I'm in bonn, the former west german capital and a place where a forward looking citiplanner planted a whole neighborhood's worth of cherry blossom trees shortly after the war (at least i assume that's what happened...). Should start blooming in the next couple of weeks, which is a good pick-me-up on the way to work.
Maybe, like, some new cures for cancer or something? But only cancer cures that weren't supported by NIH since that will just make us all sad again? Shit. Puppies maybe? Surely puppies are still safe.
I know this is a joke, but I'm reminded of The Week's "It Wasn't All Bad" section, where they highlighted positive stories. I wouldn't mind an occasional column that didn't try to paint bad news as good or look for hokey stories to make people feel better, but maybe (?) focused on small "slow boring" levers everyday people can pull that aren't strictly giving money to candidates.
Part of the despair I hear from people on the ground I talk to (that isn't just a consequence of headlines/social media) is that they don't feel like they have any agency right now and they just have to take it, day in and day out. Special elections are great, but they're special because they don't happen all that often. I for one would like to feel like I'm getting new counsel and ideas on a regular basis so that, even in the current flood the zone environment, I feel like I'm keeping the small flame of hope lit.
Downer incoming. We already tried that with the #Resistance. We flooded the town halls, held rallies to save the ACA, called our representatives nonstop. I was involved in all of it. And I don't think it worked. The practical effect was the same as the Tea Party, which was to push the deep blue/red areas much further to the left/right. And because of how voters are distributed, that hurt Democrats more than the Tea Party hurt Republicans.
Sometimes, when the buzz in my brain grows overloud, I recall being a child, outside, digging in the dirt and finding an earthworm. Cupping the wriggling thing in my hands, with bits of dirt clinging to its smooth contours, I felt the kinship of one living thing to another. Then I gently placed the worm back in the hole and watched as it made its way into the cool earth.
My kid's school made a video this week where they asked people walking by about something good that happened to them that day. It ranged from "got a 100 on a test" to "was able to get some Dunkin this morning." In the past, I might have thought this was corny, but now I hope they do this every week.
Could just pass everything through a mental filter of "How would some Fox News like bias frame this as positive for the Democrats?" Don't even need GenAI, Machine Learning, or lack of Ketamine for that one.
One thing I kinda realized about business community elites is they tend to be risk averse “cowards” and behave based on short term incentives rather than long term one.
I suspect one of the reason they embraced DEI etc was they simply scared of activist types.
And growing up in Japan, I heard a lot of successful corporate blackmailers (“shareholder meeting troll” was a thing back in the day)
They aren't cowards. They are business people, exercising their duties to owners by stewarding the company to create value. They operate in a politicized environment, but that doesn't make them political actors.
Nope, they're cowards. Sure, they have responsibilities toward shareholders. But those responsibilities don't outrank their responsibilities as citizens.
Yes, I get triggered by the notion that the overly broad invocation of "lawsuits" means powerful economic actors can't engage in meaningful critique of an administration. (And I did some triggering of my own).
I'm obviously aware there are limitations to what kind of political activities or communication a corporate leader can engage in given their fiduciary responsibilities. Jamie Dimon's job isn't the same as Matt Yglesias's! But the universal "They can't speak out because lawsuits" as almost a *commandment* seems a bit much. For starters, speaking out against government policies *likely to hurt shareholders* is arguably the *duty* of a CEO—not something to be avoided. I can't imagine Trump's constant threats to annex Canada are good for Hilton or Delta...
But the really insidious thing is this: the clear implication is that what shareholders will sue you over is the damage to the business caused by the executive branch's retribution (how dare free citizens in a country with a first amendment criticize the king!). In other words, over the years we've gone from "Using the power of government as a tool to exact vengeance is worthy of condemnation, certainly unconstitutional, and might well get you impeached" to "Business leaders aren't allowed to protest" because of lawsuits that might flow from, uh, illegal use of the government's powers!
Sure they do. Their companies are multinational and their fiduciary responsibility is to the company's shareholders. Their personal views as citizens are expressed at the ballot box and in the public square. Not in the boardroom.
As much as I don't want this to be true, I believe it is. I also believe it's this kind of logic that should have been used (and hopefully will be used one day) to eradicate Citizens United, because as it stands corporations have been given political power that scales with the money they have to spend yet this outsized political power does not carry similarly outsized responsibility.
Maybe I don't fully understand the ramifications of CU then. My understanding was that it allows for unlimited spending from corporations to independent political efforts which can still be positioned to help a candidate/campaign without directly being tied to them. Is that not right? How were corporations more powerful politically before?
At some point, the rule of law is essential to the operation of a successful and honest business and that concept also forms part of fiduciary obligations. If one thinks we are in a "normal" political environment, more or less, then of course you are right. If this is 1933 and Krupp and Thyssen and their ilk making their choices, or 1940-44 and Petain and Vichy - or, to be less alarmist (I guess), Videla's Argentina - as frankly I fear is closer than we would like to think, then the theory that CEOs are furthering shareholder value by sucking up to Trump starts to fall in on itself.
1) Being a good citizen while being a good corporate fiduciary means compromising both a little. One cannot be perfect at either, so a little compromise is fine on both.
2) There are times when the compromises are too large and one ceases to be “good” as one or the other. We are closer to that point than we’ve been because of the extreme fealty demanded by Trump, especially of large corporate leaders.
Where I see it playing out especially hard are demands that corporations cut off business relationships with perceived political enemies of Trump, lest they too become the political enemies that the administration demands be shunned. Too much complicity here could allow the administration to get enough momentum that it eventually becomes impossible to say “no.” The Executive Orders on law firms are an example. If these things are allowed to continue unabated by reasonable corporate leaders, it could get quite ugly in America to be a political opponent of the administration in a way we’ve never experienced as a country.
Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel and same logic applies to not checking Trump. like their optimal behavior to maximize their longe term gain I would imagine is to advocate for lower tax and deregulation while checking on Trump’s destructive impulses.
that’s not how they behave and they’re simply trying to avoid the short term ire of most noisy and obnoxious ppl (be it activist or Trump).
In a sense, Mitch McConell when he was a Senate majority leader is how most CEO types operate I think
In his time, Mitch McConnell exceeded my expectations with regards to slowing down Trump's worst impulses, because we're about to see what an unchecked Trump does.
You're basically describing in an nutshell why the idea that CEOs only responsibility is maximizing shareholder value is so problematic. It's an incentive structure absolutely ripe for short term thinking on everything involving the future of a company.
Genuine question - is there evidence that specific corporations that enacted "annoying woke stuff" have actually experienced the consequences of anti-woke backlash? I'm ready to be convinced. I certainly agree that the corporate world went with the flow and did a bunch of woke/DEI/ESG type stuff, and that they're rolling that back a bunch now. But unless you were really out in front doing something radical, I bet you're fine - people's memories are short and collective action is hard. I can imagine corporations deciding to go with the flow, cancel some of the more ostentatious woke stuff and retreat to a generic support for everyone's rights. They're betting that the right won't punish them as long as they basically go with the herd, and the left won't punish them for getting vaguer with their commitments.
More than temporary. Seems to have permanently reduced its market share. Went from the number 1 seller to number 2 almost immediately after the controversy to number 3 a year later. Cost Bud Light billions. The stock price still hasn't fully recovered almost 2 years later, and that's in a market where most stocks are up about 60% over the same period.
Company leadership would get sued to oblivion by shareholders for knowingly taking actions that hurt shareholder value. We can decry it all we want, but they have a job to do that supercedes their personal opinions.
I'm extremely skeptical that a CEO saying something like "the administration should obey court orders" or "invading Canada would be illegal" or "it's dangerous to eviscerate spending on scientific research" would leave an enterprise vulnerable to being sued "to oblivion."
There are limits to what the CEO of a public company can say, of course; but a board sufficiently concerned about a boss's pronouncements is free to discharge the person in question and hire a replacement. Which is really what this is all about at the end of the day: putting self-interest over country.
Could probably Google or ChatGPT specific cases alone those lines, but the details come down to specific courts, specific SEC officers, and other nuances. Regardless, there are serious concerns with corporate officers taking such actions.
The thing about this is that any action in any direction is securities fraud. Too much DEI? Fraud. Too little? Fraud. Supporting Trump? Fraud. Not supporting Trump? Believe it or not, fraud.
Correct, but based on the theory that "Everything Is Securities Fraud" one could also arguing that taking the short term path of supporting the administration to the detriment of the long term prospects for a company is also Securities Fraud as the officers aren't considering the long term impacts of supporting someone like Trump.
The final boss of "everything is securities fraud" is Elon tanking Tesla's value over the past few months. Hard to square his actions of late with his fiduciary duty to Tesla shareholders. Its almost like if the CEO of McDonalds was going around yelling about how his customers were fat losers and then joined the government with an explicit mission to raise costs for potato and beef producers while supposedly carrying on his corporate duties.
Where talking about fiduciary duties, not fraud. And it actually isn't that risky because decisions are governed by the "business judgment rule" in this space. There are outliers and weirdness, but the problem isn't so much getting sued as keeping the job and genuinely being focused on maximizing shareholder value.
It's not even so much that they would actually get sued. It can and does happen, but mostly it doesn't. The real point is that taking stands on political issues on behalf of the company, stands that won't increase shareholder value and could really harm it if Trump decides to attack the company, just isn't what their job is about.
CEOs are essentially supposed to be proxies for the board of directors, and boards are essentially supposed to be proxies for the shareholders. If the shareholders direct the company to take political stands, then the board and CEO should do so. Otherwise, the board and CEO should restrict themselves to carrying out the obligations in the contract they have with the shareholders, which is found in the articles of incorporation, the IPO statements and the prospectus. Mostly, those obligations boil down to "increase shareholder value by every legal means".
What they are definitely not supposed to do is to use the company as a vehicle for pushing their personal political agendas... and that's just as true if the agenda in question is "preserve democracy" as if it's DEI or regulations about yacht ownership. Just because you and I think the agenda is really good, and really important doesn't change the fact.
Officers of public companies are somewhat like lawyers, in that their obligation is to work zealously to further their clients' interests, regardless of their personal opinions. The legal profession makes this point more clearly, embedding it in formal rules of ethics and empowering bar review committees to evaluate and enforce it, but a similar structure exists between corporate officers and shareholders.
Perhaps what CEOs and boards should do is ask the shareholders. Put it up for a shareholder vote. If the shareholders would like to use the company's power to preserve democracy, then it would be the CEO's responsibility to enact that agenda.
But, honestly, I expect that the shareholders would vote it down and instead say the CEO should focus on increasing shareholder value. And that, then, is what the CEO should do.
It's easy to imagine a scenario where a CEO says something benign but anti-Trump, Trump uses his power to go after him, and the company's stock tanks. Would it definitely or probably happen? Perhaps not, but the downside risk is too significant for them to ignore, particularly if it's not relevant to their company
Budweiser tried sending a small promotional package to a trans influencer (IIRC- I'm not going to look up the specifics, but the original action they engaged in was not some major international advertising campaign on anything), and it caused a huge shock to the stock and sales of their products with their customer base. Deliberately wading into political waters clearly has downsides for corporations.
Corporate employees are citizens when they sign off for the day- they're free to use that time for whatever political ends they'd like. I'm perpetually flummoxed by people who argue that we should be be engaging in political activism to support desired political goals in every moment of our life. It's also frequently hypocritical given that these same people decry every comment that any corporate bigwig makes that happens to tacitly or enthusiastically support politics they disagree with. I very much doubt that Charles is sitting there thinking "well, I disagree with what he's saying, but I sure am happy that Elon Musk is using his corporate power to support Donald Trump. CEOs should really be doing more of this on the corporate dime."
The fact of the matter is that anything you want them to say precisely because it would be standing up to the lawlessness of this administration is a political statement- it's literally why you want them to say it. And as soon as companies start issuing political statements they risk a) backlash in the marketplace, and b) shareholder actions due to backlash in the marketplace. You can't have it both ways- it can't be both so banal and meaningless that it won't cause potential financial harm to the company and something that they should be doing in an attempt to have an impact in our politics.
> This is a partial list of lawsuits involving Tesla, Inc, the American automotive and energy company, since 2008; as of August 2023, Tesla is party to over 1,750 lawsuits, and as of September 2021, it is party to 200 in China alone. A significant number of the cases notably derive from the actions of the company's CEO, Elon Musk, who is also party to many of his own lawsuits. TSLAQ, a loose collective of anonymous short-sellers and skeptics of Tesla and Elon Musk, regularly discusses and shares news of these lawsuits on Twitter and elsewhere.
I want to once again remind everyone that Musk has been a volatile and impulsive individual for at least a decade. Numerous people before us have predicted his downfall and currently I'm more concerned with him distracting us while his associated staff actually restructure the federal administrative state.
Forget Musk and forget the details of DOGE. Instead, we should pay attention to the negative impacts experienced by voters as can be blamed on the Trump administration. Particularly, voters in swing states and swing voters. It'll take some time, so we can just laugh at Musk and team until then.
Tesla is a weird one. Even though it's down a lot, it's still up significantly from a year ago. Neither a shareholder lawsuit nor a lack of one would surprise me
Herein lies the fundamental amorality of corporate capitalism. Corporations sought and obtained status as a legal person but eschew any responsibility to behave like a decent person, hiding behind shareholder value except when comes to executive compensation.
This is not true, in general the business judgement rule gives the leadership broad latittude. The fear is occasionally activists investors trying to get board seats but these rarely care about political opinions. For the most part the leadership are cowards who care more about the opinion of the peers and would prefer to behave like other CEO's/leaders instead of standing out or trying to do what they think is best.
I think those responsibilities do outrank, which is the reason that corporations - definitionally - cannot be trusted with any of the obligations or privileges of citizenship, and need to be treated in the public policy realm as potentially hostile and untrustworthy actors (a presumption that can be rebutted in any particular case for any particular corporation). The people within corporations hate this framing, but it proves itself to be correct time and time again. The fact that these people respond to public policy pressure by "bandwagoning" to alter the political system (nigh unto outright fascism in the current case) is just more confirmation.
Many companies have political action committees. Practically all lobby Congress. To say they're not political actors is naive.
I was listening to an interesting Odd Lots interview with Andrew Ferguson, FTC chair that touched on this, espousing your point of view. From the transcript:
"I'll give you some background on this. 2020, I am Mitch McConnell's lawyer. I'm sitting in my Senate office. The George Floyd protests are at their peak. I start getting calls from GCs of giant Fortune 100 businesses and business groups.
I pick up the phone and they say, hey, cops are really racist. We, the business community, want you to pass a bunch of police reform bills. I was a conservative that had relatively strong deference for markets and for market actors and people making decisions in those markets.
I was shocked by this. My response as, why are you calling me about this? You're supposed to make widgets at low prices for Americans.
Why are you calling me about police reform? What the hell does this have to do with you? Leave the political debates to Americans and to voters.
Stop calling me about this. If anything, don't you want more police to protect your business? They're like, no, it's really important to us."
Ferguson goes on to tis this into why he's willing to go after social media companies for restricting speech because they have too much power, but my takeaways were that he wasn't surprised general counsels form large companies were calling him (that's common) but that they weren't taking the Republican side, and that contrary to a lot of commenters here that just thought companies were posturing, they were actually worried about the state of policing in 2020. You may want them to be neutral on all things outside of their business interests, but it is clear companies are not.
Did he name any of the companies that were calling him? Why not? Could it be that maybe he's using this story to support his arguments for why republicans should be targeting companies they disagree with? Color me skeptical here.
He does not; from there he pivots to the "censorship crisis" (his words) of 2020, going on about you would be deplatformed for questioning mask efficacy, vaccine safety, voting laws, or Hunter Biden's laptop. This all culminates in him saying "Like any consumer in 2020, you couldn't watch TV, you couldn't go online, you couldn't shop in a store without having nakedly political messages, almost exclusively the platform of one party being thrown in your face," and as a consequence he now understands the critique of the narrow consumer welfare standard with regards to antitrust.
Now, I think the argument I just typed in the preceding paragraph is laughably wrong, but I think Ferguson believes it, and I see no reason to think he's lying about the calls from Fortune 100 companies, either. (Although I couldn't say how many people called him.) And to bring it back to the original point, I doubt that was the first time a general counsel reached out to Mitch McConnel over political actions they would like taken.
I can think of a whole host of reasons why he would outright lie (and even more easily imagine him grossly exaggerating) those calls. Everything you're quoting him as saying is laughable nonsense that is exactly the kind of thing a partisan flamethrower makes up to get headlines and attention.
He said the general counsels were making those calls? That sounds like utter bullshit to me. The GC of the company is not the entity that would be lobbying congress in that fashion. I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's full of it. Maybe SOMEONE did call him and say what he's saying they did, but it almost certainly wasn't a GC at a fortune 100 company and "business groups", and it definitely wasn't a bunch of them.
They'll burn shareholder money with ease. As parent comment alluded, DEI was just lighting corporate money and credibility on fire so that if they were ever called racist, they could point to other people's money that they had put on the altar as burnt offerings. Just saying "lol get bent" would've been much cheaper but involved having a spine.
When the bullets are firing, the way to not get shot is to keep your head down. During the DEI time, that meant putting out diversity statements. During this backlash, that means taking DEI off the website.
Thank you for the gift link so I could read the whole thing.
It seems clear that the whole endeavor at Morgan was spending money to destroy things given how they've just created more internal strife and opened themselves to lawsuits. Both the black and white employees are complaining and my instinct is that both groups are right. (Baiting in minority candidates with race-specific jobs and then taking the jobs away and demoting them is like the perfect bingo-card of making all possible mistakes.)
Taking a bunch of illegal actions is not stewardship of the corporation.
Yes. But CEOs/CFOs are happy to talk about how putting a Republican in charge will be good because it will result in low taxes on corporate profits, a favorable M & A climate, and favorable tax treatment of investment.
But where were CEOs to explain that Trump's proposed agenda would break supply chains, cause higher prices and eat away at profit margins? Not to mention Trump was talking about threatening Fed independence, if a Democrat did this Wall Street would crush them.
Is corporate America invested in shareholder profits or invested in Republican party governance?
The long term interest of the owners qua owners. They could have a similar back pocket to Democrats: freer trade, lower deficits, immigration reform. My sense is that is what business associations, CoC AMA, etc. did back in the day.
Yes, and now such behavior is increasingly illegal, or at least requires disclosure. And voters, investors, consumers, and other stakeholders are increasingly informed in biased ways. Ie, Fox News, MSNBC, Warren-in-a-Bernie-skin coat, Rogan, and others will elevate the most scandalous corporate actions from eaches perspective.
The actions of Mr. Elon Musk seems to belie this formulation. At this point, the only base case to the idea that Elon Musk is trying to maximize shareholder value is that by tying himself to Trump, he'll be able to basically engage in massively corrupt practices.
And yet, even the possibility of massive corruption is not enough of headwind against the massive damage he's done to the brand name of all of his businesses. Tesla sales in Europe are absolutely tanking. He's done is very best to completely alienate his prime buying demographic in America (upper middle class Democrats).
It's extremely hard to look at his actions the last 24-36 months as being about maximizing shareholder value.
I think he has violated his fiduciary duties over and over and over again, even long before his actions with the Trump campaign.
I think the SEC should have brought an action to bar him from being an officer or director of a public company back in 2018 when he had his infamous "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." tweet.
Sadly, the time has passed. Reportedly, Acting Chair Uyeda grilled staff about the last suit against Musk potentially being political retribution. This despite the fact that Musk blatantly disregarded his obligation to disclose his >5% interest in Twitter before launching his takeover, saving him hundreds of millions as he bought shares in the open market. Notably, that suit was authorized before the effective dates of the departure of Gary Gensler and Commissioner Lizarraga. It seems likely that the suit wouldn't have been filed by this SEC.
In short, Musk for now has the protection he bought in his alignment with Trump.
This is exactly why the DEI programs of yesteryear were so foolish. That Mastercard colored its circles rainbow, or if Raytheon's laser engineer was a quarter Native-American did not matter. The capitalist class is only interested in making money. It is, quite literally, its responsibility and duty.
It's also why liberals should not count on the business class to be any sort of resistance or buffer. They do not care about rule of law or separation of powers and more than they care about land acknowledgement or trans representation. It's just a means to making their property secure.
Which is fine. But I would prefer it we treated them a little bit more like the burghers they are: crass, self-interested, tools for bringing in money to the state.
Woah, woah, woah. You have taken my comment and run much further than warranted. I can assure you the capitalist class¹ cares about the rule of law and the separation of powers, precisely BECAUSE those things are a necessary condition for them to increase the value of their firms.
¹ Referring to the "capitalist class" makes you sound like a marxist. If that is what you are going for, then fine. Otherwise, a better term might just be "business people".
I'm agreeing! The rule of law and separation of powers are means to the maintenance and increase of value of private property, which is literally their raison d'être. But history has shown that capitalists would be fine with maintenance of private property by executive fiat, or corporatism, or any other organization of the state.
This explains the asymmetry with which they react when a democracy elects a leftist administration vs a rightist one, as we see today. Laws and elections and processes that are hostile to private property and structural obstructions to the growth of profits cannot be tolerated by that group.
This is all pretty banal. I don't think even the business people should dispute what I'm saying. All I'm saying is, we should have a clear-eyed view of what this group does for society (take risks, grow the economy, provide wealth for extraction), and understand its interests.
I can see why a CEO acts this way, the board demands shareholder value. I don’t see why people like Bezos and Musk, who own a controlling interest, would succumb to short term thinking. Their incentive is very clearly to maximize their prestige. Perhaps Musk would take a 99% net worth hit to land a human on Mars. Playing politics has already cost him around half a trillion in paper wealth.
Boards are also made of people. Shareholder value is certainly the north star but it's a mistake to think they're all cold, calculating Gordon Gekkos. They have other ideas and motivations, strengths and weaknesses, and are fully capable of mistakes, getting caught up in the zeitgeist, or just doing a bad job. Look at all of the impressive people who were in the board of directors of Theranos.
I often get the feeling that board positions are mainly just a box checking exercise or, even worse, cover for the company management. The idea that they independently represent shareholder interests seems fanciful in general. Why is Musk still running Tesla for example?
Certainly, if I was a Tesla shareholder I'd be thinking it might be time for new management. The current managemant has plainly lost interest and focus on running the company for the benefit of its owners. (Musk only owns about 13%)
It would be a hard question. So much of Tesla's value is an embedded option of "What might Elon do next?". His leadership has totally revolutionized electric vehicles and space rockets already.
Tossing that option aside would be a very, very risky thing to do. But keeping Elon as CEO is also a very, very risky thing to do. I don't envy those directors.
This is an important point I think. Tesla stock has fallen quite a bit, but it's still wildly overvalued by any normal standard. That huge premium is plausibly due to Elon. Ditching him might make investors treat Tesla like a normal car company.
Why the hell would you hold a Tesla position given the firms long history of chaos under Musk?
Must already want that, or at least be open to tolerating it to be a shareholder or other long position. And short sellers have been victims of the "market can remain irrational longer than ... can remain solvent"
Musk's personal drama has always gone with the territory, yes, but I don't think he's ever before done something to so poison the brand among the very demographic that's most likely to buy an EV.
They are trapped here. Tesla shareholders are cultists as well. The share price would tank much further and faster than we have seen if he left the company.
My understanding is Musk do this for his attention seeking behavior (and while he's brilliant in optimizing operations and processes, when it comes to decision making that entails human relationship and emotions, he's horrible - like he blew away multi billion business in Latin America with Starlink by retweeting a tweet to imply Carlos Slim has tie with crime orginization).
Bezos, he's very secretive so idk but my guess is mix of fear of Trump and competition with Musk (he has Blue Origin, so I imagine he has to curry favor from Trump now) as well as his genuine sense of betrayal from Democrats during Biden administration. (this is all speculation so I could be well wrong)
That said, I also feel like Silicon Valley overall operates in herd mentality too (this is a bit ironic as a champion for innovation), so I imagine that was a factor too
Short-termism has always been a problem in business, e.g. the fixation on hitting the numbers for the quarter at the expense of longer-term value creation. So I’m not surprised it’s showing up in this area as well.
Everybody likes tax cuts, but Democrats have not done enough to sell the resulting deficits (like tariffs, like immigration restrictions) as bad for business, for growth in the longer run. It's a CEO's business to think about the longer run.
I said the first day Biden took office that businessmen weren’t going to take kindly to a Democratic president and that they would sabotage it by raising the prices of everything, and my suspicions were proven completely correct.
Though I suspect there are important asymmetries in this. Decades of practice relying on Republicans to cut taxes makes them tolerate a lot of bad behavior from Republicans. They don’t have practice at getting rewarded by Democrats.
Yeah, and for them, the Biden admin experience also reinforced their antics - in a sense, I sympathize w the business community where they seem to think had to pick the poison from two really toxic ones (I think this is the topic of past post and is misguided).
And currently, I feel like the rhetoric of both parties are very anti business ironically.
I think there’s an opportunity as well as challenge here wrt to messaging towards business community. Like “we guarantee the environment to be more predictable and stable. And we’re open to some deregulation (but not cutting the tax further)”is objectively better than having to choose between Lina Khan and Trump but this is not type of messaging that goes traction online and idk how many businesses ppl are persuaded that this is an option
My personal sense is that the business community has simply gotten too good at financial optimization. It makes them worse partners for everyone who is not an owner. Whether you are an employee, customer, local government, etc., every transaction gets just a little worse in slightly imperceptible ways.
It's hard for that group of people to be meaningful political partners.
Agree, but I think there is less reason to fear them than perhaps previously thought, at least if you have public support. There are certainly levers being used that could be useful in a Dem administration, if one is willing.
I think what businesses have learned is the wrong lesson, is that they probably prefer a candidate and administration who makes it clear that they can pay to play or pay to win. Big businesses will always be more supportive of that than most other types of relationships.
I’ve always been buffed a little bit that a lot of CEO types don’t understand that this is a classic prisoner’s dilemma scenario - like if everyone can pay to win, you have to keep out bribing other players and this is not a guaranteed win.
But considering their short term thinking, now I understand a little bit how they fall for this trap
I am not sure it’s fair to describe a “just leave me alone and let me do my business stuff” as cowardice, but they definitely have a tendency to placate so they can be let alone.
A lot of this is also on business lobbies for assuming that tariffs wouldn't actually meaningfully happen and communicating this to their members and the public.
"This does not single-handedly solve all of Democrats’ political problems, because they also need to improve the public’s view of themselves. "
Indeed. The extreme wing of the GOP clearly has more power over the GOP than the extreme wing of the Democratic Party has over it. However, in the media environment created by the newer technologies, that doesn't matter as much.
The fringes have a powerful three-way coalition. The strident Right highlights the unattractive stuff of the extreme Left, the strident Left highlights the stuff of the extreme Right, and it is the nature (and in the best interests) of competing media outlets and voices to highlight both. Crazy talk is vastly more entertaining than boring discussion of what would actually work, after all.
This is a sharp contrast to the network television era when anything outside what we now call the Overton window had a heck of a time getting a word in edgewise.
The result of this is that a substantial middle of the country has a negative view of both sides. For the partisans, "They are awful" has the obvious consequence "So anyone with a brain ought to see we are better." But that is not true when the audience was already convinced that both sides were awful.
No, the saving grace for Democrats is simply that Republicans are in power, so in the next election, it will be the Republicans whose stink will be more recent.
That's pretty much the explanation for the elections of '20 and '24. For all the carryings on over specific issues and strategies and court cases, the populace narrowly decided that getting rid of the current stench was very slightly more important than the prospect of bringing back the previous stench.
Honestly, yeah, it feels like the media environment has made an electorate that doesn't actually respond well to policy and its effects at any kind of abstract level, instead opting for a sort of political identitarianism. This is probably going to result in just anti-incumbency every 4 years as everyone gets madder and madder regardless of what happens.
This wouldn't be so bad, but this kind of thing also affects the people who are put in charge. I mean, the WV State legislature is largely run off of the principle of A. what do car dealers/AEP/WVAW/Alpha Mining want? and B. What kuh-razy thing did i hear on facebook last week? The Trump Admin is run by people who get their information entirely through social media.
There's really no policies that would be bad enough to change anyone's minds here. WV is far too brain-drained for that. The American system of government, with an emphasis on geography over people certainly can't handle this.
And yeah I used to pooh-pooh the foreign policy consensus, but it's probably better to have one than not to, because it's effectively impossible to run foreign policy if 4-year election cycles change it pretty radically every time. That's basically handling a big W to Putin and Xi, who can actually run coherent policies (though they mess up a lot, so did the Consensus).
I’ve spent years trying to actively battle nihilism in others, but I’m starting to embrace it personally.
What could Republicans do that would cause them to actually lose in a ton of these states? I kind of think nothing.
Matt’s entire philosophy of popularism can help you win a presidential election occasionally, but doing it perfectly won’t take you anywhere close to 60 senators in the foreseeable future.
That's a great point. At this point for MAGA Republicans, I don't think there is any line that would stop them from supporting Trump, and a lot of people in America still don't know how Bills get passed. We honestly need fair congressional apportionment, and the 2 party system is standing in the way of that.
Great observations, people are really good sometimes at feeling vibes and recognizing a problem. But the actual problem solving part, and understanding that complex systems sometimes don't always have a simple solution really trips people up. Another part of the problem is that you can't always solve a complex problem quickly in a way that will appease everyone, thus there is no incentive by politicians to always try and fix problems if they know the solution will cause the American people any pain or inconvenience at all.
At least on the Dem side and at least in the short term, there is an opportunity for a moderate to run in an explicitly moderate, anti-leftist, "Sister Souljah"-bait kind of way. That could still trigger media attention since it would feel like "man bites dog." And that media attention would be helpful to that candidate even in the primaries since moderates outnumber leftists even in the primary electorate (not true on the GOP side btw), and since the mood among Dem voters is increasingly focused on opposing the right rather than on internal policy disagreements. And it would be doubly helpful in the general election to be known as the candidate who won the nomination by defeating the leftists. Now of course, if/when someone like that actually were to get elected, the media environment would immediately switch back - but that is a worry for another day.
The two reasons I could see that optimistic outcome *not* happen is: (1) There could be multiple moderate candidates who are all equally strong and can't agree on how to consolidate. (2) Some on the left are self-aware enough to know that their views don't command majority support in the primary electorate, and certainly not the general electorate, so instead of trying to win an ideological showdown, they may use dirty tricks and smears to destroy the moderate opponent on non-ideological grounds. We saw an attempt at that in 2020 with Tara Reade, where some leftists deliberately partnered with the far right on a dirty tricks campaign against Biden. It didn't work, but practice makes perfect.
Why is why elections are increasingly being pursued as games with only one turn. I really hope that there’s one more free and fair election and I significantly doubt it. But if there is and Dems win, they have to play for keeps by doubling down on the dictatorship stuff. We can’t have elections again until we’ve suppressed conservative media and voices for a couple of generations and Dems can manufacture stable consent again.
I mostly agree with this but would say it’s more moderate folks in general. There’s an awful lot of center-right people who have really no platform at the moment. I’ve voted D in the last three presidential elections but don’t consider myself a Democrat.
The Dems are a center right party! When it comes to anything substantial the left rarely gets its way (which is why there’s so much language policing and wokeness, bc it gave the left a completely immaterial win)
Yeah, by global standards they are, but I can’t get behind any of the grievance politics from The Groups. Even when they don’t get their way, it’s terrible optics.
I think the biggest question going forward is how do we run a country if there is not consensus on the basic structure, function, and aims of the government. We had that consensus between FDR and Biden (allying with Western democracies, promoting our values around the world, managing an advanced economy, etc). And now we don't. It's not clear that there are some laws you can pass to prevent something like Trump and Musk from causing enormous damage in the future, no matter what institutions we set up.
Yes, in the long run you can't have a liberal democracy when 50% of the engaged portion of the electorate (or even 30% really) doesn't believe in liberal democracy. It's doomed to fail.
Which is tough because liberal democracy has really been our core identity as a country. Other countries can always fall back on blood and soil, which is very bad but at least it's an ethos. I don't know where we end up.
"Yes, in the long run you can't have a liberal democracy when 50% of the engaged portion of the electorate (or even 30% really) doesn't believe in liberal democracy."
Except that's not what we have.
What we have is both sides believe in liberal democracy but think the other side is the biggest threat to it.
For voters that said they were voting to protect democracy, more of them voted for Trump than Harris.
IE they see Democrats as a bigger threat to democracy then Republicans.
Whether you agree with them or not is besides the point. They believe they were protecting democracy by voting for Trump
No, sorry. I know it's uncomfortable for you to have to think of it this way. But what matters is who actually supports liberal democracy in point of fact, and who actually opposes it in point of fact (which in turn requires a definition of what liberal democracy entails).
If someone is angry about Stacy Abrams’ allegations of stolen elections, wouldn’t it stand to reason they’d be much more alarmed by Trump’s, which were worse and more thorough in every way, and also are supported as true by the entire Republican establishment?
No offence, but your list of reasons people think democrats are a threat to democracy amount to: 1) things Democrats didn't actually do DESPITE HAVING THE POWER TO DO IT IF THEY WERE SO INCLINED; and 2) things you just don't like.
We have a real problem with people declaring "everything I don't like is a threat to democracy." Democrats do it too. But the whining from conservatives about this has gotten absolutely deafening, which seems to be the actual point as they actually do far worse things in open and brazen attempts to destroy rule of law entirely and seem to just want people to shrug.
Democrats’ efforts to pack the court?!? wtf. Republicans have *actually* packed the courts! Judges have been a consistent right-wing priority. There’s no equivalent of the Federalist Society for the left, and there should be.
Our policy was never to align with Western democracies and people need to stop lying about this. From FDR to Biden we have always had dictators as allies and NATO has historically had plenty of dictatorships in it. Even now Erdogan's Turkey and Orban's Hungary are NATO members.
People love to BS and talk up democracy, but that is just moral preening. Talk to dissidents in Saudi Arabia about the US' love for "democracy". Just accept we ally with lots of evil for strategic reasons and that this is the way of the world..
What you said—that we allied with a lot of bad countries—is not inconsistent with what Sam said, that our policy was to ally (he never said exclusively) with Western democracies. Please don’t baselessly accuse people of lying.
Chile is actually a good point! But once again it can't just be a point in a discussion, it has to be about how everyone you're disagreeing with is in bad faith. You're not like this on every topic but on some you really, really are, and this is one of them.
I don't think everyone disagreeing with me is in bad faith.
I think it's closer to a form of wishful thinking (I compare it to believing in the afterlife below; it's something like that). People can't stand the notion that America isn't this amazing moral exemplar. It's what they want to believe about the country. So when you talk about the reality of how our foreign policy works and what we really do, they can't accept that. They want us to be the paragons of democracy and virtue and all that is good in the world.
That's not "bad faith". That's not a bunch of people saying they believe one thing while believing another. It's a bunch of people wishing something was true that wasn't true, and therefore falsely ascribing that view to US foreign policy (and NATO) when it is a totally inaccurate description.
It’s a straw man to say that anyone here has described America as an “amazing moral exemplar” or “paragons of virtue,” or rejected the “reality of how our foreign policy works.” It seems more accurate to say you seem to see next to zero correlation between American foreign policy and promotion of democracy, whereas some of us see a stronger (but definitely not 1) correlation. That’s a fine thing to disagree about; there’s no need to be dismissive.
It seems a lot of people who are dedicated to ‘slow boring’ in terms of domestic politics (our imperfect world is the best we can hope for) push for highly idealistic foreign policy (freedom must reign!).
Not meant to be a criticism - I’m probably guilty of the reverse.
I think that's right but more broadly I don't even think they truly push for an idealistic foreign policy. It's closer to belief in the afterlife-- they really truly want it to be true, so it must be true. Even though it isn't.
Here's the Democratic ad campaign I've been waiting and waiting for:
A series of ads featuring government employees talking earnestly about what they do and why they were drawn to public service.
It seems so obvious that if you believe in government, you don't do silly things like try to shut the government down. You don't cower in the face of right-wing talking points about "waste, fraud, and abuse." You acknowledge the problems but also make a full-throated defense of the good things that good government can achieve.
Trump's actions will probably have a thousand times the effect of making people like the good things government does than any ad campaign from the Democrats.
Not that running such ads in 2026 and 2028 would be a bad thing to do. When people are spring-loaded to believe something (Trump destroyed vital government functions) then it's good to give them a bit of a push.
I would like to think that this approach would be viable, but many decades of attacks on government employees, and government services have undermined the confidence of far too many Americans in the validity of much of what government does. It is regrettable that the only way people will acknowledge the benefit of many government programs and employees is the hardship that loss of those programs will inflict. Even then, the burdens will fall mostly on those without much political power.
"Democrats were usually the people creating or at least protecting those that create the problems."
The party trying to use government to DO things is obviously going to make errors and cause problems. The party intentionally sabotaging government will also cause problems!
"You can either have effective government, or give public unions whatever they want. You can't do both."
I reject the binary. It is possible to engage and negotiate with public sector unions in a fruitful way.
Sure if there's an actual adversarial process. But not when you are in their pocket.
Public unions help elect Democrats that turn around and then give those public unions what they want.
If you are actually interested in this topic I suggest reading "Not Accountable" which details all the many many ways public unions use contracts to make government not work.
Thanks for the recommendation. I am interested, but won't lie that it might take a while to get that one to the top of the stack!
My uneducated take is that while I'm sure that kind of thing happens, I don't think public sector unions have no place or are responsible for the majority of the dysfunction in government.
There is certainly opportunity to clear some of the excesses in the last few decades of liberal governance, including removing excessive regulations that have held back the ability to build and govern effectively.
If Dems are going to "make a vigorous case for government," then Dems need to do so by showing that government actually works. When it takes a bajillion dollars to build one mile of subway, when you're floating bond issues just to (not even fully) fund the sweetheart pension deal the teachers' union won from the city government, when you have to budget twice as much travel time because maybe there will be 35 minutes between buses heading where you want to go, that's a vigorous case that government is incapable of working. We need to destroy the power of environmental groups, historical preservationists, etc (AND THEIR LAWYERS) to bog progress down in the muck of proceduralism, and (as a Brit would say) JUST GET ON WITH IT. When Dems tell all these various interests, "Fuck all the way off, do not pass GO, do not collect $200, we are going to build the thing or just do what needs doing no matter what," THAT will be a self-evident case for government.
This is an understated concern imo. How exactly do we govern and figure out how our government should look like when people can't even agree on the same reality.
We have so many people that despite having access to the internet are still so confidently incorrect about many things. On top of that, we have a social media algorithm that has monetized misinformation and outrage based on vibes, so objective truth, reality and consensus building is just so hard to find right now.
Additionally, what this administration is doing is priming people to believe and support the notion that even though they are breaking the law, it is okay because they are doing it for the right reasons and hurting the right people, so it is okay. Kind of like the vigilante vs anti-vigilante type of argument types of arguments we see in fiction. However, this is real life...
"It's not clear that there are some laws you can pass to prevent something like Trump and Musk from causing enormous damage in the future, no matter what institutions we set up."
Of course you could, but it requires being in power, which means it requires that the party in power willingly give up power. Which is unlikely to happen soon, but it's absolutely something that *should*.
I think that the Democrats have a good chance of being in power again, and that will provide an opportunity to do some good things. But I don't know how to recreate the western alliance system, or the CDC disease surveillance infrastructure, or the NAEP, if it might get torn down every time Republicans win.
The answer is to do (a smart version of) the thing to the Republicans that they are currently trying to do to the Dems. Elon is wandering around, crazed, ripping the wires out of the walls looking for the switch that turns off the Woke Mind Virus, and smashing institutions in the process.
The Dems, if they get the chance, should do a well thought out and effective version of that. Identify core Republican institutions, pillars of their coalition, and act to break them. Car dealers, scammy supplement companies, the works.
And most importantly, the outrage-based media: this has to die if democracy is going to live. Change the law to kill this business model.
I think it’s just the opposite: Coalitions would shift and the Republicans would shortly be competitive again. But the *kinds* of Republicans who’d be competitive would be different. Knocking out the pillars of MAGA doesn’t mean one-party Dem rule, it means people more like Nikki Haley running for office as Republicans.
I’m pushing a structural thesis, really, that MAGA is what it is because of institutions. Change the institutions, change the party they lead to.
Yes. Dems have to win and then cancel future elections until the cancer that is the Republican Party is properly excised. I’ll never forgive Biden for holding the 2024 election and I fear we’ll be paying the price throughout our lifetimes.
“It's not clear that there are some laws you can pass to prevent something like Trump and Musk from causing enormous damage in the future…”
Treaties could be rewritten, if necessary, and Congress could pass enabling laws. Treating things like the JCPOA as if they were real commitments was always a bad idea.
Random observations from the world of retail investor advising:
1. A few people, both clients and coworkers, who have never expressed a political thoughts before, are expressing displeasure at the tariffs and (correctly I think) blaming them for the bear market.
2. We had a couple calls with some large financial institutions last December who made projections and they apparently didn't buy at all that Trump was going to do anything like this. They forecasted 2% growth, 2% inflation, very low chance of recession. I should trust my gut more, because "very low chance of recession" seemed too low to me.
3. Before the election, we previewed a few policy proposals from both candidates. The Harris proposal that prompted the strongest reaction was the potential taxing of unrealized gains (I still can't figure out if she meant at death or not).
4. I'm under no delusions that my industry represents a wide swathe of voters, BUT, I do think there are a certain number of country club types left who would buy a pitch of "look, we're not going to prioritize tax cuts über alles for you guys, but we're not going to do any crazy shit that tanks the market either."
"We had a couple calls with some large financial institutions last December who made projections and they apparently didn't buy at all that Trump was going to do anything like this"
So, so, so tired of the "Take him seriously, not literally" bullshit, and all of the people who were just convinced that the person with a 78 year history of not being a particularly strategic thinker, and of lying constantly, was somehow playing 5-D chess where he'll end up acting exactly the way you want him to.
It was obvious to anyone that this tarriff nonsense was a possible, if not likely, outcome. It's ok to be surprised in the sense of "Well, Trump lies all the time, so we had no idea what was coming", but if you are surprised in the sense of "We were sure that this one thing was off the table!" then you're just a moron.
The problem with this line of thinking is that we had four years of Trump already, he said all the same stuff on the campaign trail, and the result was tariffs on China that Biden continued and the equivalent of making the "T" in "NAFTA" stand for "Trump." It's not idiotic to think that's what you'd get again.
I'd argue it was though. It was quite clear this time that all the actors who were constraining Trump the first time didn't emerge with him on the other side of Jan. 6. The conventional wisdom was that Trump 2.0 would be far less constrained.
I think if you want to make the claim that it was reasonable that this time would be like the first, you have to explain how the Project 25 people replacing the normie Republicans wouldn't have exactly this effect.
Which people who constrained him the first time did you believe would constrain him this time? What members of the Republican party have shown a willingness to constrain Trump AND are also still occupying position of power.
I'm growing sick of the "but it was reasonable to think that Trump 2.0 would be like 1.0, because no, it wasn't.
In my hospitality business, which is highly vulnerable to downturns, I'm pausing a major renovation midway through because I just have no clue what the economy will be like in six months or a year.
Foreign tourism is already dropping. I hope the stain spreading now does not set, causing long-term damage to the usually robust and enduring attraction of the US to foreign visitors.
Thanks for saying this - I’ve seen some Canadian commenters on Substack basically telling us that “Trump is you,” and blame even those of us who voted the other way, and some really nasty comments besides. 30% of eligible Americans voted for Trump; I have real issues with people that didn’t vote at all, even in states that weren’t in play. We could have at least had Trump not win the popular vote, but that may or may not have made a difference in the behavior of the Trump administration.
At any rate, unlike in parliamentary systems, we are stuck with this until the next election. Many of us hate this but can’t do anything about it. But I am a little concerned about how we might be received when traveling abroad.
You're welcome. I've lived next to the United States all my life, I've seen a lot of it, I've lived and worked there, I've admired its power and accomplishments when it's at its best, and its cultural products and politics are ever-present up here. You can't spend more than five minutes looking at the US without realizing how divided it is, and the sort of American who is visiting us is probably an alright person, and even if not, they're still our guests.
(That said, Canadians who work in service industries often have their own view of "the Ugly American", the sort of visitor who is surprised that things aren't priced in US dollars).
I have had 0 foreign visitors so far this year. It's our slow season, but still...That said, making predictions in this business is tough and that can be exacerbated by disparate regional impacts. The pandemic, after the first few months of shutdowns and chaos, was a significant net positive for my business due to factors that I would not have been able to predict. So who knows. Maybe Europeans will still come but avoid red states, which might funnel more business my way. Maybe there will be more domestic tourism as AI displaces people with 401ks and they take early retirement. I just have to be ready to adapt as needed, and I'm trying to bank more savings in lieu of making further investments.
Also, to point 4, I would think the top 1% or even top 5% would happily make that trade. If all your money is in equities, then any market downswing is 100% losses, while any tax increase is simply a reduction in profits.
It would be better for more Americans to have their net worth tied up in diversified equities than in their house, so this would be a healthier coalition.
Also depends how you're measuring 1% or 5%, wealth or income.
The thing about housing is it’s the only investment you can make while borrowing 80% or more of the initial price. So you will have a lever effect that ends up making a doubling in the value of your home a tenfold return on investment of your own capital. I’ve experienced this myself.
I still don’t know why Congress thought ceding so much power to the president was a good idea. It’s not like tariff policy has ever been or will ever be an overnight crisis.
Back in the 60s and 70s, Congress didn't have a crystal ball telling them someone like Donald Trump would one day be president. If you really want to excoriate Congress, blame the one that was in power starting in January, 2021. They knew what Trump was like AND they knew he might well be back in power. They did nothing.
Well, they did have Richard Nixon. Although in fairness, post-Watergate did see Congress wrestling some of its power back, with the War Powers Act, the Impoundment Act, and other measures. Unfortunately, partisan polarization has overtaken things, and we've got an imperial President exploiting the "Who is gonna stop me?" loophole in the Constitution.
Civics education sucks and people consider the President as a King that does whatever he wants. That power comes from winning an election and not from the Constitution. Whether Iraq or Obamacare people wanted their guy to have a free reign and not be bogged down in stupid stuff and blow off questions of Constitutionality with "Are you serious?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08uk99L8oqQ
The small-L libertarians (the ones wearing clothes and making unlicensed toast) warned for years "imagine the worst person having this power" and got laughed out of the room. Cold comfort for them to be proven right given everything going to crap. And even if we come back from this, what are the odds anything will be learned? "Ah, we touched the stove, but we're okay now, I guess that didn't matter."
I don't think we can blame people's ignorance on civics educators. My civics teachers tried their hardest to teach us. But if the only time anyone's exposed to this knowledge is during high school, it's no wonder only a minority of us retains anything.
Whatever one might think of the constitutionality of Obamacare, it was passed by Congress, largely upheld by a conservative Supreme Court and withstood 20+ efforts at repeal. It is entirely different than executive actions that evade Congress as Trump is now doing. The constitutionality of Trump’s actions have yet to be finally decided.
I said elsewhere that Trump is doing a speed-run. It's like the imperialness of the past 10 presidents, all crammed into a few weeks, and in actions instead of words. I remember the debate about law firms defending Gitmo terrorists, and we've already surpassed the total shittiness of that in a day.
Right, but by "like Donald Trump" I meant "opposed to international trade and actively hostile toward allies." IOW, Congress failed to anticipate that the legislation giving US presidents authority to hike tariffs would be abused in the manner Trump has done, because Trump's particular ideological makeup wasn't foreseen. Nixon had authoritarian tendencies, but he wasn't a lunatic on trade, and he didn't dislike having alliances.
It's possible that Donald Trump wouldn't have given a fig for any legislation the Democratic Congress passed in 2021-2022. Biden certainly would have, though.
Interesting attempt to pin some of the blame for Trump's current actions on the Democrats, though.
Congress lets this happen because they want the presidency to have more power. It deflects blame from them personally with their constituents, and they also want a president of their party to have that power.
Longtermism and bond market to the rescue! Except not really, because discount rates are terrible and the median voter doesn't think much about the shade of trees planted for their grandkids. Which does make me grimly satisfied, in a FAFO way, that Harris lost because eggs are too expensive -> eggs are even more expensive now -> ??? midterms profit, maybe.
But it also sucks to feel the impact of these crazy trade swings in real time. This isn't the worst supply shockI've ever had to work through - during the nadir of covid, my company actually prevented us department heads from choosing what to order each day, instead trying to centrally plan around an equitable allotment of remaining inventory to each store. Eventually even that broke down, and it was just "ship literally everything that isn't nailed down, don't bother with signage or merchandising, shelves are gonna get cleaned out regardless". Even once control was devolved to the stores again, for a good long while I had something like 100 items out of stock on a rotating basis (so between a quarter and a third of products unavailable on any given day).
The current chaos isn't quite at that level, but...it's ticking up there. Items suddenly being discontinued out of the blue. Shipping estimates being changed on a dime. Planned product launches being cancelled. "Seasonal" items getting promoted to evergreen to cover holes in the lineup. Max order quantity limits on bestsellers (we try very hard not to ration things at the customer level, but more of that might be coming too). Renegotiating contracts on the fly, losing long-time suppliers we and our customers counted on for consistent quality + low price. Constant scrambling to adjust merchandising and inventory levels when items unexpectedly appear/disappear. You might not be able to tell, as a shopper on the other side of the counter...but believe me, we're worried in Groceryland. Trade instability is in many ways even worse than actually-bad-but-consistent trade hostility. At least there, the game state is known, so one can plan around it.
*You've never seen a reefer driver angry until they've delivered an entire 10-pallet load of just frozen items (like 500+ cases/12000+ units), which loaded down the truck so much it visibly rode lower, and that was just to stock my one department. All sold out the next day. I'll never forget it...
With that criteria you are only left with Gore, Kerry and Clinton. It looks like you are communicating something other than your subjective assertions.
There have only been 7 elections in the last 30 years and 3 of those were incredible candidates for Democrats. (Obama & Clinton). I don't think it's at all obvious that Harris was a worse candidate than Biden or Gore either.
Hillary was definitely worse! In 2016, the economy was fine and Trump was extremely unpopular. She still lost! The headwinds for Dems in 2024 were far worse.
Also, obviously Biden 2024 was worse than Harris, and I'd even argue that Biden 2020 just lucked out because of the pandemic.
I'd say Harris was a somewhat better candidate than Gore, about on par with Kerry, and clearly inferior to Obama.
Aren't the appropriate points of comparison for Harris actually Humphrey in 1968 and Ford in 1976? Unpopular legacy administrations, party dissension, uphill extrinsic circumstances in the country, and they all still did pretty well in the circumstances and kept it close (remember, if Harris got 236,000 more votes in the right swing states, she would have won the electoral college 270-268 while losing the popular vote by 2 million - and think what fun American politics would have been had that happened!).
I think it’s not even that Hillary was a bad candidate - she did all the candidate things well. She just had a history with voters that was unfortunate.
It's all subjective, of course, but I thought she had negative charisma; whereas Harris seemed kinda fun and cool to hang with. Then again, I never liked Hilary, starting way back with her punching down on Monica Lewinsky, so I'm sure that colors my perspective.
Trump won in 2016 in what looked like a bit of a fluke; weird reality TV host, lost the popular vote, had the Comey letter come out at the perfect time. There was a an impulse to treat him as total aberration meaning for establishment Dems they could go back to the status quo ante and to the progressives post even more clap emojis 👏.
But, the Republican Party is clearly remade, the old establishment is gone and the Party of Reagan is dead. The Dems desperately need new leadership that not only recalculates their own positions into a more popular direction but that formulates policy for the reality of an isolationist Trumpist Republican party.
I would anticipate they end up somewhere between Rubio and Vance and aesthetically trend back towards people who more or less look the part. Trump is the only weird candidate to actually turn his persona and brand into a big success politically and MAGA tends to under perform in the clutch (Dr. Oz, Hershel Walker, etc.).
There are of course always some odd ducks in the House caucuses and the GOP seems to have an unusually high number of cranks and oddballs but I suspect they're close to the ceiling of what's possible. Or maybe that's just copium.
I think the next Republican nominee is very likely to be just JD Vance. And one would have to speculate a 40% chance of winning. At that point we're 16 to 20 years between non-Trumpist nominees.
No. I have a lot of Trump-voting friends and relatives. It's almost impossible to overrate how important "Trump is entertaining" has been to them. Vance, Rubio, Haley, and other possible 2028 candidates simply don't have the juice.
I think there's a decent chance that Trump has popularity levels similar to Bush Jr did in 2008 at which point the party will be running away from him as quickly as possible.
The big question is how deep MAGAs roots are, a lot of prominent Republicans are now MAGA in the spirit of Trump rather than just getting in line and when Trump dies of obesity will they quickly get purged or will they manage to oust the remaining regular Republicans.
I think both of you are right—the party has been remade AND there’s no real substitute for Trump (so far). Which is why I’ve continued to scratch my head at what comes next for the GOP.
Very different for sure - but no reason to particularly think they will be very different in the *same* way past people were - there is room for any number of directions.
Out of curiosity, what does new leadership for the Dems look like to you? Not a person (necessarily), but what archetype is needed a la the GOP needed a shameless "strong man" and carnival barker to rustle up the low-info voters and fragile masculinity?
All indications so far are that Trumpian malevolence and incompetence will be such a big turnoff for the voters than by 2028 they'll be desperate for the opposite. Some calm, competent Democratic officeholder like a Josh Shapiro.
If Trump turns out to be successful, then the Democrats will probably need an outsider/businessman*/celebrity/cis/straight type like a Mark Cuban or Matthew McConaughey.
* Sorry businesswomen: it's going to be a long time before the Dems roll the dice on a woman candidate again, unfortunately.
Same goes for someone like Mayor Pete. He thrills the hearts of Warren-type PMC/college educated voters, but it's just not where the median voter is these days.
Bring on The Fonz! Dems seem to do best with some version of "too cool for school" candidates. We need some stylish person who is highly articulate, an attention magnet, and able to riff in a compelling way.
Trump term 1.0 was characterized by a significant lack of any strongly held political beliefs, so he just did regular republican thing. He has since picked up some actual beliefs (trade deficit bad, low-level manufacturing good) that he is sincerely trying to implement. Unfortunately those beliefs are sort of insane, so the stocks are freaking out!
He is governing as one might expect of a lame duck, who doesn't need to worry about reelection and knows this is his last shot to push through some policies he really cares about and has for a long time.
Trade deficit and tariffs are things he has been yammering about since the 1980s - he has always believed this stuff, but just didn’t know how to act on it in 2017.
As a Poland resident, Poland getting nukes is a majorly positive step. I hope we do it in tandem with the rest of the countries directly threatened by Russia.
The main thing we see from the Ukraine situation is nothing else will actually deter Putin from attacking us as he views Russia from a 19th century perspective where it basically extended from Warsaw eastwards to the pacific.
Once NATO is letting all of its member violate the NPT (which will happen once Poland does it) NPT will be permanently dead and a lot of countries you really do not want to have nuclear programs will get nuclear weapons. NPT isn't particularly fair but its a really nice baseline for the competing Great Powers to say "OK we won't let our vassals have civilisation ending weapons if you don't". Its not just a bad countries will get them its that unstable countries will get them, the advantage of such extreme controls on nuclear weaponry is it makes it very difficult for terror groups to get them, depending on how the ongoing insurgency situation in Pakistan goes we may learn the hard way what happens when we let every country have nuclear weapons.
I can't agree with this more. American foreign policy successes rarely seem to be acknowledged, inside or outside the US. Avoiding nuclear proliferation has been a huge one.
Or at least, when we decide to let Russia benefit from having invaded Ukraine. A strong push to boot Russia out of Ukraine and make clear that the world will come together to prevent aggression against non-nuclear nations could prevent this, but it seems very, very unlikely at this point.
Frankly, I disagree. No border country is looking at the Ukraine war and trying to game out what their regional strongman is learning from Russia’s experience in Ukraine. Even assuming a level of US control over Russian outcomes that is frankly unrealistic, particularly with our current President.
I thought NPT died when Israel never signed it and decided to develop nuclear weapons and had zero repercussions? And then India refused to sign it and developed nuclear weapons and had zero repercussions?
Neither country is exactly an international pariah for ignoring the NPT and developing nuclear weapons.
North Korea signed it but then developed nuclear weapons with Soviet assistance anyway. Both countries already had tons of international opprobrium so hard to say if breaking the NPT had any actual marginal downside or not.
South Africa refused to sign and developed nuclear weapons but, again, hard to see if they suffered any marginal downside given the anti-apartheid movement at the time.
Lost you when you used the 19th century expression “great powers”. That thinking has never worked for countries like Poland and no reason to think it will in the future.
They did not suggest that it was a good deal for Poland. They suggested that a) it's a good deal for the world as a whole, and b) it may be a bad deal, but you will likely find out that "You get a Nuke! And You get a Nuke! And You get a Nuke!" for every country is going to be a much worse deal.
I suspect they used the 19th century expression on purpose, and not because they are out of touch and unaware of how the world has changed since then.
... and I was not really interested in "good deal for the world as a whole" here. The point is there really is no motivation for Poland or any other country that is threatened by Russia to not proliferate now.
So far, a couple of friendly good countries have had nukes:
* Britain
* France
* Pre-Trump USA
* India?
And the following less friendly countries, at least one of whom has repeatedly threatened to use them agains Poland EVEN when Poland was an unwilling "ally".
* Russia
* China
* Pakistan
* Israel
* Apartheid South Africa
* North Korea
* Trump's USA
* Soon to be Iran
Not sure this NPT is a net positive for world security in the way you think it is.
If you are asking which list above I would put them on, probably the first. But given history, Germany having nukes would double down on my argument that Poland needs them.
Given the Russian military's performance against Ukrainian forces, how worried are people in Poland about Russia's ability to defeat Poland's army? I mean, apart from their excellent ability to hit schools and hospitals with missiles and drones.
Worried. The Polish army is currently smaller and less prepared than the Ukrainian one. And it's clear that no-one is coming to the rescue.
The worst thing is Russia's method of winning. If they won because they were good at fighting (like the US) they would cause much less destruction. They win by destroying everything in sight until you decide that you'd rather live in relative peace under them than lose everything you own.
Yes, but that's a trick with a limited lifespan given Russia's demographics. Short of a total Ukrainian collapse in the very near future (which seems unlikely), the Russians are still going to need to grind off tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of casualties before reaching the Polish border.
*SIGH* You can wank off to the Russian willingness to take casualties all you want, but in the end, there is no longer an unlimited supply of manpower there even assuming Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Belarusian conscripts (all of whom one would expect to be even less enthusiastic than ethnic Russians and all of whom are in smaller supply). I will acknowledge that getting Belarus to join would give the Russians the luxury of being immediately adjacent to Poland, but the Belarusians aren't actively providing troops in Ukraine today, so I'm skeptical that they are going to be going on the offensive against Poland. (I'm also quite sure that I remember that the Belarussian army has already been stripped of a lot of its armor and motor vehicle transport equipment in the past three years because Belarus shipped it back to Russia. See, e.g.: https://kyivindependent.com/belarus-provides-over-60-tanks-dozens-of-vehicles-to-russia/ )
Lots of reasons: Kamala was uninspiring, people were pissed off about high prices/DEI/illegal immigration, etc. etc.
But one huge reason that, frankly, Matt Y hasn't been talking much about is: half of Americans don't care about things that used to be completely obvious and accepted by all Americans regardless of party affiliation. I'm talking things like: Nobody is above the law. The loser in an election concedes and relinquishes power gracefully. It's not ok to use the DOJ to threaten your political opponents or to dole out pardons to violent rioters because they're your supporters. We ought to respect our international alliances and agreements.
Matt's nine-point CSDM is all well and good, but it contains nothing about the above concerns.
You cannot, CAN NOT have a functioning, small-l liberal democracy where only one of the two major parties is in favor of bedrock principles like those I listed above. It's like having a sparring match where only one opponent agrees to refrain from eye-gouging or using a knife.
How the heck do we get back to where our society used to be, where most people at least paid lip service to the basic principles of democracy? No one is above the law, you can't overturn an election if you don't like the result, etc.?
Can we talk more about this in addition to "how badly must the economy be doing before enough swing voters say, gee, maybe voting for Trump wasn't a great idea"?
In this piece, Matt says "it’s clear that, unfortunately, this [Trump is unfit of being POTUS because of Jan 6] is not a compelling message or narrative for swing voters." This clearly turned out to be true, but I don't like the undertone of hopelessness, like public opinion is carved in stone and there's nothing one can do about it: "Welp, swing voters don't give a damn about small-d democratic norms, whaddya gonna do." One might as well have said in 1940, "Welp, white Americans are adamantly opposed to equal rights for Black Americans, so there's nothing to be done." No! The correct thing to do is to ask, "How can we change public opinion enough to enable meaningful progress on equal rights for Black Americans?"
The moral arc of the universe doesn't bend itself. People bend it.
How can be bend the arc of American society towards, "small-d democratic norms are good and necessary, actually"?
This is a problem not just in the USA but across the world. It may take decades for humans to adapt to the emergence of social media and we may be on the other side of another world war or a nuclear accident before people once again realize that small-d democracy is actually good.
I'm not sure people ever cared about it, tbh. Democracies work because there are enough competing power centers to force each other to stay in line. All structures fray over time.
I would give the US more credit. The current small-d democratic structure was put in place after WW-II right after everyone witnessed massive suffering and the US instead of acting like a Mafia boss allowed Europe to rebuild vibrant small-d democracies. There was genuine consensus post WW-II that small-d democracy is good and we have slowly lost that memory.
I don’t think that’s it. I mean, if you time-traveled to 1955 and asked a bunch of ordinary Americans in the street “is it ok to try to overturn an election,” I bet almost all of them would say “of course not, how is this even a question?”
I think they would say that now. But then they would backfill it by saying that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump, and Democrats stole the nomination from Bernie, and then installed Harris as a queen, and so Trump was actually doing the right thing and his opponents are the villains.
I mean the US could have had election denial at any time between the civil war and 2008 as massive shifts like Civil rights and the Great depression occurred in this period. Yet it took the rise of social media post 2008 to create the conditions where a large scale conspiracy can take hold.
The public has believed incredibly stupid things in the meantime. I agree that social media has made things much worse. But our democracy has already broken once, with the Civil War.
Voters are stupid and terrible. Full stop. Strong parties were our defense against demagogues, and Trump breached the Republican Party's firewall.
I'm old enough to remember the voting machine fraud conspiracies of 2004. I think the main differences are the singularity of Donald Trump and the crank realignment meant that the conspiracies were able to reach a larger audience with less responsible pushback.
I read an article by an African student in the US once; he said something to the effect of "you kick your democracy around like a soccer ball; you do not realize how fragile this all is."
The real threat comes from a situation where the second half of America starts abandoning rule of law. We're not there, I don't think we're close, but I can think of a few plausible chains of events that get us there.
We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us from things getting really bad.
“We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us”
Meh, color me skeptical. Sure, a 78-year-old Trump is much less dangerous than a 48-year-old Trump. But he is surrounded by lackeys like Vance who are much younger, as well as intelligent and evil. It’s quite likely that one of them continues what Trump started.
In any case, the problem of “swing voters don’t give a fruit fly’s fart about democratic norms” will remain even after Trump eats the Hamburger of Destiny.
True, but are they like “I hate Vance, I’d rather vote for a Democrat” or “well I don’t like Vance, but he is the handpicked successor of God’s Anointed Servant Trump, so I must support him against the evil DemocRATs”?
So all these guys are gonna fight it out. Vance doesn't have the guts to defenestrate deSantis so it's gonna be a bunch of arguing. Uday and Qusay may try to get in but they don't have dad's charisma.
A lot of people voted just for Trump and no one else. There are people he's activated that will go back home once there's not a Trump to vote for.
I have a lot of Trump-voting family members, and I agree with your last sentence. Without Trump in the race they just won't care very much and the chances they vote at all drop enormously.
I think the spell will likely break with Trump. Trump's endorsed candidates don't do that well electorally. And I don't think he cares enough about Vance to try to prop him up like that regardless.
One thing I worry about is Jr running with the explicit promise that Trump Sr will be pulling the strings, effectively giving him a third term.
>"How do we rebuild the civil service if federal employees don’t actually get job stability in exchange for limited financial upside?" With less job stability and higher pay.
Competing with the private sector is politically toxic and less job security in this case now means worse than the private sector. Its a recipe for an utterly dysfunctional CS.
I agree, but would it actually be politically feasible to lift public service wages sufficiently to compete for the best private sector talent? To get a young hot shot to turn down a gig at Jane Street to work at Treasury?
You don’t need all A Players for CS, paying enough to attract a few A players and a bunch of B players would be a vast improvement over the C players they have now.
This might be an ok trade, and it's probably the only thing we can do in the medium term, but the main point of the trade off is continuity. If you don't want policy on everything whipsawing every four years, you need people who know how everything works. I'd say, if we wanted a more responsive government, fixing Congress to incentivize updating legislation, instead of endless showboating, would probably be better somehow.
What was the tagline? “This is the first actual transfer of power.”
I think it’s pretty clear that we DO want policy whipsawing every 4 years. People really hate it when their guy wins and the things he promised don’t happen.
I think voters can be reached on what they voted for, lower the cost of living, control border crossings. Civil servants are busier tweaking small regulations that in totality add up.
It's not (just) about the pay. Give the faceless bureacrats more capacity to actually get things done. Give them staffs that aren't just contractors. Make promotions for efficacy more rapid.
A lot of people take civil service jobs because they love America and want to contribute but are frustrated by how little they're able to bring their talent and drive to the job. More than money (though the money doesn't hurt), letting civil servants be effective is the single biggest thing you could do to make those jobs attractive.
Oh that wasn’t an endorsement of contract workers replacing government employees. I’d much prefer giving government employees raises. It is a way to get around it potentially, though.
“… the dilemmas posed by the emergence of the Delta variant (and others that followed) were substantively difficult, and Biden’s team didn’t have broadly acceptable answers."
Biden basically changed nothing from the approach that came out of CDC/FDA during the Trump Administration. These were not actually Trumps fault, they were just bureaucracies doing what bureaucracies do, but changing to a strategy of giving individuals and local policy makers information and tools so they coud make better decisions like not keeping schools closed, not requiring Covid testing for international travel would have been good policy and smart politics.
The FDA ban on human challenge trials really did need a president to say “No. this is unacceptable and the peope who say otherwise should not be in charge of setting policy. Use your fucking brains and stop whatever the hell this virtue-signalling-by-way-of-preventing-people-from-being-virtuous is.”
One of Dr. Wen's point was that the communication was unfocused and that there was no end point to any policy. No signaling that when we meet condition A, policy B will no longer be necessary.
I remember having a conversation with another guy roughly my age on a private slack group, and I was saying, "I'm stopping masking, I hate it, everyone who wants a vaccine is vaccinated, and it was never particularly effective," and his position was, "I'm going to keep masking until the CDC declares the pandemic over." And I said, "Does the CDC in fact declare pandemics over?"
There was just no end point, just a gradual lessening of urgency.
This was most obvious to me with the travel bans on Europe and South Africa lasting for months or years, rather than ending 10 or 15 days later when they were done doing their job of delaying virus arrival by a few days.
True, but that's a criticism of Trump's administration. The criticism of Biden's administration is that they didn't change that pattern of failing to define and communicate clear policy.
I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is by far the least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I think part of the problem was that some of the conditions were too ambitious and people didn't want to admit defeat/accept partial victory. California had a clear reopening plan in 2020 (e.g. https://www.desertsun.com/story/money/business/2020/08/28/california-reopening-new-rules-businesses-governor/5636271002/) but there wasn't a clear path to green (business as usual) and there were different plans for different categories which makes sense in practice but leads to incoherent public policy (bars can be open but we recommend you don't see your friends at their house and schools will remain remote)
I hope our swing voter friends are enjoying the declining cost of living/eggs/sticking it to the annoying HR lady by voting for Trump while the bust-out of America continues apace.
>>But how do we come back from the collapse of the western alliance system?<<
I doubt we can, not fully, not anytime soon. Of course, one should be humble about prognostication: the future is hard to predict. But, even if the GOP suffers big losses over the next two cycles, and a fully committed, pro-Western alliance internationalist becomes our next president, our allies and adversaries will have to consider the probability that Trump wasn't a one-off, but was in fact the product of US political and constitutional dysfunction, and that the Invade Canada Party might soon be back in power.
In the 2030s, bet-hedging will necessarily characterize global calculus with respect to US foreign policy, even when Democrats control the White House. At minimum, treaties and agreements with America won't be worth the paper they're printed on for the foreseeable future.
This is probably right, but in part it will depend on future outcomes. If the Dems win a 40 seat House majority in 2026 and its 2028 candidate wins a 1984 Reagan-like victory, then that will open up space for rebuilding alliances.
If it's another thermostatic close election, promising more swings in the future, then probably not.
What does it cost to upgrade to the premium subscription level where you get the good news?
I’ll start dropping some good news threads in the afternoon
Saw my first cherry blossoms yesterday.
I'm in bonn, the former west german capital and a place where a forward looking citiplanner planted a whole neighborhood's worth of cherry blossom trees shortly after the war (at least i assume that's what happened...). Should start blooming in the next couple of weeks, which is a good pick-me-up on the way to work.
I was briefly in DC last week, to visit U of Maryland on Friday. The cherry blossoms in College Park were already getting started!
and my bees are out there buzzing making me honey!
I was hoping for some good news about the ducks!
The Ducks? I mean, they're not gonna win the Stanley Cup anytime soon, but give it a few years, they're rebuilding, they'll be back.
4 to 8 weeks.
Took pictures of some on my way into the office today :)
Maybe, like, some new cures for cancer or something? But only cancer cures that weren't supported by NIH since that will just make us all sad again? Shit. Puppies maybe? Surely puppies are still safe.
“ I’ll start dropping some good news threads in the afternoon”
The bad news: there will be a paywall surcharge for access to afternoon threads.
This is a few days old, but I saw it today. Beaver Ida Beav Wells of Chicago now has two kits, Chewy Garcia and Plumpton Sinclair. https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/03/13/meet-ida-beav-wells-chicagos-remarkably-rotund-beaver-has-a-new-name/
I know this is a joke, but I'm reminded of The Week's "It Wasn't All Bad" section, where they highlighted positive stories. I wouldn't mind an occasional column that didn't try to paint bad news as good or look for hokey stories to make people feel better, but maybe (?) focused on small "slow boring" levers everyday people can pull that aren't strictly giving money to candidates.
Part of the despair I hear from people on the ground I talk to (that isn't just a consequence of headlines/social media) is that they don't feel like they have any agency right now and they just have to take it, day in and day out. Special elections are great, but they're special because they don't happen all that often. I for one would like to feel like I'm getting new counsel and ideas on a regular basis so that, even in the current flood the zone environment, I feel like I'm keeping the small flame of hope lit.
Matt does give us a bunch of good news at the beginning of his Friday mailbag threads. I appreciate it. Seems like enough to me?
Downer incoming. We already tried that with the #Resistance. We flooded the town halls, held rallies to save the ACA, called our representatives nonstop. I was involved in all of it. And I don't think it worked. The practical effect was the same as the Tea Party, which was to push the deep blue/red areas much further to the left/right. And because of how voters are distributed, that hurt Democrats more than the Tea Party hurt Republicans.
Sometimes, when the buzz in my brain grows overloud, I recall being a child, outside, digging in the dirt and finding an earthworm. Cupping the wriggling thing in my hands, with bits of dirt clinging to its smooth contours, I felt the kinship of one living thing to another. Then I gently placed the worm back in the hole and watched as it made its way into the cool earth.
My kid's school made a video this week where they asked people walking by about something good that happened to them that day. It ranged from "got a 100 on a test" to "was able to get some Dunkin this morning." In the past, I might have thought this was corny, but now I hope they do this every week.
Could just pass everything through a mental filter of "How would some Fox News like bias frame this as positive for the Democrats?" Don't even need GenAI, Machine Learning, or lack of Ketamine for that one.
Everything is soooo ughhhhh.
I will mail you some acid for 20 bucks, might help.
This was a joke, do not call the FBI
"Hello, FBI? You need to get over here. Someone made a joke in a Slow Boring thread."
Always knew Yglesias would somehow lead to me getting fired from my teaching gig. . . . . .
The weekly anthropocene is a substack focusing on all the progress we are making on green energy, concservation and other beneficial technologies.
What does it cost? Everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijWDuvh-vXo
One thing I kinda realized about business community elites is they tend to be risk averse “cowards” and behave based on short term incentives rather than long term one.
I suspect one of the reason they embraced DEI etc was they simply scared of activist types.
And growing up in Japan, I heard a lot of successful corporate blackmailers (“shareholder meeting troll” was a thing back in the day)
They aren't cowards. They are business people, exercising their duties to owners by stewarding the company to create value. They operate in a politicized environment, but that doesn't make them political actors.
Nope, they're cowards. Sure, they have responsibilities toward shareholders. But those responsibilities don't outrank their responsibilities as citizens.
Love that the corporate America is cowardly vs not cowardly seems to be a debate that perfectly splits Slow Boring commentariat support.
I try do do my part! Lol.
Yes, I get triggered by the notion that the overly broad invocation of "lawsuits" means powerful economic actors can't engage in meaningful critique of an administration. (And I did some triggering of my own).
I'm obviously aware there are limitations to what kind of political activities or communication a corporate leader can engage in given their fiduciary responsibilities. Jamie Dimon's job isn't the same as Matt Yglesias's! But the universal "They can't speak out because lawsuits" as almost a *commandment* seems a bit much. For starters, speaking out against government policies *likely to hurt shareholders* is arguably the *duty* of a CEO—not something to be avoided. I can't imagine Trump's constant threats to annex Canada are good for Hilton or Delta...
But the really insidious thing is this: the clear implication is that what shareholders will sue you over is the damage to the business caused by the executive branch's retribution (how dare free citizens in a country with a first amendment criticize the king!). In other words, over the years we've gone from "Using the power of government as a tool to exact vengeance is worthy of condemnation, certainly unconstitutional, and might well get you impeached" to "Business leaders aren't allowed to protest" because of lawsuits that might flow from, uh, illegal use of the government's powers!
It's truly extraordinary.
Sure they do. Their companies are multinational and their fiduciary responsibility is to the company's shareholders. Their personal views as citizens are expressed at the ballot box and in the public square. Not in the boardroom.
As much as I don't want this to be true, I believe it is. I also believe it's this kind of logic that should have been used (and hopefully will be used one day) to eradicate Citizens United, because as it stands corporations have been given political power that scales with the money they have to spend yet this outsized political power does not carry similarly outsized responsibility.
Corporations do not have that much political power in this environment. Far less than before Citizens United was decided.
Maybe I don't fully understand the ramifications of CU then. My understanding was that it allows for unlimited spending from corporations to independent political efforts which can still be positioned to help a candidate/campaign without directly being tied to them. Is that not right? How were corporations more powerful politically before?
Yep. Businesses are trying to have their cake and eat it too here
At some point, the rule of law is essential to the operation of a successful and honest business and that concept also forms part of fiduciary obligations. If one thinks we are in a "normal" political environment, more or less, then of course you are right. If this is 1933 and Krupp and Thyssen and their ilk making their choices, or 1940-44 and Petain and Vichy - or, to be less alarmist (I guess), Videla's Argentina - as frankly I fear is closer than we would like to think, then the theory that CEOs are furthering shareholder value by sucking up to Trump starts to fall in on itself.
There clearly are nuances here.
1) Being a good citizen while being a good corporate fiduciary means compromising both a little. One cannot be perfect at either, so a little compromise is fine on both.
2) There are times when the compromises are too large and one ceases to be “good” as one or the other. We are closer to that point than we’ve been because of the extreme fealty demanded by Trump, especially of large corporate leaders.
Where I see it playing out especially hard are demands that corporations cut off business relationships with perceived political enemies of Trump, lest they too become the political enemies that the administration demands be shunned. Too much complicity here could allow the administration to get enough momentum that it eventually becomes impossible to say “no.” The Executive Orders on law firms are an example. If these things are allowed to continue unabated by reasonable corporate leaders, it could get quite ugly in America to be a political opponent of the administration in a way we’ve never experienced as a country.
Ehh... I'd call it more short-term thinking. They got scared by activists not realizing that annoying woke stuff would prompt a backlash.
Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel and same logic applies to not checking Trump. like their optimal behavior to maximize their longe term gain I would imagine is to advocate for lower tax and deregulation while checking on Trump’s destructive impulses.
that’s not how they behave and they’re simply trying to avoid the short term ire of most noisy and obnoxious ppl (be it activist or Trump).
In a sense, Mitch McConell when he was a Senate majority leader is how most CEO types operate I think
In his time, Mitch McConnell exceeded my expectations with regards to slowing down Trump's worst impulses, because we're about to see what an unchecked Trump does.
You're basically describing in an nutshell why the idea that CEOs only responsibility is maximizing shareholder value is so problematic. It's an incentive structure absolutely ripe for short term thinking on everything involving the future of a company.
Ideally it would be maximizing the present value of future cash flows, which gives at least a 30 year time horizon or so.
Corporations need to be restructured as co-ops!
I’m generally not in favor of this, but I do think we ought to have more insurance companies that operate this way.
Genuine question - is there evidence that specific corporations that enacted "annoying woke stuff" have actually experienced the consequences of anti-woke backlash? I'm ready to be convinced. I certainly agree that the corporate world went with the flow and did a bunch of woke/DEI/ESG type stuff, and that they're rolling that back a bunch now. But unless you were really out in front doing something radical, I bet you're fine - people's memories are short and collective action is hard. I can imagine corporations deciding to go with the flow, cancel some of the more ostentatious woke stuff and retreat to a generic support for everyone's rights. They're betting that the right won't punish them as long as they basically go with the herd, and the left won't punish them for getting vaguer with their commitments.
The Bud Light boycott at least temporarily had an effect.
Yes. It drove people to switch to another product made by the same company.
More than temporary. Seems to have permanently reduced its market share. Went from the number 1 seller to number 2 almost immediately after the controversy to number 3 a year later. Cost Bud Light billions. The stock price still hasn't fully recovered almost 2 years later, and that's in a market where most stocks are up about 60% over the same period.
I'm assuming Target didn't change course for no reason.
Company leadership would get sued to oblivion by shareholders for knowingly taking actions that hurt shareholder value. We can decry it all we want, but they have a job to do that supercedes their personal opinions.
I'm extremely skeptical that a CEO saying something like "the administration should obey court orders" or "invading Canada would be illegal" or "it's dangerous to eviscerate spending on scientific research" would leave an enterprise vulnerable to being sued "to oblivion."
There are limits to what the CEO of a public company can say, of course; but a board sufficiently concerned about a boss's pronouncements is free to discharge the person in question and hire a replacement. Which is really what this is all about at the end of the day: putting self-interest over country.
Ah, Matt Levine has been documenting numerous shareholder lawsuits alone these lines in his "Everything Everywhere Is Securities Fraud" theory, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud . He must have covered over a 100 such instances, including Musk's 2018 security fraud over tweet.
Could probably Google or ChatGPT specific cases alone those lines, but the details come down to specific courts, specific SEC officers, and other nuances. Regardless, there are serious concerns with corporate officers taking such actions.
The thing about this is that any action in any direction is securities fraud. Too much DEI? Fraud. Too little? Fraud. Supporting Trump? Fraud. Not supporting Trump? Believe it or not, fraud.
Correct, but based on the theory that "Everything Is Securities Fraud" one could also arguing that taking the short term path of supporting the administration to the detriment of the long term prospects for a company is also Securities Fraud as the officers aren't considering the long term impacts of supporting someone like Trump.
The final boss of "everything is securities fraud" is Elon tanking Tesla's value over the past few months. Hard to square his actions of late with his fiduciary duty to Tesla shareholders. Its almost like if the CEO of McDonalds was going around yelling about how his customers were fat losers and then joined the government with an explicit mission to raise costs for potato and beef producers while supposedly carrying on his corporate duties.
Where talking about fiduciary duties, not fraud. And it actually isn't that risky because decisions are governed by the "business judgment rule" in this space. There are outliers and weirdness, but the problem isn't so much getting sued as keeping the job and genuinely being focused on maximizing shareholder value.
It's not even so much that they would actually get sued. It can and does happen, but mostly it doesn't. The real point is that taking stands on political issues on behalf of the company, stands that won't increase shareholder value and could really harm it if Trump decides to attack the company, just isn't what their job is about.
CEOs are essentially supposed to be proxies for the board of directors, and boards are essentially supposed to be proxies for the shareholders. If the shareholders direct the company to take political stands, then the board and CEO should do so. Otherwise, the board and CEO should restrict themselves to carrying out the obligations in the contract they have with the shareholders, which is found in the articles of incorporation, the IPO statements and the prospectus. Mostly, those obligations boil down to "increase shareholder value by every legal means".
What they are definitely not supposed to do is to use the company as a vehicle for pushing their personal political agendas... and that's just as true if the agenda in question is "preserve democracy" as if it's DEI or regulations about yacht ownership. Just because you and I think the agenda is really good, and really important doesn't change the fact.
Officers of public companies are somewhat like lawyers, in that their obligation is to work zealously to further their clients' interests, regardless of their personal opinions. The legal profession makes this point more clearly, embedding it in formal rules of ethics and empowering bar review committees to evaluate and enforce it, but a similar structure exists between corporate officers and shareholders.
Perhaps what CEOs and boards should do is ask the shareholders. Put it up for a shareholder vote. If the shareholders would like to use the company's power to preserve democracy, then it would be the CEO's responsibility to enact that agenda.
But, honestly, I expect that the shareholders would vote it down and instead say the CEO should focus on increasing shareholder value. And that, then, is what the CEO should do.
It's easy to imagine a scenario where a CEO says something benign but anti-Trump, Trump uses his power to go after him, and the company's stock tanks. Would it definitely or probably happen? Perhaps not, but the downside risk is too significant for them to ignore, particularly if it's not relevant to their company
Budweiser tried sending a small promotional package to a trans influencer (IIRC- I'm not going to look up the specifics, but the original action they engaged in was not some major international advertising campaign on anything), and it caused a huge shock to the stock and sales of their products with their customer base. Deliberately wading into political waters clearly has downsides for corporations.
Corporate employees are citizens when they sign off for the day- they're free to use that time for whatever political ends they'd like. I'm perpetually flummoxed by people who argue that we should be be engaging in political activism to support desired political goals in every moment of our life. It's also frequently hypocritical given that these same people decry every comment that any corporate bigwig makes that happens to tacitly or enthusiastically support politics they disagree with. I very much doubt that Charles is sitting there thinking "well, I disagree with what he's saying, but I sure am happy that Elon Musk is using his corporate power to support Donald Trump. CEOs should really be doing more of this on the corporate dime."
The fact of the matter is that anything you want them to say precisely because it would be standing up to the lawlessness of this administration is a political statement- it's literally why you want them to say it. And as soon as companies start issuing political statements they risk a) backlash in the marketplace, and b) shareholder actions due to backlash in the marketplace. You can't have it both ways- it can't be both so banal and meaningless that it won't cause potential financial harm to the company and something that they should be doing in an attempt to have an impact in our politics.
I'm waiting for the first Tesla shareholder lawsuit against Elon Musk for wiping out $800 billion (and counting) of stock value.
Maybe it's too soon, but if it hasn't happened by, say, May then one may have to rethink your position on shareholder lawsuits.
Ah, would just be another one to add to the list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tesla,_Inc.
> This is a partial list of lawsuits involving Tesla, Inc, the American automotive and energy company, since 2008; as of August 2023, Tesla is party to over 1,750 lawsuits, and as of September 2021, it is party to 200 in China alone. A significant number of the cases notably derive from the actions of the company's CEO, Elon Musk, who is also party to many of his own lawsuits. TSLAQ, a loose collective of anonymous short-sellers and skeptics of Tesla and Elon Musk, regularly discusses and shares news of these lawsuits on Twitter and elsewhere.
I want to once again remind everyone that Musk has been a volatile and impulsive individual for at least a decade. Numerous people before us have predicted his downfall and currently I'm more concerned with him distracting us while his associated staff actually restructure the federal administrative state.
Forget Musk and forget the details of DOGE. Instead, we should pay attention to the negative impacts experienced by voters as can be blamed on the Trump administration. Particularly, voters in swing states and swing voters. It'll take some time, so we can just laugh at Musk and team until then.
Tesla is a weird one. Even though it's down a lot, it's still up significantly from a year ago. Neither a shareholder lawsuit nor a lack of one would surprise me
If you bought TSLA after 10/24 you'd have a claim!
The funny thing is Grok agrees that he's likely violating his fiduciary duty to his shareholders.
Herein lies the fundamental amorality of corporate capitalism. Corporations sought and obtained status as a legal person but eschew any responsibility to behave like a decent person, hiding behind shareholder value except when comes to executive compensation.
This is not true, in general the business judgement rule gives the leadership broad latittude. The fear is occasionally activists investors trying to get board seats but these rarely care about political opinions. For the most part the leadership are cowards who care more about the opinion of the peers and would prefer to behave like other CEO's/leaders instead of standing out or trying to do what they think is best.
I think those responsibilities do outrank, which is the reason that corporations - definitionally - cannot be trusted with any of the obligations or privileges of citizenship, and need to be treated in the public policy realm as potentially hostile and untrustworthy actors (a presumption that can be rebutted in any particular case for any particular corporation). The people within corporations hate this framing, but it proves itself to be correct time and time again. The fact that these people respond to public policy pressure by "bandwagoning" to alter the political system (nigh unto outright fascism in the current case) is just more confirmation.
“…their responsibilities as citizens”
Business leaders’ responsibilities as citizens are to not break the law, nothing more than that.
This is why you’ll never be a CEO…
Many companies have political action committees. Practically all lobby Congress. To say they're not political actors is naive.
I was listening to an interesting Odd Lots interview with Andrew Ferguson, FTC chair that touched on this, espousing your point of view. From the transcript:
"I'll give you some background on this. 2020, I am Mitch McConnell's lawyer. I'm sitting in my Senate office. The George Floyd protests are at their peak. I start getting calls from GCs of giant Fortune 100 businesses and business groups.
I pick up the phone and they say, hey, cops are really racist. We, the business community, want you to pass a bunch of police reform bills. I was a conservative that had relatively strong deference for markets and for market actors and people making decisions in those markets.
I was shocked by this. My response as, why are you calling me about this? You're supposed to make widgets at low prices for Americans.
Why are you calling me about police reform? What the hell does this have to do with you? Leave the political debates to Americans and to voters.
Stop calling me about this. If anything, don't you want more police to protect your business? They're like, no, it's really important to us."
Ferguson goes on to tis this into why he's willing to go after social media companies for restricting speech because they have too much power, but my takeaways were that he wasn't surprised general counsels form large companies were calling him (that's common) but that they weren't taking the Republican side, and that contrary to a lot of commenters here that just thought companies were posturing, they were actually worried about the state of policing in 2020. You may want them to be neutral on all things outside of their business interests, but it is clear companies are not.
Did he name any of the companies that were calling him? Why not? Could it be that maybe he's using this story to support his arguments for why republicans should be targeting companies they disagree with? Color me skeptical here.
He does not; from there he pivots to the "censorship crisis" (his words) of 2020, going on about you would be deplatformed for questioning mask efficacy, vaccine safety, voting laws, or Hunter Biden's laptop. This all culminates in him saying "Like any consumer in 2020, you couldn't watch TV, you couldn't go online, you couldn't shop in a store without having nakedly political messages, almost exclusively the platform of one party being thrown in your face," and as a consequence he now understands the critique of the narrow consumer welfare standard with regards to antitrust.
Now, I think the argument I just typed in the preceding paragraph is laughably wrong, but I think Ferguson believes it, and I see no reason to think he's lying about the calls from Fortune 100 companies, either. (Although I couldn't say how many people called him.) And to bring it back to the original point, I doubt that was the first time a general counsel reached out to Mitch McConnel over political actions they would like taken.
I can think of a whole host of reasons why he would outright lie (and even more easily imagine him grossly exaggerating) those calls. Everything you're quoting him as saying is laughable nonsense that is exactly the kind of thing a partisan flamethrower makes up to get headlines and attention.
He said the general counsels were making those calls? That sounds like utter bullshit to me. The GC of the company is not the entity that would be lobbying congress in that fashion. I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's full of it. Maybe SOMEONE did call him and say what he's saying they did, but it almost certainly wasn't a GC at a fortune 100 company and "business groups", and it definitely wasn't a bunch of them.
Nothing about those anecdotes rang true to me.
They'll burn shareholder money with ease. As parent comment alluded, DEI was just lighting corporate money and credibility on fire so that if they were ever called racist, they could point to other people's money that they had put on the altar as burnt offerings. Just saying "lol get bent" would've been much cheaper but involved having a spine.
When the bullets are firing, the way to not get shot is to keep your head down. During the DEI time, that meant putting out diversity statements. During this backlash, that means taking DEI off the website.
See today's WSJ as an example: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/morgan-stanley-corporate-dei-what-happened-4a61427c?st=Gr813G&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Thank you for the gift link so I could read the whole thing.
It seems clear that the whole endeavor at Morgan was spending money to destroy things given how they've just created more internal strife and opened themselves to lawsuits. Both the black and white employees are complaining and my instinct is that both groups are right. (Baiting in minority candidates with race-specific jobs and then taking the jobs away and demoting them is like the perfect bingo-card of making all possible mistakes.)
Taking a bunch of illegal actions is not stewardship of the corporation.
Yes. But CEOs/CFOs are happy to talk about how putting a Republican in charge will be good because it will result in low taxes on corporate profits, a favorable M & A climate, and favorable tax treatment of investment.
But where were CEOs to explain that Trump's proposed agenda would break supply chains, cause higher prices and eat away at profit margins? Not to mention Trump was talking about threatening Fed independence, if a Democrat did this Wall Street would crush them.
Is corporate America invested in shareholder profits or invested in Republican party governance?
The long term interest of the owners qua owners. They could have a similar back pocket to Democrats: freer trade, lower deficits, immigration reform. My sense is that is what business associations, CoC AMA, etc. did back in the day.
Yes, and now such behavior is increasingly illegal, or at least requires disclosure. And voters, investors, consumers, and other stakeholders are increasingly informed in biased ways. Ie, Fox News, MSNBC, Warren-in-a-Bernie-skin coat, Rogan, and others will elevate the most scandalous corporate actions from eaches perspective.
The actions of Mr. Elon Musk seems to belie this formulation. At this point, the only base case to the idea that Elon Musk is trying to maximize shareholder value is that by tying himself to Trump, he'll be able to basically engage in massively corrupt practices.
And yet, even the possibility of massive corruption is not enough of headwind against the massive damage he's done to the brand name of all of his businesses. Tesla sales in Europe are absolutely tanking. He's done is very best to completely alienate his prime buying demographic in America (upper middle class Democrats).
It's extremely hard to look at his actions the last 24-36 months as being about maximizing shareholder value.
I think he has violated his fiduciary duties over and over and over again, even long before his actions with the Trump campaign.
I think the SEC should have brought an action to bar him from being an officer or director of a public company back in 2018 when he had his infamous "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." tweet.
Sadly, the time has passed. Reportedly, Acting Chair Uyeda grilled staff about the last suit against Musk potentially being political retribution. This despite the fact that Musk blatantly disregarded his obligation to disclose his >5% interest in Twitter before launching his takeover, saving him hundreds of millions as he bought shares in the open market. Notably, that suit was authorized before the effective dates of the departure of Gary Gensler and Commissioner Lizarraga. It seems likely that the suit wouldn't have been filed by this SEC.
In short, Musk for now has the protection he bought in his alignment with Trump.
This is exactly why the DEI programs of yesteryear were so foolish. That Mastercard colored its circles rainbow, or if Raytheon's laser engineer was a quarter Native-American did not matter. The capitalist class is only interested in making money. It is, quite literally, its responsibility and duty.
It's also why liberals should not count on the business class to be any sort of resistance or buffer. They do not care about rule of law or separation of powers and more than they care about land acknowledgement or trans representation. It's just a means to making their property secure.
Which is fine. But I would prefer it we treated them a little bit more like the burghers they are: crass, self-interested, tools for bringing in money to the state.
Woah, woah, woah. You have taken my comment and run much further than warranted. I can assure you the capitalist class¹ cares about the rule of law and the separation of powers, precisely BECAUSE those things are a necessary condition for them to increase the value of their firms.
¹ Referring to the "capitalist class" makes you sound like a marxist. If that is what you are going for, then fine. Otherwise, a better term might just be "business people".
I'm agreeing! The rule of law and separation of powers are means to the maintenance and increase of value of private property, which is literally their raison d'être. But history has shown that capitalists would be fine with maintenance of private property by executive fiat, or corporatism, or any other organization of the state.
This explains the asymmetry with which they react when a democracy elects a leftist administration vs a rightist one, as we see today. Laws and elections and processes that are hostile to private property and structural obstructions to the growth of profits cannot be tolerated by that group.
This is all pretty banal. I don't think even the business people should dispute what I'm saying. All I'm saying is, we should have a clear-eyed view of what this group does for society (take risks, grow the economy, provide wealth for extraction), and understand its interests.
Both are true. They are cowards, and trying to protect their company.
If they can't put the long-term interest of their companies over short-term pandering? They're cowards.
I can see why a CEO acts this way, the board demands shareholder value. I don’t see why people like Bezos and Musk, who own a controlling interest, would succumb to short term thinking. Their incentive is very clearly to maximize their prestige. Perhaps Musk would take a 99% net worth hit to land a human on Mars. Playing politics has already cost him around half a trillion in paper wealth.
Boards are also made of people. Shareholder value is certainly the north star but it's a mistake to think they're all cold, calculating Gordon Gekkos. They have other ideas and motivations, strengths and weaknesses, and are fully capable of mistakes, getting caught up in the zeitgeist, or just doing a bad job. Look at all of the impressive people who were in the board of directors of Theranos.
I often get the feeling that board positions are mainly just a box checking exercise or, even worse, cover for the company management. The idea that they independently represent shareholder interests seems fanciful in general. Why is Musk still running Tesla for example?
Certainly, if I was a Tesla shareholder I'd be thinking it might be time for new management. The current managemant has plainly lost interest and focus on running the company for the benefit of its owners. (Musk only owns about 13%)
It would be a hard question. So much of Tesla's value is an embedded option of "What might Elon do next?". His leadership has totally revolutionized electric vehicles and space rockets already.
Tossing that option aside would be a very, very risky thing to do. But keeping Elon as CEO is also a very, very risky thing to do. I don't envy those directors.
This is an important point I think. Tesla stock has fallen quite a bit, but it's still wildly overvalued by any normal standard. That huge premium is plausibly due to Elon. Ditching him might make investors treat Tesla like a normal car company.
Tesla needs their own Tim Cook
Why the hell would you hold a Tesla position given the firms long history of chaos under Musk?
Must already want that, or at least be open to tolerating it to be a shareholder or other long position. And short sellers have been victims of the "market can remain irrational longer than ... can remain solvent"
Musk's personal drama has always gone with the territory, yes, but I don't think he's ever before done something to so poison the brand among the very demographic that's most likely to buy an EV.
> Why the hell would you hold a Tesla position given the firms long history of chaos under Musk?
That "long history" of the past 5 years has it up over 700%.
They are trapped here. Tesla shareholders are cultists as well. The share price would tank much further and faster than we have seen if he left the company.
The Tesla board is an Elon appendage. It's a handful of his relatives and toadies.
Shareholders could replace the board, I suppose.
My understanding is Musk do this for his attention seeking behavior (and while he's brilliant in optimizing operations and processes, when it comes to decision making that entails human relationship and emotions, he's horrible - like he blew away multi billion business in Latin America with Starlink by retweeting a tweet to imply Carlos Slim has tie with crime orginization).
Bezos, he's very secretive so idk but my guess is mix of fear of Trump and competition with Musk (he has Blue Origin, so I imagine he has to curry favor from Trump now) as well as his genuine sense of betrayal from Democrats during Biden administration. (this is all speculation so I could be well wrong)
That said, I also feel like Silicon Valley overall operates in herd mentality too (this is a bit ironic as a champion for innovation), so I imagine that was a factor too
Neither Jeff Bezos nor Elon Musk own a controlling interest in their companies.
when has either board defied them? have there been any serious proxy fights? a plurality, even a smallish one can confer control
Short-termism has always been a problem in business, e.g. the fixation on hitting the numbers for the quarter at the expense of longer-term value creation. So I’m not surprised it’s showing up in this area as well.
I think they know this is bad governance but like tax cuts.
And deregulation
Everybody likes tax cuts, but Democrats have not done enough to sell the resulting deficits (like tariffs, like immigration restrictions) as bad for business, for growth in the longer run. It's a CEO's business to think about the longer run.
I said the first day Biden took office that businessmen weren’t going to take kindly to a Democratic president and that they would sabotage it by raising the prices of everything, and my suspicions were proven completely correct.
I'm reminded of the cartoon where the man explains "yes we destroyed the planet, but we created a lot of shareholder value."
I feel like there is a lot to be learned here for future Dem administrations about how weak and compliant the business community can really be.
Though I suspect there are important asymmetries in this. Decades of practice relying on Republicans to cut taxes makes them tolerate a lot of bad behavior from Republicans. They don’t have practice at getting rewarded by Democrats.
Yeah, and for them, the Biden admin experience also reinforced their antics - in a sense, I sympathize w the business community where they seem to think had to pick the poison from two really toxic ones (I think this is the topic of past post and is misguided).
And currently, I feel like the rhetoric of both parties are very anti business ironically.
I think there’s an opportunity as well as challenge here wrt to messaging towards business community. Like “we guarantee the environment to be more predictable and stable. And we’re open to some deregulation (but not cutting the tax further)”is objectively better than having to choose between Lina Khan and Trump but this is not type of messaging that goes traction online and idk how many businesses ppl are persuaded that this is an option
My personal sense is that the business community has simply gotten too good at financial optimization. It makes them worse partners for everyone who is not an owner. Whether you are an employee, customer, local government, etc., every transaction gets just a little worse in slightly imperceptible ways.
It's hard for that group of people to be meaningful political partners.
Tax cuts and deregulation are what they go to Republicans for, and they are still getting that.
Agree, but I think there is less reason to fear them than perhaps previously thought, at least if you have public support. There are certainly levers being used that could be useful in a Dem administration, if one is willing.
I think what businesses have learned is the wrong lesson, is that they probably prefer a candidate and administration who makes it clear that they can pay to play or pay to win. Big businesses will always be more supportive of that than most other types of relationships.
I’ve always been buffed a little bit that a lot of CEO types don’t understand that this is a classic prisoner’s dilemma scenario - like if everyone can pay to win, you have to keep out bribing other players and this is not a guaranteed win.
But considering their short term thinking, now I understand a little bit how they fall for this trap
As my economics teacher said on the first day of class, “the goal of every capitalist is to become a monopolist”
Well, the biggest can win in the sense that there will always be smaller businesses who can't afford as much to play.
I am not sure it’s fair to describe a “just leave me alone and let me do my business stuff” as cowardice, but they definitely have a tendency to placate so they can be let alone.
A lot of this is also on business lobbies for assuming that tariffs wouldn't actually meaningfully happen and communicating this to their members and the public.
"This does not single-handedly solve all of Democrats’ political problems, because they also need to improve the public’s view of themselves. "
Indeed. The extreme wing of the GOP clearly has more power over the GOP than the extreme wing of the Democratic Party has over it. However, in the media environment created by the newer technologies, that doesn't matter as much.
The fringes have a powerful three-way coalition. The strident Right highlights the unattractive stuff of the extreme Left, the strident Left highlights the stuff of the extreme Right, and it is the nature (and in the best interests) of competing media outlets and voices to highlight both. Crazy talk is vastly more entertaining than boring discussion of what would actually work, after all.
This is a sharp contrast to the network television era when anything outside what we now call the Overton window had a heck of a time getting a word in edgewise.
The result of this is that a substantial middle of the country has a negative view of both sides. For the partisans, "They are awful" has the obvious consequence "So anyone with a brain ought to see we are better." But that is not true when the audience was already convinced that both sides were awful.
No, the saving grace for Democrats is simply that Republicans are in power, so in the next election, it will be the Republicans whose stink will be more recent.
That's pretty much the explanation for the elections of '20 and '24. For all the carryings on over specific issues and strategies and court cases, the populace narrowly decided that getting rid of the current stench was very slightly more important than the prospect of bringing back the previous stench.
Honestly, yeah, it feels like the media environment has made an electorate that doesn't actually respond well to policy and its effects at any kind of abstract level, instead opting for a sort of political identitarianism. This is probably going to result in just anti-incumbency every 4 years as everyone gets madder and madder regardless of what happens.
This wouldn't be so bad, but this kind of thing also affects the people who are put in charge. I mean, the WV State legislature is largely run off of the principle of A. what do car dealers/AEP/WVAW/Alpha Mining want? and B. What kuh-razy thing did i hear on facebook last week? The Trump Admin is run by people who get their information entirely through social media.
There's really no policies that would be bad enough to change anyone's minds here. WV is far too brain-drained for that. The American system of government, with an emphasis on geography over people certainly can't handle this.
And yeah I used to pooh-pooh the foreign policy consensus, but it's probably better to have one than not to, because it's effectively impossible to run foreign policy if 4-year election cycles change it pretty radically every time. That's basically handling a big W to Putin and Xi, who can actually run coherent policies (though they mess up a lot, so did the Consensus).
I’ve spent years trying to actively battle nihilism in others, but I’m starting to embrace it personally.
What could Republicans do that would cause them to actually lose in a ton of these states? I kind of think nothing.
Matt’s entire philosophy of popularism can help you win a presidential election occasionally, but doing it perfectly won’t take you anywhere close to 60 senators in the foreseeable future.
That's a great point. At this point for MAGA Republicans, I don't think there is any line that would stop them from supporting Trump, and a lot of people in America still don't know how Bills get passed. We honestly need fair congressional apportionment, and the 2 party system is standing in the way of that.
Great observations, people are really good sometimes at feeling vibes and recognizing a problem. But the actual problem solving part, and understanding that complex systems sometimes don't always have a simple solution really trips people up. Another part of the problem is that you can't always solve a complex problem quickly in a way that will appease everyone, thus there is no incentive by politicians to always try and fix problems if they know the solution will cause the American people any pain or inconvenience at all.
At least on the Dem side and at least in the short term, there is an opportunity for a moderate to run in an explicitly moderate, anti-leftist, "Sister Souljah"-bait kind of way. That could still trigger media attention since it would feel like "man bites dog." And that media attention would be helpful to that candidate even in the primaries since moderates outnumber leftists even in the primary electorate (not true on the GOP side btw), and since the mood among Dem voters is increasingly focused on opposing the right rather than on internal policy disagreements. And it would be doubly helpful in the general election to be known as the candidate who won the nomination by defeating the leftists. Now of course, if/when someone like that actually were to get elected, the media environment would immediately switch back - but that is a worry for another day.
The two reasons I could see that optimistic outcome *not* happen is: (1) There could be multiple moderate candidates who are all equally strong and can't agree on how to consolidate. (2) Some on the left are self-aware enough to know that their views don't command majority support in the primary electorate, and certainly not the general electorate, so instead of trying to win an ideological showdown, they may use dirty tricks and smears to destroy the moderate opponent on non-ideological grounds. We saw an attempt at that in 2020 with Tara Reade, where some leftists deliberately partnered with the far right on a dirty tricks campaign against Biden. It didn't work, but practice makes perfect.
I don't know if you remember, but we did this in 2020.
Sort of, not exactly.
I definitely don’t remember.
Why is why elections are increasingly being pursued as games with only one turn. I really hope that there’s one more free and fair election and I significantly doubt it. But if there is and Dems win, they have to play for keeps by doubling down on the dictatorship stuff. We can’t have elections again until we’ve suppressed conservative media and voices for a couple of generations and Dems can manufacture stable consent again.
I mostly agree with this but would say it’s more moderate folks in general. There’s an awful lot of center-right people who have really no platform at the moment. I’ve voted D in the last three presidential elections but don’t consider myself a Democrat.
The Dems are a center right party! When it comes to anything substantial the left rarely gets its way (which is why there’s so much language policing and wokeness, bc it gave the left a completely immaterial win)
Yeah, by global standards they are, but I can’t get behind any of the grievance politics from The Groups. Even when they don’t get their way, it’s terrible optics.
I think the biggest question going forward is how do we run a country if there is not consensus on the basic structure, function, and aims of the government. We had that consensus between FDR and Biden (allying with Western democracies, promoting our values around the world, managing an advanced economy, etc). And now we don't. It's not clear that there are some laws you can pass to prevent something like Trump and Musk from causing enormous damage in the future, no matter what institutions we set up.
Yes, in the long run you can't have a liberal democracy when 50% of the engaged portion of the electorate (or even 30% really) doesn't believe in liberal democracy. It's doomed to fail.
Which is tough because liberal democracy has really been our core identity as a country. Other countries can always fall back on blood and soil, which is very bad but at least it's an ethos. I don't know where we end up.
"Yes, in the long run you can't have a liberal democracy when 50% of the engaged portion of the electorate (or even 30% really) doesn't believe in liberal democracy."
Except that's not what we have.
What we have is both sides believe in liberal democracy but think the other side is the biggest threat to it.
For voters that said they were voting to protect democracy, more of them voted for Trump than Harris.
IE they see Democrats as a bigger threat to democracy then Republicans.
Whether you agree with them or not is besides the point. They believe they were protecting democracy by voting for Trump
No, sorry. I know it's uncomfortable for you to have to think of it this way. But what matters is who actually supports liberal democracy in point of fact, and who actually opposes it in point of fact (which in turn requires a definition of what liberal democracy entails).
I'll note that I didn't vote for Trump Jan 6th was a deal breaker for me).
But that doesn't mean the right can't point to many many examples for why they THINK that Democrats are the bigger threat to democracy.
For example,
Democrats efforts to pack the court
Democrats resistance to voter ID
Democrats allowance of huge amounts of illegal immigration and false asylum claims
Democrats own stuff about stolen elections (Stacy Abrams)
Obama's pen and phone followed by Biden's student loan forgiveness
etc etc
Not to mention Biden using the DOJ to go after the former president (which is what made Trump relevant again)
Sorry, what Democratic efforts to pack the court?
If someone is angry about Stacy Abrams’ allegations of stolen elections, wouldn’t it stand to reason they’d be much more alarmed by Trump’s, which were worse and more thorough in every way, and also are supported as true by the entire Republican establishment?
Oh come on you are an educated person, there was a big (if unsuccessful) push to pack the courts, Biden even did a court commission.
Note I agree what Trump did was worse, given he was the freaken president.
But I also note that Dems didn't ostracize Abrams from the party for her election lies.
No offence, but your list of reasons people think democrats are a threat to democracy amount to: 1) things Democrats didn't actually do DESPITE HAVING THE POWER TO DO IT IF THEY WERE SO INCLINED; and 2) things you just don't like.
We have a real problem with people declaring "everything I don't like is a threat to democracy." Democrats do it too. But the whining from conservatives about this has gotten absolutely deafening, which seems to be the actual point as they actually do far worse things in open and brazen attempts to destroy rule of law entirely and seem to just want people to shrug.
We'll see how voters response to the second Trump presidency, which far and away is the most hostile to liberal democracy of my lifetime.
I suspect republicans range from not caring about it that much to also being outright hostile to it.
Democrats’ efforts to pack the court?!? wtf. Republicans have *actually* packed the courts! Judges have been a consistent right-wing priority. There’s no equivalent of the Federalist Society for the left, and there should be.
Basically the entire legal field outside FedSoc is liberal. There's for another society when you control everything.
And no Republicans didn't pack the court. There's still 9 justices. Republicans won elections over decades and changed the composition of the court.
Yes they played hardball with Merrick Garland. But that's still WAY different than changing the number of justices.
Also, if Harry Reed had listened to McConnel then Merrick Garland would have never been a thing.
Our policy was never to align with Western democracies and people need to stop lying about this. From FDR to Biden we have always had dictators as allies and NATO has historically had plenty of dictatorships in it. Even now Erdogan's Turkey and Orban's Hungary are NATO members.
People love to BS and talk up democracy, but that is just moral preening. Talk to dissidents in Saudi Arabia about the US' love for "democracy". Just accept we ally with lots of evil for strategic reasons and that this is the way of the world..
What you said—that we allied with a lot of bad countries—is not inconsistent with what Sam said, that our policy was to ally (he never said exclusively) with Western democracies. Please don’t baselessly accuse people of lying.
Chile was a Western democracy and we overthrew their government. Come on.
People need to stop thinking foreign policy is about satisfying their moral preening and self-congratulation.
Chile is actually a good point! But once again it can't just be a point in a discussion, it has to be about how everyone you're disagreeing with is in bad faith. You're not like this on every topic but on some you really, really are, and this is one of them.
I don't think everyone disagreeing with me is in bad faith.
I think it's closer to a form of wishful thinking (I compare it to believing in the afterlife below; it's something like that). People can't stand the notion that America isn't this amazing moral exemplar. It's what they want to believe about the country. So when you talk about the reality of how our foreign policy works and what we really do, they can't accept that. They want us to be the paragons of democracy and virtue and all that is good in the world.
That's not "bad faith". That's not a bunch of people saying they believe one thing while believing another. It's a bunch of people wishing something was true that wasn't true, and therefore falsely ascribing that view to US foreign policy (and NATO) when it is a totally inaccurate description.
It’s a straw man to say that anyone here has described America as an “amazing moral exemplar” or “paragons of virtue,” or rejected the “reality of how our foreign policy works.” It seems more accurate to say you seem to see next to zero correlation between American foreign policy and promotion of democracy, whereas some of us see a stronger (but definitely not 1) correlation. That’s a fine thing to disagree about; there’s no need to be dismissive.
It seems a lot of people who are dedicated to ‘slow boring’ in terms of domestic politics (our imperfect world is the best we can hope for) push for highly idealistic foreign policy (freedom must reign!).
Not meant to be a criticism - I’m probably guilty of the reverse.
I think that's right but more broadly I don't even think they truly push for an idealistic foreign policy. It's closer to belief in the afterlife-- they really truly want it to be true, so it must be true. Even though it isn't.
Dems need to make a vigorous case for government. They have been curiously absent in doing that since the 60s.
Here's the Democratic ad campaign I've been waiting and waiting for:
A series of ads featuring government employees talking earnestly about what they do and why they were drawn to public service.
It seems so obvious that if you believe in government, you don't do silly things like try to shut the government down. You don't cower in the face of right-wing talking points about "waste, fraud, and abuse." You acknowledge the problems but also make a full-throated defense of the good things that good government can achieve.
Trump's actions will probably have a thousand times the effect of making people like the good things government does than any ad campaign from the Democrats.
Not that running such ads in 2026 and 2028 would be a bad thing to do. When people are spring-loaded to believe something (Trump destroyed vital government functions) then it's good to give them a bit of a push.
Social Security Customer Service Rep, NP Forest Ranger, Vet Doctor, Nuclear Administration… all of those who got fired.
I would like to think that this approach would be viable, but many decades of attacks on government employees, and government services have undermined the confidence of far too many Americans in the validity of much of what government does. It is regrettable that the only way people will acknowledge the benefit of many government programs and employees is the hardship that loss of those programs will inflict. Even then, the burdens will fall mostly on those without much political power.
They have the political power to vote. That they don’t do so is their fault. Trump won by getting votes from 30% of all eligible voters.
Make Election Day a national holiday and make voting mandatory.
"You acknowledge the problems "
That's the problem right there of course. Democrats were usually the people creating or at least protecting those that create the problems.
You can either have effective government, or give public unions whatever they want. You can't do both
"Democrats were usually the people creating or at least protecting those that create the problems."
The party trying to use government to DO things is obviously going to make errors and cause problems. The party intentionally sabotaging government will also cause problems!
"You can either have effective government, or give public unions whatever they want. You can't do both."
I reject the binary. It is possible to engage and negotiate with public sector unions in a fruitful way.
Sure if there's an actual adversarial process. But not when you are in their pocket.
Public unions help elect Democrats that turn around and then give those public unions what they want.
If you are actually interested in this topic I suggest reading "Not Accountable" which details all the many many ways public unions use contracts to make government not work.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1957588128/?bestFormat=true&k=not%20accountable%20philip%20howard&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-pd-bk-d_di_k1_1_7&crid=YWK0W4Q8AFOI&sprefix=not%20acc
Thanks for the recommendation. I am interested, but won't lie that it might take a while to get that one to the top of the stack!
My uneducated take is that while I'm sure that kind of thing happens, I don't think public sector unions have no place or are responsible for the majority of the dysfunction in government.
There is certainly opportunity to clear some of the excesses in the last few decades of liberal governance, including removing excessive regulations that have held back the ability to build and govern effectively.
We need a film version of Michael Lewis' The Undoing Project.
If Dems are going to "make a vigorous case for government," then Dems need to do so by showing that government actually works. When it takes a bajillion dollars to build one mile of subway, when you're floating bond issues just to (not even fully) fund the sweetheart pension deal the teachers' union won from the city government, when you have to budget twice as much travel time because maybe there will be 35 minutes between buses heading where you want to go, that's a vigorous case that government is incapable of working. We need to destroy the power of environmental groups, historical preservationists, etc (AND THEIR LAWYERS) to bog progress down in the muck of proceduralism, and (as a Brit would say) JUST GET ON WITH IT. When Dems tell all these various interests, "Fuck all the way off, do not pass GO, do not collect $200, we are going to build the thing or just do what needs doing no matter what," THAT will be a self-evident case for government.
This is an understated concern imo. How exactly do we govern and figure out how our government should look like when people can't even agree on the same reality.
Case in point, the most recent Sam Seder debate where the guy was arguing with him that government agencies pay taxes and get tax breaks (https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1j7ymzr/sam_seder_on_jubilees_surrounded_government/) and when Sam corrects him, the guy just refuses to acknowledge that he may even be wrong.
We have so many people that despite having access to the internet are still so confidently incorrect about many things. On top of that, we have a social media algorithm that has monetized misinformation and outrage based on vibes, so objective truth, reality and consensus building is just so hard to find right now.
Additionally, what this administration is doing is priming people to believe and support the notion that even though they are breaking the law, it is okay because they are doing it for the right reasons and hurting the right people, so it is okay. Kind of like the vigilante vs anti-vigilante type of argument types of arguments we see in fiction. However, this is real life...
"It's not clear that there are some laws you can pass to prevent something like Trump and Musk from causing enormous damage in the future, no matter what institutions we set up."
Of course you could, but it requires being in power, which means it requires that the party in power willingly give up power. Which is unlikely to happen soon, but it's absolutely something that *should*.
I think that the Democrats have a good chance of being in power again, and that will provide an opportunity to do some good things. But I don't know how to recreate the western alliance system, or the CDC disease surveillance infrastructure, or the NAEP, if it might get torn down every time Republicans win.
The answer is to do (a smart version of) the thing to the Republicans that they are currently trying to do to the Dems. Elon is wandering around, crazed, ripping the wires out of the walls looking for the switch that turns off the Woke Mind Virus, and smashing institutions in the process.
The Dems, if they get the chance, should do a well thought out and effective version of that. Identify core Republican institutions, pillars of their coalition, and act to break them. Car dealers, scammy supplement companies, the works.
And most importantly, the outrage-based media: this has to die if democracy is going to live. Change the law to kill this business model.
That's a strategy for winning elections. But unless it works to win every election then it isn't a strategy for stable governance.
I think it’s just the opposite: Coalitions would shift and the Republicans would shortly be competitive again. But the *kinds* of Republicans who’d be competitive would be different. Knocking out the pillars of MAGA doesn’t mean one-party Dem rule, it means people more like Nikki Haley running for office as Republicans.
I’m pushing a structural thesis, really, that MAGA is what it is because of institutions. Change the institutions, change the party they lead to.
Yes. Dems have to win and then cancel future elections until the cancer that is the Republican Party is properly excised. I’ll never forgive Biden for holding the 2024 election and I fear we’ll be paying the price throughout our lifetimes.
“It's not clear that there are some laws you can pass to prevent something like Trump and Musk from causing enormous damage in the future…”
Treaties could be rewritten, if necessary, and Congress could pass enabling laws. Treating things like the JCPOA as if they were real commitments was always a bad idea.
Random observations from the world of retail investor advising:
1. A few people, both clients and coworkers, who have never expressed a political thoughts before, are expressing displeasure at the tariffs and (correctly I think) blaming them for the bear market.
2. We had a couple calls with some large financial institutions last December who made projections and they apparently didn't buy at all that Trump was going to do anything like this. They forecasted 2% growth, 2% inflation, very low chance of recession. I should trust my gut more, because "very low chance of recession" seemed too low to me.
3. Before the election, we previewed a few policy proposals from both candidates. The Harris proposal that prompted the strongest reaction was the potential taxing of unrealized gains (I still can't figure out if she meant at death or not).
4. I'm under no delusions that my industry represents a wide swathe of voters, BUT, I do think there are a certain number of country club types left who would buy a pitch of "look, we're not going to prioritize tax cuts über alles for you guys, but we're not going to do any crazy shit that tanks the market either."
"We had a couple calls with some large financial institutions last December who made projections and they apparently didn't buy at all that Trump was going to do anything like this"
So, so, so tired of the "Take him seriously, not literally" bullshit, and all of the people who were just convinced that the person with a 78 year history of not being a particularly strategic thinker, and of lying constantly, was somehow playing 5-D chess where he'll end up acting exactly the way you want him to.
It was obvious to anyone that this tarriff nonsense was a possible, if not likely, outcome. It's ok to be surprised in the sense of "Well, Trump lies all the time, so we had no idea what was coming", but if you are surprised in the sense of "We were sure that this one thing was off the table!" then you're just a moron.
He was constrained by more responsible actors the first time around. They were assuming it would be more of the same I think.
The problem with this line of thinking is that we had four years of Trump already, he said all the same stuff on the campaign trail, and the result was tariffs on China that Biden continued and the equivalent of making the "T" in "NAFTA" stand for "Trump." It's not idiotic to think that's what you'd get again.
I'd argue it was though. It was quite clear this time that all the actors who were constraining Trump the first time didn't emerge with him on the other side of Jan. 6. The conventional wisdom was that Trump 2.0 would be far less constrained.
I think if you want to make the claim that it was reasonable that this time would be like the first, you have to explain how the Project 25 people replacing the normie Republicans wouldn't have exactly this effect.
Which people who constrained him the first time did you believe would constrain him this time? What members of the Republican party have shown a willingness to constrain Trump AND are also still occupying position of power.
I'm growing sick of the "but it was reasonable to think that Trump 2.0 would be like 1.0, because no, it wasn't.
Same experience here with regards to #1. The uncertainty is more damaging than the tariffs themselves.
In my hospitality business, which is highly vulnerable to downturns, I'm pausing a major renovation midway through because I just have no clue what the economy will be like in six months or a year.
Foreign tourism is already dropping. I hope the stain spreading now does not set, causing long-term damage to the usually robust and enduring attraction of the US to foreign visitors.
A lot of Canadians very much not in the mood to visit the US at the moment.
(US visitors to Canada are welcome! We appreciate your support!)
Thanks for saying this - I’ve seen some Canadian commenters on Substack basically telling us that “Trump is you,” and blame even those of us who voted the other way, and some really nasty comments besides. 30% of eligible Americans voted for Trump; I have real issues with people that didn’t vote at all, even in states that weren’t in play. We could have at least had Trump not win the popular vote, but that may or may not have made a difference in the behavior of the Trump administration.
At any rate, unlike in parliamentary systems, we are stuck with this until the next election. Many of us hate this but can’t do anything about it. But I am a little concerned about how we might be received when traveling abroad.
You're welcome. I've lived next to the United States all my life, I've seen a lot of it, I've lived and worked there, I've admired its power and accomplishments when it's at its best, and its cultural products and politics are ever-present up here. You can't spend more than five minutes looking at the US without realizing how divided it is, and the sort of American who is visiting us is probably an alright person, and even if not, they're still our guests.
(That said, Canadians who work in service industries often have their own view of "the Ugly American", the sort of visitor who is surprised that things aren't priced in US dollars).
I have had 0 foreign visitors so far this year. It's our slow season, but still...That said, making predictions in this business is tough and that can be exacerbated by disparate regional impacts. The pandemic, after the first few months of shutdowns and chaos, was a significant net positive for my business due to factors that I would not have been able to predict. So who knows. Maybe Europeans will still come but avoid red states, which might funnel more business my way. Maybe there will be more domestic tourism as AI displaces people with 401ks and they take early retirement. I just have to be ready to adapt as needed, and I'm trying to bank more savings in lieu of making further investments.
Yes. Every day we add and remove tariffs from Canada and Mexico and every day we switch sides on the Russia/Ukraine war.
Also, to point 4, I would think the top 1% or even top 5% would happily make that trade. If all your money is in equities, then any market downswing is 100% losses, while any tax increase is simply a reduction in profits.
It would be better for more Americans to have their net worth tied up in diversified equities than in their house, so this would be a healthier coalition.
Also depends how you're measuring 1% or 5%, wealth or income.
The thing about housing is it’s the only investment you can make while borrowing 80% or more of the initial price. So you will have a lever effect that ends up making a doubling in the value of your home a tenfold return on investment of your own capital. I’ve experienced this myself.
I still don’t know why Congress thought ceding so much power to the president was a good idea. It’s not like tariff policy has ever been or will ever be an overnight crisis.
Back in the 60s and 70s, Congress didn't have a crystal ball telling them someone like Donald Trump would one day be president. If you really want to excoriate Congress, blame the one that was in power starting in January, 2021. They knew what Trump was like AND they knew he might well be back in power. They did nothing.
Well, they did have Richard Nixon. Although in fairness, post-Watergate did see Congress wrestling some of its power back, with the War Powers Act, the Impoundment Act, and other measures. Unfortunately, partisan polarization has overtaken things, and we've got an imperial President exploiting the "Who is gonna stop me?" loophole in the Constitution.
Civics education sucks and people consider the President as a King that does whatever he wants. That power comes from winning an election and not from the Constitution. Whether Iraq or Obamacare people wanted their guy to have a free reign and not be bogged down in stupid stuff and blow off questions of Constitutionality with "Are you serious?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08uk99L8oqQ
The small-L libertarians (the ones wearing clothes and making unlicensed toast) warned for years "imagine the worst person having this power" and got laughed out of the room. Cold comfort for them to be proven right given everything going to crap. And even if we come back from this, what are the odds anything will be learned? "Ah, we touched the stove, but we're okay now, I guess that didn't matter."
I don't think we can blame people's ignorance on civics educators. My civics teachers tried their hardest to teach us. But if the only time anyone's exposed to this knowledge is during high school, it's no wonder only a minority of us retains anything.
Whatever one might think of the constitutionality of Obamacare, it was passed by Congress, largely upheld by a conservative Supreme Court and withstood 20+ efforts at repeal. It is entirely different than executive actions that evade Congress as Trump is now doing. The constitutionality of Trump’s actions have yet to be finally decided.
Or Iraq, for that matter. Weird choices for examples since they’re both things Congress did.
I said elsewhere that Trump is doing a speed-run. It's like the imperialness of the past 10 presidents, all crammed into a few weeks, and in actions instead of words. I remember the debate about law firms defending Gitmo terrorists, and we've already surpassed the total shittiness of that in a day.
Wait you’re referencing the ACA passed by congress as an example of what exactly?
Right, but by "like Donald Trump" I meant "opposed to international trade and actively hostile toward allies." IOW, Congress failed to anticipate that the legislation giving US presidents authority to hike tariffs would be abused in the manner Trump has done, because Trump's particular ideological makeup wasn't foreseen. Nixon had authoritarian tendencies, but he wasn't a lunatic on trade, and he didn't dislike having alliances.
It's possible that Donald Trump wouldn't have given a fig for any legislation the Democratic Congress passed in 2021-2022. Biden certainly would have, though.
Interesting attempt to pin some of the blame for Trump's current actions on the Democrats, though.
Because congressmen like presidents of their own party more than congressmen of the other party
It happened in multiple steps over many years. Congress doesn't want to take responsibility for anything.
Because this way congressmen can avoid taking difficult votes
Because they can't get anything done and do not want the responsibility and backlash of making hard decisions anymore.
Congress lets this happen because they want the presidency to have more power. It deflects blame from them personally with their constituents, and they also want a president of their party to have that power.
Longtermism and bond market to the rescue! Except not really, because discount rates are terrible and the median voter doesn't think much about the shade of trees planted for their grandkids. Which does make me grimly satisfied, in a FAFO way, that Harris lost because eggs are too expensive -> eggs are even more expensive now -> ??? midterms profit, maybe.
But it also sucks to feel the impact of these crazy trade swings in real time. This isn't the worst supply shockI've ever had to work through - during the nadir of covid, my company actually prevented us department heads from choosing what to order each day, instead trying to centrally plan around an equitable allotment of remaining inventory to each store. Eventually even that broke down, and it was just "ship literally everything that isn't nailed down, don't bother with signage or merchandising, shelves are gonna get cleaned out regardless". Even once control was devolved to the stores again, for a good long while I had something like 100 items out of stock on a rotating basis (so between a quarter and a third of products unavailable on any given day).
The current chaos isn't quite at that level, but...it's ticking up there. Items suddenly being discontinued out of the blue. Shipping estimates being changed on a dime. Planned product launches being cancelled. "Seasonal" items getting promoted to evergreen to cover holes in the lineup. Max order quantity limits on bestsellers (we try very hard not to ration things at the customer level, but more of that might be coming too). Renegotiating contracts on the fly, losing long-time suppliers we and our customers counted on for consistent quality + low price. Constant scrambling to adjust merchandising and inventory levels when items unexpectedly appear/disappear. You might not be able to tell, as a shopper on the other side of the counter...but believe me, we're worried in Groceryland. Trade instability is in many ways even worse than actually-bad-but-consistent trade hostility. At least there, the game state is known, so one can plan around it.
*You've never seen a reefer driver angry until they've delivered an entire 10-pallet load of just frozen items (like 500+ cases/12000+ units), which loaded down the truck so much it visibly rode lower, and that was just to stock my one department. All sold out the next day. I'll never forget it...
This is fascinating. And also alarming that you are already seeing a bit of chaos again. Thanks for sharing the nuts and bolts details.
Harris lost because she was a horrible candidate, not because egg prices were too high…
I wouldn’t say she was horrible. She was a median candidate in a scenario where you needed an extraordinary candidate.
Weighed down by 4 years of some really bad policy choices
Name a worse democratic candidate that actually won the primary in the past 30 years … Hilary may have been worse, that is it.
I think Dukakis and Kerry and Clinton were all weaker candidates.
Side note: Damn! Democrats run weak candidates.
1988 was more than 30 years ago….
Ya, Dems have run some real weak candidates. I remember how Gore underperformed.
With that criteria you are only left with Gore, Kerry and Clinton. It looks like you are communicating something other than your subjective assertions.
There have only been 7 elections in the last 30 years and 3 of those were incredible candidates for Democrats. (Obama & Clinton). I don't think it's at all obvious that Harris was a worse candidate than Biden or Gore either.
Hillary was definitely worse! In 2016, the economy was fine and Trump was extremely unpopular. She still lost! The headwinds for Dems in 2024 were far worse.
Also, obviously Biden 2024 was worse than Harris, and I'd even argue that Biden 2020 just lucked out because of the pandemic.
I'd say Harris was a somewhat better candidate than Gore, about on par with Kerry, and clearly inferior to Obama.
Yeah I'd say that Harris 2024 is actually stronger than Biden 2020. But, Harris 2020 would not have been stronger than Biden 2020.
Harris 2020 did real damage to Harris 2024.
Aren't the appropriate points of comparison for Harris actually Humphrey in 1968 and Ford in 1976? Unpopular legacy administrations, party dissension, uphill extrinsic circumstances in the country, and they all still did pretty well in the circumstances and kept it close (remember, if Harris got 236,000 more votes in the right swing states, she would have won the electoral college 270-268 while losing the popular vote by 2 million - and think what fun American politics would have been had that happened!).
We could have had Pete
I think it’s not even that Hillary was a bad candidate - she did all the candidate things well. She just had a history with voters that was unfortunate.
having the media hate her was not her fault but it did make her a bad candidate.
It's all subjective, of course, but I thought she had negative charisma; whereas Harris seemed kinda fun and cool to hang with. Then again, I never liked Hilary, starting way back with her punching down on Monica Lewinsky, so I'm sure that colors my perspective.
“Basket of deplorables” is proof enough that she was a bad candidate.
Cool, shall we argue whether Superman or the Hulk is stronger, next?
Please, with the subjectivism...
Bruh, it’s Superman. He has to always hold back. Hulk is weakened by lots of emotional baggage.
Minor point, egg prices are down.
Trump won in 2016 in what looked like a bit of a fluke; weird reality TV host, lost the popular vote, had the Comey letter come out at the perfect time. There was a an impulse to treat him as total aberration meaning for establishment Dems they could go back to the status quo ante and to the progressives post even more clap emojis 👏.
But, the Republican Party is clearly remade, the old establishment is gone and the Party of Reagan is dead. The Dems desperately need new leadership that not only recalculates their own positions into a more popular direction but that formulates policy for the reality of an isolationist Trumpist Republican party.
IDK, I still think Trump has a very personal form of politics and the next GOP leader to get elected President may be very different.
I would anticipate they end up somewhere between Rubio and Vance and aesthetically trend back towards people who more or less look the part. Trump is the only weird candidate to actually turn his persona and brand into a big success politically and MAGA tends to under perform in the clutch (Dr. Oz, Hershel Walker, etc.).
There are of course always some odd ducks in the House caucuses and the GOP seems to have an unusually high number of cranks and oddballs but I suspect they're close to the ceiling of what's possible. Or maybe that's just copium.
I think the next Republican nominee is very likely to be just JD Vance. And one would have to speculate a 40% chance of winning. At that point we're 16 to 20 years between non-Trumpist nominees.
Right now but three years in this economy is a long time. Will maga turn out in same numbers without Trump on the ticket?
No. I have a lot of Trump-voting friends and relatives. It's almost impossible to overrate how important "Trump is entertaining" has been to them. Vance, Rubio, Haley, and other possible 2028 candidates simply don't have the juice.
I think there's a decent chance that Trump has popularity levels similar to Bush Jr did in 2008 at which point the party will be running away from him as quickly as possible.
I'd say it's either Vance or Donald Trump Jr. but a lot could happen in 3 years.
The big question is how deep MAGAs roots are, a lot of prominent Republicans are now MAGA in the spirit of Trump rather than just getting in line and when Trump dies of obesity will they quickly get purged or will they manage to oust the remaining regular Republicans.
And they will lack the parasocial relationship that makes Trump work
I think both of you are right—the party has been remade AND there’s no real substitute for Trump (so far). Which is why I’ve continued to scratch my head at what comes next for the GOP.
I sure hope you are right.
We REALLY need two sane normal parties (note i would argue we have zero right now)
Very different for sure - but no reason to particularly think they will be very different in the *same* way past people were - there is room for any number of directions.
Out of curiosity, what does new leadership for the Dems look like to you? Not a person (necessarily), but what archetype is needed a la the GOP needed a shameless "strong man" and carnival barker to rustle up the low-info voters and fragile masculinity?
All indications so far are that Trumpian malevolence and incompetence will be such a big turnoff for the voters than by 2028 they'll be desperate for the opposite. Some calm, competent Democratic officeholder like a Josh Shapiro.
If Trump turns out to be successful, then the Democrats will probably need an outsider/businessman*/celebrity/cis/straight type like a Mark Cuban or Matthew McConaughey.
* Sorry businesswomen: it's going to be a long time before the Dems roll the dice on a woman candidate again, unfortunately.
Same goes for someone like Mayor Pete. He thrills the hearts of Warren-type PMC/college educated voters, but it's just not where the median voter is these days.
Pete at least goes on Fox News; I think that’s quietly been a part of his strategy for 2028.
Bring on The Fonz! Dems seem to do best with some version of "too cool for school" candidates. We need some stylish person who is highly articulate, an attention magnet, and able to riff in a compelling way.
Someone who has an organic pre-existing celebrity and knows how to use social media.
Trump term 1.0 was characterized by a significant lack of any strongly held political beliefs, so he just did regular republican thing. He has since picked up some actual beliefs (trade deficit bad, low-level manufacturing good) that he is sincerely trying to implement. Unfortunately those beliefs are sort of insane, so the stocks are freaking out!
Or perhaps during 1.0, the strongly held political beliefs were held in check by "the adults in the room" who are now conspicuously absent.
He is governing as one might expect of a lame duck, who doesn't need to worry about reelection and knows this is his last shot to push through some policies he really cares about and has for a long time.
Trade deficit and tariffs are things he has been yammering about since the 1980s - he has always believed this stuff, but just didn’t know how to act on it in 2017.
As a Poland resident, Poland getting nukes is a majorly positive step. I hope we do it in tandem with the rest of the countries directly threatened by Russia.
The main thing we see from the Ukraine situation is nothing else will actually deter Putin from attacking us as he views Russia from a 19th century perspective where it basically extended from Warsaw eastwards to the pacific.
Once NATO is letting all of its member violate the NPT (which will happen once Poland does it) NPT will be permanently dead and a lot of countries you really do not want to have nuclear programs will get nuclear weapons. NPT isn't particularly fair but its a really nice baseline for the competing Great Powers to say "OK we won't let our vassals have civilisation ending weapons if you don't". Its not just a bad countries will get them its that unstable countries will get them, the advantage of such extreme controls on nuclear weaponry is it makes it very difficult for terror groups to get them, depending on how the ongoing insurgency situation in Pakistan goes we may learn the hard way what happens when we let every country have nuclear weapons.
There are so many ways we'll likely learn that having the US as the dominant military power turned out to have some positive aspects.
I can't agree with this more. American foreign policy successes rarely seem to be acknowledged, inside or outside the US. Avoiding nuclear proliferation has been a huge one.
Agreed, but don’t let Freddie deBoer hear you!
NPT died when Russia invaded Ukraine after signing a treaty saying they would respect Ukraine's borders if they gave up their nuclear weapons.
Or at least, when we decide to let Russia benefit from having invaded Ukraine. A strong push to boot Russia out of Ukraine and make clear that the world will come together to prevent aggression against non-nuclear nations could prevent this, but it seems very, very unlikely at this point.
Thanks, Obama!
Frankly, I disagree. No border country is looking at the Ukraine war and trying to game out what their regional strongman is learning from Russia’s experience in Ukraine. Even assuming a level of US control over Russian outcomes that is frankly unrealistic, particularly with our current President.
I thought NPT died when Israel never signed it and decided to develop nuclear weapons and had zero repercussions? And then India refused to sign it and developed nuclear weapons and had zero repercussions?
Neither country is exactly an international pariah for ignoring the NPT and developing nuclear weapons.
North Korea signed it but then developed nuclear weapons with Soviet assistance anyway. Both countries already had tons of international opprobrium so hard to say if breaking the NPT had any actual marginal downside or not.
South Africa refused to sign and developed nuclear weapons but, again, hard to see if they suffered any marginal downside given the anti-apartheid movement at the time.
Lost you when you used the 19th century expression “great powers”. That thinking has never worked for countries like Poland and no reason to think it will in the future.
They did not suggest that it was a good deal for Poland. They suggested that a) it's a good deal for the world as a whole, and b) it may be a bad deal, but you will likely find out that "You get a Nuke! And You get a Nuke! And You get a Nuke!" for every country is going to be a much worse deal.
I suspect they used the 19th century expression on purpose, and not because they are out of touch and unaware of how the world has changed since then.
... and I was not really interested in "good deal for the world as a whole" here. The point is there really is no motivation for Poland or any other country that is threatened by Russia to not proliferate now.
So far, a couple of friendly good countries have had nukes:
* Britain
* France
* Pre-Trump USA
* India?
And the following less friendly countries, at least one of whom has repeatedly threatened to use them agains Poland EVEN when Poland was an unwilling "ally".
* Russia
* China
* Pakistan
* Israel
* Apartheid South Africa
* North Korea
* Trump's USA
* Soon to be Iran
Not sure this NPT is a net positive for world security in the way you think it is.
How would you feel about Germany having nuclear weapons?
If you are asking which list above I would put them on, probably the first. But given history, Germany having nukes would double down on my argument that Poland needs them.
When Canada is talking about getting nukes you know things have gotten wild.
Given the Russian military's performance against Ukrainian forces, how worried are people in Poland about Russia's ability to defeat Poland's army? I mean, apart from their excellent ability to hit schools and hospitals with missiles and drones.
Worried. The Polish army is currently smaller and less prepared than the Ukrainian one. And it's clear that no-one is coming to the rescue.
The worst thing is Russia's method of winning. If they won because they were good at fighting (like the US) they would cause much less destruction. They win by destroying everything in sight until you decide that you'd rather live in relative peace under them than lose everything you own.
Russia is willing to use more people faster than you can build weapons.
Yes, but that's a trick with a limited lifespan given Russia's demographics. Short of a total Ukrainian collapse in the very near future (which seems unlikely), the Russians are still going to need to grind off tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of casualties before reaching the Polish border.
They’ll incorporate the Ukrainians and Moldovans and maybe Belarus in their army.
*SIGH* You can wank off to the Russian willingness to take casualties all you want, but in the end, there is no longer an unlimited supply of manpower there even assuming Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Belarusian conscripts (all of whom one would expect to be even less enthusiastic than ethnic Russians and all of whom are in smaller supply). I will acknowledge that getting Belarus to join would give the Russians the luxury of being immediately adjacent to Poland, but the Belarusians aren't actively providing troops in Ukraine today, so I'm skeptical that they are going to be going on the offensive against Poland. (I'm also quite sure that I remember that the Belarussian army has already been stripped of a lot of its armor and motor vehicle transport equipment in the past three years because Belarus shipped it back to Russia. See, e.g.: https://kyivindependent.com/belarus-provides-over-60-tanks-dozens-of-vehicles-to-russia/ )
Why are we in this mess?
Lots of reasons: Kamala was uninspiring, people were pissed off about high prices/DEI/illegal immigration, etc. etc.
But one huge reason that, frankly, Matt Y hasn't been talking much about is: half of Americans don't care about things that used to be completely obvious and accepted by all Americans regardless of party affiliation. I'm talking things like: Nobody is above the law. The loser in an election concedes and relinquishes power gracefully. It's not ok to use the DOJ to threaten your political opponents or to dole out pardons to violent rioters because they're your supporters. We ought to respect our international alliances and agreements.
Matt's nine-point CSDM is all well and good, but it contains nothing about the above concerns.
You cannot, CAN NOT have a functioning, small-l liberal democracy where only one of the two major parties is in favor of bedrock principles like those I listed above. It's like having a sparring match where only one opponent agrees to refrain from eye-gouging or using a knife.
How the heck do we get back to where our society used to be, where most people at least paid lip service to the basic principles of democracy? No one is above the law, you can't overturn an election if you don't like the result, etc.?
Can we talk more about this in addition to "how badly must the economy be doing before enough swing voters say, gee, maybe voting for Trump wasn't a great idea"?
In this piece, Matt says "it’s clear that, unfortunately, this [Trump is unfit of being POTUS because of Jan 6] is not a compelling message or narrative for swing voters." This clearly turned out to be true, but I don't like the undertone of hopelessness, like public opinion is carved in stone and there's nothing one can do about it: "Welp, swing voters don't give a damn about small-d democratic norms, whaddya gonna do." One might as well have said in 1940, "Welp, white Americans are adamantly opposed to equal rights for Black Americans, so there's nothing to be done." No! The correct thing to do is to ask, "How can we change public opinion enough to enable meaningful progress on equal rights for Black Americans?"
The moral arc of the universe doesn't bend itself. People bend it.
How can be bend the arc of American society towards, "small-d democratic norms are good and necessary, actually"?
This is a problem not just in the USA but across the world. It may take decades for humans to adapt to the emergence of social media and we may be on the other side of another world war or a nuclear accident before people once again realize that small-d democracy is actually good.
I'm not sure people ever cared about it, tbh. Democracies work because there are enough competing power centers to force each other to stay in line. All structures fray over time.
I would give the US more credit. The current small-d democratic structure was put in place after WW-II right after everyone witnessed massive suffering and the US instead of acting like a Mafia boss allowed Europe to rebuild vibrant small-d democracies. There was genuine consensus post WW-II that small-d democracy is good and we have slowly lost that memory.
I don’t think that’s it. I mean, if you time-traveled to 1955 and asked a bunch of ordinary Americans in the street “is it ok to try to overturn an election,” I bet almost all of them would say “of course not, how is this even a question?”
I think they would say that now. But then they would backfill it by saying that the 2020 election was actually stolen from Trump, and Democrats stole the nomination from Bernie, and then installed Harris as a queen, and so Trump was actually doing the right thing and his opponents are the villains.
I mean the US could have had election denial at any time between the civil war and 2008 as massive shifts like Civil rights and the Great depression occurred in this period. Yet it took the rise of social media post 2008 to create the conditions where a large scale conspiracy can take hold.
The public has believed incredibly stupid things in the meantime. I agree that social media has made things much worse. But our democracy has already broken once, with the Civil War.
Voters are stupid and terrible. Full stop. Strong parties were our defense against demagogues, and Trump breached the Republican Party's firewall.
I'm old enough to remember the voting machine fraud conspiracies of 2004. I think the main differences are the singularity of Donald Trump and the crank realignment meant that the conspiracies were able to reach a larger audience with less responsible pushback.
F**k, you’re probably right.
I read an article by an African student in the US once; he said something to the effect of "you kick your democracy around like a soccer ball; you do not realize how fragile this all is."
The real threat comes from a situation where the second half of America starts abandoning rule of law. We're not there, I don't think we're close, but I can think of a few plausible chains of events that get us there.
We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us from things getting really bad.
“We are hugely lucky that Trump is 78, old age will probably save us”
Meh, color me skeptical. Sure, a 78-year-old Trump is much less dangerous than a 48-year-old Trump. But he is surrounded by lackeys like Vance who are much younger, as well as intelligent and evil. It’s quite likely that one of them continues what Trump started.
In any case, the problem of “swing voters don’t give a fruit fly’s fart about democratic norms” will remain even after Trump eats the Hamburger of Destiny.
The voters who like Trump don't like his successors.
True, but are they like “I hate Vance, I’d rather vote for a Democrat” or “well I don’t like Vance, but he is the handpicked successor of God’s Anointed Servant Trump, so I must support him against the evil DemocRATs”?
So all these guys are gonna fight it out. Vance doesn't have the guts to defenestrate deSantis so it's gonna be a bunch of arguing. Uday and Qusay may try to get in but they don't have dad's charisma.
A lot of people voted just for Trump and no one else. There are people he's activated that will go back home once there's not a Trump to vote for.
I have a lot of Trump-voting family members, and I agree with your last sentence. Without Trump in the race they just won't care very much and the chances they vote at all drop enormously.
My instinct is that "Meh, I don't care enough to vote" will be fairly common in 2028 among 2024 Trump voters.
I think the spell will likely break with Trump. Trump's endorsed candidates don't do that well electorally. And I don't think he cares enough about Vance to try to prop him up like that regardless.
One thing I worry about is Jr running with the explicit promise that Trump Sr will be pulling the strings, effectively giving him a third term.
If NATO functions only at the whim of the American president, America’s allies need to make other plans.
>"How do we rebuild the civil service if federal employees don’t actually get job stability in exchange for limited financial upside?" With less job stability and higher pay.
Competing with the private sector is politically toxic and less job security in this case now means worse than the private sector. Its a recipe for an utterly dysfunctional CS.
I agree, but would it actually be politically feasible to lift public service wages sufficiently to compete for the best private sector talent? To get a young hot shot to turn down a gig at Jane Street to work at Treasury?
You don’t need all A Players for CS, paying enough to attract a few A players and a bunch of B players would be a vast improvement over the C players they have now.
This might be an ok trade, and it's probably the only thing we can do in the medium term, but the main point of the trade off is continuity. If you don't want policy on everything whipsawing every four years, you need people who know how everything works. I'd say, if we wanted a more responsive government, fixing Congress to incentivize updating legislation, instead of endless showboating, would probably be better somehow.
What was the tagline? “This is the first actual transfer of power.”
I think it’s pretty clear that we DO want policy whipsawing every 4 years. People really hate it when their guy wins and the things he promised don’t happen.
I think voters can be reached on what they voted for, lower the cost of living, control border crossings. Civil servants are busier tweaking small regulations that in totality add up.
It's not (just) about the pay. Give the faceless bureacrats more capacity to actually get things done. Give them staffs that aren't just contractors. Make promotions for efficacy more rapid.
A lot of people take civil service jobs because they love America and want to contribute but are frustrated by how little they're able to bring their talent and drive to the job. More than money (though the money doesn't hurt), letting civil servants be effective is the single biggest thing you could do to make those jobs attractive.
I doubt unions would be enthusiastic about that trade.
It works for Singapore
Will they get a vote?
This is the only solution .
I guess we could find out just how much of the government’s jobs can be contracted out instead of hired for directly.
So much government work is already contracted out. We need to pay CS folks better and have them actually do the work.
Oh that wasn’t an endorsement of contract workers replacing government employees. I’d much prefer giving government employees raises. It is a way to get around it potentially, though.
Oh I agree, I just mean that we are already pretty far along with contracting as it is.
“… the dilemmas posed by the emergence of the Delta variant (and others that followed) were substantively difficult, and Biden’s team didn’t have broadly acceptable answers."
Biden basically changed nothing from the approach that came out of CDC/FDA during the Trump Administration. These were not actually Trumps fault, they were just bureaucracies doing what bureaucracies do, but changing to a strategy of giving individuals and local policy makers information and tools so they coud make better decisions like not keeping schools closed, not requiring Covid testing for international travel would have been good policy and smart politics.
The FDA ban on human challenge trials really did need a president to say “No. this is unacceptable and the peope who say otherwise should not be in charge of setting policy. Use your fucking brains and stop whatever the hell this virtue-signalling-by-way-of-preventing-people-from-being-virtuous is.”
Same about FDA not allowing cheap and dirty COVID screening tests.
I’m glad they are *finally* allowing flu tests too.
Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark had a great discussion with Leana Wen digging into how the Biden team could have better handled Covid: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/unresolved-covid-trauma-with-dr-leana
One of Dr. Wen's point was that the communication was unfocused and that there was no end point to any policy. No signaling that when we meet condition A, policy B will no longer be necessary.
I remember having a conversation with another guy roughly my age on a private slack group, and I was saying, "I'm stopping masking, I hate it, everyone who wants a vaccine is vaccinated, and it was never particularly effective," and his position was, "I'm going to keep masking until the CDC declares the pandemic over." And I said, "Does the CDC in fact declare pandemics over?"
There was just no end point, just a gradual lessening of urgency.
This was most obvious to me with the travel bans on Europe and South Africa lasting for months or years, rather than ending 10 or 15 days later when they were done doing their job of delaying virus arrival by a few days.
True, but that's a criticism of Trump's administration. The criticism of Biden's administration is that they didn't change that pattern of failing to define and communicate clear policy.
Hi
As you are not already a subscriber, may I invite you to subscribe (for free) to my substack, "Radical Centrist?"
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I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is by far the least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I want to be that scribbler.
Thanks,
I think part of the problem was that some of the conditions were too ambitious and people didn't want to admit defeat/accept partial victory. California had a clear reopening plan in 2020 (e.g. https://www.desertsun.com/story/money/business/2020/08/28/california-reopening-new-rules-businesses-governor/5636271002/) but there wasn't a clear path to green (business as usual) and there were different plans for different categories which makes sense in practice but leads to incoherent public policy (bars can be open but we recommend you don't see your friends at their house and schools will remain remote)
I hope our swing voter friends are enjoying the declining cost of living/eggs/sticking it to the annoying HR lady by voting for Trump while the bust-out of America continues apace.
I may normally be a swing voter, but I have voted D three straight times. Trump is anathema.
>>But how do we come back from the collapse of the western alliance system?<<
I doubt we can, not fully, not anytime soon. Of course, one should be humble about prognostication: the future is hard to predict. But, even if the GOP suffers big losses over the next two cycles, and a fully committed, pro-Western alliance internationalist becomes our next president, our allies and adversaries will have to consider the probability that Trump wasn't a one-off, but was in fact the product of US political and constitutional dysfunction, and that the Invade Canada Party might soon be back in power.
In the 2030s, bet-hedging will necessarily characterize global calculus with respect to US foreign policy, even when Democrats control the White House. At minimum, treaties and agreements with America won't be worth the paper they're printed on for the foreseeable future.
This is probably right, but in part it will depend on future outcomes. If the Dems win a 40 seat House majority in 2026 and its 2028 candidate wins a 1984 Reagan-like victory, then that will open up space for rebuilding alliances.
If it's another thermostatic close election, promising more swings in the future, then probably not.