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.
The same could be said about the FTC trying to block Amazon from buying iRobot. The FTC said that Amazon couldn't be trusted due to its marketplace dominance, market concentration, and "big tech" blah, blah, blah - only to watch iRobot go into bankruptcy and be sold for parts to a Chinese company.
Lina Khan and the neo-brandeisians were a disaster and they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near public policy again.
"The same could be said about the FTC trying to block Amazon from buying iRobot. The FTC said that Amazon couldn't be trusted due to its marketplace dominance, market concentration, and "big tech" blah, blah, blah - only to watch iRobot go into bankruptcy and be sold for parts to a Chinese company."
Yes. Even Microsoft and Activision - they had no interest in helping the laggard competitor in the market. Imagine if the #3 competitor in gaming was named Sega - would the FTC still have moved to block the Activision acquisition? I doubt it - well I hope not.
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!
Honestly I don't even know what MY was trying to say there. No one was arguing that the blocked merger was the *reason* Spirit went bankrupt. They were arguing that we would not have had the bad outcome of Spirit going bankrupt if it had been allowed to merge with JetBlue. Which is incontrovertibly true.
Matt Y’s business takes in general are pretty bad.
His statement in the raising costs and seniors article earlier this week that most seniors who have brokerage accounts probably aren’t heavily invested in bonds was so mind numbingly stupid (investing more in fixed income as someone gets older is literal personal investing orthodoxy) it made it hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
I think that take is not as crazy as it appears. Obviously most people who have investments will have some bonds but the standard ratio is 60/40 to 40/60 depending on age which is very different from a time when a lot of people would have 100% exposure to US bonds (the generation who experienced Black Tuesday and swore off equities).
In the 1970s when Social Security was adjusted for cost of living, there were lots of seniors who had 0% allocation to stocks. Today if you are living entirely on the income from your bonds you are in the top 1% (most advisors would be targeting to fund your lifestyle with a mix of dividends, selling appreciated equity, and bonds) and you will be forced to liquidate your stocks as part of your required distributions from your IRA/401K. The point is the idea that inflation hurts seniors disproportionately was true in 1970 and false in 2020
And I'll at least have to give kudos to Trump for not bailing out Spirit after the failed merger, keeping a failing business model alive. I wonder just how many zombie companies are still managing to survive with our profligate stimulus/tax cut happy policies of the last decade , avoiding, in Buffet's words, the time when the tide goes out.
Why would that have been bad? Stopping the merger to preserve competition was fine and so is bailing out failing companies - no one should have to lose a job for their companies’ bad business model, not in America, at least. With the money being used in our stupid war, bailing out an airline seems small potatoes. Don’t airlines go through bailouts and bankruptcies all the time anyway? From what I understand it’s a notoriously hard business model with which to be persistently profitable, whether you’re Delta or Spirit
Airlines are not persistently unprofitable, and spirit didn't have any path to profitability even with the bailout. Their most recent plan was to cut their way to profitability, sell off gate slots, cut even more routes and flights etc. which probably would have resulted in even further decline.
They aren’t persistently unprofitable but they go through vicious cycles: demand-based, fuel price-based, and airplane life cycle based. Every few years one files for bankruptcy or has to merge
Which is ok. That enables creative destruction. As MY said in the article all the assets will end up being reused by other airlines - it isn't like we just flushed all the value down the toilet. Making it easier for companies to fail (bankruptcies that quickly go through the courts and aren't tied up for years) or people to be fired and conversely companies to be started and people easier hired drives growth an innovation. We just need to ensure we have the safety net that limits downsides ... which is more easily afforded by a high growth society.
It's not usually a good idea to keep failed business models going though we tend to have that mommy government saving us from any pain idea since the Obama years. It cheapens the value of money and companies don't focus on the best paths forward---I mean if we're going to get bailed out why try so hard? And in the bigger picture propping up the economy in that way along with stimulus and tax cuts has wrought a terrifically enormous debt load-- $40 trillion almost now. That is something that will have to be reckoned with and will likely cause even more businesses to go under if it's full weight is thrown at the economy in certain scenarios.
They are certainly in a somewhat gray area as they are quasi public anyway with airports and pretty necessary to modern life. Maybe not quite like utilities though. They were deregulated in 1978 I believe by Carter. I can't say flying was a worse experience after deregulation because I didn't start doing a few trips until the late 80s. But flying then was still a joy, wider seats, planes only half full, meals, drinks on the house and such and not particularly expensive. But when was it, the GFC (?), when the airlines started cutting niceties, narrowing seats, and loading planes to capacity. It's more efficient, eco-wise for sure and sometimes cheaper but along with TSA lines it's become a dread to get through.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s not interesting or important to discuss the issues surrounding Spirit’s bankruptcy, but they were ultimately less than 2% of flights and widely loathed by customers. I doubt this will have much long-term impact.
I liked spirit. For an extra $120 (which included your checked and carry on bag) you could guarantee the middle seat had no passenger, which was a nice amenity for my fat ass. Now their planes were rarely full in the first place from my experience so this was kind of a waste, but if I’m doing a long cross-country flight by myself I really don’t want to sit next to someone, especially some other fat person.
Say what you will, but flying OAK-DTW nonstop was golden... nobody else flying that route. I've had a lot more heartburn with Frontier, I'm shocked they're still solvent
Jetblue was also working on an earlier deal with American (partnership not merger) which formed the basis for their growth plan, which was the reason they wanted Spirit. Biden (DOJ this time) killed that partnership too, so the reason it was a "terrible mistake" in the first place is yet more terrible admin meddling for no reason.
No, the FTC saved Jet Blue from itself by stopping this merger, the thing that the FTC did do to mess up Jet Blue was breakup their alliance with American Airlines, this was allowing Jet Blue into high market locations, NYC and Boston by taking the terminal slots that American gave up when they made a bad business decisions. So when Jet Blue lost that alliance, they ended up over leveraged, they had already started the Spirit Merger talks and since CEOS are ego driven probably would have followed through without having the actual follow through to carry that merger without the AA slots. Jet Blue currently has significant debt and did have significant debt then.
"No, the FTC saved Jet Blue from itself by stopping this merger,"
But that's not why they stopped the merger. They stopped the merger because of the damage to consumers from the loss of Spirit Airlines. This saving JetBlue from itself thing is retrospective, the FTC wasn't thinking anything about that.
How do you know? I mean I don't think they should have broken up the Jet Blue/AA alliance, but by all accounts Jet Blue was over leveraged and the merger was a bad idea for both. We love to dunk on bidens ftc for all their terrible wrongs but I'm not sure this is one of them. I'm not going to argue about it though as I know that I'm in the "free speech" but out of my lane.
To wit: "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. That doesn’t make sense, just as a question of chronology and causal logic." This is sort of like saying Joe Biden is not responsible for Trump's 2nd term because Joe Biden hasn't been president for over a year. Of course that is part of the chronology and the JetBlue offer was an all cash offer so the counterfactual is pretty clear for Spirit's long term shareholders. Why are so many would be regulators so sure about what is important for other people? In fact, "the more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."
The Ann Arbor story continues to radicalize me that a YIMBY tactic that should get utilized and advocated for more is to do what Boise did, and abolish commercial zoning and replace it with mixed use zoning, allowing housing to be built within retail and office if the landowners want to.
The Ann Arbor thing also supports my thoughts about College Station, TX. There are currently 15-20 story student housing buildings going up right next to campus, but still a crunch in other parts of town. There’s a bunch of towers-in-the-parking-lot style student complexes a couple miles from campus as well, which are awful. Meanwhile the adjacent town of Bryan is wondering how to beautify the stretch of Texas Ave full of run-down 70s strip malls with appliance repair stores and abandoned Walmarts. If they just legalized student apartments and ran buses up and down Texas Ave, they would have their solution to everything.
When I arrived people had these “Keep College Station Normal” t shirts that never made any sense to me. Austin is clearly a much more normal place with much less cultishness!
Yeah, there are a lot of university towns with housing problems that could be fixed with YIMBYism. A2 is a great example--the area that's now being revitalized was ugly and inefficient when I lived there years ago, rent within walking/bus distance of campus was high (especially if your landlord was competent), and there really wasn't a great aesthetic reason to forbid new construction.
Tying this into "Are we pricks?" on the golf course, it would be just as disingenuous to upzone an established "nice" neighborhood of single-family homes. Yes, focus multi-family zoning on commercial, industrial and undeveloped areas.
But that isn't, necessarily, what is driving the builds in Ann Arbor? Per his link, this is a rise in projected demand for student level housing.
Note that I, personally, think this is great. I don't see it happening in places that think they are building places for families to live long term. But only because I fear most places are obsessed with the idea of detached single family homes.
If this can break that obsession. I'm all for it getting more press!
I am persuaded by Lyman Stone's argument that you need SFH (albeit not necessarily huge floor plans) to support the demands of couples contemplating kids.
We had three babies in a ~1,000-foot upstairs apartment, and it was doable. But it was also a great relief to finally get a house with a yard that the kids could just walk out into, and Stone's surveys suggest that many couples want more space for childrearing than apartments afford.
My main gripe with that is that I cannot tell whether he regards single-family *attached* housing to be sufficient for the purpose.
If not, and he thinks townhomes aren't family housing (which is batshit IMO but that's not relevant), then there's simply no path to solving the suburban affordability crisis at all in his world.
Not sure—he’s active on Substack and might answer questions—but I do know he's big on hyping SFH in dense neighborhoods (e.g., https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/2032137907427741806?s=20). He said somewhere that his neighborhood has about 10,000 people per square mile, and that is indeed pretty dense (about as dense as the apartment-heavy downtown near me and considerably more dense than my own neighborhood, which has a mix of SFH and apartments/townhomes).
Ehh, a lot of the most expensive suburban towns in my area have similar densities, and path dependency means the only thing that could possibly introduce more family housing in those areas would be allowing the redevelopment of individual detached houses into rowhome quadplexes on the same lots...
We had a family of 6 in a 1000 square foot house with basically no yard. Kids could walk to a park down the street easily enough, thankfully. Such that I'm sympathetic to this. It is not wrong.
But this is just a restating of my point? If you are building up to meet demand in a place that isn't student driven, density will not look the same. At all.
And it is largely because people are convinced that detached homes are superior to apartment complexes. Which, again, for how most of us view it, that is not wrong. But that doesn't mean it is naturally correct, either.
It is even more odd when I consider how many of us grew up in apartment complexes where waking up and meeting all the other kids down in the quad was the norm. I don't remember hating that time.
I don't get what we're arguing about. Who thinks SF homes shouldn't be allowed? Of course getting a house with a yard makes sense for a lot of people. The question is always why can't an apartment building be built across the street from your house with a yard. And the answer is always... character? Like there's not a reason
My comment is about planning and zoning, not personal choice. I'm still not following the justification for banning the apartment building? Or the point of your comment at all. Who thinks SFH shouldn't be allowed?
I was mainly addressing Matt's broader assertion of “ it is much easier to get people to tolerate dense new construction if it’s not in existing single-family neighborhoods.”.
My point is also that the demand probably isn't the same, either.
Specifically, the Ann Arbor build is to cover rental demand. Something most cities don't have in the same way that a college town does.
I don't think this has to be the case, of course. We could encourage families to live in rental units far more than we do. But I can't deny there is a general brain rot that thinks rental apartments bad.
Now, I absolutely think people should take Ann Arbor's lesson that trying to incentivize subsidized units is not the way to go.
"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 when 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 just don’t see how to usefully operationalize this idea when almost any position anyone takes on anything could be called a luxury belief. Under this framework only immigrants and people directly harmed by immigration should talk about immigration? Only criminals and their victims should talk about crimes?
I’m not directly harmed by the Iran war and rising costs, while not great, are so far manageable for my family and are offset by other assets growing in value during that time. Any opinions I have about the Iran war are therefore luxury beliefs?
At some point the concept has become something of a thought terminating cliche and ceased being helpful analysis.
Sure, people might use it that way, and that's probably extra-threatening because the center-left's coalition exposes it to a relatively large attack surface along these lines.
But it really seems like you're sticking your head in the sand. Do you mean to say you've really never met people that profess outrageous beliefs to get attention or seem cool?
"Pejorative" doesn't mean "always misapplied." You can be accurate and still be pejorative. Also, I prefer to contest people on substance and not on their motives. Whenever possible. Not always possible, of course. Some people just are asking for it.
"Also, I prefer to contest people on substance and not on their motives. Whenever possible. Not always possible, of course. Some people just are asking for it."
Agree 100%.
But no, it is not 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 a pejorative term. It also communicates a significant sociological / psychological observation about human behavior that's useful for understanding what's going on around you, interpreting history, and predicting future events.
"It also communicates a significant sociological / psychological observation about human behavior that's useful for understanding what's going on around you, interpreting history, and predicting future events."
I think implicit in luxury beliefs isn't just that they're higher on Maslow's hierarchy, but that if the people holding them *weren't* insulated from their consequences they wouldn't endorse them. A luxury belief isn't just a "first-world problem," it's one where the signaling dominates the sincerity.
You operationalize it by being more humble and thoughtful, and by tempering your own inclination to say something net harmful just because it would make you more popular in your local social environment.
[Edit]
Since I gather you're asking about operationalizing it offensively, I'd say it's best used sparingly, like any other fallacy. You should generally extend charity to people, but if they start talking reckless nonsense, figuratively high-fiving their entourage, operationalize the hell out of it.
There were plenty of examples of this last week, when people clowned on Piker and Tolentino by foregrounding who pays the costs of their juvenile posturing.
Highlighting the connection between those positions and their pursuit of status exposed them to additional ridicule. If done correctly, that will discourage enough people from following their example to balance out their charismatic pull.
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).
Rob Henderson was writing from within a particular milieu, with a fairly significant (and understandable) chip on his shoulder, so he focused his fire on the left's excesses. But the concept is widespread and universally applicable.
I don't think this captures the idea, though: "They are doing this advocacy to signal their status and/or wealth (being born a citizen of a desirable country)."
The idea is sharper and more useful when analyzing advocacy that's doing work within in a specific social hierarchy, like all the anons vying for twitter supremacy by bragging how cruel we should be to illegal immigrants.
1. I found Matt Y's critique of psychoanalyzing people one disagrees with to itself be psychoanalyzing. But I have a better, more substantive critique of the theory. Bear with me :)
2. The work is updating Thorsten Veblen's conspicuous consumption work. A theory developed when Veblen was at University of Chicago and originally appeared in academic journals and even his book was written for a peer academic audience.
3. While Veblen's work predates modern empirical methodology, it has been validated. Economists later coined "Vebeln goods" and it's a mathematically proven concept.
4. Ultimately it's an empirical question. When Henderson freely uses "wealthy," "affluent," "rich," and "upper class" interchangeably, and it is found that the "luxury beliefs" are not correlated to wealth at all the correct conclusion is to reject the thesis.
5. Henderson's work is pop psychology. That is a separate category, but it is not Veblen. Don't piggy back on Veblen unless you can match the rigor, care, and toil that he put into his work. Do not foist work of this nature on a non-specialist audience. It is catchy but wrong.
"Luxury beliefs" is clearly inspired by Veblen's work, but I don't think it's correct to say it's an update of Veblen. It's more a soundbite version of Bourdieu, who showed in "Distinction" how elites of every sort differentiate themselves through culture, taste, language, and symbolic positioning as much as money.
I don't think Bourdieu's work is as rigorous as Veblen's, but it's a mistake to discard a powerful analytic idea grounded in commonplace observations because it hasn't been validated yet in the charts-and-tables sense.
On the whole defund movement that is one of the main examples the book. Democrats maintained their support for de-policing even when they lived in areas with high violent crime. They were holding onto the belief even when they were not insulated from consequences. i.e. the diver for holding beliefs is ideology not status.
Also note this is a critique from a highly sympathetic audience. Now, maybe he has responded to these adequately? I haven't kept up. They probably did a live debate?
This is another reason to build up this kind of thesis over a period of time doing careful research. Making modest claims along the way, each relying on the previous finding, each being on sure footing. This is more lets make a big catchy claim, and then retract gradually.
1) Noah's article. The cost is usually credibility, outside of your relevant status community, and sometimes much more severe hostility, sometimes to the point of ostracism.
2) The Manhattan Institute article. This is extremely interesting and there's a lot to digest. The relevant finding from that study was a little narrower than Democrats maintaining support for de-policing in the face of local crime:
> in areas with high levels of violent crime, support for defunding the police generally falls for all groups except white Democrats. This is true even when socioeconomic, demographic, and political background variables are held constant.
But my headline response is this: if you live in an area with violent crime and you advocate for de-policing, it's not a luxury belief. That's failing prong one of the sinister luxury-belief-holder test! ("It’s easy to advocate for something when someone else will bear the consequences.")
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.
Both sides have A. "This is what should happen," and B. "This is what will happen if we don't get that."
A at both extremes are wild and unworkable. There is not a mandate or legal grounding for the extremes at either end, and I think we see that in the current administration clearly. We saw a bit of that under Biden with broad student loan forgiveness.
In this regard, yeah, it's embarrassing to get a chance to try your own extremes out, and Conservatives are experiencing that now along with attendant incumbent angst.
On B, the "This is what will happen," I think it's fair to say that the Right's version is less connected from reality. Leftists are wrong about what society would be like if they got all the laws they wanted, but they were evidently correct about their predictions of what Trump 2 would mean, no matter how many times someone earnestly says "TDS." On the other hand, Rightist predictions of what them losing means seems to be consistently disconnected from reality even as they control the federal government. E.g. what happens if 100 mil illegals aren't deported? Doesn't matter; that number is a lie anyway and it will not happen.
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.
That's not really right. The ability to buy status through the credit card programs contributes to it but it's more that the status rewards (free checked bags, seat upgrades, early boarding) **REALLY** drive consumer willingness to pay. Said differently, the price difference a fare would need to be to fly on a consumer's non-preferred carrier is like 30%. I don't even know if I'd fly AA out of ORD for a 50% discount to UA. The lock-in is that strong.
If I’m understanding you, for that 50% difference, couldn’t you just pay for priority boarding, etc? Or if not what is it that you’re getting through status on United?
It’s more the segments and miles to hit whichever status target you’d like to maintain. For me, it’s the free economy plus upgrades for when I’m flying for personal trips. If you don’t travel a lot … then it wouldn’t matter.
Why do the cards correlate to willingness to pay a premium for air travel on the part of consumers?
(Not trying to be tendentious, I just don't quite understand the connection here. Is the idea that if you have a bunch of credit card miles or points you feel more like paying the difference on more profitable routes or fare classes?)
I believe card points themselves are a large profit center for airlines. Chase for example buys 110k points from united for every person who opens this card. A google search indicates United generates 3-6 billion dollars from chase. I'm not sure how much selling Chase a point "costs" United exactly, but I'm betting it's a very favorable deal and therefore puts them in a much more favorable situation compared to budget airlines which cannot offer credit card products due to their (downscale) market position.
It's better to think of United as a credit card company that operates an airline. Their core airline business runs at -2% operating margin but their CC margin pulls total company op. margin to between +5-9% depending on the Q.
But other than using that additional profit center to defray costs and prices such that there's not as much margin for low-cost carriers to compete with the bigger carriers I'm not seeing the connection to consumer willingness-to-pay. The part where card issuance is an independent profit center seems orthogonal to that.
I think American mainline carriers (Delta, United + Southwest) also are competing more effectively with ULCCs than European carriers. I'm not that familiar with Lufthansa, BA, KLM, SAS etc. but I don't think they have the super budget-conscious "basic economy" fares like UA/DL? Which leaves more room for RyanAir/EasyJet/
It's mostly miles and status lock in. But also most consumer home bases tend to favor a dominate carrier so the carriers all kind of figured this differentiated pricing strategy out from Delta in Atlanta.
To get to Japan from the east coast, you simply fly to Seattle, host a SB in-person meetup at Stoup Brewery on Capitol Hill, and fly to Japan the next morning.
I was going to make a similar comment. The best way to fly to Asia from the East Coast is to..stop on the West Coast. Obviously that's not always possible, but Matt can work remote...so, do a 2-3 junket visiting/writing about an important story out west, and then continue to Japan.
nah. to the Antipodes, yes. But to Tokyo, it's 14 hours from the east coast (cause you fly over the North Pole) and 12 hours from the west coast (save Alaska or Hawaii).
This was my immediate thought too as someone who has travelled from DEN to the Far East 7-8 times. You just have a layover at SFO or SEA. It's really not that bad.
No, that just makes things worse. If you don't have kids along (who cannot possibly be forced to do this) there's a pretty foolproof way to get yourself completely flipped on a 12 hour day-night reversal within 2 days.
Fly direct from EWR, JFK, or IAD on a 12 AM redeye:
- No caffeine the morning of.
- Catch an hour or two nap starting at 5 PM
- Get some caffeine in at the airport before 10 PM
- Stay up on-board until 6 AM ET
- Sleep as much as you possibly can for the remaining 6-8 hours of the flight.
- When you feel like waking up force yourself to nap some more.
- Land at ~3-6 AM, by the time you clear customs and get to the hotel it's mid-morning.
- Get out of the hotel immediately and stay out with a full day's itinerary.
- Hold off on caffeine until late morning local time.
- Get dinner and a drink or two to slow you back down around 7 PM.
- Crash with a curtain open, and roll over without even looking at your phone every time your body says to wake up until dawn is visible.
On day two you follow the same basic steps, it's just easier. On day three it feels normal to do this.
I used this method going back and forth to East Asia right up until I had kids and again the last few times I flew out to meet my already-adjusted family there, it pretty much puts me on local time within 48 hours with only mild discomfort on the first day of bulling through.
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.
Dems in rural areas aren't condescending towards their neighbors, they just have views that are too far left to win elections--especially the ones running for office.
It is true that Republicans have been unsuccessful at undoing "tens of millions of fake asylum seekers", for the same reason they've been unsuccessful at stopping voter fraud or the insidious spread of sharia law. All are figments of their imagination.
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).
Compared to when? You think the policy status quo is to the right of 2016? 2006? 1996? 1976? 1956?
I am not sure I could defend even 2016 in the aggregate, though I guess it is arguable (Dobbs was certainly a big shift and they have been enforcing civil rights laws to roll back DEI pretty significantly).
But the direction of travel over the 20th and 21st centuries has very clearly been to the left (for good or ill!).
It’s possible the attitudes are the same, the governing elites just better reflect the attitudes. I’m not sure there was EVER a time where affirmative action and racial preferences in college admissions had higher approval than 50%
At least 1996, wasn’t alive before that. It’s notable that the big Supreme Court decisions you mention like Dobbs and SFFA were all overturning Supreme Court precedents from several generations ago in a more conservative direction—that certainly suggests things moving to the right, no? Trump is even trying to overturn birthright citizenship which has been the uncontested law since the 1800s.
A couple things have moved left, like gay marriage, marijuana, healthcare… I’m struggling to think of anything beyond that.
It's very notable that Krasner is basically the only DA from that era who has held on, and he's done it mainly by "selling out" on a lot of substance and some of the rhetoric while keeping the remaining rhetoric.
... percentage wise perhaps, but mainly by the metric of being a spectacularly incompetent administrator whose office *must* toss anything that doesn't plead out due to staffing shortfalls, experience deficits, and general disarray.
I live in MA, and that's the opposite of my perspective. Republican governors accomplished significant non-partisan projects, but they never moved any policy significantly to the right so far as I know. None of them, for instance, did anything substantial to fight the (very unpopular) Goodridge decision.
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.
Yes, that's a healthy dynamic when applied appropriately. However, that whole balance is out of whack: Republicans passing tax cuts when the economy is thriving (ideally we raise taxes in good economic times to refill govt coffers) and Democrats being ineffectual counterpoints to that scenario because of obsession with DEI, profligate immigration, trans issues, etc. Republicans and Democrats need each other to run a competent country--a bird needs a left and right wing to fly.
The Republican Party, driven by the views of many American rich people, has views about things like health care and redistribution that are deeply unpopular. That drives them to the kind of craziness that is the difference between the Republicans and normal center right parties in other countries.
I would conjecture that the broad base of popular support for redistribution is less broad than you assert. So much of Biden’s programs (expanded child tax credit) did not generate a wellspring of support.
The problem for Republicans is that they are opposed to the _current_ levels of redistribution, which is very unpopular. If they reconciled themselves to the ACA and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security and SNAP, they would be in a very different position.
I disagree with Sam's characterization of the racial situation (and indeed think moderate conservatives are way closer to normal sentiments on identity politics) but think he's onto something here. The ACA is an approximation of the conservative counter-proposal to Hilarycare and RomneyCare when he was governor of MA. I think the GOP would have a much stronger case against public expansion and maybe even a winning hand in light of the way the European welfare state is faring with low birth rates if their position was to embrace universal coverage via firmly regulated private payers. Instead their position is some odd combination of no position and find ways to kick people off of their insurance where possible as a fiscal fig leaf for tax cuts.
This is indeed what conservatives tell themselves to persuade each other not to adopt positions supported by enormous majorities of the country. (Matt regularly points out this phenomenon on the left, it is also inaccurate there.)
Right but conservatives would win fights that they are currently losing, because unaffiliated voters would then be open to agreeing with them where right now they're not.
Yeah, that safety net was inadequate as it was. ACA subsidies were good and every state should have expanded Medicaid. That should be the absolute bare minimum
I have become more bearish on this as I have gotten older. I suspect the only real constituency for expanded social transfers are from workers to retirees. The next two elections will show if the public broadly supports the expanded ACA subsidies or opposes the cuts to Medicaid or SNAP.
I am pessimistic. Much of the public will probably tolerate transfers to the poor before touching Medicare or Social Security.
For the life of me, I don't understand why we haven't found a way to incentivize jobs in the services for older people. It isn't like we are just giving out buckets of gold and older people are swimming in it, McDuck style.
Of course, just typing it I realize part of the answer. We likely did, but the bulk of that spending is eaten up by the financial sector's increasingly complicated instruments. Most folks will blame "private equity" but it isn't like they can point to a single instrument. It is all complicated to the point that people ignore it.
This is really gross in poor areas. You have 70yo nurses making home visits to 80yo retirees that don't have enough money to move into actual assisted living. But too much to qualify for help in it.
If abundance was working, the discussions would be far more centered on where we can spend money. When you have to be spending to do something, you back yourself into having to tax the people with the money.
But, the gross framing we have allowed in this nation where taxes are punitive is a cancer.
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.
I can't believe that Democrates have NOT abandoned (low income) immigration restricions. I have no doubt even Harris would have brought Southern border immigration close to zero and the next Democratic presdent more so. And almost all the DEI nonesene was non-national government tendencies. The idea that Democrats are chomping at the bit to finance "gender afirming healthcare" in Zimbabwe again is ridiculous.
>Personally, I think you don’t get from here to sanity without sane people adopting immigration restriction...<
I doubt that's right. More basically, I hope it's not right: Trump's current policy of ratcheting down our intake of immigrants is making numerous national challenges—inflation, public debt, safety net finances, childcare affordability, housing construction, geopolitical competition—more difficult. Continuing along these lines is exactly what the country does not need, especially given the acute demographic stagnation we're currently experiencing.
What triggered a lot of voters in Biden's term was border chaos. You don't need immigration "restriction" to remedy that. You need better policies regarding enforcement and asylum.
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 continuing relevance of anti-Black sentiment makes it hard for parts of American society to reconcile themselves to things like the US's most important cities and most significant forms of culture. In contrast, other ethnic minorities have gradually assimilated and mostly those divisions don't continue to structure our politics. Immigration, education, gender, and more will continue to be relevant, here as they are elsewhere. But it's the legacy of black slavery and segregation specifically that helps make our center right party different.
This claim seems difficult to reconcile with the proposition that anti-black racism is more-or-less monotonically decreasing over time. You don't have to take the position that it doesn't exist or isn't significant at all to take the position that it's much less of a force in 2020s than it was in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s. How do you reconcile increasing dysfunction on the right with decreasing salience of the putative driver of said dysfunction, inter alia simply by the dying out of older cohorts who grew up when Jim Crow was actual policy instead of something that elicits a disgust response?
He says as Southern states, within a week of being officially told the gloves are off by the Supreme Soviet, are racing to dismember black-majority legislative districts and disenfranchise their residents.
It's very clear that anti-black racism is alive and well as a political strategy. Indeed, my chief disagreement with Sam is that I think it is and remains an exceptionally effective one. Trump's approval ratings consistently go up when he stops doing insane policies that harm everybody and really focuses on the hardcore gutter racism.
I don't think I quite follow your point. Of course they want to pick up congressional seats. Gutter racism is a much more effective way of doing that than persuasion aimed at black voters.
Mathematically, Republicans gain a lot more white votes by being avowedly racist than they lose black-and-liberal-white votes by doing so.
I agree that the requirement to draw majority black districts has been softened. Does this mean black people are disenfranchised? in 2026, votes only count insofar as they are cast for or against politicians on the basis of their race? Interesting perspective.
I think the structuring effect of anti-Black sentiment continues even as individual prejudice declines. But also, the insanity of the Republican Party is driven by trying to win without reconciling themselves to these core features of our society, so your trajectory should predict craziness.
Living in a black middle class neighborhood in one of those cities, I think you're missing that, in the modern day, roughly as much of the divide emanates from the other side of the fence. Understandably, mind you, given the history, but black Americans, even middle and professional-class ones, tend to embrace a degree of ethnic nationalism or sub-nationalism or particularism that no other group in this country does.
That's wearing through at the edges as more and more ADOS kids find themselves growing up in mixed neighborhoods and dating people from other races, and as a greater portion of American black families come from more recent immigrant origins, but it's far from the case that assimilation is slowed entirely or even mainly by white/majority sentiment here.
I think it's true that Black Americans don't view the prospect of "assimilation" in the same way as eg recent Asian immigrants. I think that's entirely reasonable -- African American culture is American culture. But regardless of how you view it, this divide about what America really is represents a big difference in our politics compared to other Western countries.
I don't disagree with the last sentence, but I will caveat that relative agreement with the observation that it carries much less explanatory power than it did 20 years ago, let alone 40 or 60 years ago, and it will again carry much less explanatory power than today in another 20 years.
Dems who think this are really doing themselves a disservice by not updating their views.
It's partly a misunderstanding, in my belief anyway, of how much the GOP is driven by anti-Black racism. But it's also a bit out-of-date of how significant a distinctly "black" population is to our most significant cities and forms of culture. Rap is already at that phase where it's slowly losing relevancy, while also ethnically diversifying quite rapidly. It no longer has the association with Black, especially ADOS culture that it once had. And the same would be said for our biggest cities.
I'm not saying that NYC has the same demographics as Memphis, which is obviously not true. I'm saying that the Republican inability to become something like the British Tories, where they take seriously the country's major cities and incorporate conservative members of the major ethnic groups, is driven by the continuing relevance of the Black/non divide.
What happened in fall of 2024? The Haitian immigrant slander seemed more focused on the fact that they were foreigners than that they were black and I genuinely can’t recall anything else
(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...
I don't understand how the overall idea to exempt the modest wage earners from taxes is a good position for either party. By changing the tax system to have higher standard deductions and raising the bracket wages are creating a whole swath of society that don't actively pay taxes. Just look at what happens when you start to carve out participation like the California Prop 13.
Everyone should want a fuller participation of the tax regime not a lesser one.
I just don’t think you can sustain large amounts of transfers and public provision if you exempt so many people from contributing. It incentivizes a race to the bottom.
Sweden apparently learned that awhile back--that soaking the rich doesn't work (I remember on a visit to SKF in the late 80s the department president mentioning that with ridiculously high tax rates on high income earners back then that they were in effect not much different than a communist system). Everyone has to have some skin in the game if you're going to have some version of social democracy. It's a uniting force, something severely lacking in the US.
There is simply no way that the tax increases needed to pay for any variant on single payer will ever be politically palatable, *even if* we can turn around immediately and end employee and employer contributions and funnel them into pay.
We’re going to have to back-door the conversion of the employer-based system into effective universal coverage very incrementally. From the other week:
“Without getting into supply-side and provisioning reforms:
Reform bill 1: Offer a Medicare-derived public option on the ACA, same broad network and great negotiated rates for most care. Allow employers to buy into it.
Reform bill 2, a few years later: Require employers to allow employees to choose between in-kind health insurance benefits or the claimed employer contribution in cash or an HSA so they can pay for insurance.
Reform bill 3, the next time you get a crack at it: Gradually reduce the employer insurance tax advantages to nothing.
If you run the public option well, the end result of these three reforms is going to be within shouting distance of single payer after a decade or two. Employers will just give people more money in lieu of buying them insurance and they'll be able to go buy the public option on an exchange. Eventually, even if there's a line item on people's pay that says ‘Employer-sponsored healthcare,’ it'll just be part of their paycheck.”
One problem is that passing a reform bill is difficult, and passing a series of reform bills over many years and several elections is even more difficult. Your incremental reforms may be wise -- improve outcomes with little disruption to day-to-day practices, get everyone covered, bend the curve of cost growth -- but if they involve prolonged political struggle for very slow effects that will be invisible for years and deniable forever, it's hard to get the political will to actually do it.
At some point one feels compelled to ask whether we wish to govern or just posture in opposition. The electorate seems increasingly willing to allow us the latter...
The good thing about those ideas is that each of them is an incremental improvement. We could just do bill 1 and it be a major improvement over the current situation
To the contrary, big bills like Obamacare provoke a lot of backlash. Obamacare was almost repealed despite being quite popular. The system tends towards antimomentum: small or quiet changes that give people a sense that everything is normal
One dirty secret of health care politics is US government already spends a higher public % of GDP on health care than the OECD or the EU-OECD average[1]. If there's an obstacle to single payer in America, it's clearly not a lack of willingness to publicly spend at similar rates to Europeans on health care. Our rates are higher, if anything. Clearly it's not that much of a tax problem. This is true even if you theorize from the deficit that we only *really* pay the taxes for 8.4% GDP spend on health instead of our current 10.1% GDP spend on health. The 8.4% would be the EU-OECD average!
So then you get into, is the problem with the employer plans that they're not nationalized by the government? Probably not. The problem is they're decided by the employer due to the tax advantage. Just give the same tax advantage to private non-employer plans. Then I can shop for health insurance like I already shop for renting an apartment, groceries, a car, cellphone plan, the complex things I consider borderline essential to my day to day life.
In fact, the UK and Canada should consider even more middle class and up private co-pays[2] to help increase the investment in health care services that are needed and held down by the public understandably keeping the status quo of taxes where it is. Sounds like the main lesson here is the single payer systems should learn more from us so they can provide more people with cutting edge health care.
You have a talent for agreeing with me while pretending it's a disagreement, lol.
"The problem is they're decided by the employer due to the tax advantage. Just give the same tax advantage to private non-employer plans. Then I can shop for health insurance like I already shop for renting an apartment, groceries, a car, cellphone plan, the complex things I consider borderline essential to my day to day life."
The obvious answer is not to provide everything a tax advantage but to take it away from everything eventually. That said, this is a quibble. The real issue is that merely leveling the tax structure is insufficient for any sort of market-driven insurance selection process; we need at some point in the chain of reforms to mandate that employers make their contributions to employee healthcare fungible rather than "in-kind." That was the point of my proposed second step above.
I have a very different assessment than you of the ability of a public *option* to compete in the marketplace once employees and non-employees alike are empowered to select them, but even you will surely agree that there's no harm in offering one at-cost, so long as you bar the government from subsidizing* it to make it artificially attractive?
*Beyond the mere administrative cross-subsidy it would receive from being run by Medicare, of course, which is just an economy of scale anyway.
I'm sure we'll find a disagreement! My plan to make employee healthcare fungible rather than in-kind:
Step 1) My employer pays me a salary, via paychecks twice a month.
Step 2) I purchase a private health insurance plan with my money.
Then we have a centralized federal Medicaid policy for those whose working salary is simply too low or disability or other criteria that prevent them from earning enough to purchase private insurance.
Obviously the politics of this or any significant change will be difficult, but the optimal policy as a mix of private and public safety net seems relatively easy to draw up towards your admirable goal of fungible health care plans for the working population.
There's enough path dependency there that I think you'll need to make employer contributions fungible by legal mandate before they atrophy away sufficiently to just roll them into pay, was the point. Otherwise there's no clear path from here, where middle-income employees receive 10-20% of their pay in the form of employer healthcare contributions, to there, where they get a paycheck that includes that amount instead.
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 democratic president to get the majority of white vote was LBJ. The R core is an anti-urban (Black, Jews, LGBT, foreigners in general) coalition. This is a common coalition in US history. Sarah Palin was the exemplar of "only rural America is real America". Economics (other than low taxes) are secondary (tariffs used to be D, now they are R). Not that elements of other positions 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.
Not getting into the rest of it but there are two paths by which the anti-urban thread of American politics stops carrying so much weight:
Either the Democrats piss off minority moderates enough that the GOP ends up with a sizable urban wing and eventually comes to enjoy winning enough to keep it via enacting decent policy and disbursing the spoils of victory semi-fairly,
Or the cities continue to be attractive enough and the suburbs challenged enough with upkeep that their demographics keep converging in the manner they've slowly been doing for a few decades now, putting them more solidly and comfortably on the same side politically.
The level of taxation which the rich would have to accept to seriously enable the center-right are not *slightly* higher, I think. The expenses required to fund a universal healthcare program are not small, and (I think) will involve even the middle class taking a significant cut from their take-home pay.
Well, taxes would be higher but you would no longer paying for private insurance. If, as seems to be the case (i) rationed single payor care a la the NHS absorbs fewer dollars than our current system and (ii) the taxation to pay for it is sharply progressive, the most households would see an improvement to their bottom line.
I expect the care to be worse and a variety of other problems but "it will cost more" is hard to square with the fact that our costs are very high today relative to other systems, just structured and paid for differently.
I have to ask-do you actually know, or talk to, any Republicans or conservatives? Because as far as I can tell, you're proving correct the idea that liberals understand conservatives far less than the opposite.
Regarding the first point, don't America's rich guys effectively pay slightly higher taxes, permanently, compared to America's rich guys in the 1970s? If we think the 1970s GOP was much more reasonable and the 2020s GOP has kicked all the reasonable people out, it can't be because the tax code makes the rich pay less. The tax code got *more* progressive between these periods.
The second point is more a dysfunctional relationship with the grievance culture that has been cultivated in many Republican areas.
You can see this in that anything that was ostensibly to help black people must have been made to hurt non-black people. Often they would literally frame it as them taking things away.
And it isn't like this was limited to black people. If anything could be seen as making the city better, that must have been at the expense of people that don't live in cities. California? Literally our most productive state. Anything that they want must be making the nation worse.
If republicans would just support universal health care they would consistently hit 55-60% in national polls.
The degree of racism in the Republican party is already well optimized towards vote maximization. The british tories tried being less racist than their constituents and lost 40% of their voters to UKIP.
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.
As others have said, I really don’t think this is the case. TBH, the biggest thing that will get Republicans to chill out is a more chill Democratic Party that is regularly winning competitive elections. Or, alternatively, some enterprising Republicans could run on a chilled out centrist platform and start shifting the center of gravity too. But no this is not fundamentally about taxes or anti-black racism.
“What’s it going to take for the Republican Party to become a healthy center right party again? ... Why do Republican primary voters do this, what’s their motivation? What’s the path out for them? Just getting rid of primaries entirely?”
Great question that drew an alarmingly incoherent answer from Matt. Here’s mine. Short version: getting rid of party primaries would help some, but the foundation of society needs rebuilding.
Longer version: center right leaders (elected officials and other power brokers) are fundamentally a different tribe than core right leaders. Center right people are members of the professional-managerial class relatively high in openness to experience, while the core right tribe is low in that openness (“populist”) and high in authoritarianism. From WWII through the 1990s, centrist PMC class in right and left flavors ruled the coasts, the midwest, and the country. Populist authoritarians held sway only in the south as segregationist Democrats. Per David Shor and others, the media explosion of the 1990s (and the progressive erosion of national integrity forged in WWII, especially its institutions such as unions and churches) broke the PMC establishment’s ability to surpress authoritarian populism. Also per Shor, politics is a contest between radical, highly informed elites to gain sway over poorly informed masses with a muddle of views (centrist in aggregate but composed of right, left, and center positions). So where does that leave us?
In uncharted waters. No one knows how to rebind 260MM adult Americans into locally-rooted mediating institutions that provide a coherent foundation for national politics. The best we can do in the short term is process shifts (such as open primaries, a national presidential vote, etc.) that reduce the ability of tiny vanguards to capture the two parties. WRT race specifically, wokeness is downstream of the capture of our education institutions by lunatics. Matt has written well about this. My favorite, deeply pessimistic diagnosis is here: https://www.educationprogress.org/p/anarchy-and-overregulation-in-american
In the end, a better politics will come from a better society. Get to work building it.
We basically achieved (2) by replacing it with anti-immigration and it made things dramatically worse. The post-2020 backlash to BLM will end up brutally harming H1Bs while most of criminal justice reform survives!!
This feels like a issue where Republican politicians get associated with the public views of their worst supporters (something which usually happens to Dems). Most Rs (I'm intentionally excluding Trump here - he's sui generis) tend to stay away from explicit anti-black racist rhetoric - hence the "dog whistle racism" of the pre-Trump era. But people see conservatives online lose their shit over advertisements featuring mixed race couples and make the obvious connection.
I'm not going to get in a semantic argument about what counts as racist or not, but my general read on conservatives is that they know that explicit anti-blackness is frowned upon, but they seem to get REALLY upset by stuff like Colin Kaepernick kneeling to bring up a 10 year old example. I didn't like it either, but the conservatives I knew were LIVID about it. Basically they seem to get really fired up about stuff that is tangentially related to race. YMMV.
Yeah, I would hear people tell me they stopped watching NBA and then NFL and then NASCAR (all because of some stupid but minor thing that happened), and I'm like "do you enjoy anything in life anymore?"
Yeah - we agree. YMMV on what constitutes "racist rhetoric" but you can see how viscerally they respond to anythign race related and the position is clear.
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.
Yeah, but George Carlin knew his audience when he said to think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
So this is narrowly correct, but when you talk about average intelligence it’s pretty clear you are talking about iq. Non-quantifiable measures of intelligence don’t yield averages, unless you tokenize them.
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…
But if you have only a subset of the population opting into the test and a different subset opting out of the test it might look like two bimodal ability distributions… we only observe one set of data.
I think another thing that could moderate the Republican Party would be the moderation of the Democratic Party. The old pattern of moderating after a few losses has been replaced by regaining power because the governing party went off the rails. If Democrats posed a credible threat of not relinquishing power, the GOP might come around to their senses.
I'd be inclined to agree with this but I hesitate. Are we that sure that voter ideology follows a normal distribution with most bunched together in the moderate middle? In the past I'd say sure. Now I'm starting to wonder if the electorate is becoming more bimodal. If so, the problem is less the parties than it is the voters.
This is a fair point on winning a given election but doesn't speak to "durable." We can suppose that moderation will result in a durable middle, but a defining feature of the swing voters is changeability, which is unconnected from moderation per se.
I don't think so because partisanship will still drive the vast majority of those people further to the left or right so they can beat the other side.
For example, Biden the candidate was clearly seen as the moderate in the field, but probably 99% ish of people that preferred a Warren or Sanders still pulled the lever to beat Trump.
Plus he got enough squishy moderates to pull out the win.
Arrest me or whatever, but the Republicans will be much better off once Trump finally croaks. He's injecting himself into all these different races, like the Californian Republican primary, where his looney candidate will lose in the general election. Californians might vote for a Republican but they, quite rightly won't vote for a MAGA-tard.
I feel it's worth pointing out that Trump picked the probable saner of the two GOP candidates. Bianco is a brownshirt and Hilton is a Fox News talking head, Trump disappointed a lot of CA Republicans by picking the TV guy, a classic Trump move. While Trump going to the great golf course down below will certainly help the GOP national image, we're still a long way off from normal humans being the plurality primary electorate.
Nationally, it is basically this. I am reading through the Slow Boring archives and Matt kind of makes this point repeatedly in his 2021-22 work. GOP moderation would come from losing enough times that their major constituencies want to win again. And for that to happen, the Dems will need to moderate on immigration and cultural issues enough to have a large tent that can win.
But there is also the possibility that the GOP may not moderate on the things that you want them to moderate on. For example after Obama's re-election, the GOP leadership wanted to moderate on immigration and some cultural issues. Instead they nominated Trump, who did moderate, on Social Security, Medicare, trade, and at least image wise on some of the religious conservatism. But he went further right on immigration and some cultural matters.
But Matt here seemed to be talking about solid blue or solid red areas.
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.)
Anyone who lives through either of these two options would undoubtedly choose the Piker/Lorenz values.
If you want to be poor but live in a culture with conservative values, move to the middle east (or Hungary or wherever). The fact that people don't do this shows their revealed preferences.
(And for what it's worth, Piker and Lorenz types are only going to be into superficial performative and cultural leftism, they're not going to want to give up their economic status for anything.)
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.
My recollection, too. The Gore campaign must have had the worst polling game in the history of presidential politics. Clinton was VERY popular by the time he left...hell, he led Democrats to some nice gains in 1998. That (second term midterm pickups for the White House party) almost never happens.
That is probably a more healthy attribution than my current fear. Largely foreign bots preying on gullible chronically online people into thinking they know the answer. Largely by amplifying lunatics that are audience captured to spout more and more nonsense chasing the views.
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.
I think this is a pretty serious overstatement. Lefty dissatisfaction with Clinton was, as they say, a thing, but large swathes of the party were not against him or by proxy Gore. Nader's 2.75% of the vote certainly included some Democratic voters but I think you're seeing a backlash that wasn't there.
The way I remember the 2000 election was that it was the height of the neoliberal consensus with questions as to whether there were serious differences between the candidates, with the understanding that the way forward was so obvious that there didn't need to be.
I think the sign the party base was done w/ Clintonism was the fact there was no real Clintonite primary competitor in 2004 and the closest to that ideologically (Lieberman) ironically crashed on impact while the actual elect was between a limited return to populism (Gephardt), old school center-left liberalism (Kerry), and the new progressivism (Dean).
Maybe! Still I feel like Obama ran and won on a modernized Clinton playbook (ironically against a Clinton in the primary) in 2008. He then governed in a similar way and left office with all things considered pretty decent approval ratings.
Not really on point but I still think the most interesting forgotten moment of the 2008 primary was when Hilary got caught taking a shot with a bunch of deplorables in WVA. Obama made fun of her for it but talk about a different tent.
It’s hard for me to explain why California Republicans have resigned themselves to powerlessness.
I very much want a change in California, and the Republicans’ diagnosis is correct that a lot of California problems are a result of single party “Democrat” rule.
But look at the ideas on housing the Republicans are trying endorsing: Homelessness is not a housing issue, only a mental health and drug addiction problem. Don’t do a “housing first” approach. New housing should be primarily single family starter homes far from city cores, rather than infill.
With housing and homelessness being arguably one of the most important issues, it would be nice to have a responsible Republican opposition. Instead we get ideas that seem worse than the Democrats.
They’re not a political party - they’re a grievance machine. I too despair of California ever improving but that doesn’t mean I want a Trump lackey in the governor’s mansion. Incompetent thuggery solves nothing.
Ok so try to put yourself in the shoes of a Central Valley or Inland Empire Republican. If they take a look at Matt Mahan for example, what do they see?
They see someone, fair or not, as a woke cultural liberal who supports more immigration, and who is funded by tech billionaires. Even if they acknowledge that Mahan is more moderate on several issues, he's not someone they are excited to support.
Even if they agree that Mahan is better than one of the standard Dems (and might vote for him against a standard Dem in a top two), he's bad enough to for them to not "vote strategically" in the primary.
I suspect that if the billionaire wealth tax passes, it will do far better than it normally would among these kinds of Republicans because they think it will "own the liberal tech billionaires."
Someone like Mahan could feasibly get some votes of some urban and suburban Republicans, but even there, there would be problems. Mahan raised taxes in San Jose from my understanding, and is a red line for a lot of suburban Republicans.
Same, I am ready to vote for a sane Republican at any level in California. I think the issue is that right now, and I hope this is diminishing, Republicans main strategy seems to be emulating Trump, which obviously doesn’t work well outside of a few counties or districts in California. Hopefully that will change.
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.
What if JetBlue now just buys all of Spirit's planes and takes over its slots? Given that Spirit was always a zombie, wouldn't that be the equivalent of JetBlue merging with Spirit back under Biden? What were the great strengths that Spirit was bringing to the proposed merger that are now lost because it went bankrupt?
For customers, their Frequent Flyer program went kaput. It's all vaporized. A merger would have turned Spirit FF credits into JetBlue FF credits.
And mergers aren't always great for employees, but I was actually emailing some of the 17,000 laid off people the days before BK and I'm 100% positive it would be less bad than this for them.
Yeah, "Not saving it condemned it" isn't a useful structure for describing the collapse itself. It is useful as part of broader systemic discussions where you can talk about whether or not the save should have been done.
So my view is that Spirit's business model was not suited for the post-Covid era. Spirit's low wage and low amenities worked in the 2010s when you had a weak labor market, an easy money environment, and strong demand for cheap tickets over everything else due to the Great Recession. It stopped working so well when airline pilots and other airline workers had the ability to ask for more money due to the tight labor market. It also stopped working when other companies offered a Basic airfare, and at the same time gave passengers a better experience.
Yes a merged JetBlue would have survived for longer than Spirit did. But I strongly suspect that JetBlue would be running into problems in 2026 if they had bought Spirit. They might anyway. I'm generally an anti-neoliberal antitrust hawk, but I would not have blocked this merger. Spirit did not have that much in market share, and Jet Blue wasn't really a competitor in areas where Spirit did have considerable market share. Also Spirit was clearly a failing company by 2024, and the Jet Blue merger may have increased competition rather than reducing it.
The idea that competition doesn’t matter for airline prices is kind of crazy IMO. There’s a route that I used to fly for business a lot between two mid-size Midwest cities that was only served by one airline and I’ve paid as much as $600, which is almost what it cost to fly all the way to China when there were a ton of different airlines serving it pre-COVID.
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.
The same could be said about the FTC trying to block Amazon from buying iRobot. The FTC said that Amazon couldn't be trusted due to its marketplace dominance, market concentration, and "big tech" blah, blah, blah - only to watch iRobot go into bankruptcy and be sold for parts to a Chinese company.
Lina Khan and the neo-brandeisians were a disaster and they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near public policy again.
It's so weird that one particular policy lever - anti-trust - became a theory of everything for the Brandeis crowd.
"The same could be said about the FTC trying to block Amazon from buying iRobot. The FTC said that Amazon couldn't be trusted due to its marketplace dominance, market concentration, and "big tech" blah, blah, blah - only to watch iRobot go into bankruptcy and be sold for parts to a Chinese company."
Yes. Even Microsoft and Activision - they had no interest in helping the laggard competitor in the market. Imagine if the #3 competitor in gaming was named Sega - would the FTC still have moved to block the Activision acquisition? I doubt it - well I hope not.
That said, MS does have an atrocious record of trying to buy their way into a market.
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!
Honestly I don't even know what MY was trying to say there. No one was arguing that the blocked merger was the *reason* Spirit went bankrupt. They were arguing that we would not have had the bad outcome of Spirit going bankrupt if it had been allowed to merge with JetBlue. Which is incontrovertibly true.
Matt Y’s business takes in general are pretty bad.
His statement in the raising costs and seniors article earlier this week that most seniors who have brokerage accounts probably aren’t heavily invested in bonds was so mind numbingly stupid (investing more in fixed income as someone gets older is literal personal investing orthodoxy) it made it hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
I think that take is not as crazy as it appears. Obviously most people who have investments will have some bonds but the standard ratio is 60/40 to 40/60 depending on age which is very different from a time when a lot of people would have 100% exposure to US bonds (the generation who experienced Black Tuesday and swore off equities).
Sure but the bonds are what’s supplementing your social security while the stock is (usually) what you hope to pass on to your kids etc.
Not to mention the cap gains tax and having to actually take that money out of the market then.
In the 1970s when Social Security was adjusted for cost of living, there were lots of seniors who had 0% allocation to stocks. Today if you are living entirely on the income from your bonds you are in the top 1% (most advisors would be targeting to fund your lifestyle with a mix of dividends, selling appreciated equity, and bonds) and you will be forced to liquidate your stocks as part of your required distributions from your IRA/401K. The point is the idea that inflation hurts seniors disproportionately was true in 1970 and false in 2020
I commented to that effect on that post, but not this harshly. This is too biting.
Better question: who gives a damn if the Kmart of airlines goes under?
And I'll at least have to give kudos to Trump for not bailing out Spirit after the failed merger, keeping a failing business model alive. I wonder just how many zombie companies are still managing to survive with our profligate stimulus/tax cut happy policies of the last decade , avoiding, in Buffet's words, the time when the tide goes out.
Why would that have been bad? Stopping the merger to preserve competition was fine and so is bailing out failing companies - no one should have to lose a job for their companies’ bad business model, not in America, at least. With the money being used in our stupid war, bailing out an airline seems small potatoes. Don’t airlines go through bailouts and bankruptcies all the time anyway? From what I understand it’s a notoriously hard business model with which to be persistently profitable, whether you’re Delta or Spirit
Airlines are not persistently unprofitable, and spirit didn't have any path to profitability even with the bailout. Their most recent plan was to cut their way to profitability, sell off gate slots, cut even more routes and flights etc. which probably would have resulted in even further decline.
They aren’t persistently unprofitable but they go through vicious cycles: demand-based, fuel price-based, and airplane life cycle based. Every few years one files for bankruptcy or has to merge
Which is ok. That enables creative destruction. As MY said in the article all the assets will end up being reused by other airlines - it isn't like we just flushed all the value down the toilet. Making it easier for companies to fail (bankruptcies that quickly go through the courts and aren't tied up for years) or people to be fired and conversely companies to be started and people easier hired drives growth an innovation. We just need to ensure we have the safety net that limits downsides ... which is more easily afforded by a high growth society.
It's not usually a good idea to keep failed business models going though we tend to have that mommy government saving us from any pain idea since the Obama years. It cheapens the value of money and companies don't focus on the best paths forward---I mean if we're going to get bailed out why try so hard? And in the bigger picture propping up the economy in that way along with stimulus and tax cuts has wrought a terrifically enormous debt load-- $40 trillion almost now. That is something that will have to be reckoned with and will likely cause even more businesses to go under if it's full weight is thrown at the economy in certain scenarios.
Personally I think the government should run the airlines as a public utility with highly subsidized ticket prices tbh
They are certainly in a somewhat gray area as they are quasi public anyway with airports and pretty necessary to modern life. Maybe not quite like utilities though. They were deregulated in 1978 I believe by Carter. I can't say flying was a worse experience after deregulation because I didn't start doing a few trips until the late 80s. But flying then was still a joy, wider seats, planes only half full, meals, drinks on the house and such and not particularly expensive. But when was it, the GFC (?), when the airlines started cutting niceties, narrowing seats, and loading planes to capacity. It's more efficient, eco-wise for sure and sometimes cheaper but along with TSA lines it's become a dread to get through.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s not interesting or important to discuss the issues surrounding Spirit’s bankruptcy, but they were ultimately less than 2% of flights and widely loathed by customers. I doubt this will have much long-term impact.
So why did the FTC block the merger? What was wrong with the Democrat run process? Are they going to make similar mistakes when the stakes are higher?
I liked spirit. For an extra $120 (which included your checked and carry on bag) you could guarantee the middle seat had no passenger, which was a nice amenity for my fat ass. Now their planes were rarely full in the first place from my experience so this was kind of a waste, but if I’m doing a long cross-country flight by myself I really don’t want to sit next to someone, especially some other fat person.
Say what you will, but flying OAK-DTW nonstop was golden... nobody else flying that route. I've had a lot more heartburn with Frontier, I'm shocked they're still solvent
Jetblue was also working on an earlier deal with American (partnership not merger) which formed the basis for their growth plan, which was the reason they wanted Spirit. Biden (DOJ this time) killed that partnership too, so the reason it was a "terrible mistake" in the first place is yet more terrible admin meddling for no reason.
The administration was bad.
Their main achievement was paving a pathway for Trump to return.
No, the FTC saved Jet Blue from itself by stopping this merger, the thing that the FTC did do to mess up Jet Blue was breakup their alliance with American Airlines, this was allowing Jet Blue into high market locations, NYC and Boston by taking the terminal slots that American gave up when they made a bad business decisions. So when Jet Blue lost that alliance, they ended up over leveraged, they had already started the Spirit Merger talks and since CEOS are ego driven probably would have followed through without having the actual follow through to carry that merger without the AA slots. Jet Blue currently has significant debt and did have significant debt then.
"No, the FTC saved Jet Blue from itself by stopping this merger,"
But that's not why they stopped the merger. They stopped the merger because of the damage to consumers from the loss of Spirit Airlines. This saving JetBlue from itself thing is retrospective, the FTC wasn't thinking anything about that.
How do you know? I mean I don't think they should have broken up the Jet Blue/AA alliance, but by all accounts Jet Blue was over leveraged and the merger was a bad idea for both. We love to dunk on bidens ftc for all their terrible wrongs but I'm not sure this is one of them. I'm not going to argue about it though as I know that I'm in the "free speech" but out of my lane.
Well, it's not the FTC's job to help companies make better business decisions, right?
To wit: "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. That doesn’t make sense, just as a question of chronology and causal logic." This is sort of like saying Joe Biden is not responsible for Trump's 2nd term because Joe Biden hasn't been president for over a year. Of course that is part of the chronology and the JetBlue offer was an all cash offer so the counterfactual is pretty clear for Spirit's long term shareholders. Why are so many would be regulators so sure about what is important for other people? In fact, "the more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."
The Ann Arbor story continues to radicalize me that a YIMBY tactic that should get utilized and advocated for more is to do what Boise did, and abolish commercial zoning and replace it with mixed use zoning, allowing housing to be built within retail and office if the landowners want to.
Agreed. And this just it makes a ton of sense
For example, why doesn't every walmart and Costco have like a five story apartment building on top of it
Costco is working on it!
https://www.housingfinance.com/developments/costco-meets-affordable-housing_o
Living above a Costco would be awesome
You spelled twenty wrong but yeah
The Ann Arbor thing also supports my thoughts about College Station, TX. There are currently 15-20 story student housing buildings going up right next to campus, but still a crunch in other parts of town. There’s a bunch of towers-in-the-parking-lot style student complexes a couple miles from campus as well, which are awful. Meanwhile the adjacent town of Bryan is wondering how to beautify the stretch of Texas Ave full of run-down 70s strip malls with appliance repair stores and abandoned Walmarts. If they just legalized student apartments and ran buses up and down Texas Ave, they would have their solution to everything.
I have nothing to add other than College Station is a strange place. It's like real life Pluribus.
When I arrived people had these “Keep College Station Normal” t shirts that never made any sense to me. Austin is clearly a much more normal place with much less cultishness!
Yeah, there are a lot of university towns with housing problems that could be fixed with YIMBYism. A2 is a great example--the area that's now being revitalized was ugly and inefficient when I lived there years ago, rent within walking/bus distance of campus was high (especially if your landlord was competent), and there really wasn't a great aesthetic reason to forbid new construction.
Tying this into "Are we pricks?" on the golf course, it would be just as disingenuous to upzone an established "nice" neighborhood of single-family homes. Yes, focus multi-family zoning on commercial, industrial and undeveloped areas.
But that isn't, necessarily, what is driving the builds in Ann Arbor? Per his link, this is a rise in projected demand for student level housing.
Note that I, personally, think this is great. I don't see it happening in places that think they are building places for families to live long term. But only because I fear most places are obsessed with the idea of detached single family homes.
If this can break that obsession. I'm all for it getting more press!
I am persuaded by Lyman Stone's argument that you need SFH (albeit not necessarily huge floor plans) to support the demands of couples contemplating kids.
We had three babies in a ~1,000-foot upstairs apartment, and it was doable. But it was also a great relief to finally get a house with a yard that the kids could just walk out into, and Stone's surveys suggest that many couples want more space for childrearing than apartments afford.
My main gripe with that is that I cannot tell whether he regards single-family *attached* housing to be sufficient for the purpose.
If not, and he thinks townhomes aren't family housing (which is batshit IMO but that's not relevant), then there's simply no path to solving the suburban affordability crisis at all in his world.
Not sure—he’s active on Substack and might answer questions—but I do know he's big on hyping SFH in dense neighborhoods (e.g., https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/2032137907427741806?s=20). He said somewhere that his neighborhood has about 10,000 people per square mile, and that is indeed pretty dense (about as dense as the apartment-heavy downtown near me and considerably more dense than my own neighborhood, which has a mix of SFH and apartments/townhomes).
Ehh, a lot of the most expensive suburban towns in my area have similar densities, and path dependency means the only thing that could possibly introduce more family housing in those areas would be allowing the redevelopment of individual detached houses into rowhome quadplexes on the same lots...
Anyway, my very suburban rowhome neighborhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia clocks in at about 24,000 per square mile, with small household sizes due to a higher median age, while looking like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0023413,-75.2031669,3a,75y,231.94h,81.15t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s_zDaLH_BbzUFP0__ni1H0w!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D8.85315961996406%26panoid%3D_zDaLH_BbzUFP0__ni1H0w%26yaw%3D231.94305456933415!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUwNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
There's a lot of room for pleasant neighborhoods with attached housing that's family friendly.
We had a family of 6 in a 1000 square foot house with basically no yard. Kids could walk to a park down the street easily enough, thankfully. Such that I'm sympathetic to this. It is not wrong.
But this is just a restating of my point? If you are building up to meet demand in a place that isn't student driven, density will not look the same. At all.
And it is largely because people are convinced that detached homes are superior to apartment complexes. Which, again, for how most of us view it, that is not wrong. But that doesn't mean it is naturally correct, either.
It is even more odd when I consider how many of us grew up in apartment complexes where waking up and meeting all the other kids down in the quad was the norm. I don't remember hating that time.
I don't get what we're arguing about. Who thinks SF homes shouldn't be allowed? Of course getting a house with a yard makes sense for a lot of people. The question is always why can't an apartment building be built across the street from your house with a yard. And the answer is always... character? Like there's not a reason
It's an argument about planning, zoning, and policy, not personal choice.
My comment is about planning and zoning, not personal choice. I'm still not following the justification for banning the apartment building? Or the point of your comment at all. Who thinks SFH shouldn't be allowed?
I don't think anyone said that. Have a nice day!
I was mainly addressing Matt's broader assertion of “ it is much easier to get people to tolerate dense new construction if it’s not in existing single-family neighborhoods.”.
My point is also that the demand probably isn't the same, either.
Specifically, the Ann Arbor build is to cover rental demand. Something most cities don't have in the same way that a college town does.
I don't think this has to be the case, of course. We could encourage families to live in rental units far more than we do. But I can't deny there is a general brain rot that thinks rental apartments bad.
Now, I absolutely think people should take Ann Arbor's lesson that trying to incentivize subsidized units is not the way to go.
This just seems like such an obvious no brainer. Why don’t more places do this?
"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 when 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 just don’t see how to usefully operationalize this idea when almost any position anyone takes on anything could be called a luxury belief. Under this framework only immigrants and people directly harmed by immigration should talk about immigration? Only criminals and their victims should talk about crimes?
I’m not directly harmed by the Iran war and rising costs, while not great, are so far manageable for my family and are offset by other assets growing in value during that time. Any opinions I have about the Iran war are therefore luxury beliefs?
At some point the concept has become something of a thought terminating cliche and ceased being helpful analysis.
Isn't "luxury belief" just a pejorative term?
"I have sincerely held principles. You have luxury beliefs."
Sure, people might use it that way, and that's probably extra-threatening because the center-left's coalition exposes it to a relatively large attack surface along these lines.
But it really seems like you're sticking your head in the sand. Do you mean to say you've really never met people that profess outrageous beliefs to get attention or seem cool?
"Pejorative" doesn't mean "always misapplied." You can be accurate and still be pejorative. Also, I prefer to contest people on substance and not on their motives. Whenever possible. Not always possible, of course. Some people just are asking for it.
"Also, I prefer to contest people on substance and not on their motives. Whenever possible. Not always possible, of course. Some people just are asking for it."
Agree 100%.
But no, it is not 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 a pejorative term. It also communicates a significant sociological / psychological observation about human behavior that's useful for understanding what's going on around you, interpreting history, and predicting future events.
"It also communicates a significant sociological / psychological observation about human behavior that's useful for understanding what's going on around you, interpreting history, and predicting future events."
And it can be a fun sick burn.
I think implicit in luxury beliefs isn't just that they're higher on Maslow's hierarchy, but that if the people holding them *weren't* insulated from their consequences they wouldn't endorse them. A luxury belief isn't just a "first-world problem," it's one where the signaling dominates the sincerity.
You operationalize it by being more humble and thoughtful, and by tempering your own inclination to say something net harmful just because it would make you more popular in your local social environment.
[Edit]
Since I gather you're asking about operationalizing it offensively, I'd say it's best used sparingly, like any other fallacy. You should generally extend charity to people, but if they start talking reckless nonsense, figuratively high-fiving their entourage, operationalize the hell out of it.
There were plenty of examples of this last week, when people clowned on Piker and Tolentino by foregrounding who pays the costs of their juvenile posturing.
Highlighting the connection between those positions and their pursuit of status exposed them to additional ridicule. If done correctly, that will discourage enough people from following their example to balance out their charismatic pull.
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).
"2) They are doing this advocacy to signal their status and/or wealth (being born a citizen of a desirable country)."
No they aren't. They are doing it because they think excess immigration is bad for the country.
Yes, exactly right!
Rob Henderson was writing from within a particular milieu, with a fairly significant (and understandable) chip on his shoulder, so he focused his fire on the left's excesses. But the concept is widespread and universally applicable.
I don't think this captures the idea, though: "They are doing this advocacy to signal their status and/or wealth (being born a citizen of a desirable country)."
The idea is sharper and more useful when analyzing advocacy that's doing work within in a specific social hierarchy, like all the anons vying for twitter supremacy by bragging how cruel we should be to illegal immigrants.
I am just pissed I didn’t copyright this idea when I was drunk ranting back in 2012.
Impressive, I don’t think there’s anything from my 2012 drunken rants worth copyrighting
1. I found Matt Y's critique of psychoanalyzing people one disagrees with to itself be psychoanalyzing. But I have a better, more substantive critique of the theory. Bear with me :)
2. The work is updating Thorsten Veblen's conspicuous consumption work. A theory developed when Veblen was at University of Chicago and originally appeared in academic journals and even his book was written for a peer academic audience.
3. While Veblen's work predates modern empirical methodology, it has been validated. Economists later coined "Vebeln goods" and it's a mathematically proven concept.
4. Ultimately it's an empirical question. When Henderson freely uses "wealthy," "affluent," "rich," and "upper class" interchangeably, and it is found that the "luxury beliefs" are not correlated to wealth at all the correct conclusion is to reject the thesis.
5. Henderson's work is pop psychology. That is a separate category, but it is not Veblen. Don't piggy back on Veblen unless you can match the rigor, care, and toil that he put into his work. Do not foist work of this nature on a non-specialist audience. It is catchy but wrong.
"Luxury beliefs" is clearly inspired by Veblen's work, but I don't think it's correct to say it's an update of Veblen. It's more a soundbite version of Bourdieu, who showed in "Distinction" how elites of every sort differentiate themselves through culture, taste, language, and symbolic positioning as much as money.
I don't think Bourdieu's work is as rigorous as Veblen's, but it's a mistake to discard a powerful analytic idea grounded in commonplace observations because it hasn't been validated yet in the charts-and-tables sense.
> hasn't been validated yet
Sure, though also consider what has been explicitly invalidated already.
From a purely analytical point there should be some costs to _you_ to acquire these beliefs. What are these costs? (see https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/are-luxury-beliefs-a-real-thing)
But more importantly look at this work: https://manhattan.institute/article/is-defunding-the-police-a-luxury-belief
On the whole defund movement that is one of the main examples the book. Democrats maintained their support for de-policing even when they lived in areas with high violent crime. They were holding onto the belief even when they were not insulated from consequences. i.e. the diver for holding beliefs is ideology not status.
Also note this is a critique from a highly sympathetic audience. Now, maybe he has responded to these adequately? I haven't kept up. They probably did a live debate?
This is another reason to build up this kind of thesis over a period of time doing careful research. Making modest claims along the way, each relying on the previous finding, each being on sure footing. This is more lets make a big catchy claim, and then retract gradually.
I've got to focus on narrow responses for now:
1) Noah's article. The cost is usually credibility, outside of your relevant status community, and sometimes much more severe hostility, sometimes to the point of ostracism.
2) The Manhattan Institute article. This is extremely interesting and there's a lot to digest. The relevant finding from that study was a little narrower than Democrats maintaining support for de-policing in the face of local crime:
> in areas with high levels of violent crime, support for defunding the police generally falls for all groups except white Democrats. This is true even when socioeconomic, demographic, and political background variables are held constant.
But my headline response is this: if you live in an area with violent crime and you advocate for de-policing, it's not a luxury belief. That's failing prong one of the sinister luxury-belief-holder test! ("It’s easy to advocate for something when someone else will bear the consequences.")
Oren Cass springs to mind... he's maybe not stupid, but he is the absolute worst.
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.
Both sides have A. "This is what should happen," and B. "This is what will happen if we don't get that."
A at both extremes are wild and unworkable. There is not a mandate or legal grounding for the extremes at either end, and I think we see that in the current administration clearly. We saw a bit of that under Biden with broad student loan forgiveness.
In this regard, yeah, it's embarrassing to get a chance to try your own extremes out, and Conservatives are experiencing that now along with attendant incumbent angst.
On B, the "This is what will happen," I think it's fair to say that the Right's version is less connected from reality. Leftists are wrong about what society would be like if they got all the laws they wanted, but they were evidently correct about their predictions of what Trump 2 would mean, no matter how many times someone earnestly says "TDS." On the other hand, Rightist predictions of what them losing means seems to be consistently disconnected from reality even as they control the federal government. E.g. what happens if 100 mil illegals aren't deported? Doesn't matter; that number is a lie anyway and it will not happen.
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.
That's not really right. The ability to buy status through the credit card programs contributes to it but it's more that the status rewards (free checked bags, seat upgrades, early boarding) **REALLY** drive consumer willingness to pay. Said differently, the price difference a fare would need to be to fly on a consumer's non-preferred carrier is like 30%. I don't even know if I'd fly AA out of ORD for a 50% discount to UA. The lock-in is that strong.
If I’m understanding you, for that 50% difference, couldn’t you just pay for priority boarding, etc? Or if not what is it that you’re getting through status on United?
It’s more the segments and miles to hit whichever status target you’d like to maintain. For me, it’s the free economy plus upgrades for when I’m flying for personal trips. If you don’t travel a lot … then it wouldn’t matter.
If you put nearly all of your expenses on an airline card it’s not just the perks but it’s the miles!
Oh I commented this separately but I thought that interview was pretty great.
Why do the cards correlate to willingness to pay a premium for air travel on the part of consumers?
(Not trying to be tendentious, I just don't quite understand the connection here. Is the idea that if you have a bunch of credit card miles or points you feel more like paying the difference on more profitable routes or fare classes?)
I believe card points themselves are a large profit center for airlines. Chase for example buys 110k points from united for every person who opens this card. A google search indicates United generates 3-6 billion dollars from chase. I'm not sure how much selling Chase a point "costs" United exactly, but I'm betting it's a very favorable deal and therefore puts them in a much more favorable situation compared to budget airlines which cannot offer credit card products due to their (downscale) market position.
It's better to think of United as a credit card company that operates an airline. Their core airline business runs at -2% operating margin but their CC margin pulls total company op. margin to between +5-9% depending on the Q.
I think all airlines have a credit card
But other than using that additional profit center to defray costs and prices such that there's not as much margin for low-cost carriers to compete with the bigger carriers I'm not seeing the connection to consumer willingness-to-pay. The part where card issuance is an independent profit center seems orthogonal to that.
I think American mainline carriers (Delta, United + Southwest) also are competing more effectively with ULCCs than European carriers. I'm not that familiar with Lufthansa, BA, KLM, SAS etc. but I don't think they have the super budget-conscious "basic economy" fares like UA/DL? Which leaves more room for RyanAir/EasyJet/
It's mostly miles and status lock in. But also most consumer home bases tend to favor a dominate carrier so the carriers all kind of figured this differentiated pricing strategy out from Delta in Atlanta.
To get to Japan from the east coast, you simply fly to Seattle, host a SB in-person meetup at Stoup Brewery on Capitol Hill, and fly to Japan the next morning.
There does seem to be a lot of Seattle/pacific NW support in the comments, so this sounds like a great idea!
I was going to make a similar comment. The best way to fly to Asia from the East Coast is to..stop on the West Coast. Obviously that's not always possible, but Matt can work remote...so, do a 2-3 junket visiting/writing about an important story out west, and then continue to Japan.
nah. to the Antipodes, yes. But to Tokyo, it's 14 hours from the east coast (cause you fly over the North Pole) and 12 hours from the west coast (save Alaska or Hawaii).
This was my immediate thought too as someone who has travelled from DEN to the Far East 7-8 times. You just have a layover at SFO or SEA. It's really not that bad.
This but an actually good brewery like Urban Family in Ballard
That is not walking distance from my apartment.... Ballard is so hard to get to. Stoup is just a few blocks from the Link.
No, that just makes things worse. If you don't have kids along (who cannot possibly be forced to do this) there's a pretty foolproof way to get yourself completely flipped on a 12 hour day-night reversal within 2 days.
Fly direct from EWR, JFK, or IAD on a 12 AM redeye:
- No caffeine the morning of.
- Catch an hour or two nap starting at 5 PM
- Get some caffeine in at the airport before 10 PM
- Stay up on-board until 6 AM ET
- Sleep as much as you possibly can for the remaining 6-8 hours of the flight.
- When you feel like waking up force yourself to nap some more.
- Land at ~3-6 AM, by the time you clear customs and get to the hotel it's mid-morning.
- Get out of the hotel immediately and stay out with a full day's itinerary.
- Hold off on caffeine until late morning local time.
- Get dinner and a drink or two to slow you back down around 7 PM.
- Crash with a curtain open, and roll over without even looking at your phone every time your body says to wake up until dawn is visible.
On day two you follow the same basic steps, it's just easier. On day three it feels normal to do this.
I used this method going back and forth to East Asia right up until I had kids and again the last few times I flew out to meet my already-adjusted family there, it pretty much puts me on local time within 48 hours with only mild discomfort on the first day of bulling through.
I would support this
Or SFO! I will attend. Suck it Seattle.
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.
Dems in rural areas aren't condescending towards their neighbors, they just have views that are too far left to win elections--especially the ones running for office.
It is true that Republicans have been unsuccessful at undoing "tens of millions of fake asylum seekers", for the same reason they've been unsuccessful at stopping voter fraud or the insidious spread of sharia law. All are figments of their imagination.
How many fake asylum seekers do you figure there actually are?
Looks like there were a little under 2 million applicants during the Biden administration: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/asylum-applications. So, on the outside, 2 million.
That sounds about right.
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).
Compared to when? You think the policy status quo is to the right of 2016? 2006? 1996? 1976? 1956?
I am not sure I could defend even 2016 in the aggregate, though I guess it is arguable (Dobbs was certainly a big shift and they have been enforcing civil rights laws to roll back DEI pretty significantly).
But the direction of travel over the 20th and 21st centuries has very clearly been to the left (for good or ill!).
It’s possible the attitudes are the same, the governing elites just better reflect the attitudes. I’m not sure there was EVER a time where affirmative action and racial preferences in college admissions had higher approval than 50%
At least 1996, wasn’t alive before that. It’s notable that the big Supreme Court decisions you mention like Dobbs and SFFA were all overturning Supreme Court precedents from several generations ago in a more conservative direction—that certainly suggests things moving to the right, no? Trump is even trying to overturn birthright citizenship which has been the uncontested law since the 1800s.
A couple things have moved left, like gay marriage, marijuana, healthcare… I’m struggling to think of anything beyond that.
Criminal justice has shifted right so fast since 2021 there’s an audible sonic boom
It's very notable that Krasner is basically the only DA from that era who has held on, and he's done it mainly by "selling out" on a lot of substance and some of the rhetoric while keeping the remaining rhetoric.
If you believe that it’s important to secure convictions he’s very good at that! (I think you should, certainty of punishment matters).
... percentage wise perhaps, but mainly by the metric of being a spectacularly incompetent administrator whose office *must* toss anything that doesn't plead out due to staffing shortfalls, experience deficits, and general disarray.
I live in MA, and that's the opposite of my perspective. Republican governors accomplished significant non-partisan projects, but they never moved any policy significantly to the right so far as I know. None of them, for instance, did anything substantial to fight the (very unpopular) Goodridge decision.
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.
Yes, that's a healthy dynamic when applied appropriately. However, that whole balance is out of whack: Republicans passing tax cuts when the economy is thriving (ideally we raise taxes in good economic times to refill govt coffers) and Democrats being ineffectual counterpoints to that scenario because of obsession with DEI, profligate immigration, trans issues, etc. Republicans and Democrats need each other to run a competent country--a bird needs a left and right wing to fly.
The Republican Party, driven by the views of many American rich people, has views about things like health care and redistribution that are deeply unpopular. That drives them to the kind of craziness that is the difference between the Republicans and normal center right parties in other countries.
I would conjecture that the broad base of popular support for redistribution is less broad than you assert. So much of Biden’s programs (expanded child tax credit) did not generate a wellspring of support.
The problem for Republicans is that they are opposed to the _current_ levels of redistribution, which is very unpopular. If they reconciled themselves to the ACA and Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security and SNAP, they would be in a very different position.
That wouldn't matter. Because then the fight would be over the next expansion of those expenses.
Like the "temporary " expansions under Bidens stimulus
I disagree with Sam's characterization of the racial situation (and indeed think moderate conservatives are way closer to normal sentiments on identity politics) but think he's onto something here. The ACA is an approximation of the conservative counter-proposal to Hilarycare and RomneyCare when he was governor of MA. I think the GOP would have a much stronger case against public expansion and maybe even a winning hand in light of the way the European welfare state is faring with low birth rates if their position was to embrace universal coverage via firmly regulated private payers. Instead their position is some odd combination of no position and find ways to kick people off of their insurance where possible as a fiscal fig leaf for tax cuts.
This is indeed what conservatives tell themselves to persuade each other not to adopt positions supported by enormous majorities of the country. (Matt regularly points out this phenomenon on the left, it is also inaccurate there.)
Right but conservatives would win fights that they are currently losing, because unaffiliated voters would then be open to agreeing with them where right now they're not.
Yeah, that safety net was inadequate as it was. ACA subsidies were good and every state should have expanded Medicaid. That should be the absolute bare minimum
I have become more bearish on this as I have gotten older. I suspect the only real constituency for expanded social transfers are from workers to retirees. The next two elections will show if the public broadly supports the expanded ACA subsidies or opposes the cuts to Medicaid or SNAP.
I am pessimistic. Much of the public will probably tolerate transfers to the poor before touching Medicare or Social Security.
For the life of me, I don't understand why we haven't found a way to incentivize jobs in the services for older people. It isn't like we are just giving out buckets of gold and older people are swimming in it, McDuck style.
Of course, just typing it I realize part of the answer. We likely did, but the bulk of that spending is eaten up by the financial sector's increasingly complicated instruments. Most folks will blame "private equity" but it isn't like they can point to a single instrument. It is all complicated to the point that people ignore it.
This is really gross in poor areas. You have 70yo nurses making home visits to 80yo retirees that don't have enough money to move into actual assisted living. But too much to qualify for help in it.
Redistribution for the elderly is popular - since they vote in droves and of course "earned it".
I think where Biden went wrong is that he made it about kids. Turns out that not enough people give a shit about kids.
Giving to kids is more fraught because we judge their parents. Rightly, because most of them are doing it wrong
Italy's "far right" party would be a center right party in the Anglosphere.
Macron is also center-right. His party just ate up the old center-right.
If abundance was working, the discussions would be far more centered on where we can spend money. When you have to be spending to do something, you back yourself into having to tax the people with the money.
But, the gross framing we have allowed in this nation where taxes are punitive is a cancer.
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.
I can't believe that Democrates have NOT abandoned (low income) immigration restricions. I have no doubt even Harris would have brought Southern border immigration close to zero and the next Democratic presdent more so. And almost all the DEI nonesene was non-national government tendencies. The idea that Democrats are chomping at the bit to finance "gender afirming healthcare" in Zimbabwe again is ridiculous.
"I can't believe that Democrats have NOT abandoned (low income) immigration restrictions."
That double negative is leaving me seriously confused as to what you're saying here.
Democrats agree with…. They have no plans of a Biden 2 “asylum” policy.
Ah, thanks.
>Personally, I think you don’t get from here to sanity without sane people adopting immigration restriction...<
I doubt that's right. More basically, I hope it's not right: Trump's current policy of ratcheting down our intake of immigrants is making numerous national challenges—inflation, public debt, safety net finances, childcare affordability, housing construction, geopolitical competition—more difficult. Continuing along these lines is exactly what the country does not need, especially given the acute demographic stagnation we're currently experiencing.
What triggered a lot of voters in Biden's term was border chaos. You don't need immigration "restriction" to remedy that. You need better policies regarding enforcement and asylum.
“Sense of normalcy” = the crazies getting their policy ideas adopted by the mainstream seems like a false normalcy…
The reason Republican politics is insane is that what you suggest would not work politically.
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.
The continuing relevance of anti-Black sentiment makes it hard for parts of American society to reconcile themselves to things like the US's most important cities and most significant forms of culture. In contrast, other ethnic minorities have gradually assimilated and mostly those divisions don't continue to structure our politics. Immigration, education, gender, and more will continue to be relevant, here as they are elsewhere. But it's the legacy of black slavery and segregation specifically that helps make our center right party different.
This claim seems difficult to reconcile with the proposition that anti-black racism is more-or-less monotonically decreasing over time. You don't have to take the position that it doesn't exist or isn't significant at all to take the position that it's much less of a force in 2020s than it was in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s. How do you reconcile increasing dysfunction on the right with decreasing salience of the putative driver of said dysfunction, inter alia simply by the dying out of older cohorts who grew up when Jim Crow was actual policy instead of something that elicits a disgust response?
He says as Southern states, within a week of being officially told the gloves are off by the Supreme Soviet, are racing to dismember black-majority legislative districts and disenfranchise their residents.
It's very clear that anti-black racism is alive and well as a political strategy. Indeed, my chief disagreement with Sam is that I think it is and remains an exceptionally effective one. Trump's approval ratings consistently go up when he stops doing insane policies that harm everybody and really focuses on the hardcore gutter racism.
You don't think that might have a little more to do with wanting to pick up congressional seats?
I don't think I quite follow your point. Of course they want to pick up congressional seats. Gutter racism is a much more effective way of doing that than persuasion aimed at black voters.
Mathematically, Republicans gain a lot more white votes by being avowedly racist than they lose black-and-liberal-white votes by doing so.
Tomayto tomahto
I agree that the requirement to draw majority black districts has been softened. Does this mean black people are disenfranchised? in 2026, votes only count insofar as they are cast for or against politicians on the basis of their race? Interesting perspective.
My counterpoint is that I think anti-black racism is catastrophically worse in the 2020s than it was in the 1990s.
Really? I find this a surprising claim but would be interested in hearing more about why you think this.
yeah speaking as someone who was alive in the 90s this is a head-scratcher
I think the structuring effect of anti-Black sentiment continues even as individual prejudice declines. But also, the insanity of the Republican Party is driven by trying to win without reconciling themselves to these core features of our society, so your trajectory should predict craziness.
Living in a black middle class neighborhood in one of those cities, I think you're missing that, in the modern day, roughly as much of the divide emanates from the other side of the fence. Understandably, mind you, given the history, but black Americans, even middle and professional-class ones, tend to embrace a degree of ethnic nationalism or sub-nationalism or particularism that no other group in this country does.
That's wearing through at the edges as more and more ADOS kids find themselves growing up in mixed neighborhoods and dating people from other races, and as a greater portion of American black families come from more recent immigrant origins, but it's far from the case that assimilation is slowed entirely or even mainly by white/majority sentiment here.
I think it's true that Black Americans don't view the prospect of "assimilation" in the same way as eg recent Asian immigrants. I think that's entirely reasonable -- African American culture is American culture. But regardless of how you view it, this divide about what America really is represents a big difference in our politics compared to other Western countries.
I don't disagree with the last sentence, but I will caveat that relative agreement with the observation that it carries much less explanatory power than it did 20 years ago, let alone 40 or 60 years ago, and it will again carry much less explanatory power than today in another 20 years.
Dems who think this are really doing themselves a disservice by not updating their views.
It's partly a misunderstanding, in my belief anyway, of how much the GOP is driven by anti-Black racism. But it's also a bit out-of-date of how significant a distinctly "black" population is to our most significant cities and forms of culture. Rap is already at that phase where it's slowly losing relevancy, while also ethnically diversifying quite rapidly. It no longer has the association with Black, especially ADOS culture that it once had. And the same would be said for our biggest cities.
I'm not saying that NYC has the same demographics as Memphis, which is obviously not true. I'm saying that the Republican inability to become something like the British Tories, where they take seriously the country's major cities and incorporate conservative members of the major ethnic groups, is driven by the continuing relevance of the Black/non divide.
Don't the Tories still do very poorly with Black voters? They just have more token Black politicians because they don't use primaries.
"It's partly a misunderstanding, in my belief anyway, of how much the GOP is driven by anti-Black racism."
I'd have agreed with this statement until fall 2024 . . . .
But they’re eating our cats, srynerson!
"Hide your cats, hide your dogs, and hide your humans too because they're eating everyone out here!"
What happened in fall of 2024? The Haitian immigrant slander seemed more focused on the fact that they were foreigners than that they were black and I genuinely can’t recall anything else
(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...
I don't understand how the overall idea to exempt the modest wage earners from taxes is a good position for either party. By changing the tax system to have higher standard deductions and raising the bracket wages are creating a whole swath of society that don't actively pay taxes. Just look at what happens when you start to carve out participation like the California Prop 13.
Everyone should want a fuller participation of the tax regime not a lesser one.
I just don’t think you can sustain large amounts of transfers and public provision if you exempt so many people from contributing. It incentivizes a race to the bottom.
Sweden apparently learned that awhile back--that soaking the rich doesn't work (I remember on a visit to SKF in the late 80s the department president mentioning that with ridiculously high tax rates on high income earners back then that they were in effect not much different than a communist system). Everyone has to have some skin in the game if you're going to have some version of social democracy. It's a uniting force, something severely lacking in the US.
There is simply no way that the tax increases needed to pay for any variant on single payer will ever be politically palatable, *even if* we can turn around immediately and end employee and employer contributions and funnel them into pay.
We’re going to have to back-door the conversion of the employer-based system into effective universal coverage very incrementally. From the other week:
“Without getting into supply-side and provisioning reforms:
Reform bill 1: Offer a Medicare-derived public option on the ACA, same broad network and great negotiated rates for most care. Allow employers to buy into it.
Reform bill 2, a few years later: Require employers to allow employees to choose between in-kind health insurance benefits or the claimed employer contribution in cash or an HSA so they can pay for insurance.
Reform bill 3, the next time you get a crack at it: Gradually reduce the employer insurance tax advantages to nothing.
If you run the public option well, the end result of these three reforms is going to be within shouting distance of single payer after a decade or two. Employers will just give people more money in lieu of buying them insurance and they'll be able to go buy the public option on an exchange. Eventually, even if there's a line item on people's pay that says ‘Employer-sponsored healthcare,’ it'll just be part of their paycheck.”
One problem is that passing a reform bill is difficult, and passing a series of reform bills over many years and several elections is even more difficult. Your incremental reforms may be wise -- improve outcomes with little disruption to day-to-day practices, get everyone covered, bend the curve of cost growth -- but if they involve prolonged political struggle for very slow effects that will be invisible for years and deniable forever, it's hard to get the political will to actually do it.
At some point one feels compelled to ask whether we wish to govern or just posture in opposition. The electorate seems increasingly willing to allow us the latter...
The good thing about those ideas is that each of them is an incremental improvement. We could just do bill 1 and it be a major improvement over the current situation
To the contrary, big bills like Obamacare provoke a lot of backlash. Obamacare was almost repealed despite being quite popular. The system tends towards antimomentum: small or quiet changes that give people a sense that everything is normal
One dirty secret of health care politics is US government already spends a higher public % of GDP on health care than the OECD or the EU-OECD average[1]. If there's an obstacle to single payer in America, it's clearly not a lack of willingness to publicly spend at similar rates to Europeans on health care. Our rates are higher, if anything. Clearly it's not that much of a tax problem. This is true even if you theorize from the deficit that we only *really* pay the taxes for 8.4% GDP spend on health instead of our current 10.1% GDP spend on health. The 8.4% would be the EU-OECD average!
So then you get into, is the problem with the employer plans that they're not nationalized by the government? Probably not. The problem is they're decided by the employer due to the tax advantage. Just give the same tax advantage to private non-employer plans. Then I can shop for health insurance like I already shop for renting an apartment, groceries, a car, cellphone plan, the complex things I consider borderline essential to my day to day life.
In fact, the UK and Canada should consider even more middle class and up private co-pays[2] to help increase the investment in health care services that are needed and held down by the public understandably keeping the status quo of taxes where it is. Sounds like the main lesson here is the single payer systems should learn more from us so they can provide more people with cutting edge health care.
[1] page 199 of the pdf file, 197 as printed on the document. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/06/government-at-a-glance-2025_70e14c6c/0efd0bcd-en.pdf
[2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/up-from-single-payer
You have a talent for agreeing with me while pretending it's a disagreement, lol.
"The problem is they're decided by the employer due to the tax advantage. Just give the same tax advantage to private non-employer plans. Then I can shop for health insurance like I already shop for renting an apartment, groceries, a car, cellphone plan, the complex things I consider borderline essential to my day to day life."
The obvious answer is not to provide everything a tax advantage but to take it away from everything eventually. That said, this is a quibble. The real issue is that merely leveling the tax structure is insufficient for any sort of market-driven insurance selection process; we need at some point in the chain of reforms to mandate that employers make their contributions to employee healthcare fungible rather than "in-kind." That was the point of my proposed second step above.
I have a very different assessment than you of the ability of a public *option* to compete in the marketplace once employees and non-employees alike are empowered to select them, but even you will surely agree that there's no harm in offering one at-cost, so long as you bar the government from subsidizing* it to make it artificially attractive?
*Beyond the mere administrative cross-subsidy it would receive from being run by Medicare, of course, which is just an economy of scale anyway.
I'm sure we'll find a disagreement! My plan to make employee healthcare fungible rather than in-kind:
Step 1) My employer pays me a salary, via paychecks twice a month.
Step 2) I purchase a private health insurance plan with my money.
Then we have a centralized federal Medicaid policy for those whose working salary is simply too low or disability or other criteria that prevent them from earning enough to purchase private insurance.
Obviously the politics of this or any significant change will be difficult, but the optimal policy as a mix of private and public safety net seems relatively easy to draw up towards your admirable goal of fungible health care plans for the working population.
There's enough path dependency there that I think you'll need to make employer contributions fungible by legal mandate before they atrophy away sufficiently to just roll them into pay, was the point. Otherwise there's no clear path from here, where middle-income employees receive 10-20% of their pay in the form of employer healthcare contributions, to there, where they get a paycheck that includes that amount instead.
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 democratic president to get the majority of white vote was LBJ. The R core is an anti-urban (Black, Jews, LGBT, foreigners in general) coalition. This is a common coalition in US history. Sarah Palin was the exemplar of "only rural America is real America". Economics (other than low taxes) are secondary (tariffs used to be D, now they are R). Not that elements of other positions 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"
??????
He also presumably meant, "last *Democratic* President."
Mispoke. White vote. Will correct.
Not getting into the rest of it but there are two paths by which the anti-urban thread of American politics stops carrying so much weight:
Either the Democrats piss off minority moderates enough that the GOP ends up with a sizable urban wing and eventually comes to enjoy winning enough to keep it via enacting decent policy and disbursing the spoils of victory semi-fairly,
Or the cities continue to be attractive enough and the suburbs challenged enough with upkeep that their demographics keep converging in the manner they've slowly been doing for a few decades now, putting them more solidly and comfortably on the same side politically.
Here’s hoping. I despair at the lack of right-wing urbanism in this country.
The level of taxation which the rich would have to accept to seriously enable the center-right are not *slightly* higher, I think. The expenses required to fund a universal healthcare program are not small, and (I think) will involve even the middle class taking a significant cut from their take-home pay.
Well, taxes would be higher but you would no longer paying for private insurance. If, as seems to be the case (i) rationed single payor care a la the NHS absorbs fewer dollars than our current system and (ii) the taxation to pay for it is sharply progressive, the most households would see an improvement to their bottom line.
I expect the care to be worse and a variety of other problems but "it will cost more" is hard to square with the fact that our costs are very high today relative to other systems, just structured and paid for differently.
I have to ask-do you actually know, or talk to, any Republicans or conservatives? Because as far as I can tell, you're proving correct the idea that liberals understand conservatives far less than the opposite.
Regarding the first point, don't America's rich guys effectively pay slightly higher taxes, permanently, compared to America's rich guys in the 1970s? If we think the 1970s GOP was much more reasonable and the 2020s GOP has kicked all the reasonable people out, it can't be because the tax code makes the rich pay less. The tax code got *more* progressive between these periods.
The second point is more a dysfunctional relationship with the grievance culture that has been cultivated in many Republican areas.
You can see this in that anything that was ostensibly to help black people must have been made to hurt non-black people. Often they would literally frame it as them taking things away.
And it isn't like this was limited to black people. If anything could be seen as making the city better, that must have been at the expense of people that don't live in cities. California? Literally our most productive state. Anything that they want must be making the nation worse.
If republicans would just support universal health care they would consistently hit 55-60% in national polls.
The degree of racism in the Republican party is already well optimized towards vote maximization. The british tories tried being less racist than their constituents and lost 40% of their voters to UKIP.
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.
As others have said, I really don’t think this is the case. TBH, the biggest thing that will get Republicans to chill out is a more chill Democratic Party that is regularly winning competitive elections. Or, alternatively, some enterprising Republicans could run on a chilled out centrist platform and start shifting the center of gravity too. But no this is not fundamentally about taxes or anti-black racism.
“What’s it going to take for the Republican Party to become a healthy center right party again? ... Why do Republican primary voters do this, what’s their motivation? What’s the path out for them? Just getting rid of primaries entirely?”
Great question that drew an alarmingly incoherent answer from Matt. Here’s mine. Short version: getting rid of party primaries would help some, but the foundation of society needs rebuilding.
Longer version: center right leaders (elected officials and other power brokers) are fundamentally a different tribe than core right leaders. Center right people are members of the professional-managerial class relatively high in openness to experience, while the core right tribe is low in that openness (“populist”) and high in authoritarianism. From WWII through the 1990s, centrist PMC class in right and left flavors ruled the coasts, the midwest, and the country. Populist authoritarians held sway only in the south as segregationist Democrats. Per David Shor and others, the media explosion of the 1990s (and the progressive erosion of national integrity forged in WWII, especially its institutions such as unions and churches) broke the PMC establishment’s ability to surpress authoritarian populism. Also per Shor, politics is a contest between radical, highly informed elites to gain sway over poorly informed masses with a muddle of views (centrist in aggregate but composed of right, left, and center positions). So where does that leave us?
In uncharted waters. No one knows how to rebind 260MM adult Americans into locally-rooted mediating institutions that provide a coherent foundation for national politics. The best we can do in the short term is process shifts (such as open primaries, a national presidential vote, etc.) that reduce the ability of tiny vanguards to capture the two parties. WRT race specifically, wokeness is downstream of the capture of our education institutions by lunatics. Matt has written well about this. My favorite, deeply pessimistic diagnosis is here: https://www.educationprogress.org/p/anarchy-and-overregulation-in-american
In the end, a better politics will come from a better society. Get to work building it.
We basically achieved (2) by replacing it with anti-immigration and it made things dramatically worse. The post-2020 backlash to BLM will end up brutally harming H1Bs while most of criminal justice reform survives!!
They're trying their hardest to replace it with anit-immigrant sentiment.
Right and if they could genuinely reconcile themselves to the idea that Black Americans and Black American culture is "real America" it would work.
This feels like a issue where Republican politicians get associated with the public views of their worst supporters (something which usually happens to Dems). Most Rs (I'm intentionally excluding Trump here - he's sui generis) tend to stay away from explicit anti-black racist rhetoric - hence the "dog whistle racism" of the pre-Trump era. But people see conservatives online lose their shit over advertisements featuring mixed race couples and make the obvious connection.
I'm not going to get in a semantic argument about what counts as racist or not, but my general read on conservatives is that they know that explicit anti-blackness is frowned upon, but they seem to get REALLY upset by stuff like Colin Kaepernick kneeling to bring up a 10 year old example. I didn't like it either, but the conservatives I knew were LIVID about it. Basically they seem to get really fired up about stuff that is tangentially related to race. YMMV.
Yeah, I would hear people tell me they stopped watching NBA and then NFL and then NASCAR (all because of some stupid but minor thing that happened), and I'm like "do you enjoy anything in life anymore?"
Yeah I have some friends and family who would leave the room when I turned on football and I'd be like “oh yeah I forgot you're weird about this.”
Yeah - we agree. YMMV on what constitutes "racist rhetoric" but you can see how viscerally they respond to anythign race related and the position is clear.
You keep using the word "is" in this context instead of "is part of."
I am unsure if this is intentional IDpol-brained bullshit to the effect of "white people have no culture" or just me overindexing on phrasing?
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.
Yeah, but George Carlin knew his audience when he said to think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
In a normal distribution, the mean and median are equal. IQ is a synthetic distribution, the mean equals the median by construction.
There was no reference to IQ in the post, counselor.
So this is narrowly correct, but when you talk about average intelligence it’s pretty clear you are talking about iq. Non-quantifiable measures of intelligence don’t yield averages, unless you tokenize them.
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…
Ehh... If it's any indication, SAT scores follow a pretty normal distribution
Only when they are accepted. UC schools have banned SAT/ACT until 2028 (against the unanimous protest of faculty representatives).
No I'm talking about the general public’s SAT scores whether or not they even apply to a college.
Kind of. Alternatively, they're pretty bimodal when you consider that huge spike around zero.
Oh. You meant among people actually taking the test. Never mind.
Idk I think I know a couple people who took the test and got 0 anyways.
But if you have only a subset of the population opting into the test and a different subset opting out of the test it might look like two bimodal ability distributions… we only observe one set of data.
Possibly, but NAEP data for 4th graders also follows a normal distribution. I think Occam's Razor is that intelligence follows a normal distribution.
Unanimous wow
By construction!
I think another thing that could moderate the Republican Party would be the moderation of the Democratic Party. The old pattern of moderating after a few losses has been replaced by regaining power because the governing party went off the rails. If Democrats posed a credible threat of not relinquishing power, the GOP might come around to their senses.
Agreed.Whichever party moderates first will get a durable majority. Unless the other party moderates as well
I'd be inclined to agree with this but I hesitate. Are we that sure that voter ideology follows a normal distribution with most bunched together in the moderate middle? In the past I'd say sure. Now I'm starting to wonder if the electorate is becoming more bimodal. If so, the problem is less the parties than it is the voters.
Sure, but the winnable votes are still in the middle.
This is a fair point on winning a given election but doesn't speak to "durable." We can suppose that moderation will result in a durable middle, but a defining feature of the swing voters is changeability, which is unconnected from moderation per se.
But if it is indeed a bimodal distribution, don't you risk losing more votes than you gain by sliding down the slope toward the middle?
I don't think so because partisanship will still drive the vast majority of those people further to the left or right so they can beat the other side.
For example, Biden the candidate was clearly seen as the moderate in the field, but probably 99% ish of people that preferred a Warren or Sanders still pulled the lever to beat Trump.
Plus he got enough squishy moderates to pull out the win.
That was far less the case in 2000 and 2016.
I guess that depends on how strategic left-wing voters are.
Res ipsa loquitur.
Arrest me or whatever, but the Republicans will be much better off once Trump finally croaks. He's injecting himself into all these different races, like the Californian Republican primary, where his looney candidate will lose in the general election. Californians might vote for a Republican but they, quite rightly won't vote for a MAGA-tard.
I feel it's worth pointing out that Trump picked the probable saner of the two GOP candidates. Bianco is a brownshirt and Hilton is a Fox News talking head, Trump disappointed a lot of CA Republicans by picking the TV guy, a classic Trump move. While Trump going to the great golf course down below will certainly help the GOP national image, we're still a long way off from normal humans being the plurality primary electorate.
Nationally, it is basically this. I am reading through the Slow Boring archives and Matt kind of makes this point repeatedly in his 2021-22 work. GOP moderation would come from losing enough times that their major constituencies want to win again. And for that to happen, the Dems will need to moderate on immigration and cultural issues enough to have a large tent that can win.
But there is also the possibility that the GOP may not moderate on the things that you want them to moderate on. For example after Obama's re-election, the GOP leadership wanted to moderate on immigration and some cultural issues. Instead they nominated Trump, who did moderate, on Social Security, Medicare, trade, and at least image wise on some of the religious conservatism. But he went further right on immigration and some cultural matters.
But Matt here seemed to be talking about solid blue or solid red areas.
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.)
I don't think a country full of people with Piker/Lorenzo values would be rich for long.
Anyone who lives through either of these two options would undoubtedly choose the Piker/Lorenz values.
If you want to be poor but live in a culture with conservative values, move to the middle east (or Hungary or wherever). The fact that people don't do this shows their revealed preferences.
(And for what it's worth, Piker and Lorenz types are only going to be into superficial performative and cultural leftism, they're not going to want to give up their economic status for anything.)
Victoria's Secret Congress sounds like the title of a very wonky adult film
"These ladies bring a new meaning to the phrase 'slow boring'"
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.
Ralph Nader is kind of a case study of where supposedly prosocial motives cause one to become a great villain of history.
"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.
My recollection, too. The Gore campaign must have had the worst polling game in the history of presidential politics. Clinton was VERY popular by the time he left...hell, he led Democrats to some nice gains in 1998. That (second term midterm pickups for the White House party) almost never happens.
I mean “four more years” of surpluses and trade liberalization” not four more years of BJ’s. :)
That is probably a more healthy attribution than my current fear. Largely foreign bots preying on gullible chronically online people into thinking they know the answer. Largely by amplifying lunatics that are audience captured to spout more and more nonsense chasing the views.
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.
I think this is a pretty serious overstatement. Lefty dissatisfaction with Clinton was, as they say, a thing, but large swathes of the party were not against him or by proxy Gore. Nader's 2.75% of the vote certainly included some Democratic voters but I think you're seeing a backlash that wasn't there.
The way I remember the 2000 election was that it was the height of the neoliberal consensus with questions as to whether there were serious differences between the candidates, with the understanding that the way forward was so obvious that there didn't need to be.
I think the sign the party base was done w/ Clintonism was the fact there was no real Clintonite primary competitor in 2004 and the closest to that ideologically (Lieberman) ironically crashed on impact while the actual elect was between a limited return to populism (Gephardt), old school center-left liberalism (Kerry), and the new progressivism (Dean).
Maybe! Still I feel like Obama ran and won on a modernized Clinton playbook (ironically against a Clinton in the primary) in 2008. He then governed in a similar way and left office with all things considered pretty decent approval ratings.
Not really on point but I still think the most interesting forgotten moment of the 2008 primary was when Hilary got caught taking a shot with a bunch of deplorables in WVA. Obama made fun of her for it but talk about a different tent.
And when they did, Bush was elected! :)
It’s hard for me to explain why California Republicans have resigned themselves to powerlessness.
I very much want a change in California, and the Republicans’ diagnosis is correct that a lot of California problems are a result of single party “Democrat” rule.
But look at the ideas on housing the Republicans are trying endorsing: Homelessness is not a housing issue, only a mental health and drug addiction problem. Don’t do a “housing first” approach. New housing should be primarily single family starter homes far from city cores, rather than infill.
With housing and homelessness being arguably one of the most important issues, it would be nice to have a responsible Republican opposition. Instead we get ideas that seem worse than the Democrats.
They’re not a political party - they’re a grievance machine. I too despair of California ever improving but that doesn’t mean I want a Trump lackey in the governor’s mansion. Incompetent thuggery solves nothing.
Ideological purity is more important than winning power, with all the messy compromising that entails.
Same thing for the left wing.
Ok so try to put yourself in the shoes of a Central Valley or Inland Empire Republican. If they take a look at Matt Mahan for example, what do they see?
They see someone, fair or not, as a woke cultural liberal who supports more immigration, and who is funded by tech billionaires. Even if they acknowledge that Mahan is more moderate on several issues, he's not someone they are excited to support.
Even if they agree that Mahan is better than one of the standard Dems (and might vote for him against a standard Dem in a top two), he's bad enough to for them to not "vote strategically" in the primary.
I suspect that if the billionaire wealth tax passes, it will do far better than it normally would among these kinds of Republicans because they think it will "own the liberal tech billionaires."
Someone like Mahan could feasibly get some votes of some urban and suburban Republicans, but even there, there would be problems. Mahan raised taxes in San Jose from my understanding, and is a red line for a lot of suburban Republicans.
Sure. I don’t doubt that there are Republicans in CA that like Hilton’s and Bianco’s politics.
But ultimately, the Republicans need to get 50% of the vote if they want power.
Same, I am ready to vote for a sane Republican at any level in California. I think the issue is that right now, and I hope this is diminishing, Republicans main strategy seems to be emulating Trump, which obviously doesn’t work well outside of a few counties or districts in California. Hopefully that will change.
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.
What if JetBlue now just buys all of Spirit's planes and takes over its slots? Given that Spirit was always a zombie, wouldn't that be the equivalent of JetBlue merging with Spirit back under Biden? What were the great strengths that Spirit was bringing to the proposed merger that are now lost because it went bankrupt?
There's the loss of continuity to customers and employees.
If one is a loyal and committed Spirit customer I pray for that person's eternal soul.
Also, mergers aren't always the best thing for employee continuity?
For customers, their Frequent Flyer program went kaput. It's all vaporized. A merger would have turned Spirit FF credits into JetBlue FF credits.
And mergers aren't always great for employees, but I was actually emailing some of the 17,000 laid off people the days before BK and I'm 100% positive it would be less bad than this for them.
BK?
bankruptcy
I think Matt's just saying the real reason for Sprit's downfall is its own poor financials (which existed prior to any merger proposition).
The blocking of a merger didn't specifically and directly cause Sprit's bankruptcy (as Matt says conservatives are arguing).
It's true that a merger could have saved it, but that's a different argument.
Yeah, "Not saving it condemned it" isn't a useful structure for describing the collapse itself. It is useful as part of broader systemic discussions where you can talk about whether or not the save should have been done.
So my view is that Spirit's business model was not suited for the post-Covid era. Spirit's low wage and low amenities worked in the 2010s when you had a weak labor market, an easy money environment, and strong demand for cheap tickets over everything else due to the Great Recession. It stopped working so well when airline pilots and other airline workers had the ability to ask for more money due to the tight labor market. It also stopped working when other companies offered a Basic airfare, and at the same time gave passengers a better experience.
Yes a merged JetBlue would have survived for longer than Spirit did. But I strongly suspect that JetBlue would be running into problems in 2026 if they had bought Spirit. They might anyway. I'm generally an anti-neoliberal antitrust hawk, but I would not have blocked this merger. Spirit did not have that much in market share, and Jet Blue wasn't really a competitor in areas where Spirit did have considerable market share. Also Spirit was clearly a failing company by 2024, and the Jet Blue merger may have increased competition rather than reducing it.
The idea that competition doesn’t matter for airline prices is kind of crazy IMO. There’s a route that I used to fly for business a lot between two mid-size Midwest cities that was only served by one airline and I’ve paid as much as $600, which is almost what it cost to fly all the way to China when there were a ton of different airlines serving it pre-COVID.
Not really related, but my brother and I once got round-trip Denver-Shanghai tickets for 450 USD. It was a good deal!
Matt I will personally help you plan a Japan trip, IAD-HND is a relatively short nonstop with lots of Polaris affordability! Do it!
yup. 14 hours. ANA also flies that route with a 777.