero-sum (if we tax A to fund B, that is zero sum; if we let A get married and don’t put LGBT or immigration related obstacles in the way, that doesn’t actually hurt B or prevent B from also getting married). But a lot of people on cultural issues want to restrict and hurt others *even for no benefit to themselves* like we saw in the debate about people getting green cards to their spouses. If someone is like “I want to tax you more so that I can pay less,” I think people would see that as fine, they understand it’s self-interested and we can compromise. If someone’s like “I want to separate you from your partner/spouse even though I gain no material benefit from doing so but just for lulz” people are much more likely to see that as malicious and evil rather than simply self-interest (even if a zero-sum nature) that they can find ground to compromise with.
It seems the two paragraphs here are in tension. When you write of a conservative saying “I want to separate you from your partner/spouse even though I gain no material benefit from doing so but just for lulz”, the word "material" does a lot of work. The actual conservative presumably cares a great deal about traditional values on sexuality and marriage, and is likely to be skeptical of immigration as well. The fact that allowing something would have no immediate economic cost is not going to override strongly held opinions on cultural issues. Not for a conservative, and not for anyone else for that matter (except possibly a minute number of die hard libertarians).
I mean...money and circumstances often override cultural issues for everyone on the material world? Pro-life folks get abortions, anti-corporate people work for corporations?
It just doesn't usually change their underlying cultural position, or their voting habits.
Can I have your 10%? Bay Area rents aren’t cheap.
Americans are extremely rich. Hey! That would be a great campaign slogan! You'd be sure to get lots of votes, it the words lots meant almost none.
I mean it's definitely not something people like to hear, but it's also definitely true.
Americans love dunking on European. If I have to see that stupid European heat deaths vs. American gun deaths one more time.
European heat deaths? What?
You're better off and happier not knowing (and the statistic is probably somewhat fake anyway)
Well I guess I don't have the same definition of rich. Sure, everybody can be called rich if you pick the right comparison. In my mind to be rich is a social thing so if you are near the bottom of your society you ain't rich. How many Americans are nearer the top than the bottom? How many feel like they have a lot of control?
What's "your society"? If I have the smallest Hamptons summer home among all the partners at my firm, am I poor?
Americans are incredibly rich compared to the vast majority of people alive or who have ever lived. Even if you control for the cost of necessities, Americans lead the pack.
Spare a thought for we Brits who see Americans online complaining about their measly $60k salary (the most I've ever earned).
Do they really do this though? Progressives *really* want Medicare for All and talk about it all time. I don't think it's that they prioritize cultural over economic issues; I think it's that they never prioritize anything but want the whole shebang.
They dropped Medicare for All once the Warrenite staffers entered government and it stopped being a factional wedge issue. It's all Israel/Palestine now.
Not according to AOC.
Oh right, the exception
Respectfully, I'd say thats the definition of not prioritizing it. If youre prioritizing everything youre prioritizing nothing.
Exactly - the proof that they prioritize cultural over economic issues would be if start saying "we have to reduce the debt and entitlements if we want to secure the suburban upper-middle class as a loyal part of the anti-reactionary alliance"
I think it's important to avoid over-generalizations here. While some progressives may legitimately do prioritize cultural issues over economic ones, there are plenty of others that prioritize economic issues. Lumping every progressive politician into one big bucket, and saying "this is where all their priorities are" is far too simplistic.
On the free speech point, it's important to recognize that Matt, and also his audience, is _also_ more interested in left factional disputes than doing stories about Republicans being bad about free speech. That's why there are numerous stories from moderates at the NYT about left illiberalism on college campuses but fewer about Republicans. That's why the Letter on Justice and Open Debate was signed not just by Matt but also by tons of other free speech types, but there's no comparable letter about Republicans.
Additionally, there is also the point that Matt made on a podcast recently, which is that a big issue that gets censored is criticism of Israel, which most center-left commentators don't want to be vocal about. But to my point, Matt couldn't remember any episodes of this off-hand, while I would be surprised if he struggled similarly with remembering left factional censorship incidents.
I never heard about that Bah mi story but I know about the jailed over a FB meme story. Maybe I am more normie that most here?
If it's the one I'm thinking of, the Banh mi story was IIRC back in ~2016 or so back when "cultural appropriation" was getting into full swing and college campuses seemed to be ground zero for it, and it was called to my attention by a libertarian type who would _also_ of course be talking about the jailed over FB meme now.
The jailed over FB meme was extremely recent.
The only Oberlin story I remember is how a dumb college administrator endorsed a set of slanderous and defamatory claims against a local bakery by student activists (and endorsed boycotting and cutting school contracts with said business.)
This was after a student of a particular phenotype was confronted for shoplifting a wine bottle, ran, and then was chased by a staff member. The student and his friends beat up the staff member. This was all treated as a racist incident. (My friend who went to Oberlin says Oberlin was in the wrong but the owners were indeed racists. I still can’t get over how stupid the school was in terms of exposing itself to liability .)
"I still can’t get over how stupid the school was in terms of exposing itself to liability."
To me, this is an essential part of understanding the "oppressed by progressives" narrative. While the MAGA view drastically overstates the situation, it's also true that a tremendous number of institutions over the 2010 to 2021 timeframe that had lawyers (and, in the case of law firms, literally were lawyers) and other experts who could advise them increasingly openly acted as though various laws (statutory and common law) didn't apply to them so long as they were pursuing "noble" goals and could dispense with even the fig leaf of impartiality.
It wasn’t until 2022 that I started to realize “oh there is nothing I can do to be good enough in the eyes of these people. I am immutably guilty by phenotype and liable for the transgression committed by other people. Huh?”
I am so glad this type of nonsense is on the decline. It’s just so adversarial and unhelpful (and kind of cover for being mean/bullying.)
I mean, it’s Oberlin. What else would one expect? It’s going to be the farthest left place in America, at least in terms of college campuses, always has been. Taking an example of something that happened at Oberlin and thinking that’s a nationwide phenomenon is usually going to be an erroneous assumption. (I didn’t know about the banh mi issue but I think I did hear about the incident you’re describing, it’s tickling some memory that I had forgotten by properly discounting as being Oberlin nonsense)
I love Obies, I know a surprising number of their class of 04 fairly well; all turned out to be really cool people. But from what I hear it’s certainly a place.
I mean, I am from Ohio and knew folks who taught at Oberlin (who now are at R1s.)
It would have been an awesome place to go to college back in my college years, I think. They have a great network. It may have gone to pot, idk, but everyone I knew that went there turned out to be a pretty awesome and successful person in whatever they did
The banh mi story happened the year before-kind of primed the pump for what came later. Short story is that a Vietnamese student mentioned in class that they disliked that a pulled pork sandwich was being offered as a banh mi by the school dining services. This led to a student newspaper article about poorly made ethnic food, with a headline describing it as cultural appropriation. Which lead to a New York Post article blowing it up, then plenty of more mainstream publications piling on board.
As to how stupid the school was in the bigger incident, that's par for the course.
That's because the Banh Mi story is quite old at this point. But I can't begin to tell you how insane this story or more important how much play it got. And more important an absolutely prime example of why Matt way overemphasizes which stories get play because left of center people are reading about it and underemphasizes stories that become "controversies" because of the power of right wing noise machine. Good summary here https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/oberlin-bnh-m-protests-case-study-of-the-outrage-economy.html
Takeaway is basically this became a "story" because of the New York Post. The headline of the Post story is "Students at Lena Dunham’s college offended by lack of fried chicken" Like I know it's the New York Post, their whole schtick is catchy headlines. But this was when "Girls" was launching a thousand think pieces*, so of course Lena Dunham is shoehorned in. If you read the article I posted, you'll see just how many articles were written about what was really a non-existent story let alone scandal.
I'm sorry, Matt is really mistaken as to how much power the right wing media ecosystem has at setting agendas in mainstream press and I think it's actually a really underrated part of why Trump's scandals and corruption aren't pushing down his popularity even further. What I think unites your median New York Times reader and right wing noise machine is "these kids today!!"...THAT is as much as anything why college "controversies" get an absurd and ludicrous amount of coverage vis a vis their actual importance. That and this cultural veneration of "The 60s!".
** In the realm of non crank or non absurd partisan conservatives do have a point about some things. There may not be a show with a wider gap between it's actual viewership and the amount of articles and commentary written about it. And it's hard not to explain this without acknowledging that the political and cultural leanings of a disproportionate number of culture writers plays a part in this.
Matt's point is that left-wing media could similarly make Republicans look bad if they wanted to, but they don't want to.
Re: the first paragraph, this is true, but I don't think anyone should view it as surprising or hypocritical.
Any reasonable theory of change suggests that center-left writers will have more influence on their own side, and that legal action / support for FIRE is the best way to fight abuses by small-town red state sheriffs.
Sadly, even if the NYT or NPR cared enough to make a big stink about Bushart's shameful mistreatment, they'd risk polarizing it and magnifying the sheriff's support. (They should still report on it, of course, but as partisan organs, they're likely to achieve more if the reporting is restrained).
I don't think that view of the politics is right. Obviously the maga base isn't going to drop their views over this, but they aren't the only people. There are lots of cross pressured people who don't like left wing censoriousness, and who potentially didn't vote for Dems because of it, and who also would dislike right wing censorship if it was widely publicized.
I'm not sure which part you're disagreeing with.
I think your conclusion is correct, but I think the relevant actors have lost the ability publicize these events widely without raising suspicion about the veracity/fairness of their own coverage. Worse, they usually end up converting issues into exclusively leftist causes instead of merely creating broader awareness.
The ICE presence in Minneapolis is probably the strongest counter-example, but that was buttressed by vivid, crowd-sourced social media coverage. It might even be fair to say the numerous social media posts were a bigger factor than the media coverage. Plus the events in MN were ongoing and dramatic in a way that Bushart's jailing was not.
I do not think this is the correct diagnosis. Instead, I think Matt, the NYT Ed board, the Atlantic, etc believe that eg rural Kentucky sherrifs and the Ball State University administration are dumb, uninteresting, and unimportant for the broader direction of the country, and their audience is mostly not interested in their conduct because we don't live in those places, attend those universities, or interact with people on either side of dumb Facebook posts about Charlie Kirk.
The "etc" in your comments includes 98% of people further left than Matt, the NYT Ed board, the Atlantic....
Functionally, the center left has mostly lost sight of rural Kentucky and the Ball State University, but this is even more true of the far left.
I agree, the fact that everyone on the left agrees that Republicans are idiots is a big reason that left media focuses on intra left disputes.
I agree those are all contributing factors.
There are also many right wing people (MAGA supporters or not) who don't like this kind of crap, just as there are/were a ton of liberals who didn't like the anti-speech excesses of the Great Awokening.
The Left's illiberalism tends to receive more attention than the Right's because the Right has fewer opportunities to exercise illiberalism outside of government. Within government, however, the Right's illiberal tendencies are well documented.
The Right doesn't control important institutions outside of the church; everything else is left-leaning and, the Left has been more willing to marginalize or exclude people who fall outside its ideological orthodoxy.
"outside of government" is very much along the lines of "other than the shooting, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play". As we have seen, control of government lets you control media, universities, scientific research, law firms, etc.
"control of government lets you control media, universities, scientific research, law firms, etc."
This is overstated. The Trump administration has abused its powers, and I don't want to minimize how bad that's been or how bad it could become.
The administration has made institutions think twice before crossing them, and threaten to do worse, but they do not in any sense "control media, universities, law firms, or scientific research in the US." For every organization that succumbed to their bullying, ten have stood up and loudly denounced them.
'Control media' is obviously overstating the case, but I don't think there's ever been a situation quite like this CBS situation before? The US is not Hungary though, I think we can agree.
Lots of people have said mean things about Trump, that's true. But the actual behavior of our leading institutions has been to compromise with the lawless demands made by Trump.
"The administration has made institutions think twice before crossing them"
Ah yes: "crossing them."
In case I wasn't clear: that sucks, and if we see truly widespread capitulation to that fear, it's game over.
We see it up at the top of society... down here on the ground not so much. Minus the kowtowing that we weren't seeing in Trump 1 things would be pretty bad but non-existential.
I think you're way off on your 10 to 1 ratio. I actually think it might run the other way. And that's without taking into account the chilling effect.
Even Bushart, the Charlie Kirk/FB guy, says he plans to stay off of Facebook and not post political stuff any more. That's how intimidation works.
I did a little research on law firms and universities to refresh my memory before replying and I think my ratio may be too conservative.
Having said that, a lot depends on how you define the reference class. If you just say "Ivy League Universities", there aren't even ten possibilities. If you restrict yourself to "Ivy+", or the top 20, or the top 50, you get different ratios.
Likewise, law firms: it sucks that Kirkland & Ellis hustled to cut a deal Trump, but it's not like the rest of the legal profession fell into line. There's no one quite as big, but plenty of firms in the same ballpark fought back, and there's a very long tail that just hasn't been affected.
I don't in any way want to minimize how bad the Trump administration's actions have been. Like you said, the chilling effect is bad, even if it's impossible to calculate.
Yes, Larry Bushart is done poking the elephant. On the other hand, it's very easy to find people eager to take his place.
The problem with this is that you can’t possibly actually tell how many entities have changed their behavior out of fear of Trump.
It’s one thing to see which ones have publicly capitulated and which ones haven’t, but you are assuming that everything you haven’t seen should be categorized as resistance.
Except I suspect that, on a day-to-day basis, a very large percentage of Americans feel more oppressed/antagonized by their employer's policies, local community institutions, popular media, etc. than anything "the government" is directly doing to them.
Are we still saying that employers are woke girlbosses unleashing the fearsome demons of HR on their helpless employees? I thought that was so 2018-2022 and is pretty much evaporated by now.
In our glorious future, you will be lectured by woke commissars at work and then beaten up by ICE thugs on your way home. Bipartisanship for the win!
All of which has been well documented and criticized by the center-left. However, Trump is only attacking those organizations because of either Trump's personal vindictiveness or those institutions being biased against the Right.
The reason moderates have been criticizing the Left's illiberalism more is because the Left controls almost every important facet of American life.
'the Left controls almost [every?] important facet of American life'
No it doesn't.
It's wild to me that the fact Fortune 500 companies started doing Pride month events a few years ago has been interpreted as the Left completely controls the corporate world.
Thanks for pointing out my typo. Appreciate it!
Well...I mean, if we accept that Trump's personal vindictiveness comes from anyone refusing to sycophanticly beg to suck his dick, what you've just said is, Trump attacks any organization which doesn't agree with him and uses the power of the state to attempt to force them to agree with him...that's a lot worse than even the worst woke excesses, which could indeed be bad. Being fired sucks. Being jailed/deported is worse.
The difference between those two things is that government is the more powerful institution by leaps and bounds. That's the illiberalism that is truly dangerous.
It's also worth noting that illiberalism outside of government action probably isn't even definitionally accurate. Being censorious towards people in the private sector is distasteful but not illegal, it's not actually contrary to free speech. The government censoring someone, or scaring people into censoring themselves is the thing that is the actual breech of the right to which we are all entitled.
There are important issues surrounding free speech that aren't about government action. Like, if it turns out that every employer monitors all your online and public speech and fires you if you support the wrong causes, that will result in a massive decrease in practical freedom of speech (and all the bad things that come with it) even if not a single government employee is involved.
OTOH, government has the power to just shut down speech via sending men with guns to arrest the speakers, which is much worse than any realistic levels of employers policing their employees' speech.
"It's also worth noting that illiberalism outside of government action probably isn't even definitionally accurate. Being censorious towards people in the private sector is distasteful but not illegal, it's not actually contrary to free speech."
This doesn't even make sense on a dictionary level. Whoever said that "illiberalism" was a matter of what is and isn't illegal?
And in the church, not being a little illiberal is a straight path to an empty church. As churches get a little more flexible in their theology, their membership craters.
The biggest irony of all is that was supposed, almost by definition, to be the opposite - the conservatives the party of the civil society and intermediate powers, the progressives the party of the state and of the masses of atomized individuals.
If you think the Left controls corporate America, that's a product of your media diet being stuck in a meme version of 2020, not an accurate reflection of the private sector in America.
Six years ago they were Kendi's men. Two years ago they were Biden's. Today, they are yours. Whose will they be on the morrow?
This is beyond stupid. Log off and enter the real world. A handful of companies deciding to throw pennies at a handful of DEI programs for temporary PR purposes does not equate into the Left controlling corporate America. If this is really how you think, you've let memes hijack your thought processes.
Various corporations mouthed woke phrases when it seemed profitable to do so, and stopped when it no longer seemed profitable. Many now make the opposite statements.
I'm not at all saying those companies or their management were ever woke. I'm saying most of their public statements were always strategic, trying to say what would please their employees or investors or media covering them or politicians and bureaucrats regulating them. When their perception of what expressed beliefs would be profitable changed, so did their expressed beliefs.
That's not 100% true, of course. Some CEOs and some workforces have genuine political views and values--the folks running Chick-fil-A probably aren't just pretending to be conservative, and the folks running Penzeys Spices aren't just pretending to be liberal. But mostly it's true. Jamie Dimon took a knee for BLM with the same sincerity he did whatever ass-kissing Trump required of him.
Yeah I read that as the premise of the question. FIRE still has a lot of credibility because they point this out. But it’s obvious that anti-Israel is the most censored viewpoint in the US, even for campus deplatforming according to FIRE’s data: https://rajivsethi.substack.com/p/under-fire. And there are the anti-boycott laws and people literally thrown in jail or deported for it, which don’t apply to any other viewpoint. People who talk about free speech and ignore this one viewpoint don’t have much credibility, and it’s why a lot of people have stopped listening to centrist “free speech” people who seem to think students complaining about dining hall food is a free speech violation but are fine with the federal government jailing people for writing student paper op-eds critical of Israel.
Right, and to the larger point, it's true that unless it's about Israel, there's less audience interest and less writer interest in questions of free speech from the center as well. Matt clearly has the correct view about this, but also has said that basically he cares more about left wing social pressure at Harvard than right wing explicit censorship at regional universities in red states.
I think it's far from obvious that "anti-Israel is the most censored viewpoint in the US."
Can you think of any college professor at a top-100 school who is as openly hostile to married women in the workplace, or interracial marriage, or the integration movement (aka Civil Rights Movement), as Beshara Doumani (Brown) or Lama Abu-Odeh (Georgetown) are to a Jewish Israel?
Is this a common pattern, or are we mostly just talking about one media-startup-turned-arm-of-nepo-kid’s-media-empire in particular here?
It’s interesting I just don’t think people who read the NYT and so on are all that exposed to the right’s illiberalism. Big exception to this is university campuses, where you have state legislators being vexatious litigants against like, Texas A&M. That does seem to get into the news, and it should.
Generally, the sense I get is that if you live in a world where the left controls all the major instutitions that govern your life, it likely means you are extremely upper class and comfortable.
I mean, is it really a major problem that the power grabs of the Trump administration are not being covered mainstream press organs like the NYT and Washington Post?
I'm going to extract this discussion from implicit views of what would be good/bad Dem politics and simply point out that the left factional coverage is more interesting than the Rightist press alternative. Lots of people prefer the partisan coverage, but that doesn't change the quality of the material. The straight partisanship that doesn't acknowledge the issues with their side is just lower quality reporting.
Right, also the people who want to jail everyone who said mean stuff about Charlie Kirk are idiots who have no good arguments and aren't in the social circles of people who read this substack.
I think this is more about the game theory problems with unilateral disarmament. I've been reading Matt's stuff since his Moneybox days and I don't remember pushing back against the factional left being a big deal prior to 2016. It's not like he wasn't writing stuff that was really engaging and cultivated a loyal audience. Nor are the factional posts a majority of his output now.
Just to add to the "some Arab states acted in good faith towards their Jews but outflow happened anyway" endpoint, Tunisia is an even stronger example than Morocco.
Habib Bourguiba, the first president of the Tunisian republic tried to maintain his Jewish population, and his own foreign policy was strikingly "moderate" on Israel (at least compared to Nasser or Gaddafi). He tried to make Jews safe in Tunisia. Also, in 1965, he went to the then Jordanian-controlled West Bank, and urged Arabs there to accept the 1947 partition and negotiate rather than fight, and he was nearly stoned to death for it. He even boycotted the Khartoum conference of the three noes. He even floated that Jordan should be Palestine, which infuriated King Hussein.
None of it mattered. The Tunisian Jews went from over 100K in 1940s to a few thousand by the 1980s, with no formal state expulsion. The drops cluster exactly where you'd expect if Israel was the trigger:
Tunisia had anti-Jewish riots after Suez in 1956, destroying synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish quarters. Tunisia also had attacks on Jewish businesses and the main Tunisian synagogue after the 6 Day war in 1967.
Bourguiba's good faith couldn't hold Tunisian Jews in Tunisia when popular hostility to Zionism ran that hot and Tunisian Jews got the short end of the stick for it.
Some readings on Tunisia if interested:
The Economic & Geopolitical History of Tunisia, Part 2: Banker Imperialism, French Rule, and the Road to Independence
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/the-economic-and-geopolitical-history-663
Tunisia Part 3: Habib Bourguiba – Founding Father, Secular Strongman, & Arab Maverick
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/tunisia-part-3-habib-bourguiba-founding
The fact that some arab leaders tried to quell tensions but jews were pogromed out around the Arab world anyway is actually a stronger reason for zionism to exist than the other way around. "Israel being the trigger" only is true because of the violent reaction of the average Arab population deciding to take their anger out on their Jewish neighbors.
In neither of the cases Yaw evokes is there anything like "programs" - the Maghreb was a very different situation
Emmigration to both of Israel and France was something that was materially material - economics and better opportunity, plus certainly living in a stew where you get yelled at and shunned over Israel which you personally may not give any great shits about.
It's not "programs" and the European model, it's shunning, some violance and economic opporutnity - and which given what equally the same non-Jewish social classes facing barriers to emmigration (getting visas) jumped on is a major factor (equally the profiles that didn't emmigrate to either of France or Israel are telling, the Sephardic elite merchant-business owner class that also picked up out-going French colonial's businesses.
Misuse of history isn't helpful.
In Morocco the riots in Oujda and Jerada killed 44 Jews shortly after the declaration of the State of Israel, going house by house. Peoplee immigranting off of fear is not the same as ‘oh better economics’ when dozens have died and your neighbors are threatening more. In Libya over 140 Jews in Tripoli were murdered and half a dozen synagogues burned in 1945. In 1948 another 13 Jews were killed and nearly 300 houses burned to the ground. Anti Jewish riots continues through 1967! In Egypt there were anti Jewish riots from 1945 also through 1967, 70+ Jews dead, thousands more literally arrested and thrown into camps. Post 1957 Suez crisis literally 25k+ Jews were expelled, assets seized, and given a single suitcase to leave the county. I can go on and on.
The pull of zionism was obvious when your neighbors are killing you, burning your houses down, taking your possessions, and doing it over and over for decades. That is actually a series of extended pogroms, yes.
In fact if you look just at Tunisia, Jews were forced into labor camps during the war, and when it ended and Jews could return home with “protection” what they found was an enforced Arab Islamic state. Rabbinical courts were disbanded, Jewish community counsels were disbanded, Jewish cemeteries were destroyed to make ways for whatever the state wanted to put there, the Bizerte Crisis somehow spilled into waves of populist anti-Jewish violence, arbitrary arrests, and economic boycotts, and by the time we got to the 1967 6day war the Great Synagogue of Tunis was burned, and Jewish shops were looted in riots lasting days. The government told Jews to not go outside for fear of their lives. After that the last remaining Jews fled.
It was a slow rolling pogrom of Jews out of the country, yes. Pretending that it was only pull factors is ridiculous and ahistorical.
Do you know what pogroms are? They are sudden, indiscriminate violence and destruction against Jews by the ethnic majority. This seems like it qualifies.
Very aware of what pograms were, historically, and using Pogrom for this is about the same abuse of terminology as using Genocide to refer to Israeli action in Gaza. Can one make some strained justification of stretching the word because of emotional- political agena, yes. Is it justified no.
The cases of the Maghreb are not the same things. Different than back east.
Ok, so let’s just say that Jews in North Africa suffered occasional bouts of violence, destruction, and dispossession sometimes triggered by external events that the local Jews had nothing to do with. Fair?
Maghreb. Not same thing.
No, that us an ethnic riot. A pogrom requires some sort of government support or acqiescence. https://thebelfastpogrom.com/2022/12/20/why-pogrom-2/
That is an important distinction in the context under discussion.
It’s wasn’t political hostility towards Jews but public hostility and violence toward Jews that made them emigrate/flee.
Agree with everything you said, it is interesting. But attacking Synagogues of native Jews who don't want to emigrate to Israel isn't hostility to Zionism, calling it pro-Zionism would be odd but accurate.
Pro-Zionism and antisemitic, with the latter doing the work
This is a great point. In this case, anti-Zionism was anti-Semitism for the Tunisian public. They equated Jews and Israel regardless of whether the local Jews were Zionist or not.
There was a strong class-anti-Colonial element to the factor.
The French had favored Jews having Western education so there's something much more going on that anti-Semetism in a European sense, but a toxic mix of anti-Colonialism plus Anti-Israeli plus anti-Minority working together.
At the same time in the Maghreb the established Sephardic merchant families mostly stuck around - quite different from the East
Middle and working class Jews had both social toxicity push plus economic emmigration pull - (and of course Nasser and the Egyptian radio and TV which was reaching the whole region pouring forth fairly nasty incitement across the whole region in name of pan Arabism (lesser impact on other ethnic minorities but still there))
noting that the whole Blame the Co-Religionists reaction is something unfortuantely not out of general experience: see US and 9-11 - luckily US institutions stronger in capacity but that reaction was there.
It’s the same as European anti-Semitism in that sense. The hatred Jews experienced in new countries emerging in Eastern Europe after WW1 had the same flavor.
Rather deeper and diferently religiously structured as the comparative histories on Euro-Christian and southern side of Med show
What does Euro-Christian mean here? Do you mean Western Christian only? Do you include Orthodox?
Sounds familiar. . . .
Matt writes: "There is definitely a difference between climate donors leaning on Chuck Schumer to whip a vote about whether or not to allow California to ban gasoline-powered cars and a member taking an envelope of cash from an oil company to vote a certain way on that measure."
The hypothetical oil company needs a better General Counsel. Envelope of cash went out of fashion decades ago. Do it the right way: Hire associates and others in the member's orbit, buy products & services from the same people, donate to the member's foundation, offer them a lucrative job after they leave office.
C'mon, hypothetical oil company, get with the program and be a little creative!
One funny side plot of this administration is more junior politicals who don’t have DC experience learning there really aren’t just envelopes of cash. Gotta work for a bit before you can get to K street
That’s what insider trading is for, lol.
Some of the new lobby groups are able to play with the straight up extractive groups but it’s telling that none of the traditional firms want to play that game (because lobbyists DO go to prison! Real prison!)
And crypto!
Tom Homan is still kicking it old-school.
Yes, and I think voters rightly see how both examples are very similar.
"We're holding a virtual speaker series on January 4th, 2029 - hope you can participate, it comes with a $500,000 speaker fee. Hey, isn't that the day after you leave office? You should be free then!"
The best part is the corruption rube Goldberg machine is what "climate donors leaning on Chuck Schumer" means in reality. Coming to terms with the fact that Democrats and Republicans(the pre Trump variety) are, and always have been, corrupt needs to happen. Just because technocraric corruption is technically legal and has a more legitimate "feel" than hocking shitcoins on Twitter doesn't mean it isnt corruption.
There was a great video from The Onion a few years ago where a Trump voting man admits he made a mistake after reading 800 pages of queer feminist theory. You can understand why progressives try to keep the conversation on economics after watching it.
https://youtu.be/lpzVc7s-_e8?si=5OAXYeHprgFvrwBx
This is mockable but Democrats really should blow up stories of people voting for Trump for cultural reasons that totally blew up in their faces. Recently there was a “smart” tech guy on Twitter talking about how all the smart tech guys actually support Trump but then he got impacted by the new green card rule and everyone was mocking him for it. There have also been many news stories of Trump supporters who regret their vote after their spouses were deported that we should highlight, but the tech guy one really took the cake on vitality because he’s supposed to be genius yet couldn’t figure out one of the most fundamental facts of US politics.
There should be things like that. When we say people who vote for Trump are doing so against self-interest it should not be thought of as “you have to read 800 pages of arcane feminist theory” to understand, but rather very specific concrete things Trump did to people for no good reason that often impacts his own supporters.
Trump only serves the interests of one person.
Muslims voting for Trump because they think he's better on Israel (and then being surprised when he deports people for criticizing Israel) are mind-blowing to me.
It's like someone voting for Democrats because abortion is their number issue and they are pro-life, or voting for Republicans because guns are their number issue and they want more gun control.
Just, how? How?
In semi-defense of those voters, it appears that most voted for Jill Stein, not Trump. https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-exit-poll-of-muslim-voters-reveals-surge-in-support-for-jill-stein-and-donald-trump-steep-decline-for-harris/
On a few of the left v center political points here, I think there's a real chance of sleepwalking into disaster for progressive and centrist Dem candidates alike. There's an assumption due to the points MY mentions that Maine is easily winnable. There's an assumption of an anti trump blue wave backlash taking the House and tightening up the Senate. And trump's bungles on tariffs and Iran have dampened conservative enthusiasm, further playing into the narrative.
But I'd frame the issue less as a focus on factional Dem-on-Dem infighting trying to capitalize on that belief, and moreso the risk being that there's no affirmative policy case being made at all. The issue that Dems have to confront going into the summer is they have to make some sort of actual case, and if it's all Israel/billionaires being bad then that's again not an affirmative case about what you actually want to do when you govern. Tax billionaires for what? To fund what? Reform foreign policy commitments to whom? Why? For what purpose? These are unanswered questions in the primary fights thus far.
I don’t get it. Democrats certainly have an affirmative case! Sure, there’s disagreement between the centrists/moderates and progressives, but broadly speaking, the party wants:
1. To improve material conditions for Americans; “abundance”
2. To have a government that isn’t blatantly breaking tons of rules/isn’t run by a guy who denies election results and enriches himself
3. To try to repair our relationships with our allies/our standing in the world.
I dunno, I get just a little suspicious when people say “I just don’t know what the Democrats STAND FOR” when 2024!Trump had zero policy details and a bunch of completely unrealistic promises. Worked for him!
Abundance lip service has been restricted to housing in the primary and other policy prescriptions so far. There's no policy proscription debate abundance has sparked outside of that.
On corruption you're doing the same thing -- corruption is bad, yes. But the policy is beat the bad guy, I've seen no one run on a policy regime to fix the issue long term or make a policy agenda out of it.
On repairing our relationship with allies, what allies? How? Through what means? I've seen nothing here either.
Eventually you have to make an affirmative case rather than HE BAD ME GOOD even if it's after you win. What will they do with power? I think that's actually a dire need to explain, and Dems are getting worse and worse at it, and it has been costing them because then people can apply whatever they want to you. Harris had this exact problem, people saw her much further left wing than she functionally likely actually was. That made her lose and Dems lose down ballot badly. That's my point.
Sure, *you* want more detailed policy proposals and goals from the Democrats. You read and comment on Slow Boring, which makes you very unusual among Americans. The average American DOES NOT CARE about detailed policy proposals. Riddle me this: how many Trump voters do you think could give you *anything* resembling a description of Trump's proposed policies, beyond what would fit on a bumper sticker, like "illegal immigrants out"? I'd be surprised if it was greater than 15%.
Again it's less about policy proposal and more an affirmative case for….anything. trump made quite a lot of affirmative cases - kicking out immigrants is an affirmative case for what you want to do. “Screw that guy who is kicking out immigrants” is definitely a policy I agree with, but then it begs the question of what that candidates stance actually is on the question of immigration. Dems have become a “screw that guy” party, and while that's effective for the base it's less effective for a general election. There must be an affirmative case made, or (as we've seen) trump et al will tell the voters what the affirmative case for Dems is, and Dems will again be left going “nu uh” which is not a good political place to be in
Housing is not a small issue
Is any Dem running their campaign on a housing message? Rather than a “yeah we should build more” but as THE central tenant of their campaign like they are with Israel/billionaires/trump bad?
There are Dems running on housing and talking about it... Halina Bennet literally posts about housing every week:
https://matthewyglesias.substack.com/p/the-housing-regulator-is-now-also?r=mhuz&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Why isn’t that an actual policy case? The policies that follow are cutting military aid and diplomatic cover to Israel and raising taxes on billionaires. Given the size of the deficit the higher taxes don’t really need to be funding anything else. The why is also blatantly obvious—Israel is doing morally bad things with the money and diplomatic cover we provide, and billionaires have reaped a disproportionate untaxed benefit from our recent stonks-based economy so should pay a fair share.
The question of military aid begs the question of military risk, pretends that we get nothing for the support of allies, and is no different than saying we should not fund Ukraine without any follow up in terms of how an emboldened Russia (or in Israels case terrorist groups) would impact the US. It's treated as an end to the question that it is not, in fact, an end to at all.
Taxing billionaires to get a fair share of what? Who is not getting a fair share, and of what? Do you want to just redistribute their cash to everyone? To fund what? If we liquidated every billionaire in their entirety it to would not put a dent in the overall debt and/of deficit level. Youre begging all the same questions.
Sulla like proscription sounds nice but it would destroy so much wealth and value at the same time.
You’re just disagreeing on the merits of the first question, which is fine, but I think it’s an argument you’ll lose. No one can seriously look at some nuisance terrorist groups and conclude they are a greater evil than a superpower that has invaded multiple neighbors, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and put millions into concentration camp-like conditions.
Again we all have to pay taxes to support the general operations of the government. We are just saying that billionaires who have achieved a lion’s share of the wealth should pay more. We can paper over disagreements over how the taxes should be spent because even if we can’t reach any agreement on that higher taxes would at least reduce the national debt, which is a worthy goal.
There are over 1000+ connections between Hezbollah and latin American narco terrorist groups. Your problem is your laser focus on Israel has taken you into a place where you are completely ignorant of the wider defense and security issues that they are involved with. It's been a thorn in Dems side to completely ignore immigration as it has been a thorn to pretend terrorism is some "nuisance over there," and so now you've gone from begging the question to pretending that no threats exist. I've seen no Dem answer to these increasingly pressing questions esp as drone warfare heats up, making the domestic case even more urgent.
On billionaires the claim is actually a wealth "tax" aka a taking rather than a tax that's persistent. One one time large taking for what? To do what? Even you cannot answer it! That's my point.
Right. And more broadly, it's not a crazy lesson to draw from the Biden and Trump presidencies that votes want someone who doesn't do any moon shot policies. You can just sit there and manage things!
Had Trump spent every day of his second term playing golf and did nothing else, he would be *very* popular right now.
Yeah literally “does nothing but reverses Trump’s policies, raises taxes on billionaires, and stops funding/diplomacy for Israel” would be a major win. Otherwise just govern competently but forgettably like it’s still 2015. That would unite progressives and most moderates I think.
Neither of these are moonshot policies. They're simply base anger manifest towards no functional end.
Many progressives fundamentally care more about winning factional battles than winning power. AOC is a clear exception. Mamdani’s recent betrayal is not a good sign.
Exactly, they know they cant win fights against MAGA or Conservatives so they don't bother. They instead try to beat down the people who try and meet them halfway.
The case they have to make in November is that Trump/MAGA are bad and it's hitting you hard in the pocketbook. Everything else is marginal.
If they want to say inflation is bad then I have yet to see a plan to fight it! Ive actually seen the opposite re talking about affordability while the only policy prescriptions proposed are neobrandisian anti trust which would actually make it worse. 'Abundance' has gotten lip service and some housing specifics but that's about all I've seen on the other side of the factional argument so far.
Again, Democrats need nothing more than "lip service" plans in the midterms. The only time they'll have to sell a credible plan is in 2028 and I'm not sure it has to be all that credible even then.
Well they can't do anything if they don't win elections. You'd be surprised what simply holding a majority in the Senate and House can do.
They don't get to do any of that without the presidency so I'm not sure that that matters right now (and the anti-corruption stuff is really what should be important even then). Running on serving as a check on the arseholes dicking the voters, "I'll try to stop some of the things making your lives harder".
Agreed. Trump bad might get you over the finish line, but it also might not ( it certainly didn't in 2024)
Maybe try and be a majority party
I'll worry about the proactive case for change in 2028. Showing that Trump is really really bad is good enough for this November.
We will see, but this is my exact fear, that people are sleepwalking into assured success with overconfidence
I like that "assured success." Make it so!
Midterms are always refferendum elections.
what if the referendum is about Dems with nazi tattoos and who cheat on their wives are just as bad as trump? It would be different if it were trump's first term but this is 10 years in. The voters know who he is and what he stands for by now
Tired: Martin O'Malley would have won.
Wired: Michael Bennet would have won.
Inspired: Carcetti would have climbed the ladder of Chaos.
Look it up kids.
For a Person Experiencing Westernness, you’re up early!
(Li’l Velociraptor had a mercifully rare middle of the night wake-up; she’s asleep now and I’m going to sleep too)
Yeah, I had a bad night's sleep too, trying to see if I can recoup some time too.
So would Hickenlooper.
Update:
Tired: City Of Trees, at 4:19 AM
Wired: City Of Trees, at 10:54 AM, after 3 more hours of sleep and then voluminous amounts of tea
I think MY is dead on in the foreign policy opening. I'm a pretty long time skeptic of the way in which the US-Israel relationship has been handled, and while I think it's good that more people are starting to understand the problems with this I just don't think it's the issue people think it is. Foreign policy is a low voter priority and the particulars of Israel/Palestine are an important but also eccentric interest. Hopefully now that the Israelis have finally gotten their dream of dragging America into an unpopular, pointless war this will naturally start to correct.
Meanwhile I think foreign policy is otherwise among the more defensible aspects of the Biden administration. He held NATO together during the biggest crisis in Europe in generations. He kept Ukraine in the fight in the early days when its survival was most in doubt (and really it's a travesty that we've wound down our support). We got out of Afghanistan, which while unfortunately messy, was something the American people had voted for multiple times only to be rebuffed by the blob and undue caution from preceding administrations.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater over the weird affinity a subgroup has for Islamist tinged politics and indeed doing so is probably counter productive in other ways.
Whichever party talks the most about I-P in 2028 is probably going to be primarily defining itself as the annoying party by doing so. Being the less annoying party is going to be an asset in 2028.
Yep, monomaniacal preoccupation with the jews is a major intellectual and political liability whether you're Students for Justice in Palestine, Commentary magazine, or Tucker Carlson.
That's part of it, but it's also the issue that's the most unpleasant to publicly discuss no matter your view. People who like to discuss it are weird and unpleasant.
It’s the student gov party that won’t let you talk about funding club sports because they want endless Palestine motions, and then you end up fucking up and not funding club sports OR the annual spring party, and you have a student revolt and the state government takes all your funding ability away.
>We got out of Afghanistan, which while unfortunately messy,<
It wasn't *that* messy. Seriously.
Given the enormous scale of the operation—and the fact that pullouts (eg Dunkirk, Saigon) inevitably involve elements of chaos—the optics were always going to be messy.
But casualties were remarkably light given that (AFAIK) it was the single largest airborne evacuation in history. It was actually a *triumph* of American logistics capacity and operational expertise under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
Mind you, I know what you mean, I truly do. But the Afghanistan departure strikes me as one of the most successful episodes of right wing ref working ever. Why the hell didn't Democrats have Joe's back on this? Why the hell isn't the spin I've just put on it (highly factual spin at that) at least *competing* with the "disaster" meme that got going from day one of that operation.
It still pisses me off.
+1000 I continue to believe the intellectually honest position is that the Afghanistan withdrawal was almost flawlessly executed given the circumstances. The US suffered roughly 6 times as many casualties in the withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975 and that was a more "leisurely" withdrawal in terms of both the timeframe for completing it and the security risks involved.
South Vietnam has *a fucking coastline*!
Depending how generous you're being about what counts as "hinterland" versus "interior," South Vietnam *IS* a coastline!
In any case it was a fucking lot easier of a problem than the British retreat from Kabul circa 1850.
The most blackpilling moment of my life was watching the old neocon machine spring to life and just savage the best Foreign Policy decision of the last 25 years. I mean, that part was expected. But the way the extremely stupid American populace was just like "Yeah but the *WAY* we left!"
All the sudden I was hearing about local translators and Afghani girl schools again. Is time a flat circle?? Can people truly be this stupid and worthless?
From there, my view on Foreign Policy has permanently shifted. You should always be ratfucking when you're in the oppo. No decision is ever good, and you must have 0 principles ever. Just that the other guy is wrong. Americans are far far too stupid to care in any real way.
I feel the same way on Afghanistan. Two things:
1. The Abbey Gate suicide bombing. Absolutely tragic, and some of the servicemembers killed were part of a military unit I had previously served with (I didn't know any of them personally). Abbey Gate happened because it's almost impossible to stop truly determined suicidal fanatics while still accomplishing objectives like getting out people the US government owes a moral debt to.
2. The collapse of the Afghan government. This was always going to happen when the US withdrew. How the US withdrew didn't cause the collapse.
Preach it.
But the first 24-48 hours *were* messy and that's all the media needed to declare the withdrawal a failure.
Oh, and of course the Afghan government cutting and running was all Biden's fault, or so the story goes.
Look I think the level of flak was unfair and as I said I think the decision was the right one, but it is what it is.
I went into a little more detail in a top level comment but I think we look back on Biden's Ukraine policy far too fondly. He had to get dragged along every step of the way slowly and excruciatingly, and a lot of good men died because he and his administration were staffed by cowards who thought the term "nuclear threat" was a magic incantation that meant they had to stop doing whatever they were doing. Jake Sullivan in particular.
I understand those for whom this is much more directly personal may feel that way, but the responsibility to the American people, its treaty allies, and the role of the US in the global order (or what's left of it) is too big to immediately give on Ukrainian maximalist wishes in such a way. That's particularly the case when NATO members for whom this is all much closer were divided and conflicted.
I'd have been in favor of much more generosity and aggressive support once the Ukrainians showed the world that they were willing to fight for their country (and indeed would be much more aggressive if it were my call currently, on that basis). But responsible statecraft doesn't work that way. Ultimately all people have to secure their own future on their own terms.
I would look at it the opposite way, where American wavering led to the authoritarian regimes of the world- primarily Russia, but notable China and Iran as well- to feel comfortable being much bolder when it came to unilateral changes to the postwar world order. I'm not saying that it would be responsible to start shipping ballistic missiles or stealth fighters to the Ukrainians on day one, or even at all. But the correct response to threats of nuclear deployment isn't to back down, it's to show that those threats are empty and stay the course. Submitting, constantly, to nuclear blackmail only ensures that it'll happen again.
I don't think Biden's approach is beyond criticism but you're taking for granted that there was a consensus at the top level of the NATO alliance from the outset which there wasn't. Of the important members only the UK was all in from the beginning, with Paris and Berlin waffling, and a general strategic dearth of hardware, ammunition and materiel reserves (to say nothing of production) across the continent. Even setting up logistics takes time and the worst thing that could've happened in the moment was fracturing the alliance or members feeling like they were exposed by virtue of giving up their own strategic reserves, which were already down to the bone.
With 20/20 hindsight I think it's fair to say it could've been done better and should have been done much more decisively but (a) that doesn't fall completely on America, and (b) the slow but steady aid to Ukraine was enough to keep them in the fight at the most pivotal moments and buy them important breathing room while they developed their own defense industry. I think the Biden administration is due credit for that and to say otherwise is revisionism, maybe bordering on ingratitude to the US for the help it provided.
I think Biden was too cautious and credulous about Putin's nuclear redlines. But when you're the President you have to be thinking, "are the odds of him following through really that low enough to warrant my being more aggressive?" It's a very heavy responsibility. He may have wound up giving Putin more credit than he deserved but I for one would not have wanted to have made that call.
I would say that the authoritarian-minded leaders of Russia, China, and Iran--and, to some extent, the willingness of those governed--were the primary causal factors of the bold, authoritarian actions of these nations.
The waffling on Himars and other systems made no sense and still doesn’t. Also the pressuring Ukraine to mount a costly tank counter-offensive was a US mistake.
Did Ukraine have to be manhandled into that unfortunately failed offensive? That's not my recollection.
The methods of the counteroffensive were largely dictated by the US
Yes, NATO was arming and training new Ukrainian brigades to resemble NATO type brigades and everyone thought that was the key to success and unfortunately that turned out not to be the case and afterwards no one, including the Ukrainians, has any idea how to launch any successful offensives to take back occupied territory.
Agree but besides the point.
That's an incredibly uncharitable characterization. It's true that Joe Biden opposed *particular* proposals with respect to aiding Ukraine. He didn't greenlight every plan, every tactic and every weapons system. And rightly so. The key was to strike a balance: stymying Russia while not getting Nato inserted a hot war with a nuclear state.
But Joe Biden energetically, forcefully and successfully rallied the free world into a multi-faceted defense of Ukraine involving economic aid, large-scale flow of munitions, intelligence sharing, diplomatic efforts, and sanctions against Moscow.
History will look kindly on Joe Biden's role in stopping Putin.
Had Trump won a second term in 2020, Ukraine by now would no longer be a country.
I think both of these things can be largely true. Biden was great at the optics and coalition building aspects of the political angle. Him visiting Kyiv during wartime was genuinely impressive. That said, I think saying that the balance between stymying Russia and not getting NATO into a hot war was well struck is absurd. I've lost count of how many times Russia drew a "nuclear red line" and then quietly did nothing. Things like American weapons not being able to be used on Russian soil despite logistics networks being concentrated there were entirely unforced errors that the US IC itself was screaming about for years. Russia referred to as nuclear red lines, just off the top of my head: providing targeting intel in occupied territories, including all four "annexed" oblasts, providing sat intel within the Russian Federation, providing MANPADs, providing SAM systems, providing armored vehicles, providing tanks, providing ammunition for the Bradleys, providing TOW missiles (which worked, we still don't have them), providing fighter jets, providing spare parts for those jets, providing weapons for the jets, training the pilots in NATO countries, hotlapping the Black Sea with NATO AWACs aircraft, allowing American weapons to be used on Crimea, allowing American weapons to be used on Russian territory, cutting access to SWIFT, cutting Nordstream II (which the Americans didn't even do, lol), detaining shadow fleet tankers, and bombing Russian energy infrastructure. Given that they've followed through on none of it, I think timidity is a very fair charge to level.
Has Trump been worse? 100%. That's why I voted against him twice, having been too young the first time around, and I have much worse things to say about Elbridge Colby than anyone in the Biden admin. But the paragraph I was talking about was centered on the Biden era of this conflict, and I think that era was the one that will ultimately ensure we need to fight a much wider conflict in this decade against emboldened revisionist powers.
Biden did a lot to support Ukraine.
And he should have done a lot more or at least done it a lot faster than he did.
Yep, the US bungled a winnable moment. Pretty par for the course for its ability to to execute for allies.
I’m very afraid that Israel/Palestine is going to seriously weaken the Democratic Party in the run up to 2028 and I don’t know what to do about it. I think a big problem is that pro-Palestinian activists - the part of that group that are genuinely motivated by sympathy for Palestinian suffering and not just anti-Semitic - really think this is South Africa 2.0 and a relatively small amount of pressure from the world will get Israel to shape up and “do the right thing”. But Israel is not South Africa, it’s way more powerful and what we are actually dealing with is something more akin to China and the Uyghurs. Pro-Israel types will sometimes go around asking “why aren’t the kids protesting China” like it’s some kind of gotcha, but it’s not: it’s not productive to try to mildly pressure a powerful country like China, behavioral change will only come from massive (likely military) pressure or the country itself voluntarily deciding to change course. Unfortunately I think that’s also true with Israel.
I think Matt is right that we should just disengage but even that’s going to be really challenging, with continual, un-productive pressure from activists to keep upping the ante after every move. Cut off the military and financial aid? Ok great now we need to ban all arms sales. Ban the arm sales? Now we need a full on trade ban, etc etc. Meanwhile you have an actual resurgence of capital A anti-semitism doing things like defacing synagogues and other Jewish institutions thousands of miles away from Israel which only serves to empower the Israeli right: “see- the rest of the world hates us. We aren’t safe anywhere but at least here in Israel the military will fight to protect you”.
We’re just going to rip ourselves apart for zero benefit to the Palestinians (arguably an enraged Israel may behave even worse) and open the door to further Republican gains. Someone talk me off the ledge!
The difference between China and the Ughyurs and Israel Palestine is that if China suddenly left the Ughyurs alone I don’t think anything at all happens to the Chinese.
While the Palestinians have clearly been fighting a war against Jews / Israel for over 100 years. Palestinian Nelson Mandela never showed up.
In both cases the oppressed group did terrorism that killed a few thousand people but was never powerful enough to seriously threaten the country.
Mandela Nelson himself was the leader of the armed/terrorist wing of the ANC (and was on US terror ban lists until 2008 or so). He only became peaceful and worked on reconciliation after his side had ultimately won. So you don’t know who the Palestinian Mandela would be because they have never gotten to the stage of reconciliation.
"He only became peaceful and worked on reconciliation after his side had ultimately won."
That is not true. Mandela agreed to a meaningful ceasefire in August 1990. He then worked to bring apartheid to an end over the next few years, successfully, even in the face of ongoing violence against ANC activists.
"In August [1990], Mandela—recognising the ANC's severe military disadvantage—offered a ceasefire, the Pretoria Minute, for which he was widely criticised by MK activists."
Among others, that was followed by:
- The 1991 Sobeking Massacre [https://sahistory.org.za/dated-event/sebokeng-massacre-mourners-leaves-more-30-dead-and-40-more-injured]
- The 1992 Boipatong Massacre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boipatong_massacre]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#End_of_apartheid_and_elections]
“n both cases the oppressed group did terrorism that killed a few thousand people but was never powerful enough to seriously threaten the count”
We only know that in retrospect. The Jews and Israelis certainly thought they were in existential danger from the Arabs for at least 60 years. It was Arab execution that was lacking, not the motivation or means.
What percent of China's citizens are in missile range of Xinjiang?
I do wonder what would have happened had Israel released Marwan Barghouti from prison and he had replaced Abbas. But Bibi ensured that would never happen.
That metaphor of the "Palestinian Nelson Mandela" is very bad - if the peaceful solution for Israeli-Palestinian conflict was an Israel-from-the-river-to-the-sea, with a new constitution, a new design (distinctly Arabic) flag (even with a legal right to wave to old flag), "one-man, one-vote" (meaning that Jews would be outvoted), affirmative action for Arabs, and a state program of distributing lands of the Jewish Nationak Fund to the Arabs, everybody would (correctly, IMO) call it "the destruction of Israel"
It's a ridiculous comparison on it's face. There's almost nothing similar about Israel/Palestine and China/Ughyurs.
Yes, this is it in a nutshell. This issue is not a priority for 95% of the country, but the hardcore left and right are never going to shut up about it even if events move in their desired direction. It’s a problem.
Let's try UN level sanctions (fairly plausible if the US switches from opposition to energetic support), and once they're at North Korea levels for a few years (perhaps using the same calorie calculators and dual use good standards that Israel has used on Gaza for years), we can see if that impacts Israeli willingness to withdraw fully to 1967 borders.
ETA: To be clear, I would couple this with a general policy of gradual disengagement from the Middle East, and a genuine pivot to Asia, plus increasing pressure on our autocratic Gulf "allies" (as part of a more sincerely pro-democracy foreign policy worldwide)
International pressure worked even on China with respect to Uyghurs: https://dominotheory.com/why-the-xinjiang-camps-closed/
And Israel is not as powerful as China. If there really were global sanctions it would its prosperity, which depends on global trade. and fold quickly.
I think there is some dispute as to whether China has appreciably improved its behavior in Xinjiang: https://x.com/alisonkilling/status/2060237604004528313?s=46
I mean…. This is happening in a few places. I think Sri Lanka too! Slow motion ethnic cleansing is something a state can do if they want to try hard enough.
Citation? I googled Uyghur birth rate .3 and didn’t see any results at all. And there are actually Western tourists and media who go to Xinjiang now (while Israel is still not letting foreign media into Gaza and banning it from the West Bank). They talk to Uyghurs and it does seem like a lot of young men are missing, and the ones that are left look very soft and non-threatening, which is bad! But disproves the idea that Uyghurs are being eliminated. Their living conditions seem way better than what’s in Gaza. When I was in Shanghai recently, I went to a Uyghur restaurant run by people who I assume were Uyghurs based on dress and language. They were there, they existed. They might’ve been oppressed or discriminated against but they were not a figment of my imagination. How many Gazans run restaurants in Tel Aviv?
People have stopped talking about the Uyghur situation and polls show consistent improvement in opinions of China globally since 2019 because there’s simply no good evidence for the most outlandish claims (compared to what Israel is doing which can be seen from satellite imagery and social media videos made by Israeli soldiers themselves bragging about it) while it looks like China has closed most of the camps which is what triggered the international outrage.
There are plenty of Arabs running restaurants in Israel. "Gazan" isn't an ethnicity, it's a geographic place of origin
The big mistake would be thinking advocating less support for Israel should also mean more support for Palestine. Americans are rightly pissed that we're currently crashing the economy for Israel's interests counter to our own. That, along with other things, is a good reason to decouple more from Israel, and Americans understand that. None of which translates to Americans wanting to convert that into support for Palestinians.
To be honest, I'm not even sure that the leftists actually care about the Palestinians either. They seem more interested in using them as a helpless stick to beat Israel over the head with.
Yea I think that's right and also why it's not the issue it seems to be. There's also a lot of risk that the sane path (decoupling) is interpreted as fondness for anti-Israel activism and activists, which then results in elevation of exactly the wrong people into the public perception of who the Democrats are.
Biden’s support for Ukraine was a genuinely great accomplishment but even as a non-interventionist I think the Afghan withdrawal was a mistake. It really is what killed Biden’s popularity and presidency in the polls. There weren’t that many US soldiers there to begin with and they weren’t committing that many war crimes so it wasn’t really that big of a deal compared to later foreign policy crises. Although withdrawal polled well in the abstract, people obviously didn’t like it when they saw the mess. So that’s something popularism needs to take into account—what polling says is not what might actually happen when people see real results.
Cue Tony Blair on single issue polling.
I'm not sure that's really applicable here. Even doing the popular thing isn't going to be popular if you fuck it up in the execution.
How many more decades do you think we should have continued nation-building in Afghanistan?
Biden's fall in popularity was overdetermined. He took a hit with the early (but not continued!) mess of the withdrawal but before people could move on and his numbers bounce back the nation was hit by a historic spike in inflation and *then* by the scourge of Omicron and Delta after they thought COVID was behind them.
So, no, I don't think Afghanistan killed Biden's popularity and presidency. I think it was inflation and COVID, things of infinitely more importance to Americans.
Biden's foreign policy was good. In addition to your examples, under him Japan and South Korea buried their differences and he took the IndoPacific Quad to a new and higher level.
Biden was right on NATI and Ukraine, though he dragged his feet too much.
He was wrong about Afghanistan.
In fact I think his withdrawal there was part of the reason Putin thought he could get away with Ukraine.
I'm not convinced the two were connected.
Even if for the sake of argument we concede that it factored in some way into Putin's calculations it still isn't much of an argument for staying. The fact that after 20 years, a couple trillion dollars, and thousands of US and allied lives, the entire thing collapsed within days of our departure tells you all you need to know about the state of the project.
Our staying in Afghanistan would have facilitated Putin's aspirations in Ukraine. For significant portions of the Afghanistan war we were dependent on transit through Russia for sustaining our forces there, especially when Pakistan decided to play games with transit through their country. It would have been very hard to take the actions Biden took against Russia if there was a strong possibility of our forces being held hostage.
This is superficially plausible, but is not correct. Invading Ukraine wasn't a whim. Even if the whole 3 day thing didn't work out, it's a big deal to try to take over another country. Putin's plans were in place in the first Trump administration. It takes a while for everything to come together so that you can just drive in and take over (again, even if that didn't work).
Trying to paint Lindsey Graham as a responsible actor of any sorts is mind blowing to me
The senator is a good actor. You have to appear sincere and convincing in what you say, truly inhabit the role you are playing, sometimes improvise and go off script.
it is a really provocative idea.
Like, the idea of bravery I previously subscribed to re Graham would have him keeping his dignity, calling out Trump, and effectively ending his political career and influence. Instead he has chosen to publicly debase himself to retain some influence, and maybe he's doing that knowingly for the good of the country, even though we all think less of him now.
*If* that's true -- and it's a big if -- then that's an incredibly couragous thing to do.
And you don’t NEED to do it to keep your seat in SC. Tim Scott is doing fine! In fact he’s accumulated a ton of power as a guy who is extremely reasonable on financial services in secret Congress.
But of course this is a collective action problem, and we don't usually view the folks who decide to go along to get along on those as courageous?
Uh, it sure seems like he used this influence to get us to go to war with Iran, which is something he's wanted forever and has diminished the US permanently. Courageous?
When has Lindsay Graham ever been brave? He's been near brave, of course, when he was standing next to John McCain, so he was near the actual thing.
"And what they are interested in is primarily D-on-D primaries in blue states and districts. They very extensively covered Chris Rabb’s successful primary win in Philadelphia and did a lot to amplify his attacks on his opponent."
I think this is downstream of MY spending too much time on Twitter. I didn't even know Rabb's name before this line, but I had heard about the arrest over the Facebook post. The fallout of 2020 has let MY let the most annoying lefties in media take up too much of his headspace.
>Don’t be a sucker around this stuff. The oligarchy doesn’t care whether or not people pay their bus fare, but it loves when Democrats attract a soft-on-crime reputation that discredits them electorally.<
This can be added to your political yellow sticky collection, next to the one about how the voters you really need to convert are 50-something non-college customer service reps living outside Grand Rapids.
What would really help Democrats is if they got elected a bunch of county judges that didn't keep letting violent and career criminals back out on the streets. Stories about unnecessarily-released criminals committing more crime do a lot of reputational damage.
On the one hand, true; on the other hand, (1) it's a really big country with lots of judges and national media can promote coverage of the wackiest judge they can find and (2) in many of the cases where judges get dinged over releasing people (whether by the right or, much less frequently, by the left, usually in connection with domestic violence and sexual assault cases), my two cents as a (admittedly, non-criminal) lawyer is that the judge actually acted reasonably or at least consistently with the law.
It is an unfortunate reality that if you let out exactly zero people who proceed to reoffend, your policies were needlessly and damagingly harsh. Much as though the "best" amount of fraud in a large, complex system is not exactly zero--you are spending much more to hunt down the last nanofraud than the actual cost of the last nanofraud.
Then maybe Democrats could benefit by changing the relevant laws and sentencing guidelines.
What laws and sentencing guidelines specifically would you like to see changed?
Keep in mind that unless you adopt a system in which nobody gets pretrial release and all convicted criminals are sentenced to life without parole, there are going to be criminals who reoffend after release. We have to balance re-offense risk with the fact that keeping someone incarcerated imposes costs on that person and society broadly.
FWIW I think the key to what I think you actually want (more incarceration, but only for habitual criminals) is more police. If we clear more crimes judges will better be able to distinguish people who habitually commit crimes from people who infrequently commit crimes and make sentencing and bail decisions accordingly.
Have some sort of strike count not just for convictions, but also for arrests, where after X number of arrests there is no pretrial release mandated by law. That way there aren’t criminals with dozens of arrests being released pretrial.
I appreciate that Mamdani tightened the mayors' control over NYC schools at the expense of locals elections. Rather than take the path of throwing up his hands and bleating, "Why are you mad at me that the schools suck ass? I don't control those."
As long as there's one Democratic county judge who doesn't follow that line then we can be sure that will define and taint the Democrats as a party completely.
But, yeah, otherwise I agree with you.
I keep meaning to ask Matt a question about groups like Redneck Revolution for the same reason. Class warfare doesn't always have good prescriptions for solutions, but some types of suckerism you simply can't easily see without the labour lens. It is so much cheaper to buy off activists with lip service and sinecures compared to actually adjusting taxation rates or whatever. (And the fact that they're often quite happy to settle for such meagre concessions is equally depressing, of course.)
The Israel/Gaza stuff is pure uncut copium, on everyone's part. The far left wants to fantasize that taking a harder line with Israel would have magically turned out the mythical Left Wing Base while not losing votes from the center. The center wants to fantasize that had the dastardly far left just Stayed in Line and Voted Blue No Matter Who they could have beaten Trump through the power of... I dunno, positive thinking? Media? Even though Harris already was like +20 on voters who watch/read traditional media? I think everyone is just mentally refusing to deal with the fact that voters had decided to throw the Dems out of power by early 2024, which requires the fantasy that later choices about who to invite to the DNC or whatever made some key difference. They didn't.
In fact, surveys mostly show Israel ranking toward the bottom of relevant issues. One particularly funny one that I recall showed that voters would have reacted more negatively to either a stronger pro-Israel position OR a stronger pro-Palestinian one. This whole thing is just pundit's fallacy after pundit's fallacy. What voters want is a. to stop wasting money on it and b. for it to go away as an issue. They do not care about your 20-point plan for Middle East peace. Perhaps that's not cosmopolitan of them, but you go to an election with the voters you have, not the ones you want.
Voters may not care about Israeli domestic issues, but they do care about high gas prices caused by the Iran war. I agree with you in the sense that voters just want this issue to go away, but I think it’s rational that voters are swinging against Israel right now (and why it’s been a big issue in these primaries).
Sure, if you want to say that Trump's slavish bootlicking of Netanyahu is having domestic consequences for people's bottom lines, have at it. There's a pretty straight line connection there. Same, on the other hand, with stories about chaos and violence on college campuses.
What I don't want to see is all these bankshot theories about how if Genocide Joe had been non-specifically less genocide-y then he would magically have rolled to reelection.
The left should be fine with “do nothing” here. It will take longer but I think that still leads to good results in the long term. Israel is the most unpopular country in the world according to most polls. If the US just doesn’t get involved either way, other countries will eventually start sanctioning Israel, enforcing ICC warrants against Israelis who participated in war crimes, and that will pressure it to change. Most Israelis like their international travel and modern luxuries and aren’t going to be willing to turn into North Korea just so they can keep stealing land.
One take I heard from Holly Mathnerd was that there actually was a negative impact on reach from pro-Gaza leftists punishing regular Democrats for not being more pro-Gaza. Let me get the exact quote, one sec…
It's a centrist fallacy that " a president has only so much political capital." There are really two guiding models: The bank account, which Democrats generally believe in, where you have to make a deposit in order to have power to do something, and once you do something it's gone.
The Republicans now generally believe that powers like a muscle: the more you use it the more you get.
Of course it's true that you can only get so much done in a couple of years, even with a trifecta (as Trump is discovering).
But the bank account theory of power fundamentally hobbles your ambitions and your results.
Metaphors sometimes matter, and this one matters more than most.
I think the muscle metaphor may be truer than even you think, because muscles can be pulled or torn if they are overused or used in violent, unnatural ways. I can't just roll up to a 24-Hour Fitness, throw 200 pounds on a bench press, and start lifting.
Another similarity is that while regimes (like people) that are getting older can reinforce targeted muscle groups through smart exercise, on average they still weaken over time as they become senile.
I know Matt is framing it this way for applicability but it's wrong to say Trump is showing restraint by not pursuing traditional conservative issues. Trump just doesn't care about those issues. He doesn't want to use his muscle for them because he's lazy and has specific interests.
But Trump has less sway even on the things he does care about. Look at the ballroom, look at the "weaponization fund." Republicans gave him his way for a year and a half, now they're feeling exposed and they're getting tired of it. What is that if not the depletion of Trump's political capital?
I'm not concerned with the metaphor so much. I'm objecting to "not...a lack of constraint" and "deliberate choice." It's true enough that it is a choice insofar as he could choose to golf more, but while Matt wants to draw the parallel to other presidents and their weighing of political priorities, Trump doesn't have a political priority on traditional conservative goals. He just doesn't care about most of that.
Are the Republicans correct? Based on recent weeks it certainly seem like Trump has a lot less power than he did in his first few months of office, both in general and with his coalition.
I think in general they're correct. Of course you can overdo it, and Trump has never missed an opportunity, but I look back to the Bush administrations and Reagan and I think they all were pretty muscular. You didn't hear much talk about political capital being used up.
And it kind of makes sense. Successful political initiatives generate more authority so you can do more. I don't think a successful initiative reduces your capacity to do more.
Of course, the risk is you try to be muscular and you do something stupid. But I don't think that affects the basic point.
I'm not aware of George HW Bush accomplishing anything. George W. Bush did actually refer to the concept of political capital, when he was attempting Social Security reform…and then he didn't get to do Social Security reform! And he didn't get to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court!
"Successful political initiatives generate more authority so you can do more" sounds sensible, but is it true? Lots of successful initiatives (Obamacare is an obvious example) aren't popular until people have gotten to experience the benefits. Obama didn't get any kind of political tailwind from passing Obamacare; he got trounced in the midterms. What examples do you have in mind?
I think the point about how voters view corruption is an important one. A good example is the Obama DOJ settling contestable legal suits against corporate interests and then demanding that the corporate interests pay settlements to various advocacy groups that were often aligned with progressives (e.g. https://www.cato.org/blog/justice-department-revives-slush-fund-settlements). Depending on how you feel about the cases, the settlements, and the groups, this either looks like a "Obama settlement slush fund" or normal operation by an independent DOJ.
Presumably the way for Democrats to address these kinds of corruption issues going forward would be to gore their own ox first and then pass a broader change to the law.
If you go up to a random person on the street and ask them about this, they would respond "what dafuq are you talking about?" Being down a Cato rabbit hole is not a good way of understanding how voters feel about a topic.
I agree that a random person on the street doesn't know about this example, but people have such a wide definition of corruption that if you campaign on an anti-corruption message, you have to tread really lightly. The fact that the Obama stuff didn't blow up doesn't mean that something similar won't blow up in the future --- especially if you're making a big deal about cleaning up corruption.
Looked pretty freaken corrupt to me.
Same with the sue and settle.
Where friendly groups sued Obama administration then they just settled to get what they both wanted but thus avoided doing legislation or the Administrative procedures act
So, I've heard about this a lot, got an example of sue and settle that actually evaded the APA/legislation? All the ones I know about just agreed to complete the process by a specific point, not to have a specific outcome?
Every example I've seen is wildly exaggerated by Republicans, which is their standard MO when trying to justify everything Trump does.
A lot of left-of-center folks, including Matt, overrate how unified and coordinated conservative media and the conservative base are. Look at Candace Owens attacking Erica Kirk, for one example, or sniping between Ben Shapiro and anti-Israel conservatives.
Electorally, we just had an example of the right shooting itself in the foot with factional infighting in Texas. They knocked out a stronger incumbent for an extremely flawed candidate in Paxton. And Paxton was the favorite in the run-off even before Trump's endorsement, by the way, which signals there's lots of interest among the GOP rank and file for factional infighting in primaries.
So are Americans really OK with Trump losing a war with Iran and then handing them a bunch of cash?
I am old enough to remember when the public was outraged we withdrew from Afghanistan in a slightly embarrassing fashion and they were so mad that Biden's presidency never recovered. But starting and losing a war with Iran, shrug.
The problem (as I believe I flagged here at the start of the present Iran conflict), is that, absent a ground invasion, there's no way that the conflict would generate sufficient American casualties and footage of American military personnel suffering to ever be perceived as a "loss" by the general American public. To understand why it's a "loss" requires at least 5 to 10 minutes of learning about the Persian Gulf region and navigation through the Straits of Hormuz and, if you tried to explain that to the average American (especially after them being immersed in almost 50 years of near continuous bipartisan anti-Iran messaging in mainstream media), you're going to get something like the cabinet meeting scene in "Idiocracy" where one of the cabinet members just keeps screaming, "F@ggot!" over and over each time Luke Wilson's character tries to explain why the country's crops are failing.
FWIW I think part of the problem is the word "loss" does legitimately seem inaccurate for a situation in which the US killed Iran's Supreme Leader, had something close to air superiority over Iran, was bombing Iran's military into rubble, and sank an Iranian ship. We think of win and lose as a binary, and I don't think anyone would describe Iran's situation now as winning.
I think it's better to just point out the major negative outcomes of this action, one of which is the Hormuz situation.
I mean, this depends on your goals, right? The US goals, as far as I can tell weren't to do any of those things? They were to overthrow the regime and/or get rid of their nuclear program...neither of which has happened.
Would you describe Iran's current situation as winning?
I don't think "loss" and "win" are useful terms for a conflict like this.
Well, what are Iran's goals? I don't really know, but the impression I get is their goal (at least at the elite level) is to survive as a nation under their current form of government, keep their nuclear program, deter future attacks, with a distant fourth being to gain additional control/influence over the Strait. All of those seem to be happening though it's still early days?
If someone attacks you because you're not doing X, and you manage to repel the attackers long enough that they stop demanding X*, is that not a win?
*and this isn't even the sum total of the conditions, since it appears that Iran will be materially better off in some regards in the end, like some sanctions relief.
I mean to be fair Trump is very unpopular now and in the three months of the war his unpopularity has increased at a somewhat higher rate than prior to the war. But the base is the base and will bow down beyond what mere humans think is possible.
If Fox News says it's OK, enough of the relevant people will support it to not damage Trump's standing with his base that badly.
I remember when people went crazy about Obama sending Iran $400 million in cash after not losing a war. It's crazy that many people are going to bend over and take it when we hand over even more money after losing a war.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/02/us-sent-400-million-in-cash-to-iran-as-prisoners-were-freed-wsj-reports.html
Sadly I think we both know the answer to that