The overblown military-industrial complex

Plus: Kamala and the meme war

As a recommendation this week, I enjoyed this post from the pseudonymous Cartoons Hate Her about how Kamala Harris emerged as cool and meme-worthy while Hillary Clinton was doomed to cringedom. Her take is basically that Harris achieved a kind of unselfconscious dorkiness (“I love Venn diagrams”) that passes for cool in our irony-soaked age:

Imagine you have two teachers. One of them has worked at the school for decades and isn’t particularly popular, but one day shows up with a big Flavor-Flav inspired clock around her neck and says, “Yo, yo, yo, I’m gonna teach you about prime numbers through rap!” Then imagine that a lot of her raps were actually about how important it was to do your homework. This teacher is Hillary Clinton.

Now imagine another teacher—this one shows up to class and obliviously sits on a banana peel. She doesn’t realize she sat on the banana peel and continues to teach the class. A bunch of the kids start joking about how they should call her Mrs. Banana. The term “Mrs. Banana” slowly becomes endearing, because Mrs. Banana doesn’t seem upset about it, and in fact, seems to be fine with it. But—crucially—she isn’t pandering to it. She isn’t showing up to class in a big banana costume. But maybe it would be okay if she did. Mrs. Banana is not the establishment, even if she is the teacher and holds the power. Mrs. Banana is, in many ways, an underdog, at least as far as coolness goes, which actually makes her cooler. Mrs. Banana is Kamala Harris.

I think there’s something to that, but the key point is actually nothing about the particulars of Harris’ personality so much as the idea of being the underdog.

Before Barack Obama was president, he was the Democratic Party nominee. And before he was the nominee, he was a long-shot presidential candidate taking aim at the establishment. Clinton was an overdog in 2008, and an overdog again in 2016. People spent a lot of that cycle coming up with absurd explanations of how cranky old man Bernie Sanders managed to come across as cool, and I think it’s literally just that he was an underdog. Back in the 2020 primary cycle, nobody thought of Kamala Harris as an underdog taking on the system. But after Joe Biden tanked in the debate, he immediately became the vile, uncool establishment. And while people had lots of ideas about who should be Not Biden, Harris was always the obvious choice. So people started championing her cause, and it was cool to champion her cause because “replace the incumbent president on the ticket” is an inherently underdog quest. But it worked! And Trump was still in the lead in all the models, so it became an exciting and unlikely story of throwing a campaign together on the fly. Cool stuff! Underdogs are cool.

The other factor is gender. I think it’s possible that Harris is generating more first-female-president excitement than she did in 2020 in part because gendered expectations around ambition mean she benefits from the fact that she never really overtly sought the 2024 nomination. It fell to her as a responsibility that she picked up rather than a prize she competed for.

Other recommendations:

• Eric Goldwyn’s paper on the structural roots of construction cost bloat.

• Tim Lee tries to reassure us about AI doom.

• Brian Potter on Levittown.

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Some good news this week: The US is now back ahead of China on the Fortune Global 500 list, we’ve got some zoning reform in Missoula, Northern Virginia has joined the national zoning atlas, and the new ability to conduct surgeries remotely with robots could do a tremendous amount to increase access to health care in certain areas.

Comment of the week from Rick Gore: “Don’t support Uber just use taxis instead!” was one of my first indications of just how out of touch a lot of the media elite was. In the US at least, taxis were (and remain) a convenient option in exactly one location - Manhattan below 110th street. Sure they existed all over, but almost nowhere else was there the density to support convenient roadside hailing - even in NY that was iffy in big swaths of Brooklyn and Queens. You were reduced to calling, figuring out how to tell them where you were (not always easy if you were out late in a city you don’t know well- a prime use case for Uber today) and half the time or more they never bothered to show up. Oh- and talk to an older Black person about how “convenient” roadside hailing was. My understanding is that Uber and its competitors have also meaningfully reduced drunk driving deaths/ injuries as well. Just massive improvements to many people’s lives but a certain kind of person finds them icky because some Silicon Valley people got rich.

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And at last, our big question from Alex Newkirk: I appreciated the recent post on defense, and it got me thinking about the intellectual legacy of Eisenhower's farewell address and other related concepts. I think the concept of the military industrial complex, related Vietnam era notions of manufactured consent, and guns-vs-butter, are pretty central to a lot of people's mental model of the US government.

It shows up all the time in fiction, such as in Last Jedi where there's “only one way” to become Canto Blight rich: military contracting. Anecdotally, in a conversation with a Marxist friend of mine, he genuinely thought the primary driver of low unemployment was “the export of suffering and death [to Ukraine and Gaza].”

Were the Cold War concepts true in their time, but just out of data, or was the situation different? How should we think about defense spending in an environment of high-interest rates but a weak defense-industrial base? What is the consequence for the level of mindshare they still occupy?

I didn’t really talk about this in Tuesday’s piece on Communists, but I think an important dynamic in American political discourse is that even though there are very few Marxists in America, they have disproportionate influence in intellectual circles. So legacy Marxist concepts like “historical events are largely inevitable” or “material interests are driving everything that happens” end up being overrated. Hence, Alex’s Marxist friend wants to see the increased geopolitical tensions as driven by defense contractor politics.

As for Eisenhower, it’s interesting to go back to the actual text of his farewell address to see what he said, because the famous “military-industrial complex” remarks are so brief and ambiguous.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

My read, though, is this: