We should return to a ban on cameras in the House and Senate. Let these people work in their committee without the continuous preening for the CSpan audience. Disclosure is important for democratic legitimacy, but that doesn't require live coverage of every committee, every floor speech, every hearing.
I definitely agree that routine recording of committee meetings is counterproductive. You should sometimes do a hearing for show, but there should also be a way to work.
It should be transcribed rather than recorded in audio-video. That way you get the benefits of disclosure while removing the incentive for grandstand-y behavior.
Maybe the answer is to record but not release, say, for 10 years, so we have the historical records but don't have it getting in the way of actual governing.
Matt as a reporter on this stuff, do you find any value in committee hearings making the public case for tackling an issue and how legislation does so, or do you think more time would be better spent getting phone briefings for reporters? Like Schumer's office didn't depend on just hearings to make the case for the Frontiers Act.
I think the point here is that the cameras in the committee room are C-SPAN's. The clips are almost invariably taken from a C-SPAN recording (either directly or from a network piggybacking off C-SPAN's feed).
Maybe not so many people watch CSpan in real time, but it captures the process in ways that can be easily taken out of context and distorted by people motivated to do these things.
I think that would be the case if a lot of people actually read serious policy-based journalism (rather than takes and tweets). Unfortunately, having dabbled in this endeavor a while back, I don’t think they do. I think that for many people, policy is now conflated with politics and they basically “check the scores.” Despite being a policy wonk with a longstanding interest in issues like water infrastructure, I’ve been tuning out news for the past few years because of this dynamic. But Matt’s analysis makes sense to me (I also worked on the Hill during the previous millennium) and I’m happy to see stuff getting done, even (especially?) if it’s flying under radar.
To the extent policy-focused journalism makes politics a spectator sport, probably.
And it suggests the model of deliberative representational democracy requires giving the representatives more space and latitude between elections to deliberate.
Does "policy-focused" journalism actually do that? I think most of what people call "policy based" journalism is actually spectator sport journalism talking about who wins and who loses. Actual policy journalism that researched the trade offs for most policies and presented them wouldn't be read by enough people to impact public opinion.
I agree. When I think of actual policy journalism, I'm thinking about what I used to read in my policy wonk days--stuff like Inside US Trade and various BNA publications, not WaPo/NYT articles.
I think the problem isn't so much policy-focused journalism itself, so much as that the easiest way to get people to read it (clicks pay the rent after all) is to frame it using highly salient issues, and that's where it can be counterproductive.
This is a meta-issue of political journalism I see all the time. An article in the media describes a political situation and the various players and their goals and incentives, and how they are likely to effect the outcome (senators, congressmen, legislative staffers, activists). But the media itself is left out of the story as though they will have no effect on the outcome, when we all know if/how media coverage of the situation will have a tremendous impact, which means in turn the analysis is incomplete!
More like policy-focused journalism that is delivered to un-interested parties shifts the conversation away from the substance of the issue and towards the politics of it. I'm sure trade magazines and industry insiders that will be affected by "secret congress" legislation are well aware and have their opportunity to influence it.
"If you are persuasive, determined, and willing to be eclectic in who you partner with, then things can happen."
One of the frustrating aspects with the way intersectionality is understood by activists is that it can really push against this kind of approach.
If you're advocating for serious immigration reform, you're probably going to have to work with Catholic groups, many of whom are going to be pro-life. This isn't throwing Planned Parenthood under the bus, this is just taking your job seriously.
(Unions are much more effective, in part because they ARE willing to be transactional. If you asked a union to stop cutting deals in the name of activist solidarity, you'd be laughed out of the room.)
Yup. I agree that the method of intersectionality is anti-political in this sense. It always demands a whole loaf over a half loaf, and a whole loaf for every constituency over a half-loaf for anyone. It's deeply opposed to incremental progress, and I think that's a mistake.
I don't know if anti-political is the right word exactly. You could say it's anti-democratic though. If "speaking truth to power" is your most cherished political principle, and you also live in a democracy, even a flawed one, then logically what you believe in is speaking truth, oppositionally, to the majority of voters. In which case, you must believe either (1) that it is appropriate and feasible for political leaders to manufacture the consent of the voters, or (2) that political leaders shouldn't be accountable to voters at all.
People with minority political views tend to be very focused on “the media” and “the two party system” because they see all of mainstream politics as flowing from those institutions engaging in (1), rather than a genuinely popular preference.
And the weirdest thing is the way that people keep going back to false consciousness arguments, even when doing so is contrary to their own material interests.
Re unions: one hopes, right? It's been alarming to see unions of educated professions, most prominently journalism unions, seeming to favor an intersectional approach.
What worries me is whether we can deal with climate change on this basis. A lot of prominent Republicans and right-wingers still don't take climate change seriously and it wasn't too long ago that the Republican party as a whole was denying climate change. If we had simple majority rule, Democrats would have had many more bites at the apple at this point and we could be in a better position.
I think this is in fact a good illustration of what Matt is talking about--see his earlier post on Republican centrism as reflected by the 2020 legislation he also references in this post. A signficant number of Republicans seem willing to support climate legislation if it's not framed as part of a "green new deal" or other progressive project, and it seems like quite a few take it seriously even if they won't admit that publicly. It's unfortunate that this issue became partisan in the first place.
I think Matt should do a bit more digging into the energy bill from 2020. Yes, in the end it was folded into an omnibus, blessed by Manchin and Murkowski, and everyone moved on their way. But there was a House version passed just a few weeks/months prior, and it was hotly opposed by the House GOP. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2020206
Someone can go through and identify the changes from the House version to what ultimately passed, and maybe someone can make a case that the Republicans genuinely changed their mind because of those changes. But in reality it's because it was being stapled onto a must pass bill and except for a few fringe members there wasn't much point in standing against the train coming through the chamber.
I don't disagree with your characterization, and I love a meaty SB policy analysis! But "must-pass" bills are held up or killed pretty regularly, and hitching policies to them is a typical way to get things passed (at least during my adult lifetime). The fact that these elements passed and nobody was shrieking about it on social media or cable tv is, IMO, a good thing and evidence for the efficacy of Secret Congress.
I think if Matt does a deeper dive on the 2020 energy bill, there's more there that's harder to replicate in the future than I think he's letting on to.
A term limited Murkowski heading Senate Energy wanting to make a deal before she handed over the committee to someone else.
A moderate Manchin heading the Democratic side of Senate Energy always willing to be the moderate making deals.
A post-election hangover that kept social media and cable's focus on things like the transition of power, electoral challenges, Georgia runoff, etc.
There's probably a much smaller universe of members of the Secret Congress than the full Congress.
Also, I think there's got to be a sustainable amount of push back to the overly rosy picture that there are a significant number of Republicans willing to support climate legislation if it's framed appropriately. Waxman-Markey cap and trade in 2009 was a partisan vote despite trying to adopt a bill that, at the time, was aligned with what had been the GOP climate position (John McCain's presidential platform, others like John Warner).
More recently, the House GOP voted in a near party line vote in condemning a carbon tax, which is often pulled up online among certain intellectuals as the free market conservative solution to the challenge. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2018363
Matt noted the $35 billion for green energy research (better batteries, carbon capture, whatever). It ought to be easy to co-opt Big Defense and Big Auto with R&D funding and subsidies. Line them up and Republicans will follow. Visible, high profile stuff - Mandate electric cars! - can't succeed. Finding funding breakthrough tech can hardly fail.
That Green New Deal proposal was a perfect example of something almost intentionally designed to provoke fierce opposition and steer public discussion away from the core issue into all sorts of debatable side issues. It demanded that people agree on many things that were not essential to solving the actual problem at hand - reducing carbon emissions.
If you believe carbon emissions are causing climate change, and that we'd be better off without warming temperatures, this is a technical problem akin to how we solved the problem of the "ozone hole", which as I recall at least was not overly controversial although it was painful for some industry - ban or tax into oblivion the substance causing harmful atmospheric change. In that case, hydroflourocarbons; in this case, fossil fuels.
The squad and the squad-adjacent are a curse for Ds and good government. They are the shock troops of lefty social media and they do far more good for themselves than for the country. How did Tom Perez ever say that AOC is the future of the D party? That was just asking for trouble.
Agree, at this point it's mostly about economics - we have alternative technologies but economics are the main brake on adopting them, though better technology would make the economics more palatable, so they're related.
The one thing it definitely is not about is forcing everyone to become converts to some eco-anti-capitalist vision of a "sustainable" society.
It's both, but we'll never arrive at consensus on "How do we fix it?" if we don't agree on "Is this a real problem?"
Conservatives have loudly insisted for decades that it is not a real problem. Most of them still do. That remains the biggest obstacle to solving the problem.
Why was a job guarantee included? This vastly complicated the issue and rightly opened us up for the arguments that we were trying to do much more than fix climate change. It was unnecessarily radical and hurt the cause. Naive at best.
Let me ask this about AOC and Bernie. What do we have to show for all of the radical, uncompromising proposals? Not a lot, except for a lot of political backlash. Why does Bernie continue to hold out for the magical $15 nationwide, when there could have been a smaller amount that could have been done. Do we want the cause or do we want progress? When will the far left progressives start to be judged by what they actually accomplish, in terms of helping real people?
In general, while I am not agreeing with the full logic of the Green New Deal, I can explain it this way:
In 2009/2010, climate change was seen as something that was a wicked problem to solve, with narrow, technocratic appeal, and so it was developed with input from multiple sectors, industries, trade associations, activists, etc. A consensus based strategy was possible because even Republicans like John McCain and John Warner (even Lindsay Graham!) had been advocating for a cap and trade approach.
Cap and trade was drafted with extensive business input in hopes of keeping the deal in Secret Congress. It was supposed to be Congress acting to ensure the outcome was more friendly to business than the alternative, which was the Supreme Court mandated EPA regulation.
That didn't work. Outside groups waged a two front war, negotiating with members while drafting legislation, then running campaign ads attacking the legislation anyway. It became a salient, partisan issue. In the end, when it became a partisan issue, it passed with barely any House GOP votes, and it was then left to die in the Senate when the talks between Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham broke down.
Contrast that with the Affordable Care Act, which despite the death of Kennedy and the surprise Massachusetts special election reducing them to less than sixty votes, was still pushed through by the sheer determination of Democrats to finally pass health care--because that was a highly salient partisan issue they had campaigned on for 60 odd years. They constructed a complicated process to pass a Senate bill and then amend it through reconciliation to get it done.
The Green New Deal is about making climate change a top Democratic priority, like health care was in 2009/2010, so that the attitude of every Democrat in a trifecta is "Well we may not accomplish everything, but we have to at least make progress on climate change." It's basically saying "Well if we've lost the chance to work through Secret Congress, our goal is to make sure this is the number one priority for Democrats when they have the total control that enables a small handful of big bills to pass."
So the challenge is something like:
- Once you've failed in Secret Congress, do you keep operating in Secret Congress, or try to find another approach?
- Once you've failed in Secret Congress, and some advocacy organizations have decided to make your issue a partisan issue, is there anyway for other advocates to stay in Secret Congress?
I think there's some truth in this, but I don't think the scope of the GND reflects some grand strategy now. My casual read is that a bunch of hard-left people got together and drafted a collective wish list. Because none of them truly believed it would pass (and may not even know how to develop plans that can achieve broad support), no one shot anything down out of fear of offending others in their group for no reason.
The ACA was well-defined, the GND was/is a hodge-podge of ideas. So the idea was to propose something that even a lot of Ds weren't going to support, ever. I mean, at what point do you hold people accountable for putting forth bad ideas that hurt the cause? Imo, we have to hold people accountable for more than their intentions.
Waxman-Markey passed the House, and there was a process in the Senate that looked like it was going to get a companion bill passed, but Deepwater Horizon had unfortunate timing and derailed that process.
Yeah, in retrospect, I wonder if that was a mistake. I like the idea of it but it definitely seems to have become fodder for partisan sh*t fighting. I think the positive view is that it give people a structure to think about the country's response to climate change
Interesting that you mentioned the WA carbon tax. Many left wing groups didn't support it (or outright attacked it) because it didn't raise taxes, promoted environmental justice, transfer wealth to marginalized groups, etc. If such groups decided to support the measure, it may well have passed. Instead, the best was the enemy of the good, and the tax failed. Apparently it's green new deal or bust!
The GND had been kicking around for over a decade before AOC popularized it. The demands of the left groups opposed to the 2016 initiative were basically those of the GND even if they didn't call it that.
I would hope that they continue addressing climate change (e.g. boost green industry and pressure other countries to reduce emissions); make childcare more affordable, make the refundable CTC (a) permanent and (b) a direct cash benefit; pass anti-gerrymandering legislation (as a stretch goal, also make our voting system more proportional); admit any territory that wants to be a state as a state. I think all these things are possible and I personally believe in them.
I've been thru the DC convo many times on here, I think including with you, and I really haven't been convinced. I live here, along with hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Americans should have the right to representation.
I've thought through this and would agree to put it up for a vote with a trade off that for if it become a state we move 95% of all federal employees out of DC. Keep Congress, President and Supreme court and their immediate staff and move all other departments, agencies, etc. to the other states - distributed by population so they don't just go to Virginia and Maryland. If DC was willing to not be the center of the federal government, then they can become a state. If they want to stay the center of the federal government, then they should be that and not a state.
I don't really agree with the sentiment that DC has outsize influence as a city - the Mayor doesn't have a vote in Congress and the vast majority of people here don't have an influential job.
However, I wouldn't really oppose moving federal agencies around the country. I don't see why they all have to be in the same place.
I don't totally get this, what the problem is and how your suggestion would solve it. Like, "federal agencies are located in DC, so making DC a state would have the result that _____"? Lots of people who work at these agencies live in northern Virginia; has that led to any kind of unfair perks to Virginia? Should we expand the non-representation zone to include Alexandria?
All that said, my understanding is that the problem, whatever it is, could be solved more simply, by shrinking the "district" to just the government buildings, where no one lives, and just make the state include the city where people live.
I disagree with Ken in MIA a lot and - as I've said to him before - sometimes feel dismissed, but I don't think we should be attacking each other like this on here.
"But that’s how it’s basically always been in America, and we’ve somehow muddled through okay."
Do you really believe this, or was this just a convenient kicker?
I mean -- I would have said that the political situation in the US has gotten markedly worse in my (seven decade) lifetime. Republican contempt for the law has only grown from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Iraq War to Trump's endless plundering to the insurrection of 1/6. With no consequences for law-breaking, a culture of lawlessness has taken hold of the party. Combine that with an ideology of white revanchism that idealizes an all-white Russia over a multi-ethnic America, and you have big trouble. Now flood the country with cheap firearms and Fox News hate-speech, and you have a Rwandan genocide in the making.
So, do you really feel so all-fired sunny about our "muddling through," or is a commitment to dogged optimism merely another obligation imposed on you by your Weberian ethic of responsibility?
(In which case, you are probably also obligated to say, "no, no! I really believe it!")
IDK, 70 years ago was about the peak of McCarthyism and Jim Crow, there was no Medicare or Medicaid and J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI. I'm as worried about climate change as the next poster but I'd rather worry about that than about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
I am far more worried about climate change than about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, given that the USSR is out of business now. I also think that climate change is a greater danger than a war with Russia.
But climate change -- and many other problems that we face -- would be easier to tackle if we had a more functional domestic political system. And that's what I'm worried about: the unraveling of the US system. As Lincoln said, our greatest dangers come from internal division.
I do not think we are "muddling through" anywhere near as well as we used to. That's what I'm worried about.
Muddling through under Eisenhower meant bipartisan tolerance for Jim Crow, J. Edgar Hoover and a military-industrial complex that eventually got us sucked into Vietnam, + constantly running the risk of accidentally blowing up the whole world with hydrogen bombs.
Has the national system for self-governance improved? (Granted, the enfranchisement of minorities is a huge step in the right direction, currently being aggressively reversed in Republican state legislatures around the country).
Has our ability as a nation to solve big problems improved? The national response to the pandemic was a debacle -- no sense of unity, no willingness to sacrifice, the mildest inconveniences instantly treated as partisan footballs. If we respond to climate change -- or an actual shooting war -- as we responded to the pandemic, then we're in a lot of trouble.
Did you listened to The Weeds episode titled The Lab-Leak Hypothesis? Buried in the show at the 45 minute mark, Matt discusses the white paper by Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons "Strict ID Laws Don't Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2018". It's interesting context whether any of these laws actually impact voting and what that means for the media narrative. Worth a listen.
Somehow I can't hear the phrase "lab-leak hypothesis" without remembering that time that I left the dogs inside too long and came home to a large puddle on the floor.
I listened to this episode. I would suggest listening to Season 1 of the Fiasco podcast (about the Florida count/recount in the 2000 presidential election). Republicans realized that if they just contested every single ballot, then the election judges would have such a backlog, that they couldn't review the legitimately debatable ballots. I'm not ready to die on the hill of Voter ID laws, but laws about signature matching and appointing election commissioners seem ripe for chicanery. I don't think that we should wait for a controversial election to review these laws. We need to challenge them before they are used to throw out valid votes.
I think that the worst debacle we've gotten into since 1950 was the Vietnam War, not even Iraq comes close. It was bipartisan and inspired by a the sense of unity and willingness to sacrifice for the common good the prevailed among our politicians in the 50s and early 60s.
At that time there was *also* a somewhat bipartisan desire to build a civilized welfare state that lasted from FDR to Nixon, give or take. That has mostly stalled or gone into reverse & it is the aspect of midcentury politics we should miss the most, in my opinion.
yeah, interesting. I certainly agree that Viet Nam was a debacle. National unity plus a mistaken theory of foreign policy can lead to messes as well.
The comparisons become difficult. Is it worse to have a superbly functioning ship and crew, and be driving full steam onto a reef because of bad charts, or to have your engine out, the rudder broken, and the crew mutinying? Both bad, but in different ways.
I miss the bipartisan desire to build a civilized welfare state, plus the central role of labor unions, plus the recognition that universities are the seedbeds of national greatness through research and innovation.
I don't miss the jello-molds and ubiquitous cigarettes.
You've created a caricature of the GOP ("ideology of white revanchism that idealizes an all-white Russia over a multi-ethnic America") which inflames more than informs, in my view.
Why do you think that Putin has spent so much effort first infiltrating and then supporting the NRA and its mission of flooding the country with guns?
I can guarantee you that he is not afraid that valiant, well-armed American patriots will resist a Russian invasion, ala Red Dawn. That's just a joke -- if the Russians ever invade, Trump's followers will welcome them.
No, Putin knows that those firearms are going to be turned on other Americans, as indeed they are now.
"if the Russians ever invade, Trump's followers will welcome them."
You make some interesting points, then follow it with this. So much discourse sounds like people who spend all their time reading about the other party's constituents online and don't actually talk to anyone who voted for Trump/Biden.
Russian invasion? This is fever swamp stuff. Look at the Republican reaction to the Biden-Putin meeting. It is divided, but there has been sharp criticism from R leaders that Biden is too soft on Russia. They have an ad up criticizing it. Here was McCarthy's reaction (below). Really, let's not create our own Resistance Q .
All true. My point is about the resilience of the American political system to shocks of all kinds -- foreign interference, domestic unrest, natural disasters, and so on.
Remember how this sub-thread started -- MY says "we'll keep muddling through," i.e. the US is imperfect but basically sound and healthy.
I say: I'm not so sanguine -- I think there are a lot of problems with the underlying health of the country -- its unity and coherence are under threat from internal division as well as external interference. And I worry that it is headed for even more lawlessness and violence, sometimes fomented by foreign agents.
Foreign meddling is generally a fact of life in international affairs. But healthy countries respond to it in healthy ways. For instance, if a foreign adversary engages in gross meddling with an election, then the nation comes together to punish it and prevent any recurrence. When half of the elected officials deny that it occurred, minimize the evidence, and give the foreign country a green light for future meddling, then that country is not healthy. I don't know if we can keep on "muddling through" when one party would rather win with foreign assistance than lose without it.
Saying that things are worse now than before the civil rights act, when homosexual acts were literally crimes and women who wanted high end careers were seen as freaks is pretty rich.
Good, that's part of the case for saying that things are better. I agree that those are improvements, and I had them in mind when writing my first comment, but figured I'd let MY cite them in support of his "muddling through" claim if he wanted to.
Still, I think the situation cannot simply be reduced to comparing individual improvements to individual set-backs. There's a larger question about whether the nation as a whole, the electorate as a whole, the political system as a whole, is acting in a functional manner or is becoming pathological. If Nazi Germany had decriminalized homosexual acts in 1935 then that would have been a one-off improvement in a rapidly deteriorating total system.
But if course Nazi Germany would not have decriminalized homosexual acts in 1935: the idea is laughable. And a Nazi Germany that could have done anything like that would have been a significantly different Nazi Germany than the real one.
There have been many, many liberal wins in the US over the last seven decades. Those wins weren't anomalies created by aliens. They come out of a structure of American politics that is more complex than the narrative that you're pushing.
Human "presentism" perversity. I remember attending briefings by Army generals circa 2010 where they would claim that "this is the most challenging security environment the United States has ever faced." (Okay, okay, fighting for budgets and roles & missions, but c'mon, general.)
Russia isn't "all-white". It's a multi-ethnic state, and if you forced their ethnicities through the American lens, many would be viewed as asians or religious minorities or maybe people of color. Also Rwandan-genocide-in-the-making sounds as far-fetched as anything Q may be saying
It doesn't matter how "all white" Russia is. It only matters how their race is perceived by conservative Americans, and American media has always presented Russians as extremely white.
What do I keep doing? You ask as if I'm a broken record but I don't even think this topic has come up before.
But otherwise I appreciate your comment, because that's a good point. And if that's the case then maybe the original sentence should have been "idolize a supposedly all-white Russia". When I personally see Russians in American media it's usually muslims from the Caucus region, but that might be unique to me since I watch a lot of MMA.
The fact that many Afghan people aren't very brown doesn't mean that Americans don't imagine a brown person when they think of an Afghan refugee. The fact that many Russians don't look like Dolph Lundgren doesn't mean that Americans don't imagine a tall, fair person when they think of Russians. (Anecdotally, when I worked in European sports, almost every Russian I met was very fair in complexion, so the travel habits of people from western vs eastern Russia may also play a role in perceptions.)
I gather that I was medium-dooshy in the way I said it, but what I was trying to do was draw your attention to this point that you seem to have overlooked a couple of times.
Haha, well I'd probably do better if I even knew what the progressive line is here. If the part of the alt-right view is that Putin is good because Russia is "all white", then why repeat that lie? And if progressives believe Russia is "all white" they should stop being so parochial about race in an international context.
It’s kind of a paradox. There is much less outright corruption now than in earlier eras, but many more lobbyists. One of the reasons Republicans defended Nixon is because it was an open secret that JFK and LBJ did similar things. Many thought the 1960 election was stolen, for example, and with good reason.
Pre-Watergate presidents did all kinds of shady shit with the support of the FBI and CIA, but the Church Commission and other disclosures changed that. J. Edgar Hoover was a much more fearsome than any FBI director since.
Yes, the point about mistaken expectations of the presidential bully pulpit is a reminder of how out of whack Americans' expectations of the President are with the actual design of our government. People expect the President to have the power of a prime minister when the actual formal powers of the office are closer to that of a constitutional monarch.
It almost makes me think it could have a salutary effect of if state legislatures took control of the Electoral College back from voters, if the result was to significantly damage and weaken the Presidency and elevate the power of Congress.
This jibes with my contention of trying to de-polarize political by disaggregating positions. Is it possible to get someone who is pro-Life to support immigration reform? Someone who wants to “build the Wall” to support making taxes more progressive? Someone who opposes increasing the minimum wage to support a more generous EITC. Someone who dislikes “environmental extremists” to support a revenue neutral tax on net CO2 emissions? Someone who is “nationalistic” in foreign policy terms (anti -Iran/China) to support freer trade?
There's actually a fair amount of political science research on this. In general, absent idiosyncratic voters like myself (I want to "build the wall" and make taxes more progressive), the voters who are willing to do this are the less-educated voters or voters who follow the news less.
These voters often don't know what their "team" thinks about issues, especially lower or medium salience ones like the environment or trade (even 8 year olds knew Trump wanted the wall, and lo and behold immigration became a much more partisan issue circa 2016).
So basically lots of voters do already feel this way, and have cross-pressures...20% of Democrats are pro-life, for instance. And I think 30% of Republicans are pro-choice. But it's generally the less-educated voters, who also vote less in primaries.
The practical importance of this is in letting candidates tailor themselves to their districts and activists fundraisers volunteers accepting this and recognize that this is the opposite of Republican strategy which is to run against Godless Muslims Color-coded Socialists in every precinct of every district of every state.
your premise proves the opposite conclusion. If conservatives vote on identity, you can rebrand white identity in any number of ways (eg working class Toryism) without hemorrhaging votes.
You mean like if conservatives abandoned their long-held commitment to free trade?
How about if they gave up on small government and just wrote checks to farmers?
Or if they went from running against Bill Clinton on "family values" and then decided to support Trump?
Or if they went from arguing that Social Security and Medicare would destroy American freedom to arguing that they are more committed to protecting those programs?
It seems to me that all of those cases support my conclusion.
This is an underappreciated point that I've been thinking about for years. Chomsky talks about this - most "conservatives" are just labelled that way in the popular consciousness when really they're only Republican partisans. This is very similar to how many people view the "radical left" in congress. Most leftist politicians want nothing to do with actual communists, anarchists, or other groups who make up the actual radical left. Those groups often have very violent or collectivist ideals that threaten the interests of people in power, even AOC. These words are bludgeons used to bash people's brains in to keep them from thinking critically about the nuances of politics.
I have three very anodyne rules about American politics:
-- When you have big majorities, you can probably get big things done
-- When you have a small majority, you can keep the wheels of America greased but not too much more than that
-- If you want to get reelected, then just make sure the economy is good and we're at peace; doing big things legislatively will have no impact on your chances.
Oh, and I have one more rule about what legislation can pass:
-- If Tucker Carlson talks about it on his show, there's no way to pass bipartisan legislation; if Tucker Carlson doesn't pay attention to it, the Secret Congress may be able to pass something.
Would be curious to know who are the most effective members of Secret Congress, and how that effectiveness correlates (or doesn’t) with national profile, local popularity, partisanship, and etc.
The representative who can be spoken of is not the most effective member of the Secret House; the senator who can be named is not the most effective member of the Secret Senate.
Even if you accept all the arguments of this piece - is it _not_ supposed to be horrifying that public advocacy on an issue prevents Congress from taking action on it and only quiet lobbying can make something pass? Is everyone who doesn't have a job on Capitol Hill just supposed to keep their mouth shut and hope that good things happen?
I've been hoping you'd discuss more about Secret Congress and what, if any, advice can be given to political actors based on the knowledge of Secret Congress. I'd especially like something like "What if David Shor was in Secret Congress" but ways to both find and identify popular issues to advocate for, while avoiding the trap of doing so by appealing to partisan advocacy organizations to get a bill on the agenda.
It seems like there's a bad loop with funders not recognizing that the metrics they are using to determine if their support for a group is effective is actually undermining the chance for legislative success.
Caught me by surprise too. Next time I go inside a gas station, I'm going to look for that "you must have been born before this date in ___" calendars.
I think at least some of the time causation runs the other way, that there are deep salient disagreements in the public and that makes them nearly impossible to negotiate. Gun rights, abortion, tax policy mostly run this way.
Of course, then it becomes self reinforcing by becoming election level salient. But in those cases, other than nibbling around the edges public advocacy is the proper way to go for advocacy groups.
The hope is to raise the salience among your co-partisans to the point that they will feel as threatened by not acting as acting, hope to make it a 60/40 issue in your favor, or prevent it from going the other way. The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare.
On gay marriage: how much of that was advocacy groups and activists versus politicians pushing in that direction versus just the culture changing, organically?
In one of his interviews David Shor made the point that support for gay marriage actually stalled out during the years that it was most politicized, mid-2000s or so. But both before and after the support rose steadily.
I guess I'm skeptical of the ability of either activists or politicians to change minds or move voters. I feel like the internet, globalization and TV / Movies probably do much more, and that's why we see broad correlations across countries when it comes to support for cultural issues.
That's also the period both when the issue was being fought in the states, and when the issue was just crossing the 50% line. I wonder if one or the other of those two facts was most relevant.
It's notable that marijuana legalization mostly stalled in the 1980s and 1990s, but has continued since then on the same trajectory it was on in the 1970s. In this case, the issue crossed 50% around 2012, just before it started being fought in the states (unless you count the pre-history of medical marijuana, which started right when the issue got un-stalled, in the late 1990s).
Yeah - the stall out on marijuana happened at a time when it was less salient in politics. So it's a good counter-example to the Shor gay marriage chart.
A 20-year stall-out would seem to coincide with generational change. A pause while those too young to be involved in the prior fight came of age and many opposed died out.
Culture changing "organically" isn't a thing. Culture always has people making explicit arguments, and those arguments always feed into art, and that art informs future arguments, and so on.
The guy who wrote the Black Panther movie was unquestionably informed by activism and politics. Same with the people who wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Color Purple, and with the people who made Will and Grace.
Organic-isn't-a -thing seems a strangely hardline position to take. People used to get married and have children at earlier ages - which artist or activist drove that change? The percentage of Americans with a passport has risen steadily, over the last 30 years, from a base of only 5% - is that due to politics? Who are the people organizing the steady rise of interracial marriage among Americans? Who's behind men no longer wearing hats and sometimes wearing their hair long?
Finally -- finally!! -- someone asking the tough questions that will blow the cover off this whole sordid conspiracy.
You got your bare-headed men, your penny-loafers replacing wing-tips, and then one day, bam! it's rampant drug abuse in the streets and sexual commerce with komodo dragons. After that it's only a short step to utter degradation: whole-language literacy and people using "assumedly" for "presumably." It all starts so innocently, with a Vidal Sassoon shampoo commercial, and before you know it Western Culture has crumbled into dust.
It seems like you have picked several examples with pretty clear political/activist connections.
-- marriage age -- women can't be forced to get married at early ages anymore, and more women have opportunities to do things like go to college and start careers
-- rise in passports -- increasing cultural diversity due to changes in immigration laws in the late 70s, reduction in xenophobia starting with Civil Rights, airline bailouts, growth of trade
-- interracial marriage -- seems obviously related to decades or antiracism
-- hats and hair -- the hat industry is still huge, and hat and hair trends have long been connected to politics and activism: hippy long hair, the natural hair movement among African Americans, skinheads
"The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare."
That kind of depends on the standard for "rare." Social Security, Medicare, universal suffrage, Civil Rights, Obamacare, gay marriage, and legal weed were all super unpopular and unpassable until they weren't.
And none of those things happened because we did them "in secret."
I think tax policy is the ultimate negotiable policy within limits. Increasing the tax rates by 5-10% would generate huge talking points, but I don't it generates the passion that any of the culture war issues like gun rights or abortion does. If you moved it 40% maybe, but even then I suspect not.
On the whole, I would say that it was about fear. Much of what animates both parties in part, but especially conservatives, is the fear of loss. They feel they should have good lives in a good country and progressives want to destroy that. Some of the fear is bound up in racism, but I think its a smaller part than I've read you to believe. More of it is built up in a broader cultural understanding of how the country should work with regards to jobs, family, religion, etc. Its also an incredibly power motivator that politicians have used to drive votes.
Idk, the tea party got started after the bailouts were done proposed, and before a lot of the social fears were stoked. Obama hadn't really even taken charge yet (Santelli's Tea Party screed on CNBC was Feb 19, 2009, only a month after Obama was inaugurated) and Obama campaigned as kind of a moderate....he got lots of WWC votes. Are you reading 2021 politics into 2009?
A major underlying contention is that conservatives believe things are pretty good and we shouldn't change very much - aka conserve things the way they are. Progressives think things could be much better if we changed some stuff and progressed forward.
There is undeniable tension in these perspectives and its easy for Conservatives to believe that Progressives want to destroy their good life and its easy for Progressives to believe that Conservatives want to keep the bad things.
I think they are both right. Relative to history - things are amazing right now for more people than ever before. We should be careful not to mess that up. We also didn't get here by conserving what was, we got here by progressing forward and there are still many things that could be better. I try very hard (not always successfully) to see the best in both perspectives as I think they can both be valuable. That doesn't mean that on any particular issue both are right, one perspective is more right than the other on any specific issue.
TL;DR - I don't think you want to destroy a good life or country. You might advance specific policies I think will make things better or worse though...
I think the causation works both ways and it is important to pay attention that.
Matt's point is relevant for issues that have not yet reached salience. For example, zoning reform is an issue that could burst into a high salience issue and become ideologically polarized.
Under this theory the advocates for zoning reform should work hard to keep the level of salience and publicity around the issue as low as possible. They should ask Biden to never mention it, and not do protests about how zoning is racist (even though it is). Instead they should go behind closed doors and tell Democratic policymakers about how racist it is, and tell Republican lawmakers how zoning is government bureaucratic overreach.
At the same time, the activists don't have full control over these issues and cannot always control them. If Republicans decide zoning reform is a politically useful attack on Democrats, and Trump tried to do this in 2020, then it will rise to high salience despite anything the activists do. I would argue that this is what has happened with immigration reform, activists attempted secret congress getting some Republicans on board, but xenophobic groups then had an incentive to raise the salience to block it.
Using "secret congress" is most useful for issues that are not already high salience (or can't easily be rebranded), and don't have committed opposition who can raise the salience. These kinds of issues are usually funding for project or issue that doesn't take funding away from something else.
So the issue of "infrastructure" has been handled badly because it was raised to high salience, although that may be because of how the Trump administration handled it. But other issues that are getting through congress have been doing better due to the lower salience, despite the fact that they are similiar issues.
We should return to a ban on cameras in the House and Senate. Let these people work in their committee without the continuous preening for the CSpan audience. Disclosure is important for democratic legitimacy, but that doesn't require live coverage of every committee, every floor speech, every hearing.
I definitely agree that routine recording of committee meetings is counterproductive. You should sometimes do a hearing for show, but there should also be a way to work.
It should be transcribed rather than recorded in audio-video. That way you get the benefits of disclosure while removing the incentive for grandstand-y behavior.
Maybe the answer is to record but not release, say, for 10 years, so we have the historical records but don't have it getting in the way of actual governing.
Matt as a reporter on this stuff, do you find any value in committee hearings making the public case for tackling an issue and how legislation does so, or do you think more time would be better spent getting phone briefings for reporters? Like Schumer's office didn't depend on just hearings to make the case for the Frontiers Act.
I don't see how, in an age of social media, that it's CSpan of all things that is the problem here
Isn't the claim that the clips that go viral all originate on CSpan?
I guess? I can see how it might help on the margins, but I can't imaging how it would turn down the heat on the major issues.
"Continuous preening for the CSpan audience": this may be the funniest thing I've read this month.
I'm a real politics addict and I think I've watched CSpan maybe three minutes in the past two years.
Yeah, I don't think CSpan is the issue. The problem is the hot clips that show up on the web and in the news.
I think the point here is that the cameras in the committee room are C-SPAN's. The clips are almost invariably taken from a C-SPAN recording (either directly or from a network piggybacking off C-SPAN's feed).
Maybe not so many people watch CSpan in real time, but it captures the process in ways that can be easily taken out of context and distorted by people motivated to do these things.
Doesn’t this suggest that policy-focused journalism is often counterproductive, since informing people about an issue raises its salience?
Arguably
Now we need Secret Slow Boring!
If you want to design a publication with a built-in limit on readership you can either:
1) charge a confiscatory subscription rate
2) limit the total number of subscribers
3) name it "Slow Boring".
If we're promoting exclusionary policies to keep out the riff-raff, does that make us NIMBYs?
NIMSS's: Not In My SubStack. We're just trying to preserve the character of our neighborhood, as well as the property value of our subscriptions.
Hey, the riff-raff can go start their own substack over *there*, preferably outside my line of view. ;)
Now you're throwing shade, which is also a major NIMBY concern. (Too much of a reach?)
10,000 subscribers/330,000,000 Americans = yes, it's pretty Secret
And of course when we have one billion Americans it’ll be more secret still.
Just raise the price, the same thing we do with other negative externalities.
So when I paid for my subscription, all the time I was instead paying a Pigovian tax?
I think that would be the case if a lot of people actually read serious policy-based journalism (rather than takes and tweets). Unfortunately, having dabbled in this endeavor a while back, I don’t think they do. I think that for many people, policy is now conflated with politics and they basically “check the scores.” Despite being a policy wonk with a longstanding interest in issues like water infrastructure, I’ve been tuning out news for the past few years because of this dynamic. But Matt’s analysis makes sense to me (I also worked on the Hill during the previous millennium) and I’m happy to see stuff getting done, even (especially?) if it’s flying under radar.
To the extent policy-focused journalism makes politics a spectator sport, probably.
And it suggests the model of deliberative representational democracy requires giving the representatives more space and latitude between elections to deliberate.
Does "policy-focused" journalism actually do that? I think most of what people call "policy based" journalism is actually spectator sport journalism talking about who wins and who loses. Actual policy journalism that researched the trade offs for most policies and presented them wouldn't be read by enough people to impact public opinion.
I agree. When I think of actual policy journalism, I'm thinking about what I used to read in my policy wonk days--stuff like Inside US Trade and various BNA publications, not WaPo/NYT articles.
I think the problem isn't so much policy-focused journalism itself, so much as that the easiest way to get people to read it (clicks pay the rent after all) is to frame it using highly salient issues, and that's where it can be counterproductive.
This is a meta-issue of political journalism I see all the time. An article in the media describes a political situation and the various players and their goals and incentives, and how they are likely to effect the outcome (senators, congressmen, legislative staffers, activists). But the media itself is left out of the story as though they will have no effect on the outcome, when we all know if/how media coverage of the situation will have a tremendous impact, which means in turn the analysis is incomplete!
More like policy-focused journalism that is delivered to un-interested parties shifts the conversation away from the substance of the issue and towards the politics of it. I'm sure trade magazines and industry insiders that will be affected by "secret congress" legislation are well aware and have their opportunity to influence it.
"If you are persuasive, determined, and willing to be eclectic in who you partner with, then things can happen."
One of the frustrating aspects with the way intersectionality is understood by activists is that it can really push against this kind of approach.
If you're advocating for serious immigration reform, you're probably going to have to work with Catholic groups, many of whom are going to be pro-life. This isn't throwing Planned Parenthood under the bus, this is just taking your job seriously.
(Unions are much more effective, in part because they ARE willing to be transactional. If you asked a union to stop cutting deals in the name of activist solidarity, you'd be laughed out of the room.)
Yup. I agree that the method of intersectionality is anti-political in this sense. It always demands a whole loaf over a half loaf, and a whole loaf for every constituency over a half-loaf for anyone. It's deeply opposed to incremental progress, and I think that's a mistake.
I don't know if anti-political is the right word exactly. You could say it's anti-democratic though. If "speaking truth to power" is your most cherished political principle, and you also live in a democracy, even a flawed one, then logically what you believe in is speaking truth, oppositionally, to the majority of voters. In which case, you must believe either (1) that it is appropriate and feasible for political leaders to manufacture the consent of the voters, or (2) that political leaders shouldn't be accountable to voters at all.
People with minority political views tend to be very focused on “the media” and “the two party system” because they see all of mainstream politics as flowing from those institutions engaging in (1), rather than a genuinely popular preference.
Yep. False consciousness arguments. Same as it ever was.
And the weirdest thing is the way that people keep going back to false consciousness arguments, even when doing so is contrary to their own material interests.
Re unions: one hopes, right? It's been alarming to see unions of educated professions, most prominently journalism unions, seeming to favor an intersectional approach.
What worries me is whether we can deal with climate change on this basis. A lot of prominent Republicans and right-wingers still don't take climate change seriously and it wasn't too long ago that the Republican party as a whole was denying climate change. If we had simple majority rule, Democrats would have had many more bites at the apple at this point and we could be in a better position.
I think this is in fact a good illustration of what Matt is talking about--see his earlier post on Republican centrism as reflected by the 2020 legislation he also references in this post. A signficant number of Republicans seem willing to support climate legislation if it's not framed as part of a "green new deal" or other progressive project, and it seems like quite a few take it seriously even if they won't admit that publicly. It's unfortunate that this issue became partisan in the first place.
I think Matt should do a bit more digging into the energy bill from 2020. Yes, in the end it was folded into an omnibus, blessed by Manchin and Murkowski, and everyone moved on their way. But there was a House version passed just a few weeks/months prior, and it was hotly opposed by the House GOP. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2020206
Someone can go through and identify the changes from the House version to what ultimately passed, and maybe someone can make a case that the Republicans genuinely changed their mind because of those changes. But in reality it's because it was being stapled onto a must pass bill and except for a few fringe members there wasn't much point in standing against the train coming through the chamber.
I don't disagree with your characterization, and I love a meaty SB policy analysis! But "must-pass" bills are held up or killed pretty regularly, and hitching policies to them is a typical way to get things passed (at least during my adult lifetime). The fact that these elements passed and nobody was shrieking about it on social media or cable tv is, IMO, a good thing and evidence for the efficacy of Secret Congress.
I think if Matt does a deeper dive on the 2020 energy bill, there's more there that's harder to replicate in the future than I think he's letting on to.
A term limited Murkowski heading Senate Energy wanting to make a deal before she handed over the committee to someone else.
A moderate Manchin heading the Democratic side of Senate Energy always willing to be the moderate making deals.
A post-election hangover that kept social media and cable's focus on things like the transition of power, electoral challenges, Georgia runoff, etc.
There's probably a much smaller universe of members of the Secret Congress than the full Congress.
Also, I think there's got to be a sustainable amount of push back to the overly rosy picture that there are a significant number of Republicans willing to support climate legislation if it's framed appropriately. Waxman-Markey cap and trade in 2009 was a partisan vote despite trying to adopt a bill that, at the time, was aligned with what had been the GOP climate position (John McCain's presidential platform, others like John Warner).
More recently, the House GOP voted in a near party line vote in condemning a carbon tax, which is often pulled up online among certain intellectuals as the free market conservative solution to the challenge. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2018363
I don't think anyone believes that the picture is rosy (at least I don't). But in an environment in which deals can be made, deals might be made.
Matt noted the $35 billion for green energy research (better batteries, carbon capture, whatever). It ought to be easy to co-opt Big Defense and Big Auto with R&D funding and subsidies. Line them up and Republicans will follow. Visible, high profile stuff - Mandate electric cars! - can't succeed. Finding funding breakthrough tech can hardly fail.
And what would the Democrats do with that power? They seem to have more bad ideas than good ones.
That Green New Deal proposal was a perfect example of something almost intentionally designed to provoke fierce opposition and steer public discussion away from the core issue into all sorts of debatable side issues. It demanded that people agree on many things that were not essential to solving the actual problem at hand - reducing carbon emissions.
If you believe carbon emissions are causing climate change, and that we'd be better off without warming temperatures, this is a technical problem akin to how we solved the problem of the "ozone hole", which as I recall at least was not overly controversial although it was painful for some industry - ban or tax into oblivion the substance causing harmful atmospheric change. In that case, hydroflourocarbons; in this case, fossil fuels.
The squad and the squad-adjacent are a curse for Ds and good government. They are the shock troops of lefty social media and they do far more good for themselves than for the country. How did Tom Perez ever say that AOC is the future of the D party? That was just asking for trouble.
“… ban or tax into oblivion…fossil fuels.”
The trick, of course, is the questions how and on what timetable. It’s an economics problem, not a physics problem.
Agree, at this point it's mostly about economics - we have alternative technologies but economics are the main brake on adopting them, though better technology would make the economics more palatable, so they're related.
The one thing it definitely is not about is forcing everyone to become converts to some eco-anti-capitalist vision of a "sustainable" society.
It's both, but we'll never arrive at consensus on "How do we fix it?" if we don't agree on "Is this a real problem?"
Conservatives have loudly insisted for decades that it is not a real problem. Most of them still do. That remains the biggest obstacle to solving the problem.
What, specifically, have they “loudly insisted”?
There is a long history of prominent Republican politicians and conservative commentators downplaying or denying climate change.
Like the Waxman Markey Cap and Trade bill that failed?
The Green New Deal made sense in the shadow of previous failures on climate change.
Why was a job guarantee included? This vastly complicated the issue and rightly opened us up for the arguments that we were trying to do much more than fix climate change. It was unnecessarily radical and hurt the cause. Naive at best.
Let me ask this about AOC and Bernie. What do we have to show for all of the radical, uncompromising proposals? Not a lot, except for a lot of political backlash. Why does Bernie continue to hold out for the magical $15 nationwide, when there could have been a smaller amount that could have been done. Do we want the cause or do we want progress? When will the far left progressives start to be judged by what they actually accomplish, in terms of helping real people?
In general, while I am not agreeing with the full logic of the Green New Deal, I can explain it this way:
In 2009/2010, climate change was seen as something that was a wicked problem to solve, with narrow, technocratic appeal, and so it was developed with input from multiple sectors, industries, trade associations, activists, etc. A consensus based strategy was possible because even Republicans like John McCain and John Warner (even Lindsay Graham!) had been advocating for a cap and trade approach.
Cap and trade was drafted with extensive business input in hopes of keeping the deal in Secret Congress. It was supposed to be Congress acting to ensure the outcome was more friendly to business than the alternative, which was the Supreme Court mandated EPA regulation.
That didn't work. Outside groups waged a two front war, negotiating with members while drafting legislation, then running campaign ads attacking the legislation anyway. It became a salient, partisan issue. In the end, when it became a partisan issue, it passed with barely any House GOP votes, and it was then left to die in the Senate when the talks between Kerry, Lieberman, and Graham broke down.
Contrast that with the Affordable Care Act, which despite the death of Kennedy and the surprise Massachusetts special election reducing them to less than sixty votes, was still pushed through by the sheer determination of Democrats to finally pass health care--because that was a highly salient partisan issue they had campaigned on for 60 odd years. They constructed a complicated process to pass a Senate bill and then amend it through reconciliation to get it done.
The Green New Deal is about making climate change a top Democratic priority, like health care was in 2009/2010, so that the attitude of every Democrat in a trifecta is "Well we may not accomplish everything, but we have to at least make progress on climate change." It's basically saying "Well if we've lost the chance to work through Secret Congress, our goal is to make sure this is the number one priority for Democrats when they have the total control that enables a small handful of big bills to pass."
So the challenge is something like:
- Once you've failed in Secret Congress, do you keep operating in Secret Congress, or try to find another approach?
- Once you've failed in Secret Congress, and some advocacy organizations have decided to make your issue a partisan issue, is there anyway for other advocates to stay in Secret Congress?
I think there's some truth in this, but I don't think the scope of the GND reflects some grand strategy now. My casual read is that a bunch of hard-left people got together and drafted a collective wish list. Because none of them truly believed it would pass (and may not even know how to develop plans that can achieve broad support), no one shot anything down out of fear of offending others in their group for no reason.
The ACA was well-defined, the GND was/is a hodge-podge of ideas. So the idea was to propose something that even a lot of Ds weren't going to support, ever. I mean, at what point do you hold people accountable for putting forth bad ideas that hurt the cause? Imo, we have to hold people accountable for more than their intentions.
Waxman-Markey passed the House, and there was a process in the Senate that looked like it was going to get a companion bill passed, but Deepwater Horizon had unfortunate timing and derailed that process.
::applauds::
Just liking this wasn't enough.
Yeah, in retrospect, I wonder if that was a mistake. I like the idea of it but it definitely seems to have become fodder for partisan sh*t fighting. I think the positive view is that it give people a structure to think about the country's response to climate change
Interesting that you mentioned the WA carbon tax. Many left wing groups didn't support it (or outright attacked it) because it didn't raise taxes, promoted environmental justice, transfer wealth to marginalized groups, etc. If such groups decided to support the measure, it may well have passed. Instead, the best was the enemy of the good, and the tax failed. Apparently it's green new deal or bust!
Ah yes, damn that Green New Deal undermining a 2016 initiative. Or are you referring to the 2018 one?
The GND had been kicking around for over a decade before AOC popularized it. The demands of the left groups opposed to the 2016 initiative were basically those of the GND even if they didn't call it that.
I'm sure Boeing had nothing to do with that.
I would say build the sea walls the carbon emissions have already happened.
I would hope that they continue addressing climate change (e.g. boost green industry and pressure other countries to reduce emissions); make childcare more affordable, make the refundable CTC (a) permanent and (b) a direct cash benefit; pass anti-gerrymandering legislation (as a stretch goal, also make our voting system more proportional); admit any territory that wants to be a state as a state. I think all these things are possible and I personally believe in them.
I’m ok with new states as long as DC isn’t on the list. The rest of that sounds like bad ideas to me.
I've been thru the DC convo many times on here, I think including with you, and I really haven't been convinced. I live here, along with hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Americans should have the right to representation.
I've thought through this and would agree to put it up for a vote with a trade off that for if it become a state we move 95% of all federal employees out of DC. Keep Congress, President and Supreme court and their immediate staff and move all other departments, agencies, etc. to the other states - distributed by population so they don't just go to Virginia and Maryland. If DC was willing to not be the center of the federal government, then they can become a state. If they want to stay the center of the federal government, then they should be that and not a state.
I don't really agree with the sentiment that DC has outsize influence as a city - the Mayor doesn't have a vote in Congress and the vast majority of people here don't have an influential job.
However, I wouldn't really oppose moving federal agencies around the country. I don't see why they all have to be in the same place.
I don't totally get this, what the problem is and how your suggestion would solve it. Like, "federal agencies are located in DC, so making DC a state would have the result that _____"? Lots of people who work at these agencies live in northern Virginia; has that led to any kind of unfair perks to Virginia? Should we expand the non-representation zone to include Alexandria?
All that said, my understanding is that the problem, whatever it is, could be solved more simply, by shrinking the "district" to just the government buildings, where no one lives, and just make the state include the city where people live.
And I believe I pointed out that you have representation.
Not in Congress.
I disagree with Ken in MIA a lot and - as I've said to him before - sometimes feel dismissed, but I don't think we should be attacking each other like this on here.
"But that’s how it’s basically always been in America, and we’ve somehow muddled through okay."
Do you really believe this, or was this just a convenient kicker?
I mean -- I would have said that the political situation in the US has gotten markedly worse in my (seven decade) lifetime. Republican contempt for the law has only grown from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Iraq War to Trump's endless plundering to the insurrection of 1/6. With no consequences for law-breaking, a culture of lawlessness has taken hold of the party. Combine that with an ideology of white revanchism that idealizes an all-white Russia over a multi-ethnic America, and you have big trouble. Now flood the country with cheap firearms and Fox News hate-speech, and you have a Rwandan genocide in the making.
So, do you really feel so all-fired sunny about our "muddling through," or is a commitment to dogged optimism merely another obligation imposed on you by your Weberian ethic of responsibility?
(In which case, you are probably also obligated to say, "no, no! I really believe it!")
IDK, 70 years ago was about the peak of McCarthyism and Jim Crow, there was no Medicare or Medicaid and J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI. I'm as worried about climate change as the next poster but I'd rather worry about that than about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
I am far more worried about climate change than about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, given that the USSR is out of business now. I also think that climate change is a greater danger than a war with Russia.
But climate change -- and many other problems that we face -- would be easier to tackle if we had a more functional domestic political system. And that's what I'm worried about: the unraveling of the US system. As Lincoln said, our greatest dangers come from internal division.
I do not think we are "muddling through" anywhere near as well as we used to. That's what I'm worried about.
Muddling through under Eisenhower meant bipartisan tolerance for Jim Crow, J. Edgar Hoover and a military-industrial complex that eventually got us sucked into Vietnam, + constantly running the risk of accidentally blowing up the whole world with hydrogen bombs.
Since then, things have mostly improved.
Has the national system for self-governance improved? (Granted, the enfranchisement of minorities is a huge step in the right direction, currently being aggressively reversed in Republican state legislatures around the country).
Has our ability as a nation to solve big problems improved? The national response to the pandemic was a debacle -- no sense of unity, no willingness to sacrifice, the mildest inconveniences instantly treated as partisan footballs. If we respond to climate change -- or an actual shooting war -- as we responded to the pandemic, then we're in a lot of trouble.
Did you listened to The Weeds episode titled The Lab-Leak Hypothesis? Buried in the show at the 45 minute mark, Matt discusses the white paper by Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons "Strict ID Laws Don't Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2018". It's interesting context whether any of these laws actually impact voting and what that means for the media narrative. Worth a listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lab-leak-hypothesis/id1042433083?i=1000523871293
Somehow I can't hear the phrase "lab-leak hypothesis" without remembering that time that I left the dogs inside too long and came home to a large puddle on the floor.
I listened to this episode. I would suggest listening to Season 1 of the Fiasco podcast (about the Florida count/recount in the 2000 presidential election). Republicans realized that if they just contested every single ballot, then the election judges would have such a backlog, that they couldn't review the legitimately debatable ballots. I'm not ready to die on the hill of Voter ID laws, but laws about signature matching and appointing election commissioners seem ripe for chicanery. I don't think that we should wait for a controversial election to review these laws. We need to challenge them before they are used to throw out valid votes.
I think that the worst debacle we've gotten into since 1950 was the Vietnam War, not even Iraq comes close. It was bipartisan and inspired by a the sense of unity and willingness to sacrifice for the common good the prevailed among our politicians in the 50s and early 60s.
At that time there was *also* a somewhat bipartisan desire to build a civilized welfare state that lasted from FDR to Nixon, give or take. That has mostly stalled or gone into reverse & it is the aspect of midcentury politics we should miss the most, in my opinion.
yeah, interesting. I certainly agree that Viet Nam was a debacle. National unity plus a mistaken theory of foreign policy can lead to messes as well.
The comparisons become difficult. Is it worse to have a superbly functioning ship and crew, and be driving full steam onto a reef because of bad charts, or to have your engine out, the rudder broken, and the crew mutinying? Both bad, but in different ways.
I miss the bipartisan desire to build a civilized welfare state, plus the central role of labor unions, plus the recognition that universities are the seedbeds of national greatness through research and innovation.
I don't miss the jello-molds and ubiquitous cigarettes.
You've created a caricature of the GOP ("ideology of white revanchism that idealizes an all-white Russia over a multi-ethnic America") which inflames more than informs, in my view.
I report; you decide.
"Rwandan genocide in the making." I've decided.
Why do you think that Putin has spent so much effort first infiltrating and then supporting the NRA and its mission of flooding the country with guns?
I can guarantee you that he is not afraid that valiant, well-armed American patriots will resist a Russian invasion, ala Red Dawn. That's just a joke -- if the Russians ever invade, Trump's followers will welcome them.
No, Putin knows that those firearms are going to be turned on other Americans, as indeed they are now.
"if the Russians ever invade, Trump's followers will welcome them."
You make some interesting points, then follow it with this. So much discourse sounds like people who spend all their time reading about the other party's constituents online and don't actually talk to anyone who voted for Trump/Biden.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/russia-and-putin-receive-low-ratings-globally/ft_2020-02-07_russia_07/
Shorter version: "Putin is Q"
I have no theories about Q, but if you believe that Maria Butina was not acting on Putin's orders, then you know nothing about contemporary Russia.
Russian invasion? This is fever swamp stuff. Look at the Republican reaction to the Biden-Putin meeting. It is divided, but there has been sharp criticism from R leaders that Biden is too soft on Russia. They have an ad up criticizing it. Here was McCarthy's reaction (below). Really, let's not create our own Resistance Q .
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/mccarthy-slams-biden-for-giving-putin-a-pass-after-years-of-silence-on-trumps-relationship-with-russian-president/ar-AAL9eeo
Could you tone it down a little? Jeez.
Don't all countries meddle in the affairs of other countries a little? Even allies? Look at the CIA spying on Angela Merkel.
All true. My point is about the resilience of the American political system to shocks of all kinds -- foreign interference, domestic unrest, natural disasters, and so on.
Remember how this sub-thread started -- MY says "we'll keep muddling through," i.e. the US is imperfect but basically sound and healthy.
I say: I'm not so sanguine -- I think there are a lot of problems with the underlying health of the country -- its unity and coherence are under threat from internal division as well as external interference. And I worry that it is headed for even more lawlessness and violence, sometimes fomented by foreign agents.
Foreign meddling is generally a fact of life in international affairs. But healthy countries respond to it in healthy ways. For instance, if a foreign adversary engages in gross meddling with an election, then the nation comes together to punish it and prevent any recurrence. When half of the elected officials deny that it occurred, minimize the evidence, and give the foreign country a green light for future meddling, then that country is not healthy. I don't know if we can keep on "muddling through" when one party would rather win with foreign assistance than lose without it.
“…Putin has spent so much effort first infiltrating and then supporting the NRA and its mission of flooding the country with guns?”
I have seen no good evidence that is true.
Clearly, no one in America would want to own a gun absent Russian intervention. Duh.
:-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association#Russian_influence
John, are you saying that the line you quote in parentheses is not factual? Or that we don't benefit from talking about it?
If you, treadmill, and I all have honestly held disagreements on this, wouldn't open and frank dialogue be better than silent stewing?
Saying that things are worse now than before the civil rights act, when homosexual acts were literally crimes and women who wanted high end careers were seen as freaks is pretty rich.
Good, that's part of the case for saying that things are better. I agree that those are improvements, and I had them in mind when writing my first comment, but figured I'd let MY cite them in support of his "muddling through" claim if he wanted to.
Still, I think the situation cannot simply be reduced to comparing individual improvements to individual set-backs. There's a larger question about whether the nation as a whole, the electorate as a whole, the political system as a whole, is acting in a functional manner or is becoming pathological. If Nazi Germany had decriminalized homosexual acts in 1935 then that would have been a one-off improvement in a rapidly deteriorating total system.
But if course Nazi Germany would not have decriminalized homosexual acts in 1935: the idea is laughable. And a Nazi Germany that could have done anything like that would have been a significantly different Nazi Germany than the real one.
There have been many, many liberal wins in the US over the last seven decades. Those wins weren't anomalies created by aliens. They come out of a structure of American politics that is more complex than the narrative that you're pushing.
That's fine -- change the hypothetical if you like.
My point was simply that you cannot respond to concerns about the gradual decay of a system by pointing to occasional one-off successes.
"That's fine -- change the hypothetical if you like."
The Nazis had a great infrastructure program!
Human "presentism" perversity. I remember attending briefings by Army generals circa 2010 where they would claim that "this is the most challenging security environment the United States has ever faced." (Okay, okay, fighting for budgets and roles & missions, but c'mon, general.)
You've got that right. And the problem with presentism has never been worse than it is right now.
Russia isn't "all-white". It's a multi-ethnic state, and if you forced their ethnicities through the American lens, many would be viewed as asians or religious minorities or maybe people of color. Also Rwandan-genocide-in-the-making sounds as far-fetched as anything Q may be saying
Wigan, you keep doing this.
It doesn't matter how "all white" Russia is. It only matters how their race is perceived by conservative Americans, and American media has always presented Russians as extremely white.
What do I keep doing? You ask as if I'm a broken record but I don't even think this topic has come up before.
But otherwise I appreciate your comment, because that's a good point. And if that's the case then maybe the original sentence should have been "idolize a supposedly all-white Russia". When I personally see Russians in American media it's usually muslims from the Caucus region, but that might be unique to me since I watch a lot of MMA.
The fact that many Afghan people aren't very brown doesn't mean that Americans don't imagine a brown person when they think of an Afghan refugee. The fact that many Russians don't look like Dolph Lundgren doesn't mean that Americans don't imagine a tall, fair person when they think of Russians. (Anecdotally, when I worked in European sports, almost every Russian I met was very fair in complexion, so the travel habits of people from western vs eastern Russia may also play a role in perceptions.)
I gather that I was medium-dooshy in the way I said it, but what I was trying to do was draw your attention to this point that you seem to have overlooked a couple of times.
You keep avoiding toeing the progressive line. :)
Haha, well I'd probably do better if I even knew what the progressive line is here. If the part of the alt-right view is that Putin is good because Russia is "all white", then why repeat that lie? And if progressives believe Russia is "all white" they should stop being so parochial about race in an international context.
It’s kind of a paradox. There is much less outright corruption now than in earlier eras, but many more lobbyists. One of the reasons Republicans defended Nixon is because it was an open secret that JFK and LBJ did similar things. Many thought the 1960 election was stolen, for example, and with good reason.
Pre-Watergate presidents did all kinds of shady shit with the support of the FBI and CIA, but the Church Commission and other disclosures changed that. J. Edgar Hoover was a much more fearsome than any FBI director since.
How did JFK, not being the incumbent, win the 1960 elections with the help of the FBI and CIA?
Stealing the election was done by local political machines. The FBI and CIA were things like COINTELPRO which was arguably far worse than Watergate.
Similarly true with SCOTUS—often a majority of cases are decided unanimously and a slim minority are 5-4
Somehow when we let legislators legislate, instead of measuring against the legistlative vision of the executive branch, things work out. Go figure.
Yes, the point about mistaken expectations of the presidential bully pulpit is a reminder of how out of whack Americans' expectations of the President are with the actual design of our government. People expect the President to have the power of a prime minister when the actual formal powers of the office are closer to that of a constitutional monarch.
It almost makes me think it could have a salutary effect of if state legislatures took control of the Electoral College back from voters, if the result was to significantly damage and weaken the Presidency and elevate the power of Congress.
This jibes with my contention of trying to de-polarize political by disaggregating positions. Is it possible to get someone who is pro-Life to support immigration reform? Someone who wants to “build the Wall” to support making taxes more progressive? Someone who opposes increasing the minimum wage to support a more generous EITC. Someone who dislikes “environmental extremists” to support a revenue neutral tax on net CO2 emissions? Someone who is “nationalistic” in foreign policy terms (anti -Iran/China) to support freer trade?
There's actually a fair amount of political science research on this. In general, absent idiosyncratic voters like myself (I want to "build the wall" and make taxes more progressive), the voters who are willing to do this are the less-educated voters or voters who follow the news less.
These voters often don't know what their "team" thinks about issues, especially lower or medium salience ones like the environment or trade (even 8 year olds knew Trump wanted the wall, and lo and behold immigration became a much more partisan issue circa 2016).
So basically lots of voters do already feel this way, and have cross-pressures...20% of Democrats are pro-life, for instance. And I think 30% of Republicans are pro-choice. But it's generally the less-educated voters, who also vote less in primaries.
The practical importance of this is in letting candidates tailor themselves to their districts and activists fundraisers volunteers accepting this and recognize that this is the opposite of Republican strategy which is to run against Godless Muslims Color-coded Socialists in every precinct of every district of every state.
In my opinion, it's not possible because conservatives vote based on identity, not issues.
your premise proves the opposite conclusion. If conservatives vote on identity, you can rebrand white identity in any number of ways (eg working class Toryism) without hemorrhaging votes.
You mean like if conservatives abandoned their long-held commitment to free trade?
How about if they gave up on small government and just wrote checks to farmers?
Or if they went from running against Bill Clinton on "family values" and then decided to support Trump?
Or if they went from arguing that Social Security and Medicare would destroy American freedom to arguing that they are more committed to protecting those programs?
It seems to me that all of those cases support my conclusion.
You seem to be confusing Republicans with conservatives.
This is an underappreciated point that I've been thinking about for years. Chomsky talks about this - most "conservatives" are just labelled that way in the popular consciousness when really they're only Republican partisans. This is very similar to how many people view the "radical left" in congress. Most leftist politicians want nothing to do with actual communists, anarchists, or other groups who make up the actual radical left. Those groups often have very violent or collectivist ideals that threaten the interests of people in power, even AOC. These words are bludgeons used to bash people's brains in to keep them from thinking critically about the nuances of politics.
That statement certainly goes both ways in many cases
It certainly would not be easy, but in principle, why couldn't a desire for progressive taxation be a "white" marker?
For now, they do
I have three very anodyne rules about American politics:
-- When you have big majorities, you can probably get big things done
-- When you have a small majority, you can keep the wheels of America greased but not too much more than that
-- If you want to get reelected, then just make sure the economy is good and we're at peace; doing big things legislatively will have no impact on your chances.
Oh, and I have one more rule about what legislation can pass:
-- If Tucker Carlson talks about it on his show, there's no way to pass bipartisan legislation; if Tucker Carlson doesn't pay attention to it, the Secret Congress may be able to pass something.
Addendum: If Republicans are in charge, liberals need to figure out how to get Tuck Carlson to agree with them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/24/energy-202-how-pebble-mine-opponents-used-fox-news-push-trump-delay-alaska-project/
Would be curious to know who are the most effective members of Secret Congress, and how that effectiveness correlates (or doesn’t) with national profile, local popularity, partisanship, and etc.
The representative who can be spoken of is not the most effective member of the Secret House; the senator who can be named is not the most effective member of the Secret Senate.
Even if you accept all the arguments of this piece - is it _not_ supposed to be horrifying that public advocacy on an issue prevents Congress from taking action on it and only quiet lobbying can make something pass? Is everyone who doesn't have a job on Capitol Hill just supposed to keep their mouth shut and hope that good things happen?
I've been hoping you'd discuss more about Secret Congress and what, if any, advice can be given to political actors based on the knowledge of Secret Congress. I'd especially like something like "What if David Shor was in Secret Congress" but ways to both find and identify popular issues to advocate for, while avoiding the trap of doing so by appealing to partisan advocacy organizations to get a bill on the agenda.
It seems like there's a bad loop with funders not recognizing that the metrics they are using to determine if their support for a group is effective is actually undermining the chance for legislative success.
I see we might have a new Marc— welcome Simon!
I like to think that all of us here encourage Matt to write and proof more carefully.
In other words, if you can't see the Marc, then you're the Marc.
I resemble that remark.
Sorry, but you're not Novicoff, and swapping you for him would be a trade-Marc violation.
You need to be 21 to buy tobacco now?
Caught me by surprise too. Next time I go inside a gas station, I'm going to look for that "you must have been born before this date in ___" calendars.
I think at least some of the time causation runs the other way, that there are deep salient disagreements in the public and that makes them nearly impossible to negotiate. Gun rights, abortion, tax policy mostly run this way.
Of course, then it becomes self reinforcing by becoming election level salient. But in those cases, other than nibbling around the edges public advocacy is the proper way to go for advocacy groups.
The hope is to raise the salience among your co-partisans to the point that they will feel as threatened by not acting as acting, hope to make it a 60/40 issue in your favor, or prevent it from going the other way. The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare.
On gay marriage: how much of that was advocacy groups and activists versus politicians pushing in that direction versus just the culture changing, organically?
In one of his interviews David Shor made the point that support for gay marriage actually stalled out during the years that it was most politicized, mid-2000s or so. But both before and after the support rose steadily.
I guess I'm skeptical of the ability of either activists or politicians to change minds or move voters. I feel like the internet, globalization and TV / Movies probably do much more, and that's why we see broad correlations across countries when it comes to support for cultural issues.
That's an interesting point - I hadn't noticed the stall in the 2000s: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
That's also the period both when the issue was being fought in the states, and when the issue was just crossing the 50% line. I wonder if one or the other of those two facts was most relevant.
It's notable that marijuana legalization mostly stalled in the 1980s and 1990s, but has continued since then on the same trajectory it was on in the 1970s. In this case, the issue crossed 50% around 2012, just before it started being fought in the states (unless you count the pre-history of medical marijuana, which started right when the issue got un-stalled, in the late 1990s).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-inches-new-high.aspx
Yeah - the stall out on marijuana happened at a time when it was less salient in politics. So it's a good counter-example to the Shor gay marriage chart.
A 20-year stall-out would seem to coincide with generational change. A pause while those too young to be involved in the prior fight came of age and many opposed died out.
Culture changing "organically" isn't a thing. Culture always has people making explicit arguments, and those arguments always feed into art, and that art informs future arguments, and so on.
The guy who wrote the Black Panther movie was unquestionably informed by activism and politics. Same with the people who wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Color Purple, and with the people who made Will and Grace.
Organic-isn't-a -thing seems a strangely hardline position to take. People used to get married and have children at earlier ages - which artist or activist drove that change? The percentage of Americans with a passport has risen steadily, over the last 30 years, from a base of only 5% - is that due to politics? Who are the people organizing the steady rise of interracial marriage among Americans? Who's behind men no longer wearing hats and sometimes wearing their hair long?
"Who's behind men no longer wearing hats"
Finally -- finally!! -- someone asking the tough questions that will blow the cover off this whole sordid conspiracy.
You got your bare-headed men, your penny-loafers replacing wing-tips, and then one day, bam! it's rampant drug abuse in the streets and sexual commerce with komodo dragons. After that it's only a short step to utter degradation: whole-language literacy and people using "assumedly" for "presumably." It all starts so innocently, with a Vidal Sassoon shampoo commercial, and before you know it Western Culture has crumbled into dust.
It seems like you have picked several examples with pretty clear political/activist connections.
-- marriage age -- women can't be forced to get married at early ages anymore, and more women have opportunities to do things like go to college and start careers
-- rise in passports -- increasing cultural diversity due to changes in immigration laws in the late 70s, reduction in xenophobia starting with Civil Rights, airline bailouts, growth of trade
-- interracial marriage -- seems obviously related to decades or antiracism
-- hats and hair -- the hat industry is still huge, and hat and hair trends have long been connected to politics and activism: hippy long hair, the natural hair movement among African Americans, skinheads
"The ultimate success is something like gay marriage, where the other side eventually capitulated, though that it is very rare."
That kind of depends on the standard for "rare." Social Security, Medicare, universal suffrage, Civil Rights, Obamacare, gay marriage, and legal weed were all super unpopular and unpassable until they weren't.
And none of those things happened because we did them "in secret."
I think tax policy is the ultimate negotiable policy within limits. Increasing the tax rates by 5-10% would generate huge talking points, but I don't it generates the passion that any of the culture war issues like gun rights or abortion does. If you moved it 40% maybe, but even then I suspect not.
How do you explain the TEA Party movement of the early Obama era?
On the whole, I would say that it was about fear. Much of what animates both parties in part, but especially conservatives, is the fear of loss. They feel they should have good lives in a good country and progressives want to destroy that. Some of the fear is bound up in racism, but I think its a smaller part than I've read you to believe. More of it is built up in a broader cultural understanding of how the country should work with regards to jobs, family, religion, etc. Its also an incredibly power motivator that politicians have used to drive votes.
Idk, the tea party got started after the bailouts were done proposed, and before a lot of the social fears were stoked. Obama hadn't really even taken charge yet (Santelli's Tea Party screed on CNBC was Feb 19, 2009, only a month after Obama was inaugurated) and Obama campaigned as kind of a moderate....he got lots of WWC votes. Are you reading 2021 politics into 2009?
"They feel they should have good lives in a good country and progressives want to destroy that."
Are you saying that you feel this way or that other people who are conservative feel this way?
Do you think that I want to destroy your good life and country?
A major underlying contention is that conservatives believe things are pretty good and we shouldn't change very much - aka conserve things the way they are. Progressives think things could be much better if we changed some stuff and progressed forward.
There is undeniable tension in these perspectives and its easy for Conservatives to believe that Progressives want to destroy their good life and its easy for Progressives to believe that Conservatives want to keep the bad things.
I think they are both right. Relative to history - things are amazing right now for more people than ever before. We should be careful not to mess that up. We also didn't get here by conserving what was, we got here by progressing forward and there are still many things that could be better. I try very hard (not always successfully) to see the best in both perspectives as I think they can both be valuable. That doesn't mean that on any particular issue both are right, one perspective is more right than the other on any specific issue.
TL;DR - I don't think you want to destroy a good life or country. You might advance specific policies I think will make things better or worse though...
“…conservatives believe things are pretty good and we shouldn't change very much…”
That’s a facile understanding of conservatism.
Lincoln may have explained it best when he said, “What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”
I think the causation works both ways and it is important to pay attention that.
Matt's point is relevant for issues that have not yet reached salience. For example, zoning reform is an issue that could burst into a high salience issue and become ideologically polarized.
Under this theory the advocates for zoning reform should work hard to keep the level of salience and publicity around the issue as low as possible. They should ask Biden to never mention it, and not do protests about how zoning is racist (even though it is). Instead they should go behind closed doors and tell Democratic policymakers about how racist it is, and tell Republican lawmakers how zoning is government bureaucratic overreach.
At the same time, the activists don't have full control over these issues and cannot always control them. If Republicans decide zoning reform is a politically useful attack on Democrats, and Trump tried to do this in 2020, then it will rise to high salience despite anything the activists do. I would argue that this is what has happened with immigration reform, activists attempted secret congress getting some Republicans on board, but xenophobic groups then had an incentive to raise the salience to block it.
Using "secret congress" is most useful for issues that are not already high salience (or can't easily be rebranded), and don't have committed opposition who can raise the salience. These kinds of issues are usually funding for project or issue that doesn't take funding away from something else.
So the issue of "infrastructure" has been handled badly because it was raised to high salience, although that may be because of how the Trump administration handled it. But other issues that are getting through congress have been doing better due to the lower salience, despite the fact that they are similiar issues.
Props for the audio version.