To take the parallels with conservatives even further, I have to admit I also enjoy watching Rs crash out over the far left in deep blue cities, perhaps intuitively understanding how satisfying it must have felt in 2016 for even mod conservatives “to own the libs”. I can now imagine center right Rs watching anti-Trump libs go hysterically overboard and sometimes embarrass themselves in 2016 as I find myself observing from a distance as conservatives lose their minds to the point of claiming “that the phrase taxing the rich is akin to some racial slurs”. Even as a mod Dem, there’s something satisfying watching these people embarrass themselves.
I keep hearing this weird, I guess, defense of the Biden administration on Spirit along the lines of "airline mergers are hard and the Spirit - JetBlue merger probably would have gone badly."
Who cares? This is Howl's Moving Goalposts?
We went from Spirit - JetBlue is going to be bad for consumers because of the power of the merged duo to "good thing JetBlue ended up not making a terrible mistake."
It's incoherently trying to defend a shoddy policy decision.
In fact, as I argued in my question on this subject, the FTC should have cared MORE about JetBlue when they were making their decision. If they care about competition in the airline industry, making sure JetBlue is a viable competitor to the legacy airlines and Southwest was more important than whether Spirit lowered consumer prices for another year or two, as it was already clear that things were going quite badly for them as a low cost carrier. The fact the FTC didn't care about this and negged the merger might have saved JetBlue a lot of pain, but it was purely accidental and not a result of good policy decisions.
Agree 100%. It seems at a minimum plausible that the merged airline would have survived. And as you write, the fact that the merger may have gone badly does not vindicate the decision to block it. That was certainly not the argument used at the time!
How would a theoretical world where rich guys accepted “slightly higher” taxes change anything? At any given level of taxation, Democrats will still be the party that wants them incrementally higher, and Republicans will want them incrementally lower. This dynamic is actually one of the more reasonable and sane things about our politics imho.
This seems bonkers to me, and a case of completely failing to understand your opponent. Liberals are obsessed with taxing the rich and racial justice, it is true and that obsession is distorting your thinking here. If you changed nothing about Trump other than acceptance of slightly higher taxes and friendlier tomAmerican blacks almost all of the bad crazy shit he does would be unchanged (tariffs, immigration crackdown, lawlessness, Iran, corruption, DOGE killing millions, etc.).
In fact, a Republican Party built around “we will lower taxes and ensure a colorblind level playing field that jettisons all critical theory nonsense [which liberals would surely interpret, perhaps correctly, as anti black in effect at minimum] would be the start of a much saner Republican politics than we have now! Though I don’t think it would work politically.
Personally, I think you don’t get from here to sanity without sane people adopting immigration restriction and elimination of racial patronage as policy planks. Now it’s just the America First populist lunatics who have that in their platform but, as in elections abroad, these positions can be adopted by more normal right of center politicians are return a sense of normalcy.
(1) just doesn't seem true? The US already pays a similar fraction of GDP on healthcare as Europe, where (generally speaking) broad-based taxes are levied on the entire population, partially through VAT. To fund anything like universal health care, everyone needs to accept higher taxes, and the increases probably won't be slight.
There is this weird fiction that we can continually tax fewer and fewer people and somehow afford more government transfers and services.
All these attitudes do is make those who pay taxes feel like suckers (usually upper middle class people.) It really make public provision and governance zero sum when you have a NOVA city council members going on Kojo’s show saying they want to increase taxes on those who pay the most taxes to give a local tax cut to everyone else.
In Maryland and Virginia all the government cuts resulted in lost tax revenue. Rather than cut transfer and services programs enacted during the covid windfall politicians are looking to increase taxes on already highly taxed households.
It’s not sustainable because it creates a constituency against those in power.
I beat my head against the wall for several minutes trying to come up with a "Zeno's Paradox of Taxation" bit, but couldn't stick the landing. Every iteration it got 50% better, but never quite hit the mark...
On your 2nd point - why do you think that's true? I feel like there's no one major force of cultural divide, but if I had to choose one I'd probably put immigration, education, or gender above race. The latter two increasingly influence the communication styles and sensibilities of the two parties and in a good chunk of the country Black people are such a tiny portion of the population that I can hardly imagine local conservatives shaping their views around them.
Well, race is a major thing, cultural change in general.
There have always been about 25-30% of the country that are reactionaries who want to go back 30-40 years. They used to be more distributed and perhaps more importantly, the elites of each party largely didn't have any of them.
Like, I guarantee you if you talked to a median Republican in Massachusetts, they'd nod at what Republican things Baker did do or the really 'bad' Democratic things he stoppe,d but then have a litany of largely cultural issues that Baker either supported or didn't stop, from abortion to immigration to LGBT stuff.
Because people tend not to really give a damn about whether the views they have are popular or not when they choose a politician.
Plus, I bet they never heard about the deregulation or business tax cuts Baker did or whatever, but they sure as hell heard from Facebook or talk radio or whatever about whatever woke thing Baker did, just like Democratic voters hear every time a moderate votes w/ the Republican's on a cultural issue, but never hears about them voting for reasonable good stuff, largely due to those voters own choices.
The last president to get the majority of non-white vote was LBJ. The R core is an anti-urban (Black, Jews, LGBT, foreigners in general) coalition. Economics (other than low taxes) are secondary (tariffs used to be D, now they are R). Not that elements of those aren't in the R side but as the country polarizes, that becomes increasingly the essence of the R's. It is why Kansas stays R despite the harm done to the farm economy. The R's will only lose that if disaffected D's wind up there.
The tax question should be limited to closing loop holes and tricks, not raising rates. But that would create a big impact ( and of course in any sane world you would hire more IRS employees/AI agents to audit many more folks - the ROI on that would be huge). And won't someone think of the deficit ?
The issue is that people won’t agree on what a loophole or trick is. Is an IRA a loophole? What about when someone stuffs non-public start-up equity in it so that it’s now worth billions of dollars?
If we opt to raise rates, the idea that we only reverse tax cuts for “those people” but not others is fundamentally flawed. It makes a certain segment of workers (who are not super rich tax loophole people) suckers and generates a form of animus and pushback that undermines the rational for government transfers.
I really think that the path to "Republicans are a normal, sane center-right party" has to include "electing normal, sane Republicans actually results in significant, noticeable, sticky moves toward the priorities of the right." Not the dynamic that's been frequently commented on since Dabney's rant about "northern conservatism", where the left makes sticky changes (like allowing in tens of millions of fake asylum-seekers) and the right doesn't even try to get the country back to the status quo ante.
Republicans have decided that they want to spend their efforts competing over who can gobble the most paint chips rather than competing over poorly governed cities.
This is the flip of Democrats giving up on rural races. Democratic partisans prefer snide bigotry towards people without college degrees.
The status quo on policy on most issues has moved to the right—like this is clearly the case with guns and taxes, and even immigration (it’s true that the stock of immigrants is higher but our policy is stricter compared to the Reagan/Bush I years—it’s really stark when you read autobiographies of people who came here generations ago about how easy it was).
Something I learned this week from Josh Barro’s Central Air podcast is that big reason why ultra low cost carriers are more suited to Europe is because of credit cards.
Interchange fees are capped in Europe so you don’t see premium credit cards existing there. And without these cards, which are a huge profit center for these airlines, consumers are less likely to pay a premium for air travel.
Half the people are below Median intelligence. We can't say whether that's half of average or more or less without knowing the shape of the distribution.
It may have been monomodal. College professors are now finding a bimodal grade distribution. It could very well be that intelligence is segmenting into two normal distributions…
I’m not advocating for a nationalization of Spirit. However the one dynamic that isn’t considered here is where their planes go.
There’s a global narrowbody shortage with airbus having a 7-8 year order book. If Spirits planes end up in other countries it would meaningfully increase prices and decrease quality for a relatively long period of time.
I wonder what can be done to increase plane production (other than of course abolishing the NLRB and crushing their unions, which obviously we should do anyway)
Just woke up from a coma from 2015! Did the Boeing strategy of playing maximal labor hardball result in increased or decreased market share relative to euro-labor-practice airbus?
Maybe we should implement a law to protect the American airplane manufacturing industry. Require all flights between domestic American airports to be done with American-made, American-crewed airplanes. Worked for shipbuilding!
I attribute a lot of the trajectory toward our current pathologies to the Left not being willing to put up with Clinton's success and forcing poor Al Gore to forgo a "four more years" campaign. Of course he cousl have lost, but it would have set the party up to block the Bush tax cuts that destroyed Clinton's surplus.
"Left not being willing to put up with Clinton's success and forcing poor Al Gore to forgo a "four more years" campaign."
I think it was more operators judging that Clinton's scandals made him more toxic than it was worth hanging on to his coat tails. Retrospectively obviously should have tried the coat tails since Gore lost anyway.
Yes, large swaths of the Democratic Party even in 2000 disagreed that many of Clinton's successes were actually successes. It may have been the only way to win in 1992 & 1996, but eventually the voters get a say.
It's just very hard in practice to let those pesky "cultural issues" go. Imagine two buttons. Pressing one ensures the nation is impoverished, but the arc of justice is finally stopped by the ghost of Buckley. Pressing the other ensures the nation is wealthy beyond wildest imaginings, but the values of, say, Hasan Piker and Taylor Lorenz are de rigueur throughout society. Obviously pressing the red button is cutting off rhinoplasty to spite one's facelift, while the blue one is correct on several grounds, utilitarian and otherwise. But I still "don't want to win this way", and would feel bad about the decision. Wealth without culture is empty hedonism; culture without wealth is Nobel savagery. We value both things, maybe not equally, but as Sacred Values that feel awful to trade off against each other.
(The synthesis centrist party has been found hard and not tried, albeit not for lack of punditry or Victoria's Secret Congress.)
Ann Arbor also abolished parking minimums a few years ago, and they're rapidly building out fairly high quality bike infrastructure. There's also talk of pedestrianizing parts of downtown and creating bus lanes, and even taking over state-owned routes so they can prioritize safety and quality of life over traffic flow. (Now that I think of it, I'd be interested in hearing your take on the economics of state vs. local control of roads.) It's exciting to live near a place where the government is actually investing political capital into undoing the damage of 20th century car infrastructure.
The “luxury beliefs” thing also just seems like conservatives copying the idea of privilege but in a dumb way—a lot of conservatism is a luxury belief by people who were born white middle-class or above in a rich country, and they’d obviously have very different beliefs if they were born into less privileged situations.
I'm puzzled by the statement that "This whole thing got off on a bad foot with conservatives arguing that the Biden administration’s antitrust actions were the reason Spirit went bankrupt."
The argument that a merged JetBlue-Spirit entity would have survived the current moment is plausible, no? Blocking the merger was contentious at the time, and it does not seem unreasonable for people who wanted to let the market players do what they thought was best to feel vindicated. Even if we accept that the merger would have gone badly, that was not the argument raised against allowing it to proceed, as I recall. Rather the opposite.
Was reading the WSJ this morning (non-paywall link below) about Ted Turner's vast land holdings. Much of this has been placed into conservation trusts or otherwise encumbered to permanently bar future development: “Turner ensured that upon his passing, his lands will continue to be protected, limiting future development and parcellation,” the company said.
The US Government already owns over 100 million acres, mostly across the Western US. We have National Parks, Monuments, Conservation Lands, refuges, etc. Most Presidents since Reagan's time have expanded the "protected from development" spaces. Adding more land at the whim of a rich person strikes me as hubristic and bad for the future.
I'm wouldn't advocate for the elimination of National Parks and the like -- the beauty of those spaces provide something special to the Nation. But seeing Ted Turner restrict activity on land far past his death seems like something that shouldn't be allowed.
He bought it and set up a vehicle that has ownership and property rights. The entity could be compelled to change their behavior or change their management practices in the future.
I would prefer we focus our energy on upzoning. There are a lot of strip malls with large parking lots in urban areas that probably could be redeveloped and we need to really think about how to integrate and connect subdivisions to larger transportation networks.
I'm guessing part of the reason he bought so much land was to put his holdings into an irrevocable trust to avoid estate taxes but on the whole I agree that this dynasty maneuver is a bit suspect.
The weirdest part about Rob Henderson's whole approach is that it's identity politics at its purest - every complaint he makes about having been the conservative at Yale is fundamentally based on the notion that there is no such thing as a politics that is not derived fundamentally from identity. Conservatives usually hate that sort of thing!
What conservatives (and lots of liberals, too!) hate is identity politics based on immutable characteristics of birth. One can *choose* to be a conservative at Yale or a liberal at Hillsdale and it actually says something about the person. But the fact that someone was born Black, Asian or gay doesn't communicate much about them as a person.
Conservatives love identity politics, they just want only certain identities to be allowed, like "American" and "Christian", all others like "gay" or "black" are totally invalid and worthless and should be ignored.
Yes, those are all high-status things! What could be higher-status than having other people as slaves? You certainly aren’t lower-status than them.
The best measure of status is how many other countries will let you in visa-free because that’s an actual measure of how other people treat you based on your nationality, and America is near the top of that list, albeit it’s fallen a bit under Trump.
True but in FdBs defense, a big part of Henderson’s deployment of identity politics is that he grew up in a very tough situation (unlike the affluent leftists he went to school with and is distinguishing himself from). That’s also pretty immutable.
Meh, I grew up in a tough situation relative to the affluent people I met in college (maybe not as tough as Henderson) and I’d say that:
- I feel I am more leftist because you realize how much inequality at birth matters—even if I end up being much more successful than my classmates later on, there are a lot of childhood and early adulthood things I would’ve missed that I can never get back. So it’s not enough to say poor people can pull themselves up by bootstraps because even if they will only have a little time to enjoy it.
- You also need to take the outside view and realize that just being born an American citizen puts you in the top 10% of humans today and maybe even the top 1% of humans who have ever lived, so you can’t get too mad at the birth lottery.
This is why a lot of people dislike Gavin Newsom, even if they often agree with him politically. He oozes unearned privilege. His case is interesting because while his family had ridiculous social capital, he wasn’t wealthy as a child due to poor financial decisions by his father.
I think people who grow up with a lot of social and financial capital in America find it very hard to fully understand or empathize with people who don’t. I agree it is identity politics.
The whole marketing of hierarchies of phenotypical preference as justice was a really bad idea.
Labeling whole swaths of people pejorative status based on immutable characteristics generates resentment. Gaslighting the losers of this phenotypical preference game that this is somehow moral was just proponents of this nonsense lighting all their credibility and social capital on fire.
Yale is kind of immutable. Most people could never get in in the first place. You can be in your thirties or forties and decide to become Catholic. You can't decide that choosing state school was a bad idea and become a Yale grad.
"many smart, principled people simply disagree in good faith."
I'm going to hurt myself nodding in agreement with that, but also ... what a strange week to drag the idea of luxury beliefs! Piker and Tolentino's masterclass just wrapped! The idea of "luxury beliefs" depends on two unassailable propositions:
1) It’s easy to advocate for something for which someone else will bear the consequences.
2) People can use that to signal their status and/or wealth.
It is bad to assume these forces are at play in every disagreement, but it's stupid to ignore the possibility.
Yeah but you could apply this to anyone. Take immigration restriction:
1) When conservatives advocate immigration restrictions, consequences are borne by other people (would-be immigrants)
2) They are doing this advocacy to signal their status and/or wealth (being born a citizen of a desirable country).
Ditto for crime:
1) When conservatives advocate harsh criminal justice including things like explicit racial profiling, consequences are borne by other people (poor/black/brown people who look like criminals and get profiled).
2) They are doing this to signal status (the justice system surely always treats them fairly) and wealth (they have property to protect).
To take the parallels with conservatives even further, I have to admit I also enjoy watching Rs crash out over the far left in deep blue cities, perhaps intuitively understanding how satisfying it must have felt in 2016 for even mod conservatives “to own the libs”. I can now imagine center right Rs watching anti-Trump libs go hysterically overboard and sometimes embarrass themselves in 2016 as I find myself observing from a distance as conservatives lose their minds to the point of claiming “that the phrase taxing the rich is akin to some racial slurs”. Even as a mod Dem, there’s something satisfying watching these people embarrass themselves.
It’s because they chastised normal people for not endorsing stupid for almost a decade.
I keep hearing this weird, I guess, defense of the Biden administration on Spirit along the lines of "airline mergers are hard and the Spirit - JetBlue merger probably would have gone badly."
Who cares? This is Howl's Moving Goalposts?
We went from Spirit - JetBlue is going to be bad for consumers because of the power of the merged duo to "good thing JetBlue ended up not making a terrible mistake."
It's incoherently trying to defend a shoddy policy decision.
In fact, as I argued in my question on this subject, the FTC should have cared MORE about JetBlue when they were making their decision. If they care about competition in the airline industry, making sure JetBlue is a viable competitor to the legacy airlines and Southwest was more important than whether Spirit lowered consumer prices for another year or two, as it was already clear that things were going quite badly for them as a low cost carrier. The fact the FTC didn't care about this and negged the merger might have saved JetBlue a lot of pain, but it was purely accidental and not a result of good policy decisions.
Agree 100%. It seems at a minimum plausible that the merged airline would have survived. And as you write, the fact that the merger may have gone badly does not vindicate the decision to block it. That was certainly not the argument used at the time!
The two big changes needed for the Republicans to become a sane center right party:
- America's rich guys have to accept slightly higher taxes, permanently
- anti-black racism specifically has to stop being the major force of American cultural divides
How would a theoretical world where rich guys accepted “slightly higher” taxes change anything? At any given level of taxation, Democrats will still be the party that wants them incrementally higher, and Republicans will want them incrementally lower. This dynamic is actually one of the more reasonable and sane things about our politics imho.
This seems bonkers to me, and a case of completely failing to understand your opponent. Liberals are obsessed with taxing the rich and racial justice, it is true and that obsession is distorting your thinking here. If you changed nothing about Trump other than acceptance of slightly higher taxes and friendlier tomAmerican blacks almost all of the bad crazy shit he does would be unchanged (tariffs, immigration crackdown, lawlessness, Iran, corruption, DOGE killing millions, etc.).
In fact, a Republican Party built around “we will lower taxes and ensure a colorblind level playing field that jettisons all critical theory nonsense [which liberals would surely interpret, perhaps correctly, as anti black in effect at minimum] would be the start of a much saner Republican politics than we have now! Though I don’t think it would work politically.
Personally, I think you don’t get from here to sanity without sane people adopting immigration restriction and elimination of racial patronage as policy planks. Now it’s just the America First populist lunatics who have that in their platform but, as in elections abroad, these positions can be adopted by more normal right of center politicians are return a sense of normalcy.
(1) just doesn't seem true? The US already pays a similar fraction of GDP on healthcare as Europe, where (generally speaking) broad-based taxes are levied on the entire population, partially through VAT. To fund anything like universal health care, everyone needs to accept higher taxes, and the increases probably won't be slight.
There is this weird fiction that we can continually tax fewer and fewer people and somehow afford more government transfers and services.
All these attitudes do is make those who pay taxes feel like suckers (usually upper middle class people.) It really make public provision and governance zero sum when you have a NOVA city council members going on Kojo’s show saying they want to increase taxes on those who pay the most taxes to give a local tax cut to everyone else.
In Maryland and Virginia all the government cuts resulted in lost tax revenue. Rather than cut transfer and services programs enacted during the covid windfall politicians are looking to increase taxes on already highly taxed households.
It’s not sustainable because it creates a constituency against those in power.
I beat my head against the wall for several minutes trying to come up with a "Zeno's Paradox of Taxation" bit, but couldn't stick the landing. Every iteration it got 50% better, but never quite hit the mark...
On your 2nd point - why do you think that's true? I feel like there's no one major force of cultural divide, but if I had to choose one I'd probably put immigration, education, or gender above race. The latter two increasingly influence the communication styles and sensibilities of the two parties and in a good chunk of the country Black people are such a tiny portion of the population that I can hardly imagine local conservatives shaping their views around them.
The elevating of “black” status in the recent phenotype preference hierarchy is probably the reason Sam cites anti-black racism as the divide.
It’s more about the “other” and our group. This has shifted over time. Anti-black racism still exists but its influence has greatly diminished.
Well, race is a major thing, cultural change in general.
There have always been about 25-30% of the country that are reactionaries who want to go back 30-40 years. They used to be more distributed and perhaps more importantly, the elites of each party largely didn't have any of them.
Like, I guarantee you if you talked to a median Republican in Massachusetts, they'd nod at what Republican things Baker did do or the really 'bad' Democratic things he stoppe,d but then have a litany of largely cultural issues that Baker either supported or didn't stop, from abortion to immigration to LGBT stuff.
Because people tend not to really give a damn about whether the views they have are popular or not when they choose a politician.
Plus, I bet they never heard about the deregulation or business tax cuts Baker did or whatever, but they sure as hell heard from Facebook or talk radio or whatever about whatever woke thing Baker did, just like Democratic voters hear every time a moderate votes w/ the Republican's on a cultural issue, but never hears about them voting for reasonable good stuff, largely due to those voters own choices.
The last president to get the majority of non-white vote was LBJ. The R core is an anti-urban (Black, Jews, LGBT, foreigners in general) coalition. Economics (other than low taxes) are secondary (tariffs used to be D, now they are R). Not that elements of those aren't in the R side but as the country polarizes, that becomes increasingly the essence of the R's. It is why Kansas stays R despite the harm done to the farm economy. The R's will only lose that if disaffected D's wind up there.
"The last president to get the majority of non-white vote was LBJ"
??????
The tax question should be limited to closing loop holes and tricks, not raising rates. But that would create a big impact ( and of course in any sane world you would hire more IRS employees/AI agents to audit many more folks - the ROI on that would be huge). And won't someone think of the deficit ?
The issue is that people won’t agree on what a loophole or trick is. Is an IRA a loophole? What about when someone stuffs non-public start-up equity in it so that it’s now worth billions of dollars?
If we opt to raise rates, the idea that we only reverse tax cuts for “those people” but not others is fundamentally flawed. It makes a certain segment of workers (who are not super rich tax loophole people) suckers and generates a form of animus and pushback that undermines the rational for government transfers.
I really think that the path to "Republicans are a normal, sane center-right party" has to include "electing normal, sane Republicans actually results in significant, noticeable, sticky moves toward the priorities of the right." Not the dynamic that's been frequently commented on since Dabney's rant about "northern conservatism", where the left makes sticky changes (like allowing in tens of millions of fake asylum-seekers) and the right doesn't even try to get the country back to the status quo ante.
Republicans have decided that they want to spend their efforts competing over who can gobble the most paint chips rather than competing over poorly governed cities.
This is the flip of Democrats giving up on rural races. Democratic partisans prefer snide bigotry towards people without college degrees.
The status quo on policy on most issues has moved to the right—like this is clearly the case with guns and taxes, and even immigration (it’s true that the stock of immigrants is higher but our policy is stricter compared to the Reagan/Bush I years—it’s really stark when you read autobiographies of people who came here generations ago about how easy it was).
Something I learned this week from Josh Barro’s Central Air podcast is that big reason why ultra low cost carriers are more suited to Europe is because of credit cards.
Interchange fees are capped in Europe so you don’t see premium credit cards existing there. And without these cards, which are a huge profit center for these airlines, consumers are less likely to pay a premium for air travel.
Half the people are below Median intelligence. We can't say whether that's half of average or more or less without knowing the shape of the distribution.
It may have been monomodal. College professors are now finding a bimodal grade distribution. It could very well be that intelligence is segmenting into two normal distributions…
I’m not advocating for a nationalization of Spirit. However the one dynamic that isn’t considered here is where their planes go.
There’s a global narrowbody shortage with airbus having a 7-8 year order book. If Spirits planes end up in other countries it would meaningfully increase prices and decrease quality for a relatively long period of time.
How about who is going to get the slots?
If dominant carriers are allowed to buy the slots or even bid them up severely, that will hurt JetBlue.
I wonder what can be done to increase plane production (other than of course abolishing the NLRB and crushing their unions, which obviously we should do anyway)
Just woke up from a coma from 2015! Did the Boeing strategy of playing maximal labor hardball result in increased or decreased market share relative to euro-labor-practice airbus?
Maybe we should implement a law to protect the American airplane manufacturing industry. Require all flights between domestic American airports to be done with American-made, American-crewed airplanes. Worked for shipbuilding!
I attribute a lot of the trajectory toward our current pathologies to the Left not being willing to put up with Clinton's success and forcing poor Al Gore to forgo a "four more years" campaign. Of course he cousl have lost, but it would have set the party up to block the Bush tax cuts that destroyed Clinton's surplus.
"Left not being willing to put up with Clinton's success and forcing poor Al Gore to forgo a "four more years" campaign."
I think it was more operators judging that Clinton's scandals made him more toxic than it was worth hanging on to his coat tails. Retrospectively obviously should have tried the coat tails since Gore lost anyway.
Ralph Nader is kind of a case study of where supposedly prosocial motives cause one to become a great villain of history.
Yes, large swaths of the Democratic Party even in 2000 disagreed that many of Clinton's successes were actually successes. It may have been the only way to win in 1992 & 1996, but eventually the voters get a say.
It's just very hard in practice to let those pesky "cultural issues" go. Imagine two buttons. Pressing one ensures the nation is impoverished, but the arc of justice is finally stopped by the ghost of Buckley. Pressing the other ensures the nation is wealthy beyond wildest imaginings, but the values of, say, Hasan Piker and Taylor Lorenz are de rigueur throughout society. Obviously pressing the red button is cutting off rhinoplasty to spite one's facelift, while the blue one is correct on several grounds, utilitarian and otherwise. But I still "don't want to win this way", and would feel bad about the decision. Wealth without culture is empty hedonism; culture without wealth is Nobel savagery. We value both things, maybe not equally, but as Sacred Values that feel awful to trade off against each other.
(The synthesis centrist party has been found hard and not tried, albeit not for lack of punditry or Victoria's Secret Congress.)
Ann Arbor also abolished parking minimums a few years ago, and they're rapidly building out fairly high quality bike infrastructure. There's also talk of pedestrianizing parts of downtown and creating bus lanes, and even taking over state-owned routes so they can prioritize safety and quality of life over traffic flow. (Now that I think of it, I'd be interested in hearing your take on the economics of state vs. local control of roads.) It's exciting to live near a place where the government is actually investing political capital into undoing the damage of 20th century car infrastructure.
The “luxury beliefs” thing also just seems like conservatives copying the idea of privilege but in a dumb way—a lot of conservatism is a luxury belief by people who were born white middle-class or above in a rich country, and they’d obviously have very different beliefs if they were born into less privileged situations.
I'm puzzled by the statement that "This whole thing got off on a bad foot with conservatives arguing that the Biden administration’s antitrust actions were the reason Spirit went bankrupt."
The argument that a merged JetBlue-Spirit entity would have survived the current moment is plausible, no? Blocking the merger was contentious at the time, and it does not seem unreasonable for people who wanted to let the market players do what they thought was best to feel vindicated. Even if we accept that the merger would have gone badly, that was not the argument raised against allowing it to proceed, as I recall. Rather the opposite.
Matt I will personally help you plan a Japan trip, IAD-HND is a relatively short nonstop with lots of Polaris affordability! Do it!
Kinda off topic, but it IS a Friday.
Was reading the WSJ this morning (non-paywall link below) about Ted Turner's vast land holdings. Much of this has been placed into conservation trusts or otherwise encumbered to permanently bar future development: “Turner ensured that upon his passing, his lands will continue to be protected, limiting future development and parcellation,” the company said.
The US Government already owns over 100 million acres, mostly across the Western US. We have National Parks, Monuments, Conservation Lands, refuges, etc. Most Presidents since Reagan's time have expanded the "protected from development" spaces. Adding more land at the whim of a rich person strikes me as hubristic and bad for the future.
I'm wouldn't advocate for the elimination of National Parks and the like -- the beauty of those spaces provide something special to the Nation. But seeing Ted Turner restrict activity on land far past his death seems like something that shouldn't be allowed.
https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/luxury-homes/ted-turner-cnn-founder-preservation-e48f36e3?st=9BWeyr&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
He bought it and set up a vehicle that has ownership and property rights. The entity could be compelled to change their behavior or change their management practices in the future.
I would prefer we focus our energy on upzoning. There are a lot of strip malls with large parking lots in urban areas that probably could be redeveloped and we need to really think about how to integrate and connect subdivisions to larger transportation networks.
I'm guessing part of the reason he bought so much land was to put his holdings into an irrevocable trust to avoid estate taxes but on the whole I agree that this dynasty maneuver is a bit suspect.
The weirdest part about Rob Henderson's whole approach is that it's identity politics at its purest - every complaint he makes about having been the conservative at Yale is fundamentally based on the notion that there is no such thing as a politics that is not derived fundamentally from identity. Conservatives usually hate that sort of thing!
What conservatives (and lots of liberals, too!) hate is identity politics based on immutable characteristics of birth. One can *choose* to be a conservative at Yale or a liberal at Hillsdale and it actually says something about the person. But the fact that someone was born Black, Asian or gay doesn't communicate much about them as a person.
Conservatives love identity politics, they just want only certain identities to be allowed, like "American" and "Christian", all others like "gay" or "black" are totally invalid and worthless and should be ignored.
Look at how excited republicans get when they can point to a black person who agrees with them
That behavior is pathetic.
You realize that we went through like a decade where those first referenced identities were relegated as low status by educated elites?
In what world is “American” low-status; we are practically global aristocrats.
Something something “white settler colonial slaveholder culture”…
Yes, those are all high-status things! What could be higher-status than having other people as slaves? You certainly aren’t lower-status than them.
The best measure of status is how many other countries will let you in visa-free because that’s an actual measure of how other people treat you based on your nationality, and America is near the top of that list, albeit it’s fallen a bit under Trump.
True but in FdBs defense, a big part of Henderson’s deployment of identity politics is that he grew up in a very tough situation (unlike the affluent leftists he went to school with and is distinguishing himself from). That’s also pretty immutable.
Meh, I grew up in a tough situation relative to the affluent people I met in college (maybe not as tough as Henderson) and I’d say that:
- I feel I am more leftist because you realize how much inequality at birth matters—even if I end up being much more successful than my classmates later on, there are a lot of childhood and early adulthood things I would’ve missed that I can never get back. So it’s not enough to say poor people can pull themselves up by bootstraps because even if they will only have a little time to enjoy it.
- You also need to take the outside view and realize that just being born an American citizen puts you in the top 10% of humans today and maybe even the top 1% of humans who have ever lived, so you can’t get too mad at the birth lottery.
This is why a lot of people dislike Gavin Newsom, even if they often agree with him politically. He oozes unearned privilege. His case is interesting because while his family had ridiculous social capital, he wasn’t wealthy as a child due to poor financial decisions by his father.
I think people who grow up with a lot of social and financial capital in America find it very hard to fully understand or empathize with people who don’t. I agree it is identity politics.
The whole marketing of hierarchies of phenotypical preference as justice was a really bad idea.
Labeling whole swaths of people pejorative status based on immutable characteristics generates resentment. Gaslighting the losers of this phenotypical preference game that this is somehow moral was just proponents of this nonsense lighting all their credibility and social capital on fire.
Conservatives practice a lot of identity politics based on what country people happen to have been born in!
Yale is kind of immutable. Most people could never get in in the first place. You can be in your thirties or forties and decide to become Catholic. You can't decide that choosing state school was a bad idea and become a Yale grad.
"many smart, principled people simply disagree in good faith."
I'm going to hurt myself nodding in agreement with that, but also ... what a strange week to drag the idea of luxury beliefs! Piker and Tolentino's masterclass just wrapped! The idea of "luxury beliefs" depends on two unassailable propositions:
1) It’s easy to advocate for something for which someone else will bear the consequences.
2) People can use that to signal their status and/or wealth.
It is bad to assume these forces are at play in every disagreement, but it's stupid to ignore the possibility.
I am just pissed I didn’t copywriter this idea when I was drunk ranting back in 2012.
Yeah but you could apply this to anyone. Take immigration restriction:
1) When conservatives advocate immigration restrictions, consequences are borne by other people (would-be immigrants)
2) They are doing this advocacy to signal their status and/or wealth (being born a citizen of a desirable country).
Ditto for crime:
1) When conservatives advocate harsh criminal justice including things like explicit racial profiling, consequences are borne by other people (poor/black/brown people who look like criminals and get profiled).
2) They are doing this to signal status (the justice system surely always treats them fairly) and wealth (they have property to protect).