Rent control is just a zombie that will never die, huh? It always seems that society needs to relearn the hard way on how price controls lead to shortages and rationing, after the older generations that learned it the hard way before die off, and new, younger generations take over.
I really wish that that those who are so angry over landlords jacking up prices would realize that landlords would lose so much leverage to do so with increased competition via increased hous8jg supply.
I think we're in a holding pattern where mayors run on it because it is in fact popular and sounds nice to people. Then, when they enter office they realize it's A) Not a good idea so they propose a very watered down idea or don't do it. Or B) Realize that due to issues with home rule/how the mayoral powers are constructed they literally can't.
Don't forget the quieter, easier to sneak by voters version - making eviction nearly unattainable. In DC, the general hostility towards landlords, covid-era exigencies, and a painfully backed up court system conspired to crank up the barriers to eviction for any cause. Council recently had to tweak their own tenant friendly laws because large building-owners were lurching towards bankruptcy, ironically threatening the affordability covenants the mayor touts as solving the housing problem. Homeowners roll their eyes at the suggestion to rent out a house or downstairs apartment - why take the risk of never being able to evict a tenant. QED, less housing.
Y’all are missing how rent control exemplifies a key weakness of democracy: good policy is post-market impersonal redistribution to classes of losers but good politics is rigging the market for local residents. Rent control in my district helps me as a renter immediately, and I am inclined to vote for the legislator who offers it to me. Normal people DGAF about second-order effects across large polities. They want control of their homes and their neighborhoods. They want less change and more money for themselves.
This is an optimistic take. In NYC about half the rental stock is subject to some form of rent control (either controlled or regulated) and the conditions of those controls have only gotten stricter over time (most notably in 2017). It's not an exaggeration to say that the predictably bad effects of these progressive laws has resulted in the very likely election of a yet more progressive mayor who is promising to enact even worse policies with predictably worse effects!
Much more accurate to say that they're difficult to enact at first but once implemented they ratchet only one way.
NYC is kind of unique in that regard, though. Cambridge, MA was notorious for rent control in the 70s and 80s (Boston and Brookline also had it), they even had a rule that if you bought a condo that was rent-controlled you couldn’t live in it (some people got around that one by incorporating themselves as owners and then renting to themselves as individuals). In 1994 a statewide referendum was passed banning rent control, still in effect despite occasional efforts to bring it back.
Hey, I had a sweet deal on a spacious, light-filled unit in Coolidge Corner back in the day (I nabbed it just before the good voters of the Commonwealth dumped rent control). It had hardwood floors and park views (and in the distance I could see the Blue Hills). Loved that place.
In those days my motto was "Market rents for thee but not for me." lol.
I explained the issue to a smart friend of mine and her response was, "But we have to do *something*." Yes, but not this! And then another friend in the room said "Marx said 'rent is theft'," and I nobly bit my tongue off and refrained from explaining what "rent" means in economics and that she herself benefitted 100% from rent-seeking, while I inwardly pounded my head on the floor.
Look, you only have so many friends in life. They're kind-hearted women who would come hold your hand if your husband died. I can't alienate *everybody* or I'd be stuck being right and entirely alone.
I heard a similar response when a rent control initiative failed in the Bay Area. I knew a bunch people that and they were really upset because they saw rent control as a pretty of good solution to people they knew struggling to afford rent. To them People voting against it didn’t care about people struggling to pay rent. If you pointed out that rent control would mean that there were fewer rental units available for low income people the response was that landlords were bad. But that really doesn’t count as a fix
I feel a little extorted, but I have to admit the whole thing makes me inclined to advocate more vigorously for subsidies (as part of packages aiming to increase supply, so the subsidies don't just get eaten up).
>> If you pointed out that rent control would mean that there were fewer rental units available for low income people the response was that landlords were bad.
Conceptually, this assumes that builders will respond to higher rents with more building, but isn't it conceivable that Bay Area building permits would still be impossible to get even if equilibrium rents were market rather than price controlled?
I get that rent stabilization is unpopular here, but it doesn’t necessarily block markets from doing their work. NYC’s system covers a portion of units, leaving plenty of free-market stock where rent pressure continues to incentivize new supply. In the meantime, stabilization meaningfully cushions the bottom quintile or two while we wait for regulatory streamlining and new construction to bring prices down. That’s why, despite its flaws, it can function as a useful transitional tool alongside pro-growth reforms (Jerusalem Demsas has converted to this take). The devil is in the details, as with all policy.
It would be awesome if someone could concoct an experiment where the class buys and sells [widgets], but then introduces a price control while the money supply of the buyers goes up, and the sellers of the [widgets] realize that they can't sustainably produce and sell enough of them. I don't know how you'd craft it, though.
In one of my environmental science classes we played the fish game.
Each person has a number of fishing ships, and everyone is given the instruction to maximize profits. They can continue to buy additional ships with those profits. But of course if everyone does that and keeps adding ships the fish population eventually collapses.
It was a really powerful game.
I think some of those types of games to teach basic economics would also be helpful
See, if you're a smart and petty enemy even if you're ready to surrender right before Christmas you just wait a bit to throw up the middle finger at the victor.
I agree, but ugh, "if no one is allowed to make money renting, there will be fewer rentals and the ones that remain will be lower quality" seems so clear and obvious, borne out by repeated daily experience.
Locally the response is "housing is a human right, profiting from it should be illegal."
[Edit: I want to reply "... but not food?" Except I know what happens next.]
If food prices seemed to be randomly raised every year despite the quality of said food not rising and food costs were half of people's costs, you might see the calls for publicly mandated food prices.
Hell, there were grain doles in the Roman Empire for a reason and also a reason why there are more price controls on food in less well-off areas of the world.
And somehow there's no effective version of the counter-response: Then if it's going to be illegal to pay professionals to build and maintain housing, we'll need to let people do it themselves, which means repealing almost all of the zoning laws and building codes and licensing requirements.
>Rent control is just a zombie that will never die, huh?<
Same as tariffs. Same as immigration restrictionism. Same as all policies that sharply depart from liberalism (you know, the school of political economy that birthed the modern world, and gave us the enviable quality of life our ancestors could scarcely dream of, and which we seem determined to jettison as a planet).
Demsas had a pro-rent control take along these lines. Basically rent control is fine as a way to grandfather in old-prices if you also build enough that the prevailing rent in new units comes down.
In order words, its not a solution but it works as a promise. I can particularly see it appealing if a politician expends political capital to ram through a bunch of zoning reforms that will encourage new construction, but they need the political payoff for that construction ASAP. Then they can do a rent-freeze, and then actually take the steps to make that price possible.
The problem is the one you articulate though, which is that its too easy for a politician to make a promise about prices but then not work towards the solution.
The other problem is that rent control can be enacted immediately, but building massive amounts of housing can take much longer, so it would be asking the market to accept a short term shortage crunch.
My mental model is that it is essentially people not realizing that progress is defined by everything moving. The idea of "gained ground" that can keep you ahead of everyone else on its own is basically a myth.
Disagree. Rent control, like the minimum wage, has a political element to it. For example, the market can't set a basic minimum wage unless we as a society decide we are comfortable with labor exploitation. Rent control agreements also outline the basic terms of a tenancy agreement so both parties benefit from a set contractual arrangement. It also serves as an anti-poverty measure by ensuring those with limited means have stable housing. Matt is very wrong about this.
It ensures that for the lucky subset who are able to stably remain in the existing housing, but makes it much more difficult for those who don't have it.
Do people need rent control in rural Mississippi or Arkansas? Lots of very poor people just scraping by in those places but rents are very very cheap and the homelessness rate is very low
Tangential topic but related to the rent control: affordable housing can cost billions to construct and then billions to bail out of you're also just building a lot of apartments. Eventually affordable rents and market rents align.
To steelman OP far more than it probably deserves, the US government and the financial sector together do quite a lot to prop up the fixed-rate mortgage as an easy-to-get instrument. Remove this infrastructure and homebuyer ability to buy would decrease, lowering demand, hence price, hence quantity supplied.
Why would that be the case? People make positive returns providing all kinds of services, and I don’t see why housing services should be any different here.
It’s true that there’s *greater* return for incumbent owners if supply falls behind demand. But developers don’t get to reap those profits, and developers are the ones that generate supply.
In general, for most classes of productive capital, capitalist control of the profits doesn’t lead to an undersupply. Why would it with housing?
Are you saying that incumbent owners "dictate the supply" by being the constituency most likely to vote for NIMBY garbage? Well, yes, and that's what we're trying to fight.
(of course one has to parse out what you think you mean here. Housing as a rental asset? Housing as a build-to-sell activity? Housing as a renovate to upsell, the whole flippers game...)
Of course the statement itself is boggling in its logic - so I guess the idea is that the Evil Sombody are somehow what, lobbying for the NIMBY regs that prevent more housing from being built... "because finance"?
First 2008 was over-supply relative to demand and liquidity - as well as notaby really poor regulation of brokers in the souther sun states - originating borderline fraudulent to outright fraudulent mortgages that got packaged up principally by non-bank lenders, and resold.
The housing built ran into liquidity crisis but in end all got absorbed and the Fed in fact made profit on its rescue bail out portfolio.
That is utterly different than having enough housing stock to meet demand (and in the right places).
So again, what financialisation are you imagining is causing a problem and by what metrics - or is it just the slogan?
Confiscatory or semi-confiscatory georgist taxes might do it. I don't see what else possibly could. Will Rogers was right that they're not making any more land. Provided society allows pieces of our planet to be an investable asset (as opposed to something we rent from the government), folks are going to engage in speculation.
"They're not making any more land" is sort of the ur-argument for rent control: the resource controlled is intrinsically scarce and not subject to supply expansion in the way that other commodities are (YIMBYism seeks to alleviate this but even that's in many ways fundamentally about building out more than up -- if you could just take existing downtown skyscrapers and make them arbitrarily tall there'd be nothing to fight over.). It's still a bad idea, but there's a lot more intrinsic validity to at least the Georgist-inflected versions of skepticism of land ownership and the illegitimacy of land rents than there is to price controls in other markets.
I don't necessarily agree with Georgism (or at least all its aspects) but I have tremendous *respect* for it and I think many of its essential premises are profoundly correct.
I agree with much of your comment here, but I'm not sure I understand the first part. The fact that land is a highly limited resource is all the *more* reason to encourage as much *building* (upwards, if need be) as possible; and rent control, needless to say, throws an enormous monkeywrench into the sector that produces housing. IOW land-scarcity is a factor that strongly argues against rent controls.
Conceptually, Georgism *is* rent control -- it's just a different mechanism of confiscating land rents from the landlord by taxing them rather than preventing them from being charged in the first place. There should, in principle, be no effect on the incentive to build.[1]
My point in the first part was just that you can't actually build yourself out of land scarcity[2]. YIMBYism's fundamental premise is "consume more land, just less of it for a given level of population increase than NIMBYism," where the operative part is "consume more land." YIMBYism isn't a solution to land scarcity in much the same way that "burn methane rather than coal" isn't a solution to secular increases in atmospheric CO2.
[1] Also, even in rent-control world, people can build and sell condos, right?
I think your point about Coates conducts himself in general is good. However I think he is trying to have it both ways with the writer vs politician angle.
Ezra says he thinks Democrats should run pro life candidates in red states and Coates reprimands him for this on the basis that it would offend some people who don’t have access. To me this is tactics - Coates has a clear view on the kinds of candidates Dems can run and he would like that view enforced.
Similarly Ezra points to a culture of rejection and tent shrinking within the party that Coates rejects but then moves on to say that any kind of “hatred” means you shouldn’t engage with people and the cause of their disagreement is that Ezra is not enforcing this norm to a suitable degree.
Since Coates is a “writer” he doesn’t have to take responsibility for any dynamic or outcomes but he is engaging in politics.
I see Coates as a pretty pure partisan for black identity and what he sees as the interests of Black Americans. Thats his unifying core. IOW, he’s not a pluralist - he tends to center one constituency, Black Americans, and to treat their historical and present safety, wealth, and dignity as the decisive test of American politics.And fundamentally he wants Democrats to align with that to much greater degree than is the case, even if it costs Democrats politically.
For Klein, he is much more of a pluralistic thinker and looks more at the big picture. I think that is fundamental basis of their disagreement.
This really came through in the interview. Every time Klein talked about American politics or the polity, Coates would shrink the aperture to talk about the experience and history of Black Americans, and he did so in a way that really implied Black America is a monolith, despite admitting it’s possible some 20% of Black voters might actually hold (“hateful”?) conservative beliefs.
I agree with your observation about Coates, which is why I think it's odd that his views and writing don't seem to have evolved as the black electorate has changed.
(Probably relatedly, AFAICT he has relatively little experience among black churchgoers, and so he tends to present black voters' interests as less cross-pressured than they actually are.)
Coates, in his own words, is part of a "tradition" of Black intellectuals and writers that goes back to the civil rights era. These intellectuals remain in dialogue or negotiation with "White America", or to be more accurate, with college-educated white liberals and progressives. One somewhat uncharitable account of this interaction is described by Shelby Steele in his book, "White Guilt," but the essence of this interaction is for the Black intellectuals to continually emphasize and illustrate the nature and extent of the injustice and suffering visited upon Black Americans, which the white liberals are then expected to atone for in various ways.
In their past public interactions, Coates has continued this traditional role, and Klein has for his part acted out the "traditional" role of the guilt-ridden, self-effacing white liberal. I recall listening to their discussion in the George Floyd era and it was very much that way.
I just listened to the interview. I have a dim memory of reading Coates as being capable of discussing ideas and issues without resorting to his favorite subject: Black history, slavery, anti-Black racism, and his personal role in "the struggle". John McWhorter has often said that Coates is precisely that: a one-trick pony, intellectually. Certainly he did nothing here to disabuse anyone of that notion, constantly changing the subject back to his favorite topic, and one point even admitting, "Again, my tradition is the only thing I have a reference point for, so I’m sorry to keep going back to this."
Coates is one of those people that wants a political party that does exactly what he wants, and if they consistently lose he wouldn't care, he'd rather be right than see results. And then if that political party lost, it would just further entrench his view that America in general is a racist country. As someone who is black, and has a lot of political conversations with my family, I can say that his views aren't entirely out of bounds with some portion of the black electorate. That said, he's the exact type of person who doesn't believe in a bigger tent, and it's just another great example of why the 2 party system is great sometimes but also terrible.
Like words are hard to thread but I think I fundamentally agree that reparations puts you into a structural argument about wealth transfer over time and immediate action on this when eventually the structural problem is better served by a structural answer to a more general issue not a relitigation of failures to provide immediate reparations that are lost in time to the present.
"However I think he is trying to have it both ways with the writer vs politician angle."
This was always my issue with the Colbert's, Stewarts, Penn and Teller, etc. type shows. At some point you are deep enough in the politics that you can't really retreat back to the sidelines.
Colbert and Stewart I get, but do Penn and Teller have a reputation for politics I am unaware of? Certainly stage magic lends itself less to being a pseudo-talking-head than late night comedy does
P&T are both highly principled libertarians, or at least they were back in their Bullshit! days. I believe that the modern Republican party has sent both of them somewhat left as they realized that they were the only principled ones.
Yes, definitely libertarian, but more of the South Park variety. I know they're huge fans of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and Penn said that they were happy that they did the Scientology episode so they didn't have to, as Bullshit! fans were begging them to do an episode on it.
Something else about Penn and Teller that I forgot to add is that they are skeptics above all else. They really have low tolerance for bullshit artists that make claims that are false, unfalsifiable, or without enough empiric proof. I'd say that made up about half of their Bullshit! episodes. Like many skeptics, that often leads down to a libertarian path with regard to ideology, but it's by no means limited to that path.
They had a show called Penn and Teller Bullshit which was a more Libertarian leaning type of what Jon Oliver kind of does. It was less straight forwardly political but they had some real misses over the years.
Coates actually refuted Ezra’s point about running pro life candidates in red states as unsound due to pro choice ballot initiatives having successfully passed in red states. I’m all for a bigger tent but being pro choice should continue to be a pillar of the Democratic Party.
He refuted it poorly. There clearly are states and districts where it is unpopular and more districts where it is popular in a squishy moderate sense. But importantly he is engaging in strategic politics here not just speaking truth.
The strategic point is that in a very large country with high political stakes you need flexibility not pillars. Louisiana will continue to elect pro choice politicians, the question is will the be uniformly republican or more of a mix.
I'll also add, even on its own terms, Klein was making a bad argument. These referenda suggest that there are way more cross-pressured voters in red states who are pro-choice, but support the GOP for other reasons than vice versa.
Coates was right to point out how Ezra's particular strategy here made no sense, and he did talk about moderating on other issues that were important to him, so it's not like he threw out the broad idea of triangulation conceptually.
I think this speaks to the fact that "moderation" on particular issues is more difficult and less fruitful than some commentators, like Matt, suggest. I read his mea culpas in the column. If I was a cross pressured swing voters, would I actually believe any of them as sincere changes?
Moderation in select topics is necessary for Dems to win in certain areas, but abortion is a weird topic for either Klein or Matt to bring up.
I think "moderation" is less important than coalition-building. You don't need to say you've personally changed your mind on things. Instead, you just make deals with people whose views are known to genuinely be more moderate, and support them for certain offices. Show, don't tell. And on that note:
"Trump’s key strategy for winning rural votes has been saying things that they agree with, just as Barack Hussein Obama was able to win in places like Iowa and Ohio by saying things those voters agreed with." --> Even though I'm basically in agreement with this point, it's stated in a way that's almost lab-designed to drive away the partisan libs it's ostensibly intended to persuade. The point is not to agree. The point is to be willing to work alongside people you moderately disagree with.
I think that swing voters who are largely disengaged are very cynical about politicians' promises. So I agree about show-dont-tell.
Matt keeps bringing up rhetoric here, and citing Donald Trump's supposed moderation, but almost all of that is just lies and hot air. And when the lies are reveled, Trump does become less popular, like he did in his first term after he cut rich people's taxes after saying that he wanted to tax the rich. Trump also didn't moderate at all on abortion, to most people. He's doing everything past Republicans have done to restrict it.
"Trump also didn't moderate at all on abortion." I wouldn't say this is exactly true. To get elected in 2016, he put out a list of Supreme Court candidates designed to please the hard-core anti-abortion folks. Those people want a national ban and to end IVF as well. He hasn't pursued those goals. He also hasn't bragged about Dobbs for quite a while. None of that is "moderate", but it's certainly pulled back from his alliance with the anti-abortion extremists.
He didn't moderate on abortion! Abortion used to be available in far more places and for far more people than it is now, and that is entirely thanks to the people Donald Trump placed on the Supreme Court. 'Most people' are categorically correct in their understanding of this topic if they understand that; my fear is they don't.
(1) Proactively running an antiabortion candidates in the vast swaths of the US where that makes absolutely no sense. (In most places where Democrats have a prayer of being competitive, a zealously anti-abortion candidate who prioritizes restricting access to abortions is obviously a non-starter on variety of levels).
and
(2) Failing to get behind a candidate who is *insufficiently purist* on the issue of abortion, but is nonetheless a pretty strong prospect for a general election.
Maybe the second phenomenon isn't a big problem, or a common one. But if there's a Joe Manchin-like candidate (48% rating from NARAL) running in a red or purple state who's clearly a stronger general election candidate than someone who gets a 100% rating from NARAL, I'm not sure throwing the first one under the bus gets us where we need to be, and it'll hurt reproductive rights in the bargain. And we CERTAINLY shouldn't stiff-arm said candidate if he or she wins the nomination.
Florida ran their referendum during the 2024 election and it came in at 57%. Kamala Harris received 43% of the vote in that state.
ETA: Turns out lots of states had similar initiatives during the 2024 general election. Who knew! (I'm not being sarcastic, I just looked it up.) Some results:
Arizona: 61.6% (Harris 46.7%)
Missouri: 51.6% (Harris 40.1%)
Montana: 57.76% (Harris 38.5%)
Nevada: 64.3% (Harris 47.49%)
Only Nebraska and South Dakota saw measures lose by majorities.
TL;DR this is a place where I would strongly agree with Coates. The Republican framing is that abortion is unpopular. The data above strongly indicate that framing is false: if pro-choice initiatives are running up to 15 points better than Dem candidates in general elections, you need to be running towards those issues and not away from them. The job of a pundit is to build accurate framing, not to accede to inaccurate framing by your political opponents.
I liked your comment, but within the last generation we've had Democratic senators in both Nebraska and South Dakota. I would agree with Ezra, and not with Coates, that in those states, we should be running pro-life Democrats
Seeing as you have I think a little bit more classic political science training than the average commenter on here.....
I'm just really skeptical of this view Matt and others seem to have, that you can build a political party so incredibly big tent that it includes both pro and anti-abortion candidates, pro and anti-gun control types, pro and anti-transgender rights folks, and both sides of every other hot button culture war issue out there. In theory I guess you could have a party that contains all of those elements, but it just doesn't seem very realistic in practice
I don't see what, conceptually, makes a Democratic party with both pro/anti-Gun Control candidates more inconceivable than a Democratic party that includes both YIMBYs and NIMBYs or people that support/oppose a close relationship with Israel.
I am not 100% sure we can either. But I will note that 50 years ago, this was the Democratic Party, at least in Congress.
It would require the party to convince voters that their economic concerns should dominate their cultural concerns. Our nation may now be too rich for that to work - we are much wealthier than we were in 1970.
But I do think it's a worth a shot, based on my normative preferences of valuing those economic issues much more than views on abortion, guns, transgender, etc. Others can and do disagree.
If you still have the data in front of you, what was the percentage of raw votes that those initiatives got vs the presidential vote? We did see a lot of evidence in 2024 that there were plenty of Trump voters who voted for him and left the rest of the ballot blank. Could be the case here too.
I wrote the previous post by Googling and hopping back and forth between Ballotpedia pages. This one is too much work for me, so I'm just going to outsource it to ChatGPT. I glanced at the totals for Florida and they seem right to me, you'll have to take its word (or double check for yourself) the results for the other states.
TL;DR: No. The totals indicate that there's some drop-off between President and the abortion ballot measures, but not a lot. Nowhere near enough to explain it as single-entry ballots.
Even red states don't want "no abortion at all" but that doesn't mean they want "abortion on demand" candidates.
You can't just count the number of initiatives. You need to compare what the law was before, what the law was after, and where the state is on the red-blue spectrum.
While “ban all abortions” is generally unpopular, “ban all abortions in the third trimester except for the health of the mother” is a more popular position for candidates in purple and light red states to take than “legal abortions for any reason until birth” yet there are basically no Democrats running for office who explicitly take the former position
Mostly because it’s a dumb position and democrats have an honesty problem. Virtually all abortions that take place in the third trimester are medically-necessary abortions, so banning those abortions would be actually *vastly worse* than any other area of the abortion debate. There’s a kind of cynical political who’ll just triangulate on that position because it sounds reasonable and voters are poorly-informed, but I actually want my political party not to kill women or leave women infertile. That’s an example of a “value” that would be bad to trade away for a few votes (that I doubt will come anyway.)
Is it a dumb position? Third trimester abortions are deeply unpopular. By making the exception for health of the mother you cover the sympathetic cases. You also don't need to defend deeply unpopular (and super rare) third elective trimester abortions.
This would be a good post if you were making it from 2010 or something. But here in 2025 we know what "health of the mother" exceptions actually mean in red states, which is nothing whatsoever. So I can't in good conscience advocate that any Democrat vote for those exceptions, unless they are *certain* about the integrity of all the officials making the decisions, which no red state Democrat can be.
Not all Democrats need to support this. I'm just saying that if you're running for office in rural Texas then your position on abortion should be different than if you're running for office in Chicago, and that needs to be OK.
I think the reason Ezra picked that issue is because of the past rather than the present. Many of the votes to pass Obamacare came from pro-life Democrats. We need to figure out how to get more heterodox Democrats elected; maybe the current versions are anti-affirmative action or pro-gun.
I'm not sure he refuted it. Pro choice initiatives have passed. That doesn't mean pro choice politicians win elections. A democrat who also happens to be pro life can pick up some voters for whom pro life is a single issue decider, while no losing an equivalent number of pro choice voters because there is no pro choice candidate available to them.
I know some pro choice voters might stay home or otherwise vote in protest, but I think there are few of them.
agree—it should be a pillar of the party. But, we should also be open to running candidates who are less pro-choice than we would like in certain races and states where it makes sense to, if that means we are better able to gain power and therefore protect women’s rights in the long-term.
Missouri passed a choice initiative in 2024 and yet Josh Hawley easily won re-election. Now the state legislature is trying to undo it with another initiative. In theory that would be bad for them electorally but I suspect it won't matter.
I don't think this is what Coates is saying. He's saying that women who need abortion access or trans people or other vulnerable people are in the coalition, and that we owe a duty of loyalty to them not to throw them under the bus. He also suggests that Ezra is wrong on the particular issue of abortion politics, but broadly he's saying that sticking together and maintaining solidarity in a losing cause in the short term is the right decision, which is in line with the rest of what he says in the discussion.
That whole framing of “throwing people under the bus” is a rhetorical shield to exempt one from both substantiating their positions and criticism.
It dehumanizes and delegitimizes people who have differing views on controversial subjects such youth gender medicine or the extent to which we should allow abortion access. All it communicates is there is only ONE correct position and if you disagree you aren’t even worthy of speaking.
This was the deep rhetorical hypocrisy being Coates’ words. He creates a rhetorical shield around his views such that one cannot even interrogate their foundations without being framed as a transgressor.
I really dislike the "throwing people under the bus" framing. We can be pro-choice, pro-trans-rights popularist moderates! We just need to be clear about how to be pro-choice and pro-trans-rights. I think a majority of Americans consider themselves pro-choice but that majority depends on a large chunk of moderates who largely align with Bill Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" framework. Before Dobbs, pro-choice groups demanded purity for their support, and saying that abortion should be "rare" made you insufficiently pro-choice. Bring "safe, legal, and rare" back into the pro-choice tent and we'll have a solid majority position that candidates can win with in many reddish states. Those abortion rights ballot measures absolutely rely on "safe, legal, and rare" votes. Likewise, I think most Americans believe that some number of people are born with gender dysphoria, that physically transitioning from their biological sex to their identified gender is an appropriate treatment, and that such people should be treated with respect and not be discriminated against. People who believe that generally consider themselves pro-trans-rights. Many of those people also think that competitive women's sports should be reserved for biological women, that the biological gender binary is for the most part the natural, default order of things, and that we should be very careful about irreversible medical gender treatment for kids. Believing those things can get you labeled a transphobe in some circles even if you think of yourself as broadly pro-trans. Rather than treating cultural issues as a binary, we should really work on developing a concept of cultural moderation that looks at nuanced, middle-ground positions on social issues.
Yes! As Coates put it, "I’m all for unifying, I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity. I just can’t." Sometimes, essentially the same idea is expressed as or "denying" someone's "right to exist".
This capacious and (IMHO) greatly exaggerated concept of what constitutes threatening one's "humanity" or very "existence", is not only a rhetorical shield deployed to avoid having to address specifics and criticism. It is also an expedient tactic for avoiding paying any attention to or consideration for the beliefs and preferences of persons who may be defined as having "de-humanized" certain persons or groups, usually "vulnerable" racial or gender minorities who are deemed to deserve special attention or protection. The archetypical example was Hillary Clinton's famous "deplorables" comments.
Quite often (but not always) the claims of dehumanization are deployed cynically, or recklessly, as reflected in many cases of public shaming, de-platforming and firing that seemed to peak in or about 2020 or 2021.
This motte-and-bailey game of alleged "dehumanization" is the engine and essential logic of modern social justice activism. It works quite well within the elite progressive circles where, I imagine, people like Coates and Klein spend a good deal of their time. It is less effective as deployed within mass politics, to state the obvious.
I think that Klein finally has accepted the real political costs of indulging this set of tactics and allowing it too much influence over Democratic politics. I think it is laudable that Klein is now encouraging a broader discussion of how Democrats and liberals can get past it, and especially that he is speaking about this in plain and pragmatic terms.
For his part, in this conversation, Coates served as a fairly good example of how many elite liberals may bristle at the suggestion that wokeness is a counter-productive aspect of liberalism, as if Klein's merely broaching the subject violated noms about the radical and reflexive deference that liberals are expected to pay toward fairly radical identitarian views in general (and Coates' assumptions about "anti-racism" in particular).
I surmise that this cohort will stubbornly cling to their moralistic views about identity and social justice even at very great cost - even when they themselves claim to believe that electoral success has "existential" stakes, and when "democracy is on the ballot". In this sense, I find it very hard to know what they actually and truly believe about this specific topic.
What else are you supposed to do if you believe something strongly? Gesture about how great the opposing position is blithely? These positions have real impacts, they're not at the level of talking about what chess opening is best, where i agree that it's not a constructive framework.
Everybody thinks there's one correct position and the other people are wrong on political issues, that's just how it works.
There 𝘢𝘳𝘦 some issues where it makes sense to act like there's only one reasonable side. But most of the time you need to have the wisdom and intelligence to recognize, first, that you might be wrong. Second, you need to realize that even if you're right, other people may have different interests, priorities and judgments.
You need to acknowledge that you're going to have to take an L sometimes. If you can't accept that, you are on a road that ends in violence.
Right. I'd say first step is not to unnecessarily define yourself into a minority. On the specific issues of abortion and trans rights, I don't think you have to -- we're only in a minority position if you insist on the Groups' purist positions. Most people have broadly pro-choice and pro-trans-rights views but disagree with the Groups on some specifics. Take the W on that! Now if you insist that you have to die on the hill of including trans women in women's sports or "shout your abortion" or abolishing the concept of gender mostly being tied to biological sex -- or if you're talking about a genuine minority issue like having liberal asylum policies -- part of living in a democracy means you need to convince people to change their minds if you want to get your way. Calling people racists and transphobes and bullying Democratic politicians into taking unpopular positions isn't a good way to do that -- you have to actually try persuasion.
The problem with Coates' and progressives' position is that if you squint hard enough, everything becomes someone you need to protect from those nasty buses. It's the classic everything bagel problem, where every position seems to be held strongly at once, and thus very little is ever actually accomplished.
And then Coates says "well I'm just a writer so I don't have to worry about implementation." Writers aren't really doing much of a service if they only say what they think -- to be helpful they need to propose a pathway to convincing people they're right. We love to talk about how much we care about democracy, and we should act like we care about convincing a majority of people that we're right on things.
> What else are you supposed to do if you believe something strongly?
How about argue for the position? Try to persuade? Pretending like any deviation from orthodoxy is forbidden is how we got into this mess on the left anyway, so stop that!
Politics is very often about coming home with half a loaf of bread. Insisting that anyone who compromises on bringing home the full loaf will often lead to coming home with nothing. A moderate Democratic president on trans issues, who pushed back on gender treatment for minors and transwomen in sports would still be enormously better for trans people than the current administration.
And that's the politician's perogative, to be tactical, to lie as necessary to win, but the writer's perogative is to say what they really think. I'll never be much of a politician because of this.
My view is that people respond to candidates as human beings more than they respond to issues. This is why "strength" and "dominance" are so important to Trump, and why he keeps his promises even when they hurt him. People abhor weakness, and compromising on key values exudes it.
Genuine question: what promises has he kept despite the harm they cause him? I see Trump as someone who presents strength and dominance, as you say, but does so in fleeting fashion- that is to say, he's never bound by what he just said five minutes ago, and he will strongly and dominantly present himself tomorrow saying the exact opposite of what he said today if he thinks that doing so will benefit him. But I recognize that I'm biased about Trump's character due to my personal dislike of the man.
ETA: I also want to make clear that his "dominance" is frequently in service of pretty pathetic whining. I wish more libs would respond to his bitching and moaning by mocking him as a big crybaby who acts like a sullen teenager rather than acting like every word he says is causing tremendous harm. Only powerful people can cause tremendous harm, so you're conceding the argument to him when you act like his attacks and whining are so harmful. It always seemed to me that pointing out that "he's whining like a little B because he's so weak/pathetic" was the smarter response.
I don't think Trump cares at all about abortion, and would prefer to never talk about it. I think he thought the issue was politically toxic during 2024, and he ran like hell from it. But he made promises to his evangelical base and so we got Dobbs, and we'll get something even worse this term. Maybe the FDA will ban Mifepristone?
I also think a lot of the "hurt people in blue states" stuff is designed to appease his base, so they perceive him as a strongman. Even though at some level it just ensures that blue states send more Democrats to Congress. He could pivot to being a bipartisan President For Everyone at any time, and we'd probably carve his face into Mt. Rushmore we'd all be so relieved. But instead he'll keep the base happy.
The FDA just approved a generic version of Mifepristone, which has apparently infuriated pro-life groups. I also think he promised to do things like release the Epstein files, chastised Ukraine brutally in public comments for months only to turn around in the past month and stake out the exact opposite position, spent an entire campaign pretending to not know what Project 2025 is only to turn around and appoint it's creators to high level governmental positions and now publicly praise it within just the last week, etc. etc. etc.
I don't see any of the examples you cite as situations where Trump thinks keeping his promises hurts him but that he's honor bound not to change course. I think he believes that those promises are part of what has gotten him elected President twice and that they make him more popular with the part of the country he cares about. I think he (accurately) views politics as being split into different factions, and he couldn't care less about doing things that appeal to people that aren't his supporters, so he doesn't care about being viewed as a bipartisan President for all.
So I disagree with your premise, but appreciate you providing examples of where the argument comes from.
Well I’m not going to try to convince you of that. But here’s what I would try to convince you of: if a pundit is going to move away from debating wonkish policy and start advocating *electoral* strategy, then they’d better have a *very good* mental model of what typical voters actually care about.
To my mind that’s why this argument is so important. I think Coates is saying that voters respond to principles and conviction and strength and react badly to compromise on principles, and Klein and Matt are saying voters will respond to compromise on policies even if they potentially intersect with strongly-held principles of the recent Dem party. The one with the better intuition about voter behavior is probably the one you want to bet on. And I’m not betting on Klein and Matt having a great intuition about the median voter.
In addition to what Gordon says, the point is that Ezra agrees on the substance with Coates. Throwing people under the bus is about sacrificing vulnerable members of the coalition for the greater good, not about simply disagreeing.
There's a separate issue of whether anyone is allowed to disagree with how marginalized people see their situation, but I don't think that issue comes up in this conversation.
"Throwing people under the bus is about sacrificing vulnerable members of the coalition for the greater good, not about simply disagreeing"
This is misleading. No one here is advocating for throwing the vulnerable under the bus*.
People here advocate repudiating the stupidest, shrillest, loudest voices on X/Bluesky. It's a slow boring comments section commonplace that these people aren't significant, much less vulnerable members of the coalition.
* With one exception - some of the talk about the scary, chronic homeless population qualifies.
Lots of people think, including in this comments section, that we should be ok with banning gender affirming medical treatment for trans kids (people rarely want to ban it for cis kids), or banning third trimester abortion, in service of winning elections. Those are actual policy positions, not just Sister Souljah-ing Taylor Lorenz.
"Lots of people think, including in this comments section, that we should be ok with banning gender affirming medical treatment for trans kids..."
This is probably true of this comment section but I think viewing it as "throwing people under the bus" is a bit too cynical.
I think those commenters think that it is better for the kids not to get that kind of treatment. Not that it is worse for them but we should sacrifice them to win votes.
Sam, you are framing fairly common beliefs among voters (especially in the case of 3rd trimester abortions which were mostly banned under Casey) as beyond the pale and as unacceptable positions.
Using terms like “throwing vulnerable people under the bus” communicates that the speaker is declaring that even nuanced disagreement with a specific position is unacceptable. It dehumanizes other people for not holding a very specific set of beliefs. (Many of which are novel social positions advocated for by a minority of the population.)
People definitely disagree with how Zionists Jews in diaspora see their situation; I think the same standard progressives apply in that circumstance should be applied to all minority/marginalized groups of any kind during special pleading sessions with society.
Why is it the right decision? An anti-gun control, trans minimalist, abortion minimalist Democratic elected official is presumably still much more valuable than the Republican who would otherwise be in that position.
I mean, that's what Coates thinks, he goes over his position a lot in that podcast. Despite being consistently the most left wing person in these comments I stick around because I disagree with him about that specifically.
But Coates seemed fine with Obama essentially lying about his thoughts on gay marriage and said he understood that FDR couldn’t get black people all the way with the New Deal even though he probably personally wanted to.
The funny thing is in other spaces I'm in, I've been the guy pushing back and attempting to point out political reality to people who think Democrats are all corporate sellouts.
While I'm personally very left-wing on pure policy matters in a if I was a dictator way, I rhetorically seem more intransigent here because this comment section is 90% moderate pushback. I just don't think a lot of what people want would actually work and thus, would upset the base and not actually win any elections.
Like, most of my issues w/ congressional leadership and moderates is not their individual positions on issues, but because they've capitulated to Trump over and over.
Compared to many of the people I know around my age and younger, I'd be far more OK w/ a Mayor Pete or Newsom or even Shapiro nomination as opposed to Pritzer or AOC.
OTOH, if you also want people older than me who also make me seem calm and reasonable, visit the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog comment section.
I have no idea how old you are, so that might help to contextualize. In my experience, there's always someone more left-wing or right-wing than yourself around, and there's always people that will think a given person (no matter what they think) is a squish.
I really want to understand why you and many others think that going more left wing would work. Barack Obama would be considered a total sellout in today's environment and get cancelled. I don't understand where this mass voter base of disaffected leftists is supposed to come from. Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump wasn't a clear enough difference?
I find that the trans issue is easier to resolve than the abortion issue: We do not owe it to biological/born men to compete in women sports or use female only bathrooms etc. We do owe them other basic rights obviously, but nothing that currently would be wildly unpopular and radical. A moderate stance on this issue is not only defensible but legitimate.
It seems that way until you realize that any policy that distinguishes between trans women and women is viewed as an admission that people/govt doesn’t see trans women as real women, and that is apparently a morally reprehensible view.
So the only way to prove that we believe trans women are women is to allow them into every space and category that females have.
This is why the “gender and sex are different” argument has always been a fig leaf.
That’s what the radicals believe. I think there is a difference between trans women who were born and have undergone puberty as men and biological women who were born women. This difference is almost always irrelevant for practical purposes, and people can self-identify as women if they want (I would respect this out of politeness, perhaps unless the person clearly still looks and behaves as a male), except for in a few areas where the interests of biological women must take precedence.
I don’t think it’s a belief limited to radicals. It lies at the core of modern gender identity—that they *really are* the sex they want to be on the inside.
The reason that sports, prisons, bathrooms are flash points is because they are the few areas left in modern life where sex matters, and to be excluded from those areas is to be told they’re not really women (ie not female.)
I respect your right to the opinion that it’s fine for anyone to identify as a woman, but I strongly disagree, and as a woman I am frankly the one of the two of us who will bear the brunt of this kind of inclusion or polite social fiction that you think is so inconsequential.
The bathroom issue isn't easy to thread logistically. Should building codes require at least one unisex option - that might be viable, but what about the vast, existing commercial and industrial stock with gendered restrooms? I have real sympathy for trans citizens who need to pee, and most voters don't like the state intruding into the intimate bathroom habits of individuals either way (see the fight over the NC bathroom ban that Rs were clearly losing in the court of public opinion). All that said, I also get what Rowling is saying - women are more vulnerable to violence and are entitled to safe spaces like gendered restrooms if that's what they want. There's not really a win-win here - my guess is that the cis-majority view prevails, but it pisses off a bunch of progressives who view that outcome as bigotted and risks breaking the democratic coalition.
Long term, we probably get one-holer restrooms for which gender is irrelevant. Which is good for everyone but the folks who have to pay extra money/space to accomodate more one-holer restrooms.
I am quite sympathetic to the concept of having safe spaces for women. I'm less sympathetic tying it to a necessary bodily function, and one that isn't that pleasant of an act, at that.
Who is doing the bus throwing? The person who votes for a candidate that actively works for some members of the coalition but not others, or the person who supports the candidate that loses and therefore gets a politician who supports no members of the coalition?
Consider this from the other side: If you were a one-issue pro-life voter in 2024, did Trump's likely unwillingness to push for federal abortion restrictions convince you to support Harris? No, probably you figured that Trump would still be better for your cause than Harris.
That is also my view, but Coates' view, that those people should maintain solidarity and work until that changes, is not crazy or bad faith as people here have suggested.
A writer makes money by selling books or subscriptions. They can continue being a writer as long as they sell enough books and subscriptions.
A politician has to win elections to keep being a politician. Losing a single election often ends a political career and Richard Nixon is basically to only politician to bounce back from two straight Ls.
The categories writer and politician emerge from the tactics that are necessary to become and remain in each category.
On the flip side, what's the point of being an influential political writer? It's about more than selling books. You gain influence because people admire your thoughts. Politicians don't need influential thought leaders to tell them to compromise. They're hard-wired for compromise. They need influential thought leaders to sell them on values, strategic goals and a plan for achieving them.
Selling content is table stakes for being a political writer. A stringer for the AP or journeyman for the Austin Statesman who covers a state legislature is, in this sense, a political writer.
At the lower levels, the consuming motivation is just having a job and staying in the game. As you move up, you start to face questions of influence versus pay. Of course no one wants to subscribe to a stack whose writer is cynically bullshitting them and simulating agreement to maintain subscriptions. People want sincerity not calculation. That’s why Matt’s brand of “say smart things I think are true (and quietly soft pedal some inconvenient wedge issues)” works.
I think plenty of people would be happy to write chum for $200k/year. However, I think most people who are willing to pay for writing have good enough instincts to not pay for that.
Ezra and Matt are both famous and at the top of the field. When you're at the top of the field, and politicians are bragging about your endorsement in fundraising emails, you've moved beyond basic questions of survival and paying the bills. You have to ask hard questions like: "am I actually serving the people whose values I share?" and "Should I be opining on important questions of political strategy in widely-read venues?"
Because at that point in your career there are multiple ways to make money, and someone with principles and ethics should care a lot about whether they're doing good or harm.
I do not see Ezra as someone who is writing content because he wants to pay the bills. I think he genuinely wants to help bring the country back from Trump. I just worry that maybe he's not helping people, and maybe it's time to think hard about why that is. (I have some separate criticisms of Matt, but I say those all the time so it's dull.)
Ezra is very smart and gets the facts right, but he’s so ensconced within this professional upper middle class cocoon that he’ll never have much influence over moderates. The amount of energy he devotes to helping progressives work through their “big feelings” is almost farcical. The decarbonizatiob framework of Abundance is synecdoche for his recent career- it is driven by the proclivities of the liberal donor base, not by how real Americans think.
Is it just me or is Ezra Klein . . . boring? He writes so earnestly like the weight of the world is on his shoulders and when he talks it sounds like the nation waits breathlessly to hear his Olympian judgments.
More and more he sounds to me like the next generation's David Brooks.
But I grant that this may just be me.
P.S. An update. I just listened to Klein's interview with Brian Eno. Whoa. I gave Klein too much credit for being interesting. He's even more boring and pretentious than I thought. Eno's a very interesting guy with a fascinating history but you sure wouldn't know it from this interview. (Disclaimer: The last 45 minutes may have been great. But I had given up after the first 45.)
I think Ezra has a lot of influence. I think his NYT piece urging the Dems into a shutdown was the straw that broke the camel's back, and that's a good chunk of why we're in one. (To be clear, it was the right call: the important datapoint was "even Ezra Klein agrees".)
I don't know what to tell you about the decarbonization framework. Clearly we're going to decarbonize; Permian fields are already starting to run dry, we're not investing enough to maintain supplies for decades, low-carbon energy is becoming absurdly cheap. So if you're building any "framework" for the next two decades, you'd better adjust it to economic reality.
I think there's a different role when you are an activist, a politician, a journalist, or a public intellectual. Some people are a little of all of those, but an activist/public intellectual like TNC ought to say what he believes, and probably it makes sense for him to push back on compromise, albeit within a context of being willing to hold his nose and support imperfect candidates when the election comes.
While I'm skeptical of Bold Truth Telling in general, the framing of Coates in particular as indifferent to the ebb and flow of "politics" is odd. He very notably became famous in large part due to his advocacy for a specific, detailed policy solution to redress systemic discrimination! The intervening decade has obscured everyone's memory a bit, but at the time this was a serious, full throated advocacy effort to push some form of reparations through, complete with persuasion, experts, data, the whole deal.
One of the points that Andrea Pitzer made in her excellent piece [1] (which you should read!) is that *no pundit* is a professional politician. That's not their job. When it comes to advice like "you should moderate" or "you should compromise on your positions or values", politicians don't really need to be told this by pundits like Klein. Compromising values is kind of baked into their DNA.
The goal of the pundit class is to actually point the party in some useful direction other than simple advice like "compromise." To the extent that you don't have a useful message to offer other than "concede to the other side's framing", maybe it's time to step aside and let a younger generation of pundits try some new ideas.
”Concede to the other side’s framing” implies that politics is all about framing. It isn’t. People will dislike the more radical parts of the progressive agenda no matter how you ”frame” it. Framing used to be underrated, now it’s overrated.
Education polarization has accelerated the tendency on the left to think that winning the war for terminology clinches the war for policy. Like, once you convert “pro-life” to “anti-choice,” it’s over.
Politics isn’t about framing, there’s a lot of strategy. But if you’ve conceded to the other side’s framing, then you aren’t going to be thinking clearly on strategy either. The concrete example is Klein/Coates where Ezra argues for running against abortion, then gets reminded that abortion referenda consistently ran 11-15% ahead of Harris in 2024, then kind if stumbles away from this point. Here’s a case where the data tells a very powerful story, but Klein has a different story in his head. Thats what happens when you concede to adversarial framing, you can’t think clearly.
Imagine a WWII general listening to German propaganda and then refusing to invade Europe because “they’re unbeatable.” You cannot have your thought leaders drinking the other side’s kool aid.
I don’t think that’s framing, but rather having the facts wrong. Framing is when you say stuff like ”keep your hands off women’s bodies” conveniently ignoring that the issue, at least according to pro-lifers, involve another person’s life too.
Framing is how you convince other people to adopt your preferred beliefs as fact, even when they have access to data that obviously contradicts the facts. It’s powerful! My argument is that both Klein and Matt have become victims of successful framing by the other side, so they’re making bad strategic arguments rather than trying to frame the issues their own way.
I think Matt is being polite, and Coates is basically ridiculous. He’s a good prose writer of almost no substance, and him being fashionable (and difficult to safely criticize) was, in retrospect, a good leading indicator that we were cooked.
So much of what Coates did in that interview was frame his positions in such a way that even critiquing or disagreeing with him makes you a bad person.
That is not a helpful way to have discussions in a democrat society, especially when it comes to controversial subjects. It is the same form of dehumanizing that Coates criticizes others of.
Well said, and unusually useful for me. My town is in the midst of a budget crisis in which one side is justifying their incivility with Nazi comparisons ("there aren't two sides to the question of gas chambers").
He’s a nice person who is not terrible to hang out with. So they continue to hang out with him even if he’s not too bright.
ETA: he’s also a bit if a unicorn in that he’s a black guy with zero exposure to the black church. None. I can’t think of a less representative ADOS person. He’s been raised in a weird cocoon of black nationalism ensconced in a white enclave. So he naturally appeals to a certain liberal who doesn’t want to think that hard about how socially conservative the median black person in the states is.
Contrast this with Nicole Hannah jones, who is a vicious idiot who really no one wants around unless they are forced to have her around (plenty of examples of this on the right too- Mike pence is hanging around because people like him)
Our side made some terrible mistakes in the ~2016-2022 period but the fact that it's hard to remember who Kendi, DiAngelo et al even are any more is a sign that we're returning to health and are isolating the crazies more and more into a bubble, quarantined from the rest of us.
Now we just have to convince the rest of the country that we're not ruled by the crazies anymore.
The problem is that Democrats need to actively refute those thinkers; instead the dominant strategy is at best ignoring them and at worst gaslighting (word carefully chosen) about how prominent they were in the 2019-20 time period.
Sure, if there's a hook to do so. Like if one comes out with a new book. If they just do it out of the blue, then it will feel odd and won't break through in any case.
Black Americans have a higher rate of religious participation but a lot of them still aren’t part of the church (only 57% attend at least monthly according to this poll: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-attendance-and-congregational-involvement/). I went to mostly black schools and cannot remember the black church ever even coming up in conversation. And the nature of being a minority is that you’re more likely to live in a mostly-white area. Coates’ background does not seen that atypical.
In fairness I think he mainly grew up in Baltimore as it was becoming a majority black city but I believe has also said in his writing that he felt alienated from the larger black community during his childhood and adolescence.
For sure, and my point I think is generally in agreement with yours. I think there's a lot to criticize about his world view and the conclusions he reaches but I don't think it's accurate or fair to try to paint him as an outsider among black people or anything like that.
Something Ezra said once that stuck with me is that it's important to have multiple mental models and ways of thinking about the world. They're like tools in the tool belt, and you pick out the right one for the problem at hand.
Coates has a unique way of seeing the world that has a powerful internal logic to it, and his perspective is sometimes useful. The problem is that it's the only tool in his tool belt, and that's what makes him seem ridiculous.
Perfect example of this is Coates visiting Israel and the West Bank and applying US racial dynamics to an entirely different situation. Ezra is generally a great listen but it was frustrating to watch him platform such a ridiculous world view.
It was worse than that. Ezra Klein platformed Coates on the Israeli-Palestinian topic, even though Coates’ entire exposure was a 10 day ideologically charged organized trip and a Palestinian writers’ festival, and his perspective was that nuance can cloud moral clarity.
I agree if having only one way of thinking you shoehorn everything into is the most common way to think. If it’s not—I assume it isn’t because that just seems too consistent for people—then I think Klein is really just telling on himself.
My personal view of Coates (in addition to his being a talented writer) is that he's kind of Chun-Li in the "For Me It Was Tuesday" dialogue in "Street Fighter"
I think it's extremely easy to sympathize with this point of view: in view of the tremendous objective historical harms caused by racism against Black Americans in the United States, one could easily infer that this was a defining and indelible motivation behind historical societal social trends: it hugely impacts *me* and *my constituency* in material ways, and there was also a Civil War about it, ergo, it must perniciously inform the motivations behind decisionmaking at all times. But Coates is sort of held hostage to the lens of his experience (again, understandably, since it's his experience--this is true of all of us in some respects) in a way that can make it hard to evaluate things in a way that's depersonalized but with a potentially more accurate theory-of-mind.
I took a mental divorce from Coates when he quoted I believe it was Malcolm X saying "if you plunge a knife six inches into a man's back and pull it out two inches, you can't say you've made progress." In other words, the situation is no different from what it was sixty years ago and we've never made any progress on race relations.
That was such a nihilistic view of America that I couldn't take anything he wrote/said seriously ever again.
(Oh, and then he opined on Israel/Palestine in such an ignorant way (proudly so by his testimony) that that removed any further doubt.)
I’ve written a couple papers on racial violence in the south and reviewed papers on other countries and like… it is a statement to our progress that someone would be so silly to compare us now to us then.
We have made such a ridiculous amount of progress! The world imagined by KenDiAngelo was long in the rear view mirror.
And yet, now we've got the most racist administration since sometime before Ronald Reagan though I'm not sure how far back I should be reaching. I choose to believe that the vast majority of Americans are not like that, no matter what filth has risen to the top.
I imagine that it is insanity-inducing either way, but the valence that it has seems like it differs based on whether you don't really have the capacity to opt out of seeing it that way due to System 1 thinking versus choosing to interpret things in a way that seems maladaptive via System 2 thinking. The first kind seems like it just kinda sucks in a way that should elicit sympathy.
I think the relationship between Coates and the more centrist wing of the party is defined by one particular tension, that being that it's become taboo on the larger left to say that some things around race and really demographics more generally have changed in the post war era, and that most of those changes have been for the better. IMO it's kind of ridiculous since many of these things are to the great credit of liberal politics in America but beyond that it's what has us kind of stuck and unable to adapt to slow but sure racial depolarization and demographic changes.
Regarding the CTU's endorsement of Shakur: Lots of people like to fantasize about being an avenging and violent force for good. Dirty Harry, the Die Hard series, every Charles Bronson movie.
The problem with their endorsement is that they valorized an actual terrorist who was pursuing a bad, not good, political outcome. But in their defense, the terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were warmly welcomed into Northwestern University and the University of Illinois-Chicago [edited], respectively, when the FBI decided to stop pursuing them.
I don't think racism infects our society anywhere near as much as Ta-Nahesi Coates believes, but I can understand how seeing the difference between how Black, violent 1970s radicals like Shakur are viewed versus how Dohrn, Ayers and other white, violent 1970s radicals are welcomed into respectable political positions might radicalize some CTU members.
How much does the views of the leadership of the CTU translate to how teachers behave in the classroom? I tend to think very little.
Unions, like any organization have a lot of unique internal dynamics that result in who runs and wins elections. But I would venture that whatever those dynamics are, the reason the members vote for their leadership is primarily for how the leadership is perceived as representing the members with respect to their interactions with the city as employer/paymaster.
It is unlikely that the members are voting for their leadership based on how good a classroom teacher the union leader is. It wouldn't actually make sense to do so unless you think teaching reading to six year-olds is the same skill set as negotiating contracts.
The re integration of Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground, and others is mind blowing to me. No one is rehabilitating McVeigh or the Ruby Ridge idiots on the right, nor should they.
The Right quickly turned Kyle Rittenhouse into a mascot/keynote speaker and have rehabilitated Jan. 6 rioters, several of which were later re arrested for other crimes after being pardoned. Valorizing an elderly or dead criminal may be wrong, but none of the leftists mentioned are currently a threat to anyone, unlike the violent lunatics Trump and co. Released and constantly hold up as heroes.
It's disheartening how few people can set aside their passions to view that case objectively. I thought Rittenhouse was a bit of a naive moron to put himself into that position in the first place, but when I was his age I was also a naive moron about most things. Being dumb and irresponsible doesn't make his actions criminal on that day given what we know about the actual circumstances of the shooting.
For sure- that's a big component of it. But I actually think it's worse than that. I think the ppl we're talking about view his political beliefs as being disqualifying from even making a self defense claim. Guns are bad, his politics are, he shot someone with a gun, he's guilty as sin and should spend his life in jail.
Rittenhouse is also IMO the poster child for the rule that says: if you are putting yourself in a dangerous position because you have a gun, the gun is probably making you less safe, not more safe.
The public backlash against that poor kid (who was 17 at the time) created a situation where he had virtually no other career options after his acquittal. He was even barred from social media before his trial even started.
He's a murderer, but he's innocent of any actual crimes. The laws were bad, and that's why he's innocent, but you can't convict people of crimes that aren't on the books and shouldn't try to do so.
The laws were bad? The laws in WI at the time (and now) are pretty standard self defense statutes. You can replicate that scenario in pretty much any state and the jury’s conclusion wouldn’t change
Were the people at Ruby Ridge good, upstanding citizens? No. Did the FBI and US Marshals barge in there looking to start a fight when it wasn't at all necessary? Yes.
Exactly; the conversations I had with my conservative friends are the mirror image of the ones I have about ICE with my liberal friends today. Are the victims blameless? No, technically they’re breaking laws. Is it a good idea to have a national, possible politicized police force looking for trouble? Definitely not.
McVeigh no, but Ruby Ridge was a George Floyd moment for the right. People don’t talk about it much any more because it happened so long ago but I remember hearing way more people saying Ruby Ridge was an unjustified massacre than that it was justified.
Depends on how you choose to count some of the J6 "hostages" and "martyrs"...
The closest to actual terrorists there though are the Proud Boy/Oathbreaker types and I've not really heard of them being invited to state dinners or anything.
I think there is possibly another more banal thing going on. Yes it seems like the Chicago Teachers Union chapter is run by people who seem to be to the left of even other leaders of the Teachers Union. But I think the other very real possibility is that a lot of orgs are run by older people who don’t put enough thought into who they put in charge of their social media platforms. So you end up with people running social media accounts who very possibly have ideas on certain topics that maybe shouldn’t be put on official Twitter feed.
Feel like something similar probably happened with the Libertarian party of NH. There was a while there where the Libertarian party of NH Twitter account was putting out a whole lot of no doubt about it Neo Nazi stuff. Now my “in the wild” experience with the Libertarians is it’s a mix of actual Cato reading principled libertarians…and absolute nutballs. Wouldn’t at all shock me if the Libertarian party hired one of these nutballs out of sorts of negligence
I’ll also note that I suspect there is a similar dynamic as to why super lefty DEI stuff ended up in various companies training materials. State X passed a law mandating DEI training. HR scrambles to comply, researches DEI experts and comes up with Robin DeAngelo and suddenly DeAnglelo’s quite frankly racist DEI stuff is out the wild.
In the case of the LP, they didn’t hire them; rather, a really dedicated minority executed a hostile takeover from within. It’s actually one of the few right-wing parallels I can think of to the way some left-wing organizations go, although even then, it doesn’t have the same dynamic where the moderates are scared to criticize the extremists.
I mean I think you sort of described everything that's happened with the Republican Party over the last 10 years.
There maybe more examples of cases like this with left wing groups than right wing groups, but I'd say the entire infrastructure of one of the two major political parties being taken over by a lunatic outweighs in importance anything that's happened in a variety of lefty orgs.
That's a different dynamic, Trump won the GOP by winning over its voters and then demonstrating he could win general elections. Obviously it's more important, but it's still different.
I still go on but on a different name than I used* to so the combo of my algorithm not being the same and Musk changing the platform means they don't come up in my feed.
* I used to be a heavy twitter poster and interacted a ton with various pundits (including Matt). Then I started talking trash to David Sacks about his advocacy for saving Silicon Valley Bank and he got my account deactivated. I actually agreed with saving Silicon Valley Bank but given Sacks' previously stated positions on a variety of topics thought he was ripe for mockery for suddenly forgetting any libertarian principles he might have when it was his own money at stake.
Is "crazy social media intern" really a thing that still happens?
Social media has been used regularly by approximately every organization of any significance for well over a decade now. It's a relatively established career track mostly followed by the PR/marketing people you'd expect.
Not that "org has to walk back awful social media post" shouldn't ever happen, but it should be at about the frequency of having to walk back an awful TV and or CEO remark.
I think it’s a lot simpler. I agree with how Ross Douthat put it when he had Hasan Piker on his show: once you “DSA leftist” (or go even further left) and start talking about everything the state does or doesn’t do as “violence,” then a little more violence is just no big deal:
> Douthat: But this analogy is itself part of why people think you are normalizing the things that are taboo, which would include right-wing forms of violence. But if your theory is that all of these things are incitement — that if you support putting more people in jail, that’s incitement; if you support border security, that’s incitement; it’s incitement all the way down — you’re basically saying: The person who incites violence against a politician is in the same position as the person who supports border security. And that seems like an argument that lends itself to encouraging people to commit political violence, because you’re saying: It’s all normal already. What’s a little more? What’s one more act of incitement in a world of incitement? You’re just normalizing it when you make that argument.
> Piker: Yeah, my argument is that I’m not normalizing it — it’s already normal. I don’t want it to be normal. I want it to be abnormal. I want people to actually take a serious look at the violent structures that already exist that, from the point of the recipient, is already experienced as a direct form of violence.
I think this reflects a fundamentally different view of how the far left and the far right view violence. The far left sees having a state with hierarchical authority figures and a monopoly on violence as inherently violent, bad, and preventable. Right wingers believe hierarchy is natural and inevitable, so the state having a monopoly on violence is theoretically fine. Right wingers therefore tend to cheer on violence only when they think the state has violated the social contract in some way - someone else in this thread mentioned Rittenhouse, whose celebration in right wing media is an excellent example of this.
As an LA millennial, I can tell you Amanda and Sean are a certain species of middle-aged California lib who live extremely traditional, almost conservative lives but whose brains are cooked by the internet and think violent radicalism is sorta cool. I know dozens of people like this, suburban parents with normie office jobs who’ve never committed or suffered any real violence in their lives yet talk like they're in the Weather Underground after a drink or two. It’s all about fashionable rhetoric on Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok and nothing about what they’re actually capable of or what would be a good way to make policy into reality. It can be aggravating sometimes!
I love the Big Pic, but the pod on OBAA was jarrrrrrring. It's like they've completely missed PTA's pretty conservative streak. Like Perfidia is a sign of resistance and power and noble struggle? It's cool to be in the French 75 fighting the man?
Was the point of Boogie Nights that it's cool to be in the porn industry? Do they think that the camera was admiring Jungle Pussy's nonsense speech at the bank?
The tone is unbearable when they start to talk about "radical politics." They need to just eat at Republique, work from home, and vote Dem. It'll be fine.
"But none of the identity-brained Democrats who believe it was desperately important to put a mediocre white man on the ticket to balance out Harris..."
So have we come around to agree that Walz was a dud?
His debate was bad and he didn't do much for the campaign — mainly because the Harris team kept his mouth shut. BUT I think we all memory hole the excitement he created when he first burst on the scene. He can be a good communicator, but I think if he really wants to change some minds and widen the tent, he needs to take on some heterodox positions. He refuses to do so, and will just return to being the governor of a blueish state. Which is totally fine.
My view of Walz is that he was a missed opportunity *precisely because* he generated all that base excitement. The reason why he generated that base excitement is that the base felt like they dodged a bullet: Harris could have chosen someone who would have been interpreted as signaling moderation, and by strategically backing a dark horse who was a white guy but did *not* signal moderation, they successfully strangled that idea in its crib. They were celebrating over their factional victory, but victory for their faction prevented Harris from scoring points with the general electorate.
I don't have a problem with Walz himself. He's ok. Not a great debater. Pretty decent speechifier.
Yea this is the crucial piece ppl miss. The Walz excitement was mostly driven by an expression of anti Shapiroism... cloaked in "HE HUNTS!!!!" enthusiasm.
Matt made this point at the time but our perceptions get completely warped by the fact Minnesota is in the middle of America and the only part of Pennsylvania that hyper into politics coastal libs have ever been to is Philly.
But because the Twin Cities dominate most of the state's population, Minnesota is actually a meaningfully more urban, higher educated, and more liberal state then Pennsylvania is. So Walz became coded as the "real" WWC pick and Shapiro less so,
Despite the fact the actual driver of this push was a proxy for gaza politics.
Gaza is certainly one reason why further-left folks hate Shapiro. And the crazy thing about that is that Shapiro's and Walz's policy views on I/P are basically identical. I've read articles where Shapiro has condemned Netanyahu in the harshest of terms, which he's able to do precisely because of the "Nixon goes to China" thing. But because Shapiro is so Jewish -- i.e. he isn't just technically Jewish like say Paul Rudd, but also "looks Jewish" and finds part of his core cultural identity in his Jewishness -- that kind of mainstream stance isn't acceptable for him, he would need to hold firmly left-wing views in order to be ok. And defeating him in a factional contest feels like a win in the I/P proxy war regardless of the (lack of) policy implications.
At the same time, I also think the distaste for Shapiro is not purely about I/P. It's also the fact that he looks like the kind of guy who went to a good college and got a job at someplace like Deloitte and wears a suit. There's no person on earth hated more by young lefties.
Paradoxically, while Gavin Newsom isn't liked by young lefties either, he's better able to get away with his suit-wearing because (a) he's tall and waspy and got an athletic scholarship so isn't the kind of guy they personally encountered on a regular basis on campus, and (b) he's a bit older.
(To be clear though, I don't think Harris had to pick Shapiro. I thought Cooper or Kelly would have been good choices, for instance. But once Walz became the darling of the base, he became the worst choice for that very reason, through no fault of his own.)
This is really well put as to the nature of the hatred. The crazy thing is how Shapiro's actual resume doesn't really fit this typecast in the way Pete definitely does.
I really don't care about this sort of thing but lefties are correct that Pete went to Harvard then McKinsey and the Navy and is exactly the "40 under 40" type they despise.
But do lefties really hate University of Rochester graduates who go to evening law school and then state legislature positions in the same way?
Similarly the leading avatars of American leftism, Mandani, Bernie, and AOC went to Bowdoin, UChicago, and Boston U. What gives!
Yeah it gets a little fuzzy, but I guess the thing is that Shapiro and Buttigieg have always practiced "respectability politics," for lack of a better word. Shapiro didn't work for McKinsey, but he looks like the kind of guy who *might* have worked for McKinsey. And the fact that he was working toward any sort of political career at all in his 20s and doing so "within the system" is still seen as bad. It's okay if you do it in a countercultural or radical or "speaking truth to power" kind of way, but not if you're upholding mainstream liberalism - that makes you a traitor. Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez can plausibly claim that they weren't planning political careers all along, and when they did enter politics they did it to overthrow the existing Democratic hierarchy, not help it.
I think the difference is that Walz was a nice civically minded social studies teacher who literally got into politics after his students got kicked out of an event for being against Bush. So even if he is personally pro-Israel he was trusted more to respect protestors’ freedom of speech than Shapiro who IIRC was actually involved in crackdowns.
I read about those "crackdowns" and they're so overblown. Shapiro's image and identity are the driving factors, and the "crackdowns" were backfilled to provide a more defensible official rationale.
Walz, like almost every other VP nominee, mattered at most a tiny bit. But in such a tight race with the stakes so high, Harris needed to have made a bolder decision.
But again any effect would have been very small and hard to discern.
I don't disagree with that, i.e. I don't think Walz per se mattered a lot. What did matter is how hard Harris went on "heterodox" (or whatever you want to call it) messaging, like Bill Clinton showily did in 1992. She actually did more of that than I expected, and overall I thought she ran a much better campaign that I feared she would, and that's why she made it close. But she needed to do more. The Walz choice was a symptom or example of her being a little too cautious.
Agreed. She actually ran a pretty good campaign. Like every other politician in history, she could have run a better one.
It was a bad year for incumbents and sometimes the voters are just going to do a colossally idiotic thing and put the worst person in history into the Oval Office.
Were voters excited or just Democratic party people who thought the "Republicans are weird" was an entire campaign strategy?
I can't say for sure but I feel like I thought he was a dud from the beginning, the Tim Kaine redux.
I remember some people being excited, I just think those people were kind of dumb and the type of people that think Walz appeals to "rural" voters more than he does.
I say this with no polling data or other evidence, but I thought Walz's angle on how Trump and Vance never laughed, and how Trump would never pet a dog had some potential. People love their dogs!
This is the opposite of memory-holing, though. It's calling into question the judgement of people that were excited by his nomination. The excitement was not universal and was probably informed by a bad theory of politics.
Useful to quote some parts here (interesting from a separate analytical path Matt's critique aligned with Silver)
_____
Making a risk-averse selection when you are ahead makes sense — but I do worry that Harris’ current lead is genuinely razor-thin. The pick seems a little complacent, and I would rather see her running more aggressively than making a defense choice.
The big issue to me is that once again, a flawed set of identity considerations seems to have unduly limited Democrats’ options — in 2020, Biden seems to have only considered Black women, while in 2024, Harris seems to have only considered white men.
If you want a popular swing-state governor who is not Josh Shapiro, the answer is Gretchen Whitmer. If you want a Minnesota politician with a strong track record of over-performing in the rural midwest, the answer is Amy Klobuchar. If you want a talented political communicator, the answer is Pete Buttigieg (who is a white man, but who seems to have had being gay counted as a strike against him).
Excitement he created? The Democrats and large media would have been excited about any warm body. They wanted to like him. He was a dud for sure. I found a few clips of him talking after Harris picked him and his mediocrity was clear right away. The receipts of me saying so in this space at the time.
Honestly, if I were Kamala Harris, I would have picked Andre Dickens, Mayor of Atlanta and would have him go on television and everywhere and tell everyone how much he loves cops and hates anti cop protestors. And his method of dealing with anti cop protests is calling them all criminals and having them arrested.
I was impressed by him in interviews I heard before he was picked. Those skills didn't carryover into the campaign. I don't think there's any great lesson in choosing or not choosing him. The reason primaries work is that they test a candidate over and over again. Unless you can select a VP that's also been through that sort of gauntlet it's always a bit of a crapshoot.
One of the reasons Biden worked as a pick for Obama was that he had in fact been through the wars on the national stage for decades. He performed in the campaign exactly as expected.
Attacking identity politics “for putting a mediocre white man on the ticket” is sort of too clever. First, this isn’t his identity politics typically operate. Second, VP choices don’t matter that much, Harris lost by too much for Shapiro to have bailed her out.
Harris sort of foregrounded this type of thinking in her comments about Pete and it is one of Matt's favorite bits.
I don't think the VP pick mattered much but I think the Walz fandom got a bit silly and I think these politicians coming out of seemingly nowhere to become the VP nominee is a sort of weird element of American politics that could use some though from the parties.
It's sardonically hilarious to say now but I think the platonic ideal model for the VP pick actually is Biden in 2008.
If the best model for President is, as Matt says, Outsider/Not Radical, then you need a real old Washington hand to close some deals on the hill. And preferably someone who is not seen as better than yourself as a candidate and maybe not peering over your shoulder. Thats why Dubya picked Cheney (er he picked himself but still) and why Obama chose Biden. Both were chosen for the right reasons but they each violated those reasons substantially.
yeah as more of a centrist it's good that Shapiro wasn't the VP candidate because that would have just added more fuel to the progressive fire that Harris lost because she wasn't sufficiently leftwing.
I disagree and agree with Matt. When you centralize identity politics in your thinking then it’s easy to overvalue its impact vs other attributes like policy positions or political talent and Rizz.
On whether a better VP pick would have made a difference? That’s tough. You may be right. I would have picked a high talent communicator with Max charm and likeability. People lack imagination on these things. Just to indicate the direction I am thinking someone like Matthew McConaughey. Why not?
Honestly, if I were Kamala Harris, I would have picked Andre Dickens, Mayor of Atlanta and would have him go on television and everywhere and tell everyone how much he loves cops and hates anti cop protestors. And his method of dealing with anti cop protests is calling them all criminals and having them arrested.
And while VP choices do not probably matter too much, the specific mode that the choice reflected (as correctly flagged by both of Matt and Silver) was a bad signal for the eventual campaign deployment (neither here nor there, reversion back to Dem/Already-Pre-Sold-Lefty themes by September).
I absolutely haven't. I actually wonder if Walz kicked Matt's dog or something the way he writes about him.
I loved and love Walz and think he was clearly handcuffed by the campaign. Loud and outspoken rural white dude and didn't go to an elite college, taught in schools, coached football, believes in live and let live and also implemented universal free lunch. He's a dream profile. And is funny.
I genuinely don't understand the hate he garners; I think there's some general Monday morning quarterbacking by a certain class of writers about him that just isn't backed up by data.
I am sad that the author of One Billion Americans says that it's not going to fly. The immigration politics suck, and it is what it is, but I still hold faint hope that at some point Americans realize the tradeoff they're sowing by supporting more restrictionist measures. But it's also sad, as Matt's observed, that the natalist avenue has gone off some real bizarre paths, instead of just settling in of an increase child allowance, and then let the chips fall where they might.
The fertility rate really does not seem to be an affordability problem though, at least not in a way that a little extra child allowance will help (even though I’d take it!). Rich countries have fewer kids. It’s cultural. Hard to fix.
Liberalism is correct -- it's almost axiomatic that people should be free to pursue their own interests if they don't harm others -- but a society that emphasizes maximizing one's own happiness is going to have lower fertility.
Having kids is hard, expensive, draining, stressful. It does not pass any cost/benefit analysis, largely because it's orthogonal to cost/benefit analyses. Having kids is a lot bigger than one's own happiness, and as long as we have a society where people are free to pursue their own happiness, we'll have lower fertility.
I think I am already happier for having kids, and my kids are very young and one of them is very high needs. I expect the lifetime increase to my happiness as they age and have lives and children of their own to increase.
I think “kids are a drag” vibes are in fact a big part of the problem. Paying a mortgage is a drag but home ownership is (correctly!) seen as nice and a marker of things going well for you. Kids should be the same way, not some duty to discharge.
Yeah. Maybe there's no solution for this, but there are just so many guys out there who in their youth were reluctant to have children and only realized after the fact that they love being dads. If there were a way to communicate that to more young guys, it might at least make a small dent in the problem. Obviously, you'd need a different approach with young women.
I expected to love being a dad and I do love being a dad. But I don't know if it's made me *happier.*
It's 1000% given my life more meaning and purpose and I couldn't imagine a life without my kids, and they're infinitely more important to me than my personal happiness. But also my day-to-day would likely involve more pleasure and less stress if I didn't spend so much time and energy focusing on dinner negotiations and bedtime routines.
I don't want to go all Aristotle on you, but the additional meaning and purpose has shifted my happiness scale for the better: my floor is lower and my ceiling is higher.
Happiness is definitely not the right word. Satisfaction? Fulfillment? It's like running a marathon. No one who's run a marathon has told me it was fun. But they're all glad they did it!
I would've been quite happy to reproduce, I just never wanted to be burdened with those stupid, noisy luxury pets. My two kitties already demand more attention than I have free time for.
Smart people criticize the stock market for prioritizing short term financial results instead of long-term decision making.
I think of having kids the same way. You're giving up happiness in the short term (especially the 2nd trimester - year 1 period) in exchange for long-term... happiness is not quite the right word. More like satisfaction or fulfillment.
That’s very true of the first kid but less true of successive kids, while a lot of costs increase linearly or exponentially. Most people with a typical income, time, and energy level without significant free help trying to maximize their happiness would have one kid tops.
I always feel sorry for only child families. Everyone involved is missing out on so much of what makes family fun. Siblings are a treasure for each other and parents.
edit - to be clear, only child families are not bad just as no children is not bad. Its just that people who don't have them are missing out.
I was reading that moms today spend 50% more time with their kids than in the 70s when they locked the kids outside so they could smoke and watch Days of Lives in peace. Even with costs the same, if the time commitment had stayed at the 1970s level, that would mean more kids.
I suspect this is a bigger effect than any of the policies we sometimes discuss. Social expectations for the job of mother (or father) make each child much more expensive in terms of time, energy, and money. And when the price goes up, people have fewer kids, just like Econ 101 would suggest.
Absolutely true, at least if the parents in my local sphere are any indication. The amount of doting is toxic at times, it seems to me. But most of the kids are holding down good jobs and such, not sure if there are downstream effects to helicopter parenting.
It also helps these days that most of our kids live to five and we don't need them to be labor on the family farm. Maybe protectionism, nativism, and anti-vax will mean we'll go back to having children work on farms and then die of mumps, so we'll need more kids.
My mother in law certainly does; I strongly suspect that while my BFF is attached to his daughter he probably would've preferred not to have had her (definitely his ex-wife). That said, of the people I know that have children they're the only ones I'm aware of.
It passes cost-benefit analysis if the elder care regime is weak. But the trend for outsourced (to government) provision of both healthcare and retirement funding support undermines the real benefit of having children (and grandchildren) who will care for you in old age. And you need more than one for risk mitigation.
Or to the extend that it is an affordability problem, the combination of fewer opportunities for child labor and more perceived need to invest in education makes the affordability problem so severe that politically plausible fixes won’t work.
If family businesses where children could meaningfully contribute from age 12 were common and if children could be given an interest or be apprenticed rather than needing an expensive education, fertility would increase.
Twelve years is a long-ass time. When husband and I were deciding whether to have a second child, we didn’t say to ourselves, “If only we could send her to work at age 12, this would be such an easy decision!” The infant and toddler years are super labor intensive for parents, and sending 12-year-olds to work does nothing to change that.
Besides, how many 12-year-olds would be a net negative in the workplace? “Quite a few” would be my guess.
that extends from 17 year olds working summer jobs to 8 year olds working 8 hour days in sweat shops. The further down the affluence spectrum you go the knife common child labor is.
2) The actual value of 12 year old labor is more subtle. If you already have a 10 year old and a 7 year old, it’s much easier to have a third child knowing that household productive capacity is about to increase.
Furthermore, under the status quo, every dollar spent on the youngest kid constrains the education you can give to the oldest two, The tradeoffs between siblings are very real.
Lyman Stone argues that the South Korean expectation that parents will support their kids till age 25-30 meaningfully contributes to South Korea's lower TFR. Asking parents for 30 years of support per kid is a much bigger ask than ~18 years.
It’s gonna be like that everywhere if AI keeps getting better… You should assume if you’re having a kid today it’ll be a lifelong financial commitment.
Religious-nutter run Iran is having trouble with fertility... one of Russia's war aims is stealing Ukrainian children to turn into Russians to replenish their own supply (why they need to kill a 100k plus or so existing Russians to do it escapes me). It's happening basically everywhere except Nigeria.
The obvious solution is uterine replicators, but we don't have the tech or sufficient interest. Seems like a better use of resources for the rich pro-natalists than being laser focused on bigger LLMs.
it would only have to deter a meaningful fraction of women to have some effect on fertility. i’m sure it does. the easier you make parenting and the more culturally acceptable it is to lightly educate and heavily work your kids, the more kids people will have. very simple really once you strip away all the double-talk.
Most women want kids, but they don't want them when they're in their twenties and just starting their careers. And the problem is that once you hit your mid-30s your fertility starts falling off a cliff. If people could reliably start families in their 40s, it would definitely help the fertility crisis
Dunno about first kids but I know a fair amount of women who don't want additional kids because the first pregnancy was so unpleasant. Not dangerous. Just unpleasant. Morning sickness for 2 months, basically bedridden for weeks at a time, on bedrest for the last trimester, couldn't eat anything but bread and cheese without feeling nauseous, that sort of thing.
Not sure about data but my current partner and several other women I’ve dated have told me this is the reason, it’s a pretty intimate thing to say though.
Extending this a bit, wouldn't it be nice if we could skip children entirely?* I've been trying to figure out the framework to produce fully-fledged adults and I haven't quite gotten there yet.*
*Yes, this is full on sci-fi nonsense, but I can conceptualize how you'd give human beings something like telepathy but speedrunning 15-20 years of education and learning seems a lot harder.
Compared to sub-Saharan Africa yes but middle income countries now have fewer kids. Europeans and East Asians and increasingly even Latin Americans have fewer kids than Americans with a one-kid norm instead of a two-kid norm like we have here because they are poorer and can’t afford the giant houses we have.
I think history shows that our melting pot has limits on how many new ingredients can be quickly added. That’s why I strongly support immigration that isn’t chaos or unfettered system gaming. The alternative is this toxic pendulum of backlash and counter backlash.
Until now, the previous big hitting the brakes on immigration when emergency restrictions were put in place to slow immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Basically it was decided there were too many Polish, Jews, and Italians coming here, and it was some sort of threat to our whiteness.
The backlash and politics was real, but the underlying thought process was idiotic at best. It seems indisputable that in fact we're better off because of that immigration, and the lesson from that should be find ways to overcome the backlash, not just repeat the stupidity.
First, I think it's just part of human nature and the way we organize into ingroups and outgroups that there is always a backlash when your group grows too quickly, adding new members who have differences from the status quo. That works at most every level, including nation-states.
Here in the US, we had lots of immigration in the early 20th century - that created a backlash, and after the Depression got started, the door closed until the late 1960s. We are now at a point where we have a larger percentage of foreign-born than the peak back then, so I think we have partly overcome the backlash, but it will never be eliminated. But there is still a limit to the amount of change people will accept and it's not about "whiteness" - there's no country that wants to accept large numbers of foreigners who natives think will end up changing the nature of their country in fundamental ways.
Secondly, there is the issue of resources. Long-term immigration is beneficial, but in the short term, it can pose significant challenges in terms of housing, employment opportunities, and other aspects. It's not the case that the US can accept any level of immigration without substantial negative effects. Could the US handle an influx of 10 million migrants per year, for example? I don't think so. Support systems were straining under the Biden peak which was, IIRC, a bit over 2 million annually.
Now you combine these two and look at countries that have taken on large numbers of people from different countries. Problems seem to start when the foreign-born population reaches about 10-15% for most countries. That's certainly the case in Europe and US, where we peaked at 15.8%. The late-19th/early 20th century peak in the US was ~14.7 %. Then immigration shut down, and that declined to only ~4.7% in 1970.
Rather than try to keep immigration really high and "overcome the backlash" - which I have no idea how that would actually work- I'd prefer to keep a steady state level of immigration that keeps the foreign-born population at around 10-12%, which I think is sustainable.
First, it absolutely was about whiteness in the ‘20s. They weren’t subtle or abashed about it. Keeping out the swarthy races was the point.
Today’s backlash certainly includes some of that: “Can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”, shithole countries, and the great replacement theory give that away.
My real argument is that problem is a misnomer. Yes, then and now, there was a backlash, but it’s based on a false premise. Jewish, Polish, and Italian immigrants were in fact good for-the US, short and long time. There wasn’t a problem, there was ignorance. That doesn’t solve the political challenge, but I think it’s important to not credit that thinking with anything else than refutation. Whatever else we have to do, I don’t think we should credit those folks with being correct on the merits.
It wasn't just about swarthy races (the Irish weren't swarthy), it was also about keeping out Catholics, Jews, and various "others" for reasons that went beyond the melanin content in one's skin. What we call "whiteness" today is far different from any similar definition 120 years ago.
And my point is that there will always be this kind of "othering" of foreigners, regardless of the term used or the actual basis for the othering (nationality, skin color, religion, language, culture, etc.). It's not always about race or skin color, and it certainly isn't always about "white" people.
As for the backlash, I'm not claiming that it's correct on its merits. I'm simply acknowledging that this is the way human societies consistently act. No country, to my knowledge, has taken the position that unlimited immigration is perfectly acceptable. The US has consistently done better than just about any country currently or historically at accepting and integrating immigrants, but even we have limits. Until someone comes up with a way to change that dynamic, my view is that it's simply a reality that must be dealt with.
This conversation reminds me of a very interesting 2019 book, “Whiteshift” by Eric Kaufmann. One of the key insights is that ethnic majorities are very sensitive to the rate of change, and the degree of assimilation, rather than just totally opposed to immigration or the long range prospect of demographic change.
I think you're right and that recent history shows that beyond a certain point immigration becomes a threat to democracy. Whether anyone thinks thats right or wrong is sort of besides the point. It just is. Eventually you have to pick and the choice to me seems quite obvious, which is that you stay a democracy and revisit immigration when the time is right.
One billion Americans sounds kind of extreme though doesn’t it? That would take us to near-Chinese levels of density and very few people would like that. Even setting aside the “Great Replacement” type concerns. It strikes me as one of the most unpopular framings possible for more immigration.
The more popular framing is probably “it’s nice to have the freedom to go where you want and not that many people are probably going to actually move to your area.” Right-wing people complain that this is how the 1965 immigration reform was actually passed.
France’s density is 122 per sq km and China’s is 151. Nowhere near Belgium at 383 or Netherlands at 529.
People think they care about national population density but that is one of the most meaningless statistics in terms of what actually matters to one’s life. Can you really tell the difference between the next city being 50 miles away and 75 miles away? And yet that represents more than a factor of 2 in population density.
Almost all of France is good inhabitable land but a lot of China (and the US) is deserts and mountains. China is very dense—you go there and take the high-speed rail out of Shanghai and it’s endless 40-story apartment buildings for hours (hundreds of kms). Most people wouldn’t like that.
I think it's misleading to look at the land right by the rail and think that's telling you about the distance to travel to get to open spaces. If you compare the population density map of China (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs1kvplwfsmu41.jpg) and France (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_in_France.png), you can see that there is a strip right along the river from Shanghai to Nanjing that has parts with comparable density to Paris, but even going in the direction to Hangzhou, density along that stretch is comparable to Paris suburbs, like Boulogne or Creteil. And once you're past Hangzhou, you're in places with similar density to Champagne or Dijon.
The scales on those maps are different. France gets under 300/sqkm in the Paris suburbs. Going West on the rail line from Shanghai you don’t hit that until you’re well past Wuhan.
Anyone who wants more density should drive on the 405 in L.A. at rush hour (and now rush hour seems to be 5am to 10pm, lol). I suppose higher density would equate with more saturation with mass transit but still....
Does more density nationally mean that the west side of LA has higher density? Or does it mean that Bakersfield and Fresno are as big as San Francisco? Or does it mean that there are as many small towns and exurbs throughout California and west Texas as there are in Indiana and Georgia?
I’m still in the camp of “too soon to see the effects” as far as this tariff stuff, immigration crack down and general policy chaos unleaded by Trump and yet his numbers on immigration have tanked anyway (even if Dems are still way worse).
Point being, if the real world effects of this immigration crackdown start being felt more 1-2 years from now, wouldn’t shock me if the pro immigration side has “a moment” again.
Trump's numbers on immigratino have declined but hardly tanked - remaining his best numbers overall and in context of wider "support" for his general conceptual actions but modest backlash over the most extreme stuff.
That's far different from his Economy or Inflation numbers that have in fact genuinely tanked.
It's not unusual for there to be a backlash following surges in immigration. The foreign born are at the highest percentage of the population since the 1930s, and close to the late 19th century peak.
It's natural to take a pause and let the issue fade away.* Then we'll no doubt see increased numbers of immigrants coming again.
* Which is not to defend the vicious, damaging Trump policies, and it's no surprise that the thermostatic response to that is hurting Trump's popularity. Which is not to say that absent Trump there would be widespread support for increased immigration levels.
Looking at comparables in European reactions as well, it's pretty clear that there's some trigger threshold in percent of visible not-native born over some percent of the total population that definately triggers reaction.
Look at UK and the reaction to the huge influx Poles that seems to have been a quite major driver of Brexit.
There can be disagreements on just how bad cultural change is--even I might get pressed on it if the perfect storm was concocted. But if there are too many jobs available that the native population can't fill on their own, then there will be tradeoffs against many other aspects of quality of life in favor of whatever cultural status quo wants to be preserved.
I feel Coates is a "truth teller" in the RFK jr or Candace Owens way, he firmly believes things that are ridiculous and obviously false. It used to be weird things about UFOs,now he limits to really dumb views on maths etc being racist.
It goes back to the point about terrorists, people on the centre left do seem to have a blindness to the most ridiculous and unpleasant people on their side.
Journalists don't dive enough into the pseudoscience, I don't think he talks about epigenetics in the way many of his allies do, but he believes in negative forces that effect some people based on the life of their great-great granndparents but don't impact the children of Holocaust survivors or Vietnamese boat people. His world view involves lots of mysterious forces that can influence people without having any visible effect.
Yes, but if we judged people for having bad epistemological processes, then we would have to exclude almost in the public sphere. We can only afford to exclude the obviously insane.
When I first heard about it I assumed it would merely repeal the state law outlawing rent control. Nope: it would limit annual rent increases in the covered dwellings to "not exceed the annual increase in Consumer Price Index or 5%, whichever is lower, in any 12-month period."
The mind boggles. The only way to make a profit in real dollars under those constraints is to cut costs every single year (itself an ominous prospect for renters). Why would anyone invest in rental units with so many superior alternatives?
Many more people have been renters than have been landlords. They think about rent only from the perspective of the tenant. I think people don’t hear the difference between “rent should increase on average by the same amount as general inflation” and “rent should never increase by more than general inflation”. Increasing on average by more than general inflation is just as much a problem for the tenant as increasing on average by less than general inflation is for the landlord. But people don’t realize the law they are writing is enforcing the one, rather than preventing the other.
Maybe a good way to answer why some liberals admire terrorist scumbags like Bill Ayers is to think about why a lot of conservatives who would have and will never storm the Capitol nonetheless admire and defend the January 6 rioters who do. Or why western cowards who would never put their own life at risk for anything and who also don't support rape, murder, or hostage taking domestically admire and defend Hamas nihilist rapists. Or why Second Amendment enthusiasts think the purpose of the thing is to ensure that citizens can commit violent treason if they dislike the government.
It's what Tom Wolfe called "radical chic", combined with the fact that a lot of people have a romantic sense of political revolution. They think George Washington and "when in the course of human events". It's very hard to convince people who grow up with founding myths of dashing revolutionaries overthrowing tyrants that actually most "violent revolutionaries" are just evil unimportant petty thugs who need to go to prison and never be accepted by polite society again.
I think a lot of people look at old terrorist lefty radicals who no longer actively advocate violence as something like dogs after neutering. Once the wildness has been extracted, they MIGHT have something interesting to offer.
I think Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey type realignments are more interesting because, in some ways, their politics haven’t changed at all. There is an internal coherence to their politics focused on civil liberties and restrained foreign policy. But there is also just a contrarian disposition.
I read somewhere that Ezra Klein is like anti-Glenn Greenwald, in both good and bad ways. Ezra Klein is high trust, and rationalizes choices made by elites because he has an inherent belief in the power of elites. When something goes wrong, the “groups”, “the senate, filibuster” are to blame, not really powerful politicians. In all this election post mortem, have Ezra or people doing this professionally admitted that Kamala was just a stupid and unimpressive dud, didn’t have it in her to actually win?
GG, on the other hand, takes it to the other extreme. He instinct is to identify powerful entity in a fight and put all his weight to defend the least powerful, whether good/bad or how immoral. He has an inherent distrust of politicians.
"Ezra Klein is high trust, and rationalizes choices made by elites because he has an inherent belief in the power of elites. "
I don't read enough post-Weeds Ezra to know if this is true but it is notable that Ezra's biggest triumph in recent memory was realizing Biden was too old 3 months before all the other take-sters(and 3 years after the voters.
The Glenn Greenwald types seem to become defined but their enemies and their POV just sort of orbits around the people who criticize them.
Yeah I give Ezra high marks for that bold call (I thought the same but why couldn't most Democrats admit to this? Loyalty? Obtuseness? Ageism?), too bad few jumped on the bandwagon early to strategize a more coherent replacement candidate. It still boggles me that they put Biden on the debate stage with Trump.
I think they couldn't admit it because they thought doing so would lead to Kamala being nominated which they thought would be even worse. It was only when it became clear that Kamala had a better shot than Biden that they switched
It's amazing how much of his worldview seems driven by paranoia and resentment. The fact he is a crank should have been clear to people even back in the Bush years.
Arguably the two of you aren't disagreeing. If his "instinct is to identify the powerful entity in a fight and put all his weight to defending the least powerful," then since the US is the most powerful country in the world it is therefore the ultimate source of evil in the world. Therefore, the overriding goal of all politics is to oppose the US and undermine its power. Therefore, since Putin is an opponent of the US, Putin is on the side of good and whatever is advantageous to him is also good. Likewise, since Trump is a bad president who is destroying the US from within, Trump is also on the side of good. A good president of the US, in contrast, would be evil.
I think he is just fundamentally opposed to the United States national security alliance system we have built up over the world and thinks we should just dismantle it.
GG and similar people have been ideologically consistent - they are anti-establishment and specifically against the US foreign policy establishment and federal law enforcement. The partisan valence of both switched sides as one effect of Trump’s disruption.
In some ways yes. It is such an interesting dynamic because is it a migration from far left to far right back to far left now (post Oct7) or literally someone with a psychotic fixation on a few issues (foreign policy + civil rights re national security) whose valence has changed since a bunch of the former neocon Bulwark types are now permanently within the Dem coalition?
I don’t think he’s migrated on those issues, I think the left and right have. During the Bush years it was the left that was skeptical of the national security state and intelligence community. With Trump, that has switched, with Democrats and much of the left seeing them as not problematic at all, but as noble civil servants, while the GoP and the right thinks they are part of the “deep state” conspiracy.
GG, Taibbi and others have stayed largely the same - they still hate the national security state and establishment and the ways in which that establishment uses American power.
At least that’s the way I look at it. As a former intelligence analyst and part of that defense establishment, I was and remain opposed to most of their ideas and arguments which I don’t think have changed all that much.
I don't think this is right. He has a inherent distrust of politicians *in power*. In the Biden years he was one of the biggest anti-anti-Trump voices.
I don't actually think she's smarter than the average commenter here. The average commenter here is really intelligent. It's a high bar. That doesn't mean we'd make better presidents
I think she was not presidential level smart and it’s a lil offensive to pretend that it’s racism or sexism to point that out. I heard Indian Americans say she won’t even be the smartest person in Edison, New Jersey (a majority south Asian town). Obama as a Black man had to be smarter than most candidates to prevail, and Hilary’s problem was her cynicism/low moral character not her intelligence. I don’t agree with conservative politics, especially foreign policy hawkishness, but Nikki Haley is a very competent version of that kind of politics. There’s ideology and then there’s just talent/competence. You don’t have to agree with Zohran’s politics to appreciate that he’s the best version of that kind of socialist politics. Ezra’s focus on ideological big tent is well taken but can he admit that Kamala was just not the best version of the politics she represents? I also think if a person with more moral character had OG MAGA politics: foreign policy restraint, econ moderation, and immigration restrictionism, it would have even more appeal.
She couldn’t talk contemporaneously, on a holistic level, she seemed kind of empty and unable to hold her own intellectually without wavering. It made her appear weak. I would say Trump is unique on many dimensions but yes I would agree Kamala and Bush prob have similar level of intelligence and I know a ton of libs were quite offended at how stupid Bush was, besides disagreeing with him on policy
Responding only to the opening of this post, which for some reason pissed me off lol.
I suppose I agree with Matt that Democrats should just go ahead and coalesce around Geoff Duncan as our best chance to win. Maybe that’s the end of the story.
But it’s awfully annoying as both a process and result, and I think “winners-first” advocates need to be a bit more careful in their pitches.
Matt says the mayor of the largest city in the state wouldn’t be a good nominee because of two reasons aside from general mayoral underperformance: 1) she wasn’t great at her job and 2) someone else, who happens to be a completely different black woman albeit with similar views/strategic positioning, has already lost twice. Relatedly, I happen to dislike Mayor Bottoms’ PA voiceovers in Hartsfield-Jackson. OK.
Is there anything in the post about how Duncan performed in his job as LG, which is probably 1/10th the job of Atlanta mayor? Or even what the fuck he has ever done professionally except bucking Trump and flip-flopping on fundamental values? It could be really great! But I don’t know either way and in my view it’s unseemly to just gloss over it.
Georgia isn’t Alabama. Trump is 1-1 in his last two elections there and the state has two Democratic Senators who’ve won multiple elections. As Matt points out, Sen. Warnock won by reaching out to Geoff Duncan types. However, he’s not literally Geoff Duncan — and Democrats in theory should have *more* room in non-federal elections.
“KLB bad, GD good” might be true, but I feel it’s a lazy, inappropriate way to make the case.
That quote was an admonishment, not an evaluation of the situation. Literally his entire premise was that GD is better. Which, he probably is! But I thought the argument was off-putting.
It's clear he doesn't think much of Bottoms ("Bottoms was not a particularly popular or successful mayor of Atlanta"), and I agree that would have been unsatisfying as an assessment of the race. I just think Matt was making a different kind of point.
Now I’m getting really pedantic. But I agree he was attempting to make a different kind of point. But instead he made this particular point in a very unsatisfying way that raised my hackles about how serious the actual project is being presented and can be convincing to folks like me and to my left.
Yeah. that does really demonstrate a level of character that is vitally important to judging someone. It might not be dispositive, but it's a large enough check on the pro side that the opponent had better have something where they also show some extraordinariness to overcome it.
You have to understand that in Matt's brain all of politics is taking positions on issues and voters have perfect knowledge of all those positions. Being rational people, they choose the person closest to their position. So if that's your starting point, then what Matt says makes perfect sense and is correct.
The first is arguably a fair representation, the second is clearly wrong. He’s always pounding the table for people to highlight their popular positions (Biden should talk more about the increase in oil production during his term) and downplay their unpopular ones. That explicitly recognizes that voters don’t know everything and you have to tell them (over and over again) the things you want them to know.
I don’t think it is so much which positions you take that matters, but rather which positions you don’t take. If you’re pro-open borders it doesn’t matter how charismatic you are or how good at ”framing” your policies. You have to rid yourself of certain - to the popular majority - toxic beliefs and policies before you stand any chance of winning.
I think it's just based on policy positioning. Matt claims (without citation, to your point) that Bottoms is criticizing Duncan for not being progressive enough. Assuming that's true, then clearly Bottoms is to the left of Duncan. Given that Abrams lost (narrowly) in 2018, during a blue wave election, it seems pretty obvious that we need a candidate who is more moderate rather than a candidate who is more progressive
That is all true. Personally, as someone who’s extremely sympathetic to running the more moderate viable candidate in statewide races in purple states, I don’t think it’s sufficient to say “well KCB is attacking GD from the left so GD should be the nominee.” This shit needs to mean more than that.
Taking a step back, I don’t think this specific race is necessarily the best example of my argument because I’m confident that GD is the best nominee. But it’s certainly not guaranteed and the flippancy around it PMO.
Bottoms was widely considered to be a failed mayor who did not even attempt to secure a second term and skipped out to a do-nothing outreach job in the Biden administration. As a Georgia Democrat I do not support her campaign.
I don’t know! I need to do a lot more research to form an opinion either way. I admit that. But that’s sort of my point. When you’re trying to sell a Democratic electorate on foregoing a serious Democratic politician in favor of someone who discovered women’s bodily autonomy two seconds ago, it would be nice to at least hear about both their records and a more affirmative case. The tactical stuff only gets you so far.
Curious, how would you vote if you did the research, determined after a fair evaluation that Bottoms would be a better performer than Duncan as governor, but also determined after a fair evaluation that Duncan was more likely to win?
I look at the world today and think winning and not losing is the most important criteria, because the upside of a less personally attractive to me candidate winning is smaller than the downside of that candidate losing.
This is a good point - I think progressives don't like the dirty business of embracing some rando who's 'only' more likely to win because in their hearts, they really want an electorate that supports the 'best' candidate (who may be the black mayor of the state's major city who rural voters are likely pre-polarized against). That ideal electorate does not exist, largely, but heart over head candidates are a trap that primary voters in particular can't easily quit. Recent polling suggests they are more ready to be coldly pragmatic and back winners, but we'll see. Literally every other variable is downstream of statewide electabilty at this point imo.
How strong were the qualifications of Warnock and Ossoff before they won their elections? Warnock’s re-election qualification was “Not Hershel Walker, please God!”
I remember seeing KLB do a couple of TV interviews a number of years ago and thought she did well in them. I liked her affect at the time. I have no other data to base an opinion on. But I do think the mayor thing is a fair point by Matt though. Not that she performed poorly as mayor (I have no idea) but just it's very common for big-city mayors to get tarnished in the eyes of voters elsewhere in the state simply because they were mayors of the state's biggest city.
Fair point by you though that Abrams is a different person from KLB. Just because KLB has a particular strategy vis-a-vis Duncan in the primary doesn't mean that she'd replicate Abrams' crappy strategy in the general.
I'm pretty sold on the winners first argument when the chance of losing is real, which it clearly is in Georgia. I'm probably going to mostly agree with almost anyone running on the democratic side. I'm certainly going to agree with any of them more than I agree with any Republican, so who is likeliest to win is to me the best metric, absent some strong reason to believe the person would be terrible at the job.
It didn’t annoy me to the same degree—perhaps because I am primed to think Bottoms is no good based on progressive big city mayor who got famous during Floyd vibes.
But (I) I too would be really interested to hear more about the pros and cons of each of policy and (ii) your comment made me admit some bias to myself — a black lady who is progressive coded and involved in the Biden administration just feels bad to me — Kamala / woke era trauma? Racist assumptions? Maybe!
I don’t think there’s any doubt that a white man has a better shot than a black woman running statewide in GA. But I would like that case made explicitly (or not!) rather than just “Stacey Abrams lost.”
"wouldn’t the most honorable and politically prudent course of action for the Democratic Party have been for her to step aside? If she truly believed those identities were significant liabilities, why insist on running in what Democrats themselves framed as an existential contest against Trump?"
It seems like a mistake to take anything a politician says in a "Why I lost Book" seriously. It's constant excuse making.
The "throw under the bus" phrasing should be thrown under a bus. Then the bus should go in reverse and back over the phrasing. Then it should run over the phrasing one more time, for good measure. And anyone who uses the phrasing thereafter should be dragged by the police to the town square, there at High Noon in the sight of G-d and the public to be given three lashes with the cane.
JD Vance has no rizz. He may win the 2028 Republican nomination by default, but his number of devoted cultists will be much, much smaller than Trump's. And that means whatever version of Trumpism he adopts likely won't have as much support, initially, as Trump himself does.
Pessimistically, Vance seems like the Maduro to Trump's Chavez, or, more optimistically, Sheinbaum to Obrador. It's tough to follow a messy, charismatic populist.
I think so. Seems more pragmatic on dealing with cartels, and definitely has fewer weird hobbyhorses like obsessive love for the failed state-run oil company or wanting to build specific expensive infrastructure projects just because they sound good.
And do those people outnumber the low-info voters who turned out for Trump, previously didn't vote or voted for Obama, and who may fade back into the woodwork once Trump is no longer in the picture? I have no idea.
The high info Romney types were turned off by things like the treatment of Zelensky and embrace of the AfD. Whether or not the Romney-Clinton voters are numerous enough to make a difference in 2028 is likely the bigger question.
I think you're underestimating how much anti-Russian sentiment means to that class of older American hawks. It was Romney who called Russia the US biggest geopolitical adversary.
I agree that Vance won't be as electorally successful as Trump, but if Vance takes office before 2028, he'll have the ability to use the levers of power in an Orbanian fashion before he ever has to face a primary or general electorate.
In reference to the question what turns people radical....
For a lot of white people in my bubble, the radicalizing thing was when 'woke' ideology was imposed on their kids. Sure. sitdown and listen. Fine. We all need to be heard. Maybe you shouldn't have advantages--and explicit disadvantages at times. But when you start imposing those things onto my children I will go to war with you. I will not standby and allow my children to be discriminated against because of some perceived injustice generations ago, which they (and I) are innocent of--and whose ancestors weren't even in the country for.
That's why i think focus on race and level-setting by holding others back (2 wrongs don't make a right) is a loser. Both on the merits and politically. I literally don't care where else you stand.....and i still voted Kamala cause Trump is that bad.
going to the big question of what happens to the coalitions after trump leaves. I think there are a decent amount of never-trump republicans waiting to come back if some semblance of law-abiding-ness comes back. I think the cultural shift at the bottom of the SES ladder is more permanent (and a longer term trend).
Rent control is just a zombie that will never die, huh? It always seems that society needs to relearn the hard way on how price controls lead to shortages and rationing, after the older generations that learned it the hard way before die off, and new, younger generations take over.
I really wish that that those who are so angry over landlords jacking up prices would realize that landlords would lose so much leverage to do so with increased competition via increased hous8jg supply.
I think we're in a holding pattern where mayors run on it because it is in fact popular and sounds nice to people. Then, when they enter office they realize it's A) Not a good idea so they propose a very watered down idea or don't do it. Or B) Realize that due to issues with home rule/how the mayoral powers are constructed they literally can't.
Don't forget the quieter, easier to sneak by voters version - making eviction nearly unattainable. In DC, the general hostility towards landlords, covid-era exigencies, and a painfully backed up court system conspired to crank up the barriers to eviction for any cause. Council recently had to tweak their own tenant friendly laws because large building-owners were lurching towards bankruptcy, ironically threatening the affordability covenants the mayor touts as solving the housing problem. Homeowners roll their eyes at the suggestion to rent out a house or downstairs apartment - why take the risk of never being able to evict a tenant. QED, less housing.
I dont have it handy but the WSJ had an article about this in NYC recently.
Y’all are missing how rent control exemplifies a key weakness of democracy: good policy is post-market impersonal redistribution to classes of losers but good politics is rigging the market for local residents. Rent control in my district helps me as a renter immediately, and I am inclined to vote for the legislator who offers it to me. Normal people DGAF about second-order effects across large polities. They want control of their homes and their neighborhoods. They want less change and more money for themselves.
Which is why government should have very little ability to do things like this
Because the power will almost certainly be abused
Excellent Josh Barro column on these dynamics in NYC: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/this-is-the-kind-of-overregulation
The government could also rig the market with subsidies or fully funding voucher programs
This is an optimistic take. In NYC about half the rental stock is subject to some form of rent control (either controlled or regulated) and the conditions of those controls have only gotten stricter over time (most notably in 2017). It's not an exaggeration to say that the predictably bad effects of these progressive laws has resulted in the very likely election of a yet more progressive mayor who is promising to enact even worse policies with predictably worse effects!
Much more accurate to say that they're difficult to enact at first but once implemented they ratchet only one way.
Clearly real rent control has never been tried
NYC is kind of unique in that regard, though. Cambridge, MA was notorious for rent control in the 70s and 80s (Boston and Brookline also had it), they even had a rule that if you bought a condo that was rent-controlled you couldn’t live in it (some people got around that one by incorporating themselves as owners and then renting to themselves as individuals). In 1994 a statewide referendum was passed banning rent control, still in effect despite occasional efforts to bring it back.
Hey, I had a sweet deal on a spacious, light-filled unit in Coolidge Corner back in the day (I nabbed it just before the good voters of the Commonwealth dumped rent control). It had hardwood floors and park views (and in the distance I could see the Blue Hills). Loved that place.
In those days my motto was "Market rents for thee but not for me." lol.
Including the effort coming next fall: https://www.mass.gov/doc/25-21-an-initiative-petition-to-protect-tenants-by-limiting-rent-increases/download.
(Though, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this goes much farther than merely repealing the ban.)
You forgot "rinse and repeat" lol.
I explained the issue to a smart friend of mine and her response was, "But we have to do *something*." Yes, but not this! And then another friend in the room said "Marx said 'rent is theft'," and I nobly bit my tongue off and refrained from explaining what "rent" means in economics and that she herself benefitted 100% from rent-seeking, while I inwardly pounded my head on the floor.
Look, you only have so many friends in life. They're kind-hearted women who would come hold your hand if your husband died. I can't alienate *everybody* or I'd be stuck being right and entirely alone.
I heard a similar response when a rent control initiative failed in the Bay Area. I knew a bunch people that and they were really upset because they saw rent control as a pretty of good solution to people they knew struggling to afford rent. To them People voting against it didn’t care about people struggling to pay rent. If you pointed out that rent control would mean that there were fewer rental units available for low income people the response was that landlords were bad. But that really doesn’t count as a fix
I feel a little extorted, but I have to admit the whole thing makes me inclined to advocate more vigorously for subsidies (as part of packages aiming to increase supply, so the subsidies don't just get eaten up).
That sounds very sensible. Subsidies and an increase in supply would probably raise the quality of housing available to low income people.
>> If you pointed out that rent control would mean that there were fewer rental units available for low income people the response was that landlords were bad.
Conceptually, this assumes that builders will respond to higher rents with more building, but isn't it conceivable that Bay Area building permits would still be impossible to get even if equilibrium rents were market rather than price controlled?
That’s the thing—how are supply-and-demand arguments against rent control relevant when housing supply is already inelastic for unrelated reasons?
Yes, we do need to do something. build a lot more housing
I've actually brought my smart friend around to that! And it was a struggle, because she's Ms. Ecology. But the smart won out.
The ecology argument is that if we can't build here (in a city) then we'll have to take over farmland or cut down forests. Density or sprawl.
I get that rent stabilization is unpopular here, but it doesn’t necessarily block markets from doing their work. NYC’s system covers a portion of units, leaving plenty of free-market stock where rent pressure continues to incentivize new supply. In the meantime, stabilization meaningfully cushions the bottom quintile or two while we wait for regulatory streamlining and new construction to bring prices down. That’s why, despite its flaws, it can function as a useful transitional tool alongside pro-growth reforms (Jerusalem Demsas has converted to this take). The devil is in the details, as with all policy.
Price controls are a very intuitively appealing idea, and will be with us always. Up there with “we will win the war by Christmas!”
Which is why we should teach economics in high school and emphasize repeatedly.How bad ideas like rent control are
It would be awesome if someone could concoct an experiment where the class buys and sells [widgets], but then introduces a price control while the money supply of the buyers goes up, and the sellers of the [widgets] realize that they can't sustainably produce and sell enough of them. I don't know how you'd craft it, though.
great idea
In one of my environmental science classes we played the fish game.
Each person has a number of fishing ships, and everyone is given the instruction to maximize profits. They can continue to buy additional ships with those profits. But of course if everyone does that and keeps adding ships the fish population eventually collapses.
It was a really powerful game.
I think some of those types of games to teach basic economics would also be helpful
We have always been at war with East Asia.
See, if you're a smart and petty enemy even if you're ready to surrender right before Christmas you just wait a bit to throw up the middle finger at the victor.
It is indeed intuitive. "All those politicians are morons. If I were mayor I'd make raising the rent illegal!"
It's just very hard to explain to people that the solution to high rents isn't "make people stop raising rents."
I agree, but ugh, "if no one is allowed to make money renting, there will be fewer rentals and the ones that remain will be lower quality" seems so clear and obvious, borne out by repeated daily experience.
Locally the response is "housing is a human right, profiting from it should be illegal."
[Edit: I want to reply "... but not food?" Except I know what happens next.]
If food prices seemed to be randomly raised every year despite the quality of said food not rising and food costs were half of people's costs, you might see the calls for publicly mandated food prices.
Hell, there were grain doles in the Roman Empire for a reason and also a reason why there are more price controls on food in less well-off areas of the world.
Indeed, I appreciate the perspective-enhancement.
And somehow there's no effective version of the counter-response: Then if it's going to be illegal to pay professionals to build and maintain housing, we'll need to let people do it themselves, which means repealing almost all of the zoning laws and building codes and licensing requirements.
I don't hear "money isn't real anyway" much anymore. But I always tighten up at "late-stage capitalism" and "passive income."
"Late stage capitalism? We're barely getting started!"
The “everyone is twelve” theory of politics
>Rent control is just a zombie that will never die, huh?<
Same as tariffs. Same as immigration restrictionism. Same as all policies that sharply depart from liberalism (you know, the school of political economy that birthed the modern world, and gave us the enviable quality of life our ancestors could scarcely dream of, and which we seem determined to jettison as a planet).
The number of zombie ideas which just won't die are legion. Reaganite ideas on taxes, Marxism, you can make a long list.
"Reaganite Marxist," the unintended sequel to "California Uber Alles."
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZZd-1svImQ
Demsas had a pro-rent control take along these lines. Basically rent control is fine as a way to grandfather in old-prices if you also build enough that the prevailing rent in new units comes down.
In order words, its not a solution but it works as a promise. I can particularly see it appealing if a politician expends political capital to ram through a bunch of zoning reforms that will encourage new construction, but they need the political payoff for that construction ASAP. Then they can do a rent-freeze, and then actually take the steps to make that price possible.
The problem is the one you articulate though, which is that its too easy for a politician to make a promise about prices but then not work towards the solution.
The other problem is that rent control can be enacted immediately, but building massive amounts of housing can take much longer, so it would be asking the market to accept a short term shortage crunch.
My mental model is that it is essentially people not realizing that progress is defined by everything moving. The idea of "gained ground" that can keep you ahead of everyone else on its own is basically a myth.
Disagree. Rent control, like the minimum wage, has a political element to it. For example, the market can't set a basic minimum wage unless we as a society decide we are comfortable with labor exploitation. Rent control agreements also outline the basic terms of a tenancy agreement so both parties benefit from a set contractual arrangement. It also serves as an anti-poverty measure by ensuring those with limited means have stable housing. Matt is very wrong about this.
It ensures that for the lucky subset who are able to stably remain in the existing housing, but makes it much more difficult for those who don't have it.
Perhaps for wealthy folk in a place like New York this is true. But most people just scraping by need rent control to survive.
Do people need rent control in rural Mississippi or Arkansas? Lots of very poor people just scraping by in those places but rents are very very cheap and the homelessness rate is very low
Market conditions in different jurisdictions will vary. But the principle remains the same. Rent control sets the minimum standard.
Tangential topic but related to the rent control: affordable housing can cost billions to construct and then billions to bail out of you're also just building a lot of apartments. Eventually affordable rents and market rents align.
Rent control will die when housing prices stop skyrocketing, which will probably require a definancialization of the housing sector
What does financialization have to do with housing supply?
To steelman OP far more than it probably deserves, the US government and the financial sector together do quite a lot to prop up the fixed-rate mortgage as an easy-to-get instrument. Remove this infrastructure and homebuyer ability to buy would decrease, lowering demand, hence price, hence quantity supplied.
Housing as an asset class only generates a return if there isn’t enough of it for everyone
Why would that be the case? People make positive returns providing all kinds of services, and I don’t see why housing services should be any different here.
It’s true that there’s *greater* return for incumbent owners if supply falls behind demand. But developers don’t get to reap those profits, and developers are the ones that generate supply.
In general, for most classes of productive capital, capitalist control of the profits doesn’t lead to an undersupply. Why would it with housing?
Incumbent owners dictate the supply, not developers
Are you saying that incumbent owners "dictate the supply" by being the constituency most likely to vote for NIMBY garbage? Well, yes, and that's what we're trying to fight.
That is entirely false and utterly incoherent.
(of course one has to parse out what you think you mean here. Housing as a rental asset? Housing as a build-to-sell activity? Housing as a renovate to upsell, the whole flippers game...)
Of course the statement itself is boggling in its logic - so I guess the idea is that the Evil Sombody are somehow what, lobbying for the NIMBY regs that prevent more housing from being built... "because finance"?
What "financialisation" of the housing sector? In metrics.
No mortgages.
Well that would be ... interesting. For various values of "catastrophic shortages" interesting.
If there are no mortgages housing prices will fall and people can buy houses without mortgages. QED Ipso facto hasta la vista.
It’s like we didn’t have a financial crisis based on synthetic financial products based on housing
Where to start?
First 2008 was over-supply relative to demand and liquidity - as well as notaby really poor regulation of brokers in the souther sun states - originating borderline fraudulent to outright fraudulent mortgages that got packaged up principally by non-bank lenders, and resold.
The housing built ran into liquidity crisis but in end all got absorbed and the Fed in fact made profit on its rescue bail out portfolio.
That is utterly different than having enough housing stock to meet demand (and in the right places).
So again, what financialisation are you imagining is causing a problem and by what metrics - or is it just the slogan?
Confiscatory or semi-confiscatory georgist taxes might do it. I don't see what else possibly could. Will Rogers was right that they're not making any more land. Provided society allows pieces of our planet to be an investable asset (as opposed to something we rent from the government), folks are going to engage in speculation.
"They're not making any more land" is sort of the ur-argument for rent control: the resource controlled is intrinsically scarce and not subject to supply expansion in the way that other commodities are (YIMBYism seeks to alleviate this but even that's in many ways fundamentally about building out more than up -- if you could just take existing downtown skyscrapers and make them arbitrarily tall there'd be nothing to fight over.). It's still a bad idea, but there's a lot more intrinsic validity to at least the Georgist-inflected versions of skepticism of land ownership and the illegitimacy of land rents than there is to price controls in other markets.
I don't necessarily agree with Georgism (or at least all its aspects) but I have tremendous *respect* for it and I think many of its essential premises are profoundly correct.
I agree with much of your comment here, but I'm not sure I understand the first part. The fact that land is a highly limited resource is all the *more* reason to encourage as much *building* (upwards, if need be) as possible; and rent control, needless to say, throws an enormous monkeywrench into the sector that produces housing. IOW land-scarcity is a factor that strongly argues against rent controls.
Conceptually, Georgism *is* rent control -- it's just a different mechanism of confiscating land rents from the landlord by taxing them rather than preventing them from being charged in the first place. There should, in principle, be no effect on the incentive to build.[1]
My point in the first part was just that you can't actually build yourself out of land scarcity[2]. YIMBYism's fundamental premise is "consume more land, just less of it for a given level of population increase than NIMBYism," where the operative part is "consume more land." YIMBYism isn't a solution to land scarcity in much the same way that "burn methane rather than coal" isn't a solution to secular increases in atmospheric CO2.
[1] Also, even in rent-control world, people can build and sell condos, right?
[2] in fact, given the way network effects work, you're more likely in some ways to build yourself *into* it (see the top level comparison of Conanicut and Manhattan here - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-housing, as well as https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/change-my-mind-density-increases)
You could simply exempt new construction from rent controls for say 20 years, that's really not that hard
Yep. Or you could also simply not have rent control That's likewise not that hard.
I think your point about Coates conducts himself in general is good. However I think he is trying to have it both ways with the writer vs politician angle.
Ezra says he thinks Democrats should run pro life candidates in red states and Coates reprimands him for this on the basis that it would offend some people who don’t have access. To me this is tactics - Coates has a clear view on the kinds of candidates Dems can run and he would like that view enforced.
Similarly Ezra points to a culture of rejection and tent shrinking within the party that Coates rejects but then moves on to say that any kind of “hatred” means you shouldn’t engage with people and the cause of their disagreement is that Ezra is not enforcing this norm to a suitable degree.
Since Coates is a “writer” he doesn’t have to take responsibility for any dynamic or outcomes but he is engaging in politics.
I see Coates as a pretty pure partisan for black identity and what he sees as the interests of Black Americans. Thats his unifying core. IOW, he’s not a pluralist - he tends to center one constituency, Black Americans, and to treat their historical and present safety, wealth, and dignity as the decisive test of American politics.And fundamentally he wants Democrats to align with that to much greater degree than is the case, even if it costs Democrats politically.
For Klein, he is much more of a pluralistic thinker and looks more at the big picture. I think that is fundamental basis of their disagreement.
This really came through in the interview. Every time Klein talked about American politics or the polity, Coates would shrink the aperture to talk about the experience and history of Black Americans, and he did so in a way that really implied Black America is a monolith, despite admitting it’s possible some 20% of Black voters might actually hold (“hateful”?) conservative beliefs.
I agree with your observation about Coates, which is why I think it's odd that his views and writing don't seem to have evolved as the black electorate has changed.
(Probably relatedly, AFAICT he has relatively little experience among black churchgoers, and so he tends to present black voters' interests as less cross-pressured than they actually are.)
Coates, in his own words, is part of a "tradition" of Black intellectuals and writers that goes back to the civil rights era. These intellectuals remain in dialogue or negotiation with "White America", or to be more accurate, with college-educated white liberals and progressives. One somewhat uncharitable account of this interaction is described by Shelby Steele in his book, "White Guilt," but the essence of this interaction is for the Black intellectuals to continually emphasize and illustrate the nature and extent of the injustice and suffering visited upon Black Americans, which the white liberals are then expected to atone for in various ways.
In their past public interactions, Coates has continued this traditional role, and Klein has for his part acted out the "traditional" role of the guilt-ridden, self-effacing white liberal. I recall listening to their discussion in the George Floyd era and it was very much that way.
This is spot on.
I just listened to the interview. I have a dim memory of reading Coates as being capable of discussing ideas and issues without resorting to his favorite subject: Black history, slavery, anti-Black racism, and his personal role in "the struggle". John McWhorter has often said that Coates is precisely that: a one-trick pony, intellectually. Certainly he did nothing here to disabuse anyone of that notion, constantly changing the subject back to his favorite topic, and one point even admitting, "Again, my tradition is the only thing I have a reference point for, so I’m sorry to keep going back to this."
Coates is one of those people that wants a political party that does exactly what he wants, and if they consistently lose he wouldn't care, he'd rather be right than see results. And then if that political party lost, it would just further entrench his view that America in general is a racist country. As someone who is black, and has a lot of political conversations with my family, I can say that his views aren't entirely out of bounds with some portion of the black electorate. That said, he's the exact type of person who doesn't believe in a bigger tent, and it's just another great example of why the 2 party system is great sometimes but also terrible.
Like words are hard to thread but I think I fundamentally agree that reparations puts you into a structural argument about wealth transfer over time and immediate action on this when eventually the structural problem is better served by a structural answer to a more general issue not a relitigation of failures to provide immediate reparations that are lost in time to the present.
"However I think he is trying to have it both ways with the writer vs politician angle."
This was always my issue with the Colbert's, Stewarts, Penn and Teller, etc. type shows. At some point you are deep enough in the politics that you can't really retreat back to the sidelines.
Colbert and Stewart I get, but do Penn and Teller have a reputation for politics I am unaware of? Certainly stage magic lends itself less to being a pseudo-talking-head than late night comedy does
P&T are both highly principled libertarians, or at least they were back in their Bullshit! days. I believe that the modern Republican party has sent both of them somewhat left as they realized that they were the only principled ones.
Yes, definitely libertarian, but more of the South Park variety. I know they're huge fans of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and Penn said that they were happy that they did the Scientology episode so they didn't have to, as Bullshit! fans were begging them to do an episode on it.
Something else about Penn and Teller that I forgot to add is that they are skeptics above all else. They really have low tolerance for bullshit artists that make claims that are false, unfalsifiable, or without enough empiric proof. I'd say that made up about half of their Bullshit! episodes. Like many skeptics, that often leads down to a libertarian path with regard to ideology, but it's by no means limited to that path.
They had a show called Penn and Teller Bullshit which was a more Libertarian leaning type of what Jon Oliver kind of does. It was less straight forwardly political but they had some real misses over the years.
I believe Penn at least was pro-libertarian who turned hard away from Republicanism over the years.
There was a good recent piece in the New York Times about both of them.
Libertarians fit somewhat in the Republican coalition of Reagan, but fit very poorly in the Republican coalition of Trump.
Coates actually refuted Ezra’s point about running pro life candidates in red states as unsound due to pro choice ballot initiatives having successfully passed in red states. I’m all for a bigger tent but being pro choice should continue to be a pillar of the Democratic Party.
He refuted it poorly. There clearly are states and districts where it is unpopular and more districts where it is popular in a squishy moderate sense. But importantly he is engaging in strategic politics here not just speaking truth.
The strategic point is that in a very large country with high political stakes you need flexibility not pillars. Louisiana will continue to elect pro choice politicians, the question is will the be uniformly republican or more of a mix.
I'll also add, even on its own terms, Klein was making a bad argument. These referenda suggest that there are way more cross-pressured voters in red states who are pro-choice, but support the GOP for other reasons than vice versa.
Coates was right to point out how Ezra's particular strategy here made no sense, and he did talk about moderating on other issues that were important to him, so it's not like he threw out the broad idea of triangulation conceptually.
I think this speaks to the fact that "moderation" on particular issues is more difficult and less fruitful than some commentators, like Matt, suggest. I read his mea culpas in the column. If I was a cross pressured swing voters, would I actually believe any of them as sincere changes?
Moderation in select topics is necessary for Dems to win in certain areas, but abortion is a weird topic for either Klein or Matt to bring up.
I think "moderation" is less important than coalition-building. You don't need to say you've personally changed your mind on things. Instead, you just make deals with people whose views are known to genuinely be more moderate, and support them for certain offices. Show, don't tell. And on that note:
"Trump’s key strategy for winning rural votes has been saying things that they agree with, just as Barack Hussein Obama was able to win in places like Iowa and Ohio by saying things those voters agreed with." --> Even though I'm basically in agreement with this point, it's stated in a way that's almost lab-designed to drive away the partisan libs it's ostensibly intended to persuade. The point is not to agree. The point is to be willing to work alongside people you moderately disagree with.
I think that swing voters who are largely disengaged are very cynical about politicians' promises. So I agree about show-dont-tell.
Matt keeps bringing up rhetoric here, and citing Donald Trump's supposed moderation, but almost all of that is just lies and hot air. And when the lies are reveled, Trump does become less popular, like he did in his first term after he cut rich people's taxes after saying that he wanted to tax the rich. Trump also didn't moderate at all on abortion, to most people. He's doing everything past Republicans have done to restrict it.
"Trump also didn't moderate at all on abortion." I wouldn't say this is exactly true. To get elected in 2016, he put out a list of Supreme Court candidates designed to please the hard-core anti-abortion folks. Those people want a national ban and to end IVF as well. He hasn't pursued those goals. He also hasn't bragged about Dobbs for quite a while. None of that is "moderate", but it's certainly pulled back from his alliance with the anti-abortion extremists.
He didn't moderate on abortion! Abortion used to be available in far more places and for far more people than it is now, and that is entirely thanks to the people Donald Trump placed on the Supreme Court. 'Most people' are categorically correct in their understanding of this topic if they understand that; my fear is they don't.
To me there's a difference between:
(1) Proactively running an antiabortion candidates in the vast swaths of the US where that makes absolutely no sense. (In most places where Democrats have a prayer of being competitive, a zealously anti-abortion candidate who prioritizes restricting access to abortions is obviously a non-starter on variety of levels).
and
(2) Failing to get behind a candidate who is *insufficiently purist* on the issue of abortion, but is nonetheless a pretty strong prospect for a general election.
Maybe the second phenomenon isn't a big problem, or a common one. But if there's a Joe Manchin-like candidate (48% rating from NARAL) running in a red or purple state who's clearly a stronger general election candidate than someone who gets a 100% rating from NARAL, I'm not sure throwing the first one under the bus gets us where we need to be, and it'll hurt reproductive rights in the bargain. And we CERTAINLY shouldn't stiff-arm said candidate if he or she wins the nomination.
I would argue that off cycle ballot initiatives represent a different population than general elections.
Florida ran their referendum during the 2024 election and it came in at 57%. Kamala Harris received 43% of the vote in that state.
ETA: Turns out lots of states had similar initiatives during the 2024 general election. Who knew! (I'm not being sarcastic, I just looked it up.) Some results:
Arizona: 61.6% (Harris 46.7%)
Missouri: 51.6% (Harris 40.1%)
Montana: 57.76% (Harris 38.5%)
Nevada: 64.3% (Harris 47.49%)
Only Nebraska and South Dakota saw measures lose by majorities.
TL;DR this is a place where I would strongly agree with Coates. The Republican framing is that abortion is unpopular. The data above strongly indicate that framing is false: if pro-choice initiatives are running up to 15 points better than Dem candidates in general elections, you need to be running towards those issues and not away from them. The job of a pundit is to build accurate framing, not to accede to inaccurate framing by your political opponents.
I liked your comment, but within the last generation we've had Democratic senators in both Nebraska and South Dakota. I would agree with Ezra, and not with Coates, that in those states, we should be running pro-life Democrats
Seeing as you have I think a little bit more classic political science training than the average commenter on here.....
I'm just really skeptical of this view Matt and others seem to have, that you can build a political party so incredibly big tent that it includes both pro and anti-abortion candidates, pro and anti-gun control types, pro and anti-transgender rights folks, and both sides of every other hot button culture war issue out there. In theory I guess you could have a party that contains all of those elements, but it just doesn't seem very realistic in practice
I don't see what, conceptually, makes a Democratic party with both pro/anti-Gun Control candidates more inconceivable than a Democratic party that includes both YIMBYs and NIMBYs or people that support/oppose a close relationship with Israel.
I am not 100% sure we can either. But I will note that 50 years ago, this was the Democratic Party, at least in Congress.
It would require the party to convince voters that their economic concerns should dominate their cultural concerns. Our nation may now be too rich for that to work - we are much wealthier than we were in 1970.
But I do think it's a worth a shot, based on my normative preferences of valuing those economic issues much more than views on abortion, guns, transgender, etc. Others can and do disagree.
If you still have the data in front of you, what was the percentage of raw votes that those initiatives got vs the presidential vote? We did see a lot of evidence in 2024 that there were plenty of Trump voters who voted for him and left the rest of the ballot blank. Could be the case here too.
I wrote the previous post by Googling and hopping back and forth between Ballotpedia pages. This one is too much work for me, so I'm just going to outsource it to ChatGPT. I glanced at the totals for Florida and they seem right to me, you'll have to take its word (or double check for yourself) the results for the other states.
TL;DR: No. The totals indicate that there's some drop-off between President and the abortion ballot measures, but not a lot. Nowhere near enough to explain it as single-entry ballots.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68e281c3-1dcc-8013-a08f-c4c73b2b02c7
Even red states don't want "no abortion at all" but that doesn't mean they want "abortion on demand" candidates.
You can't just count the number of initiatives. You need to compare what the law was before, what the law was after, and where the state is on the red-blue spectrum.
While “ban all abortions” is generally unpopular, “ban all abortions in the third trimester except for the health of the mother” is a more popular position for candidates in purple and light red states to take than “legal abortions for any reason until birth” yet there are basically no Democrats running for office who explicitly take the former position
Mostly because it’s a dumb position and democrats have an honesty problem. Virtually all abortions that take place in the third trimester are medically-necessary abortions, so banning those abortions would be actually *vastly worse* than any other area of the abortion debate. There’s a kind of cynical political who’ll just triangulate on that position because it sounds reasonable and voters are poorly-informed, but I actually want my political party not to kill women or leave women infertile. That’s an example of a “value” that would be bad to trade away for a few votes (that I doubt will come anyway.)
Is it a dumb position? Third trimester abortions are deeply unpopular. By making the exception for health of the mother you cover the sympathetic cases. You also don't need to defend deeply unpopular (and super rare) third elective trimester abortions.
This would be a good post if you were making it from 2010 or something. But here in 2025 we know what "health of the mother" exceptions actually mean in red states, which is nothing whatsoever. So I can't in good conscience advocate that any Democrat vote for those exceptions, unless they are *certain* about the integrity of all the officials making the decisions, which no red state Democrat can be.
Not all Democrats need to support this. I'm just saying that if you're running for office in rural Texas then your position on abortion should be different than if you're running for office in Chicago, and that needs to be OK.
But he could only make that point if he conceded that it's important to run candidates with popular views, a point he doesn't concede at all.
I think the reason Ezra picked that issue is because of the past rather than the present. Many of the votes to pass Obamacare came from pro-life Democrats. We need to figure out how to get more heterodox Democrats elected; maybe the current versions are anti-affirmative action or pro-gun.
I'm not sure he refuted it. Pro choice initiatives have passed. That doesn't mean pro choice politicians win elections. A democrat who also happens to be pro life can pick up some voters for whom pro life is a single issue decider, while no losing an equivalent number of pro choice voters because there is no pro choice candidate available to them.
I know some pro choice voters might stay home or otherwise vote in protest, but I think there are few of them.
agree—it should be a pillar of the party. But, we should also be open to running candidates who are less pro-choice than we would like in certain races and states where it makes sense to, if that means we are better able to gain power and therefore protect women’s rights in the long-term.
Missouri passed a choice initiative in 2024 and yet Josh Hawley easily won re-election. Now the state legislature is trying to undo it with another initiative. In theory that would be bad for them electorally but I suspect it won't matter.
I don't think this is what Coates is saying. He's saying that women who need abortion access or trans people or other vulnerable people are in the coalition, and that we owe a duty of loyalty to them not to throw them under the bus. He also suggests that Ezra is wrong on the particular issue of abortion politics, but broadly he's saying that sticking together and maintaining solidarity in a losing cause in the short term is the right decision, which is in line with the rest of what he says in the discussion.
That whole framing of “throwing people under the bus” is a rhetorical shield to exempt one from both substantiating their positions and criticism.
It dehumanizes and delegitimizes people who have differing views on controversial subjects such youth gender medicine or the extent to which we should allow abortion access. All it communicates is there is only ONE correct position and if you disagree you aren’t even worthy of speaking.
This was the deep rhetorical hypocrisy being Coates’ words. He creates a rhetorical shield around his views such that one cannot even interrogate their foundations without being framed as a transgressor.
I really dislike the "throwing people under the bus" framing. We can be pro-choice, pro-trans-rights popularist moderates! We just need to be clear about how to be pro-choice and pro-trans-rights. I think a majority of Americans consider themselves pro-choice but that majority depends on a large chunk of moderates who largely align with Bill Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" framework. Before Dobbs, pro-choice groups demanded purity for their support, and saying that abortion should be "rare" made you insufficiently pro-choice. Bring "safe, legal, and rare" back into the pro-choice tent and we'll have a solid majority position that candidates can win with in many reddish states. Those abortion rights ballot measures absolutely rely on "safe, legal, and rare" votes. Likewise, I think most Americans believe that some number of people are born with gender dysphoria, that physically transitioning from their biological sex to their identified gender is an appropriate treatment, and that such people should be treated with respect and not be discriminated against. People who believe that generally consider themselves pro-trans-rights. Many of those people also think that competitive women's sports should be reserved for biological women, that the biological gender binary is for the most part the natural, default order of things, and that we should be very careful about irreversible medical gender treatment for kids. Believing those things can get you labeled a transphobe in some circles even if you think of yourself as broadly pro-trans. Rather than treating cultural issues as a binary, we should really work on developing a concept of cultural moderation that looks at nuanced, middle-ground positions on social issues.
Yes! As Coates put it, "I’m all for unifying, I’m all for bridging gaps, but not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity. I just can’t." Sometimes, essentially the same idea is expressed as or "denying" someone's "right to exist".
This capacious and (IMHO) greatly exaggerated concept of what constitutes threatening one's "humanity" or very "existence", is not only a rhetorical shield deployed to avoid having to address specifics and criticism. It is also an expedient tactic for avoiding paying any attention to or consideration for the beliefs and preferences of persons who may be defined as having "de-humanized" certain persons or groups, usually "vulnerable" racial or gender minorities who are deemed to deserve special attention or protection. The archetypical example was Hillary Clinton's famous "deplorables" comments.
Quite often (but not always) the claims of dehumanization are deployed cynically, or recklessly, as reflected in many cases of public shaming, de-platforming and firing that seemed to peak in or about 2020 or 2021.
This motte-and-bailey game of alleged "dehumanization" is the engine and essential logic of modern social justice activism. It works quite well within the elite progressive circles where, I imagine, people like Coates and Klein spend a good deal of their time. It is less effective as deployed within mass politics, to state the obvious.
I think that Klein finally has accepted the real political costs of indulging this set of tactics and allowing it too much influence over Democratic politics. I think it is laudable that Klein is now encouraging a broader discussion of how Democrats and liberals can get past it, and especially that he is speaking about this in plain and pragmatic terms.
For his part, in this conversation, Coates served as a fairly good example of how many elite liberals may bristle at the suggestion that wokeness is a counter-productive aspect of liberalism, as if Klein's merely broaching the subject violated noms about the radical and reflexive deference that liberals are expected to pay toward fairly radical identitarian views in general (and Coates' assumptions about "anti-racism" in particular).
I surmise that this cohort will stubbornly cling to their moralistic views about identity and social justice even at very great cost - even when they themselves claim to believe that electoral success has "existential" stakes, and when "democracy is on the ballot". In this sense, I find it very hard to know what they actually and truly believe about this specific topic.
Spot on.
What else are you supposed to do if you believe something strongly? Gesture about how great the opposing position is blithely? These positions have real impacts, they're not at the level of talking about what chess opening is best, where i agree that it's not a constructive framework.
Everybody thinks there's one correct position and the other people are wrong on political issues, that's just how it works.
You are supposed to have a little humility.
There 𝘢𝘳𝘦 some issues where it makes sense to act like there's only one reasonable side. But most of the time you need to have the wisdom and intelligence to recognize, first, that you might be wrong. Second, you need to realize that even if you're right, other people may have different interests, priorities and judgments.
You need to acknowledge that you're going to have to take an L sometimes. If you can't accept that, you are on a road that ends in violence.
Right. I'd say first step is not to unnecessarily define yourself into a minority. On the specific issues of abortion and trans rights, I don't think you have to -- we're only in a minority position if you insist on the Groups' purist positions. Most people have broadly pro-choice and pro-trans-rights views but disagree with the Groups on some specifics. Take the W on that! Now if you insist that you have to die on the hill of including trans women in women's sports or "shout your abortion" or abolishing the concept of gender mostly being tied to biological sex -- or if you're talking about a genuine minority issue like having liberal asylum policies -- part of living in a democracy means you need to convince people to change their minds if you want to get your way. Calling people racists and transphobes and bullying Democratic politicians into taking unpopular positions isn't a good way to do that -- you have to actually try persuasion.
The problem with Coates' and progressives' position is that if you squint hard enough, everything becomes someone you need to protect from those nasty buses. It's the classic everything bagel problem, where every position seems to be held strongly at once, and thus very little is ever actually accomplished.
And then Coates says "well I'm just a writer so I don't have to worry about implementation." Writers aren't really doing much of a service if they only say what they think -- to be helpful they need to propose a pathway to convincing people they're right. We love to talk about how much we care about democracy, and we should act like we care about convincing a majority of people that we're right on things.
> What else are you supposed to do if you believe something strongly?
How about argue for the position? Try to persuade? Pretending like any deviation from orthodoxy is forbidden is how we got into this mess on the left anyway, so stop that!
Indeed. At some level people should just say what they think without worrying too much about what others say or think.
The trick is of course that a politician shouldn’t be doing that every five minutes.
Politics is very often about coming home with half a loaf of bread. Insisting that anyone who compromises on bringing home the full loaf will often lead to coming home with nothing. A moderate Democratic president on trans issues, who pushed back on gender treatment for minors and transwomen in sports would still be enormously better for trans people than the current administration.
And that's the politician's perogative, to be tactical, to lie as necessary to win, but the writer's perogative is to say what they really think. I'll never be much of a politician because of this.
My view is that people respond to candidates as human beings more than they respond to issues. This is why "strength" and "dominance" are so important to Trump, and why he keeps his promises even when they hurt him. People abhor weakness, and compromising on key values exudes it.
Genuine question: what promises has he kept despite the harm they cause him? I see Trump as someone who presents strength and dominance, as you say, but does so in fleeting fashion- that is to say, he's never bound by what he just said five minutes ago, and he will strongly and dominantly present himself tomorrow saying the exact opposite of what he said today if he thinks that doing so will benefit him. But I recognize that I'm biased about Trump's character due to my personal dislike of the man.
ETA: I also want to make clear that his "dominance" is frequently in service of pretty pathetic whining. I wish more libs would respond to his bitching and moaning by mocking him as a big crybaby who acts like a sullen teenager rather than acting like every word he says is causing tremendous harm. Only powerful people can cause tremendous harm, so you're conceding the argument to him when you act like his attacks and whining are so harmful. It always seemed to me that pointing out that "he's whining like a little B because he's so weak/pathetic" was the smarter response.
I don't think Trump cares at all about abortion, and would prefer to never talk about it. I think he thought the issue was politically toxic during 2024, and he ran like hell from it. But he made promises to his evangelical base and so we got Dobbs, and we'll get something even worse this term. Maybe the FDA will ban Mifepristone?
I also think a lot of the "hurt people in blue states" stuff is designed to appease his base, so they perceive him as a strongman. Even though at some level it just ensures that blue states send more Democrats to Congress. He could pivot to being a bipartisan President For Everyone at any time, and we'd probably carve his face into Mt. Rushmore we'd all be so relieved. But instead he'll keep the base happy.
The FDA just approved a generic version of Mifepristone, which has apparently infuriated pro-life groups. I also think he promised to do things like release the Epstein files, chastised Ukraine brutally in public comments for months only to turn around in the past month and stake out the exact opposite position, spent an entire campaign pretending to not know what Project 2025 is only to turn around and appoint it's creators to high level governmental positions and now publicly praise it within just the last week, etc. etc. etc.
I don't see any of the examples you cite as situations where Trump thinks keeping his promises hurts him but that he's honor bound not to change course. I think he believes that those promises are part of what has gotten him elected President twice and that they make him more popular with the part of the country he cares about. I think he (accurately) views politics as being split into different factions, and he couldn't care less about doing things that appeal to people that aren't his supporters, so he doesn't care about being viewed as a bipartisan President for all.
So I disagree with your premise, but appreciate you providing examples of where the argument comes from.
Well I’m not going to try to convince you of that. But here’s what I would try to convince you of: if a pundit is going to move away from debating wonkish policy and start advocating *electoral* strategy, then they’d better have a *very good* mental model of what typical voters actually care about.
To my mind that’s why this argument is so important. I think Coates is saying that voters respond to principles and conviction and strength and react badly to compromise on principles, and Klein and Matt are saying voters will respond to compromise on policies even if they potentially intersect with strongly-held principles of the recent Dem party. The one with the better intuition about voter behavior is probably the one you want to bet on. And I’m not betting on Klein and Matt having a great intuition about the median voter.
In addition to what Gordon says, the point is that Ezra agrees on the substance with Coates. Throwing people under the bus is about sacrificing vulnerable members of the coalition for the greater good, not about simply disagreeing.
There's a separate issue of whether anyone is allowed to disagree with how marginalized people see their situation, but I don't think that issue comes up in this conversation.
"Throwing people under the bus is about sacrificing vulnerable members of the coalition for the greater good, not about simply disagreeing"
This is misleading. No one here is advocating for throwing the vulnerable under the bus*.
People here advocate repudiating the stupidest, shrillest, loudest voices on X/Bluesky. It's a slow boring comments section commonplace that these people aren't significant, much less vulnerable members of the coalition.
* With one exception - some of the talk about the scary, chronic homeless population qualifies.
Lots of people think, including in this comments section, that we should be ok with banning gender affirming medical treatment for trans kids (people rarely want to ban it for cis kids), or banning third trimester abortion, in service of winning elections. Those are actual policy positions, not just Sister Souljah-ing Taylor Lorenz.
"Lots of people think, including in this comments section, that we should be ok with banning gender affirming medical treatment for trans kids..."
This is probably true of this comment section but I think viewing it as "throwing people under the bus" is a bit too cynical.
I think those commenters think that it is better for the kids not to get that kind of treatment. Not that it is worse for them but we should sacrifice them to win votes.
Sam, you are framing fairly common beliefs among voters (especially in the case of 3rd trimester abortions which were mostly banned under Casey) as beyond the pale and as unacceptable positions.
Using terms like “throwing vulnerable people under the bus” communicates that the speaker is declaring that even nuanced disagreement with a specific position is unacceptable. It dehumanizes other people for not holding a very specific set of beliefs. (Many of which are novel social positions advocated for by a minority of the population.)
People definitely disagree with how Zionists Jews in diaspora see their situation; I think the same standard progressives apply in that circumstance should be applied to all minority/marginalized groups of any kind during special pleading sessions with society.
Why is it the right decision? An anti-gun control, trans minimalist, abortion minimalist Democratic elected official is presumably still much more valuable than the Republican who would otherwise be in that position.
I mean, that's what Coates thinks, he goes over his position a lot in that podcast. Despite being consistently the most left wing person in these comments I stick around because I disagree with him about that specifically.
When did the left-wing rankings come out? I want to know where I fall on that list.
I hear the David bracket is very competitive this year...
The David bracket is crowded but not competitive.
But Coates seemed fine with Obama essentially lying about his thoughts on gay marriage and said he understood that FDR couldn’t get black people all the way with the New Deal even though he probably personally wanted to.
But also said that if he was there during the new deal, he would have been opposing the compromises that FDR made to get it passed!
Freddie might take this personally
I welcome their hatred. :)
Sam, are you more left wing than Jesse Ewiak?
Dunno, seems hard to be sure. I did join the DSA and have a Bernie sticker in the 1990s though.
The funny thing is in other spaces I'm in, I've been the guy pushing back and attempting to point out political reality to people who think Democrats are all corporate sellouts.
While I'm personally very left-wing on pure policy matters in a if I was a dictator way, I rhetorically seem more intransigent here because this comment section is 90% moderate pushback. I just don't think a lot of what people want would actually work and thus, would upset the base and not actually win any elections.
Like, most of my issues w/ congressional leadership and moderates is not their individual positions on issues, but because they've capitulated to Trump over and over.
Compared to many of the people I know around my age and younger, I'd be far more OK w/ a Mayor Pete or Newsom or even Shapiro nomination as opposed to Pritzer or AOC.
OTOH, if you also want people older than me who also make me seem calm and reasonable, visit the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog comment section.
I have no idea how old you are, so that might help to contextualize. In my experience, there's always someone more left-wing or right-wing than yourself around, and there's always people that will think a given person (no matter what they think) is a squish.
I really want to understand why you and many others think that going more left wing would work. Barack Obama would be considered a total sellout in today's environment and get cancelled. I don't understand where this mass voter base of disaffected leftists is supposed to come from. Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump wasn't a clear enough difference?
I find that the trans issue is easier to resolve than the abortion issue: We do not owe it to biological/born men to compete in women sports or use female only bathrooms etc. We do owe them other basic rights obviously, but nothing that currently would be wildly unpopular and radical. A moderate stance on this issue is not only defensible but legitimate.
It seems that way until you realize that any policy that distinguishes between trans women and women is viewed as an admission that people/govt doesn’t see trans women as real women, and that is apparently a morally reprehensible view.
So the only way to prove that we believe trans women are women is to allow them into every space and category that females have.
This is why the “gender and sex are different” argument has always been a fig leaf.
That’s what the radicals believe. I think there is a difference between trans women who were born and have undergone puberty as men and biological women who were born women. This difference is almost always irrelevant for practical purposes, and people can self-identify as women if they want (I would respect this out of politeness, perhaps unless the person clearly still looks and behaves as a male), except for in a few areas where the interests of biological women must take precedence.
I don’t think it’s a belief limited to radicals. It lies at the core of modern gender identity—that they *really are* the sex they want to be on the inside.
The reason that sports, prisons, bathrooms are flash points is because they are the few areas left in modern life where sex matters, and to be excluded from those areas is to be told they’re not really women (ie not female.)
I respect your right to the opinion that it’s fine for anyone to identify as a woman, but I strongly disagree, and as a woman I am frankly the one of the two of us who will bear the brunt of this kind of inclusion or polite social fiction that you think is so inconsequential.
The bathroom issue isn't easy to thread logistically. Should building codes require at least one unisex option - that might be viable, but what about the vast, existing commercial and industrial stock with gendered restrooms? I have real sympathy for trans citizens who need to pee, and most voters don't like the state intruding into the intimate bathroom habits of individuals either way (see the fight over the NC bathroom ban that Rs were clearly losing in the court of public opinion). All that said, I also get what Rowling is saying - women are more vulnerable to violence and are entitled to safe spaces like gendered restrooms if that's what they want. There's not really a win-win here - my guess is that the cis-majority view prevails, but it pisses off a bunch of progressives who view that outcome as bigotted and risks breaking the democratic coalition.
One option is to do it just like many pro sports technically are: a "female-only" restroom and an "open" restroom that anyone is allowed to use.
This is how the bathrooms on my college dorm floor worked.
Long term, we probably get one-holer restrooms for which gender is irrelevant. Which is good for everyone but the folks who have to pay extra money/space to accomodate more one-holer restrooms.
I am quite sympathetic to the concept of having safe spaces for women. I'm less sympathetic tying it to a necessary bodily function, and one that isn't that pleasant of an act, at that.
Many issues are easy to resolve in the style you demonstrate.
Who is doing the bus throwing? The person who votes for a candidate that actively works for some members of the coalition but not others, or the person who supports the candidate that loses and therefore gets a politician who supports no members of the coalition?
Consider this from the other side: If you were a one-issue pro-life voter in 2024, did Trump's likely unwillingness to push for federal abortion restrictions convince you to support Harris? No, probably you figured that Trump would still be better for your cause than Harris.
That is also my view, but Coates' view, that those people should maintain solidarity and work until that changes, is not crazy or bad faith as people here have suggested.
A writer makes money by selling books or subscriptions. They can continue being a writer as long as they sell enough books and subscriptions.
A politician has to win elections to keep being a politician. Losing a single election often ends a political career and Richard Nixon is basically to only politician to bounce back from two straight Ls.
The categories writer and politician emerge from the tactics that are necessary to become and remain in each category.
and if we want to be extra cynical about things, progressive losing and nihilism has definitely been good for Coates' career
On the flip side, what's the point of being an influential political writer? It's about more than selling books. You gain influence because people admire your thoughts. Politicians don't need influential thought leaders to tell them to compromise. They're hard-wired for compromise. They need influential thought leaders to sell them on values, strategic goals and a plan for achieving them.
Selling content is table stakes for being a political writer. A stringer for the AP or journeyman for the Austin Statesman who covers a state legislature is, in this sense, a political writer.
At the lower levels, the consuming motivation is just having a job and staying in the game. As you move up, you start to face questions of influence versus pay. Of course no one wants to subscribe to a stack whose writer is cynically bullshitting them and simulating agreement to maintain subscriptions. People want sincerity not calculation. That’s why Matt’s brand of “say smart things I think are true (and quietly soft pedal some inconvenient wedge issues)” works.
I think plenty of people would be happy to write chum for $200k/year. However, I think most people who are willing to pay for writing have good enough instincts to not pay for that.
Ezra and Matt are both famous and at the top of the field. When you're at the top of the field, and politicians are bragging about your endorsement in fundraising emails, you've moved beyond basic questions of survival and paying the bills. You have to ask hard questions like: "am I actually serving the people whose values I share?" and "Should I be opining on important questions of political strategy in widely-read venues?"
Because at that point in your career there are multiple ways to make money, and someone with principles and ethics should care a lot about whether they're doing good or harm.
I do not see Ezra as someone who is writing content because he wants to pay the bills. I think he genuinely wants to help bring the country back from Trump. I just worry that maybe he's not helping people, and maybe it's time to think hard about why that is. (I have some separate criticisms of Matt, but I say those all the time so it's dull.)
Ezra is very smart and gets the facts right, but he’s so ensconced within this professional upper middle class cocoon that he’ll never have much influence over moderates. The amount of energy he devotes to helping progressives work through their “big feelings” is almost farcical. The decarbonizatiob framework of Abundance is synecdoche for his recent career- it is driven by the proclivities of the liberal donor base, not by how real Americans think.
Is it just me or is Ezra Klein . . . boring? He writes so earnestly like the weight of the world is on his shoulders and when he talks it sounds like the nation waits breathlessly to hear his Olympian judgments.
More and more he sounds to me like the next generation's David Brooks.
But I grant that this may just be me.
P.S. An update. I just listened to Klein's interview with Brian Eno. Whoa. I gave Klein too much credit for being interesting. He's even more boring and pretentious than I thought. Eno's a very interesting guy with a fascinating history but you sure wouldn't know it from this interview. (Disclaimer: The last 45 minutes may have been great. But I had given up after the first 45.)
As a conservative leaning republican
I would say people like ezra or Matt have influenced me.
I think these are people of good faith making smart reasoned arguments.Maybe I should listen to them
Even when I don't agree with them on everything or even if I don't agree with them.On most things
He really needs to move somewhere that’s not Silicon Valley
I think Ezra has a lot of influence. I think his NYT piece urging the Dems into a shutdown was the straw that broke the camel's back, and that's a good chunk of why we're in one. (To be clear, it was the right call: the important datapoint was "even Ezra Klein agrees".)
I don't know what to tell you about the decarbonization framework. Clearly we're going to decarbonize; Permian fields are already starting to run dry, we're not investing enough to maintain supplies for decades, low-carbon energy is becoming absurdly cheap. So if you're building any "framework" for the next two decades, you'd better adjust it to economic reality.
"he’ll never have much influence over moderates."
What political writer out there do you think does have much influence over moderates?
I think there's a different role when you are an activist, a politician, a journalist, or a public intellectual. Some people are a little of all of those, but an activist/public intellectual like TNC ought to say what he believes, and probably it makes sense for him to push back on compromise, albeit within a context of being willing to hold his nose and support imperfect candidates when the election comes.
While I'm skeptical of Bold Truth Telling in general, the framing of Coates in particular as indifferent to the ebb and flow of "politics" is odd. He very notably became famous in large part due to his advocacy for a specific, detailed policy solution to redress systemic discrimination! The intervening decade has obscured everyone's memory a bit, but at the time this was a serious, full throated advocacy effort to push some form of reparations through, complete with persuasion, experts, data, the whole deal.
Politics!
Coates is such a fake intellectual - it's frustrating that progressives keep propping this guy up as if he has anything enlightening to say.
One of the points that Andrea Pitzer made in her excellent piece [1] (which you should read!) is that *no pundit* is a professional politician. That's not their job. When it comes to advice like "you should moderate" or "you should compromise on your positions or values", politicians don't really need to be told this by pundits like Klein. Compromising values is kind of baked into their DNA.
The goal of the pundit class is to actually point the party in some useful direction other than simple advice like "compromise." To the extent that you don't have a useful message to offer other than "concede to the other side's framing", maybe it's time to step aside and let a younger generation of pundits try some new ideas.
[1] https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-have-to-swallow-frogs
Obviously they do need that advice, since they didn’t make the compromises necessary to win at the last election.
”Concede to the other side’s framing” implies that politics is all about framing. It isn’t. People will dislike the more radical parts of the progressive agenda no matter how you ”frame” it. Framing used to be underrated, now it’s overrated.
Education polarization has accelerated the tendency on the left to think that winning the war for terminology clinches the war for policy. Like, once you convert “pro-life” to “anti-choice,” it’s over.
Politics isn’t about framing, there’s a lot of strategy. But if you’ve conceded to the other side’s framing, then you aren’t going to be thinking clearly on strategy either. The concrete example is Klein/Coates where Ezra argues for running against abortion, then gets reminded that abortion referenda consistently ran 11-15% ahead of Harris in 2024, then kind if stumbles away from this point. Here’s a case where the data tells a very powerful story, but Klein has a different story in his head. Thats what happens when you concede to adversarial framing, you can’t think clearly.
Imagine a WWII general listening to German propaganda and then refusing to invade Europe because “they’re unbeatable.” You cannot have your thought leaders drinking the other side’s kool aid.
I don’t think that’s framing, but rather having the facts wrong. Framing is when you say stuff like ”keep your hands off women’s bodies” conveniently ignoring that the issue, at least according to pro-lifers, involve another person’s life too.
Framing is how you convince other people to adopt your preferred beliefs as fact, even when they have access to data that obviously contradicts the facts. It’s powerful! My argument is that both Klein and Matt have become victims of successful framing by the other side, so they’re making bad strategic arguments rather than trying to frame the issues their own way.
I think Matt is being polite, and Coates is basically ridiculous. He’s a good prose writer of almost no substance, and him being fashionable (and difficult to safely criticize) was, in retrospect, a good leading indicator that we were cooked.
So much of what Coates did in that interview was frame his positions in such a way that even critiquing or disagreeing with him makes you a bad person.
That is not a helpful way to have discussions in a democrat society, especially when it comes to controversial subjects. It is the same form of dehumanizing that Coates criticizes others of.
Well said, and unusually useful for me. My town is in the midst of a budget crisis in which one side is justifying their incivility with Nazi comparisons ("there aren't two sides to the question of gas chambers").
Why do you want to destroy jobs for the working man in Zyklon B factories?
Uh, must be one hell of a budget, or else Godwin’s law just hit hard on that particular debate.
I'm sorry to report that it concerns about $300,000 (to be generous) of a $44 million dollar budget.
Ah. I assume it's earmarked entirely for malaria nets in Uganda, then? That would be around 60-70 lives at stake.
"there aren't two sides to the question of gas chambers"
I think the next time someone says this, the only appropriate response is “[Mugatu voice] He’s absolutely right.”
When I am feeling less generous I tend to frame it as “taking victims and using them as rhetorical human shields like Hamas.”
Definitely not a polite thing to say, but this is the type of linguistic nihilism these people engage in.
But there are two sides to the question of gas stoves and whether the government should ban them
He’s a nice person who is not terrible to hang out with. So they continue to hang out with him even if he’s not too bright.
ETA: he’s also a bit if a unicorn in that he’s a black guy with zero exposure to the black church. None. I can’t think of a less representative ADOS person. He’s been raised in a weird cocoon of black nationalism ensconced in a white enclave. So he naturally appeals to a certain liberal who doesn’t want to think that hard about how socially conservative the median black person in the states is.
Contrast this with Nicole Hannah jones, who is a vicious idiot who really no one wants around unless they are forced to have her around (plenty of examples of this on the right too- Mike pence is hanging around because people like him)
I like how Kendi has fallen off so much he doesn’t even get a mention.
Our side made some terrible mistakes in the ~2016-2022 period but the fact that it's hard to remember who Kendi, DiAngelo et al even are any more is a sign that we're returning to health and are isolating the crazies more and more into a bubble, quarantined from the rest of us.
Now we just have to convince the rest of the country that we're not ruled by the crazies anymore.
Too many bookstores still have “Antiracist Baby” on display….
The problem is that Democrats need to actively refute those thinkers; instead the dominant strategy is at best ignoring them and at worst gaslighting (word carefully chosen) about how prominent they were in the 2019-20 time period.
Sure, if there's a hook to do so. Like if one comes out with a new book. If they just do it out of the blue, then it will feel odd and won't break through in any case.
Yeah, I didn't mean they needed to call a press conference to specifically do it.
NHJ is on her way there but Howard is too embarrassed to face up to the fact that she is stealing their money, unlike BU and Kendi
Oh man I had completely forgotten about him.
Black Americans have a higher rate of religious participation but a lot of them still aren’t part of the church (only 57% attend at least monthly according to this poll: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-attendance-and-congregational-involvement/). I went to mostly black schools and cannot remember the black church ever even coming up in conversation. And the nature of being a minority is that you’re more likely to live in a mostly-white area. Coates’ background does not seen that atypical.
In fairness I think he mainly grew up in Baltimore as it was becoming a majority black city but I believe has also said in his writing that he felt alienated from the larger black community during his childhood and adolescence.
Alienation from one’s community seems like a pretty typical experience for teenagers though, especially in lower-status communities.
That’s, like, what being a teenager is all about lol
For sure, and my point I think is generally in agreement with yours. I think there's a lot to criticize about his world view and the conclusions he reaches but I don't think it's accurate or fair to try to paint him as an outsider among black people or anything like that.
Ah, yes, I didn't see your point about the black church before I made a similar one. You're exactly right.
Something Ezra said once that stuck with me is that it's important to have multiple mental models and ways of thinking about the world. They're like tools in the tool belt, and you pick out the right one for the problem at hand.
Coates has a unique way of seeing the world that has a powerful internal logic to it, and his perspective is sometimes useful. The problem is that it's the only tool in his tool belt, and that's what makes him seem ridiculous.
Perfect example of this is Coates visiting Israel and the West Bank and applying US racial dynamics to an entirely different situation. Ezra is generally a great listen but it was frustrating to watch him platform such a ridiculous world view.
It was worse than that. Ezra Klein platformed Coates on the Israeli-Palestinian topic, even though Coates’ entire exposure was a 10 day ideologically charged organized trip and a Palestinian writers’ festival, and his perspective was that nuance can cloud moral clarity.
I agree if having only one way of thinking you shoehorn everything into is the most common way to think. If it’s not—I assume it isn’t because that just seems too consistent for people—then I think Klein is really just telling on himself.
I think Matt, and other writers, sincerely like and respect Coates and his thinking.
Personally I have never seen the appeal of his work but I don't think they are just being "polite" with the way they engage with him.
My personal view of Coates (in addition to his being a talented writer) is that he's kind of Chun-Li in the "For Me It Was Tuesday" dialogue in "Street Fighter"
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButForMeItWasTuesday
I think it's extremely easy to sympathize with this point of view: in view of the tremendous objective historical harms caused by racism against Black Americans in the United States, one could easily infer that this was a defining and indelible motivation behind historical societal social trends: it hugely impacts *me* and *my constituency* in material ways, and there was also a Civil War about it, ergo, it must perniciously inform the motivations behind decisionmaking at all times. But Coates is sort of held hostage to the lens of his experience (again, understandably, since it's his experience--this is true of all of us in some respects) in a way that can make it hard to evaluate things in a way that's depersonalized but with a potentially more accurate theory-of-mind.
I took a mental divorce from Coates when he quoted I believe it was Malcolm X saying "if you plunge a knife six inches into a man's back and pull it out two inches, you can't say you've made progress." In other words, the situation is no different from what it was sixty years ago and we've never made any progress on race relations.
That was such a nihilistic view of America that I couldn't take anything he wrote/said seriously ever again.
(Oh, and then he opined on Israel/Palestine in such an ignorant way (proudly so by his testimony) that that removed any further doubt.)
I’ve written a couple papers on racial violence in the south and reviewed papers on other countries and like… it is a statement to our progress that someone would be so silly to compare us now to us then.
And I grew up in the South in the 50s/60s/70s. It was an absurd comment by him.
We have made such a ridiculous amount of progress! The world imagined by KenDiAngelo was long in the rear view mirror.
And yet, now we've got the most racist administration since sometime before Ronald Reagan though I'm not sure how far back I should be reaching. I choose to believe that the vast majority of Americans are not like that, no matter what filth has risen to the top.
I imagine that it is insanity-inducing either way, but the valence that it has seems like it differs based on whether you don't really have the capacity to opt out of seeing it that way due to System 1 thinking versus choosing to interpret things in a way that seems maladaptive via System 2 thinking. The first kind seems like it just kinda sucks in a way that should elicit sympathy.
Now I'm wondering what the comment you were replying to said!
You may be right. I just don’t get it though.
I think a lot of it is that he’s very good as an essayist even if those essays are largely just navel-gazing.
I think the relationship between Coates and the more centrist wing of the party is defined by one particular tension, that being that it's become taboo on the larger left to say that some things around race and really demographics more generally have changed in the post war era, and that most of those changes have been for the better. IMO it's kind of ridiculous since many of these things are to the great credit of liberal politics in America but beyond that it's what has us kind of stuck and unable to adapt to slow but sure racial depolarization and demographic changes.
Regarding the CTU's endorsement of Shakur: Lots of people like to fantasize about being an avenging and violent force for good. Dirty Harry, the Die Hard series, every Charles Bronson movie.
The problem with their endorsement is that they valorized an actual terrorist who was pursuing a bad, not good, political outcome. But in their defense, the terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were warmly welcomed into Northwestern University and the University of Illinois-Chicago [edited], respectively, when the FBI decided to stop pursuing them.
I don't think racism infects our society anywhere near as much as Ta-Nahesi Coates believes, but I can understand how seeing the difference between how Black, violent 1970s radicals like Shakur are viewed versus how Dohrn, Ayers and other white, violent 1970s radicals are welcomed into respectable political positions might radicalize some CTU members.
The thing about the CTU, is that they're run by edgy hard-left internet takesters, who also unfortunately are in charge of the education of 300k kids
How much does the views of the leadership of the CTU translate to how teachers behave in the classroom? I tend to think very little.
Unions, like any organization have a lot of unique internal dynamics that result in who runs and wins elections. But I would venture that whatever those dynamics are, the reason the members vote for their leadership is primarily for how the leadership is perceived as representing the members with respect to their interactions with the city as employer/paymaster.
It is unlikely that the members are voting for their leadership based on how good a classroom teacher the union leader is. It wouldn't actually make sense to do so unless you think teaching reading to six year-olds is the same skill set as negotiating contracts.
Sadly I think the answer is quite a lot
The re integration of Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground, and others is mind blowing to me. No one is rehabilitating McVeigh or the Ruby Ridge idiots on the right, nor should they.
The Right quickly turned Kyle Rittenhouse into a mascot/keynote speaker and have rehabilitated Jan. 6 rioters, several of which were later re arrested for other crimes after being pardoned. Valorizing an elderly or dead criminal may be wrong, but none of the leftists mentioned are currently a threat to anyone, unlike the violent lunatics Trump and co. Released and constantly hold up as heroes.
Rittenhouse was obviously innocent. Whatever post acquittal public persona nonsense he may engage in not withstanding.
It's disheartening how few people can set aside their passions to view that case objectively. I thought Rittenhouse was a bit of a naive moron to put himself into that position in the first place, but when I was his age I was also a naive moron about most things. Being dumb and irresponsible doesn't make his actions criminal on that day given what we know about the actual circumstances of the shooting.
I think ppl just don't realize that the self defense argument begins the moment he feels threatened, not when he leaves his home to go to Wisconsin...
For sure- that's a big component of it. But I actually think it's worse than that. I think the ppl we're talking about view his political beliefs as being disqualifying from even making a self defense claim. Guns are bad, his politics are, he shot someone with a gun, he's guilty as sin and should spend his life in jail.
Rittenhouse is also IMO the poster child for the rule that says: if you are putting yourself in a dangerous position because you have a gun, the gun is probably making you less safe, not more safe.
If anything, I’d say he’s a poster child for why “open carry” is often a dumb idea. Openly carrying a gun is more likely to be seen as antagonistic
Not guilty of the crime, yes. Innocent, hardly.
The public backlash against that poor kid (who was 17 at the time) created a situation where he had virtually no other career options after his acquittal. He was even barred from social media before his trial even started.
He's a murderer, but he's innocent of any actual crimes. The laws were bad, and that's why he's innocent, but you can't convict people of crimes that aren't on the books and shouldn't try to do so.
The laws were bad? The laws in WI at the time (and now) are pretty standard self defense statutes. You can replicate that scenario in pretty much any state and the jury’s conclusion wouldn’t change
He should have been convicted because of his ideology not his actions
"I hate my opponents and I don't want the best for them"
Helikitty Trump.
Trump’s tactics aren’t the problem, the ideology (and the corruption) are. We need a Democrat Trump, but dialed up to 1000
The Jan 6 rioters are rioters, not terrorists. This seems quite different. And Rittenhouse isn't any kind of terrorist at all.
The FBI and US Marshals were the idiots at Ruby Ridge.
I've always seen sympathy for the people at Ruby Ridge, and to a lesser extent Waco, among the 2nd Amendment/libertarian wing of the right.
Were the people at Ruby Ridge good, upstanding citizens? No. Did the FBI and US Marshals barge in there looking to start a fight when it wasn't at all necessary? Yes.
Exactly; the conversations I had with my conservative friends are the mirror image of the ones I have about ICE with my liberal friends today. Are the victims blameless? No, technically they’re breaking laws. Is it a good idea to have a national, possible politicized police force looking for trouble? Definitely not.
McVeigh no, but Ruby Ridge was a George Floyd moment for the right. People don’t talk about it much any more because it happened so long ago but I remember hearing way more people saying Ruby Ridge was an unjustified massacre than that it was justified.
G Gordon Liddy in 1993: "If a federal agent is at your doorstep, two words: head shots."
McVeigh cited Ruby Ridge and Waco I believe as justification for the bombing.
Where are these people today when ICE is abducting children from their beds?
Jan. 6 erasure.
There's a prominent fascist of Twitter whose pfp is David Koresh wearing a maga hat. I think Vance follows him.
This is always the mistake of saying “never” or “no one.” There’s always someone.
Though they haven’t named a building at Baylor after Koresh yet, and all the weather underground guys got jobs at Columbia
I’d pick the Vice President’s ear over a job at Columbia…
Shitposting within view of the VP comes with neither salary nor tenure.
I wouldn’t
Are there any examples of right-wing terrorists who got rehabilitated? The closest examples I can think of are:
a. Some Klansmen ended up repudiating the Klan and having successful political careers. Maybe Byrd was the most important?
b. Some Irgun terrorists ended up as right wing figures in Israeli politics, though that's pretty different from US politics.
Not necessarily “the right” but hoo boy was Bragg a massive piece of shit (fort Bragg).
A bunch of confederate generals got rehabilitated
Depends on how you choose to count some of the J6 "hostages" and "martyrs"...
The closest to actual terrorists there though are the Proud Boy/Oathbreaker types and I've not really heard of them being invited to state dinners or anything.
Don't give the right any ideas
Give it time...
I think there is possibly another more banal thing going on. Yes it seems like the Chicago Teachers Union chapter is run by people who seem to be to the left of even other leaders of the Teachers Union. But I think the other very real possibility is that a lot of orgs are run by older people who don’t put enough thought into who they put in charge of their social media platforms. So you end up with people running social media accounts who very possibly have ideas on certain topics that maybe shouldn’t be put on official Twitter feed.
Feel like something similar probably happened with the Libertarian party of NH. There was a while there where the Libertarian party of NH Twitter account was putting out a whole lot of no doubt about it Neo Nazi stuff. Now my “in the wild” experience with the Libertarians is it’s a mix of actual Cato reading principled libertarians…and absolute nutballs. Wouldn’t at all shock me if the Libertarian party hired one of these nutballs out of sorts of negligence
I’ll also note that I suspect there is a similar dynamic as to why super lefty DEI stuff ended up in various companies training materials. State X passed a law mandating DEI training. HR scrambles to comply, researches DEI experts and comes up with Robin DeAngelo and suddenly DeAnglelo’s quite frankly racist DEI stuff is out the wild.
In the case of the LP, they didn’t hire them; rather, a really dedicated minority executed a hostile takeover from within. It’s actually one of the few right-wing parallels I can think of to the way some left-wing organizations go, although even then, it doesn’t have the same dynamic where the moderates are scared to criticize the extremists.
I mean I think you sort of described everything that's happened with the Republican Party over the last 10 years.
There maybe more examples of cases like this with left wing groups than right wing groups, but I'd say the entire infrastructure of one of the two major political parties being taken over by a lunatic outweighs in importance anything that's happened in a variety of lefty orgs.
That's a different dynamic, Trump won the GOP by winning over its voters and then demonstrating he could win general elections. Obviously it's more important, but it's still different.
Mises Caucus, right?
Did LPNH stop Nazi posting?
Honestly don't know.
I still go on but on a different name than I used* to so the combo of my algorithm not being the same and Musk changing the platform means they don't come up in my feed.
* I used to be a heavy twitter poster and interacted a ton with various pundits (including Matt). Then I started talking trash to David Sacks about his advocacy for saving Silicon Valley Bank and he got my account deactivated. I actually agreed with saving Silicon Valley Bank but given Sacks' previously stated positions on a variety of topics thought he was ripe for mockery for suddenly forgetting any libertarian principles he might have when it was his own money at stake.
Is "crazy social media intern" really a thing that still happens?
Social media has been used regularly by approximately every organization of any significance for well over a decade now. It's a relatively established career track mostly followed by the PR/marketing people you'd expect.
Not that "org has to walk back awful social media post" shouldn't ever happen, but it should be at about the frequency of having to walk back an awful TV and or CEO remark.
Ahem, that's the University of Illinois-Chicago. Let's not slander the U of C!
Though to be fair, he used to attend plenty of events in Hyde Park.
My apologies. Will edit.
> people like to fantasize about being an avenging and violent force for good
I loved the CHH headline for this - "You'll Kill Marauders, But Will You Change a Diaper?"
https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/youll-kill-marauders-but-will-you
That is hilarious.
I think it’s a lot simpler. I agree with how Ross Douthat put it when he had Hasan Piker on his show: once you “DSA leftist” (or go even further left) and start talking about everything the state does or doesn’t do as “violence,” then a little more violence is just no big deal:
> Douthat: But this analogy is itself part of why people think you are normalizing the things that are taboo, which would include right-wing forms of violence. But if your theory is that all of these things are incitement — that if you support putting more people in jail, that’s incitement; if you support border security, that’s incitement; it’s incitement all the way down — you’re basically saying: The person who incites violence against a politician is in the same position as the person who supports border security. And that seems like an argument that lends itself to encouraging people to commit political violence, because you’re saying: It’s all normal already. What’s a little more? What’s one more act of incitement in a world of incitement? You’re just normalizing it when you make that argument.
> Piker: Yeah, my argument is that I’m not normalizing it — it’s already normal. I don’t want it to be normal. I want it to be abnormal. I want people to actually take a serious look at the violent structures that already exist that, from the point of the recipient, is already experienced as a direct form of violence.
I think this reflects a fundamentally different view of how the far left and the far right view violence. The far left sees having a state with hierarchical authority figures and a monopoly on violence as inherently violent, bad, and preventable. Right wingers believe hierarchy is natural and inevitable, so the state having a monopoly on violence is theoretically fine. Right wingers therefore tend to cheer on violence only when they think the state has violated the social contract in some way - someone else in this thread mentioned Rittenhouse, whose celebration in right wing media is an excellent example of this.
Piker sounded like a sociopath in that conversation with Douthat. Is that how he always sounds?
Reasonable people might prefer Biggie, but calling Tupac a terrorist goes a little too far!
NOT CTU members. Who knows what they think?
I appreciate the nuance in this take.
As an LA millennial, I can tell you Amanda and Sean are a certain species of middle-aged California lib who live extremely traditional, almost conservative lives but whose brains are cooked by the internet and think violent radicalism is sorta cool. I know dozens of people like this, suburban parents with normie office jobs who’ve never committed or suffered any real violence in their lives yet talk like they're in the Weather Underground after a drink or two. It’s all about fashionable rhetoric on Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok and nothing about what they’re actually capable of or what would be a good way to make policy into reality. It can be aggravating sometimes!
I love the Big Pic, but the pod on OBAA was jarrrrrrring. It's like they've completely missed PTA's pretty conservative streak. Like Perfidia is a sign of resistance and power and noble struggle? It's cool to be in the French 75 fighting the man?
Was the point of Boogie Nights that it's cool to be in the porn industry? Do they think that the camera was admiring Jungle Pussy's nonsense speech at the bank?
The tone is unbearable when they start to talk about "radical politics." They need to just eat at Republique, work from home, and vote Dem. It'll be fine.
I can’t pin down Pynchon but I’m curious about the tone of the source material
Like, how many dudes in Che t-shirts actually want to be a combatant in an actual communist insurgency/civil war?
"But none of the identity-brained Democrats who believe it was desperately important to put a mediocre white man on the ticket to balance out Harris..."
So have we come around to agree that Walz was a dud?
His debate was bad and he didn't do much for the campaign — mainly because the Harris team kept his mouth shut. BUT I think we all memory hole the excitement he created when he first burst on the scene. He can be a good communicator, but I think if he really wants to change some minds and widen the tent, he needs to take on some heterodox positions. He refuses to do so, and will just return to being the governor of a blueish state. Which is totally fine.
My view of Walz is that he was a missed opportunity *precisely because* he generated all that base excitement. The reason why he generated that base excitement is that the base felt like they dodged a bullet: Harris could have chosen someone who would have been interpreted as signaling moderation, and by strategically backing a dark horse who was a white guy but did *not* signal moderation, they successfully strangled that idea in its crib. They were celebrating over their factional victory, but victory for their faction prevented Harris from scoring points with the general electorate.
I don't have a problem with Walz himself. He's ok. Not a great debater. Pretty decent speechifier.
Yea this is the crucial piece ppl miss. The Walz excitement was mostly driven by an expression of anti Shapiroism... cloaked in "HE HUNTS!!!!" enthusiasm.
Matt made this point at the time but our perceptions get completely warped by the fact Minnesota is in the middle of America and the only part of Pennsylvania that hyper into politics coastal libs have ever been to is Philly.
But because the Twin Cities dominate most of the state's population, Minnesota is actually a meaningfully more urban, higher educated, and more liberal state then Pennsylvania is. So Walz became coded as the "real" WWC pick and Shapiro less so,
Despite the fact the actual driver of this push was a proxy for gaza politics.
Gaza is certainly one reason why further-left folks hate Shapiro. And the crazy thing about that is that Shapiro's and Walz's policy views on I/P are basically identical. I've read articles where Shapiro has condemned Netanyahu in the harshest of terms, which he's able to do precisely because of the "Nixon goes to China" thing. But because Shapiro is so Jewish -- i.e. he isn't just technically Jewish like say Paul Rudd, but also "looks Jewish" and finds part of his core cultural identity in his Jewishness -- that kind of mainstream stance isn't acceptable for him, he would need to hold firmly left-wing views in order to be ok. And defeating him in a factional contest feels like a win in the I/P proxy war regardless of the (lack of) policy implications.
At the same time, I also think the distaste for Shapiro is not purely about I/P. It's also the fact that he looks like the kind of guy who went to a good college and got a job at someplace like Deloitte and wears a suit. There's no person on earth hated more by young lefties.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/aoc-deserved-the-oversight-job/comment/82432666
https://www.slowboring.com/p/friday-thread-bd7/comment/102366566
https://x.com/hamiltonnolan/status/1826444171978170874
Paradoxically, while Gavin Newsom isn't liked by young lefties either, he's better able to get away with his suit-wearing because (a) he's tall and waspy and got an athletic scholarship so isn't the kind of guy they personally encountered on a regular basis on campus, and (b) he's a bit older.
(To be clear though, I don't think Harris had to pick Shapiro. I thought Cooper or Kelly would have been good choices, for instance. But once Walz became the darling of the base, he became the worst choice for that very reason, through no fault of his own.)
This is really well put as to the nature of the hatred. The crazy thing is how Shapiro's actual resume doesn't really fit this typecast in the way Pete definitely does.
I really don't care about this sort of thing but lefties are correct that Pete went to Harvard then McKinsey and the Navy and is exactly the "40 under 40" type they despise.
But do lefties really hate University of Rochester graduates who go to evening law school and then state legislature positions in the same way?
Similarly the leading avatars of American leftism, Mandani, Bernie, and AOC went to Bowdoin, UChicago, and Boston U. What gives!
Yeah it gets a little fuzzy, but I guess the thing is that Shapiro and Buttigieg have always practiced "respectability politics," for lack of a better word. Shapiro didn't work for McKinsey, but he looks like the kind of guy who *might* have worked for McKinsey. And the fact that he was working toward any sort of political career at all in his 20s and doing so "within the system" is still seen as bad. It's okay if you do it in a countercultural or radical or "speaking truth to power" kind of way, but not if you're upholding mainstream liberalism - that makes you a traitor. Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez can plausibly claim that they weren't planning political careers all along, and when they did enter politics they did it to overthrow the existing Democratic hierarchy, not help it.
I think the difference is that Walz was a nice civically minded social studies teacher who literally got into politics after his students got kicked out of an event for being against Bush. So even if he is personally pro-Israel he was trusted more to respect protestors’ freedom of speech than Shapiro who IIRC was actually involved in crackdowns.
I read about those "crackdowns" and they're so overblown. Shapiro's image and identity are the driving factors, and the "crackdowns" were backfilled to provide a more defensible official rationale.
Walz, like almost every other VP nominee, mattered at most a tiny bit. But in such a tight race with the stakes so high, Harris needed to have made a bolder decision.
But again any effect would have been very small and hard to discern.
I don't disagree with that, i.e. I don't think Walz per se mattered a lot. What did matter is how hard Harris went on "heterodox" (or whatever you want to call it) messaging, like Bill Clinton showily did in 1992. She actually did more of that than I expected, and overall I thought she ran a much better campaign that I feared she would, and that's why she made it close. But she needed to do more. The Walz choice was a symptom or example of her being a little too cautious.
Agreed. She actually ran a pretty good campaign. Like every other politician in history, she could have run a better one.
It was a bad year for incumbents and sometimes the voters are just going to do a colossally idiotic thing and put the worst person in history into the Oval Office.
Were voters excited or just Democratic party people who thought the "Republicans are weird" was an entire campaign strategy?
I can't say for sure but I feel like I thought he was a dud from the beginning, the Tim Kaine redux.
I remember some people being excited, I just think those people were kind of dumb and the type of people that think Walz appeals to "rural" voters more than he does.
I say this with no polling data or other evidence, but I thought Walz's angle on how Trump and Vance never laughed, and how Trump would never pet a dog had some potential. People love their dogs!
This is the opposite of memory-holing, though. It's calling into question the judgement of people that were excited by his nomination. The excitement was not universal and was probably informed by a bad theory of politics.
[Edit: "infoamed"?]
It's worth revisiting Matt's total lack of enthusiasm about the pick: https://www.slowboring.com/p/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-tim-walz
Useful to quote some parts here (interesting from a separate analytical path Matt's critique aligned with Silver)
_____
Making a risk-averse selection when you are ahead makes sense — but I do worry that Harris’ current lead is genuinely razor-thin. The pick seems a little complacent, and I would rather see her running more aggressively than making a defense choice.
The big issue to me is that once again, a flawed set of identity considerations seems to have unduly limited Democrats’ options — in 2020, Biden seems to have only considered Black women, while in 2024, Harris seems to have only considered white men.
If you want a popular swing-state governor who is not Josh Shapiro, the answer is Gretchen Whitmer. If you want a Minnesota politician with a strong track record of over-performing in the rural midwest, the answer is Amy Klobuchar. If you want a talented political communicator, the answer is Pete Buttigieg (who is a white man, but who seems to have had being gay counted as a strike against him).
Yeah this is how I feel.
The people who were excited and thought Walz had a ton of appeal are people whose political judgement I don't really trust.
Walz burst through because he called Republicans "weird" and so got the VP nomination.
There's a word to describe that kind of dynamic that lies behind such a decision which is "weird."
I feel there’s a great application for “infoamed” just waiting for its moment.
Excitement he created? The Democrats and large media would have been excited about any warm body. They wanted to like him. He was a dud for sure. I found a few clips of him talking after Harris picked him and his mediocrity was clear right away. The receipts of me saying so in this space at the time.
Honestly, if I were Kamala Harris, I would have picked Andre Dickens, Mayor of Atlanta and would have him go on television and everywhere and tell everyone how much he loves cops and hates anti cop protestors. And his method of dealing with anti cop protests is calling them all criminals and having them arrested.
“A bounty on the scalp of every they/them in cop city”- not something he said but uh
I was impressed by him in interviews I heard before he was picked. Those skills didn't carryover into the campaign. I don't think there's any great lesson in choosing or not choosing him. The reason primaries work is that they test a candidate over and over again. Unless you can select a VP that's also been through that sort of gauntlet it's always a bit of a crapshoot.
One of the reasons Biden worked as a pick for Obama was that he had in fact been through the wars on the national stage for decades. He performed in the campaign exactly as expected.
He had his catch phrase, and that was all he had
The whole affair was pretty much the political version of this Simpsons episode: https://youtu.be/ytVEh0G8m2I?si=SQA0pDAWlnz64Jp8
Attacking identity politics “for putting a mediocre white man on the ticket” is sort of too clever. First, this isn’t his identity politics typically operate. Second, VP choices don’t matter that much, Harris lost by too much for Shapiro to have bailed her out.
Harris sort of foregrounded this type of thinking in her comments about Pete and it is one of Matt's favorite bits.
I don't think the VP pick mattered much but I think the Walz fandom got a bit silly and I think these politicians coming out of seemingly nowhere to become the VP nominee is a sort of weird element of American politics that could use some though from the parties.
It's sardonically hilarious to say now but I think the platonic ideal model for the VP pick actually is Biden in 2008.
If the best model for President is, as Matt says, Outsider/Not Radical, then you need a real old Washington hand to close some deals on the hill. And preferably someone who is not seen as better than yourself as a candidate and maybe not peering over your shoulder. Thats why Dubya picked Cheney (er he picked himself but still) and why Obama chose Biden. Both were chosen for the right reasons but they each violated those reasons substantially.
The VP doesn’t matter much when you pick a dud. Make it matter!
yeah as more of a centrist it's good that Shapiro wasn't the VP candidate because that would have just added more fuel to the progressive fire that Harris lost because she wasn't sufficiently leftwing.
I disagree and agree with Matt. When you centralize identity politics in your thinking then it’s easy to overvalue its impact vs other attributes like policy positions or political talent and Rizz.
On whether a better VP pick would have made a difference? That’s tough. You may be right. I would have picked a high talent communicator with Max charm and likeability. People lack imagination on these things. Just to indicate the direction I am thinking someone like Matthew McConaughey. Why not?
Honestly, if I were Kamala Harris, I would have picked Andre Dickens, Mayor of Atlanta and would have him go on television and everywhere and tell everyone how much he loves cops and hates anti cop protestors. And his method of dealing with anti cop protests is calling them all criminals and having them arrested.
Rather as Matt was saying at time, it is exactly the Identity First politics - where identarian balancing combined with factional appeal above appreciation of genuine skill prevailed. (https://www.slowboring.com/p/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-tim-walz)
And while VP choices do not probably matter too much, the specific mode that the choice reflected (as correctly flagged by both of Matt and Silver) was a bad signal for the eventual campaign deployment (neither here nor there, reversion back to Dem/Already-Pre-Sold-Lefty themes by September).
No man who loves Crazy Taxi as much as Coach Walz could be a dud.
I absolutely haven't. I actually wonder if Walz kicked Matt's dog or something the way he writes about him.
I loved and love Walz and think he was clearly handcuffed by the campaign. Loud and outspoken rural white dude and didn't go to an elite college, taught in schools, coached football, believes in live and let live and also implemented universal free lunch. He's a dream profile. And is funny.
I genuinely don't understand the hate he garners; I think there's some general Monday morning quarterbacking by a certain class of writers about him that just isn't backed up by data.
I am sad that the author of One Billion Americans says that it's not going to fly. The immigration politics suck, and it is what it is, but I still hold faint hope that at some point Americans realize the tradeoff they're sowing by supporting more restrictionist measures. But it's also sad, as Matt's observed, that the natalist avenue has gone off some real bizarre paths, instead of just settling in of an increase child allowance, and then let the chips fall where they might.
The fertility rate really does not seem to be an affordability problem though, at least not in a way that a little extra child allowance will help (even though I’d take it!). Rich countries have fewer kids. It’s cultural. Hard to fix.
Liberalism is correct -- it's almost axiomatic that people should be free to pursue their own interests if they don't harm others -- but a society that emphasizes maximizing one's own happiness is going to have lower fertility.
Having kids is hard, expensive, draining, stressful. It does not pass any cost/benefit analysis, largely because it's orthogonal to cost/benefit analyses. Having kids is a lot bigger than one's own happiness, and as long as we have a society where people are free to pursue their own happiness, we'll have lower fertility.
I think I am already happier for having kids, and my kids are very young and one of them is very high needs. I expect the lifetime increase to my happiness as they age and have lives and children of their own to increase.
I think “kids are a drag” vibes are in fact a big part of the problem. Paying a mortgage is a drag but home ownership is (correctly!) seen as nice and a marker of things going well for you. Kids should be the same way, not some duty to discharge.
Yeah. Maybe there's no solution for this, but there are just so many guys out there who in their youth were reluctant to have children and only realized after the fact that they love being dads. If there were a way to communicate that to more young guys, it might at least make a small dent in the problem. Obviously, you'd need a different approach with young women.
I expected to love being a dad and I do love being a dad. But I don't know if it's made me *happier.*
It's 1000% given my life more meaning and purpose and I couldn't imagine a life without my kids, and they're infinitely more important to me than my personal happiness. But also my day-to-day would likely involve more pleasure and less stress if I didn't spend so much time and energy focusing on dinner negotiations and bedtime routines.
"It's 1000% given my life more meaning and purpose and I couldn't imagine a life without my kids"
That's a pretty good definition of "happiness" in my book.
I don't want to go all Aristotle on you, but the additional meaning and purpose has shifted my happiness scale for the better: my floor is lower and my ceiling is higher.
Happiness is definitely not the right word. Satisfaction? Fulfillment? It's like running a marathon. No one who's run a marathon has told me it was fun. But they're all glad they did it!
I would've been quite happy to reproduce, I just never wanted to be burdened with those stupid, noisy luxury pets. My two kitties already demand more attention than I have free time for.
As if to punish me for this comment 2 of my kids had just absolutely nuclear meltdown level tantrums after daycare today lol.
Smart people criticize the stock market for prioritizing short term financial results instead of long-term decision making.
I think of having kids the same way. You're giving up happiness in the short term (especially the 2nd trimester - year 1 period) in exchange for long-term... happiness is not quite the right word. More like satisfaction or fulfillment.
That’s very true of the first kid but less true of successive kids, while a lot of costs increase linearly or exponentially. Most people with a typical income, time, and energy level without significant free help trying to maximize their happiness would have one kid tops.
I disagree, I think, having the second kid greatly increases the amount of happiness
It gives the kids someone to play with
You are no longer now. The sole source of entertainment
I believe long term having two kids means less work.Not more
There's also the overlap in resources that siblings can use that tend to make the cost per child go down with having more than one in the household.
Surveys suggest women at least are a lot more likely to be less happy than more happy after the second kid: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/baby-no-2-is-harder-on-mom-than-dad/
I always feel sorry for only child families. Everyone involved is missing out on so much of what makes family fun. Siblings are a treasure for each other and parents.
edit - to be clear, only child families are not bad just as no children is not bad. Its just that people who don't have them are missing out.
I was reading that moms today spend 50% more time with their kids than in the 70s when they locked the kids outside so they could smoke and watch Days of Lives in peace. Even with costs the same, if the time commitment had stayed at the 1970s level, that would mean more kids.
I suspect this is a bigger effect than any of the policies we sometimes discuss. Social expectations for the job of mother (or father) make each child much more expensive in terms of time, energy, and money. And when the price goes up, people have fewer kids, just like Econ 101 would suggest.
Absolutely true, at least if the parents in my local sphere are any indication. The amount of doting is toxic at times, it seems to me. But most of the kids are holding down good jobs and such, not sure if there are downstream effects to helicopter parenting.
Other than we're going extinct at the rate we're going.
Humanity is 7 billion persons away from going extinct. It;s more than ridiculous to extrapolate to extinction.
And I wonder how much more times dads spend with their kids vs the 1970s
Various sources put it as 3x.
Yep, probably at least that.
I was very much on the fence about having kids before I had
Them
It's easy to understand how kids will change your life for the worse
And hard to understand how much they will change your life for the better
But they will change your life for the better. Kids are great, more people should have them.
It also helps these days that most of our kids live to five and we don't need them to be labor on the family farm. Maybe protectionism, nativism, and anti-vax will mean we'll go back to having children work on farms and then die of mumps, so we'll need more kids.
Having kids absolutely does pass a cost/benefit analysis.
How many people, at the end of the day, regret that they had kids?
Pretty hard thing to poll! I don’t think anybody wants to be on the record—even to themselves—admitting they regret their living, breathing children.
My mother in law certainly does; I strongly suspect that while my BFF is attached to his daughter he probably would've preferred not to have had her (definitely his ex-wife). That said, of the people I know that have children they're the only ones I'm aware of.
It passes cost-benefit analysis if the elder care regime is weak. But the trend for outsourced (to government) provision of both healthcare and retirement funding support undermines the real benefit of having children (and grandchildren) who will care for you in old age. And you need more than one for risk mitigation.
Card B has it right: https://nypost.com/2025/09/10/sports/cardi-b-admits-she-wants-more-kids-as-stefon-diggs-romance-blooms/
Or to the extend that it is an affordability problem, the combination of fewer opportunities for child labor and more perceived need to invest in education makes the affordability problem so severe that politically plausible fixes won’t work.
If family businesses where children could meaningfully contribute from age 12 were common and if children could be given an interest or be apprenticed rather than needing an expensive education, fertility would increase.
This is an odd take.
Twelve years is a long-ass time. When husband and I were deciding whether to have a second child, we didn’t say to ourselves, “If only we could send her to work at age 12, this would be such an easy decision!” The infant and toddler years are super labor intensive for parents, and sending 12-year-olds to work does nothing to change that.
Besides, how many 12-year-olds would be a net negative in the workplace? “Quite a few” would be my guess.
1) Child labor is a spectrum
that extends from 17 year olds working summer jobs to 8 year olds working 8 hour days in sweat shops. The further down the affluence spectrum you go the knife common child labor is.
2) The actual value of 12 year old labor is more subtle. If you already have a 10 year old and a 7 year old, it’s much easier to have a third child knowing that household productive capacity is about to increase.
Furthermore, under the status quo, every dollar spent on the youngest kid constrains the education you can give to the oldest two, The tradeoffs between siblings are very real.
Lyman Stone argues that the South Korean expectation that parents will support their kids till age 25-30 meaningfully contributes to South Korea's lower TFR. Asking parents for 30 years of support per kid is a much bigger ask than ~18 years.
It’s gonna be like that everywhere if AI keeps getting better… You should assume if you’re having a kid today it’ll be a lifelong financial commitment.
I doubt 28 year old men just sit home and play video games without pushback. It’s more complicated.
Religious-nutter run Iran is having trouble with fertility... one of Russia's war aims is stealing Ukrainian children to turn into Russians to replenish their own supply (why they need to kill a 100k plus or so existing Russians to do it escapes me). It's happening basically everywhere except Nigeria.
The obvious solution is uterine replicators, but we don't have the tech or sufficient interest. Seems like a better use of resources for the rich pro-natalists than being laser focused on bigger LLMs.
It is notable that western memes about fertility can't be stopped by the Iranian or North Korean regimes.
I don't think uterine replicators would have much impact.* Pregnancy is hard for sure, but its the 18 years after that deter most people.
*Unless your thinking the government is going to start using uterine replicators and then raising state parented children.
Most men, maybe, but pregnancy itself is a huge deterrent for a lot of women.
it would only have to deter a meaningful fraction of women to have some effect on fertility. i’m sure it does. the easier you make parenting and the more culturally acceptable it is to lightly educate and heavily work your kids, the more kids people will have. very simple really once you strip away all the double-talk.
Is there data on this? I've met women who don't want kids, but never any who said it was because of not wanting to be pregnant.
Most women want kids, but they don't want them when they're in their twenties and just starting their careers. And the problem is that once you hit your mid-30s your fertility starts falling off a cliff. If people could reliably start families in their 40s, it would definitely help the fertility crisis
Dunno about first kids but I know a fair amount of women who don't want additional kids because the first pregnancy was so unpleasant. Not dangerous. Just unpleasant. Morning sickness for 2 months, basically bedridden for weeks at a time, on bedrest for the last trimester, couldn't eat anything but bread and cheese without feeling nauseous, that sort of thing.
Not sure about data but my current partner and several other women I’ve dated have told me this is the reason, it’s a pretty intimate thing to say though.
Well it's what I'd do; way more efficient. This is why Stephen Miller hates Heritage Americans like me...
Extending this a bit, wouldn't it be nice if we could skip children entirely?* I've been trying to figure out the framework to produce fully-fledged adults and I haven't quite gotten there yet.*
*Yes, this is full on sci-fi nonsense, but I can conceptualize how you'd give human beings something like telepathy but speedrunning 15-20 years of education and learning seems a lot harder.
Compared to sub-Saharan Africa yes but middle income countries now have fewer kids. Europeans and East Asians and increasingly even Latin Americans have fewer kids than Americans with a one-kid norm instead of a two-kid norm like we have here because they are poorer and can’t afford the giant houses we have.
I think we will get there eventually.
I think history shows that our melting pot has limits on how many new ingredients can be quickly added. That’s why I strongly support immigration that isn’t chaos or unfettered system gaming. The alternative is this toxic pendulum of backlash and counter backlash.
In what ways does history show that?
Until now, the previous big hitting the brakes on immigration when emergency restrictions were put in place to slow immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Basically it was decided there were too many Polish, Jews, and Italians coming here, and it was some sort of threat to our whiteness.
The backlash and politics was real, but the underlying thought process was idiotic at best. It seems indisputable that in fact we're better off because of that immigration, and the lesson from that should be find ways to overcome the backlash, not just repeat the stupidity.
I'd say there are two aspects to this.
First, I think it's just part of human nature and the way we organize into ingroups and outgroups that there is always a backlash when your group grows too quickly, adding new members who have differences from the status quo. That works at most every level, including nation-states.
Here in the US, we had lots of immigration in the early 20th century - that created a backlash, and after the Depression got started, the door closed until the late 1960s. We are now at a point where we have a larger percentage of foreign-born than the peak back then, so I think we have partly overcome the backlash, but it will never be eliminated. But there is still a limit to the amount of change people will accept and it's not about "whiteness" - there's no country that wants to accept large numbers of foreigners who natives think will end up changing the nature of their country in fundamental ways.
Secondly, there is the issue of resources. Long-term immigration is beneficial, but in the short term, it can pose significant challenges in terms of housing, employment opportunities, and other aspects. It's not the case that the US can accept any level of immigration without substantial negative effects. Could the US handle an influx of 10 million migrants per year, for example? I don't think so. Support systems were straining under the Biden peak which was, IIRC, a bit over 2 million annually.
Now you combine these two and look at countries that have taken on large numbers of people from different countries. Problems seem to start when the foreign-born population reaches about 10-15% for most countries. That's certainly the case in Europe and US, where we peaked at 15.8%. The late-19th/early 20th century peak in the US was ~14.7 %. Then immigration shut down, and that declined to only ~4.7% in 1970.
Rather than try to keep immigration really high and "overcome the backlash" - which I have no idea how that would actually work- I'd prefer to keep a steady state level of immigration that keeps the foreign-born population at around 10-12%, which I think is sustainable.
First, it absolutely was about whiteness in the ‘20s. They weren’t subtle or abashed about it. Keeping out the swarthy races was the point.
Today’s backlash certainly includes some of that: “Can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”, shithole countries, and the great replacement theory give that away.
My real argument is that problem is a misnomer. Yes, then and now, there was a backlash, but it’s based on a false premise. Jewish, Polish, and Italian immigrants were in fact good for-the US, short and long time. There wasn’t a problem, there was ignorance. That doesn’t solve the political challenge, but I think it’s important to not credit that thinking with anything else than refutation. Whatever else we have to do, I don’t think we should credit those folks with being correct on the merits.
It wasn't just about swarthy races (the Irish weren't swarthy), it was also about keeping out Catholics, Jews, and various "others" for reasons that went beyond the melanin content in one's skin. What we call "whiteness" today is far different from any similar definition 120 years ago.
And my point is that there will always be this kind of "othering" of foreigners, regardless of the term used or the actual basis for the othering (nationality, skin color, religion, language, culture, etc.). It's not always about race or skin color, and it certainly isn't always about "white" people.
As for the backlash, I'm not claiming that it's correct on its merits. I'm simply acknowledging that this is the way human societies consistently act. No country, to my knowledge, has taken the position that unlimited immigration is perfectly acceptable. The US has consistently done better than just about any country currently or historically at accepting and integrating immigrants, but even we have limits. Until someone comes up with a way to change that dynamic, my view is that it's simply a reality that must be dealt with.
This conversation reminds me of a very interesting 2019 book, “Whiteshift” by Eric Kaufmann. One of the key insights is that ethnic majorities are very sensitive to the rate of change, and the degree of assimilation, rather than just totally opposed to immigration or the long range prospect of demographic change.
I think you're right and that recent history shows that beyond a certain point immigration becomes a threat to democracy. Whether anyone thinks thats right or wrong is sort of besides the point. It just is. Eventually you have to pick and the choice to me seems quite obvious, which is that you stay a democracy and revisit immigration when the time is right.
One billion Americans sounds kind of extreme though doesn’t it? That would take us to near-Chinese levels of density and very few people would like that. Even setting aside the “Great Replacement” type concerns. It strikes me as one of the most unpopular framings possible for more immigration.
The more popular framing is probably “it’s nice to have the freedom to go where you want and not that many people are probably going to actually move to your area.” Right-wing people complain that this is how the 1965 immigration reform was actually passed.
Matt argued in the book that it would be more like France style density, even after taking Alaska out of the equation.
France’s density is 122 per sq km and China’s is 151. Nowhere near Belgium at 383 or Netherlands at 529.
People think they care about national population density but that is one of the most meaningless statistics in terms of what actually matters to one’s life. Can you really tell the difference between the next city being 50 miles away and 75 miles away? And yet that represents more than a factor of 2 in population density.
Almost all of France is good inhabitable land but a lot of China (and the US) is deserts and mountains. China is very dense—you go there and take the high-speed rail out of Shanghai and it’s endless 40-story apartment buildings for hours (hundreds of kms). Most people wouldn’t like that.
I think it's misleading to look at the land right by the rail and think that's telling you about the distance to travel to get to open spaces. If you compare the population density map of China (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs1kvplwfsmu41.jpg) and France (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_in_France.png), you can see that there is a strip right along the river from Shanghai to Nanjing that has parts with comparable density to Paris, but even going in the direction to Hangzhou, density along that stretch is comparable to Paris suburbs, like Boulogne or Creteil. And once you're past Hangzhou, you're in places with similar density to Champagne or Dijon.
The scales on those maps are different. France gets under 300/sqkm in the Paris suburbs. Going West on the rail line from Shanghai you don’t hit that until you’re well past Wuhan.
Did he cover how much of the Great American Desert probably isn't worth inhabiting? We've got lots of space, but much of it sucks...
A huge chunk of China is even more uninhabitable desert, and as Kenny says in my reply to me, their density is not much higher than France's.
"That would take us to near-Chinese levels of density and very few people would like that."
No one lives in Manhattan - it's too crowded.
Anyone who wants more density should drive on the 405 in L.A. at rush hour (and now rush hour seems to be 5am to 10pm, lol). I suppose higher density would equate with more saturation with mass transit but still....
Does more density nationally mean that the west side of LA has higher density? Or does it mean that Bakersfield and Fresno are as big as San Francisco? Or does it mean that there are as many small towns and exurbs throughout California and west Texas as there are in Indiana and Georgia?
Overcrowded standing room only public transit is no fun either!
I’m still in the camp of “too soon to see the effects” as far as this tariff stuff, immigration crack down and general policy chaos unleaded by Trump and yet his numbers on immigration have tanked anyway (even if Dems are still way worse).
Point being, if the real world effects of this immigration crackdown start being felt more 1-2 years from now, wouldn’t shock me if the pro immigration side has “a moment” again.
We saw it in Trump's first term.
That will be the thermostatic reaction against Trump, not really a "pro-immigration" moment.
As long as no one goes and over interprets it again, that's good... The asylum thing was such a bloody stupid move...
Trump's numbers on immigratino have declined but hardly tanked - remaining his best numbers overall and in context of wider "support" for his general conceptual actions but modest backlash over the most extreme stuff.
That's far different from his Economy or Inflation numbers that have in fact genuinely tanked.
Yeah, i hate it, but his numbers on crime and immigration are propping Trump up and keeping him from falling into Term 2 W territory.
It's not unusual for there to be a backlash following surges in immigration. The foreign born are at the highest percentage of the population since the 1930s, and close to the late 19th century peak.
It's natural to take a pause and let the issue fade away.* Then we'll no doubt see increased numbers of immigrants coming again.
* Which is not to defend the vicious, damaging Trump policies, and it's no surprise that the thermostatic response to that is hurting Trump's popularity. Which is not to say that absent Trump there would be widespread support for increased immigration levels.
Yup.
Looking at comparables in European reactions as well, it's pretty clear that there's some trigger threshold in percent of visible not-native born over some percent of the total population that definately triggers reaction.
Look at UK and the reaction to the huge influx Poles that seems to have been a quite major driver of Brexit.
There's a huge muddle area between Trump immigration crack down, and 1 billion Americans.
And that's where the vast majority of americans are
We acknowledge that immigration is good, but that the rate of immigration needs to be low.And slow enough for people to assimilate
Too much cultural change too fast is bad
There can be disagreements on just how bad cultural change is--even I might get pressed on it if the perfect storm was concocted. But if there are too many jobs available that the native population can't fill on their own, then there will be tradeoffs against many other aspects of quality of life in favor of whatever cultural status quo wants to be preserved.
agreed, so the political branch needs to take those various things into account and then pass a law that achieves the desired compromise.
I feel Coates is a "truth teller" in the RFK jr or Candace Owens way, he firmly believes things that are ridiculous and obviously false. It used to be weird things about UFOs,now he limits to really dumb views on maths etc being racist.
It goes back to the point about terrorists, people on the centre left do seem to have a blindness to the most ridiculous and unpleasant people on their side.
Journalists don't dive enough into the pseudoscience, I don't think he talks about epigenetics in the way many of his allies do, but he believes in negative forces that effect some people based on the life of their great-great granndparents but don't impact the children of Holocaust survivors or Vietnamese boat people. His world view involves lots of mysterious forces that can influence people without having any visible effect.
The obvious guess is that the conclusion is the important thing, and the argument for why is secondary.
Yes, but if we judged people for having bad epistemological processes, then we would have to exclude almost in the public sphere. We can only afford to exclude the obviously insane.
Eh I’d push back on that and say Coates is perfectly pleasant despite basically being wrong about everything
I don't think Owens or RFK are unpleasant in person.
Didn't RFK basically drive his wife to suicide?
Sure crackpots can be pleasant
That doesn't mean you should take anything.They say seriously
The 2026 Massachusetts rent control ballot question is abysmal. [https://www.mass.gov/doc/25-21-an-initiative-petition-to-protect-tenants-by-limiting-rent-increases/download]
When I first heard about it I assumed it would merely repeal the state law outlawing rent control. Nope: it would limit annual rent increases in the covered dwellings to "not exceed the annual increase in Consumer Price Index or 5%, whichever is lower, in any 12-month period."
The mind boggles. The only way to make a profit in real dollars under those constraints is to cut costs every single year (itself an ominous prospect for renters). Why would anyone invest in rental units with so many superior alternatives?
Don’t increase rent, just subdivide units residents are renting every so often.
Tenement living for all.
Many more people have been renters than have been landlords. They think about rent only from the perspective of the tenant. I think people don’t hear the difference between “rent should increase on average by the same amount as general inflation” and “rent should never increase by more than general inflation”. Increasing on average by more than general inflation is just as much a problem for the tenant as increasing on average by less than general inflation is for the landlord. But people don’t realize the law they are writing is enforcing the one, rather than preventing the other.
Maybe a good way to answer why some liberals admire terrorist scumbags like Bill Ayers is to think about why a lot of conservatives who would have and will never storm the Capitol nonetheless admire and defend the January 6 rioters who do. Or why western cowards who would never put their own life at risk for anything and who also don't support rape, murder, or hostage taking domestically admire and defend Hamas nihilist rapists. Or why Second Amendment enthusiasts think the purpose of the thing is to ensure that citizens can commit violent treason if they dislike the government.
It's what Tom Wolfe called "radical chic", combined with the fact that a lot of people have a romantic sense of political revolution. They think George Washington and "when in the course of human events". It's very hard to convince people who grow up with founding myths of dashing revolutionaries overthrowing tyrants that actually most "violent revolutionaries" are just evil unimportant petty thugs who need to go to prison and never be accepted by polite society again.
I think a lot of people look at old terrorist lefty radicals who no longer actively advocate violence as something like dogs after neutering. Once the wildness has been extracted, they MIGHT have something interesting to offer.
A super important point that they should teach in school
I think Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey type realignments are more interesting because, in some ways, their politics haven’t changed at all. There is an internal coherence to their politics focused on civil liberties and restrained foreign policy. But there is also just a contrarian disposition.
I read somewhere that Ezra Klein is like anti-Glenn Greenwald, in both good and bad ways. Ezra Klein is high trust, and rationalizes choices made by elites because he has an inherent belief in the power of elites. When something goes wrong, the “groups”, “the senate, filibuster” are to blame, not really powerful politicians. In all this election post mortem, have Ezra or people doing this professionally admitted that Kamala was just a stupid and unimpressive dud, didn’t have it in her to actually win?
GG, on the other hand, takes it to the other extreme. He instinct is to identify powerful entity in a fight and put all his weight to defend the least powerful, whether good/bad or how immoral. He has an inherent distrust of politicians.
"Ezra Klein is high trust, and rationalizes choices made by elites because he has an inherent belief in the power of elites. "
I don't read enough post-Weeds Ezra to know if this is true but it is notable that Ezra's biggest triumph in recent memory was realizing Biden was too old 3 months before all the other take-sters(and 3 years after the voters.
The Glenn Greenwald types seem to become defined but their enemies and their POV just sort of orbits around the people who criticize them.
Yeah I give Ezra high marks for that bold call (I thought the same but why couldn't most Democrats admit to this? Loyalty? Obtuseness? Ageism?), too bad few jumped on the bandwagon early to strategize a more coherent replacement candidate. It still boggles me that they put Biden on the debate stage with Trump.
I think they couldn't admit it because they thought doing so would lead to Kamala being nominated which they thought would be even worse. It was only when it became clear that Kamala had a better shot than Biden that they switched
Glenn Greenwald only takes whatever political position is advantageous to Putin.
It's amazing how much of his worldview seems driven by paranoia and resentment. The fact he is a crank should have been clear to people even back in the Bush years.
He was saying things they wanted to hear.
Alas, that seems to be the defining driver of populism.
Arguably the two of you aren't disagreeing. If his "instinct is to identify the powerful entity in a fight and put all his weight to defending the least powerful," then since the US is the most powerful country in the world it is therefore the ultimate source of evil in the world. Therefore, the overriding goal of all politics is to oppose the US and undermine its power. Therefore, since Putin is an opponent of the US, Putin is on the side of good and whatever is advantageous to him is also good. Likewise, since Trump is a bad president who is destroying the US from within, Trump is also on the side of good. A good president of the US, in contrast, would be evil.
I think he is just fundamentally opposed to the United States national security alliance system we have built up over the world and thinks we should just dismantle it.
He is just a proponent of authoritarian imperialism because Western liberalism supposedly derailed the Soviet’s global communist imperial ambitions.
US is number 2, let's be real
GG and similar people have been ideologically consistent - they are anti-establishment and specifically against the US foreign policy establishment and federal law enforcement. The partisan valence of both switched sides as one effect of Trump’s disruption.
In some ways yes. It is such an interesting dynamic because is it a migration from far left to far right back to far left now (post Oct7) or literally someone with a psychotic fixation on a few issues (foreign policy + civil rights re national security) whose valence has changed since a bunch of the former neocon Bulwark types are now permanently within the Dem coalition?
I don’t think he’s migrated on those issues, I think the left and right have. During the Bush years it was the left that was skeptical of the national security state and intelligence community. With Trump, that has switched, with Democrats and much of the left seeing them as not problematic at all, but as noble civil servants, while the GoP and the right thinks they are part of the “deep state” conspiracy.
GG, Taibbi and others have stayed largely the same - they still hate the national security state and establishment and the ways in which that establishment uses American power.
At least that’s the way I look at it. As a former intelligence analyst and part of that defense establishment, I was and remain opposed to most of their ideas and arguments which I don’t think have changed all that much.
I think a better way to put it is that Ezra thinks in terms of systems and incentives.
> He has an inherent distrust of politicians.
I don't think this is right. He has a inherent distrust of politicians *in power*. In the Biden years he was one of the biggest anti-anti-Trump voices.
I don't actually think she's smarter than the average commenter here. The average commenter here is really intelligent. It's a high bar. That doesn't mean we'd make better presidents
I think she was not presidential level smart and it’s a lil offensive to pretend that it’s racism or sexism to point that out. I heard Indian Americans say she won’t even be the smartest person in Edison, New Jersey (a majority south Asian town). Obama as a Black man had to be smarter than most candidates to prevail, and Hilary’s problem was her cynicism/low moral character not her intelligence. I don’t agree with conservative politics, especially foreign policy hawkishness, but Nikki Haley is a very competent version of that kind of politics. There’s ideology and then there’s just talent/competence. You don’t have to agree with Zohran’s politics to appreciate that he’s the best version of that kind of socialist politics. Ezra’s focus on ideological big tent is well taken but can he admit that Kamala was just not the best version of the politics she represents? I also think if a person with more moral character had OG MAGA politics: foreign policy restraint, econ moderation, and immigration restrictionism, it would have even more appeal.
She couldn’t talk contemporaneously, on a holistic level, she seemed kind of empty and unable to hold her own intellectually without wavering. It made her appear weak. I would say Trump is unique on many dimensions but yes I would agree Kamala and Bush prob have similar level of intelligence and I know a ton of libs were quite offended at how stupid Bush was, besides disagreeing with him on policy
Responding only to the opening of this post, which for some reason pissed me off lol.
I suppose I agree with Matt that Democrats should just go ahead and coalesce around Geoff Duncan as our best chance to win. Maybe that’s the end of the story.
But it’s awfully annoying as both a process and result, and I think “winners-first” advocates need to be a bit more careful in their pitches.
Matt says the mayor of the largest city in the state wouldn’t be a good nominee because of two reasons aside from general mayoral underperformance: 1) she wasn’t great at her job and 2) someone else, who happens to be a completely different black woman albeit with similar views/strategic positioning, has already lost twice. Relatedly, I happen to dislike Mayor Bottoms’ PA voiceovers in Hartsfield-Jackson. OK.
Is there anything in the post about how Duncan performed in his job as LG, which is probably 1/10th the job of Atlanta mayor? Or even what the fuck he has ever done professionally except bucking Trump and flip-flopping on fundamental values? It could be really great! But I don’t know either way and in my view it’s unseemly to just gloss over it.
Georgia isn’t Alabama. Trump is 1-1 in his last two elections there and the state has two Democratic Senators who’ve won multiple elections. As Matt points out, Sen. Warnock won by reaching out to Geoff Duncan types. However, he’s not literally Geoff Duncan — and Democrats in theory should have *more* room in non-federal elections.
“KLB bad, GD good” might be true, but I feel it’s a lazy, inappropriate way to make the case.
I thought Matt was arguing that GD's viability was a good sign, not that he was clearly a better candidate than Bottoms.
"Democrats opening their hearts to ex-Republicans without demanding that they disavow everything they’ve ever said or done is how you expand the tent"
That quote was an admonishment, not an evaluation of the situation. Literally his entire premise was that GD is better. Which, he probably is! But I thought the argument was off-putting.
It's clear he doesn't think much of Bottoms ("Bottoms was not a particularly popular or successful mayor of Atlanta"), and I agree that would have been unsatisfying as an assessment of the race. I just think Matt was making a different kind of point.
Now I’m getting really pedantic. But I agree he was attempting to make a different kind of point. But instead he made this particular point in a very unsatisfying way that raised my hackles about how serious the actual project is being presented and can be convincing to folks like me and to my left.
Fair. Anyone that reads the comments know I'll quibble hard when the point is important enough to me.
Bucking Trump is not a small thing. Almost every other Republican who has done it has left politics altogether.
Yeah. that does really demonstrate a level of character that is vitally important to judging someone. It might not be dispositive, but it's a large enough check on the pro side that the opponent had better have something where they also show some extraordinariness to overcome it.
You have to understand that in Matt's brain all of politics is taking positions on issues and voters have perfect knowledge of all those positions. Being rational people, they choose the person closest to their position. So if that's your starting point, then what Matt says makes perfect sense and is correct.
The first is arguably a fair representation, the second is clearly wrong. He’s always pounding the table for people to highlight their popular positions (Biden should talk more about the increase in oil production during his term) and downplay their unpopular ones. That explicitly recognizes that voters don’t know everything and you have to tell them (over and over again) the things you want them to know.
The problem with this view is that it assumes that people learn about politicians from the messaging of politicians.
I’m not sure that’s actually true anymore.
I don’t think it is so much which positions you take that matters, but rather which positions you don’t take. If you’re pro-open borders it doesn’t matter how charismatic you are or how good at ”framing” your policies. You have to rid yourself of certain - to the popular majority - toxic beliefs and policies before you stand any chance of winning.
I think it's just based on policy positioning. Matt claims (without citation, to your point) that Bottoms is criticizing Duncan for not being progressive enough. Assuming that's true, then clearly Bottoms is to the left of Duncan. Given that Abrams lost (narrowly) in 2018, during a blue wave election, it seems pretty obvious that we need a candidate who is more moderate rather than a candidate who is more progressive
Weird for matt to make the common mistake of assuming a black machine city politician is liberal. He doesn’t with Bowser.
Black city politics are their own thing.
That is all true. Personally, as someone who’s extremely sympathetic to running the more moderate viable candidate in statewide races in purple states, I don’t think it’s sufficient to say “well KCB is attacking GD from the left so GD should be the nominee.” This shit needs to mean more than that.
Taking a step back, I don’t think this specific race is necessarily the best example of my argument because I’m confident that GD is the best nominee. But it’s certainly not guaranteed and the flippancy around it PMO.
Was Bottoms that bad? Or did she just get dealt maybe the worst structural situation to have to deal with BLM? Just no good choices for her
Bottoms was widely considered to be a failed mayor who did not even attempt to secure a second term and skipped out to a do-nothing outreach job in the Biden administration. As a Georgia Democrat I do not support her campaign.
I don’t know! I need to do a lot more research to form an opinion either way. I admit that. But that’s sort of my point. When you’re trying to sell a Democratic electorate on foregoing a serious Democratic politician in favor of someone who discovered women’s bodily autonomy two seconds ago, it would be nice to at least hear about both their records and a more affirmative case. The tactical stuff only gets you so far.
Curious, how would you vote if you did the research, determined after a fair evaluation that Bottoms would be a better performer than Duncan as governor, but also determined after a fair evaluation that Duncan was more likely to win?
I look at the world today and think winning and not losing is the most important criteria, because the upside of a less personally attractive to me candidate winning is smaller than the downside of that candidate losing.
This is a good point - I think progressives don't like the dirty business of embracing some rando who's 'only' more likely to win because in their hearts, they really want an electorate that supports the 'best' candidate (who may be the black mayor of the state's major city who rural voters are likely pre-polarized against). That ideal electorate does not exist, largely, but heart over head candidates are a trap that primary voters in particular can't easily quit. Recent polling suggests they are more ready to be coldly pragmatic and back winners, but we'll see. Literally every other variable is downstream of statewide electabilty at this point imo.
How strong were the qualifications of Warnock and Ossoff before they won their elections? Warnock’s re-election qualification was “Not Hershel Walker, please God!”
Trump barely won georgia
Brian kemp way outperformed trump and crushed it
I remember seeing KLB do a couple of TV interviews a number of years ago and thought she did well in them. I liked her affect at the time. I have no other data to base an opinion on. But I do think the mayor thing is a fair point by Matt though. Not that she performed poorly as mayor (I have no idea) but just it's very common for big-city mayors to get tarnished in the eyes of voters elsewhere in the state simply because they were mayors of the state's biggest city.
Fair point by you though that Abrams is a different person from KLB. Just because KLB has a particular strategy vis-a-vis Duncan in the primary doesn't mean that she'd replicate Abrams' crappy strategy in the general.
I'm pretty sold on the winners first argument when the chance of losing is real, which it clearly is in Georgia. I'm probably going to mostly agree with almost anyone running on the democratic side. I'm certainly going to agree with any of them more than I agree with any Republican, so who is likeliest to win is to me the best metric, absent some strong reason to believe the person would be terrible at the job.
It didn’t annoy me to the same degree—perhaps because I am primed to think Bottoms is no good based on progressive big city mayor who got famous during Floyd vibes.
But (I) I too would be really interested to hear more about the pros and cons of each of policy and (ii) your comment made me admit some bias to myself — a black lady who is progressive coded and involved in the Biden administration just feels bad to me — Kamala / woke era trauma? Racist assumptions? Maybe!
I don’t think there’s any doubt that a white man has a better shot than a black woman running statewide in GA. But I would like that case made explicitly (or not!) rather than just “Stacey Abrams lost.”
"wouldn’t the most honorable and politically prudent course of action for the Democratic Party have been for her to step aside? If she truly believed those identities were significant liabilities, why insist on running in what Democrats themselves framed as an existential contest against Trump?"
It seems like a mistake to take anything a politician says in a "Why I lost Book" seriously. It's constant excuse making.
The "throw under the bus" phrasing should be thrown under a bus. Then the bus should go in reverse and back over the phrasing. Then it should run over the phrasing one more time, for good measure. And anyone who uses the phrasing thereafter should be dragged by the police to the town square, there at High Noon in the sight of G-d and the public to be given three lashes with the cane.
Haha, what do you dislike so much about it?? (Just curious)
JD Vance has no rizz. He may win the 2028 Republican nomination by default, but his number of devoted cultists will be much, much smaller than Trump's. And that means whatever version of Trumpism he adopts likely won't have as much support, initially, as Trump himself does.
He's gonna have to push Trump down the stairs if he's seriously hoping to be president in 2029...
Pessimistically, Vance seems like the Maduro to Trump's Chavez, or, more optimistically, Sheinbaum to Obrador. It's tough to follow a messy, charismatic populist.
Has Sheinbaum been better than Obrador?
I think so. Seems more pragmatic on dealing with cartels, and definitely has fewer weird hobbyhorses like obsessive love for the failed state-run oil company or wanting to build specific expensive infrastructure projects just because they sound good.
I agree but there are lots of Romney voters who backed Clinton, Biden and Harris who won't hate Vance in the same way.
That was probably more true in 2017 than in 2028.
And do those people outnumber the low-info voters who turned out for Trump, previously didn't vote or voted for Obama, and who may fade back into the woodwork once Trump is no longer in the picture? I have no idea.
We willl see.
The high info Romney types were turned off by things like the treatment of Zelensky and embrace of the AfD. Whether or not the Romney-Clinton voters are numerous enough to make a difference in 2028 is likely the bigger question.
I am sceptical that either of those things are in the top ten things Romney-Harris voters care about.
I think you're underestimating how much anti-Russian sentiment means to that class of older American hawks. It was Romney who called Russia the US biggest geopolitical adversary.
Viktor Orban has no rizz either.
I agree that Vance won't be as electorally successful as Trump, but if Vance takes office before 2028, he'll have the ability to use the levers of power in an Orbanian fashion before he ever has to face a primary or general electorate.
But does he have aura?
If you have to ask if someone has aura, that means they don't.
In reference to the question what turns people radical....
For a lot of white people in my bubble, the radicalizing thing was when 'woke' ideology was imposed on their kids. Sure. sitdown and listen. Fine. We all need to be heard. Maybe you shouldn't have advantages--and explicit disadvantages at times. But when you start imposing those things onto my children I will go to war with you. I will not standby and allow my children to be discriminated against because of some perceived injustice generations ago, which they (and I) are innocent of--and whose ancestors weren't even in the country for.
That's why i think focus on race and level-setting by holding others back (2 wrongs don't make a right) is a loser. Both on the merits and politically. I literally don't care where else you stand.....and i still voted Kamala cause Trump is that bad.
going to the big question of what happens to the coalitions after trump leaves. I think there are a decent amount of never-trump republicans waiting to come back if some semblance of law-abiding-ness comes back. I think the cultural shift at the bottom of the SES ladder is more permanent (and a longer term trend).