The solution to dynastic wealth is a well designed inheritance and gift tax.
Let the self-made billionaire allocate his capital his whole life — he’s good at it. Let him borrow against it to keep allocating. But borrowing should only defer the tax, never erase it. Taxes are only avoidable because of the step-up in basis at death. Heirs inherit the appreciated assets, the loans get repaid, a lifetime of gains is wiped clean. Kill the step-up. Tax the full lifetime appreciation at death with a progressive gift and bequest tax on top. The top rate could be 90% on fortunes over $500M and 98% over $5B. Anyone who complains about getting 12 or 13% of five billion by dint of birth is an asshole. Under this refund, the loan is just borrowing against a bill that always comes due.
And yes, that means the controlling interest largely gets sold off when he dies. That’s okay. The allocation skill was the founders and is only weakly heritable. If the son’s been running the operation and is good at it, the board keeps him on. He has a material slice of daddy’s equity, decades of relationships, this is like starting on third base. If he’s proven himself and has balls, he can take out more loans to pay daddy’s capital gains and estate taxes and keep the family voting interest intact. However, the modal case is that he’s a nepo baby and should be pensioned off with a small eight figure trust fund. No one should feel sorry for that person.
I might quibble at the rates and break-points, but I largely agree with you.
I do think this same thinking should be applied to Foundations like the hypothetical billion-dollar one bequeathed to Matt in today's mailbag. Those, too, should be strongly incentivized to distribute their money over a finite timeline.
First $750k (per decedent) is exempt, not part of taxable estate.
Rates:
Zero-$1M 15%
$1M-$3M 25%
$3M-$6M 35%
$6M-$10M 50%
$10-$50M 65%
$50M-$500M 80%
$500M-$5B 90%
$5B plus 98%
This would raise a lot of revenue. No one would be impoverished. A delicious amount of intra haute bourhoise compression would occur, the middle bourgeois is taxed only lightly but shows some solidarity with the workers!
Yes, sorta makes sense. This being Slow Boring, let's be clear about the unintended consequences--no billionaires will actually pay these rates, instead they'll set up foundations for their kids to run, or throw Bezos-style weddings or mega-vacations for all their grandchildren and their friends. It's not an injustice, and indeed shows some solidarity. Although part of me, based on the billion-$ heirs I've seen, is worried that giving them foundations or newspapers to run might do more damage than just letting them retire to Santa Monica. This might be the Progressive Activist Full Employment Act of 2027. Seems like death is distorting, and all you can do is move the distortions around.
Feels like you could do things about this, too. We could be much more aggressive on wealth. Nobody worth $1 billion needs that money as motivation. At that point, it's status and everybody earning less means your $100 million is just as motivating as your $100 billion.
I'd be careful about assuming you know what motivates someone else. I've known and worked with a couple of near-billionaires. For them, having/making more $ wasn't about status or consumption. They liked their status and nice things, sure, but yes, they knew they had enough. Their real motivation was accomplishment--these were people who'd made their money by changing some significant industry, one of them twice. They believed (not unreasonably) that they could do it again, but faster this time if they could rely less on investors. To take a real example from ~10 yrs ago: if you think you know better than anyone else how to build a global satellite network, then it makes a huge difference whether you have $1B, $10B, or $50B to put towards it. Could they really do it again? I don't know, but to David Abbott's point they were really good at allocating capital, and they each had an area where they were smart as heck, and I wouldn't bet against them.
Fair point, but from a motivation perspective, it's the same: the driving factor at some point ceases to be money, it's what the money represents. People who need to challenge themselves in that way don't stop having that need because the rewards are smaller. If you're driven to build a global satellite network, once you've proven you can build another hugely profitable business, you'll be able to secure the resources. I think it's also worth noting that that same individual has done enormous harm with his wealth in other venues, so maybe him not having money that puts him outside of normal constraints would be a good thing.
^"We could be much more aggressive on wealth." It's a good point, that inheritance tax shares a lot of features with a wealth tax (with some big differences, too, but still...). That means it has all the same problems as wealth taxes: it's taxing savings over consumption, it's easy to switch assets around and manipulate, it impacts non-liquid assets in a weird way, etc. I'm all for inheritance taxes because it's just too icky. But from an efficiency point of view, I wonder if it would be more optimal to just tax the income a lot more aggressively when it's first made, and then back off on all the "tax it again later" moves.
This is where I'm glad I don't write policies, because I don't think I have nearly enough knowledge (or for that matter, interest in the details) to craft one that offers anything approaching an optimal outcome.
Lot of takeaways but one is a favorite hobby horse of mine; don’t over romanticize the past. Colleges if anything were worse when it came to free thinking and were quite willing to sell out to administrations seeking to silence speech.
I really don't want to one of those people who says illiberal tendencies among far left students or faculty is somehow fake news. But its stuff like this (among many other reasons) why I think there is no higher delta in domestic politics between the actual importance of a thing and the amount of news coverage it gets.
Because these huge endowments are so clearly much more impactful as far as how universities and colleges operate. I remember when Bill Ackman first got involved with the campus culture wars a few years back and he started writing essay length tweets. I found it kind of astonishing that the take away wasn't "why does Bill Ackman have this much power and influence regarding faculty hiring at Harvard?!" Like it was astonishing to me how little this was remarked upon.
To bring it back to the topic at hand. I guess I should be happy this endowment isn't at least to freaking Harvard; much better to be provided to a major public university in my book. But yeah, hard not to look at this as a giant tax dodge. Also, add to the list of stuff where Trump is not as much an outlier sometimes as we might think; just way more obvious and oafish. What I'm getting at is, just how different is providing millions to a college to have your name attached to a bunch of buildings versus constructing giant statues of yourself? Yes, the money to the college is going to a better purpose for society, but let's be real, there is a big Venn Diagram overlap as far as ego motivations here.
Is the difference between a foundation and a nonprofit all in the funding?
The Savoy company in Philly does 2 weekends of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera each year and seems to be at least partially run on donations (and program ads by cast and local companies—you get a whole book when you sit down!). But they are 125 years old now. Comic opera (or the local trail organization or the Philly ballet) aren’t exactly feeding the hungry, but I do like that they exist and presumably stockpile some money for times when donations don’t fully cover costs.
IANAL, but I believe current rules require all nonprofits / foundations to distributed 5% of their assets annually (an average of 5%/year over 5 years), even the ones like you describe.
Increasing this to 15% or 20% would either force the foundation to distribute the majority of its assets over a 10-20 year period or find new funding sources. Both of which are better than seeing an initial bequeath fund a permanent foundation for perpetuity.
But wouldn’t that also encourage all that spend money to make money type of advertising?
Like I bought a consumer reports membership when I bought my house and needed a new washer/dryer/etc, but there was so much begging mail—rounds of car lottery tickets and letters requesting donations.
Or the constant SPCA commercials as a kid that were just all sad animals? Or the monthly Wikipedia banners asking for donations even though to my understanding the website itself is funded many times over? Or the huge packet Arbor Day foundation likes to send out?
If someone gives the local animal shelter 2million in their will and it’s funded for the next 40years, isn’t that a good thing that means it can focus on taking care of and placing animals instead of attracting donations?
A lot of public sector funds flow to nonprofits, and for sure some of that is ill-advised, but a lot of it is fine. Most state universities and hospitals are set up as nonprofits, and I don’t think we would want to privilege for-profit institutions. I don’t have problems with money being distributed to food banks, either.
How are you defining public-sector funds? I think I'm missing something in the terminology. If we don't let government money going to non-profits, that would be a complete catastrophe, since government has increasingly outsourced public services to non-profits. It would be completely ruinous for the economy to shift such large amounts of money away from those services and jobs. Also, a complete non-starter politically.
So legally, the distinction is between public charities and private foundations. The default status is private foundation, but organizations can obtain public Charity status by (a) falling into a statutory category of charity, such as church, school, or hospital, (B) existing for the purpose of supporting another public Charity, or (c) raising at least 10% of its income from “public support” – meaning government funding, grants for public charities, or small donations from a large group of individual individuals and businesses.
Why not do both? Tax the borrowing collateralized by appreciated capital assets as income… and have that accrue basis to the collateralized asset when it comes time to figure inheritance, gift, or capital gains tax - without the step-up in basis upon death.
Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement. Working needs as much incentive as collecting returns on previously acquired capital.
The recent research suggesting some part of shifts in income to return on capital vs labor is due to structuring to take advantage of tax rates suggest such preferential policy is rewarding those who have the scale and/or market opportunity to structure their income. Not exactly useful behavior.
Properly set individual or household exemption values make sure the incentive for enough people to accumulate capital remains.
It’s hard to defend policy loopholes - like borrow-spend-die / step-up in basis - that are only accessible at such extraordinary scale of income/wealth. Normies like myself are forced translate our labor into immediately taxable wage income because (a) we don’t have the negotiating power to translate our labor into appreciable assets and (b) no-one will lend us enough against small asset bases to live off.
"Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement."
This is largely because we don't adjust basis for inflation. A worker gets paid reasonably quickly. But someone could buy a stock for $20 in 2000, sell it for $30 in 2026, pay capital gains on a $10 gain, but have a real loss after inflation.
I don't think Democrats should ignore the political benefits of cracking down on taking loans against your wealth. To the typical American, I imagine it just wreaks of tax cheating and it could help fund reversing things like the Trump tariffs.
The take from a well written estate tax would be so big this would be unnecessary.
You could have presumptions of “unreasonable structuring” if a descendent paid less than a certain percentage of his peak net worth, then allow this to be rebutted by shoring the reduction in net worth was an unintentional loss or a business imperative.
Very large estates can support detailed adjudication.
I believe in free enterprise and I don’t want to complicate the administration of any business during the founder’s lifetime. Also, these loans would be much less attractive without the stepped up basis loophole.
But I'll trade the entirety of the estate tax for ending the carve-out for long-term capital gains (and so many other things but that's the main one) and charging progressive rates on all income regardless of source.
This would lead to a number of "I lived with my parents and when they tragically died they forced me to sell my childhood home too" stories. Would be very unpopular.
Index the gains. If mom and dad bought the house for $25,000 in 1972 and then sold it for $350,000 in 2022, that 25K is about 170K today, so they'd only have capital gains on 180K.
This is how we should put the thumb on the scale to encourage "long-term capital gains", just give them a bigger boost.
I don't agree with the confiscatory rates--why should gift giving be taxed at such a higher rate than other consumption--but it is absolute insanity that the step-up basis exception exists. I know of literally no-one who defends it on the merits.
The basis for the confiscatory rates is because they are addressing a different problem than consumption taxes try to address. Different problems call for different solutions.
The problem (or, at least, perceived problem) with inherited wealth is the intergenerational replication of inequality.
My personal feeling is most of the arguments misdiagnose the problem. Very few normal people are particularly upset that Sam Walton's children inherited vast wealth. But many more people start feeling uncomfortable at things like the Kennedy's still having vast wealth after 5 generations or the Rockefeller heirs owning the largest private residence in DC almost a century after John Rockefeller died.
And in both cases what people especially don't like is the shift to politics.
Other extremely wealthy heirs like the Mars family or Abigail Johnson draw basically zero ire because they largely keep quiet on politics. I think the largest political effort from the Mars family was their lobbying over daylight savings so it extended to November so Halloween would have more candy sales.
We could have a "step-up debt" policy where all debt is zeroed out in the estate. Just kidding, but even voicing it makes it clear how crazy the step-up basis is.
You could probably actually build a successful political movement around "step-up debt" - it's substantially less crazy than, "Let's abolish property taxes and just not replace them with anything" and that's turning into something with real politicians supporting it.
I'm conceptually in agreement but practically skeptical. As sometimes pointed out (most often by Tran Hung Dao), this was tried 50 years ago and then repealed almost immediately because it was impractical. For stocks and other publicly traded assets, it would be easy now, but not always so for property, private businesses, etc. That's not to say it shouldn't be done then, but it's probably a lot harder than most assume.
I only ask because this sounds so dispassionate to the "heirs". My children are my family, and part of my work has been to build something that endures beyond me, that they can continue to grow & that my efforts to look out for my kin can extend beyond my own brief time in this physical world.
You’re talking about inheriting humongous fortunes. I agree with David Abbott on this: if someone complains about inheriting *only* 50 million instead of 500 million, that someone is a greedy asshole.
My kids, young as they are, would also be better stewards of the US national intelligence establishment than Bill Pulte. But "my family should be personal dictators because they are smarter than most voters" is an idea with a long and bad track record.
I think you need a growth mindset wrt the potential for hyperinflation in your lifetime. If things go just wrong, tou may end up with a *car* that costs $50 million!
I feel like these responses are fixated on the financial value and whether the number is impressive, and I find that a little disappointing.
Most significant wealth is not mere financial assets - think more of the art collection, the real estate, the family business, etc. To quote The Jerk: "I don't care about losing all the money. It's losing all the stuff."
I'm trying to suss out whether you are opposed to the dynastic impulse as a value. And to be clear, I find it quite a natural impulse, even if I have no expectation of hitting the numbers under discussion here. But I support being able to build something based on family, not trying to use tax policy to dissolve the entity and restart every generation from scratch.
Apologies for the personal question, but I find it useful to know who has "skin in the game" re intergenerational transfers. Honestly, having kids changed my feelings about inherited wealth. I think far less now from the receiver's side and far more from the giver's - one final gesture to your offspring at the end.
Yes, I have 2 kids. I’m already giving them absolutely massive advantages when I compare them to e.g. kids in Gaza and Lebanon or refugee kids you see. I don’t need to give them insurmountable ones.
I also grew up poor and am richer and am still kind of salty about that because I missed a lot of childhood/young adult stuff my peers had, and had to work much harder as a young adult, and am still bidding against likely heirs with much less stressful jobs for housing. I also really grok the power of compound interest now and understand how the same exponential growth that makes it easy to save for retirement, if unchecked over generations, means some people have self-perpetuating and insurmountable economic advantages over others. So yes part of the reason I think it is unfair that I was born poorer than other people probably is personal experience.
I’d much rather reset every generation and let everyone compete on a level playing field. Also just as a matter of fun and meaningfulness—if you had say a sports game where every team’s score was not just what they scored that game but all of what they’ve scored in their history, that would rapidly stop being interesting once some teams become the forever winners and people would stop watching.
The zero-sum thinking on display here is crushingly depressing.
Edit: to clarify, I have no problem with substantial inheritance/estate taxes. I just find the last paragraph horrifying.
To repeat what I wrote in the depths of this thread: lives are not lived for the amusement of spectators, individuals can have different win conditions, and my success has nearly zero bearing on yours.
I'll inherit nothing from my parents, therefore I know they must have hated me throughout life, despite their generous attention, loving support, and (sometimes) wise advice. I'm sure your kids will come around to hating you if you don't ensure their inheritance is untaxed, too.
The thing is, progressives are often very nice people, but they have no base impulse towards tax optimization and so are fundamentally un-American. It’s very sad. (/s, mostly)
Do we have a demonstrated tendency to ruin ourselves within several generations or is this cope based on anecdotal stories similar to the cope about lottery winners losing money, when actual studies (and common sense?) suggest that the majority of lottery winners retain their wealth and have better lives (https://time.com/5427275/lottery-winning-happiness-debunked/)
Like how hard is it to just stick the money in an index fund and withdraw a safe amount every year, generic you are telling me rich people can’t figure that out? I can’t believe it.
We’re turning over that list because new even larger fortunes are being made from the Internet and AI which we dominate. I’m not sure that’ll be the case going forward. It’s also much easier to keep fortunes growing now—if you just plop it in an index fund and withdraw 1% per year ($10m for a billion-dollar fortune) it’ll keep growing. A modest 7% annual return means your fortune grows 2^8=256x passively over an 80-year lifetime. It’s hard to see how anyone of even average intelligence could lose a big fortune unless they want to.
The three generation rule is stochastic. The founder is competent by construction, but odds are one of the next two generations won’t be. Even if 70% of adults could handle a fortune competently, which is optimistic, there’s a 51% chance of incompetence in the second or third generation.
Most of them are still hella rich, maybe not Elon Musk level but most probably are still billionaires or centimillionaires living stealthily. Some are even still visible like the Mellon-Scaifes heirs are still billionaires funding right-wing caused with their Gilded Age fortunes today.
And it’s probably a lot easier to keep fortunes going forward giving smaller family sizes and a better legal/financial environment for this kind of thing.
When it comes to these large estates people are either bequeathing family businesses or they are simply handing down large amounts of wealth.
Family businesses are famously inefficient. And I don't think they are healthy for family life. I love my father, but I don't think we could maintain a relationship if he was always my boss. I know people who work for their family business, and they often feel trapped by it and often have adversarial relationships with family members. Estate taxes discouraging this kind of nepotistic family business is both good for the economy, and I think it is in the long run good for families.
If we are just talking about handing down liquid wealth, estate taxes don't even begin until $30 million for married couples. If you have 3 children and leave them each $10 million, then they can feasibly have lives of leisure simply living on the interest payments, so long as their budgets are below $300,000 a year.
Bill Gates has a much more reasonable attitude toward this, where he plans to leave his kids less than 1% of his fortune, although that is still over a billion dollars.
Having just been through an inheritance recently and thinking about my own inheritance to my kids, the age of everyone is important to getting your thoughts clear. The benefit of money is much more important to pay for big expenditure of your kids well (hopefully) before your death. For most people an early investment in a 529 or a later investment in college is the most impactful thing you can do for your kids. The benefit of a loan free launch into adulthood is enormous.
To leave them a large amount on your death after old age probably puts your kids age in 40+ and probably 50+. They will be mid to late career, maybe with kids of their own. While it was nice to get an inheritance, I was not expecting / banking on it.
The single biggest thing that my parents did was to pay for half of the grandkids college.
Why would a billionaire let a bunch of government yutzes have their money? This will just engender Euro style charitable foundations that have the company at the center and the family happens to control.
Why an inheritance tax and not an estate tax, which already exists? Taxing both the person passing away and the person inheriting seems excessive to me.
I'd caveat that I'm cool with gifting while alive. My preference is eliminate the gift tax and raise the estate tax as high as the peak of the Laffer Curve. But this works too. I'm not dogmatic about it.
This continues to make no sense to me. I put all the money into a trust for my kids benefit, but make myself the trustee. It eliminates the inheritance tax, avoids the gift tax, but I continue to have all the control...
Uhh… if it's an irrevocable trust, it's considered a gift, and potentially subject to gift tax. If it's a revocable trust, the assets are part of your estate when you die.
There isn't an inheritance tax in the US, but some states have them, and that's different than the estate tax.
It would be an irrev trust, so would be a gift, but you want to get rid of the gift tax! No tax at all.
*Estate tax/inheritance tax - sure, I think we should replace the former with the latter, but for this general purpose they work out to be the same for large amounts of money.
I think the difference between inheritance and estate taxes is that the former is based on the amount inherited and the latter is based on the total value of the estate. Which favors the former in my view. Dividing $100m among 100 heirs should be taxed differently than leaving one douchebag $100m
If the rate was flat, it wouldn't make a difference. But given political reality, if we were ever to massively increase either estate or inheritance taxes, there would still probably be an exemption amount. I guess in that universe, I'd favor an inheritance tax rather than an estate tax. Encourage some rich guy to give $20k or so to a whole bunch of different people or something. But we currently have the estate tax and don't have the inheritance tax. So it may just be politically easier to lower the threshold for the estate tax down to like $1M or something.
Oh ok, we’re talking about my hypothetical. Well in an irrevocable trust, you don't retain control of the assets. I don't completely throw out the idea of family businesses and things like that, I just think if you want to give it to family, go ahead and give it to family while you're alive.
In an irrevocable trust, you can't *pull the money back.* But you very much can be named as trustee and since you wrote the trust, you can be very specific about how you as trustee can manage the money. You could even pay yourself as trustee! Believe me, I've seen some family trusts where the grantor continues to have 99% of control just like they did before they put the money into a trust.
Nicely thought out. One quibble. If an asset passes through the estate and the tax has been paid, why not allow that asset to have a step up in basis?
Just thinking that if an oldster sold the assets in the months prior to death and paid the capital gains tax, and someone inherited the cash, the cash is already stepped up and if the heir bought back similar assets, those assets would have the stepped up basis.
I think it’s actually fine to keep the step-up in basis as long as you design a tax on unrealized gains at inheritance that can’t be sidestepped or planned around. Doing both is distortive—over three generations you’ll double-tax the early gains. But yeah, you need at least one, and I think just killing the step-up in basis isn’t gonna cut it; the Walton heirs wouldn’t be *more* likely to realize capital gains and incur a big tax bill if they had a tax basis even closer to zero than it already is.
Edit: I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a 90% rate anyway, but realistically what a 90% rate will get you is a level of compliance on the order of Italy’s. People will start burying gold bars on cheap land, that sort of thing.
It seems like the folks strongly defending Platner during the last few months might end up looking like those who strongly defended Biden after The Debate.
I like Slow Boring because I'm interested in policy and governance questions (plus the best commenters), but don't really have the partisan bug. Those who are the most partisan get the opportunity to be on "the inside", but the requirement to defend everyone on the team must be a real intellectual compromise.
I'd call myself left of center but the Platner sex scandals in a normal world should be disqualifying. If someone is willing to break their vows made to their wife, why would I trust them to not break their oath to their voters?
An emotional part of me agrees with you. I find cheating to be a huge personal flaw.
But what we now know about the extra marital proclivities of many of our politicians says that empirically there is not a strong correlation between their oaths to voters and their marriage vows.
Hypocritical as it is as far as assessing a person's moral worth, I'm okay with holding new nominees to a stricter standard than established politicians. I think even his most ardent opponents would argue that Bill Clinton had at least a modestly successful track record of governance. We had much stronger priors for assessing his entire body of work, such as it was, when we all found out he was also a cheating dirtbag.
What are Platner's established qualifications by comparison?
Unfortunately it all comes back to the binary choice. At this point either Platner or Collins will be Maine's Senator in 2027. Platner is poorly qualified, Collins is even more poorly qualified because she has and will continue to support and enable Trump's corruption of our democracy.
Since 2016 the world we live in is one where you can get elected president twice despite extensive evidence of infidelity, and get re-elected despite losing a civil case centered around rape allegations. I don't disagree with you, but it's pretty clear swing voters don't care about infidelity anymore.
I’m not convinced we should draw conclusions based on what Trump can and cannot get away with. He’s unique, and just because many voters don’t care about him doing certain things I don’t think it holds that they’ll feel the same way about other politicians.
>If someone is willing to break their vows made to their wife, why would I trust them to not break their oath to their voters?<
So you'd have urged people to vote against Franklin Roosevelt?
I'm guessing the answer to that question is "yes" because you sound like a conservative who would prefer continued GOP control of that Senate seat. Which is your right! But be honest, please: it's not Platner's relationships you're concerned with but his politics. Correct?
It will certainly not be a shock if any politician breaks his campaign promises, goes back on his stated principles, or makes decisions that are bad for the nation for reasons of political expedience. Indeed, that seems like the expected behavior....
The primary is in four days and I assume Platner wins that handily.
I also believe that if something truly terrible about him comes out later there could be (and probably should be) enormous pressure on him to drop out.
But if nothing really bad comes out later (I include the dating stories) then it will be time for people to shut up and join the Platner bandwagon in order to defeat Collins.
One can pretty much say that about all candidates, of course. If something really bad about someone comes out, that would be bad for that candidate's electoral chances.
And, sure, if nothing really bad comes out but after he wins the nomination his polling numbers go down the drain then the Maine Democratic party should think hard about how to get him to drop out. Lots of hypotheticals there, of course. We'll see what happens! In the meantime, he'll be the candidate and it would be good to support our candidates.
As I’ve said before, I think it’s fine to be completely mercenary and support Platner as the way to get a D seat. That holds so long as Platner has a chance to win, which is now very much in doubt.
But I’m not going to carry water for a serial liar and abuser.
I mean, you're not really going to carry the water- you live on the exact opposite side of the country. You have as much input on the next Senator from Maine as you do the next Prime Minister of India.
Will Mainers elect a former Blackwater mercenary with a Nazi tattoo with a DUI, a history of racist & sexist comments in his mid-30s, weird sexting habits, a messy personal life, etc.? Who- BTW- has literally no qualifications for the office whatsoever. That's for us to decide and you to watch from afar
It's hard to remove someone from the nomination after the voters gave it to him because there's some chance some bad news may come out. It would have to be pretty damn bad.
Let's say he easily wins on Tuesday (I'd be shocked if he doesn't). That suggests that Maine Democratic voters have done a huge discounting of what they've learned about him. That should give us pause when we confidently assert that additional bad news (unless *really* bad) will hurt him that much. There may come a point where it actually *helps* him.
When voters get really mad at the status quo and the system, they tend to really like outsiders and aren't very persnickety about some of their rough edges.
>It's hard to remove someone from the nomination after the voters gave it to him<
Not just hard, but legally next to impossible, I think.
(Mind you I'd be happy to learn otherwise, but I'm not aware of any kind of impeachment process to deny a candidate a duly won place on the general election ballot.)
Trump famously lost his 2016 run after a long history of misogynistic comments was exposed, including one where he said he could "grab women by the pussy" -- which ultimately benefited his female rival.
You’re thinking Roy Moore in Alabama, who lost to Doug Jones after multiple revelations that he was really into teen girls, to the extent that he was banned from the mall for being a creep
And he still got 48% of the vote! Which is massively underperforming for a Republican in Alabama, but there were 650k voters who said “better the creep than the Democrat.”
I very much doubt it. The thing is, Trump has been the same dude for his whole adult life. He is a lifelong publicity hound, playboy, and poster child for being a crass rich a--hole. It's his brand.
His comments in that interview probably didn't tarnish his brand much because they weren't so out of line with who he'd always seemed to be. Similarly with the Stormy Daniels stuff--when I heard about that scandal, my first thought was something like "yeah, sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect from Trump."
Now, I'd prefer an electorate that didn't find crass publicity-seeking rich playboy a--holes appealing to send to the white house, but reality is what it is.
The asymmetry is interesting here, I think it’s a function of the voters.
As much as the Dems want to be sexually pretty liberal, it seems like the sex scandals really do hurt them more, and I wonder if dem voters just care more about improprieties and crimes. I don’t want to call it piety, but there is a sexual piety and some demand for purity in the democratic voter base that doesn’t appear to be there in the GOP IN TERMS OF REVEALED, NOT STATED preference
My guess is that it depends on the politician and his prior image. A sex scandal would hurt someone whose public image was about being personally moral and responsible, but not someone whose public image was about being a bad boy, playboy on his nth trophy wife, etc.
>As much as the Dems want to be sexually pretty liberal, it seems like the sex scandals really do hurt them more<
Maybe. Or maybe it's just sex scandals hurt ALL politicians more in the old days, before the arrival of Donald Trump.
My sense is that, for better or worse, the Trump-driven coarsening of our politics has deadened the electorate's outrage instincts. People seem a lot more cynical. Paxton absolutely crushed Cornyn (and is highly likely to beat the squeaky clean Talarico). Platner is leading Collins in the polling. And a man who was found liable for a rape flipped all seven swing states.
He lost principled votes but picked up other ones that didn't seem to mind it as much in an elected official. I don't know that we can say that the "American voter" cares strongly about this sort of stuff.
Bad judgment is a job qualification issue, so to the extent you think the scandals show he will likely do a bad job, maybe it changes your vote. But I think most people are mainly concerned with how his winning/losing will affect the balance of power in the senate. And for that, it's entirely reasonable that you may prefer to put an irresponsible jackass who will vote D into the senate over a sensible and decent woman who will vote R in the senate.
I saw Matt Stoller call Platner a rejection of the HR Lady of Politics. Which is funny because Platner is actually pretty woke, so rejection of HR lady politics basically just means the nazi tattoo and his bad treatment of women.
With the horseshoe theory piece, one obvious similarity between certain leftists and Trump supporters is the insistence that purported scandals are not regrettable facts that can be forgiven in the context of the campaign, but rather the facts of the scandal reflect well on the candidate. I think the idea behind this is that left factional politics demands unconditional loyalty to be a member in good standing of the movement? But it's a pretty big problem if you are ever going to try to use electability as a criterion for choosing candidates in a primary or "secret primary."
This actually reignited an annoyance of mine. For all the talk about biases of media against conservatives, it is not brought up enough that this is a "liberal" publication being critical of a Democrat in a way we would never see in the inverse.
The media is so structurally biased in favor of Republicans that it is quite maddening.
As one contradicting datapoint: The Wall Street Journal has often been quite critical of Trump and his administration, members of his cabinet/staff, and supporters.
Which it's why it's one of the only legacy outlets I have any time for. The Journal and the Times have the resources and inclination to pursue journalism for its own sake even if they screw it up some of the time. So many of these orgs are corrupted by right-wing arseholes or are kind of useless (MSNow, no idea what's with that name).
I mean, there are also some basically anti-Trump conservative publications that also are very critical of Trump et al. The Dispatch is not shy about saying bad things about Trump and his followers, and I gather (though I'm not a reader) that the Bullwark is the same.
How would we quantify whether conservative or liberal media are more willing to criticize their own side? I can't even begin to work out how I'd try to measure it.
The Bulwark crew are mostly liberaltarian Never Trumper Dems at this point; The Dispatch is made up of Never Trumper Nation Review refugees. Neither outlet counts as legacy media nor do they have the resources to do much reporting. Doesn't mean they have no value.
They kind of end up being the exception that proves the rule. It goes to the line Matt had about only liberals having agency. Everyone fundamentally acts as if Trump is the fault of the left, and everyone just decided that no one else has any responsibility in the matter.
If Platner loses to Collins then I, as someone who's willing to give him a pass, will look bad.
If he beats Collins then I shall do a Snoopy-style victory dance.
I'm a super partisan because the alternative is continued Trump/MAGA control of our government beside which all questions about policy and governance pale.
The sad fact is that despite his objectively bad candidacy, we'd be worse off if Platner hadn't run, because the "alternatives" are someone who demonstrably has no juice (Costello) and a dried-up husk (Mills). If Platner hadn't run we'd have just gotten Mills by default and then lost.
By contrast, at this point there are still some choices open to us. Someone is going to lose the gubernatorial nomination (several someones, actually) and if oppo keeps dropping about Platner, maybe he can be forced to resign in favor of one of them.
But the core problem here is that we never had a real competitive primary because all of the candidates who were any good were too big of cowards to run (and, more controversially, I think a lot of the moderate faction genuinely don't mind if Collins wins).
I don't really know what to tell you here. Moderates who both a. have some semblance of political acumen and b. genuinely want the Democratic Party to do well are almost a nonexistent species. This is why actually existing moderates in the 119th, 118th and 117th Congresses, respectively, keep doing things like "funding Donald Trump's government in exchange for nothing," "giving away lifetime circuit court judgeships to far-right lunatics rather than confirm totally normal Joe Biden appointees," and "refusing to pass legislation that would block Republicans from rigging elections at the state level."
It's not possible to explain this stuff as eleven-dimensional chess because it isn't; it's just straightforwardly harming Democratic political fortunes because that's what they want to do.
But given the choice between "person who wants essentially the same things I want even if I don't necessarily line up 100 percent with their ideas on how to get there" and "person who will betray me for nothing," I am going to vote for the first one even assuming that the second one is hypothetically slightly more electable.
I think that's a reasonable approach. And of course, in this specific case, the traitor faction hasn't really even put up a candidate!
No need to strongly defend him, just point to Senate math and the fake moderate's Trump 2 voting record. That said, wouldn't say no to someone better than Platner (Mills is not).
If the stuff in the latest NY Times story is true, then it is disqualifying. Full stop. I’m tired of the “he’s just going to be a senator not a president” schtick because those making it clearly would come up with a different excuse if it was a presidential candidate. The “this is what real Americans/veterans are like” excuses are disgusting and insulting.
This man should not be in office and the party should do something about it. What other reason is there to have political parties than to determine who we want to hold out as the best of us?
Maybe against a presidential candidate J.D. Vance or Trump Jr... Against what one would've formerly considered a respectable candidate? The only ones making excuses would be leftists.
Senate 51+ Trump = terribad for the country (it's going to get worse from here on out regardless, it's just *how* much worse that's in question). That's it, end of story, end of justifications. If you like our trajectory and live in Maine, vote your conscience; if you don't, still vote your conscience but know that the consequentialist argument is the most persuasive one.
This is also backwards. The point of that quote is that Roper's petty personal gain is an unworthy reward for sacrificing his honor. If Roper had sacrificed his honor for something important, well, that could still be bad, but it wouldn't make sense to say "But for Wales?" in that case.
I must be lucky because, even being on BlueSky, I haven't seen many Platner defenders. I see much more "Why did we pick this fool?" and have since before his opponent dropped out.
As ever, the majority of voters - even primary voters with a skewed percentage - have little to no engagement in the online debate and are not directly touched by the enthusiastic Platner fans. That said, now that he's national news, I suspect most people who do know about him know him as "Nazi tattoo guy" and I'm curious how those Dem primary voters who aren't caught in the online Discourse feel about that.
>It seems like the folks strongly defending Platner during the last few months might end up looking like those who strongly defended Biden after The Debate.<
Is there an alternative if you think allowing MAGA six more years of control of that seat is potentially a disaster for the country?
The primary is next week, isn't it? I haven't read any proposals as to how Democrats can extricate themselves from having Platner as their nominee. Mills has already dropped out and Costello seems to have zero name recognition. Four days isn't enough time to trigger a Costello surge, I think.
I suppose if Platner were to drop out after getting the nomination there must be a process whereby he can be replaced on the ballot? That would be the best out for Democrats. But if not (or he refuses to go, which seems likely), this dilemma doesn't appear it's going to be at all like the Biden situation, when a process (that is, a convention) was already in place to come up with a replacement.
Which gets us back to square one.
So, what it's in the national interest? That Maine seat could very conceivably be the difference between a Trumpist rubber stamp...and not. YMMV, but I'm willing to put up with his body art and dating history to prevent a 41 year old Alito clone joining SCOTUS.
"questionable/inadvisable personal conduct" is a far cry from "basically a walking vegetable", especially in today's political climate.
To me, it looks like there has been an extremely concerted effort by the media in recent weeks to tank Platner. Is this an explicit conspiracy or just extreme similarity of thought by all of these outlets (NYT, the Atlantic, etc.)? I have no way of knowing, and the consequences are the same either way. But viewed objectively, it's extremely suspicious. Especially the continued claims that he's an actual for real Nazi.
Note that this is all separate from whether or not he's a good candidate, would make a good Senator, and so forth. When the media is pushing a certain narrative this hard, we should always ask cui bono.
You've piqued my curiosity. A sordid love life would make Collins - who in my perception has always been an extremely boring politician - a little more interesting!
My hot take on Horseshoe political theory is that it's mostly the humdrum observation that whatever your positions, your adversaries are not generally homogenous. To YOU that looks like a horseshoe - but there is no one horseshoe; it's just an illusion caused by your own perspective.
Person A likes gambling and legal weed, and sees a horseshoe of nanny-state liberals and social conservative republicans. Person B is an elite neoliberal and sees a horseshoe of leftie socialists and right-wing populists. Person C is a MAGA populist and sees a horseshoe of elite liberals and country club republicans. Person D supports immigration and sees a horseshoe of left labor protections and right-wing ethnic nationalism. etc. Person E is a DSA communist and sees the corporate dems and corporate republicans working together... Etc...
But it's all just the totally routine observation that my adversaries are not homogenous.
One real part of the horseshoe is statism. Far left and far right types both like a more aggressive and intrusive government that folks in the mainstream do.
Well, but my point is that a statist can equally look out and sees things like the MAHA coalition, where the "far left" and "far right" are the horseshoe of people opposed to mandatory vaccination.
If you try to do British-style video surveillance in the US, you get opposition from a funky horseshoe coalition of "don't tread on me" Republicans and anti-Fascist Lefties - again anti-statist.
But I don't think this is true. ACLU liberals would also be opposed to this. Potentially the most opposed to this. So it's not really much of a horseshoe.
Why do you describe that as non-polarized when I would describe it as another of these infinite horseshoes?
To the hawks, there is a horseshoe of right-wing isolationists and left-wing peaceniks.
To the doves, there is a horseshoe of right-wing neocons and left-wing Liberal Hawk "global policeman" interventionists? (It's still an invasion, whether we are smashing our enemies or liberating the oppressed foreigners)
You can find plenty of centrist doves and extremist hawks. So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum.
A horseshoe happens when the views are collected on the extremes, which IS true about things like anti-free trade, conspiracy theories, police state views, etc. But isn't at all true about hawks and doves.
Hmm, I worry we might be bogged down in semantics.
But I do think your words here were the point I was trying to make when I said the horseshoe is an illusion: "So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum."
The average smaller government entity has extremely bad IT and security compared to reputable private tech companies. Even the federal courts got hacked (and now you have to 2FA into them). So if you’re concerned about cybersecurity this is not the right approach.
You’re going to have to massively increase the competence of government employees and probably pay them private sector tech industry level salaries for this to work. I was adjacent to government surveillance in a past job and saw some shockingly careless stuff around sharing data (never any maliciousness or misuse, just careless/incompetent). Non-tech private companies can be pretty bad about this too.
The most reliable form of data protection means data minimization. I actually don’t really care about security footage in public places where people don’t have an expectation of privacy anyway per se and of course stopping violent sort of street crime is very important. But we should prevent the government from getting private data and have simple policies that require data to be deleted after a certain fairly short time.
Not necessarily true, anarchists and libertarians are generally considered far-left or far-right but their whole thing is being against an aggressive government.
Horseshoe #1: Both Nazis and Commies are on board with banning opposition political parties, censoring news outlets, making schools spend a lot of time indoctrinating kids on the ruling ideology, discarding democracy and independent courts in favor of one-party rule.
Horseshoe #2: Both left- and right- conspiracy theory types are on board with believing that vaccines are being used to inject microchips into people, oin massive billionaire pedophile conspiracies, and in the Jews controlling the media/finance/society/the weather, etc.
I agree that that part is key to the most common horseshoe, but to Miles's point, there can also be a less common inverted horseshoe where different ideological factions are seen as insufficiently enforcing certain laws or government actions.
But that doesn't explain why Rae Huang (the splitter socialist LA mayor candidate) and Spencer Pratt were being friendly on Twitter before the election.
I'm in New York so I don't know anything about this, but I asked ChatGPT and this reply seemed reasonable:
The key context is the top-two runoff math. L.A.’s mayoral race advances the top two candidates if nobody gets 50%, and late polling had Bass, Raman, and Pratt bunched together, while Huang was polling around 9%. That made Huang’s voters potentially decisive: votes for Huang were mostly votes not going to Nithya Raman, the progressive with a real shot at the runoff.
So Pratt had an obvious incentive to be “nice” to Huang: elevate the left candidate who could split Raman’s progressive lane. That does not require Pratt to like socialism; it only requires him to prefer a fragmented left. A social-media post praising Huang over Raman would function as a wedge: “leftists, vote for the purer left candidate,” which helps Pratt if it keeps Raman below him.
Huang’s incentive was different: her campaign was arguing against “viability” and “tactical voting,” explicitly framing those arguments as establishment gatekeeping. Her campaign site told voters not to wait until November and to “vote with your values,” which fits the decision to reject pressure to consolidate behind Raman.
Right, both candidates share a dislike for mainstream liberalism and prefer making alliances with people whose substantive views they hate rather than compromising with the electorate or anyone else.
Looks like Huang is getting under 3% so in the end she won't be the reason Raman doesn't make the runoff. (Raman is six percentage points behind Pratt with, by my estimate, maybe 90% of the vote counted, so her chances are small and diminishing.)
A lot of the vote remains to be counted, and the people I follow who are tracking it say Raman will overtake Pratt. This isn't wishful thinking—these same people also favor Steyer, but say he will fail to overtake Hilton. Late votes are always much more liberal than earlier votes.
Why do people think there are lots of vote remaining to be counted? In the intense election of 2022 between Bass and Caruso, which had very high interest, there were 646K votes cast. So far, 556K votes have been counted (or 85% of the 2022 total). I find it hard to believe this election will crack 646. As of last night, Raman was >30K votes behind Pratt. It's very hard to believe she can make up that gap with what I believe to be a relatively small total of outstanding votes. And I supported Raman!
Because we look at what the county says, and they say they've counted about 1.4 million votes and have about 700K votes in hand that they haven't counted,
That last sentence is actually not true, and it's worth spinning out a pretty long comment why to arm ourselves against fascist conspiracizing.
What is true is that there are some structural reasons why late votes tend, on average and on the whole, to be somewhat left-leaning. For example, if a candidate's support is disproportionately concentrated among low-income voters who may have difficulty with the voting process, it may take longer for them to marshal their support. If you are distracted by trying to survive you may be less able to swiftly put your ballot in the mail. In some sense, this is the same phenomenon that historically meant that the right benefitted from voter suppression.
But those structural factors can be completely submerged by other, more direct ones. In the context of a primary the #1 leading cause of people returning their ballots late is that they haven't decided who to vote for, which is not primarily a product of education so much as it is a product of how many candidates there are, how similar they are, and how much the imperatives of strategic voting are going to dictate things. This specific election was almost the perfect storm for late Democratic ballot return as it featured a whole bunch of hotly contested races between candidates with very little to differentiate them from one another on policy and where avoiding or causing a top-two lockout was of cardinal strategic importance. I am a high-consciensciousness low-agreeability personality type who normally mails back my ballot a month in advance because nothing is going to change my views, but I held on to said ballot until the day before Election Day because I was voting strategically in multiple different races.
In general elections there's a whole other set of considerations; the number one cause of the ballot trail pointing one way or another is late-deciding swing voters, which is why the trail in 2018 was super-blue and the trail in 2020 was weirdly-kinda-red (Trump was in a huge hole and then won most late deciders to nearly close to the point where the Electoral College insanity could hand him another term). That got particularly intense in Arizona, where late-mailed ballots were INCREDIBLY red. This got to the point that Trump nearly overtook Biden from what had initially looked like so insurmountable a hole that Fox News errantly called the state for him, after misunderstanding how many ballots were still outstanding.
In other words, "late mail is liberal" is not a law of nature. It's a contingent tendency that can easily be overridden by other factors. Republican operatives aren't just morally wrong to spread conspiracy theories about late mail being illegitimate, they are factually wrong about their own helplessness to change it (although how much they actually believe in what they're saying, versus just lie to delegitimize liberals, is unclear).
In California, the earlier the vote, the older the voter, on average. This is easy to observe, because at various times of the election period counties publicize the ages of the voters who have returned their votes already.
Early voters tend to be old and homeowners. Later voters tend to be younger, renters, and more to the left. This happens every single election. Every single election, late votes move the result to the left by a lot. I think it was the second midterm of Bush's presidency, on election day four contested House elections in the Central Valley showed more votes for the Republicans, and it looked bleak for the Dems. But as more votes got counted, one, then the next, then the next, and then the fourth of these House seats moved to the Dem column. The first one was Josh Harder, and I think that was his first election.
This is, I regret to say, very much a case of "not knowing ball." CalSOS and LA County Elections both issue regular unprocessed-ballots reports based on what's come in (and there's still a small amount left to come in from other counties and late-arriving mail, though at this point it's likely a pretty good estimate since a few ballots will also be excluded, sent to other counties, or have uncured signature problems).
The most recent SOS report shows that LA has processed 1,395,987 ballots and estimates 713,180 unprocessed. The latter number is clearly just a ballpark estimate (the bulk of it is a flat "700,000" estimate for uncounted mail, likely formed by just eyeballing the number of unopened pallots) so it might be 650,000 or 750,000 but it's not going to be 100,000 or 1,000,000. LA County itself is a bit further along in its estimates and says that there are now 1,477,473 ballots processed and more like 688,180 unprocessed. A hair less than one-third, in other words.
Final turnout for this primary is going to absolutely smash the 2022 figures. I realize that primary turnout is generally pathetic and so it sounds stupid to say that 40 percent is really high but that is in fact the case, and we're tracking for somewhere in that vicinity (a bit less in LA, which probably will end up about 37 percent).
This would be nice if it were true, but "the far left" and "the far right" are relatively objective features of American politics, and the observation "the far left and the far right have more in common with each other than the political center or the median American voter" is deeply offensive to both groups, so horseshoe theory resists collapse.
This is a great take. It's just that the selection effect on this board is for liberals' liberals. I think to many folks here, some simple policy preferences are just too scandalous to even think about. So the Horseshoe is very obvious. They group the integralist and the socialist who says: "The state should intervene to direct the allocation of capital for the common good," together right away.
I guess it's important to think about it in the Spanish Civil War sense of it. Left and Right are coalitions that exist in the context of the historical forces at play.
Zhu De and Chiang Kai Shek could fight on the same side of the 1911 rebellions when the question was: Should Qing rule China?
This sort of "short window" conception of ideas is why Fukuyama is so compelling. Many people really live at the end of history!
This is going to sound uncharitable, maybe more uncharitable than intended, but I tend to see the dynamic on the post Reagan right in question as coming down to increasing consolidation of low IQ, low human capital people into a single party. Or maybe a realization of that old saw about not all conservatives being stupid but most stupid people being conservative.
I say this as someone who more or less agrees with a lot of the criticisms, by say, an Andrew Sullivan, of institutionalized liberalism, and maybe more controversially here, sympathizes with a lot of the once far left now often seen as far right concern about the natsec state that would be associated with Glenn Greenwald types.
Among the (many) differences that keep me a liberal is that I don't think these things can be addressed by putting f*cking idiots in charge, who are constitutionally incapable of actually solving problems. Moreover I think the larger right is mired in an ecosystem of reactive grievance, where no matter what their own idiotic leaders do, they have conditioned themselves to jump to a litany of past provocations by their opponents to justify it. Ultimately its gotten them to the place where they are now, with total brain drain from their party, their institutions, and a lot of their candidates, to the point that they can't study their own past or govern effectively when given the chance.
It’s a real moral rot. I am relatively conservative but Republicans’ affinity for lazy and casual dishonesty, inconsistency, and nihilism makes them utterly repulsive to me.
One interesting thing about working in and around government as an economist is that many (most?) of us can’t be GOP because of the moral rot. However, the vicious inflexible stupidity of the democrats when they get in power, especially of those they choose to give power and appoint to agencies (Chopra being one, the crazy transportation kleptomaniac being another, I’m not even including Khan who I thought did pretty well towards the end) is truly dangerous and causes a lot of harm.
This means many serious people are left without a home.
You might want to rewrite this because your preceding and following statements are a bit disjoint. It’s early. Start a second sentence rather than comma conjunction.
How much is this specifically about Biden though, who operated with a very coalition mindset? Like are there Obama appointees that you'd describe as viciously inflexible and stupid?
Fair enough. I think in a democracy it's not realistic to expect a governmental elite from any party that you personally think are 100% brilliant managers and policy minds (really this applies to any large organization).
Politics just seems to be getting dumber, their certainly human capital sorting, but leftist ideologues believe in complicated theories that require some level of verbal ability to understand, but have no evidence and fall apart if anyone questions them.
I am stumped by Marxists, they seem smart, but the basis is a guy in the mid 19th century making predictions that didn't come true and the whole idea is a specific teleology of human history, which is odd to believe for atheists. I don't think there are that many Marxists on the Left, far more are vaguely anarchist who see rule enforcement as oppressive and lots of obviously dumb and hypocritical identity politics theories. Far more common than any ideology is people who think there is an easy way for govery to get money accompanied by a refusal to do cost benefit analysis or investigate spending.
I knew a guy who had been, essentially, a Marxist theologist in the old USSR. He was very smart (after the collapse of the Soviet Union he ended up as a software developer), but I think his job back home was some mix of Marxist philosophizing and spinning up a Marxist justification for whatever it was that the USSR was doing at that moment.
Also went to war with their own members. Contract with America and family friendly senate made being a congressperson or senator deeply unappealing. You see more turnover than I think you’d see otherwise, which is good and bad.
I think the twin clusterf--ks of the War on Terror and the financial crisis/bank bailouts destroyed the credibility of a lot of the previous intellectual leadership of the conservative movement, and that probably opened a path for Trump et al to move in.
Is it that smart conservatives would rather own successful businesses than toil for the government? When they cross over, you would hope it would be a Romney or a Bloomberg, but instead we're getting a Trump (or a late-stage Musk)
That's reasonable but if there's a supply shortage of smart conservatives who want to be politicians, how would we know? Supply-demand works in an economic market, but the premise here is that the incentives are better in the actual market than in politics. Political "demand" can annoint a Trump, but if you'd rather not be a politician than a business leader, it can't offer you anything.
I dunno man. I think Mitt Romney would happily be president right now if he could, and after watching people I would've once thought of as arch conservatives run out of their own safe seats I'm not sure any of them with half a brain could win if they wanted to.
Smart conservatives have different politics than dumb ones. Romney and Bloomberg are technocrats who have more in common with Obama than Trump, even if the former has trouble realizing it. Ted Cruz and the Elon Musk "tech right" are rare exceptions.
Who would elect the head of an investment bank like Dimon or whoever runs Goldman if they were conservative and interested in running?
Hell, I just listened to an interview with Yannis Varoufakis and the Left isn’t interested in electing an intelligent guy who doesn’t try to sell magic and one weird trick solutions.
If we’re just constraining it to smart guys Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are pretty damn smart. Joni Ernst. John Thune is very smart. I respect the hell out of Tim Scott’s institutional knowledge and staffers.
Deep red states I think tend to elect smart senators but I also note they might not survive a primary if it were held tomorrow.
Do you mean "smart" in the sense of taking actions to keep and gain more power, serve their own interests, etc.? Or "smart" in the sense of selflessly serving the well-being of the nation despite this costing them their power and position? Because one of those definitions makes a lot more sense to me than the other, and explains how smart people like Cruz, Cotton, Rubio, Vance, etc., actually behave.
I don't think this is it. It's that Trump has successfully been able to turn the GOP into a party of yes-men by going after anyone that stood up to him. And those people tended to by less principled who are now more interested in saying yes to Trump than pursuing a conservative agenda. That's not a GOP thing, it's a Trump thing, and I'm curious to see how it changes in a post-Trump world.
Maybe! But while nothing is forever I'd be surprised if the conservative intelligentsia is ready to reconstitute so quickly and after being done so dirty. Part of it is their own fault of course in light of the discrediting policy disasters of the W Bush administration but I'm a lot less certain anyone is waiting in the wings.
I think John Podhertz has a theory that the Republican Party is much more top down than the Democrats and generally just reflects the character of the top of the ticket in every cycle.
I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it explains the current level of submission.
Trump was uniquely popular in the party and willing to primary or threaten to primary congressmen and senators to get his way. Would Biden or Obama threaten to do the same with someone they disagreed with? Would they have even been able to?
And there were 4 years where he lost but managed to retain the leadership of the party, so we essentially went through 6 cycles ('18, '20, and '22) prior to his 2nd election where was able to mold the GOP in his image and remove any checks and balances.
This particular set of circumstances seems unlikely to repeat itself. Unless someone is able to take on the mantle of Trumpism. Trump could potentially keep it alive from the sidelines if he remains popular, but he's also old and declining rapidly. I could see him running off into the sunset (unless the State comes after his corruption, in which case he would remain involved to defend himself).
It's hard to imagine what the Republican party will look like after Trump because, as with NATO and the world order in general, it's easier to destroy something than to build something new.
Moreover I think the larger right is mired in an ecosystem of reactive grievance, where no matter what their own idiotic leaders do, they have conditioned themselves to jump to a litany of past provocations by their opponents to justify it.
"
I agree the right does this. But so does the left. It's called partisan brain.
Partisanship continually blinds us to the problems in our own party and highlights the problems in the opposing party
This is true but I think it plays out in ways that are asymmetric. The Democrats are overrun with a form of midwittery that creates its own blind spots and bad incentives whereas I think the Republicans are overrun with idiots.
I don’t really get why people say they don’t do anything. There’s core Republican goals and they’ve accomplished all of them: stopping illegal immigration (done), not banning guns (done), cutting taxes for the rich (done), banning affirmative action (done), starting a war in the Middle East (done), making tax evasion easier (done)
They've had their wins in the courts but most of this is via EO and the lack of actual immigration legislation strikes me as a massive fail on their part. It's something they pretty clearly had a mandate to tighten up and that would be hard for Democrats go undo but they haven't even tried.
Yep, the one I keep coming back to is the Refugee Act of 1980, which gives the President discretion to admit up to an extra 125,000 refugees each year above and beyond any other immigration caps. Republicans have been $h!tting blood over Biden "flooding" the US with immigrants and Trump has awarded zero or near zero visas under it, but the GOP have done literally nothing to repeal the statute. The next Democratic President can just start it up again on Day One of their administration.
There are a number of things I can think of in that area that they could've done and that I think even front line Democrats would have had a hard time opposing.
Banning abortion nationwide? Yes, The Groups grumble about Trump's passivity on the issue but then they shut their mouths and bow down to their master.
The corollary to this is that when you find a rare smart person who's a committed member of that movement, there's a pretty good chance that he's pure evil. Like I think Stephen Miller is a reasonably smart person. To be smart and still want to be on that team necessarily means there's something seriously wrong with your value system.
As a still Registered Ronald Reagan Republican, I am more than happy to talk about conservatives. There are none left in the Republican Party. There are reactionary, post liberal populists, but nary one conservative that I am aware of.
None of Trump’s policies are conservative, limited government, for example. In what world would a conservative government take ownership positions of private companies?
When you realize that owning the libs is actually the primary goal of many Republicans, rather than preventing abortions from happening or implementing fiscally conservative policies, then you stop being baffled as to their relationship with politics
There was a party shift triggered by Goldwater and Reagan, and another one triggered by Trump. "Republican" in 1966, in 1996, and in 2026 mean very different things--they support different policies, represent different voters and regions and economic interests, have to stay on the right side of different donors and media outlets, etc.
Being a Republican does not necessarily mean you are a conservative. Being conservative is a set of principles. Other than enriching yourself while making edifices to yourself is all Trump has brought to the GOP. It is not conservative.
How about voicing your support against the post liberals and standing up for the Rule of Law, limited government, businesses shouldn’t be owned by the government except in supreme emergencies. What happened with be fiscally responsible? And yes, scolding is very much in the English conservatism. In fact, yelling get off my lawn when the post liberals want to destroy something remind them about Chesterston’s Fence. USAID, Vocie of America might be a very useful tool in helping the US with Iran War let alone Cuba. Trump’s an idiot as are his policies and his MAGA crowd easily swayed by a huckster. The man who suggested putting bleach in your vein, who said he was smarter than the generals. Yes, yell and scream that there is nothing conservative about Trump and his politics. His immigration policy is bigoted, short-sighted, and actually harms America. The tariff policy is hurting America and Americans...the man is off his rocker. An elderly bigoted sociopath. Yes, scold away my friends.
If your definition is Reaganism, very true as the party under Donald Trump has rejected him and that era of conservatism. But Conservative in the broad context covers a much wider swathe of territory.
personal liberty, free trade, conserve institutions and norms that work, limited government, the rule of law, fiscally responsible...these are mine. The post liberal crap MAGA is serving up has nothing conservative about it. At least in my mind.
Historically that mix is not specifically conservative and free and personal liberty are based in the enlightenment and classical liberalism which was opposed to the conservative monarchical order.
Do you think I am endorsing Trump’s reactive mix right wing reactive authoritarianism, I am not. I am just pointing out that the Reagan conservatism is a rather unusual bird in what was historically understood as *conservative*
Airplanes are certainly full of bogus emotional support animals, and this is despite a Trump and Biden initiative that now requires people to perjure themselves to do it. They commit the perjury because shipping a dog the right way, or boarding a dog (as I do) costs lots of money.
It seems to me you just have to put your middle finger up to the disability rights movement (which hates gatekeeping) and gatekeep. Make people disclose their disability, document it through a psychiatrist, and do periodic audits and pull the licenses of any psychiatrist who participates in a bogus certification.
“Full of” seems like an exaggeration. I fly a decent amount and it’s rare to see any animal on the plane, let alone one that seems to be masquerading as emotional support.
Are you willing to pay for putting in place the infrastructure to do everything you suggest? Everyone says they don’t want a police state except for when it is their pet peeve or project. Personally, I agree with Matt on this one there might be some abuse, but seems pretty minor. Now when the emotional support Alligators and pythons start appearing on planes, then we can talk.
I'd open a batting cage and charge a quarter for 20 pitches like the old days. All of the batting cages near by closed down, despite them being busy whenever I would go. I think they all got displaced by shiny, expensive private coaching facilities that cost an arm and a leg to get into.
The public golf course driving range at east Potomac has driveline, I would campaign to open city run batting cages with the camera and computer system for baseball
Our local Wildlife Safari has one of the top breeding programs in the country (and probably the world).
One of the handlers took a cheetah cub home with her once. Later the Cheetah escaped. Everyone freaked out because there are homes nearby. The Cheetah was found at the home of the handler, calmly waiting for her.
They're pretty trainable (think some of the Indians IIRC were using them a lot like hunting dogs), it's just breeding them in captivity that's a problem. They need too much space. Presumably gross amounts of money + time could overcome this problem in a way not available to the ancients.
An organization that runs large scale randomized trials for common behaviors. Like let's actually identify the causal effect of dental cleanings or college admissions without the SAT.
A Packard heir (of Hewlett-Packard) did open a restored theater showing old movies. It has a mighty Wurlitzer, and sometimes shows silent movies with an organist. I guess when he was a kid asking Dad to see videos, his sister wanted a fish tank—she opened Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Knott's Berry Farm is one of those places whose logic I didn't question as a kid, forgot about for decades, and then is so weird as an adult when I look back on it.
This from Josh Barro is a good take on Graham Platner. I don't think he has done anything disqualifying and I don't think it is dignified or healthy to talk to exes or look into someone's marriage, but he is so obviously a terrible and irresponsible guy.
Why can't the party find a local doctor or vet 40-55 with no baggage and tempt them into every race where there is a lack of obvious political choice, every district must have lots to choose from?
I just attended a plenary given by a doctor/medical school professor in Indiana (https://medicine.iu.edu/faculty/5086/bosslet-gabriel) who talked about how the local Democratic Party tried to convince him to run for an open US House seat (or maybe state senate, i forget). He ended up saying no because he found it impossible to campaign AND do his day job AND see his school-age kids and wasn't willing to sacrifice the latter 2. There's good reason why you don't see more doctors running for office.
That is the reason they don't run for state senate, I don't think it is that hard to find someone willing to be stressed for a 30% chance of being a senator.
I also think candidates should be expected to campaign less, it isn't that effective and it probably turns off lots of prospective candidates.
In deep red seats, they should just run a generic sensible professional who isn't expected to campaign, in order to boost everyone else in the election and in case the Republican gets caught in a scandal. Also boosts popular vote share and helps exclude cranks.
I'm pretty sure a doctor with a successful practice would take a huge financial hit if he left his medical practice to become a US senator. His expenses would go up, his income would go down, his life would become much more chaotic, his future would become much harder to plan for, etc.
This is idiotic. We ought to add a zero to the end of the salaries of basically all the elected federal officials and a bunch of the appointed ones.
There actually seems to be some political pull towards non-professional candidates like Dan Osborne in Nebraska or, to an extent Josh Turek in Iowa. But, one can find those candidates without someone as whatever as Platner is.
Dan Osborne was a good candidate, but the default should be to find a responsibile professional especially medics, they are the most likely to be smart, conscientious and responsible, they have been tested for at least 20 years by their job and schooling.
Republicans are definitely screenshotting lots of Dem defences of Platner for when they have a candidates who has problems with exes or dodgy Reddit posts.
Yeah I get - though am annoyed that - political operators didn't want to take on Collins, but *someone* would, someone green and idealistic enough not to be spooked, someone who isn't an obvious jerk.
Platner's character isn't even the worst part of about him IMO. Just hearing him talk you can tell he'll vote for whatever dumb ideas percolating in gen-z socialist-slop forums end up in bill form. Warren would have a great ally in outlawing build to rent.
I haven't followed the Maine senate race very closely but I feel like the Nazi tattoo thing was burying the lede. Do I feel like a bad tattoo choice is disqualifying for office? Nope. Is someone being a dirtbag moron disqualifying for office? Hopefully!
How can I contribute to the Matthew Yglesias Nonprofit Movie Theater That Shows Cool Old Movies and Brings in Guest Speakers and Other Programming Foundation?
It's been a real bad tick year on the ranch. Normally not a problem but we've found several that made their way into the house some how. I assume they hopped a ride in on pants legs.
These theaters exist in other places. My local is the Frida Theater in Santa Ana, CA. They just had a John Waters retrospective but they do all sorts of cool things.
There’s a similar theater that George RR Martin owns in Santa Fe.
Republicans are less concerned about policy because they are a Trump personality cult. I was watching a press conference by the Agriculture Secretary recently and she literally mentioned Trump and Jesus in the same sentence as if they were comparable. When you explore right-wing media and speeches by Republican politicians, they spend so much time just talking about how great Trump is without reference to particular policies. No, he's just self-evidently great, the only problem is the radical left resisting his greatness, and aren't we blessed to have him as our president?
Similarly, there was a personalty cult around George W. Bush before his presidency completely went off the rails in the last few years. And before him there was a Reagan personality cult that eventually overlapped and outlasted the Bush cult.
Most Democrats really like Obama, but even then I don't get the same "he can do no wrong" energy from Obama fans.
It helps Obama hasn't done much wrong, if you bring up Tony Rezko you do get a few Obama is saintly ignore the evidence takes but no one really cares about the Rezko case.
Is the SAT problem going away? UMass and UCs still don’t require them. You can’t even submit them at UCs.
Also, the math portion of the SAT seems slightly busted with savvy kids using Desmos regression to get the hard math questions right. Maybe good schools should require APs instead?
The obviously crazy and dumb policy that became a momentary elite consensus position despite being obviously crazy and dumb turned out, on reflection, to be obviously crazy and dumb. In another few years, it may even be possible to reverse this obviously crazy and dumb policy....
I feel like the buried headline in today’s answers is Matt thinks Murc’s law is true.
I honestly think Matt should expand on his answer in a stand alone post because I think if he does he’ll see the implications of his insight I think are broader than just what he noted in his response. For one I think it’s key component to why news coverage is the way it is.
"Murc's Law is the assumption that only Democrats have agency or causal influence over American politics, meaning that Democrats are often blamed for the actions and behaviors of Republicans. This concept highlights a tendency in political discourse to hold Democrats responsible for Republican misbehavior, suggesting that Republicans act only in response to Democratic actions."
"suggesting that Republicans act only in response to Democratic actions"
Actually I think both parties at least in part define themselves against the other party. When Trump cracked down on immigration in his 1st term suddenly Dems because much more open border (contra Obama's record).
When Trump came out with his crazy Tariffs Dems became much more free trade.
And of course Republicans became anti-vaccine at least in part because Biden was pushing them. If Trump had won reelection I think that would have been a LOT more muted.
I've said before that one thing I'm taking a victory lap on is being right along about Bari Weiss (if you read Matt's Twitter feed, you'll see he's turned on her and not a fan). What I mean is her success is not possible without a whole of pundits in the center or center left essentially boosting her. And I honestly think it stems from this unspoken assumption (or sometimes spoken which I'll get to in a sec) that responsibility for protecting free speech is something that falls only or at least primarily on Democrats or people left of center. It actually kind of baffled me when centrist or left of center pundits would approvingly quote someone like Chris Rufo on this topic. Like I think for some pundits, it was an astonishing level of naivety in thinking Rufo was actually some ally for the cause of free speech (Despite everything in this background and just very obvious red flags he was not the level when it came to defending free speech). But I actually think part of it is this lack of expectation that people on the right or MAGA have any agency in protecting free speech and that protecting speech needs to come from the left.
Like I don't know how else to explain this sentence from Freddie DeBoar "Myself, I hold left activists to a substantially higher standard than I hold conservative officials seeking political vengeance". Look this would be an insane thing to say if it was "right activists" and "liberal officials". Just any sort of basic understanding regarding hierarchy of power should tell you how absurd this is. But also, I think there are other centrist or left of center or hard to define pundits who would express a similar sentiment and it's hard to explain this without "Murc's law" at least in my book.
There are some people that defend free speech almost always. Organizations like FIRE come to mind.
But while I think the vast majority of Americans broadly support the idea of Freedom of speech they tend not to be so absolutist.
I put myself squarely in that category. Moreover, I think the details very much matter. I think there should be a broad Overton window of acceptable speech. But that window shouldn't be unlimited. Moreover, I think that applies to publicly funded institutions like public universities .
For an easy example, I wouldn't want a professor at a public university that supported the KKK, or made a bunch of racist statements against black people. But I also wouldn't want one that made the same type of statements against Jews or white people.
Regarding Bari Weiss, I generally like The Free Press (of course that doesn't mean I support every article, or every viewpoint they publish). I know less of Chris Rufo, but I agree that public universities have huge viewpoint problems and are generally WAY out of line on some issues with the broader public (for example support of using race as part of a criteria to admin students, or trans issues). And I'm ok with state legislators getting them back in line. Same applies to the anti-western anti-American slop they put out.
I'm fine with most of the grievance studies departments getting cut or eliminated at public universities.
Freddie may be appreciated by some conservatives, but has no influence with them and does not aspire to it.
That basic arrangement explains every example of "Murc's law" I've ever seen: you can in every case infer that the accused cannot affect Republican / conservative politics, and they're working with what they have.
A very carefully worded post that doesn't touch on ~any of the actual controversies that have been roiling the comments of his blog for many of the days now. What's the deal with some random oyster farmer! I'm firmly in the "glad I don't live in Maine" camp, but with answers like that, it just makes me wonder why bother selecting such mailbag question at all.
I'd like to see Matt reckon directly with treating him like a serious candidate days after and days before serious, er, quality issues came out about him. But I sympathize with the punt insofar as the story isn't over *yet* and he may as well let it cook for a little since obviously things will keep popping off.
Thanks for answering my question. I am not quite sure what the answer is but lots of people with power make decisions with obvious negative effects, despite being told ahead, this was especially common in 2020 and are never held accountable.
Part of the answer is every organisation needs more accountability and a willingness to fire people. Probably also need to discipline the kind of people who said maths tests are racists etc they can't be conducive to a good academic atmosphere.
The solution to dynastic wealth is a well designed inheritance and gift tax.
Let the self-made billionaire allocate his capital his whole life — he’s good at it. Let him borrow against it to keep allocating. But borrowing should only defer the tax, never erase it. Taxes are only avoidable because of the step-up in basis at death. Heirs inherit the appreciated assets, the loans get repaid, a lifetime of gains is wiped clean. Kill the step-up. Tax the full lifetime appreciation at death with a progressive gift and bequest tax on top. The top rate could be 90% on fortunes over $500M and 98% over $5B. Anyone who complains about getting 12 or 13% of five billion by dint of birth is an asshole. Under this refund, the loan is just borrowing against a bill that always comes due.
And yes, that means the controlling interest largely gets sold off when he dies. That’s okay. The allocation skill was the founders and is only weakly heritable. If the son’s been running the operation and is good at it, the board keeps him on. He has a material slice of daddy’s equity, decades of relationships, this is like starting on third base. If he’s proven himself and has balls, he can take out more loans to pay daddy’s capital gains and estate taxes and keep the family voting interest intact. However, the modal case is that he’s a nepo baby and should be pensioned off with a small eight figure trust fund. No one should feel sorry for that person.
I might quibble at the rates and break-points, but I largely agree with you.
I do think this same thinking should be applied to Foundations like the hypothetical billion-dollar one bequeathed to Matt in today's mailbag. Those, too, should be strongly incentivized to distribute their money over a finite timeline.
My ideal scheme would be something like this.
First $750k (per decedent) is exempt, not part of taxable estate.
Rates:
Zero-$1M 15%
$1M-$3M 25%
$3M-$6M 35%
$6M-$10M 50%
$10-$50M 65%
$50M-$500M 80%
$500M-$5B 90%
$5B plus 98%
This would raise a lot of revenue. No one would be impoverished. A delicious amount of intra haute bourhoise compression would occur, the middle bourgeois is taxed only lightly but shows some solidarity with the workers!
Yes, sorta makes sense. This being Slow Boring, let's be clear about the unintended consequences--no billionaires will actually pay these rates, instead they'll set up foundations for their kids to run, or throw Bezos-style weddings or mega-vacations for all their grandchildren and their friends. It's not an injustice, and indeed shows some solidarity. Although part of me, based on the billion-$ heirs I've seen, is worried that giving them foundations or newspapers to run might do more damage than just letting them retire to Santa Monica. This might be the Progressive Activist Full Employment Act of 2027. Seems like death is distorting, and all you can do is move the distortions around.
Feels like you could do things about this, too. We could be much more aggressive on wealth. Nobody worth $1 billion needs that money as motivation. At that point, it's status and everybody earning less means your $100 million is just as motivating as your $100 billion.
I'd be careful about assuming you know what motivates someone else. I've known and worked with a couple of near-billionaires. For them, having/making more $ wasn't about status or consumption. They liked their status and nice things, sure, but yes, they knew they had enough. Their real motivation was accomplishment--these were people who'd made their money by changing some significant industry, one of them twice. They believed (not unreasonably) that they could do it again, but faster this time if they could rely less on investors. To take a real example from ~10 yrs ago: if you think you know better than anyone else how to build a global satellite network, then it makes a huge difference whether you have $1B, $10B, or $50B to put towards it. Could they really do it again? I don't know, but to David Abbott's point they were really good at allocating capital, and they each had an area where they were smart as heck, and I wouldn't bet against them.
Fair point, but from a motivation perspective, it's the same: the driving factor at some point ceases to be money, it's what the money represents. People who need to challenge themselves in that way don't stop having that need because the rewards are smaller. If you're driven to build a global satellite network, once you've proven you can build another hugely profitable business, you'll be able to secure the resources. I think it's also worth noting that that same individual has done enormous harm with his wealth in other venues, so maybe him not having money that puts him outside of normal constraints would be a good thing.
^"We could be much more aggressive on wealth." It's a good point, that inheritance tax shares a lot of features with a wealth tax (with some big differences, too, but still...). That means it has all the same problems as wealth taxes: it's taxing savings over consumption, it's easy to switch assets around and manipulate, it impacts non-liquid assets in a weird way, etc. I'm all for inheritance taxes because it's just too icky. But from an efficiency point of view, I wonder if it would be more optimal to just tax the income a lot more aggressively when it's first made, and then back off on all the "tax it again later" moves.
This is where I'm glad I don't write policies, because I don't think I have nearly enough knowledge (or for that matter, interest in the details) to craft one that offers anything approaching an optimal outcome.
That's just flat-out stealing the wealthy's wealth. I'm agin it.
I think you should add college endowments to the list.
Sort of related to this. I thought this article in The Ringer was excellent about the dynamics of higher education right now. https://www.theringer.com/2026/04/29/national-affairs/higher-education-trust-crisis-yale-report
Lot of takeaways but one is a favorite hobby horse of mine; don’t over romanticize the past. Colleges if anything were worse when it came to free thinking and were quite willing to sell out to administrations seeking to silence speech.
I was thinking about this when I read this story: https://news.utk.edu/2026/06/04/ut-receives-historic-130-million-investment-from-dee-and-jimmy-haslam-largest-in-university-history/
I really don't want to one of those people who says illiberal tendencies among far left students or faculty is somehow fake news. But its stuff like this (among many other reasons) why I think there is no higher delta in domestic politics between the actual importance of a thing and the amount of news coverage it gets.
Because these huge endowments are so clearly much more impactful as far as how universities and colleges operate. I remember when Bill Ackman first got involved with the campus culture wars a few years back and he started writing essay length tweets. I found it kind of astonishing that the take away wasn't "why does Bill Ackman have this much power and influence regarding faculty hiring at Harvard?!" Like it was astonishing to me how little this was remarked upon.
To bring it back to the topic at hand. I guess I should be happy this endowment isn't at least to freaking Harvard; much better to be provided to a major public university in my book. But yeah, hard not to look at this as a giant tax dodge. Also, add to the list of stuff where Trump is not as much an outlier sometimes as we might think; just way more obvious and oafish. What I'm getting at is, just how different is providing millions to a college to have your name attached to a bunch of buildings versus constructing giant statues of yourself? Yes, the money to the college is going to a better purpose for society, but let's be real, there is a big Venn Diagram overlap as far as ego motivations here.
Giving to UT is even worse than giving to Harvard, fuck the Vols and that stupid UT orange
Florida alum I presume? Or maybe LSU?
Going to guess not Texas given the aversion to orange.
College endowments are taxed!
Yup, but only a handful of schools pay the max rate of 8% on their investment income. I think there’s an argument for taxing the corpus.
Is the difference between a foundation and a nonprofit all in the funding?
The Savoy company in Philly does 2 weekends of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera each year and seems to be at least partially run on donations (and program ads by cast and local companies—you get a whole book when you sit down!). But they are 125 years old now. Comic opera (or the local trail organization or the Philly ballet) aren’t exactly feeding the hungry, but I do like that they exist and presumably stockpile some money for times when donations don’t fully cover costs.
IANAL, but I believe current rules require all nonprofits / foundations to distributed 5% of their assets annually (an average of 5%/year over 5 years), even the ones like you describe.
Increasing this to 15% or 20% would either force the foundation to distribute the majority of its assets over a 10-20 year period or find new funding sources. Both of which are better than seeing an initial bequeath fund a permanent foundation for perpetuity.
But wouldn’t that also encourage all that spend money to make money type of advertising?
Like I bought a consumer reports membership when I bought my house and needed a new washer/dryer/etc, but there was so much begging mail—rounds of car lottery tickets and letters requesting donations.
Or the constant SPCA commercials as a kid that were just all sad animals? Or the monthly Wikipedia banners asking for donations even though to my understanding the website itself is funded many times over? Or the huge packet Arbor Day foundation likes to send out?
If someone gives the local animal shelter 2million in their will and it’s funded for the next 40years, isn’t that a good thing that means it can focus on taking care of and placing animals instead of attracting donations?
A lot of public sector funds flow to nonprofits, and for sure some of that is ill-advised, but a lot of it is fine. Most state universities and hospitals are set up as nonprofits, and I don’t think we would want to privilege for-profit institutions. I don’t have problems with money being distributed to food banks, either.
How are you defining public-sector funds? I think I'm missing something in the terminology. If we don't let government money going to non-profits, that would be a complete catastrophe, since government has increasingly outsourced public services to non-profits. It would be completely ruinous for the economy to shift such large amounts of money away from those services and jobs. Also, a complete non-starter politically.
So legally, the distinction is between public charities and private foundations. The default status is private foundation, but organizations can obtain public Charity status by (a) falling into a statutory category of charity, such as church, school, or hospital, (B) existing for the purpose of supporting another public Charity, or (c) raising at least 10% of its income from “public support” – meaning government funding, grants for public charities, or small donations from a large group of individual individuals and businesses.
Thank you! This is something I never thought about before and it is interesting.
A foundation typically gives money, while a nonprofit typically spends money.
Why not do both? Tax the borrowing collateralized by appreciated capital assets as income… and have that accrue basis to the collateralized asset when it comes time to figure inheritance, gift, or capital gains tax - without the step-up in basis upon death.
Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement. Working needs as much incentive as collecting returns on previously acquired capital.
The recent research suggesting some part of shifts in income to return on capital vs labor is due to structuring to take advantage of tax rates suggest such preferential policy is rewarding those who have the scale and/or market opportunity to structure their income. Not exactly useful behavior.
Properly set individual or household exemption values make sure the incentive for enough people to accumulate capital remains.
It’s hard to defend policy loopholes - like borrow-spend-die / step-up in basis - that are only accessible at such extraordinary scale of income/wealth. Normies like myself are forced translate our labor into immediately taxable wage income because (a) we don’t have the negotiating power to translate our labor into appreciable assets and (b) no-one will lend us enough against small asset bases to live off.
Because we should let allocators allocate or we will have French style growth.
The bargain should be clear- allocate well and live a life of luxury and prestige and give your kids small eight figures. Thats a very fair bargain.
"Speaking of capital gains tax, it’s underrated how a lower capital gains vs labor income tax is perverse value statement."
This is largely because we don't adjust basis for inflation. A worker gets paid reasonably quickly. But someone could buy a stock for $20 in 2000, sell it for $30 in 2026, pay capital gains on a $10 gain, but have a real loss after inflation.
I don't think Democrats should ignore the political benefits of cracking down on taking loans against your wealth. To the typical American, I imagine it just wreaks of tax cheating and it could help fund reversing things like the Trump tariffs.
The take from a well written estate tax would be so big this would be unnecessary.
You could have presumptions of “unreasonable structuring” if a descendent paid less than a certain percentage of his peak net worth, then allow this to be rebutted by shoring the reduction in net worth was an unintentional loss or a business imperative.
Very large estates can support detailed adjudication.
I believe in free enterprise and I don’t want to complicate the administration of any business during the founder’s lifetime. Also, these loans would be much less attractive without the stepped up basis loophole.
For sure, end the step-up at death.
But I'll trade the entirety of the estate tax for ending the carve-out for long-term capital gains (and so many other things but that's the main one) and charging progressive rates on all income regardless of source.
I keep it simple: get rid of the step up basis and then just treat inheritance like any other income.
This would lead to a number of "I lived with my parents and when they tragically died they forced me to sell my childhood home too" stories. Would be very unpopular.
You can exempt $2M or something if that's a concern.
Index the gains. If mom and dad bought the house for $25,000 in 1972 and then sold it for $350,000 in 2022, that 25K is about 170K today, so they'd only have capital gains on 180K.
This is how we should put the thumb on the scale to encourage "long-term capital gains", just give them a bigger boost.
I don't agree with the confiscatory rates--why should gift giving be taxed at such a higher rate than other consumption--but it is absolute insanity that the step-up basis exception exists. I know of literally no-one who defends it on the merits.
The basis for the confiscatory rates is because they are addressing a different problem than consumption taxes try to address. Different problems call for different solutions.
The problem (or, at least, perceived problem) with inherited wealth is the intergenerational replication of inequality.
My personal feeling is most of the arguments misdiagnose the problem. Very few normal people are particularly upset that Sam Walton's children inherited vast wealth. But many more people start feeling uncomfortable at things like the Kennedy's still having vast wealth after 5 generations or the Rockefeller heirs owning the largest private residence in DC almost a century after John Rockefeller died.
And in both cases what people especially don't like is the shift to politics.
Other extremely wealthy heirs like the Mars family or Abigail Johnson draw basically zero ire because they largely keep quiet on politics. I think the largest political effort from the Mars family was their lobbying over daylight savings so it extended to November so Halloween would have more candy sales.
We could have a "step-up debt" policy where all debt is zeroed out in the estate. Just kidding, but even voicing it makes it clear how crazy the step-up basis is.
You could probably actually build a successful political movement around "step-up debt" - it's substantially less crazy than, "Let's abolish property taxes and just not replace them with anything" and that's turning into something with real politicians supporting it.
Aaagh I’m regretting my post already.
I'm conceptually in agreement but practically skeptical. As sometimes pointed out (most often by Tran Hung Dao), this was tried 50 years ago and then repealed almost immediately because it was impractical. For stocks and other publicly traded assets, it would be easy now, but not always so for property, private businesses, etc. That's not to say it shouldn't be done then, but it's probably a lot harder than most assume.
It was repealed because of gentry and denture hostility not impracticality.
Genuine curiosity - do you have kids?
I only ask because this sounds so dispassionate to the "heirs". My children are my family, and part of my work has been to build something that endures beyond me, that they can continue to grow & that my efforts to look out for my kin can extend beyond my own brief time in this physical world.
You’re talking about inheriting humongous fortunes. I agree with David Abbott on this: if someone complains about inheriting *only* 50 million instead of 500 million, that someone is a greedy asshole.
They’ll be good with 15% of 5B, I think.
My kids are very important to me. They do not need to inherit anything worth hundreds of millions of dollars, let alone much bigger fortunes.
Imagine thinking you’d rather have Gavin Newsom, Charlene DeBlasio, Trumptards or Lina Khan types direct your money instead of your kids.
That’s wild.
My kids, young as they are, would also be better stewards of the US national intelligence establishment than Bill Pulte. But "my family should be personal dictators because they are smarter than most voters" is an idea with a long and bad track record.
You could also spend it or give it to charity.
And your argument could apply to any tax. It’d be even stronger applied to income tax (imagine you want Trump to spend your money instead of you!)
And yet we pay, and the government receives, vast amounts of tax revenue every year and the people haven't overthrown the system.
Are you in favor of zeroing out all taxes or just making sure that rich heirs don't have to pay very much?
These estate taxes won’t save us from the spending problem that’s driving this.
Nor do the income taxes I pay and yet I'm happy enough to still pay them. The whole "price of civilization" thing.
If voters are unhappy with government officials' spending policies, they should elect different government officials.
I'm in favor but only if I get to be an aristocrat, damnit!
I have a kid and I will never have $50 million, much less $500M.
Terribly irresponsible for you to have kids, then! Heavens.
I think you need a growth mindset wrt the potential for hyperinflation in your lifetime. If things go just wrong, tou may end up with a *car* that costs $50 million!
Skill issue.
I feel like these responses are fixated on the financial value and whether the number is impressive, and I find that a little disappointing.
Most significant wealth is not mere financial assets - think more of the art collection, the real estate, the family business, etc. To quote The Jerk: "I don't care about losing all the money. It's losing all the stuff."
I'm trying to suss out whether you are opposed to the dynastic impulse as a value. And to be clear, I find it quite a natural impulse, even if I have no expectation of hitting the numbers under discussion here. But I support being able to build something based on family, not trying to use tax policy to dissolve the entity and restart every generation from scratch.
“restart every generation from scratch” come the bloody hell on dude
No, most wealth is financial assets, and kids usually don’t want random stuff.
I support every generation starting from scratch because otherwise your family dictates your life outcomes and that’s not very fair.
Nikuruga, also curious if you have kids?
Apologies for the personal question, but I find it useful to know who has "skin in the game" re intergenerational transfers. Honestly, having kids changed my feelings about inherited wealth. I think far less now from the receiver's side and far more from the giver's - one final gesture to your offspring at the end.
Yes, I have 2 kids. I’m already giving them absolutely massive advantages when I compare them to e.g. kids in Gaza and Lebanon or refugee kids you see. I don’t need to give them insurmountable ones.
I also grew up poor and am richer and am still kind of salty about that because I missed a lot of childhood/young adult stuff my peers had, and had to work much harder as a young adult, and am still bidding against likely heirs with much less stressful jobs for housing. I also really grok the power of compound interest now and understand how the same exponential growth that makes it easy to save for retirement, if unchecked over generations, means some people have self-perpetuating and insurmountable economic advantages over others. So yes part of the reason I think it is unfair that I was born poorer than other people probably is personal experience.
I’d much rather reset every generation and let everyone compete on a level playing field. Also just as a matter of fun and meaningfulness—if you had say a sports game where every team’s score was not just what they scored that game but all of what they’ve scored in their history, that would rapidly stop being interesting once some teams become the forever winners and people would stop watching.
The zero-sum thinking on display here is crushingly depressing.
Edit: to clarify, I have no problem with substantial inheritance/estate taxes. I just find the last paragraph horrifying.
To repeat what I wrote in the depths of this thread: lives are not lived for the amusement of spectators, individuals can have different win conditions, and my success has nearly zero bearing on yours.
I have kids and even better I know at least 3 people who have had to get rid of car and art collections. It’s just better to do it BEFORE your die.
Oh and one case where they didn’t have a plan and it turned into a massive boondoggle.
If your kid wants your stuff collection, you will no problem giving it to them over the course of your life.
I'll inherit nothing from my parents, therefore I know they must have hated me throughout life, despite their generous attention, loving support, and (sometimes) wise advice. I'm sure your kids will come around to hating you if you don't ensure their inheritance is untaxed, too.
The thing is, progressives are often very nice people, but they have no base impulse towards tax optimization and so are fundamentally un-American. It’s very sad. (/s, mostly)
Do we have a demonstrated tendency to ruin ourselves within several generations or is this cope based on anecdotal stories similar to the cope about lottery winners losing money, when actual studies (and common sense?) suggest that the majority of lottery winners retain their wealth and have better lives (https://time.com/5427275/lottery-winning-happiness-debunked/)
Like how hard is it to just stick the money in an index fund and withdraw a safe amount every year, generic you are telling me rich people can’t figure that out? I can’t believe it.
Most financial advisors think the 3 generation thing is true, and the survey evidence we have from those advisors suggests it’s true.
I haven’t seen anything that would pass peer review though. We DO turn over our richest 100 list much faster than Europe, especially France.
We’re turning over that list because new even larger fortunes are being made from the Internet and AI which we dominate. I’m not sure that’ll be the case going forward. It’s also much easier to keep fortunes growing now—if you just plop it in an index fund and withdraw 1% per year ($10m for a billion-dollar fortune) it’ll keep growing. A modest 7% annual return means your fortune grows 2^8=256x passively over an 80-year lifetime. It’s hard to see how anyone of even average intelligence could lose a big fortune unless they want to.
The three generation rule is stochastic. The founder is competent by construction, but odds are one of the next two generations won’t be. Even if 70% of adults could handle a fortune competently, which is optimistic, there’s a 51% chance of incompetence in the second or third generation.
Most of them are still hella rich, maybe not Elon Musk level but most probably are still billionaires or centimillionaires living stealthily. Some are even still visible like the Mellon-Scaifes heirs are still billionaires funding right-wing caused with their Gilded Age fortunes today.
And it’s probably a lot easier to keep fortunes going forward giving smaller family sizes and a better legal/financial environment for this kind of thing.
When it comes to these large estates people are either bequeathing family businesses or they are simply handing down large amounts of wealth.
Family businesses are famously inefficient. And I don't think they are healthy for family life. I love my father, but I don't think we could maintain a relationship if he was always my boss. I know people who work for their family business, and they often feel trapped by it and often have adversarial relationships with family members. Estate taxes discouraging this kind of nepotistic family business is both good for the economy, and I think it is in the long run good for families.
If we are just talking about handing down liquid wealth, estate taxes don't even begin until $30 million for married couples. If you have 3 children and leave them each $10 million, then they can feasibly have lives of leisure simply living on the interest payments, so long as their budgets are below $300,000 a year.
Bill Gates has a much more reasonable attitude toward this, where he plans to leave his kids less than 1% of his fortune, although that is still over a billion dollars.
I'm instinctively wary of arguments structured as "what I think we should do is actually better for people even if it is not what they say they want"
Having just been through an inheritance recently and thinking about my own inheritance to my kids, the age of everyone is important to getting your thoughts clear. The benefit of money is much more important to pay for big expenditure of your kids well (hopefully) before your death. For most people an early investment in a 529 or a later investment in college is the most impactful thing you can do for your kids. The benefit of a loan free launch into adulthood is enormous.
To leave them a large amount on your death after old age probably puts your kids age in 40+ and probably 50+. They will be mid to late career, maybe with kids of their own. While it was nice to get an inheritance, I was not expecting / banking on it.
The single biggest thing that my parents did was to pay for half of the grandkids college.
Seconded!
I am very much against the inheritance tax.
I am okay with taxing the assets that are sold to pay for the loan.
But a much easier solution is just a broad based consumption tax may be offset with a prebate up to the poverty level
Why would a billionaire let a bunch of government yutzes have their money? This will just engender Euro style charitable foundations that have the company at the center and the family happens to control.
Why an inheritance tax and not an estate tax, which already exists? Taxing both the person passing away and the person inheriting seems excessive to me.
When people actually try to give real advice on "buy borrow die" it's doesn't work for the long term.
https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/the-buy-borrow-and-die-strategy-275/ Podcast for the wealthy, and there are very limited scenarios where it works. It's basically an end-of-life hack.
Still, get rid of the step-up basis.
I'd caveat that I'm cool with gifting while alive. My preference is eliminate the gift tax and raise the estate tax as high as the peak of the Laffer Curve. But this works too. I'm not dogmatic about it.
This continues to make no sense to me. I put all the money into a trust for my kids benefit, but make myself the trustee. It eliminates the inheritance tax, avoids the gift tax, but I continue to have all the control...
What part of this is good?
Uhh… if it's an irrevocable trust, it's considered a gift, and potentially subject to gift tax. If it's a revocable trust, the assets are part of your estate when you die.
There isn't an inheritance tax in the US, but some states have them, and that's different than the estate tax.
It would be an irrev trust, so would be a gift, but you want to get rid of the gift tax! No tax at all.
*Estate tax/inheritance tax - sure, I think we should replace the former with the latter, but for this general purpose they work out to be the same for large amounts of money.
I think the difference between inheritance and estate taxes is that the former is based on the amount inherited and the latter is based on the total value of the estate. Which favors the former in my view. Dividing $100m among 100 heirs should be taxed differently than leaving one douchebag $100m
If the rate was flat, it wouldn't make a difference. But given political reality, if we were ever to massively increase either estate or inheritance taxes, there would still probably be an exemption amount. I guess in that universe, I'd favor an inheritance tax rather than an estate tax. Encourage some rich guy to give $20k or so to a whole bunch of different people or something. But we currently have the estate tax and don't have the inheritance tax. So it may just be politically easier to lower the threshold for the estate tax down to like $1M or something.
Oh ok, we’re talking about my hypothetical. Well in an irrevocable trust, you don't retain control of the assets. I don't completely throw out the idea of family businesses and things like that, I just think if you want to give it to family, go ahead and give it to family while you're alive.
In an irrevocable trust, you can't *pull the money back.* But you very much can be named as trustee and since you wrote the trust, you can be very specific about how you as trustee can manage the money. You could even pay yourself as trustee! Believe me, I've seen some family trusts where the grantor continues to have 99% of control just like they did before they put the money into a trust.
Nicely thought out. One quibble. If an asset passes through the estate and the tax has been paid, why not allow that asset to have a step up in basis?
Just thinking that if an oldster sold the assets in the months prior to death and paid the capital gains tax, and someone inherited the cash, the cash is already stepped up and if the heir bought back similar assets, those assets would have the stepped up basis.
I think it’s actually fine to keep the step-up in basis as long as you design a tax on unrealized gains at inheritance that can’t be sidestepped or planned around. Doing both is distortive—over three generations you’ll double-tax the early gains. But yeah, you need at least one, and I think just killing the step-up in basis isn’t gonna cut it; the Walton heirs wouldn’t be *more* likely to realize capital gains and incur a big tax bill if they had a tax basis even closer to zero than it already is.
Edit: I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a 90% rate anyway, but realistically what a 90% rate will get you is a level of compliance on the order of Italy’s. People will start burying gold bars on cheap land, that sort of thing.
100% agree.
Fantastic proposal and very well said. There might be some debate on rates, but the point is spot on.
It seems like the folks strongly defending Platner during the last few months might end up looking like those who strongly defended Biden after The Debate.
I like Slow Boring because I'm interested in policy and governance questions (plus the best commenters), but don't really have the partisan bug. Those who are the most partisan get the opportunity to be on "the inside", but the requirement to defend everyone on the team must be a real intellectual compromise.
https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/2062720568646885490
I think it's the opposite as one of the main Biden non-defenders.
Platner is going to win because his "scandals" are unimportant to normal people and are an obsession of the weirdos who are political hobbyists.
Age related decline is a job qualification. This stuff isn't.
I'd call myself left of center but the Platner sex scandals in a normal world should be disqualifying. If someone is willing to break their vows made to their wife, why would I trust them to not break their oath to their voters?
An emotional part of me agrees with you. I find cheating to be a huge personal flaw.
But what we now know about the extra marital proclivities of many of our politicians says that empirically there is not a strong correlation between their oaths to voters and their marriage vows.
Hypocritical as it is as far as assessing a person's moral worth, I'm okay with holding new nominees to a stricter standard than established politicians. I think even his most ardent opponents would argue that Bill Clinton had at least a modestly successful track record of governance. We had much stronger priors for assessing his entire body of work, such as it was, when we all found out he was also a cheating dirtbag.
What are Platner's established qualifications by comparison?
I don't think I disagree with you.
Unfortunately it all comes back to the binary choice. At this point either Platner or Collins will be Maine's Senator in 2027. Platner is poorly qualified, Collins is even more poorly qualified because she has and will continue to support and enable Trump's corruption of our democracy.
Platner is unqualified and Collins is anti-qualified. Great work, everyone.
There's another progressive Democrat in the primary, everyone could just vote for him.
But it seems like going to the mattresses for Platner for emotional reasons is more important.
Clinton was trying to become President. Platner is trying to be one of one hundred Senators.
Big difference.
Senator Trump wouldn't have really been a problem.
Since 2016 the world we live in is one where you can get elected president twice despite extensive evidence of infidelity, and get re-elected despite losing a civil case centered around rape allegations. I don't disagree with you, but it's pretty clear swing voters don't care about infidelity anymore.
I’m not convinced we should draw conclusions based on what Trump can and cannot get away with. He’s unique, and just because many voters don’t care about him doing certain things I don’t think it holds that they’ll feel the same way about other politicians.
>If someone is willing to break their vows made to their wife, why would I trust them to not break their oath to their voters?<
So you'd have urged people to vote against Franklin Roosevelt?
I'm guessing the answer to that question is "yes" because you sound like a conservative who would prefer continued GOP control of that Senate seat. Which is your right! But be honest, please: it's not Platner's relationships you're concerned with but his politics. Correct?
I don’t really understand what an oath with voters is….and even the spirit of the question. Is it don’t be corrupt or something else?
It will certainly not be a shock if any politician breaks his campaign promises, goes back on his stated principles, or makes decisions that are bad for the nation for reasons of political expedience. Indeed, that seems like the expected behavior....
Lots of empty seats in Congress, sad to say.
Wearing a Nazi tattoo for 20 years is disqualifying to me. And I’m pretty much squarely in the mainstream of Democrats.
Working as a literal mercenary is not great either. Neither is all the offensive shit he posted when he was in his mid 30s.
The primary is in four days and I assume Platner wins that handily.
I also believe that if something truly terrible about him comes out later there could be (and probably should be) enormous pressure on him to drop out.
But if nothing really bad comes out later (I include the dating stories) then it will be time for people to shut up and join the Platner bandwagon in order to defeat Collins.
We’ll see what polls say over the next couple of weeks and if more stuff comes out.
Collins shouldn’t be underestimated and she regularly over-performs polls.
And the fact of the matter is that Platner’s problems only lose votes and make this contest more difficult than it otherwise would be.
Yes, if more (really bad) stuff comes out.
One can pretty much say that about all candidates, of course. If something really bad about someone comes out, that would be bad for that candidate's electoral chances.
And, sure, if nothing really bad comes out but after he wins the nomination his polling numbers go down the drain then the Maine Democratic party should think hard about how to get him to drop out. Lots of hypotheticals there, of course. We'll see what happens! In the meantime, he'll be the candidate and it would be good to support our candidates.
As I’ve said before, I think it’s fine to be completely mercenary and support Platner as the way to get a D seat. That holds so long as Platner has a chance to win, which is now very much in doubt.
But I’m not going to carry water for a serial liar and abuser.
We'll see if it's very much in doubt. Like, what upcoming polls have to say.
I'll carry the water for you in that case.
I mean, you're not really going to carry the water- you live on the exact opposite side of the country. You have as much input on the next Senator from Maine as you do the next Prime Minister of India.
Will Mainers elect a former Blackwater mercenary with a Nazi tattoo with a DUI, a history of racist & sexist comments in his mid-30s, weird sexting habits, a messy personal life, etc.? Who- BTW- has literally no qualifications for the office whatsoever. That's for us to decide and you to watch from afar
Sure, but Pr[something really bad comes out about Platner] is a lot bigger than Pr[something really bad comes out about Collins].
It's hard to remove someone from the nomination after the voters gave it to him because there's some chance some bad news may come out. It would have to be pretty damn bad.
Let's say he easily wins on Tuesday (I'd be shocked if he doesn't). That suggests that Maine Democratic voters have done a huge discounting of what they've learned about him. That should give us pause when we confidently assert that additional bad news (unless *really* bad) will hurt him that much. There may come a point where it actually *helps* him.
When voters get really mad at the status quo and the system, they tend to really like outsiders and aren't very persnickety about some of their rough edges.
>It's hard to remove someone from the nomination after the voters gave it to him<
Not just hard, but legally next to impossible, I think.
(Mind you I'd be happy to learn otherwise, but I'm not aware of any kind of impeachment process to deny a candidate a duly won place on the general election ballot.)
I think American voters are wrong and it should be more French, but sexting and misogynistic comments do cut through to ordinary voters.
Trump famously lost his 2016 run after a long history of misogynistic comments was exposed, including one where he said he could "grab women by the pussy" -- which ultimately benefited his female rival.
I think if those comments came out during the primary instead of the general election, trump probably would have lost.
But when fear at the general election, partisan brain takes over.
Accept in some very extreme instances. I believe there are republican senate candidate that lost a couple years ago.I forgot who it was
You’re thinking Roy Moore in Alabama, who lost to Doug Jones after multiple revelations that he was really into teen girls, to the extent that he was banned from the mall for being a creep
And he still got 48% of the vote! Which is massively underperforming for a Republican in Alabama, but there were 650k voters who said “better the creep than the Democrat.”
Yep that's the one, a rare moment of sanity.
I very much doubt it. The thing is, Trump has been the same dude for his whole adult life. He is a lifelong publicity hound, playboy, and poster child for being a crass rich a--hole. It's his brand.
His comments in that interview probably didn't tarnish his brand much because they weren't so out of line with who he'd always seemed to be. Similarly with the Stormy Daniels stuff--when I heard about that scandal, my first thought was something like "yeah, sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect from Trump."
Now, I'd prefer an electorate that didn't find crass publicity-seeking rich playboy a--holes appealing to send to the white house, but reality is what it is.
Hard to say, but remember Trump wasn't so dominant at first, he won because he had a pretty loyal minority of the party and the field was split.
But it wasn't till after he won that Republicans really solidified around him.
Not the Louisiana prostitute guy.
The asymmetry is interesting here, I think it’s a function of the voters.
As much as the Dems want to be sexually pretty liberal, it seems like the sex scandals really do hurt them more, and I wonder if dem voters just care more about improprieties and crimes. I don’t want to call it piety, but there is a sexual piety and some demand for purity in the democratic voter base that doesn’t appear to be there in the GOP IN TERMS OF REVEALED, NOT STATED preference
My guess is that it depends on the politician and his prior image. A sex scandal would hurt someone whose public image was about being personally moral and responsible, but not someone whose public image was about being a bad boy, playboy on his nth trophy wife, etc.
>As much as the Dems want to be sexually pretty liberal, it seems like the sex scandals really do hurt them more<
Maybe. Or maybe it's just sex scandals hurt ALL politicians more in the old days, before the arrival of Donald Trump.
My sense is that, for better or worse, the Trump-driven coarsening of our politics has deadened the electorate's outrage instincts. People seem a lot more cynical. Paxton absolutely crushed Cornyn (and is highly likely to beat the squeaky clean Talarico). Platner is leading Collins in the polling. And a man who was found liable for a rape flipped all seven swing states.
And his support fell heavily and many GOP elites unendorsed him.
He lost principled votes but picked up other ones that didn't seem to mind it as much in an elected official. I don't know that we can say that the "American voter" cares strongly about this sort of stuff.
Nope. Political hobbyists think they do and want them to, but they don't.
Bad judgment is a job qualification issue, so to the extent you think the scandals show he will likely do a bad job, maybe it changes your vote. But I think most people are mainly concerned with how his winning/losing will affect the balance of power in the senate. And for that, it's entirely reasonable that you may prefer to put an irresponsible jackass who will vote D into the senate over a sensible and decent woman who will vote R in the senate.
Platner has the power to fix this problem. He will just be like Biden and draw it out and foist the consequences on others.
Correct and booooooo.
I saw Matt Stoller call Platner a rejection of the HR Lady of Politics. Which is funny because Platner is actually pretty woke, so rejection of HR lady politics basically just means the nazi tattoo and his bad treatment of women.
With the horseshoe theory piece, one obvious similarity between certain leftists and Trump supporters is the insistence that purported scandals are not regrettable facts that can be forgiven in the context of the campaign, but rather the facts of the scandal reflect well on the candidate. I think the idea behind this is that left factional politics demands unconditional loyalty to be a member in good standing of the movement? But it's a pretty big problem if you are ever going to try to use electability as a criterion for choosing candidates in a primary or "secret primary."
More in this vein: https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/2061538609883123917
For a summary of the situation so far, Elizabeth Bruenig has this at The Atlantic. Free article attached:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/graham-platner-maine-populism-elections/687429/?gift=JMxeazBxkbnELEmOxw7TqTRehCgLH1Oy7s3hmV6swEE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
This actually reignited an annoyance of mine. For all the talk about biases of media against conservatives, it is not brought up enough that this is a "liberal" publication being critical of a Democrat in a way we would never see in the inverse.
The media is so structurally biased in favor of Republicans that it is quite maddening.
As one contradicting datapoint: The Wall Street Journal has often been quite critical of Trump and his administration, members of his cabinet/staff, and supporters.
Which it's why it's one of the only legacy outlets I have any time for. The Journal and the Times have the resources and inclination to pursue journalism for its own sake even if they screw it up some of the time. So many of these orgs are corrupted by right-wing arseholes or are kind of useless (MSNow, no idea what's with that name).
I mean, there are also some basically anti-Trump conservative publications that also are very critical of Trump et al. The Dispatch is not shy about saying bad things about Trump and his followers, and I gather (though I'm not a reader) that the Bullwark is the same.
How would we quantify whether conservative or liberal media are more willing to criticize their own side? I can't even begin to work out how I'd try to measure it.
The Bulwark crew are mostly liberaltarian Never Trumper Dems at this point; The Dispatch is made up of Never Trumper Nation Review refugees. Neither outlet counts as legacy media nor do they have the resources to do much reporting. Doesn't mean they have no value.
They kind of end up being the exception that proves the rule. It goes to the line Matt had about only liberals having agency. Everyone fundamentally acts as if Trump is the fault of the left, and everyone just decided that no one else has any responsibility in the matter.
Thoughtful comments by Bruenig, whom I respect.
Is this how conservatives are talking about Ken Paxton now?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Platner's not my cup of tea but man I will accept a lot of crap if it means we can undermine Trump and the MAGA people.
(And, yes yes, there is a line I will not cross. Like if Platner was the equal of Trump in awfulness I wouldn't want him to win.)
FYI nothing new since the Kik thing
If Platner loses to Collins then I, as someone who's willing to give him a pass, will look bad.
If he beats Collins then I shall do a Snoopy-style victory dance.
I'm a super partisan because the alternative is continued Trump/MAGA control of our government beside which all questions about policy and governance pale.
It seems like the general Maine population is much more into Platner than the American people were into Biden.
It's curious to me that we are willing to let the Maine electorate make this decision when we have the SB commentariat right here.
The sad fact is that despite his objectively bad candidacy, we'd be worse off if Platner hadn't run, because the "alternatives" are someone who demonstrably has no juice (Costello) and a dried-up husk (Mills). If Platner hadn't run we'd have just gotten Mills by default and then lost.
By contrast, at this point there are still some choices open to us. Someone is going to lose the gubernatorial nomination (several someones, actually) and if oppo keeps dropping about Platner, maybe he can be forced to resign in favor of one of them.
But the core problem here is that we never had a real competitive primary because all of the candidates who were any good were too big of cowards to run (and, more controversially, I think a lot of the moderate faction genuinely don't mind if Collins wins).
I don't really know what to tell you here. Moderates who both a. have some semblance of political acumen and b. genuinely want the Democratic Party to do well are almost a nonexistent species. This is why actually existing moderates in the 119th, 118th and 117th Congresses, respectively, keep doing things like "funding Donald Trump's government in exchange for nothing," "giving away lifetime circuit court judgeships to far-right lunatics rather than confirm totally normal Joe Biden appointees," and "refusing to pass legislation that would block Republicans from rigging elections at the state level."
It's not possible to explain this stuff as eleven-dimensional chess because it isn't; it's just straightforwardly harming Democratic political fortunes because that's what they want to do.
But given the choice between "person who wants essentially the same things I want even if I don't necessarily line up 100 percent with their ideas on how to get there" and "person who will betray me for nothing," I am going to vote for the first one even assuming that the second one is hypothetically slightly more electable.
I think that's a reasonable approach. And of course, in this specific case, the traitor faction hasn't really even put up a candidate!
No need to strongly defend him, just point to Senate math and the fake moderate's Trump 2 voting record. That said, wouldn't say no to someone better than Platner (Mills is not).
If the stuff in the latest NY Times story is true, then it is disqualifying. Full stop. I’m tired of the “he’s just going to be a senator not a president” schtick because those making it clearly would come up with a different excuse if it was a presidential candidate. The “this is what real Americans/veterans are like” excuses are disgusting and insulting.
This man should not be in office and the party should do something about it. What other reason is there to have political parties than to determine who we want to hold out as the best of us?
"What other reason is there to have political parties than to determine who we want to hold out as the best of us?"
Isn't this totally backwards? Parties make the individual less important, not more important.
Maybe against a presidential candidate J.D. Vance or Trump Jr... Against what one would've formerly considered a respectable candidate? The only ones making excuses would be leftists.
Senate 51+ Trump = terribad for the country (it's going to get worse from here on out regardless, it's just *how* much worse that's in question). That's it, end of story, end of justifications. If you like our trajectory and live in Maine, vote your conscience; if you don't, still vote your conscience but know that the consequentialist argument is the most persuasive one.
But for Wales?
This is also backwards. The point of that quote is that Roper's petty personal gain is an unworthy reward for sacrificing his honor. If Roper had sacrificed his honor for something important, well, that could still be bad, but it wouldn't make sense to say "But for Wales?" in that case.
I haven't actually read the NYT article. I know he sexted other women when his mairrage was on the rocks. What is it exactly that's so bad?
I must be lucky because, even being on BlueSky, I haven't seen many Platner defenders. I see much more "Why did we pick this fool?" and have since before his opponent dropped out.
The typical Blueskyer have been among the earliest Platner haters.
As ever, the majority of voters - even primary voters with a skewed percentage - have little to no engagement in the online debate and are not directly touched by the enthusiastic Platner fans. That said, now that he's national news, I suspect most people who do know about him know him as "Nazi tattoo guy" and I'm curious how those Dem primary voters who aren't caught in the online Discourse feel about that.
>It seems like the folks strongly defending Platner during the last few months might end up looking like those who strongly defended Biden after The Debate.<
Is there an alternative if you think allowing MAGA six more years of control of that seat is potentially a disaster for the country?
The primary is next week, isn't it? I haven't read any proposals as to how Democrats can extricate themselves from having Platner as their nominee. Mills has already dropped out and Costello seems to have zero name recognition. Four days isn't enough time to trigger a Costello surge, I think.
I suppose if Platner were to drop out after getting the nomination there must be a process whereby he can be replaced on the ballot? That would be the best out for Democrats. But if not (or he refuses to go, which seems likely), this dilemma doesn't appear it's going to be at all like the Biden situation, when a process (that is, a convention) was already in place to come up with a replacement.
Which gets us back to square one.
So, what it's in the national interest? That Maine seat could very conceivably be the difference between a Trumpist rubber stamp...and not. YMMV, but I'm willing to put up with his body art and dating history to prevent a 41 year old Alito clone joining SCOTUS.
"questionable/inadvisable personal conduct" is a far cry from "basically a walking vegetable", especially in today's political climate.
To me, it looks like there has been an extremely concerted effort by the media in recent weeks to tank Platner. Is this an explicit conspiracy or just extreme similarity of thought by all of these outlets (NYT, the Atlantic, etc.)? I have no way of knowing, and the consequences are the same either way. But viewed objectively, it's extremely suspicious. Especially the continued claims that he's an actual for real Nazi.
Note that this is all separate from whether or not he's a good candidate, would make a good Senator, and so forth. When the media is pushing a certain narrative this hard, we should always ask cui bono.
This isn’t a defense of Platner but there’s a really weird double standard here where no one is talking about Collins pretty sordid love life.
You've piqued my curiosity. A sordid love life would make Collins - who in my perception has always been an extremely boring politician - a little more interesting!
I have to say, this is the first I've ever heard anything about that. Do you have an article to point to?
Andy O’Brien is tweeting about it. Is it real? Pfft we’ll see
I hate Collins for so many reasons but I don't give a damn about her "pretty sordid love life."
Just as I don't care about troubles in Platner's marriage. Just as I don't care about the "biblical divorce" Paxton is going through.
Ah, so *that*'s who was exchanging nude photos with Platner....
I wonder how many of these people will be backing Collins or at least unendorsing Platner by November, I guess it depends on how much more comes out.
My hot take on Horseshoe political theory is that it's mostly the humdrum observation that whatever your positions, your adversaries are not generally homogenous. To YOU that looks like a horseshoe - but there is no one horseshoe; it's just an illusion caused by your own perspective.
Person A likes gambling and legal weed, and sees a horseshoe of nanny-state liberals and social conservative republicans. Person B is an elite neoliberal and sees a horseshoe of leftie socialists and right-wing populists. Person C is a MAGA populist and sees a horseshoe of elite liberals and country club republicans. Person D supports immigration and sees a horseshoe of left labor protections and right-wing ethnic nationalism. etc. Person E is a DSA communist and sees the corporate dems and corporate republicans working together... Etc...
But it's all just the totally routine observation that my adversaries are not homogenous.
One real part of the horseshoe is statism. Far left and far right types both like a more aggressive and intrusive government that folks in the mainstream do.
Well, but my point is that a statist can equally look out and sees things like the MAHA coalition, where the "far left" and "far right" are the horseshoe of people opposed to mandatory vaccination.
If you try to do British-style video surveillance in the US, you get opposition from a funky horseshoe coalition of "don't tread on me" Republicans and anti-Fascist Lefties - again anti-statist.
But this is a fun game! Throw me another one!
I saw an anti body cam argument the other day that was basically like “it actually lets us do crime, which we like, because that is our culture”
But I don't think this is true. ACLU liberals would also be opposed to this. Potentially the most opposed to this. So it's not really much of a horseshoe.
Honestly the anti-vax thing is different. It's just a non-polarized issue (or at least used to be).
Non-polarized issues are different from the horseshoe. Another non-polarized issue is hawkishness/doveishness.
Why do you describe that as non-polarized when I would describe it as another of these infinite horseshoes?
To the hawks, there is a horseshoe of right-wing isolationists and left-wing peaceniks.
To the doves, there is a horseshoe of right-wing neocons and left-wing Liberal Hawk "global policeman" interventionists? (It's still an invasion, whether we are smashing our enemies or liberating the oppressed foreigners)
You can find plenty of centrist doves and extremist hawks. So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum.
A horseshoe happens when the views are collected on the extremes, which IS true about things like anti-free trade, conspiracy theories, police state views, etc. But isn't at all true about hawks and doves.
Hmm, I worry we might be bogged down in semantics.
But I do think your words here were the point I was trying to make when I said the horseshoe is an illusion: "So there's no horseshoe. Just a distribution of minority views throughout the political spectrum."
The average smaller government entity has extremely bad IT and security compared to reputable private tech companies. Even the federal courts got hacked (and now you have to 2FA into them). So if you’re concerned about cybersecurity this is not the right approach.
You’re going to have to massively increase the competence of government employees and probably pay them private sector tech industry level salaries for this to work. I was adjacent to government surveillance in a past job and saw some shockingly careless stuff around sharing data (never any maliciousness or misuse, just careless/incompetent). Non-tech private companies can be pretty bad about this too.
The most reliable form of data protection means data minimization. I actually don’t really care about security footage in public places where people don’t have an expectation of privacy anyway per se and of course stopping violent sort of street crime is very important. But we should prevent the government from getting private data and have simple policies that require data to be deleted after a certain fairly short time.
The difference of course, is that corporations can't send men with guns to your house
Well, they *can*, but there are laws against it, and as a result in well-run countries they generally don’t.
Government is free to enforce the safety of public spaces and roads. They are not free to create a surveillance state to do so.
I'm totally ok with them hiring police officers, and enforcing laws. I'm not ok with them spying on us every second of the day.
1984 is a warning not a guidebook.
Not to mention it's prohibited by the 4th amendment.
The problem is that governments and their employees can and often do misuse that data, or use the data to expand their power in scary ways.
Not necessarily true, anarchists and libertarians are generally considered far-left or far-right but their whole thing is being against an aggressive government.
Huh, I was thinking that far left and far right types both are more *anti* government than people in the mainstream.
I world say more conspiratorial, which isn't the same thing as not being more comfortable with violence than more pro-social people.
I think you can get other variants.
Horseshoe #1: Both Nazis and Commies are on board with banning opposition political parties, censoring news outlets, making schools spend a lot of time indoctrinating kids on the ruling ideology, discarding democracy and independent courts in favor of one-party rule.
Horseshoe #2: Both left- and right- conspiracy theory types are on board with believing that vaccines are being used to inject microchips into people, oin massive billionaire pedophile conspiracies, and in the Jews controlling the media/finance/society/the weather, etc.
Maybe A horseshoe but the point is that there is no one horseshoe
Someone tell us the math term for a horseshoe shape in high-dimensional space!
I agree that that part is key to the most common horseshoe, but to Miles's point, there can also be a less common inverted horseshoe where different ideological factions are seen as insufficiently enforcing certain laws or government actions.
I like this a lot. People say things like "horshoe is undefeated" about wildly divergent things to the point it seems entirely nonfalsifiable.
But that doesn't explain why Rae Huang (the splitter socialist LA mayor candidate) and Spencer Pratt were being friendly on Twitter before the election.
I'm in New York so I don't know anything about this, but I asked ChatGPT and this reply seemed reasonable:
The key context is the top-two runoff math. L.A.’s mayoral race advances the top two candidates if nobody gets 50%, and late polling had Bass, Raman, and Pratt bunched together, while Huang was polling around 9%. That made Huang’s voters potentially decisive: votes for Huang were mostly votes not going to Nithya Raman, the progressive with a real shot at the runoff.
So Pratt had an obvious incentive to be “nice” to Huang: elevate the left candidate who could split Raman’s progressive lane. That does not require Pratt to like socialism; it only requires him to prefer a fragmented left. A social-media post praising Huang over Raman would function as a wedge: “leftists, vote for the purer left candidate,” which helps Pratt if it keeps Raman below him.
Huang’s incentive was different: her campaign was arguing against “viability” and “tactical voting,” explicitly framing those arguments as establishment gatekeeping. Her campaign site told voters not to wait until November and to “vote with your values,” which fits the decision to reject pressure to consolidate behind Raman.
Right, both candidates share a dislike for mainstream liberalism and prefer making alliances with people whose substantive views they hate rather than compromising with the electorate or anyone else.
Looks like Huang is getting under 3% so in the end she won't be the reason Raman doesn't make the runoff. (Raman is six percentage points behind Pratt with, by my estimate, maybe 90% of the vote counted, so her chances are small and diminishing.)
A lot of the vote remains to be counted, and the people I follow who are tracking it say Raman will overtake Pratt. This isn't wishful thinking—these same people also favor Steyer, but say he will fail to overtake Hilton. Late votes are always much more liberal than earlier votes.
Why do people think there are lots of vote remaining to be counted? In the intense election of 2022 between Bass and Caruso, which had very high interest, there were 646K votes cast. So far, 556K votes have been counted (or 85% of the 2022 total). I find it hard to believe this election will crack 646. As of last night, Raman was >30K votes behind Pratt. It's very hard to believe she can make up that gap with what I believe to be a relatively small total of outstanding votes. And I supported Raman!
Huh. Latest update was 60K votes, Raman 39%, Bass 34%, Pratt 18%. Now Raman is only 3.3% behind. This is doable for Raman.
Because we look at what the county says, and they say they've counted about 1.4 million votes and have about 700K votes in hand that they haven't counted,
That last sentence is actually not true, and it's worth spinning out a pretty long comment why to arm ourselves against fascist conspiracizing.
What is true is that there are some structural reasons why late votes tend, on average and on the whole, to be somewhat left-leaning. For example, if a candidate's support is disproportionately concentrated among low-income voters who may have difficulty with the voting process, it may take longer for them to marshal their support. If you are distracted by trying to survive you may be less able to swiftly put your ballot in the mail. In some sense, this is the same phenomenon that historically meant that the right benefitted from voter suppression.
But those structural factors can be completely submerged by other, more direct ones. In the context of a primary the #1 leading cause of people returning their ballots late is that they haven't decided who to vote for, which is not primarily a product of education so much as it is a product of how many candidates there are, how similar they are, and how much the imperatives of strategic voting are going to dictate things. This specific election was almost the perfect storm for late Democratic ballot return as it featured a whole bunch of hotly contested races between candidates with very little to differentiate them from one another on policy and where avoiding or causing a top-two lockout was of cardinal strategic importance. I am a high-consciensciousness low-agreeability personality type who normally mails back my ballot a month in advance because nothing is going to change my views, but I held on to said ballot until the day before Election Day because I was voting strategically in multiple different races.
In general elections there's a whole other set of considerations; the number one cause of the ballot trail pointing one way or another is late-deciding swing voters, which is why the trail in 2018 was super-blue and the trail in 2020 was weirdly-kinda-red (Trump was in a huge hole and then won most late deciders to nearly close to the point where the Electoral College insanity could hand him another term). That got particularly intense in Arizona, where late-mailed ballots were INCREDIBLY red. This got to the point that Trump nearly overtook Biden from what had initially looked like so insurmountable a hole that Fox News errantly called the state for him, after misunderstanding how many ballots were still outstanding.
In other words, "late mail is liberal" is not a law of nature. It's a contingent tendency that can easily be overridden by other factors. Republican operatives aren't just morally wrong to spread conspiracy theories about late mail being illegitimate, they are factually wrong about their own helplessness to change it (although how much they actually believe in what they're saying, versus just lie to delegitimize liberals, is unclear).
In California, the earlier the vote, the older the voter, on average. This is easy to observe, because at various times of the election period counties publicize the ages of the voters who have returned their votes already.
Early voters tend to be old and homeowners. Later voters tend to be younger, renters, and more to the left. This happens every single election. Every single election, late votes move the result to the left by a lot. I think it was the second midterm of Bush's presidency, on election day four contested House elections in the Central Valley showed more votes for the Republicans, and it looked bleak for the Dems. But as more votes got counted, one, then the next, then the next, and then the fourth of these House seats moved to the Dem column. The first one was Josh Harder, and I think that was his first election.
Your estimate is waaaaaaaaaay off. The vote is about 2/3 counted, maybe less.
Only if there are a lot more votes than in 2022.
We're 90% to that total right now
I voted for Raman but I'm pessimistic.
This is, I regret to say, very much a case of "not knowing ball." CalSOS and LA County Elections both issue regular unprocessed-ballots reports based on what's come in (and there's still a small amount left to come in from other counties and late-arriving mail, though at this point it's likely a pretty good estimate since a few ballots will also be excluded, sent to other counties, or have uncured signature problems).
The most recent SOS report shows that LA has processed 1,395,987 ballots and estimates 713,180 unprocessed. The latter number is clearly just a ballpark estimate (the bulk of it is a flat "700,000" estimate for uncounted mail, likely formed by just eyeballing the number of unopened pallots) so it might be 650,000 or 750,000 but it's not going to be 100,000 or 1,000,000. LA County itself is a bit further along in its estimates and says that there are now 1,477,473 ballots processed and more like 688,180 unprocessed. A hair less than one-third, in other words.
Final turnout for this primary is going to absolutely smash the 2022 figures. I realize that primary turnout is generally pathetic and so it sounds stupid to say that 40 percent is really high but that is in fact the case, and we're tracking for somewhere in that vicinity (a bit less in LA, which probably will end up about 37 percent).
This would be nice if it were true, but "the far left" and "the far right" are relatively objective features of American politics, and the observation "the far left and the far right have more in common with each other than the political center or the median American voter" is deeply offensive to both groups, so horseshoe theory resists collapse.
This is a great take. It's just that the selection effect on this board is for liberals' liberals. I think to many folks here, some simple policy preferences are just too scandalous to even think about. So the Horseshoe is very obvious. They group the integralist and the socialist who says: "The state should intervene to direct the allocation of capital for the common good," together right away.
I guess it's important to think about it in the Spanish Civil War sense of it. Left and Right are coalitions that exist in the context of the historical forces at play.
Zhu De and Chiang Kai Shek could fight on the same side of the 1911 rebellions when the question was: Should Qing rule China?
This sort of "short window" conception of ideas is why Fukuyama is so compelling. Many people really live at the end of history!
Alternatively, less pro-social people often end up in the same place, even if they took different paths to get there.
Good point!
This is going to sound uncharitable, maybe more uncharitable than intended, but I tend to see the dynamic on the post Reagan right in question as coming down to increasing consolidation of low IQ, low human capital people into a single party. Or maybe a realization of that old saw about not all conservatives being stupid but most stupid people being conservative.
I say this as someone who more or less agrees with a lot of the criticisms, by say, an Andrew Sullivan, of institutionalized liberalism, and maybe more controversially here, sympathizes with a lot of the once far left now often seen as far right concern about the natsec state that would be associated with Glenn Greenwald types.
Among the (many) differences that keep me a liberal is that I don't think these things can be addressed by putting f*cking idiots in charge, who are constitutionally incapable of actually solving problems. Moreover I think the larger right is mired in an ecosystem of reactive grievance, where no matter what their own idiotic leaders do, they have conditioned themselves to jump to a litany of past provocations by their opponents to justify it. Ultimately its gotten them to the place where they are now, with total brain drain from their party, their institutions, and a lot of their candidates, to the point that they can't study their own past or govern effectively when given the chance.
It’s a real moral rot. I am relatively conservative but Republicans’ affinity for lazy and casual dishonesty, inconsistency, and nihilism makes them utterly repulsive to me.
One interesting thing about working in and around government as an economist is that many (most?) of us can’t be GOP because of the moral rot. However, the vicious inflexible stupidity of the democrats when they get in power, especially of those they choose to give power and appoint to agencies (Chopra being one, the crazy transportation kleptomaniac being another, I’m not even including Khan who I thought did pretty well towards the end) is truly dangerous and causes a lot of harm.
This means many serious people are left without a home.
You might want to rewrite this because your preceding and following statements are a bit disjoint. It’s early. Start a second sentence rather than comma conjunction.
Yeah that’s a bit better I think.
I got to sleep in to 6:30 actually.
How much is this specifically about Biden though, who operated with a very coalition mindset? Like are there Obama appointees that you'd describe as viciously inflexible and stupid?
Stupid sure but I didn’t work with any of them so it’s second hand. Geithner was a really dim bulb
Fair enough. I think in a democracy it's not realistic to expect a governmental elite from any party that you personally think are 100% brilliant managers and policy minds (really this applies to any large organization).
Who’s the transportation kleptomaniac? I don’t think of Ray LaHood or Pete Buttigieg as being describable that way (nor Elaine Chao for that matter).
I think you have that combined with a seeming inability to connect actions to achievement of their own stated goals.
Politics just seems to be getting dumber, their certainly human capital sorting, but leftist ideologues believe in complicated theories that require some level of verbal ability to understand, but have no evidence and fall apart if anyone questions them.
I tend to refer to their ideas as theological dogmas. I call Marxism a theology. It has dictums, scripture, and priests bestowing revealed truths.
I am stumped by Marxists, they seem smart, but the basis is a guy in the mid 19th century making predictions that didn't come true and the whole idea is a specific teleology of human history, which is odd to believe for atheists. I don't think there are that many Marxists on the Left, far more are vaguely anarchist who see rule enforcement as oppressive and lots of obviously dumb and hypocritical identity politics theories. Far more common than any ideology is people who think there is an easy way for govery to get money accompanied by a refusal to do cost benefit analysis or investigate spending.
Most of it is an aesthetic now. A weird pop Marxist aesthetic to paint over a bunch of incoherent and incompatible beliefs.
I knew a guy who had been, essentially, a Marxist theologist in the old USSR. He was very smart (after the collapse of the Soviet Union he ended up as a software developer), but I think his job back home was some mix of Marxist philosophizing and spinning up a Marxist justification for whatever it was that the USSR was doing at that moment.
I suspect this has something to do with the media environment and the loss of any shared frame of reference.
They decimated their policy shop (which was fierce in the 1980's) and started listening to Rush Limbaugh instead. That was the key moment.
Also went to war with their own members. Contract with America and family friendly senate made being a congressperson or senator deeply unappealing. You see more turnover than I think you’d see otherwise, which is good and bad.
I think the twin clusterf--ks of the War on Terror and the financial crisis/bank bailouts destroyed the credibility of a lot of the previous intellectual leadership of the conservative movement, and that probably opened a path for Trump et al to move in.
Is it that smart conservatives would rather own successful businesses than toil for the government? When they cross over, you would hope it would be a Romney or a Bloomberg, but instead we're getting a Trump (or a late-stage Musk)
I don't think it's the top down phenomenon that would imply.
That's reasonable but if there's a supply shortage of smart conservatives who want to be politicians, how would we know? Supply-demand works in an economic market, but the premise here is that the incentives are better in the actual market than in politics. Political "demand" can annoint a Trump, but if you'd rather not be a politician than a business leader, it can't offer you anything.
I dunno man. I think Mitt Romney would happily be president right now if he could, and after watching people I would've once thought of as arch conservatives run out of their own safe seats I'm not sure any of them with half a brain could win if they wanted to.
Smart conservatives have different politics than dumb ones. Romney and Bloomberg are technocrats who have more in common with Obama than Trump, even if the former has trouble realizing it. Ted Cruz and the Elon Musk "tech right" are rare exceptions.
Could smart conservatives get elected?
Who would elect the head of an investment bank like Dimon or whoever runs Goldman if they were conservative and interested in running?
Hell, I just listened to an interview with Yannis Varoufakis and the Left isn’t interested in electing an intelligent guy who doesn’t try to sell magic and one weird trick solutions.
Yes but being in office changes you. Look at Mike Lee, a genuinely intelligent iconoclast who has taken a toxic asshole turn.
See Mitt Romney.
If we’re just constraining it to smart guys Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton are pretty damn smart. Joni Ernst. John Thune is very smart. I respect the hell out of Tim Scott’s institutional knowledge and staffers.
Deep red states I think tend to elect smart senators but I also note they might not survive a primary if it were held tomorrow.
Are all those people all that smart if you bother to account for all their capitulation to Trump?
Do you mean "smart" in the sense of taking actions to keep and gain more power, serve their own interests, etc.? Or "smart" in the sense of selflessly serving the well-being of the nation despite this costing them their power and position? Because one of those definitions makes a lot more sense to me than the other, and explains how smart people like Cruz, Cotton, Rubio, Vance, etc., actually behave.
I personally believe that's why universities are so much more drastically tilted than they were; not sure about government.
I don't think this is it. It's that Trump has successfully been able to turn the GOP into a party of yes-men by going after anyone that stood up to him. And those people tended to by less principled who are now more interested in saying yes to Trump than pursuing a conservative agenda. That's not a GOP thing, it's a Trump thing, and I'm curious to see how it changes in a post-Trump world.
Maybe! But while nothing is forever I'd be surprised if the conservative intelligentsia is ready to reconstitute so quickly and after being done so dirty. Part of it is their own fault of course in light of the discrediting policy disasters of the W Bush administration but I'm a lot less certain anyone is waiting in the wings.
Yes and I'm afraid "We will restore Reaganism" is mostly going to end up being "Who's Reagan?".
I think John Podhertz has a theory that the Republican Party is much more top down than the Democrats and generally just reflects the character of the top of the ticket in every cycle.
I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it explains the current level of submission.
Trump was uniquely popular in the party and willing to primary or threaten to primary congressmen and senators to get his way. Would Biden or Obama threaten to do the same with someone they disagreed with? Would they have even been able to?
And there were 4 years where he lost but managed to retain the leadership of the party, so we essentially went through 6 cycles ('18, '20, and '22) prior to his 2nd election where was able to mold the GOP in his image and remove any checks and balances.
This particular set of circumstances seems unlikely to repeat itself. Unless someone is able to take on the mantle of Trumpism. Trump could potentially keep it alive from the sidelines if he remains popular, but he's also old and declining rapidly. I could see him running off into the sunset (unless the State comes after his corruption, in which case he would remain involved to defend himself).
It's hard to imagine what the Republican party will look like after Trump because, as with NATO and the world order in general, it's easier to destroy something than to build something new.
"
Moreover I think the larger right is mired in an ecosystem of reactive grievance, where no matter what their own idiotic leaders do, they have conditioned themselves to jump to a litany of past provocations by their opponents to justify it.
"
I agree the right does this. But so does the left. It's called partisan brain.
Partisanship continually blinds us to the problems in our own party and highlights the problems in the opposing party
This is true but I think it plays out in ways that are asymmetric. The Democrats are overrun with a form of midwittery that creates its own blind spots and bad incentives whereas I think the Republicans are overrun with idiots.
At least at the national level this certainly seems to be true.
Of course the reason I'm a republican is policy wise I think they tend to be right even if Trump messes everything up.
I don’t really get why people say they don’t do anything. There’s core Republican goals and they’ve accomplished all of them: stopping illegal immigration (done), not banning guns (done), cutting taxes for the rich (done), banning affirmative action (done), starting a war in the Middle East (done), making tax evasion easier (done)
They've had their wins in the courts but most of this is via EO and the lack of actual immigration legislation strikes me as a massive fail on their part. It's something they pretty clearly had a mandate to tighten up and that would be hard for Democrats go undo but they haven't even tried.
Yep, the one I keep coming back to is the Refugee Act of 1980, which gives the President discretion to admit up to an extra 125,000 refugees each year above and beyond any other immigration caps. Republicans have been $h!tting blood over Biden "flooding" the US with immigrants and Trump has awarded zero or near zero visas under it, but the GOP have done literally nothing to repeal the statute. The next Democratic President can just start it up again on Day One of their administration.
There are a number of things I can think of in that area that they could've done and that I think even front line Democrats would have had a hard time opposing.
Banning abortion nationwide? Yes, The Groups grumble about Trump's passivity on the issue but then they shut their mouths and bow down to their master.
The corollary to this is that when you find a rare smart person who's a committed member of that movement, there's a pretty good chance that he's pure evil. Like I think Stephen Miller is a reasonably smart person. To be smart and still want to be on that team necessarily means there's something seriously wrong with your value system.
As a still Registered Ronald Reagan Republican, I am more than happy to talk about conservatives. There are none left in the Republican Party. There are reactionary, post liberal populists, but nary one conservative that I am aware of.
None of Trump’s policies are conservative, limited government, for example. In what world would a conservative government take ownership positions of private companies?
I think there are conservatives left in the republican party.
But they are certainly not running the show
When you realize that owning the libs is actually the primary goal of many Republicans, rather than preventing abortions from happening or implementing fiscally conservative policies, then you stop being baffled as to their relationship with politics
There was a party shift triggered by Goldwater and Reagan, and another one triggered by Trump. "Republican" in 1966, in 1996, and in 2026 mean very different things--they support different policies, represent different voters and regions and economic interests, have to stay on the right side of different donors and media outlets, etc.
Being a Republican does not necessarily mean you are a conservative. Being conservative is a set of principles. Other than enriching yourself while making edifices to yourself is all Trump has brought to the GOP. It is not conservative.
Tom Cotton is pretty traditionally conservative. There are others.
Not if they stay silent on Trump's breaking of core traditional values. Unless, of course, you count cowardism as a core conservative value.
The Republican party includes more than elected officials
it is said that traditional conservatives like myself represent about 10% of the current party.
“Not if they stay silent…”
I don’t think being a scold is a traditional conservative value.
Maybe if you have never lived in the South...
How about voicing your support against the post liberals and standing up for the Rule of Law, limited government, businesses shouldn’t be owned by the government except in supreme emergencies. What happened with be fiscally responsible? And yes, scolding is very much in the English conservatism. In fact, yelling get off my lawn when the post liberals want to destroy something remind them about Chesterston’s Fence. USAID, Vocie of America might be a very useful tool in helping the US with Iran War let alone Cuba. Trump’s an idiot as are his policies and his MAGA crowd easily swayed by a huckster. The man who suggested putting bleach in your vein, who said he was smarter than the generals. Yes, yell and scream that there is nothing conservative about Trump and his politics. His immigration policy is bigoted, short-sighted, and actually harms America. The tariff policy is hurting America and Americans...the man is off his rocker. An elderly bigoted sociopath. Yes, scold away my friends.
These are the values or classical liberalism. I suggest you explorer history a bit more as you may find out you are actually a liberal.
If your definition is Reaganism, very true as the party under Donald Trump has rejected him and that era of conservatism. But Conservative in the broad context covers a much wider swathe of territory.
personal liberty, free trade, conserve institutions and norms that work, limited government, the rule of law, fiscally responsible...these are mine. The post liberal crap MAGA is serving up has nothing conservative about it. At least in my mind.
Historically that mix is not specifically conservative and free and personal liberty are based in the enlightenment and classical liberalism which was opposed to the conservative monarchical order.
Yes, just as you should be opposed to any and all post liberal destruction of Chesterton’s Fence
Do you think I am endorsing Trump’s reactive mix right wing reactive authoritarianism, I am not. I am just pointing out that the Reagan conservatism is a rather unusual bird in what was historically understood as *conservative*
I’m trying to think of someone else who would be more “conservative” perhaps Buckley.
Airplanes are certainly full of bogus emotional support animals, and this is despite a Trump and Biden initiative that now requires people to perjure themselves to do it. They commit the perjury because shipping a dog the right way, or boarding a dog (as I do) costs lots of money.
It seems to me you just have to put your middle finger up to the disability rights movement (which hates gatekeeping) and gatekeep. Make people disclose their disability, document it through a psychiatrist, and do periodic audits and pull the licenses of any psychiatrist who participates in a bogus certification.
Trump tore up the social contract and used it as toilet paper, and COVID flushed the toilet
“Full of” seems like an exaggeration. I fly a decent amount and it’s rare to see any animal on the plane, let alone one that seems to be masquerading as emotional support.
Are you willing to pay for putting in place the infrastructure to do everything you suggest? Everyone says they don’t want a police state except for when it is their pet peeve or project. Personally, I agree with Matt on this one there might be some abuse, but seems pretty minor. Now when the emotional support Alligators and pythons start appearing on planes, then we can talk.
It's not a "police state" to require verification to claim a government benefit.
Isn't part of the issue the threat that the airline might violate federal regs wrt ADA compliance and accomodations?
“ineffective altruism”
I'd open a recording studio and promote local artists on my own radio station.
I'd open a batting cage and charge a quarter for 20 pitches like the old days. All of the batting cages near by closed down, despite them being busy whenever I would go. I think they all got displaced by shiny, expensive private coaching facilities that cost an arm and a leg to get into.
The public golf course driving range at east Potomac has driveline, I would campaign to open city run batting cages with the camera and computer system for baseball
Centuries long endowment for a cheetah domestication program.
Our local Wildlife Safari has one of the top breeding programs in the country (and probably the world).
One of the handlers took a cheetah cub home with her once. Later the Cheetah escaped. Everyone freaked out because there are homes nearby. The Cheetah was found at the home of the handler, calmly waiting for her.
They're pretty trainable (think some of the Indians IIRC were using them a lot like hunting dogs), it's just breeding them in captivity that's a problem. They need too much space. Presumably gross amounts of money + time could overcome this problem in a way not available to the ancients.
An organization that runs large scale randomized trials for common behaviors. Like let's actually identify the causal effect of dental cleanings or college admissions without the SAT.
These exist! Check out EMC, for example:
https://economicmobilitycorp.org/
I would finance a musical remake of "Logan's Run", starring Taylor Swift as Logan and Lana del Ray as Francis.
Will you be offering a pledge level in your crowdfunding campaign that gives a producer credit on the film?
Haha, yes, and the top donor gets to play the apothecary!
Angrier at our worthless existing oligarchs than I have ever been.
A Packard heir (of Hewlett-Packard) did open a restored theater showing old movies. It has a mighty Wurlitzer, and sometimes shows silent movies with an organist. I guess when he was a kid asking Dad to see videos, his sister wanted a fish tank—she opened Monterey Bay Aquarium.
I'd build another amusement park in Orange County, California to compete with Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm. I'd nail it for sure.
Knott's Berry Farm is one of those places whose logic I didn't question as a kid, forgot about for decades, and then is so weird as an adult when I look back on it.
Pan for gold. Get some boysenberry jam. Ride Montezuma's Revenge. Hug Snoopy. Perfectly logical!
I’d start a prison abolition group, or just join Sunrise.
If I wanted an effective somewhat activist ecoterrorist group, I’d start a fund to spray paint private jets
"Hey, I'm landing here!" https://frinkiac.com/img/S06E18/453536.jpg
I'd put on a stage adaptation of John Landis's Oscar (itself an adaptation of a play) and commission an animated adaptation of Hadestown.
This from Josh Barro is a good take on Graham Platner. I don't think he has done anything disqualifying and I don't think it is dignified or healthy to talk to exes or look into someone's marriage, but he is so obviously a terrible and irresponsible guy.
Why can't the party find a local doctor or vet 40-55 with no baggage and tempt them into every race where there is a lack of obvious political choice, every district must have lots to choose from?
https://joshbarro.substack.com/p/low-conscientiousness-losers-are?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1tkxvc
I just attended a plenary given by a doctor/medical school professor in Indiana (https://medicine.iu.edu/faculty/5086/bosslet-gabriel) who talked about how the local Democratic Party tried to convince him to run for an open US House seat (or maybe state senate, i forget). He ended up saying no because he found it impossible to campaign AND do his day job AND see his school-age kids and wasn't willing to sacrifice the latter 2. There's good reason why you don't see more doctors running for office.
That is the reason they don't run for state senate, I don't think it is that hard to find someone willing to be stressed for a 30% chance of being a senator.
I also think candidates should be expected to campaign less, it isn't that effective and it probably turns off lots of prospective candidates.
In deep red seats, they should just run a generic sensible professional who isn't expected to campaign, in order to boost everyone else in the election and in case the Republican gets caught in a scandal. Also boosts popular vote share and helps exclude cranks.
I'm pretty sure a doctor with a successful practice would take a huge financial hit if he left his medical practice to become a US senator. His expenses would go up, his income would go down, his life would become much more chaotic, his future would become much harder to plan for, etc.
This is idiotic. We ought to add a zero to the end of the salaries of basically all the elected federal officials and a bunch of the appointed ones.
There actually seems to be some political pull towards non-professional candidates like Dan Osborne in Nebraska or, to an extent Josh Turek in Iowa. But, one can find those candidates without someone as whatever as Platner is.
Dan Osborne was a good candidate, but the default should be to find a responsibile professional especially medics, they are the most likely to be smart, conscientious and responsible, they have been tested for at least 20 years by their job and schooling.
I am not claiming they are less corrupt, just better at dealing with serious responsibilities.
Perhaps, but the rabble are just as unvirtuous.
AH. I said "just as unvirtuous," not "more unvirtuous." 🙂
I just hope that if Platner wins that no one takes that as a lesson on what to do going forward. Just that Susan Collins sucks (which is hardly news).
Republicans are definitely screenshotting lots of Dem defences of Platner for when they have a candidates who has problems with exes or dodgy Reddit posts.
I mean why not? Having moral fiber is for suckers; we've all learned this.
We will see.
Collins has a lot of problems with exes though.
As far as I know no abuse allegations!
You hinted at this before...... there are way too many Andy O'Brians for me to narrow it down on Twitter, can you give a brother a link?
Yeah I get - though am annoyed that - political operators didn't want to take on Collins, but *someone* would, someone green and idealistic enough not to be spooked, someone who isn't an obvious jerk.
Platner's character isn't even the worst part of about him IMO. Just hearing him talk you can tell he'll vote for whatever dumb ideas percolating in gen-z socialist-slop forums end up in bill form. Warren would have a great ally in outlawing build to rent.
He is just genuinely an idiot.
I haven't followed the Maine senate race very closely but I feel like the Nazi tattoo thing was burying the lede. Do I feel like a bad tattoo choice is disqualifying for office? Nope. Is someone being a dirtbag moron disqualifying for office? Hopefully!
Haven’t heard him talk, is there something you have in mind you could point to get the gist?
How can I contribute to the Matthew Yglesias Nonprofit Movie Theater That Shows Cool Old Movies and Brings in Guest Speakers and Other Programming Foundation?
Also ticks are the answer to the last question.
It's been a real bad tick year on the ranch. Normally not a problem but we've found several that made their way into the house some how. I assume they hopped a ride in on pants legs.
One was found in the bed. My wife was NOT happy.
Haha, I would not be either!!
But maybe still better than the screwworm
https://www.google.com/search?q=mexican+screwworm&oq=mexican+screwworm&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDYzNzVqMGo0qAIBsAIB&client=ms-android-verizon-us-rvc3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#lfId=ChxjMe
These theaters exist in other places. My local is the Frida Theater in Santa Ana, CA. They just had a John Waters retrospective but they do all sorts of cool things.
There’s a similar theater that George RR Martin owns in Santa Fe.
Yeah, I actually live very close to the AFI Silver Theater, but it never hurts to have more!
Republicans are less concerned about policy because they are a Trump personality cult. I was watching a press conference by the Agriculture Secretary recently and she literally mentioned Trump and Jesus in the same sentence as if they were comparable. When you explore right-wing media and speeches by Republican politicians, they spend so much time just talking about how great Trump is without reference to particular policies. No, he's just self-evidently great, the only problem is the radical left resisting his greatness, and aren't we blessed to have him as our president?
Similarly, there was a personalty cult around George W. Bush before his presidency completely went off the rails in the last few years. And before him there was a Reagan personality cult that eventually overlapped and outlasted the Bush cult.
Most Democrats really like Obama, but even then I don't get the same "he can do no wrong" energy from Obama fans.
It helps Obama hasn't done much wrong, if you bring up Tony Rezko you do get a few Obama is saintly ignore the evidence takes but no one really cares about the Rezko case.
Is the SAT problem going away? UMass and UCs still don’t require them. You can’t even submit them at UCs.
Also, the math portion of the SAT seems slightly busted with savvy kids using Desmos regression to get the hard math questions right. Maybe good schools should require APs instead?
SAT should not allow calculators
The obviously crazy and dumb policy that became a momentary elite consensus position despite being obviously crazy and dumb turned out, on reflection, to be obviously crazy and dumb. In another few years, it may even be possible to reverse this obviously crazy and dumb policy....
I feel like the buried headline in today’s answers is Matt thinks Murc’s law is true.
I honestly think Matt should expand on his answer in a stand alone post because I think if he does he’ll see the implications of his insight I think are broader than just what he noted in his response. For one I think it’s key component to why news coverage is the way it is.
Murc's law for anyone else that had to google it:
"Murc's Law is the assumption that only Democrats have agency or causal influence over American politics, meaning that Democrats are often blamed for the actions and behaviors of Republicans. This concept highlights a tendency in political discourse to hold Democrats responsible for Republican misbehavior, suggesting that Republicans act only in response to Democratic actions."
"suggesting that Republicans act only in response to Democratic actions"
Actually I think both parties at least in part define themselves against the other party. When Trump cracked down on immigration in his 1st term suddenly Dems because much more open border (contra Obama's record).
When Trump came out with his crazy Tariffs Dems became much more free trade.
And of course Republicans became anti-vaccine at least in part because Biden was pushing them. If Trump had won reelection I think that would have been a LOT more muted.
Because the two writers in questions are...writers, they express what I'm getting at likely better than I can.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/03/andrew-gelman-on-murcs-law
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/12/the-paradoxical-limits-of-murcs-law
I've said before that one thing I'm taking a victory lap on is being right along about Bari Weiss (if you read Matt's Twitter feed, you'll see he's turned on her and not a fan). What I mean is her success is not possible without a whole of pundits in the center or center left essentially boosting her. And I honestly think it stems from this unspoken assumption (or sometimes spoken which I'll get to in a sec) that responsibility for protecting free speech is something that falls only or at least primarily on Democrats or people left of center. It actually kind of baffled me when centrist or left of center pundits would approvingly quote someone like Chris Rufo on this topic. Like I think for some pundits, it was an astonishing level of naivety in thinking Rufo was actually some ally for the cause of free speech (Despite everything in this background and just very obvious red flags he was not the level when it came to defending free speech). But I actually think part of it is this lack of expectation that people on the right or MAGA have any agency in protecting free speech and that protecting speech needs to come from the left.
Like I don't know how else to explain this sentence from Freddie DeBoar "Myself, I hold left activists to a substantially higher standard than I hold conservative officials seeking political vengeance". Look this would be an insane thing to say if it was "right activists" and "liberal officials". Just any sort of basic understanding regarding hierarchy of power should tell you how absurd this is. But also, I think there are other centrist or left of center or hard to define pundits who would express a similar sentiment and it's hard to explain this without "Murc's law" at least in my book.
There are some people that defend free speech almost always. Organizations like FIRE come to mind.
But while I think the vast majority of Americans broadly support the idea of Freedom of speech they tend not to be so absolutist.
I put myself squarely in that category. Moreover, I think the details very much matter. I think there should be a broad Overton window of acceptable speech. But that window shouldn't be unlimited. Moreover, I think that applies to publicly funded institutions like public universities .
For an easy example, I wouldn't want a professor at a public university that supported the KKK, or made a bunch of racist statements against black people. But I also wouldn't want one that made the same type of statements against Jews or white people.
Regarding Bari Weiss, I generally like The Free Press (of course that doesn't mean I support every article, or every viewpoint they publish). I know less of Chris Rufo, but I agree that public universities have huge viewpoint problems and are generally WAY out of line on some issues with the broader public (for example support of using race as part of a criteria to admin students, or trans issues). And I'm ok with state legislators getting them back in line. Same applies to the anti-western anti-American slop they put out.
I'm fine with most of the grievance studies departments getting cut or eliminated at public universities.
Freddie may be appreciated by some conservatives, but has no influence with them and does not aspire to it.
That basic arrangement explains every example of "Murc's law" I've ever seen: you can in every case infer that the accused cannot affect Republican / conservative politics, and they're working with what they have.
Can't decide if the Platner Punt is a masterpiece of mailbag trolling, or a straight-faced answer, or both.
He did just write a full post on Platner: https://www.slowboring.com/p/seventeen-thoughts-on-graham-platner
A very carefully worded post that doesn't touch on ~any of the actual controversies that have been roiling the comments of his blog for many of the days now. What's the deal with some random oyster farmer! I'm firmly in the "glad I don't live in Maine" camp, but with answers like that, it just makes me wonder why bother selecting such mailbag question at all.
Probably because he thought it would be a humorous (if not substantive) response.
Maybe it’s Matt’s way of saying “Stop asking me about this!”
I'd like to see Matt reckon directly with treating him like a serious candidate days after and days before serious, er, quality issues came out about him. But I sympathize with the punt insofar as the story isn't over *yet* and he may as well let it cook for a little since obviously things will keep popping off.
I took it as the "Epstein? The financier?" thing that Jim Downey did on Conan.
Thanks for answering my question. I am not quite sure what the answer is but lots of people with power make decisions with obvious negative effects, despite being told ahead, this was especially common in 2020 and are never held accountable.
Part of the answer is every organisation needs more accountability and a willingness to fire people. Probably also need to discipline the kind of people who said maths tests are racists etc they can't be conducive to a good academic atmosphere.
I feel the horseshoe has a simple answer, at both extremes they are antisemitic nutjobs, so they have something in common.