The power of fiction

Plus: Alternate Humphrey, big worries about AI, and the generational shift on Israel

We have a long mailbag this week (the first five questions are from our GiveDirectly donors), so instead of a long preamble, I’ll just share a picture I took of the sun setting over Blue Hill Bay that I’m proud of.

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Tom G: The narrative fiction that I’ve consumed has almost certainly impacted my values and (center-left) politics. There are obvious instances, like stories with empathetic portrayals of minority characters and dogged individualists set against powerful institutions, but I’m sure there are more subtle examples too. In a world where a large segment of the culture is hyper-sensitive to “wokeness” in pop culture, what sort of stories (movies, TV shows, video games, etc.) can move the needle politically? Can you think of any contemporary examples that have had a discernible impact for the better? For the worse?

In a lot of ways, I think it’s precisely in times of backlash that cultural works are a powerful force for either driving or cementing change.

For example, the #MeToo movement and moment have a mixed legacy and are facing some backlash, just like most things that are left-coded. And yet, popular culture continues to reinforce good, pro-social messages — things like sexual harassment, date rape, and domestic violence are consistently stigmatized in a way they weren’t in the past. I don’t want to see Blade Runner canceled over that one scene, but more recent Ridley Scott movies and the Blade Runner sequel don’t contain anything like that, nor would any other mainstream pop culture these days. Movies both reflect the norms of their time and also set norms for young people and new generations, and they often do so implicitly without a lot of hubbub.

The politics of standing up squarely and saying “foreign-born people are human beings whose interests count, morally speaking!” are sort of inherently not great. But the prospects of telling stories that depict foreign-born people as humans with lives and problems and interests that count for something are as strong as they’ve ever been, because at the end of the day, it’s true that foreign-born people — whether they are immigrants or recipients of foreign aid or beneficiaries of international trade or victims of war or whatever else — are, in fact, humans with lives and problems and interests that count for something. This is conveyed more effectively, I think, the less heavy-handed it is.

In terms of contemporary examples, one that I think is bad is that, as Christian Britschgi has written, there’s a long tradition of Hollywood depicting real estate developers as a uniquely suspect sub-category of business person. This is generally not an explicit policy argument, which is part of why it’s effective. You get the sense that, in general, it’s totally fine and good to have a business where you make products and then sell them to people who want them… just not if the product is buildings.

I think a positive example is that the incredibly successful run of Marvel movies that concluded with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame makes its villain an explicit Population Bomb guy. I think all the efflorescence of YIMBY politics and “abundance” thinking that we’ve seen over the past five years is, of course, primarily due to my 2012 book The Rent Is Too Damn High. But the audience for the Avengers movies was a bit bigger.

Ben F: What would be different if Humphrey had won in ’68?

The 1968 election is a really interesting one. On the one hand, it was incredibly close. Humphrey ran just 0.7 percentage points behind Nixon (although it should be said that Nixon had a much more efficient coalition in the Electoral College), and it’s easy to imagine small changes resulting in a Humphrey victory.

On the other hand, this is a race in which more than 13 percent of the vote went to George Wallace. The macro political trend was clearly the crackup of the New Deal political coalition, with the Civil Rights Act putting an end to the Solid South at just the time that Democrats were struggling with the Vietnam War, plus the “normal” problems of trying to win a third term in a row. Nixon followed up his narrow 1968 win with a landslide in 1972, and Carter’s one term was a mess, so in retrospect, we see 1968 as the dawn of a whole new political era. But it was a very close election.

And I think it’s entirely possible that had Humphrey won, he would have benefitted from the incumbent-friendly economic circumstances of 1972, as well as being able (as Nixon was) to de-escalate American involvement in Vietnam in a way that voters were happy with. Could he have won a Nixon-esque landslide? No. The basic tensions inside the coalition would still have been there. And a more liberal federal judiciary would’ve been handing down unpopular decisions. But I think he could’ve squeezed it out. Meanwhile, we know that the historical Nixon in his first term signed the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, along with the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Consumer Product Safety Act, followed by the Endangered Species Act in 1973. A similar legislative track record under a Humphrey administration would be understood by everyone to reflect the remarkable vitality of the Great Society political coalition rather than its demise.

On some level, of course, I am purposefully describing a world that is not very different than our historical world. But I do think it’s extremely different on a level of vibes and narrative. You don’t get the sense that Cold War Liberalism fundamentally failed in Vietnam or that the accomplishments of the civil rights movement made center-left politics in the United States fundamentally unworkable. Let’s say Ed Muskie gets the presidential nomination in 1976 and loses, possibly even loses very badly, but that still leaves us with the fact that Kennedy/Johnson/Humphrey led a full Second New Deal that completely transformed the country.

Ronald Reagan would come into office with a mandate to roll back the excesses of this era and could enact a lot of the major deregulations (of natural gas, of passenger aviation, of trucking, of craft beer) that many people associate with the historical Reagan but that were actually enacted by Jimmy Carter. These are good ideas, but they would not by themselves have large enough short-term macroeconomic impacts to offset the major inflationary headwinds of the era. Because of this, I think Reagan would lose in 1980 to Jerry Brown, who would then have his own unsatisfactory four- year term of austerity budgeting and interest group infighting. The failed Reagan years would discredit the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which finally has a successful eight-year run from 1985-1992 under the stewardship of George H.W. Bush.

What’s interesting to me about this is that the short-term policy implications of the switch are small. Humphrey mostly signs the same liberal legislation that the historical Nixon signed, and Reagan mostly signs the same deregulatory legislation that the historical Carter signed.

But the long-term trajectory of the country is very different. Monetary policy dynamics between 1981 and 1984 meant that historical Reagan crushed inflation and ran for re-election during an economic boom in a way that validated crackpot tax policy theories. In this alternate universe, GOP funny money supply-side thought never gets entrenched. And with Humphrey serving two terms and Democrats losing power in 1976 because voters are upset about inflation, we don’t get the kind of hyper-pessimism about race that was a dominant theme of 1980s progressive intellectual life.

I think Democrats largely avoid the identitarian turn and hew closer to the MLK/Rustin view that the future of racial justice is basically just continuous with egalitarian economic policy. Some kind of universal health care bill passes in 1993. A more liberal Supreme Court abolishes the death penalty, orders equitable K-12 school funding, and keeps the Second Amendment narrow and the Commerce Clause broad.

Spencer G: I’m a 30-something straight white guy who’s been trying (unsuccessfully) to publish fiction for the last decade — I’ve got an agent, shopped around 5 different novels, and gotten a lot of polite no thank yous from publishing houses. My sense is that it has always been difficult to publish a first novel, but there have been a few articles recently talking about the dearth of debut novels coming out specifically from writers in my demographic. So while my best guess is that my lack of success probably has more to do with my own writing than broader industry trends, I’m curious to hear a) if you have any thoughts on the trend and b) what advice you would have for someone in my shoes.

I have no useful advice to offer about this. As an observation about the discourse, I would say that this is a “three things can be true at the same time” situation:

1. It is just objectively hard to get a novel published, and that’s always true for all kinds of people (this I know a lot about, courtesy of my father and his parents).

2. The market matters. If literary fiction by straight white men were flying off the shelves, it’s not like you’d see a publisher’s conspiracy to prevent books by these authors from coming to print.

3. But given the generally bleak economics of literary fiction (2) and the consequent general difficulty of anyone getting published (1), you end up with a more politicized process in which it’s certainly cooler to champion new voices.

But I do kind of think, given the general tenor of political views in literary circles (including the grumpy white men who constitute the right-wing of this discourse), that the market forces are the most underrated factor here. Zoomed out globally, plenty of entertainment content by straight white men sees the light of day. Very little of that content is literary fiction (as opposed to Jack Reacher books or movies about Superman), because the market for literary fiction is small and within the small market, most of the customers are women. One thing I’m toying with is doing a gender-swapped version of the poptimists versus rockism discourse, but for books. But I’m not quite ready to go there yet.

Robert M: In honor of having recently started Marquez’s The General in His Labyrinth, why did Gran Colombia fall apart so quickly while the fledgling United States was able to endure? And in an alternate-history take, how would today’s geopolitical situation be different if Gran Colombia had survived (or would it)?

I don’t have any special insights on the instability of Gran Colombia beyond what you’ll read on Wikipedia or what can be gleaned from season five of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast.

In a lot of ways, I think the more interesting question is why the post-independence United States of America proved to be so politically stable. And here I think you have to make some appeals to the old-fashioned notion that, despite their many well-known flaws, the political leaders of the founding generation had some major civic virtues. From George Washington voluntarily relinquishing power to Alexander Hamilton refusing to do a corrupt bargain with Aaron Burr to Thomas Jefferson deciding not to do an authoritarian clamp down against the defeated Federalists, a bunch of things went right.

The American political tradition has deep roots in versions of English liberalism that have served us well, but I also think some of these events in the Early Republic had a high degree of contingency.

Simon A: You expressed pessimism, in a previous mailbag question, about the ability of American political institutions to govern superintelligence, citing the risk of a president “selling the country down the river to foreign autocrats.” Since then, we’ve seen a potential lifting of export controls on some advanced AI chips to China as part of a trade deal, and now the White House announced AI-related executive orders. Do these developments confirm your fears? Also, how do you see the political landscape for AI policy evolving? Could it become another polarized issue or could there be popular consensus that a “popularist” could leverage?

I find this export controls piece to be particularly bleak, because on its face, “America should try to maintain a technological lead over China” is already part of the consensus in America. But Trump is so corrupt and so focused on childish misunderstandings of world trade that he can’t seem to stick with the correct policy here.

Eliza Rodriguez: You wrote earlier this week that Democrats should take the need for ideological diversity in certain sectors more seriously. Your two examples were academia and law enforcement.

In academia, you are hired based on your work and how it contributes to the university as a whole. Ideology is fair game in hiring or rejecting potential candidates. For this reason, I think it is possible and desirable to set out on the mission to hire more conservative professors at universities.

But hiring more liberal cops? How could this be done?