I have to go help a friend move some stuff for the next few hours so I’m just dropping in now to remind people to stay civil and make me have to do as little moderating as possible this afternoon
Maybe you should try what my teachers occasionally did and put some brown-noser in charge of taking down names of people who misbehaved while you're gone.
The rejection of compromise is also driven by creeping Niemöllerism, too -- after all, first they came for [tiny marginal group] and then they came for me. This engenders the attitude that you must respond to any threat, of any severity, to any member of your coalition as a maximal threat to the entire coalition. Indeed -- you are weak and naive to respond with less than maximum force to any threat. For "they" are implacably evil, and they treat compromise only as a means to total victory.
Are there enemies who are implacably evil, and cannot be appeased? Yes; Hitler was one, and Putin is now another.
But Niemöller's dictum is a catastrophic model for domestic politics, where the median US voter is more likely to respond to uncompromising purity with thermostatic rejection. Furthermore, strategies and attitudes inspired by Niemöller's dictum make you look, to your opponents and neutral onlookers, exactly like the kind of implacable enemy with whom there can be no compromise. So they're going to Niemöller you just like you Niemöller them, and then politics has been replaced by warfare.
It's a stirring quotation, but a horrible model for being an effective agent in a democracy.
I've always read Niemöller in a much more Mencken kind of way:
>The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
I think that it speaks to the fact that this dichotomy is often blurry and sometimes breaks down. Compromising on one issue doesn't always give you leeway on others. For instance, some LGB folks have called to cut trans people out of their coalition, thinking that conservatives wouldn't go after them either. However, the recent spate of book bans, groomer rhetoric, and Don't say gay law have all impacted LGB folks as well.
It's not that there are never trade offs with coalition building, but they don't always take the simple left-right dichotomy that Matt and other "popularists" say they do.
Isn't some of it that the anti-marriage-equality folks kept claiming it was a slippery slope to other things, and as cultural warfare keeps aiming for maximal victories around hotly contested issues, that seems to ring true, so they get less tolerant?
Consider polygamy(picking it because it's not _currently_ a hot button fight). Some claimed that marriage equality would lead to people trying to legalize polygamy. I have no real moral objection to polygamy (I worry about how it has been used to repress women in the past but that's a worry about it's dangers, not a moral objection) but I want no part of it myself. Depending on the specific protections I could vote for it on a ballot measure but I think it would be political suicide for the Democrats to try to push this, even if a few polyamorous people would significantly benefit legally, I think it's just wildly unpopular.
That's bad for some of those people! Visitation rights in hospital etc. But I think pushing for it would also cause "traditional family" supporters to double down even more on their pushback.
Some LGB folks have called for cutting out the T--because the concept of gender identity is antithetical to homosexuality, and much of what activists are pushing for in law and social norms would make same sex attraction akin to “sexual racism”, as one voice put it notably.
Acceptance of and support for gay marriage was at an all time high until trans rights activism started hitting the news and schools. It’s the forced teaming of LGB and T in the first place that’s hurting LGBs.
I think it's the moralist side but trying to give some clarity as to what to expect when defending sacred principles. It's also in its own way kind of an antithesis to Matt's essay in the sense that it most obviously implicates constitutional rights (speech, depending on your view of the exclusionary rule the Fourth Amendment) for which an absolutist rather than a compromise position has obvious virtues despite also potential drawbacks.
But the ACLU also wasn't running for office. I'm glad the ACLU did that, they used those cases to help other groups later. But it would have been terrible politics for a party to do this, and that the ACLU at the time seemed unaffiliated with a party(this last statement may be faulty memory/historical understanding on my part)
And it's really, really sad that this happened. We need more groups like the old ACLU that were laser focused on one set of issues without getting derailed by others that don't have as much consensus among those laser focused on their prime issues.
Arguably the more frustrating invocation of Niemöller occurs in contexts in which the secular trend is *in favor* of the social-progressive left (which is to say, on almost every social-progressive frontier), and less than-total-victory is equated to a camels'-nose-under-the-tent loss. The sports debate referenced in Matt's article seems like it's among the most acute examples here: in what respect is the status quo facing some degree of pushback on *worse* than fifteen years ago from the perspective of even the most ardent of advocates? This is simply *not like* the situation that the Niemöller poem is referencing, and the analogy is therefore bad regardless of the merits the substantive position!
Like, yes, Dobbs, but also Dobbs is basically the exception that proves the rule here as far as "things not going the way that progressives would like in a way suggestive of their inevitable victory."
Also, Dobbs happened because Roe was a maximalist victory that society wasn’t ready for. It’s not just an exception, it’s a cautionary tale: if you pursue victories that are too maximalist to be widely accepted, you risk a Pyrrhic victory, even if it seems like you had solidly won for 5 straight decades.
Roe, itself, wasn't all that maximalist (states can't interfere in the first trimester, can restrict but not ban in the second, can ban in the third); the problem was that when the Supreme Court first tried to analyse what was a non-restrictive regulation in the first trimester and what was a permitted restrictive regulation that wasn't tantamount to a ban in the second, in Casey, it abandoned the trimester framework for "undue burden", which then meant that instead of having some restrictions on the second trimester that don't apply to the first, every state either applied them to every abortion or to none, and the entire concept of Roe that 13-26 weeks isn't the same as 0-13 went out of the window.
Weirdly, Casey was a compromise (crafted by O'Connor). If the compromise in Casey had been to stick to the trimester framework and strike down all the restrictions for the first trimester and permit them all for the second (rather than permit some and ditch others), then I suspect the abortion debate could have been very different.
You’re correct on the specifics, but too specific to be correct on the broader level I was working on.
One can certainly cast Roe’s trimester scheme as “not maximalist”, but this ignores the fact that it basically overrode every state’s existing laws in an absolutely maximalist fashion.
Abortion was simply not a polarized issue at that time, and Roe’s maximalism is what changed that. A different Casey might well have mooted/averted Dobbs, but that’s a VERY large possibility space you’re talking about. Moreover, the generation of abortion activism that Roe started was a key influence on the Casey that we got - we don’t get *this* Casey without millions of liberals believing that abortion is a core human right that derives from privacy.
So, the point remains that Roe sowed the seeds of its demise.
All of that is true - but any decision that permitted early abortions in states that didn't want to legalise them would have been "maximalist" in your sense, and any such decision would have to come from the idea that abortion is a core human right.
Within the space of possible Supreme Court decisions that legalise abortion, I think it's hard to regard Roe as maximalist.
If your criticism of Roe is that "a Supreme Court decision that legalises abortion is maximalist", then sure. But then I don't think you're criticising Roe, the specific decision, but the entire concept of a constitutional right to abortion without a constitutional amendment.
>> If your criticism of Roe is that "a Supreme Court decision that legalises abortion is maximalist", then sure.
More or less. But it didn’t JUST legalize abortion, it overrode every state’s existing laws regardless of to what extent they themselves legalized it.
>> Within the space of possible Supreme Court decisions that legalise abortion, I think it's hard to regard Roe as maximalist.
Again, though, you’re applying the absolute wrong frame to this. The problem wasn’t WHICH legal abortion scheme it imposed on the whole country, it was THAT it imposed a scheme on the whole country before it was ready.
The rule of Roe was that the only valid restrictions in the second trimester were ones that protected the woman's health. Fetal interests didn't become compelling until the third trimester. This is one key element people see as maximalist; until Casey, the Supreme Court took a pretty hard line on all pre-viability restrictions, particularly ones it understood as being about the fetus. Casey held that states could regulate abortion out of respect for fetal life even pre-viability, such as by trying to inform/persuade a woman's choice, as long as it didn't impose an undue burden. But Casey didn't allow pre-viability bans either, even with exceptions.
Many people are more uncomfortable with second trimester abortions than first trimester abortions, but I don't think the American constitutional law of abortion ever really internalized that (at least not officially). My personal view is that I would accept restrictions on second trimester pre-viability abortions in exchange for more solid guarantees of real access in the first trimester, particularly for women who have difficulty traveling or paying for care.
It drew two lines, one at the boundary between the first and second trimesters and the other at the end of the second trimester which was presumed to be viability. Abortions had to be legal to viability, but could be restricted in the second trimester. The problem was that it didn't come up with a framework for what was an OK regulation and what wasn't, the lower courts just threw all regulations out, and then Casey threw the whole trimester framework in the bin.
Roe *did* protect women's rights for those five decades which, as Pyrrhic victories go, wasn't *that* Pyrrhic. You could say it was an undemocratic way to protect those rights but that's what we want the Supreme Court to do.
Yes, it energized the most conservative part of the Republican base and helped push the drive to get more conservative justices on the Supreme Court, but I doubt that, absent Roe, the two parties would both be moderate groups happy to find common ground today.
To be clear, I’m not blaming Roe for this current crisis, nor positing a magical alternative history.
To that point, I believe that Roe and abortion politics in general can be characterized as an adjuvant of the polarization spiral kicked off by the Sixth Party system. It didn’t conclusively accelerate the spiral, but it *did* profoundly shape how it took place.
But I do think that if Roe had essentially been Dobbs - ruling that abortion was an issue for the states - that abortion would have been a mostly moot issue by the 90’s, because all of the state-level politics would have fully played out by then.
Without abortion as a rallying cry for social conservatives like Evangelicals, and especially as a focus of campaign promises for their politicians, the GOP would have had to turn to other cultural issues much sooner. We don’t have to make any overconfident/unjustified pronouncements about alternative history merely to observe the mechanics we’ve seen play out over the last 50 years, and note that those mechanics would have proceeded very differently.
I agree that things would have turned out very differently. Better or worse, who's to say.
I think the whole debate turns on whether one thinks abortion should have been decided by the democratic process or that it was a right that deserved being protected from majority action in certain locations.
I think that entire question you pose, that entire framing of abortion as potentially a "right", is not something most people at the time Roe was decided would have recognized.
I won't insult you by saying your opinions about abortion might not be deeply nor sincerely held, nor well-considered. But I *will* say that they are quite obviously profoundly shaped by Roe. Specifically, by the fact that Roe framed abortion as a core civil right and therefore shaped what its supporters would believe about it.
But before Roe, abortion was widely considered even by its supporters to be a social question, not a question of civil rights. That's part of why it was so easy for politicians in both parties to have wildly varying opinions on it.
My point is, it's really easy to frame it as "democratic process vs. rights" after 50 years of framing it that way. But that doesn't necessarily mean people HAD to frame it that way. Absent Roe (or in "Roe = Dobbs" world), it's possible -- and I deeply suspect so -- that abortion would have continued being seen as a social question, one that might as well fall under "states' rights". A handful of activists might call it a "human right", and they might even have a sizeable minority of public sentiment behind them, but we'd all be side-eye-ing them the way we do people who insist that "healthcare is a human right", even if many of us still vaguely supported abortion-on-demand.
David, you also can't ignore the fact that other areas of life, such as contraception, and even zoning, were being discussed in terms of privacy and individual basic rights. Wasn't Roe "just" another step, though certainly major because of the moral issue,another step along the trail of increased autonomy of individuals as developing after WW2 and through the 60's and 70's?
That assumes some sort of moral arc of history that may or may not exist, and also that abortion resides somewhere on that arc, which it doesn’t necessarily have to.
As one would expect for a deeply personal political argument among competing views of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
David M. is correct that Roe circumvented those debates from happening and they are happening now instead of in the 1970s. State-level elections are turning on this questions, as should have happened years ago.
Dobbs happened because Republicans worked for 50 years to get their judges on the bench so they could constrain women's rights in a way they could not via the ballot box.
Plenty of states could have banned abortion “at the ballot box”, but Roe kept them from doing that. I’m not asking you to abjure your beliefs here, I’m just asking you to consider other perspectives.
This comment puts me in an odd position because on the one hand I agree with the analysis, but on the other hand I feel like events have overtaken it in some sense, at least in some parts of the country. I'm thinking specifically about the recent laws in Florida, where the initial action was pretty explicitly against trans people, but that grew into a more general anti-gay attack. I think a lot of people claimed that you could do the sports fight while still supporting gay marriage or being okay with gay people, and instead it looks pretty clearly, at least to me, like the Niemöller analysis holds: the initial attack was just the leading edge of a campaign against a much broader group of people.
And I think you see a similar dynamic in other areas; education issues immediately come to mind (i.e. an attack on gender studies is the leading edge for we should just eliminate tenure and maybe chop the humanities in half and hold history programs to nakedly partisan rewrites). Dobbs is another good example; no sooner had the ink dried on Alito's high-minded defense of sending it back to the states than conservatives began talking about the necessity of a national ban and state legislators began looking for ways to extend anti-abortion sovereignty across their borders.
If Niemöller was wrong, the obvious result would be that people take power and go this far but no farther. But I feel like the actual evidence for that proposition is somewhat lacking. I'm a huge fan of the civil rights movement, but they really WERE planning to use this victory to move forward to THAT victory, and the racists were, in some sense, totally correct to respond with maximum force, even though that also made them (in my opinion) evil.
So like I said, I prefer your analysis, but I'm not actually sure that I buy it.
It's not a question of whether he was wrong, or whether my analysis is right. The cases will vary, and he'll be right about some cases, and wrong about others. That's why it's "creeping Niemöllerism:"
First they applied Niemöller's dictum to Hitler, and they were right!
Then they applied it to some unclear cases, and it's unclear whether they were right or wrong.
Then they applied it to every little intra-faction spat, and politics became intractable.
Neither Niemöller's dictum nor its opposite can be employed as universal guides to politics. You've got to look at the facts of the case, and at your opponents.
I'm just saying that the widespread adoption and over-employment of Niemöllerism is one of the factors making politics unworkable by making compromise seem like total surrender.
I guess what I should have written is that it feels to me like maybe the Niemöller analysis holds more often than makes me personally comfortable. I am basically pretty onboard with both your analysis of the risks of turning things into zero-sum / absolutist fights and with MY's argument about the necessity of advancing by half steps and not throwing people out of the tent.
But my training as a historian coupled with my own observations of events in my lifetime as a broadly-read person with an interest in politics make me feel unsettled about that position in a sense of "maybe I should be quicker to view certain kinds of actors as inherently bad-faith or unsafe as partners for compromise."
I don't know; I think I'm having a hard time articulating how I feel about it, and I'm still not sure I have done so very eloquently. Partly I think I am grappling with an interesting dysjunction in my life, which is that these questions are in some ways similar to, yet also very different from, moral and ethical questions that come up in my role as a health care worker. But also hard problems are hard. That's just the nature of the game.
I think Niemöller applies when rights start getting taken away (I think about it all the time, like someday They will start apply a carefully twisted AI /LLM to our comments on this Substack and then come for us), but I'm doubtful that anyone suddenly jumps on the trans wagon or whatever because of Niemöller. There are a lot of other sociological/psychological factors going on ... "we need a new issue so we can feel virtuous!" "I wanna be a victim too!" (some of my imprecise ways of judging people I don't agree with.)
Viewing Putin as implacably evil is positively dangerous. He’s been in power for 20 years and has fought two wars, both contesting territory his country controlled within his lifetime. Russias claims to Ukraine are not so difference than France’s claim to Alsace in 1914. Was Poincaré an unfathomable monster? Putin has probably killed a smaller portion of his subjects in foreign wars than the enlightened monarch and early vaccine adopter Catherine the Great. He has been far less sanguinary than the men of 1914.
Moreover, Ukraine cannot defeat Putin on the battlefield and will have to negotiate with him. The alternative is a material risk of nuclear war. Containment is still a thing.
Comparing 2023 leaders to 1914 leaders on the morality scale is like saying that the benchwarmers on the Detroit Pistons are better NBA players than the 1950s Celtics were.
On some sense it might be true but it's a useless comparison, and we need to compare people to their own lifetimes.
If France had unilaterally declared war on Germany to reclaim Alsace, they’d have been the villains of WWI (which also wouldn’t have been as big a conflict because there’s no chance Britain and Italy, and maybe even Russia, would have joined them).
That World War I was more devastating than the Ukraine war is undeniable; the question is about responsibility for devastation. Poincaré did what he did, but to get World War I Russia also had to do what it did, Serbia what it did, Austria and Germany what they did, Britain had to declare war over the Belgium treaty…all of it was horrible but the analogy to Putin's "I want to dominate Ukraine so here I go declaring war" does not hold up.
Take it from someone who’s been amply accused of being absurdly on the wrong side of these debates... just quit while you’re still merely just *losing*.
France didn’t start the war over Alsace. The Germans attacked first. And Alsace was not a formally independent sovereign for nearly a century before 1914, nor did it ever achieve de facto independent sovereignty for the most recent 3 decades.
Ukraine absolutely can defeat Russia on the battlefield. If Afghani guerillas could defeat the Soviet Union, Ukraine can defeat Russia. Will it? We'll see. But the capability exists, and Ukrainian forces are advancing right now and bombing Moscow. Wars are unpredictable and topple governments all the time.
I just read a (non-paywalled, I don’t subscribe) piece from Matt Taibbi, and it’s striking how his faction (for which I’m grasping for a name) subscribes to basically this mode of thought.
To him, everything is about the criminalization of dissent, and also follows a very “first they came for _____” pattern. I sort of get it: he was rightly skeptical of the “Trump-Russia collusion” hypothesis and got professionally and personally burned for it, which I agree sucks. That experience, though, clearly radicalized him to the point of turning him from opposing Trump to regarding Trump as a persecuted martyr to be mentioned in the same breath as Julian Assange.
Some of his basic precepts aren’t wrong, exactly: there really are consensuses that relegate dissenters to the status of moral perverts, and there really is some nexus of state, corporate and cultural power that is used to enforce those consensuses. But his increasing tendency to see - again - _everything_ in those terms, and his sort of reverse-Niemöllerism are unnerving. Because I like historical comparisons, I see him as a modern-day Desmoulins whipping up enragés, or at least self-styled enragés.
In terms of social issues, people feel they're losing their rights right now--not just "tiny marginal" groups but the broad population. Abortion comes to mind.
That triggers loss aversion, which is more radicalizing than, say, aversion to thwarted gain.
Not only do they feel directly impacted by a right taken away that they previously took for granted, they're going to see actual tiny groups (trans, etc.) and their shrunken freedom through the same lens.
Niemoller and his logic has bupkis to do with this. People don't need to use him as an analogy. They can feel the loss of their rights in their everyday lives.
(Of course, if you don't know anyone who feels that right now, that's a different story.)
You've presumed the outcome, that leftists are as deluded as Jones and Beck. I think it's obvious that they're not, even though MattY's right that their anti-pragmatic approach to politics sucks
Some of them *are* that deluded. Seems to me that equating people who don't want to defund police and are skeptical of transition care for minors with Hitler is just as crazy, and is the same logical error, as equating the Affordable Care Act to the works of Stalin.
In the grand scheme of things, the issues we're currently debating around minority rights are tiny in comparison to the violent bigotry that used to be routine, but some people insist on equating the denial of their preferred policy on these topics with genocide. That is simply insane and we shouldn't mince words about that.
I just think that's a pretty small, specific group of people to focus on, relative to, say, Tea Partyers back in 2013 who thought Obama was doing a "Socialist takeover" or, say, people in 2018 who were worried about Trump doing a "fascist takeover."
MY makes some great points, but I don’t think he fully engages with the problem. In his quotes from the representative non-compromise camp there is talk of gop wanting to “eradicate” people (presumably the trans) and literally supporting de jure (?) racial discrimination.
It’s worth dwelling on this rhetoric a bit. Are we to take it literally? If so I’d argue these Uber educated and connected peole are unhinged form reality and it’s very much worth pondering why.
If however it’s hyperbole, it’s again worth considering why they resort to it? Is it because they implicitly realizing that the no compromise position isn’t very convincing when considers in realistic terms ?
‘Stop trans genocide’ is a common refrain. It only makes sense when you realise it is ideology speak, and ‘genocide’ has a meaning other than the dictionary definition.
Sorry for the confusion. I’m not referring to anything done by anyone in the comments section but those consciously using “genocide” as “ideology speak” which they are fully aware has little and less to do with any reality.
For real...I wish there was some kind of limited quote functionality, where you could take an excerpt of what you're replying to and address that directly (similar to the reddit > tag)
I don't think so, it's more that denying trans people gender transition results in a massive increase in their suicide rate.
When I talk to middle-aged trans people, they talk about the numbers of other trans people of their age (most trans people know other trans people who came out at the same time; they form mutual support groups to get through the legal and medical obstacles) that have died of suicide and it (anecdotally) reminds me of gay men in their 50s and 60s talking about how many of their generation died of AIDS.
There are a bunch of studies that show that trans people who have successfully transitioned have an elevated risk of suicide compared to cis people, but that risk has fallen over the years (presumably because they face lesser levels of discrimination and hatred now than in the 1980s when the earliest studies were done). But the elevated risk of suicide for trans people who were denied the ability to transition is much higher and there's no evidence that it's come down - the relative risk of not transitioning keeps going up.
Would you describe the Reagan Administration's deliberate lack of effort in medical research on AIDS as a "gay genocide"? It's perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but there's certainly something to it: an awful lot of gay men died and a different policy could (perhaps) have saved them, and the policy was motivated by prejudice against gay men. It's not outrageous to use similar language about trans people dying of suicide as a result of being denied medical and social transition.
...and it's worth pointing out that there's a fraction of anti-trans people who like talking about the high suicide rate for trans people, especially whenever they encounter a trans person having mental health problems, which certainly looks (from the trans / trans-advocate side) like trying to talk people into suicide.
> Would you describe the Reagan Administration's deliberate lack of effort in medical research on AIDS as a "gay genocide"?
No. It was negligent, short-sighted, and bigotry was an obstacle to turning it around. But none of that amounts to genocide, and the inability to distinguish between the two phenomenon robs you of the ability to reason about social problems or grapple constructively with political constraints, especially in a society where people are allowed to disagree with each other.
Indeed. Extremists on both ends show a lack of tolerance for disagreement or dissent. It's a big part of the reason why extremist regimes tend to do a lot of damage to the countries they rule.
Yeah, this is my point that it's hyperbole. I'd say that, as someone more cynical about the Reagan Administration's motives, that it's on the continuum that has genocide at one end, but not especially close to that end.
My view of the median view in the Reagan Administration is roughly: it conveniently removed a group they were bigoted against and therefore were entirely content to see die, though they weren't prepared to go as far as killing them, but they didn't see themselves as having a responsibility to go out of their way to save them.
I don't agree that it's hyperbole: it isn't on that continuum at all, and treating it as if it were fails to make basic distinctions, which calls every single thing you say into question.
Being cruel to people who then commit suicide is a terrible thing, but it does not fit the definition of “genocide.” Using the word genocide in order to associate transphobia with something like the Holocaust seems less likely to work than to simply degrade the meaning of “genocide” and make it harder to take seriously.
"Being cruel to people who then commit suicide is a terrible thing, but it does not fit the definition of 'genocide.'"
Can't it, though? Genocide is the systematic eradication of the cultural practices of an ethnic group (against that group's will). It doesn't require gas chambers — the Rwandans managed just fine with machetes. It doesn't even require murder weapons: it's hard to argue the American Indian boarding schools weren't implements of genocide.
*If* you believe that trans people are an ethnic group, and *if* you believe that there is a systematic conspiracy to eliminate trans people by degrading their mental health until they commit suicide, then I think that would qualify as genocide. Now, I think those claims lack empirical support. But I don't think your original claim (that suicide-inducing cruelty is never genocidal) is justified either.
Saying trans people are an ethnic group when they have no biological similarities to one another as far as ethnicity goes isn't just something that "lacks empirical support" but "absurdly scientifically wrong on the level of saying that humanity originated on Mars"
Just like the famines in Bengal and Ireland, Reagan probably lacks the willfullness inherent in genocide, but there's a reason the position that the British colonial governments committed genocide is an accepted minority view
Agreed about that last point. There were the same comments about gay people - "they have more depression/etc, they can't be good parents", when a significant source of those things was feeling discriminated against/forced to stay in the closet.
Slight pushback on your first point though. I can't speak to trans adults, but "Massive increase in their suicide rate" has been also used about teens to support teen medical transition and seems to lack good evidence (vs the control of therapy without medical transition). I could easily see it being different for adults if nothing else for a "wait until 18 is a finite time, unlike wait until never"
The problem with waiting until they are adults is that if they get reassignment hormone therapy as teens, they can mature into the physical appearance of the gender they identify as, rather than their birth sex. A person who looks like the sex they identify as is less likely to suffer discrimination in work and in life. It is why this should only be done under specialized medical supervision by professionals who are best able to distinguish true gender dysphoria from other gender issues.
Right. Like it or not, the question has to have some sort of answer during a period of time when people aren't deemed to be adults. And it's not a question that has an easy answer, each case should be evaluated individually.
Even there, the information we have today is strongly suggestive that a large majority of those cases resolve during or as a result of puberty with only supportive treatment/therapy. It is *normal* for pre-teens and teenagers to be uncomfortable in their body including questioning its changing shape and their gender. Preemptively medicalizing that anxiety is *not* a good thing and does not lead to good outcomes.
Setting this as the framework for “acceptable” early intervention basically ensures that every pre-adolescent who presents with gender dysphoria will transition to the other gender. I do not find it coincidental that the folks pushing most strongly for this standard are the ones who believe that a few percent of the population is innately trans.
To be clear, I wasn't saying that I insist that we make teens wait.
I was only positing why suicide rates among "teens denied transition until 18" might not match the suicide rates among "adults denied transition forever"
My understanding is that even "true gender dysphoria" can _sometimes_ resolve itself over puberty. That is, some % of teens with "true gender dysphoria" will end up not needing any medical intervention whatsoever. Others, I believe, _can_ benefit from it for exactly the reasons you state.
Equating suicidal tendencies to genocide is obviously political rhetoric gone too far, but I thought Richard laid it out well at how suicide is a real risk.
And I have to think whether or not trans attitude is as positive now as it used to be. From my memory of the 1990s, it was more of a novelty that may not have had deep acceptance, but also didn't rile people as much as it does now. The most famous trans person at the time was Chaz Bono, who didn't elicit much attention one way or the other, and there were a wide array of movies involving trans or drag characters (The Birdcage, Mrs. Doubtfire, To Wong Foo..., and (with its climax not aging well) Ace Ventura) that I really wonder what the reaction to would be today. We're going through a really weird and intense part of history right now with this, and at some point I think and hope that emotions will dial down a bit.
I don't think any of those movies are about trans characters but rather drag characters, but that might be splitting hairs. The bigger point I'd make is that the actual treatment of trans people was EXTREMELY negative in this era (here's a Wikipedia page to depress you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_being_transgender), and it's hard to imagine that a few crossdressing characters used as comic relief balanced the scales there.
But the other problem I have with the idea that attitudes towards trans people today (which definitely are very hostile and scary, and that's absolutely bad) are more harmful than they were in the past is this: the current attacks on trans people are a backlash to increasing assertions of trans people's rights to get medical treatment and to live as the gender they identify. If the effect of that has been to make things *worse* for trans people, what does that say about the movement? My perception is definitely that life for gay people post-Stonewall was better than it was before, and I certainly would want to think that's true for trans people today as well.
There has been a fall in trans suicide as the availability and acceptance of transition has gone up: I think a major explanation of the increase in trans identification is that so many fewer trans people kill themselves, and therefore they live longer. If you're looking at a 60-70% suicide rate by the age of 30 and you can drop that to a (still amazingly high) 10% suicide rate, then the population is going to treble even without any other changes.
Teen suicide among cis people is an entirely separate phenomenon and requires entirely separate explanations.
It isn't insane at all, it's just that "genocide" is a very loaded word so no one is going to post the Norman Rockwell painting and say "actually, I think genocide is good!" But obviously, Republicans would prefer it if there were no trans people, and occasionally take legislative (or at least rhetorical) steps to stop trans people from existing. That's very much textbook genocide--preventing anyone from transitioning is "the intentional destruction of a people" (definition from Wikipedia). You don't have to kill the humans to kill the people; for instance, it was once common to force Jews to convert to Christianity or face expulsion or death, and if that's not genocide, it's close enough that the distinction isn't interesting to make. And to reiterate, these are very loaded terms, so making the comparison I just did might make people upset, but the situations are really very similar.
Funny identity disclaimer: I am ethnically Jewish but not trans, for what it's worth.
(1) This analysis breaks down when one considers whether there can be such a thing as a "people" who can exist only through *active* surgical/pharmaceutical intervention.
(2) That first point also goes to the inapplicability of your Jewish/Christian analogy. As you describe it, Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or face expulsion or death. Accepting that qualifies as genocide, the actual analogy would be if someone was proposing to hunt down trans people, force them to renounce being trans, and make them behave in gender conforming ways. As far as I'm aware, even in the most bonkers red states no one has introduced legislation or otherwise proposed that trans people must publicly profess to not be trans.
You left out an important part--hunt them down, force them to renounce being trans *and* kill them if they refuse. I think it's that last bit that makes it genocide.
I omitted that because of the "expulsion" part. I think most human rights organizations these days include not-expressly-lethal depopulation efforts as part of genocide and imposing specific state-level restrictions on trans people could be generously construed as a form of passive "expulsion." (E.g., the Nazis banned kosher slaughter of animals and imposed other restrictions on Jewish religious and cultural activities.)
The bigger issue is really point #1 in any event -- can you have a "people" who (in their telling) must depend on continuing medical intervention to bring about their existence?
Yeah, I agree that they haven't proposed legislation to do things like that, but I'm sure some Republicans secretly or not so secretly would like to. For example, I googled "Republican transphobic remarks" and found this fun quote:
"'The lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,' Barnaby said. 'That’s right, I called you demons and imps, who come and parade before us and pretend that you are part of this world.'"
So that's what one elected Republican has to say about trans people. He apologized afterwards; of course, this is my opinion, but I feel that his apology reflects political expedience while his real views are, well, what he said. So it seems pretty clear that at least some Republicans want to do something like genocide to trans people. I am not that emotional about this topic, honestly, but if you are, especially if you are trans yourself, it's easy to make the mental leap from "some" to "most" and say "Republicans want trans genocide."
Your first point is interesting but I think there can be some trans people who don't medically transition and still pass, which would surely still qualify them as an imp or a demon or whatnot. I don't think the people going on anti-trans rants are checking their prescriptions first.
Of course it is also true that many identity groups are prone to hysterically exaggerating their plight, which is common among trans people but definitely not unique to them. No, wanting people to play on the sports team that matches their chromosomes isn't genocide, but there are many people who are way past that on the anti-trans scale.
In the discourse one repeatedly hears—and not from internet randos but from the various Matt Walshes that are riding high these days—that transgender people are suffering from a bizarre delusion and their identification should be given zero weight. That certainly seems to support your point: viewing trans identity as a pure aberration is tantamount to believing it should be stamped out.
Are gay people a people? I think they are. And trans people at least arguably existed (though extremely rare) before medical intervention. So defining transgenderism as a pitiful mental illness to be treated into oblivion, as many seem to prefer, would eliminate this people in the same way attempts to cure homosexuality aimed at eliminating that one.
(1) I'm skeptical that gay people are at least traditionally "a people," because (absent modern medical technology) there is no continuity of "gayness" as a culture outside of people choosing to specifically participate in it -- even gay people who had biological children (typically due to social pressure or coercion) more often hid their sexual orientation and didn't try to pass on "gay cultural traditions" to their descendents. The situation of gay people pre-1970s advances in medicine would seem more analogous to Roman Catholic religious orders or the Shakers, neither of which would I presume you would characterize as a "people."
(2) You're the person who used "pathetic" to describe transgender people, not me. That said, yes, the state of being transgender is a mental illness. That isn't being mean, it's ***LITERALLY*** what the statement that you believe you were "born into the wrong body" means, unless you are espousing the faith-based viewpoint that there are gendered souls that make your consciousness a distinct entity from your physical body. If we are not throwing out the last 350 years of philosophy and science that overwhelmingly went to establishing that your consciousness is an emergent property of your brain, which is part of your body. As such, from a "first do no harm perspective," resolving the mental illness should focus from the outset on trying to reconcile your subjective self-perception with your objective body and only if that is unsuccessful should medical professionals move on to trying to alter your objective body to conform to your subjective self-perception.
(3) I 100% agree that trans people existed prior to medical intervention, but that just goes to the point about why limiting the availability of medical transition is not "genocide." If male infant circumcision was made less readily available would that be a "genocide" of Jewish people?
(4) As mentioned elsewhere, I oppose all proposals to restrict medical transition for adults and think the only limitation for minors should be needing the consent of both custodial parents. But I take those positions because I believe people should have the right to do what they want so long as they aren't harming anyone else, not because I believe it's "genocide" if people don't get to do that.
I think the word "genocide" has been used outside the context of "exterminationist mass killing of an ethnic group" almost since its origin and while I don't like or employ that usage it's hard to say that it's "wrong." To give another Jewish example, the post-Stalin Soviet Union didn't do mass killings of Jews but did repress Jewish religious and cultural expression in a pretty brutal and coercive manner. Lots of people call this "cultural genocide." And that's what the far right wants to do to trans people: use the force of law to make being publicly trans impossible, forcibly detransition both medically and socially. I still wouldn't use "genocide" for this. But that's what people are talking about.
Unless one is a language prescriptivists, usages are never "wrong." But they can be counterproductive and can undermine the speaker's credibility.
I don't think you'll find many prescriptivists here, so when someone makes a comment that sounds like they're saying a usage is wrong, I usually take them to mean something closer to "ridiculous".
Interesting point. I think if someone uses "dog" to mean "cat" then their usage is wrong, in that they either are ignorant about the word's meaning or they are speaking in a deliberately confusing way. This is not usually true of someone who talks about "cultural genocide." People who talk about "trans genocide" are invoking a real tradition of broadly understanding "genocide" in the context of thinking about state oppression of minority groups, particularly oppression that seeks to end a group's existence as a social group (whether or not this is sought to be done by mass killing). This may be a counterproductive usage because it turns off so many listeners or maybe the provocative nature of the claim successfully raises the salience of the issue; I don't know. But it's not really my call.
I don't like it because I think it makes sense to reserve "genocide" for a case involving destruction of a group by mass killing, bearing in mind the special moral significance of intentional killing as a greater wrong than most anything else. But it's a longstanding thing that the usage doesn't conform to my preference and it seems like a losing battle to fight about it.
What is unhinged about the trans eradication point there does seem to be a faction of Republicans who are seriously pushing for something that seems aimed at driving them out of public life and renormalizing what was rather common in my lifetime casual de facto legal violence.
Jim Crow actually drive black people from public life and yet it was not eradication and genocide. Genocide is genocide. Come back to me when they open the gas chambers. Until then shut up with this disgusting hyperbole. Some of us lost family members to actual genocide so we care about our tragedy being misused for cheap points. Thanks.
I agree with your first two sentences (I don't think actual gas chambers are needed before "genocide" is reached though), but it's trivially easy to find people claiming that the US was and still is engaged in a "genocide" of black people. (That's not even a particularly recent bit of hyperbole -- it was being used at least as a early as 1951, when you'd think everyone involved would have had a very fresh understanding of what genocide looked like: https://depts.washington.edu/moves/CRC_genocide.shtml )
Lynching in the south was not anything like genocide. Genocide is about eliminating an entire group from the human gene pool. Lynching was about political and social control.
White southerners wanted most Black people to remain alive and in the south in order to continue working in agriculture, domestic labor, and other low paid jobs. It was dehumanizing and very damaging to both groups of people in different ways, but it not genocide or even approaching genocide.
I agree there's nothing comparable happening in the US currently. I just brought up the historical point there because I Googled "black genocide" to get an example of someone using the terminology (thinking I would grab something from the last few years) and was rather amazed to see how early the usage of "genocide" in this context was.
People being murdered with the tacit endorsement of the state, or even its explicit order and by its official agents is insufficient in and of itself to be defined as genocide. There is a fundamental difference in both intention and outcome. This is very basic stuff.
It's happened before in the US. Assuming that the maximalist goals of a political movement will be accomplished is hubris. Political movements can even lose ground. Look at what happened in Afghanistan and Iran in the 20th century.
but the dispute is over whether describing republicans as "wanting to eradicate" trans people is "unhinged from reality," not how likely we think they are to succeed
Perhaps the issue is what is meant by “eradicate”--is a trans person “eradicated” when they are deliberately misgendered? When there are barriers to gender reassignment treatment? Given all the comparisons of far right to Nazis, using the word “eradicate” suggests that someone wants to exterminate transgender people (and maybe black people, too)
well, I'd like to start by pointing out that correcting someone where i think they've misstated the terms of a debate is a purely formal intervention and doesn't mean that i think or must be committed to thinking that they're wrong on the first-order substance, and I'd hope this community would be the sort capable of maintaining that distinction, but to step into the fray:
1) "eradicate" isn't anyone's paraphrasing or editorializing, it's a direct quote from a cpac speaker. you can make whatever interpretive points you like about what the proper referent of "transgenderism" is supposed to be, but certainly "[the social phenomenon of] transgenderism" cannot be a ridiculous candidate, nor can use of the word "eradicate" constitute being "unhinged from reality."
2) to the extent that states are passing or attempting to pass laws which forbid cross-sex hormone therapy for adults, or ban crossdressing in public, they are eliminating what it is that makes trans people trans, conceptually, socially, and physiologically. to say that "eradicate" is a completely inappropriate word to use in this context is at least as uncharitable to the left as you're accusing the left of being to republicans, and
3) yes, i think if you repeatedly accuse a certain group of people of perpetrating sex crimes against children, you are at the very least hoping someone will eradicate them for you
I agree with your point 2. However, with point 1, I think taking one speaker’s use of that word to mean that the party as a whole supports eradication is an unjustified inference. And I just disagree on point 3: accusing a population of heinous crimes does not equate with calling for their extermination. In my experience people have often overstated, either in jest or seriously, the prevalence of sex abuse among priests or the Boy Scouts (to be clear, both are very serious problems that I would never want to minimize). However, I don’t think even the most extreme guilt-by-association positions here could be equated with wanting Catholics, priests, or Boy Scout leaders exterminated.
Are they eradicated when they kill themselves? The argument is that compelling trans people to pretend to be of their birth gender constitutes a form of torture, and torturing people until they commit suicide isn't a vast improvement over deliberately killing them.
It's not a very compelling argument, because "if you don't let me act as my gender you are torturing me" is a pretty flimsy starting point and the next step "and therefore I'll surely kill myself" is also pretty weak.
Torturing someone until they kill themselves (doesn't usually happen, btw, people usually try to live) is pretty bad and isn't really analogous to very many other situations.
Such nonsense. You can do better. Lgbt people of all kinds were socially forced into the closet just about everywhere h til a couple of decades ago. That was bad and disproportionate numbers committed suicide, Yet nobody tried to eradicate them. In some places past and present there is even a death penalty, sometimes *enforced* and even that isn’t an actual attempt at eradication. The only exception is Nazi germany (for whom it was very much secondary properly to the eradication of the Jews). Eradication actually means something because it is genuine historic phenomenon that might conceivably happen again. Hence it’s both in the interest of respect for victims AND prudence (as well as the small matter of truth) that we should use that term with care.
I just don't know how seriously to take these statements, which suggests a political position of moderation. Which doesn't seem to by what the trans movement is pursuing.
How should people respond to a high-profile media personality saying ‘transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely’, which I’m assuming is the basis of that statement. Why should we spend time dwelling on how people react to those sentiments rather than the actual person calling for the ‘eradication’ in the first place?
Maybe back up a step...what if we went back to referring to adult female persons as “women,” while acknowledging transgender women as legal women. I always thought it was crazy when British “terfs” claimed that women were being erased by trans women, until suddenly it became unacceptable to refer to female persons collectively as “women.” I think some feminists were so enamored of the idea of men getting pregnant that they forgot the reason for wanting that was so males could see what it was like, but transgender men aren’t male. the cosmic justice notion isn’t there, so saying “men can get pregnant” just sounds unhinged.
I think there are some people that want to insist that the word “women” should always only be used in a way that includes both cis and trans women, and there are others that want to insist that the word “women” should always only be used in a way that only includes cis women. I think that trying to insist that one of these usages is technically correct and the other is wrong is going to be about as successful as insistence that “North America” always includes Canada, USA, and Mexico, or insisting that “North America” is always only Canada and USA. There are two closely related concepts here, and both are equally deserving of the name (because names are arbitrary social markers that get used in varied ways depending on context), and no one is going to succeed in getting people to use the word only their preferred way.
But separating pregnancy from the idea of womanhood is either unhinged or deliberately provocative. That’s something more than accepting trans women as women. If you want to give birth to a child, you are identifying as a woman; it’s not a minor detail for someone who otherwise identifies as male. Pretending otherwise reminds me of the interrogation scene in 1984 where O’Brien tries to get Winston Smith to say that 2+2=5. It’s a marker for ideological fealty, much like MAGA and election denial.
What about women who don't want to have kids, or who were born infertile? What about intersex people who identify with one of the two overwhelmingly dominant gender options, which may or may not have anything to do with their ability to reproduce?
"Womanhood" is a social construct. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter, or that we should get rid of it. It just means that it isn't going to match perfectly to any cleanly defined biological or medical standard, because the people who invented the idea did so with only the most rudimentary understanding of what they were defining. If we as a species had held off on developing cultural preconceptions about gender until we'd figured out this whole genetics business, we wouldn't be in this mess now.
But also, geographically, Mexico is absolutely in Central America. And in any case, continents are a cultural thing as much as a geographic one (note that most people around the world count Europe as a continent, regardless of how they treat the Americas and Australia). People are going to use the word each way, and insisting that only one is correct is a fools errand.
If presented with the hypothetical compromise of "if you let us criminalize drag performances, we will let you have a medicare-based public option", lol yes I would absolutely take that deal!
Everyone has to draw a principled line somewhere. I'd argue opening the door for the criminalization of free speech is absolutely not worth the trade. This isn't some narrow identity politics issue - it would be trading away a foundational right for everyone.
We’ve already accepted bans on indecent exposure and restrictions on campaign finance. These are literal criminalizations of free speech. The bills that cause problems for drag are written in a way that probably actually exempts most drag performance, but instead fits in with obscenity laws by criminalizing things like “sexually suggestive performances” in “places where people under 18 could be”. I absolutely think these bills should be stopped, but they’re really more about posturing than about actually restricting rights, and thus they could be part of a meaningful compromise if the other things are good enough.
It’s a yes or no question though. To win elections, should Democrats support candidates who take these positions?
It’s also not at all like Obama’s position on gay marriage. One is ‘Do we accept the status quo in favour of the potential for future progress. The other is ‘Do we accept policies that actively introduce harm onto people?’
A better example would be whether Democrats should have supported a candidate in 2008 that not only opposed same-sex marriage but actively believed we should overturn Lawrence v Texas.
You are assuming that the political struggle is won, there is a new status quo, and all that is required is to defend it. I don't think that is the case here. Medical treatment of trans kids is contested as is trans participation in sports.
For president, absolutely not. For state or congressional races, it depends on the electorate of the state or district. Of course, what constitutes “support” depends on circumstances: if we’re talking about a House district where a Dem only had a chance of election by calling to reinstate laws against sodomy, it could probably only *help* that candidate’s chances for Obama to say “I strongly disagree with Candidate X on this issue.”
Those would be very stupid compromises. Smarter compromises could include allowing each school district to decide its own policy on gender and sports, requiring schools notify parents if a minor requests pronouns other than those typically associated with gender assigned at birth.
Some part of the American right thinks it’s popular to marginalize drag queens, but they are delusional. Compromising on a couple of the most controversial trans issues takes the juice out of the anti-gay and anti-drag policies. Frankly, it curbs the anti-trans energy as well.
As long as we have a First Amendment, criminalizing drag shows will be blatantly unconstitutional. Have not heard about the "removing children from their homes," but that also sounds like a constitutional violation as well (fundamental right of parents to raise their children)
I don’t think rhetoric about ‘eradicating transgenderism’ would be sparking the same reaction if there *wasn’t* a demonstrable political effort accompanying it.
I think the reaction to 'eliminate whiteness' demonstrates that this is not, in fact, correct. There has not been any real demonstrable political effort accompanying it, and yet there's still a massive reaction.
More broadly, if that's the case...why are we talking about rhetoric rather than action?
I'd agree that the *efforts* are not "substantially similar" at this stage, but I think both expressions are defendable in identical ways -- that they do not mean that anyone should literally be killed, but that a mode of thought should be made unacceptable or otherwise discouraged.
Ummm... because how people react is key to -winning-. And if you don't win, you lose -- and accomplish nothing. And your enemy gets what he wants. So, are you interested in -accomplishing- something, or are you posturing in front of the mirror to demonstrate 'virtue'?
It's a matter of priorities. If you try to get everything you want, you usually end up getting nothing, because human existence is made that way. Decide what you want -most-, and then calculate the odds of getting that, as opposed to something that you may want less but which can be attained.
In principle, basically anything *could* be an appropriate concession, if there is enough other progress on things that matter significantly. In practice, some things don’t ever come in useful packages and they aren’t worth compromising on for the smaller wins they could sometimes come with.
Well, some people and all politicians should just ignore it an not feed the troll. But some different people should reply with different visions about how society should respond to the range of issues that are "transgenderism." We can't afford "no enemies on the Left."
I’m struggling to understand why an explicit call for ‘eradication’ is something we should ignore, but people’s reaction to that message is instead something that is ‘worth dwelling on’ as OP suggests. I’m especially unclear on why we should ignore the former when there are clear efforts to enact policies that demonise and marginalise trans people.
Who said anything about ignoring something? It's just one more reason to win elections and trounce the people making these calls. Just because people aren't talking about something all the time doesn't mean they are ignoring it. But you know, losing elections have consequences, and if we lose elections, we might get policies that demonize and marginalize trans people. So, the question is, what's the best way to prevent that?
Thank you for this comment! I wasn’t aware of this quote, which is horrifying, and as averse as I am to “cancel culture” I do think such quote should be a fireable offense in many workplaces (including esp media outlets) and also bannable if used on sb (quotes excluded obviously!). You’d have had a point if it were made by an elected gop official, esp one in top position of leadership. As it is to my understanding it was made by one Michael Knowles who is a private individual.
I guess I don’t entirely disagree that there’s a distinction between a gop official saying it and a private individual, but I also think it carries a bit more weight when the private individual is speaking at a major political conference in which GOP officials are in attendance and none of them come out to condemn those words. It’s not like Knowles was just speaking them on his Twitter or YouTube page.
I agree that this is an important point. As I said I wasn’t aware that the language originated on the right and was just being quoted! This doesn’t excuse the hyperbole used by the leftist people quoted by MY but is “mitigating circumstances” so to speak.
It’s a bigoted opinion but not much different from when homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name” or the Puritanical impulse to discourage any discussion of sex or sexuality in public.
It’s a near universal phenomenon to see people on one side of a political divide describe those on the other side as morally inferior. You can see this throughout history. And it is very symmetrical, suggesting that it’s best viewed as an evolved coalitional ingroup:outgroup behavior. Moral repugnance strengthens coalition.
And a clear signal of group commitment is to be more outraged than most. Which is why MY considering compromise will be viewed by some progressives as moral betrayal.
I recommend looking at pew research on attitudes towards race and other cultural things. Today's Republicans are less tolerant than Democrats, but they are far more tolerant than Democrats were ten or twenty years ago. Rhetoric aside, GOP voters aren't actually getting more bigoted. There's little hope of the "destroy" rhetoric gaining traction nationally.
It's hyperbole, but it's understandable why they resort to it: Loss aversion.
Previous eras, like the Nineties, were characterized by slow, grinding progress for LGBT rights. When you're gaining, not losing, you're more willing to compromise.
I would argue that trans rights (for example) are being clearly whittled away in the current era, especially on the state level. Retrenchment breeds less willingness to compromise.
I don't think it's a coincidence that social conservatives radicalized behind Trump shortly after gay marriage was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court--they felt cornered, even if their "loss" was minor. It's the same reason suburban NIMBYs characterize upzoning laws as "destroying the suburbs"--any perceived loss, however incremental, radicalizes far more efficiently than missing out on big gain.
Compromise is something people are okay with in an era of progress. Less so the opposite. Hence the hyperbole.
Actually, not really; I just wanted to say that. I mean, there was some mildly heated debate, but pretty chill compared to what you get from some quarters. I mean, no one that I saw used the word “groomer” or “mutilation,” which is pretty good! And while there was discussion of whether anti-trans discrimination amounts to “genocide,” no one (again, that I saw) said “it definitely is genocide, and if you disagree you’re a moral pervert!”
So I’m going to call this thread a win for relatively civil discourse on trans issues and have a celebratory [something currently in my fridge].
Per, Politico: The new law labels seven nations as a “foreign country of concern” — China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela — and restricts property ownership for some residents from those countries.
Now, one can debate the inclusion of China with those other countries. But to call it a 19th-century style alien land law is not accurate and perhaps intended to inflame more than inform.
Because all of those other countries are subject to various travel restrictions and economic sanctions regimes and part of them are officially classified under US law as "state sponsors of terrorism"?
Because laws motivated by racial superiority/inferiority and laws based on geopolitical rivalries/threats are pretty different? You can't see that?
Also, there seems to be a sleight of hand in the way you're using the term "Chinese People" which in the 19th century could have only be thought of as a racial categorization - there were no "Asian American" people, at least not in the public conscienceless. If your grandparents are from China but you're an American citizen the law doesn't target you.
I guess I really don’t see how the motivation is relevant. A law that says that legal permanent residents are banned from owning land because of their national origin seems equally pernicious whether it’s because you think they are an inferior race or because you think such people can’t be trusted.
I don't think you really think that motivations of laws and rules are irrelevant. Especially in a world where disproportionate impact is likely to be felt by virtually any legal or economic change, it's important to have some trust and transparency around why, for example, proposing to raise taxes on higher incomes is motivated primarily by fiscal considerations and not by dislike of people white, asian or urban professionals, for example.
If you want to debate about whether the law in question is pernicious, that's fine, but I don't see any of the objectors here recognizing that there are valid security concerns and valid concerns within the Chinese-American community over CCP efforts to police, oppress, harass and even abduct them. Instead there's some kind of strawman argument that this is a referendum on racism
More recently, there was Trump v. Hawaii, and this law seems to be very similarly tailored to the travel ban to get constitutional signoff from SCOTUS if it gets that far. (Though to be clear, I think that case was wrongly decided and I largely agree with you, and even if not deemed unconstitutional it's a bad and counterproductive law.)
Because these “foreigners” are valid legal permanent residents of the United States and thus count as “American persons” for most constitutional purposes.
My understanding is that the law under consideration covers foreign inhabitants who are not US residents. That is, that they do not live in the US. If that is not true, then we are discussing something different here. Some of the people on this thread seem to be suggesting that foreigners who reside outside of the US have some sort of constitutional right to buy land in the US.
The draft bill they considered in Texas made no mention of where people were living or whether they were US citizens - it said that if they held citizenship of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia, then they couldn’t buy property.
If the bill really just prevents people who reside in those countries from owning property in the state, that would be pretty inoffensive (and maybe even a good idea to apply more broadly than just to citizens of these countries).
Because if your state wants to attract companies which need incredibly smart people, making many of those people feel unwelcome is bad. (Also, "arbitrary" is I guess a house now?)
Again, this is a policy choice. It might be a bad idea, but it is certainly constitutional and letting the CCP run wild among the Chinese diaspora in the US has its own costs.
As someone with a lot more skin in the game on this front than you, I have to point out that my entire household supports these restrictions, including the green card applicant, the green card holder, the naturalized citizen and the native born citizen.
The Party-state has a vast apparatus for maintaining the “loyalty” of its diaspora which necessitates that the US take steps against its “whole of society” and “civil-military fusion” approaches.
That, unfortunately, includes measures which damage or even destroy Chinese “private” firms and a few genuinely private ones at home, discriminating against her citizens abroad, and likely banning her firms from operating in the US in a great many spheres of endeavor.
Where we need to get better is at poaching and offering a path to naturalization for her best and brightest in at least 4-5x the current numbers, but barring non-resident, non-citizens from buying property is very much a nothing-burger.
I don't have much heartburn from restricting Chinese national purchase of land near military bases (and airports, but whatever) but I don't get the restriction on buying agricultural land. What's the fear about that?
I’m not sure. If anything I’d *want* Chinese nationals, private firms, and SOEs owning a bunch of commoditized, non-sensitive, low-value-added assets in the West so I can seize them all in the event of a war, along with zeroing every debt instrument owned by those same entities and confiscating dollar and Euro assets wherever possible.
I’d not have written the law quite how they did, lol.
"Stereotyping all Chinese citizens as CCP agents is bad".
Complete straw man. No one is doing that. The idea is that the CCP (along with other governments that make no secret of their animosity towards the US) will use agents to further CCP goals.
The anti-Japanese laws targeted US citizens of Japanese descent with no connections to the government of Imperial Japan. Somehow you don't seem to be able to see or acknowledge the difference.
Kind of. You can discriminate between citizens and noncitizens regarding privileges and immunities, but you can't discriminate between citizens and noncitizens on issues of due process or equal protection.
Also, in this case, based on how you all have described the law above, it looks like it is *not* discriminating between citizens and noncitizens. Rather, it is discriminating between noncitizens who came from some countries vs. noncitizens who came from other countries. That seems more questionable.
Also, from a policy standpoint, a Chinese or Russian or Venezuelan national might be a dissident, and that might in fact be the reason why they're here. Seems pretty unfair to people like that.
One of the important things to understand about this law is that it doesn't discriminate against anyone who is here --- it doesn't even distinguish between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants.
It only prohibits ownership by people “domiciled” in China who don’t have U.S. citizenship or permanent residency from owning property in Florida.
So, I went and looked it up, and 'Foreign Principal' is defined as:
"Any person who is domiciled in a foreign country of concern and is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States."
or
"A political party or member of a political party or any subdivision of a political party in a foreign country of concern;"
Putting aside the corporate/partnership limits. That second one I wonder about, but the first one I think doesn't apply to our potential asylee? At that point, I wouldn't expect them to be domiciled in China, right?
How would you be able to tell the difference between a dissident and an agent of a foreign government? I'm agnostic on whether this law is a good idea or not, but I don't understand how you would in practice be able to tell the difference between foreign agents who wish the US harm and people who claim to be dissidents.
The implication of your statement is that the US can't discriminate between citizens and non-citizens in its laws, or act against citizens of foreign powers who are hostile or in a state of war with the US. How is that going to work exactly? If we end up in a shooting war with North Korea (who we only have an armistice but no peace treaty with) and China intervenes, we can take no action against Chinese citizens in the US?
"nationalize"? I don't think that's been said here. The whole thread is about land ownership by foreign nationals. Foreigners (US citizens included when we are in other countries) never have all the same rights as citizens. You can't live in another country or work there without visas. You can't be accepted at their schools or vote in their elections, etc...
What the rules should specifically be is always up for debate, but I can't believe the idea that foreigners are sometimes treated differently is even being discussed, in part because every institution and government around the entire globe operates this way.
We do this all the time. Different foreigners enter the US under different Visa laws. Some countries have visa-free relationships and some don't. Some countries are sanctioned.
You neglect to note that in the 19th century, there were severe restrictions on people of Chinese origin becoming -citizens-.
And there aren't now.
Discriminating between citizens and non-citizens is absolutely and completely kosher. And discriminating between non-citizens of different origins is too.
Everyone has an inalienable right to be on their own side.
It's somewhat disingenuous to talk about foreign origins. The law in question isn't about origins, it's not about people who have come here, it is specifically about people who are still domiciled, that is still live, in those countries. People who may seek to own land here but have not ever even set foot on US soil and never intend to.
Try buying land in China, any of the other countries on that last, or dozens of other countries that the US does actually gets along with. Buying land in a foreign country is not an inalienable right.
Try to exercise free speech in one of those countries then. Or demand to be treated equally regardless of your skin color and ancestry. Tell me how that goes.
"even discriminating based on citizenship is illegal as long as the person had work permission". Btw there's plenty of US-citizen preference written in to employment laws.
Does it not? The Texas one I saw very much did - it said nothing about where people reside, and just said that their citizenship would ban them from purchasing property.
Non-citizens are allowed residence on conditions set by citizens, through the political system. Citizens do that because it benefits -them-, either individually or collectively. They can change their minds about it anytime they please. The country belongs to them, after all. That's why non-citizens can't vote.
Beginning to believe this is hopeless but answering "this is problematic" with "this is legal" is incoherent. I would find expelling all non-citizens problematic, as (presumably?) you would as well.
It includes American permanent residents of Chinese citizenship, and probably also dual citizens (the Texas one very explicitly included dual citizens in the ban).
China does not allow dual citizenship for adults, period. It takes *great* precautions to discover if someone has left a foreign country using a foreign passport and sought admission at the Chinese border with a Chinese passport, requires all people applying for visas to certify they’ve never held a Chinese passport, and checks the information thus provided against domestic data for basically anyone with a Chinese-origin name.
Anyone working to hold both passports is, frankly, worthy of considerable suspicion.
I think there's some truth to this post and I don't want to debate it exactly so much as raise another issue: even highly educated people can still be stupid about various subjects and easily fold to pressures to believe and/or support stupid things. This isn't to say the educational divide doesn't increasingly matter or that higher intelligence people don't have advantages over lower intelligence people. However there is not some bright light that says 'no person above x intelligence threshold or y educational achievement will believe this.' The quintessential example is Matt's discussion of how poor and nonsensical Tema Okun's work is, yet versions of it turn up all over the place, especially places with a lot of high intelligence, high educational achievement people.
So I am all for political pragmatism, but I think there is more going on when it comes to some of these issues. Being smart does not make someone ahead of his or her time on every issue characterized as one of morality. Sometimes they're just being stupid. So next time any of us correctly wonders how the right got so stupid it became a hot bed of vaccine skepticism we should take care to make sure we aren't doing the same thing on some issue.
High IQ and educational qualifications simply make people better at rationalizing what they want to believe anyway, usually so they can feel comfortable fitting in with their social reference group and avoid getting 'pecked'. That's an unconscious process, usually, by the way.
Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning rule all.
I think we're relatively rational when we are pursuing personal rewards and have good feedback on how we're doing. Science, sports, work, etc., to varying degrees. Socio-political chatter has somewhat perverse, often hidden incentives, as you say, but people can still be (approximately) rational in general.
I might be taking you too seriously here but I think the raison d’etre of the rationalists is to acknowledge this rationalizing tendency and try to resist it, to be more rational. I found The Scout Mindset to be a good guide to this. Of course, I’m sure results vary wildly among different self-proclaimed rationalists.
I was mostly having fun, but I also think they take themselves too seriously. Julia Galef (author of The Scout Mindset), for example, has completely disappeared from public life, which suggests one can only be perfectly rational for so long.
That's disappointing about Galef. I checked her Twitter account and indeed, no tweets in over a year and a half. That's a shame, I liked what she had to bring to the table.
Her disappearing from public life seems like a non-sequitur to anything we're talking about? Plenty of them keep on going for years, kind of incessantly to be honest.
We are not, even -in potentia-, rational beings. We are rationalizing animals. "Reason" in the human sense evolved as a means of social solidarity, to render one's in-group (and close relatives, in that context) more effective competitors for resources and hence more likely to pass on their DNA.
I actually think a bigger part of it is more directly related to the relationship between wealth and social influence and education insulating people from the consequences of taking abstract positions.
As Matt suggested, if you think hard about a proposition to trade boring medicare expansion that directly helps millions of people for some sort of trans rights bill that is abstractly righteous but helps an extremely small sliver of people, the only way that trans wins is if you don't perceive either of the outcomes to impact you at all.
100% agree with Matt for a simple reason. In the moralist progressive logic, there are no roadblocks between their current position and the complete eradication of all unfairness in life under the guise of the term “rights” - which is implausible for at least two reasons - the sheer complexity of life which will always yield a decent amount of unfairness, and the sheer subjectivity of the concept.
Also, even if the body politic magically grants the moralists every position they hold, within about a week they will find a new crusade - that’s just how many people are wired.
The subjectivity of things that get one cancelled is one of my biggest frustrations with modern left-leaning discourse. Like, reasonable people can disagree on whether trans girls she be allowed to play girls sports, but then if you’re persona-non-grata for disagreeing with someone on this, well-you can no longer agree to disagree
I don’t think you have to aspire to fairness in every aspect of life, to aspire to fairness in every exercise of government power, or perhaps more expansively social power. The point of going around calling everything “socially constructed” is that we can just choose better fictions to believe in.
Mike, I have to disagree - and for the reasons you have just stated. If the struggle is an eternal one, the moralist side will never be satisfied. How often have you been inclined to compromise with someone you know will never be satisfied? For this reasons, the moralists risk resigning themselves to a minority which is deadly in our system.
Politics is all about how we live together despite no one being completely satisfied ever. Telling people that they need to pick an endpoint that will satisfy them so that they stop engaging in politics just seems to miss the point.
Did the civil rights movement get long-term victory? Because to me it seems like a 400 year struggle with partial victory with lots and lots of compromises along the way.
What constitutes "unfairness?" Opinions differ... and all opinions are equal. You can argue logically -from- a moral premise, but you cannot argue -to- a moral premise; those are inherently arbitrary and subjective. They're a "just because".
Another sure-fire way to inflame and confuse any debate: misuse the terms "existence" and "existential".
If I ask you to turn down your music, I am asking you not to be noisy. "So you're saying I shouldn't BE!" No, I said you shouldn't be noisy. "But you're saying I should't be! You literally want me not to exist!! My existence is being threatened!!!" Actually, I have no objection to your existence, it's only your volume that I'd like you to modulate. And you can change your volume without losing your existence.
"What do you mean, you want to eradicate racism in America? You must mean you want racists not to exist! You are literally threatening their existence!!!" No, I'm quite happy for those people to continue existing, but I'd like them to lose their racist attitudes. Becoming less racist will not kill them -- they will just stop being racist. "You see? You just said you want them to stop being! This is an existential threat! You want to kill millions of Americans!" Here we see the sequential fallacies of sliding from "end -ism" to "end -ists" to "kill the -ists".
And of course, you can ratchet up the misuse of "existence" by tossing in some "genocides" here and there.
"Oh, so you wish there were fewer people with COVID? In other words, you want those people not to exist! You are advocating for the genocide of people with COVID!!!" Umm, no, I just want them to get better. It's true that I would like fewer copies of the virus to exist -- that really is a matter of existence -- and I might even be okay with genocide for the genus of COVID viruses. But so far as their human hosts go, I am not attacking their existence at all, just trying to cure them. I don't want the people not to be, I just want them not to be sick.
And on and on it continues, confusing "being F" with "being" in the sense of "existing". It's a cheap trick, and I wish it were not so prevalent among people with whom I otherwise agree.
It's a different cheap trick, not confusing "is F" with "is", but confusing "equals" with "is correlated with and may cause."
I mean, someone could say "smoking = death," and then defend it by saying that "smoking is statistically correlated with several leading causes of death to such a degree that we can confidently posit a causal relation." It just wouldn't make as good of a slogan.
So too, "in some cases, silence about a particular social evil may be statistically correlated with increases in violence surrounding that evil, and may even play a causal role," would be true but less punchy.
But, yeah, I wish people would not abuse the equals-sign, either.
But I could at least distinguish that wish from the wish that it stop barking, and I did not confuse "I want that dog to stop barking" with "I want the barking dog to stop existing."
One reason not to confuse these things is to that you can demand greater clarity from people. Some public figure says, "we should eradicate racism!" It's worth pressing them to clarify: do you just want to eradicate an ideology, or do you want to eradicate the people who hold it? And do you want to eradicate the holders of the ideology only in the innocuous sense that you want to change their minds, or do you want to shed blood?
"I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends," said Lincoln, who also knew when and how to destroy his enemies by ending their biological activity. He may have toyed with the figure for rhetorical effect, but he knew how to distinguish destroying your enemies by making them your friends, from destroying your enemies by putting Minie balls through their skulls.
I would love to ban the usage of conjugations of exist in this usage as political rhetoric. AGW discourse is also infamous for excessive use of the word.
I think there can be some myopia among those who consider themselves pragmatists. They may think there are opportunities for gains if they allow for compromise and tactical retreats in some areas, but in fact they are just giving up ground and getting nothing in return.
To use your Texas example. It's true that Medicaid expansion would be a huge benefit to an enormous amount of currently-uninsured people in our state. But Medicaid expansion also currently has a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon. As frustrating as it is, we are a conservative state and we're unlikely to have anything other than Republican majorities for another two or three cycles, at the least.
Meanwhile, our governor and attorney general have been actively weaponizing the state government to attack trans people. Parents are getting investigated for child abuse for helping their child get gender-affirming care. Providers are being targeted for harassment. Trans people who had gone through years of psychological evaluations, social transition, and are now finally beginning their hormonal transition are getting cut off midway through their treatment and told they have to wait and re-start after they turn 18 (after which it will be a much more arduous process).
So when "pragmatic" progressives are unwilling to come to the defense of trans people because some trans issues are unpopular, they aren't actually helping any uninsured people in Texas. What they are doing is leaving the rest of us in the lurch. Yeah, school sports bans were always going to pass, but things like having CPS going after families with trans kids are morally shocking enough that it could be stopped. Calling out that horrible situation and advocating for its end is the moral and pragmatic option.
I don't quite understand what the position you're taking is here. Are moderate democrats failing to condemn CPS going after families with trans kids (for what?)? If so, that is bad, but I'm not aware of MY or similar democrats taking the position that one shouldn't condemn things like that because that would be bad politics. At the same time, there is clearly significant disagreement within the democratic coalition regarding the use of puberty blockers and such, so if that's what you're talking about then well, yeah. Many moderates literally disagree with the progressives on the merits and think that we should be far more cautious in the use of puberty blockers on children.
More fundamentally, I think that even if we accept that moderates and progressives align on a given issue (e.g., protecting trans people) and, even if their view on it is unpopular somewhere, want to try to make that view more popular, you still run into the same problem that MY is discussing in this post. If trans activists scold people as bigots for their attitudes towards sports or skepticism towards puberty blockers, they're not likely to win many converts. I just don't see how moderates joining in and scolding these people is useful, even if their failure to do so offends progressives. You have to persuade them, and, frankly, persuading the moderates in your own party that you're right is the first step, and trans activists haven't exactly been nailing that.
I agree mostly with what you said here but would take it a step farther. Handing out puberty blockers like their aspirin is morally shocking to use the language of the previous post. When does affirmation become encouragement? When does support become a nudge?
There is one very simple truth that people like Lance don’t acknowledge in their pursuit of being an ally - all other things being equal it is best for one to live their life as the sex Mother Nature (not a doctor) assigned them at birth. That has to be part of the equation. The reason for this is also simple - physically changing one’s body to align with the opposite sex comes at a price to one’s health. No parent should want their kid to pay that price unless it is absolutely necessary. The lefts disregard to confused young people by cheering them on through the gender affirming care ladder that ends with taking a knife to a healthy human body is morally shocking.
Except that around 1in 4,000 (based on google search) children are actually born with both sets of genitalia and traditionally a doctor decided which to go with. Trans advocates overdo it when they say gender is a spectrum, but conservatives overdo it when they say it’s a simple binary. Of course people who identify as their sex at birth (which is almost everyone) are better off, but that doesn’t help those who don’t.
That number is waaaaayyyyy off. There are literally like 100 known cases ever of people being born with genital *tissue* (not functional genitalia) from both sexes. In nearly all cases these are XX people with some anomalous internal testicular tissue that does not work.
1/4000 might be the number for something like the “true intersex” population, but that is not the same as “genitals from both sexes”, it’s more like “it’s truly ambiguous and we can’t tell without chromosomal testing”. Caster Semenya is one of the those people.
There are zero cases of “child born with two functional sets of genitals and the doctor decided which to pick”. I’m not sure where you heard that, but it’s clearly been run through a few games of “telephone”.
Back before it was hug, I remember hearing that part of the transition process was working with a therapist to make SURE this is what you wanted. Seems sad that we’ve lost that, though I’ll add it is great that the people who are truly dysmorphic are no longer marginalized.
What you consider to be “gender-affirming care” seems to me, despite being on the left, to be something akin to child abuse. The more data we get, the more disastrous it looks.
The need to talk about this subject with such a euphemism goes a long way towards explaining why it is so concerning, once people understand what it entails.
The nearly-uninhibited use of chemical castration drugs once used to punish homosexuality on minors under the guise of a “reversible” course of treatment?
I feel like you’re underrating the odds of Republican state legislators and governors folding on Medicaid expansion: it’s happened in Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, etc.
They've basically only folded to ballot initiatives, and my very poor understanding of Texas politics says they aren't really a thing there, unless someone who knows better can correct me
Right but as Texas gets bluer and bluer Republicans will face pressure to reverse their (unpopular) position on this (high-salience) issue in order to keep winning elections there.
We have about as many issues on the ballot as California does in recent years, but in Texas these are all constitutional amendments that got initiated and passed by the legislature. I believe there is no way to get a ballot measure around the legislature.
Re "Medicaid expansion also currently has a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon" Is 2027 soon? Given Dem Gov wins in KY, LA, KS etc, there's certainly a chance we win TX-Gov in 2026. And as in NC (https://governor.nc.gov/news/press-releases/2023/03/27/governor-cooper-signs-medicaid-expansion-law) a Dem gov, with a veto point in hand, can force a medicaid expansion compromise. Winning in red states is not impossible, especially in non-federal, non-gerrymandered races.
I think it's disingenuous to not acknowledge the peculiarities in those races. Andy Bershear didn't win because Kentucky is going blue, he won because he was a dynastic candidate going against one of the least popular governors in the country. Same with Kelly; she followed absolute insanity from Brownback
The TX GOP could nominate someone insanely right-wing like Dan Patrick. They've done a good job of nominating normal Republicans for governor, but that can always change.
I agree a normal Republican like Abbott or Perry will beat a Democrat, but a moderate Democrat would have a real shot against a Dan Patrick type
I'm not holding my breath for a Democratic governor in Texas any time this decade. Part of the problem is that the state party is an absolute shambles. The party's organizing has been a mess and we have a very weak bench of potential candidates. Hell, Beto O'Rourke had to practically be forced to run in the last gubernatorial race because nobody else was stepping up to the plate.
1) It will take longer than that. The AG easily won while not only being under indictment, but while being viewed by most attorneys in the state in both parties as a complete moron. If he can’t be beaten, Democrats are a long way off.
2) Democrats haven’t even been able to competent people to run. The state party is very much stuck in the mud because it’s entirely made up of county officials from 4-5 urban counties jockeying for power amongst themselves. None of them run in competitive races except in their primaries. So you end up with people like Lupe Valdez “running” statewide but just being a terrible candidate in every way possible. Or Beto running on a gun control platform in the most pro-gun state in the country. Or Wendy Davis running on a pro choice platform in a pro life state.
3) When it flips, it will likely be all at once, except the Texas Legislature. Statewide elections are almost entirely referendums on the two parties and nothing else.
If the outlook for Texas Democrats is that bleak then I don’t know how they can hope to stop the measures you’re talking about. Unless those measures are unpopular…which would make it pragmatic to fight against them!
I'm very confused by how you think the Democratic party that is so weak in Texas that it cannot get a popular Medicaid expansion done is going to push for much less popular trans rights?
Plenty of red states, several redder than Texas, have implemented Medicaid expansion. It's just false to imply that Texas being a Trump +5.5% state makes Medicaid expansion impossible.
This speaks to a common frustration I have with Matt's popularism articles. They bring up electoral trade offs and encourage rigorous thinking about them, which is good advice. However, they then only ever expound one type of compromise, take the author's preferred policy prioritization as self-evident, and castigate anyone uneasy with these implicit statements as unserious. Now Matt has a large corpus of writing. He's overall pretty clear about what issues he ranks as most important, but a lot of "moralists" also do an implicit ranking. In fact, the person he's responding to is actually pretty clear about ranking certain issues as more important than others. I think a lot of progressives understand that trade offs exist, but they're skeptical that the compromise that popularists want will be in their best interest.
But this is what Matt’s last sentence is about: that as the Dems have gotten more educated, the economic/safety net stuff has gone into their “we can compromise on this” column, even though it affects more people, because it doesn’t affect the educated as keenly.
I think Matt's point is that to the extent Democrats see various identity issues as non-negiotable, that hurts their odds of winning elections which makes it harder to enact the economic/safety net agenda. The outcome is broadly similar but the mechanism is — importantly — different; when in power, Democrats still try to pass the economic/safety net priorities: see ARP.
That was my read as well. My take is that, setting the morality of it aside, these trade offs are likely harder to exploit than Matt and other "popularists" claim.
He's criticizing someone for not taking compromises and prioritizing, when this person is making their priorities clear. Matt is, in turn, showing a compromise on different issues and taking a stand on Medicaid Expansion. That's fine, but he's treating one the person doing this as fundamentally unserious and "moralizing". Popularism, as it's described, is often just the writer's political agenda dressed up as the most politically pragmatic option.
But Medicaid expansion, and Obamacare generally, is itself a compromise—there are and were certainly people (many of them big fans of the senior Senator from Vermont) arguing that Dems should have held out for single-payer, but Matt wasn't one of them.
Yes, a compromise that gained them something. People get health insurance. What does acquiescing to transphobia net progressives? I haven't seen any evidence that it's helpful to their strategy. Conservatives are still all too happy to go after LGB people. Compromise and issue prioritization can be a useful tool, but it's not always going to give you the leeway you want. It requires actually looking at the specific issue and the trade offs involved. Matt and most self-described popularists quickly make pronouncements about the appropriate trade offs and call anyone with a different view of them moralizers.
Yes—a compromise that gained them something! So you agree that it's not that everyone is taking absolutist stands and the question is just which issues to stand on.
As for your question, well, what did "acquiescing" on gay marriage get for people who care about LGBT rights? It seems to me it got us Bill Clinton, who appointed two Supreme Court justices and Barack Obama who appointed two more—in other words, it got us same-sex marriage, along with most of the other ways in which legal discrimination against gay people has been undone. So when you ask "what does acquiescing to transphobia net progressives," I would need to know what you mean by acquiescence and what are the contexts in which people are proposing to do it.
Well, the example Matt uses is Democrats compromising on LGBT-phobia by supporting civil unions but not gay marriage. And it arguably helped them win elections. That seems to be the compromise that gained them something, which eventually they were able to discard once they had the public on their side.
> So when "pragmatic" progressives are unwilling to come to the defense of trans people because some trans issues are unpopular, they aren't actually helping any uninsured people in Texas. What they are doing is leaving the rest of us in the lurch.
What would pragmatic progressives coming to the defense of trans people in your state actually look like? Tweeting about it? Because unless they win power and pass legislation they're not defending anyone
I assume there is a beef here, but would be good to get a view on @ettingermentum’s view that: “that trans people and trans rights are not liabilities to any left-wing movement in any sense of the term”
It seems like when either side indulges its most extreme partisans on the issue, it becomes a liability. Even when gay rights were solidly unpopular, it hurt the Republicans to put Pat Buchanan on stage. So I agree that that Rufo is probably hurting the Republicans, but I don’t think it follows that issues like trans women playing women’s sports are not a potential liability for Democrats.
To normies, a regular trans person is not that high up on the weirdo scale, less high up on the weirdo scale than the straight dude who talks about trans people all the time. When DeSantis for examples starts to turn into that dude, it's weird, and people don't like it.
People also don't like 15 year old biological males competing against girls in sports, because those males are also seen as weirdos.
More importantly, the normie voter thinks the way to deal with that is a school board election, or maybe a legislate election, not it be one of the main points of a Presidential race.
Right, a lot of activists often ignore that agree/disagree is not the only factor. There's also "how much does this matter?" and for most voters, all this stuff doesn't matter much. Kind of similar to gun control for the left.
Republicans can spend all day talking about how people don't want a 16 year old with a penis to run girl's track and they'll get tons of people including me to say "yes that makes sense" but it's not going to turn me into a Republican because it's a minor policy issue. Same with Democrats and background checks for guns.
To put it another way, there is a lot of (well-deserved) moral outrage over the obviously-inhumane razor-wire buoys that our governor has put in the Rio Grande. If someone was trying to say that it isn't worth arguing that they be removed because illegal immigration doesn't poll well in Texas and they only appear to have killed a couple of people, that person would be making both a tactical and moral error.
> obviously-inhumane razor-wire buoys that our governor has put in the Rio Grande
FWIW, you're conflating two separate things: the buoys and razor wire fences put on land (I checked because I agree it sounded pretty awful if combined!).
Is it just me, or are fewer people being screamed at these days for saying that women are people with two x chromosomes and only women should play women’s sports?
i spend great effort defining my own categories. i am unlikely to ally with anyone who calls my categories bigoted, and leery of allying with politicians who sneer at my categories.
Medicaid expansion is more realistic than you think it is. One, federal legislation has been proposed to make it more enticing slash get around the hold out issue. So, for that, the block is controlling congress, not Texas. In that context, pragmatism makes more sense. Two, things happen in red states! Medicaid expansion is reasonably popular if, for example, it gets on the ballot. Although that’s not an option in Texas, it’s not as much as a political deadweight as you’re making it out to be.
The fact was there were no laws about those things in either direction, and they are happening regularly. Boston Children's Hospital, for example, has been doing them for 15-20 years, at least.
The point that I, observer from abroad, and many other commenters here is that sterlizing children is bad. And people in favor of sterilizing children are not a majority ("status quo"), but are using euphemisms to generate sympathy and confusion.
How are the Democrats compromising on abortion? They seem to be winning outright every time it comes up for a vote. Getting Roe v Wade back on the books requires Supreme Court justices and for that you need a Democratic president and Senate.
They're not really, and I think that's Mike's the point. In the past Matt suggested that Dems triangulate on the issue to build Democratic support. For a variety of reasons, that isn't happening. Public disapproval of 2nd trimester abortions seems to be pretty soft, and the GOP seems to be overreaching even on that. I've seen a few state legislative races in VA and polling in other places suggest that state-level triangulation (which would be different from federal changes) isn't what voters want.
I think it depends. Democrats aren't compromising in general. One question is whether Mike would rather Democrats drive the governor of Louisiana out of office over it.
Unless Mike lives in Louisiana or spends his time interfering in Louisiana politics in an unhelpful way, it's hard to see why what he 'would rather' matters (or what you or I would rather, for that matter).
I feel like I’m missing something. Isn’t this post and discussion about political strategy? So it’s completely legitimate to express our hopes about what Louisiana Democrats do. It feels almost like saying “you’re not Joe Biden so what do you care what he does”
I would say they're not having to compromise right now because they're playing defense for a popular status quo from Roe v. Wade.
If they pushed for national legalization across all three trimesters (as _some_ activists want) they'd get hammered.
The compromise position that seems popular is somewhere in the middle of letting people have abortions in the first N weeks(9-15? unsure) so any time you're pushing away from that (Republicans currently) you're going to have trouble.
Basically the Democrats(relative to the maximalist position) are pushing for the current compromise position already.
Yes, but the actual status quo, not the most extreme version of the status quo. And playing defense politically has the advantage of not having to spell out the exact line of defense unless it's tactically helpful.
I think where I come down is basically that the moralists are correct that you shouldn't, "compromise on rights". The problem being that they're mostly kind of idiots who don't understand what "rights" are. The rights that are so important are all right there, in the 14th Amendment mostly. "Equal protection" is a right. It's something everybody is entitled to in equal measure. It's not about gay rights, or women's right or hell even black rights, despite the historical context, because it's just a "right". It's fundamental to what a right is that it applies to all those groups.
Which brings us to the Civil Rights Act. What is that then? Well, that's where the pragmatism has value. The government hadn't been doing a very good job recognizing the rights the 14th Amendment obligated them to defend. So they had to write some laws, which are inherently compromises, to better secure the recognition of those rights. The Civil Rights Act didn't create "rights" they were already there.
The modern activist seems to believe the legislature can grant a "right" to all sorts of things that aren't in the Constitution already, and are really fundamentally incompatible with the concept of a "right". This isn't really either thing. This is embracing moralist language to advance a material interest that is neither a right, nor a pragmatic goal in advance of one. This is a grift.
Which again brings us back to the pragmatists, who are dangerous, because they don't really care if the thing is or isn't a right or not, or is or isn't constitutional or not. They are unconstrained. They care about wielding power. They will typically make any promise, violate any right, so long as it expands their capacity to do so.
I'm not that person. I side with the moralists, rightly understood, even where it makes it harder to do things I might consider good. Maintaining the constraints of the constitution is more important than efficient, pragmatic, technocracy.
You make some good points but "Should these people have this right" actually is a political question. Questions don't become apolitical because they're important or because they have obvious answers. Democracies take rights from people all the time (felons lose the right to vote for instance)
If your answer is that yes people deserve a certain right, you need to actually do politics to make that outcome happen. And that involves compromise sometimes, unless you decide violence is better than compromise and then you try to take it by force. Which is sometimes justified but hard to fathom in 2023 America.
I think part of the core of my "people should use the word 'right' carefully" take is that, to me, a right is a thing one would be ethically justified in resorting to violence to vindicate. When I hear someone claim a right to something it implies they should be able to literally put a gun to someone's head and demand it. It's a high bar.
In a broad, more historically common sense, "politics" doesn't care about rights. It doesn't care about the justification. It's "pragmatic". It's just about who's holding the gun. The liberal democratic tradition is supposed to be different. The state is supposed to be constructed in such a manner that it will secure your rights without you having to demand them by force of arms with "politics", or democracy if one prefers, constrained to more a proper sphere.
As you probably know, a very broad amendment like the 14th Amendment can be contorted by really smart SCOTUS justices to mean whatever they want it to mean. The recent SFFA v. Harvard/UNC cases are a great example: both sides had conflicted views of what the 14th Amendment meant with regard to affirmative action: one side said the 14A bars it, while the other side said that the 14A gives Congress a compelling reason to impose it as restorative justice, while both sides rejected a *third* view that had held for over 40 years, the wishy-washy "diversity only" rationale Powell made up.
The bottom line is that stated rights are only as good as the people are willing to interpret and enforce them.
I agree with you in principle, and think you're right that the language of rights has been abused beyond all recognition and taken a lot of people down some seriously strange and misguided paths. But I also think these things are to a significant degree dependent on each other. It's no coincidence that the societies most protective of rights (properly understood) are also the wealthiest, most productive, and well functioning. These things go hand in hand, and without a well run state, and some degree of shared prosperity, rights (again as properly understood) tend to be the first thing on the chopping block.
Aren't the parties also shrinking? I know there is state-to-state variation, but it feels like I see more headlines pointing out that independents are outnumbering either registered Democrats or Republicans. If that is true, then when does the "demographic realignment of the parties" just become a purity spiral that pushes out moderate and heterodox voters?
When I read about "Republican voters" these days, it seems that what I'm actually reading about is the MAGA cultists, not the sane, rational, conservatives that I know. And when I read virtually anything touching on trans issues, the quotes in the articles are not even close to representative of the view of Democrats / progressives or Republicans / conservatives in my social circles. (And those are markedly less fervent and ideological than they were 10-20 years ago, but maybe that is just a function of aging.)
I cannot even be bothered to come up with a label for my own views let alone fathom the worldview of someone who is capable of writing about the taxonomy of progressives. Am I in the minority or are people who think out loud on the Slow Boring comments section while waiting for their morning blood-caffeine levels to stabilize just a somewhat quiet majority?
I think I saw a stat that today's independents are more loyal to one party in voting behavior than partisans were a generation ago, so while in name there are more independents, in actuality we are more polarized than ever.
I see that statistic discussed nationally, but the local paper tells me that our Independents tend to view both parties as too extreme. That does (again, according to the local paper) translate into something like 80% of Independents reliably voting for one party—against the other party, really—but because Independents are now a plurality, that other 20% decides elections. (Only statewide, due to gerrymandering.)
That is why I wonder if the parties are shedding membership and are in a purity spiral. Say a center-right voter leaves the GOP because they feel it has been taken over by the far-right wing, but still ends up voting straight Republican because they feel that the Democratic party has been taken over by the far-left wing, which they view as more dangerous. The result is an increasingly polarized electorate, but the cause is, ironically, moderates leaving the two major parties, which then become even more reliant on a shrinking base of ideologically extreme partisans.
Im pretty sure American Independents are a mix of people that just people that don't know anything about politics and partisans that don't want the party labels for essentially PR reasons, I don't think declining party membership would indicate anything about political views
Well, as a possibly representative member of the Slow Boring comments section, I've been an Independent since I was old enough to vote and I don't think I fall into either those categories. In fact, precisely because I am interested in politics the baseline function of party affiliation as a voting guide is not particularly useful to me. And I don't vote straight party line anything, so I don't think it's a PR thing. If there were a serious political party that represented my priorities I'd have no problem joining it. But this is also an age of declining party power, so there is really no downside to staying an Independent.
I go out of my way not to discuss politics with people in meatspace, so I lack anecdotes about other people's proclivities vis-a-vis party affiliation. I do see that the local paper talks about declining party membership a lot and tries to do "person on the street" stories to explain it, but those articles are never satisfying. The only people I know for sure are registered Democrats and Republicans are my parents and they're about the same age as the likely Republican nominee. They describe their own party as representing their views, but see the opposing party as increasingly extremist.
>as a possibly representative member of the Slow Boring comments section
i would say probably not, most people here seem to be some variety of liberal (since Matt himself is one). I don't know what your priorities are but almost no one takes the party line 100%, they just pick the party that they agree with on more things, a compromise you might say.
I don't mean to say that you have to agree 100% with a party to be a member. But you have to agree directionally and you probably should be on board with the big issues. I respect the "I am going to change things from the inside" mindset, but I came of (voting) age in the Clinton era, where both parties (and public opinion) were opposed to the things I was for and for the things I opposed. And I'm not an activist, so it never made sense to me to join a party that I disagreed with on issues that were important to me.
The Mason philosophy makes you much less effective at democratic politics, but the *reason* why it makes you less effective is that it's a rejection of democracy in concept. Taken to its logical conclusion, it means that if there was a way to impose your own views on these "non-compromisable" issues on the country through non-democratic, non-electoral means, then you would not only be allowed to do that, but you'd be morally obligated to do it. I'm sure that people like Mason envision doing it through the courts a la Brown v. Board of Education, but the courts are ultimately responsive to democratic politics too, if indirectly rather than directly. If the voters aren't with you, then the voters are wrong and a vanguard should overrule them. You can frame it in terms of "false consciousness" if it makes the medicine go down easier, but that's the bottom line.
That has quite literally been the MO of groups like the Transgender Law Center, who recognize the unpopularity of many of their goals but, believing that are fundamental human rights issues, they’ve quietly lobbied for laws to be changed without the public knowing.
I found Mason’s claim regarding principles on which there can be no compromise interesting. If, “no compromise,” is to make any sense, then it has to be on a binary yes/no principle, not one with any continuous free parameters. If there is a free parameter, some will think 0.5 is the right level, and others will think 0.6 is the right level, neither can claim principled truth, and compromise is 0.55…just like taxation. But then Mason claims that there can be no compromise on the grand principle of treating African Americans equally: “We can’t compromise on whether Black Americans should be treated equally as white Americans.” Interestingly, this is precisely a topic where grand principle confronts a policy approach with free parameters, but it is the *conservative* side that is the grand principle, while progressives favor policies with free parameters on which compromise is unavoidable. The grand principle was enunciated succinctly by John Roberts, “The way to stop discriminating on race is to stop discriminating on race,” whereas the progressive view is to employ some degree of race-conscious policy to offset other race-associated disadvantages. For example, progressives usually believe in some sort of boost in college admission for African Americans, but how much? Should it be the equivalent of 30 SAT points, or 50? Setting that level is something on which views will differ, and compromise is unavoidable.
Reading your comment made me realize that I've read countless takes in support and in opposition to affirmative action and I've never heard one advocate try to quantify how many SAT points being Black should be worth.
The Supreme Court actually made setting a precise number illegal in Gratz v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 244 (2003), although I think the decision makes little sense as a piece of jurisprudence -- I think all preceding cases on affirmative action strongly indicated that this was by far the best way to implement their holdings. The Court was just uncomfortable seeing this reduced to an actual number.
The court is *always* uncomfortable whenever the end result starts getting reduced to a number. That's why they gave up in Rucho v. Common Cause, and why Excessive Fines jurisprudence is a mess.
These are (supposedly) the smartest, most convincing lawyers in the nation. You'd think they could handle a little math. But apparently not.
It would basically just be some function of a regression coefficient. If I had my way, income and a lot of other stuff would be in that regression, and the income coefficient would be larger than the other stuff, and race coefficients might just be small enough to call zero
Did working class whites leave the Democratic Party or did the Democratic party abandon working class whites? It was kind of a mutual separation. Working class living standards were basically stagnant from 1974 to 2016. Working class whites noticed this. (Black voters noticed it too, but they are more dependent on maintaining the safety net, so they largely stayed Democrat. Even a successful black businessman probably has plenty of cousins who get benefits and is probably sees many of them socially).
Why vote on economic issues when that strategy has failed for a generation?
The basic problem with the American safety net is it does much more for the underclass (roughly the bottom 20%) than for the working class. Successful blue collar workers (eg self employed plumbers) pay fairly stiff taxes and get few benefits until they retire. The chronically unemployed get medicaid basically for free.
Working stiffs could tolerate this situation while their standard of life was increasing. But when the elevator stopped working and hadn’t worked for 40 years, cultural symbolism became irresistible.
I do not think "Even a successful black businessman probably has plenty of cousins who get benefits and is probably sees many of them socially" accurately describes why upper class blacks are democrats. You really think "my cousin gets food stamps" is more likely than "this party contains prominent figures who look like me and expresses concern regarding discrimination against people like me" not to mention "people who hate me because of the color of my skin almost uniformly support the other party" ?
The Boston DSA moved to expel one of the most liberal state reps (Mike Connelly) for insufficient purity in several areas (he had a 100% score from Progressive Mass in 21-22). Next, from the Globe:
--State Senator Lydia Edwards is even more scathing. ... “The ‘let them eat cake’ wing of the left is so out of touch with the lived struggle of so many people. They will hold their breath for purity and throw a temper tantrum, while they are stably housed, food secure, and healthy.” Edwards, the first woman and first person of color to represent her district, also calls DSA members “progressive white supremacists.” Asked why, Edwards said: “They are progressive. They also believe they know what is better for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) people. And whether they want to admit it, trusting your perspective of what is better for people of color than people of color telling you … is white supremacy.”--
Further:
--She’s also very outspoken when it comes to criticizing progressive stands such as defunding the police. That, Edwards said, is “overwhelmingly a white suburban mantra. Say that in Mattapan.” Another example of progressives being out of touch is the willingness of protesters to get arrested. “I can’t think of a greater way to say, ‘I am white, rich, and privileged. So privileged I can afford to have an arrest record,’” Edwards said.--
Although I appreciate Senator Edwards’ defense of pragmatism, describing these misguided DSA purists as “white supremacists” isn’t reasonable, accurate, or, for that matter, especially pragmatic.
Well it is Massachusetts, and it is greater Boston, and this is the DSA: the median primary voter is a click or two to the left of your average Warren supporter.
I suppose this kind of fiery identitarian rhetoric may be pragmatic in the very narrow sense of “popular with Edwards’ own constituents” (I don’t know), but it doesn’t seem healthy for the Democratic Party or the progressive movement in general for liberal elected officials to be directing meritless allegations of “white supremacy" at potential coalition partners on the left. Even if they're annoying.
But why should anyone care what's pragmatic for Edwards personally unless there's a risk someone worse will take her seat? If "pragmatism" simply means "anything that could conceivably help one Democratic politician get from 96.6% to 97.3% in her deep blue district," it just amounts to individualized campaign strategy. To my mind, the point of pragmatism is to get better policy outcomes, which may require that Democratic politicians in very blue districts think about the interests of the statewide or national party when speaking in public.
And if the idea is that Edwards should talk like this to avoid getting unseated by a DSA firebrand, I'm not sure how calling leftists "white supremacists" would help. (In any event, a successful challenge from the left seems unlikely; in 2021, Edwards won 60 percent of the vote in the Dem primary, with the other 40 percent going to a slightly more conservative candidate from the working-class suburb of Revere. This is a very blue district, but it's not Cambridge or Amherst.)
In a world where individual donations matter far more than party money, Edward's job is to get money from people who will click on a link on her Twitter page or whatever and throw her $20, not to keep the guys and gals who work in shiny towers in downtown Boston happy at a $500/plate dinner, or whatever.
Why, it's almost as if well-educated latte liberals on the coasts know that refusing to prioritize coalition politics maximizes the chances their own taxes won't go up any time soon. I wouldn't be shocked if a few of these folks even oppose housing abundance.
How long is the timeframe? 5 years ago no. But 15? 20? George Pataki was governor of New York up until 2006. Scott Brown was elected in 2010. New Hampshire and Washington still don't have income taxes.
These states used to be more Republican, sure. I think the question is how we define the "well educated latte liberals" that Jasper is talking about—it's true that educated voters used to run more Republican, but the cultural signifier of "latte" 15-20 years ago meant cities and the educated people in the cities were quite liberal.
Anyway, if these voters are sincere about wanting low taxes, why aren't their taxes lower? (New Hampshire is not a "latte liberal" state at all, though Washington, home of Starbucks, obviously is.) I live in California and I can assure you that the "socially liberal, economically conservative" side is not running rampant here. There isn't even momentum to bring back the SALT deduction.
I think the better question is why aren't taxes higher in those states? If they truly are so economically progressive, why did single-payer healthcare fail so badly in California and Vermont? Why aren't there any major efforts to raise taxes even more? What would happen in California if there was a serious push to raise property taxes? (Which, btw, California should raise property taxes, so they can lower capital gains and income taxes and make state tax revenue not so utterly dependent on the stock market). Broad-based social spending requires broad-based, high taxes on everyone. The "high-tax" states have high taxes on high earners, but that is not enough to fund European levels of social spending.
George Pataki and Scott Brown were outliers, which is why you remember them.
They won because they won a bunch of non-Republicans. If you are defining "Republicans" as "people who have voted for a Republican for a major office at least once this century" then 75% of Americans are Republicans but it isn't a useful definition.
Maybe trite, but the brain is a survival machine first and not strictly a truth-seeking apparatus. There’s something beautiful and awe-inspiring about how progressives manage to (1) sabotage their coalition’s ability to raise their taxes and (2) posture as pure and better than everyone else, all while (3) remaining 100% sincere internally.
I agree with you. The six figure PMCs upon whom the Democratic Party increasingly relies for votes and funding are quite sincere in their desire not to see their taxes increase, even if it's not something they're noisy about (they are noisy about mandatory housing scarcity, though).
Except as noted above, when you look into referendums that would actually raise taxes, these PMC's vote for the higher taxes at higher rates than the rural voters. Look at the results of Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increases, etc. It's consistent.
Now, I'm sure there's a random neighborhood or town where that isn't true, but in general, there's been no widespread proof that when they can vote specifically one way or the other, these new suburban voters are secret anti-tax Republican's who just like gay people.
I understand among both some of my fellow far lefties and the social centrists who are uncomfortable with current change, might both be nostalgic for a time when the left-wing of the party was a bunch of union voters with a variety of views on social issues, but that simply isn't true anymore.
No, the future of a social democratic state in US is likely going to be led by wine moms in the suburbs and urban liberals of all sorts of education and backgrounds in Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, and Texas, not non-college educated white voters in rural Michigan or Kentucky, no matter if that was true in 1971.
Not that it means the Democrat's should just bottom out amongst these voters, but there shouldn't be nostalgia for a section of voters that don't really exist anymore.
They’re definitely sincere, but it is funny, not as in haha but hmm interesting, that the strategy works as well as it does for economic self interest and in-group reputation.
As someone who has spent my entire life around “well-educated latte liberals from the coasts,” I can assure you that their cultural politics are sincere, and they are not engaging in some complex Machiavellian plot to thwart progressive taxation or universal health care. I agree with Matt’s arguments in this essay, and have spent a lot of time debating with friends who are closer to the moralist position. They are not cynics; in fact, their unwillingness to think strategically is (from my perspective) kind of the whole problem.
> acting like latte liberals are cartoon villains in the comments of an essay explaining why acting like conservatives are cartoon villains is unproductive
Oh man- you beat me to it! Yeah, it’s an ingenious way to keep your taxes low AND still be able to have lots of cool progressive friends (who you would lose if you came out as a Republican and said you prioritized low taxes). Win-win!
I can't believe it hasn't been said yet as I burn through at least the top level comments while I continue to be a person experiencing Westernness, but that last paragraph is an absolute banger that really turns things upside down at the moralists identified in this article, with the Scoville heat units similarly turned up. That's the type of paragraph that's well designed to get the moralists to yell at Matt a bunch on Twitter when it should be challenging their devotion as to which issues they deem uncompromisable.
If I felt my existence were threatened, I’d probably push to put a book in school libraries other than the one with a picture of a young person giving a blow job to a dildo (NPR had a story about librarians liters organizing to get this book on shelves). I would probably choose something geared a bit more toward normal people to represent me. But I don’t feel my existence is threatened and maybe I’m just bad at politics. Maybe the librarians and activists are doing the right thing.
This would be a reasonable statement if you pretend there is only one book at the center of book-banning efforts and not hundreds of them. Maybe you are in fact bad about politics if you don’t understand the actual issue!
You’re giving a really good example of MY’s thesis here. Should public schools have such a book in their libraries? Just say “no, public schools shouldn’t have those books in their libraries, we’re talking about books that should be in school libraries. Books with poetry. Books about this country’s history with slavery and Jim Crow. No one wants this book in school libraries. It’s entirely irrelevant.” But maximalists can’t bring themselves to say that. So a book like that ends up becoming the issue, essentially giving a win to the other side.
I mean I guess I would be giving a good example of MY’s thesis if my comment was “I feel very strongly about this specific book being made available in schools” rather than what I actually wrote.
If progressive literary maximalists organize around the opinion that the book should be in schools, progressives who say “I’m not sure I agree but they are part of the coalition so it’s not my place to suggest they might be wrong,” are effectively allowing maximalists to define progressives.
The problem isn’t that sincere maximalists on any one specific issue are too abundant-I don’t think there are many of them. The problem is that maximalists on any one issue in the coalition are becoming maximalists on all issues to signal solidarity. It makes for some unpopular messaging overall and weird positions that hurt advocacy groups. Unions end up weighing in on cultural issues that their membership isn’t really on board with. Etc.
But there is a point there. Books are not being "banned" in the sense that they cannot be published, or cannot be purchased, or cannot be accessed. A few books are being not put on the very small number of shelves in very small school libraries.
My kids are now in their low 20s. The library in their middle class public high school was about the size of two classrooms, maybe half that space, if that, was dedicated to shelved books --- very few students read any of them.
Outside of mandated textbooks I'm not sure how long it's been since my kids read a physical dead tree book. Every book that we're talking about can be purchased and read easily online or even accessed and read for free via the many public libraries that allow for online access even if you live outside their area.
Maybe even apropos to Matt's point today, compromising by advocating for greater access for kids to the internet might be more useful than fighting for actual shelf space in a few school libraries where most of the books won't ever be checked out anyway.
It’s only a point in a very specific, pedantic sense. The people who want to remove these books from libraries are very specifically saying “Children should not have access to LGBTQ-focused material and we should restrict access to them.”
You are moreover misrepresenting the issue as saying it is about books “not being put on shelves”. They are being removed from shelves. Nobody who favours removing books from libraries is advocating it on the grounds that ‘very few students read’ physical books. On the contrary, they are overtly trying to prevent kids from accessing these books. I’m not sure how that isn’t clear.
My point is that the restrictions they're trying to put in place are near trivial. Yes, they would like children to not have access to LGBTQ focused material. With today's technology and easy access in many different ways to these same materials they might as well be commanding the tides not to change.
The people trying to suppress these works are trying to prevent their kids from "turning gay" they may not realize it, but that's not how things work. These are stupid acts being perpetrated by ignorant people with probably near zero effects. It's good to oppose these efforts, but it's also good to keep in perspective how small a problem this actually is.
"Not being put on shelves" and "being removed from shelves" is virtually the same thing. I suppose a perfectly accurate version would be "not being allowed on shelves", that way you don't have to distinguish between a book that's already purchased vs. one that could be or is being purchased.
Some books are going to be excluded and some included. The only issue is -who- gets to say which is which, and -what- books will be included/excluded. And that's simply a question of the power to force your opinions on others.
“People should have access to this book and choose for themselves whether to read it” is not equivalent to “People should not have access to this book and not be able to choose for themselves whether to read it”
Because not all books will be included in any collection. A collection implies choice -- including some, which necessarily means excluding others.
Is every school library to be infinite? Nobody is to be directed to certain books? Because to be directed to certain books -- making them available -- implies excluding others.
You have your opinions on which volumes should be used; others have different opinions; you fight to see who gets to prevail. QED.
State-financed education is a process of indoctrination in a State-approved narrative.
The only question is -whose- narrative. That's what people fight about.
Hypothetically, a school library could be made infinite with the emergence of technology. The barriers in its way are expense, copyright considerations, and--as you say--who should be directed to what books.
Your condescending ‘umm actually’ aside, I don’t disagree with you here, but that’s not the debate. The argument is not to remove certain books and replace them with others. It is simply ‘These books (and more specifically this subject matter) should not be made available.’
I don’t agree that merely making a book available is an endorsement of the book’s content. It does not affect an individual’s choice to read the book beyond simply enabling them to make that choice. Restricting access, however, does affect that choice specifically be impeding it. What would be analogous would be making those books mandatory reading which, as far as I can tell, is not a position that is being broadly taken.
The fact that this one book is at the center of this controversy is so weird. Like, I could not imagine having an opinion on its inclusion one way or the other.
It's at the center of the controversy because: (1) there's a visual (always easier to get people worked up when there are pictures); (2) the specific picture -- as critics of the book would point out -- is something that is plainly outside what mainstream culture considers acceptable to depict in media available to minors without parental supervision (that sort of scene even in animated form would get a film an "R" rating and it would not be shown on network television); and (3) the defenders of keeping the book have to comedically tie themselves into pretzels to justify keeping the book in high school libraries, but aren't willing to just let go of the anchor, so people who want to ban it are going to keep pressing because it discredits the defenders with "normies."
I have to go help a friend move some stuff for the next few hours so I’m just dropping in now to remind people to stay civil and make me have to do as little moderating as possible this afternoon
"...stay civil and make me have to do as little moderating as possible...."
Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue! Incivility in defense of liberty is no vice!
[said the guy who lost to LBJ in a landslide, and I hope all of my political opponents adopt his position!]
His other slogan was “In your heart you know he’s right,” to which liberals replied, “In your guts you know he’s nuts”--those were the days
it must be said that even philosophically these shibboleths are just wrong
"I don't care what you do, just don't create any extra paperwork for me" comprises a significant portion of my management strategy.
Maybe you should try what my teachers occasionally did and put some brown-noser in charge of taking down names of people who misbehaved while you're gone.
Well that’s what Matt pays me to do
Sounds like Milan needs an intern!
A Deputy Intern. Who in turn could outsource the work to an Assistant Deputy Intern!
Assistant TO the Deputy Intern.
I think you should secretly outsource this and/or get someone to write a bot to do the job for you.
I hoped that that worked, and that nothing fell off of the truck!
i’m becoming a fan of the warning then one day ban concept.
The rejection of compromise is also driven by creeping Niemöllerism, too -- after all, first they came for [tiny marginal group] and then they came for me. This engenders the attitude that you must respond to any threat, of any severity, to any member of your coalition as a maximal threat to the entire coalition. Indeed -- you are weak and naive to respond with less than maximum force to any threat. For "they" are implacably evil, and they treat compromise only as a means to total victory.
Are there enemies who are implacably evil, and cannot be appeased? Yes; Hitler was one, and Putin is now another.
But Niemöller's dictum is a catastrophic model for domestic politics, where the median US voter is more likely to respond to uncompromising purity with thermostatic rejection. Furthermore, strategies and attitudes inspired by Niemöller's dictum make you look, to your opponents and neutral onlookers, exactly like the kind of implacable enemy with whom there can be no compromise. So they're going to Niemöller you just like you Niemöller them, and then politics has been replaced by warfare.
It's a stirring quotation, but a horrible model for being an effective agent in a democracy.
I've always read Niemöller in a much more Mencken kind of way:
>The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H.L. Mencken
Come to think of it. Is that Mencken quote on the moralist side or the pragmatist side? Or is simply not "progressive" in some third way?
This is pluralism. Compromise in service of universal principles. Does Matt's view of progress abandon the pluralist ideal?
I think that it speaks to the fact that this dichotomy is often blurry and sometimes breaks down. Compromising on one issue doesn't always give you leeway on others. For instance, some LGB folks have called to cut trans people out of their coalition, thinking that conservatives wouldn't go after them either. However, the recent spate of book bans, groomer rhetoric, and Don't say gay law have all impacted LGB folks as well.
It's not that there are never trade offs with coalition building, but they don't always take the simple left-right dichotomy that Matt and other "popularists" say they do.
Isn't some of it that the anti-marriage-equality folks kept claiming it was a slippery slope to other things, and as cultural warfare keeps aiming for maximal victories around hotly contested issues, that seems to ring true, so they get less tolerant?
Consider polygamy(picking it because it's not _currently_ a hot button fight). Some claimed that marriage equality would lead to people trying to legalize polygamy. I have no real moral objection to polygamy (I worry about how it has been used to repress women in the past but that's a worry about it's dangers, not a moral objection) but I want no part of it myself. Depending on the specific protections I could vote for it on a ballot measure but I think it would be political suicide for the Democrats to try to push this, even if a few polyamorous people would significantly benefit legally, I think it's just wildly unpopular.
That's bad for some of those people! Visitation rights in hospital etc. But I think pushing for it would also cause "traditional family" supporters to double down even more on their pushback.
Some LGB folks have called for cutting out the T--because the concept of gender identity is antithetical to homosexuality, and much of what activists are pushing for in law and social norms would make same sex attraction akin to “sexual racism”, as one voice put it notably.
Acceptance of and support for gay marriage was at an all time high until trans rights activism started hitting the news and schools. It’s the forced teaming of LGB and T in the first place that’s hurting LGBs.
I think it's the moralist side but trying to give some clarity as to what to expect when defending sacred principles. It's also in its own way kind of an antithesis to Matt's essay in the sense that it most obviously implicates constitutional rights (speech, depending on your view of the exclusionary rule the Fourth Amendment) for which an absolutist rather than a compromise position has obvious virtues despite also potential drawbacks.
But the ACLU also wasn't running for office. I'm glad the ACLU did that, they used those cases to help other groups later. But it would have been terrible politics for a party to do this, and that the ACLU at the time seemed unaffiliated with a party(this last statement may be faulty memory/historical understanding on my part)
And it's really, really sad that this happened. We need more groups like the old ACLU that were laser focused on one set of issues without getting derailed by others that don't have as much consensus among those laser focused on their prime issues.
I switched my support from the ACLU to FIRE. Like the old ACLU, sometimes FIRE makes me grind my teeth, but on net I'm happy with my choice.
But if the American Nazi party were on the verge of a plurality in Congress, Bukele style disregard for legal nicities might make sense.
If they were on the verge of a plurality they wouldn't need the ACLU's help as a marginal outcasts.
Arguably the more frustrating invocation of Niemöller occurs in contexts in which the secular trend is *in favor* of the social-progressive left (which is to say, on almost every social-progressive frontier), and less than-total-victory is equated to a camels'-nose-under-the-tent loss. The sports debate referenced in Matt's article seems like it's among the most acute examples here: in what respect is the status quo facing some degree of pushback on *worse* than fifteen years ago from the perspective of even the most ardent of advocates? This is simply *not like* the situation that the Niemöller poem is referencing, and the analogy is therefore bad regardless of the merits the substantive position!
Like, yes, Dobbs, but also Dobbs is basically the exception that proves the rule here as far as "things not going the way that progressives would like in a way suggestive of their inevitable victory."
Also, Dobbs happened because Roe was a maximalist victory that society wasn’t ready for. It’s not just an exception, it’s a cautionary tale: if you pursue victories that are too maximalist to be widely accepted, you risk a Pyrrhic victory, even if it seems like you had solidly won for 5 straight decades.
Roe, itself, wasn't all that maximalist (states can't interfere in the first trimester, can restrict but not ban in the second, can ban in the third); the problem was that when the Supreme Court first tried to analyse what was a non-restrictive regulation in the first trimester and what was a permitted restrictive regulation that wasn't tantamount to a ban in the second, in Casey, it abandoned the trimester framework for "undue burden", which then meant that instead of having some restrictions on the second trimester that don't apply to the first, every state either applied them to every abortion or to none, and the entire concept of Roe that 13-26 weeks isn't the same as 0-13 went out of the window.
Weirdly, Casey was a compromise (crafted by O'Connor). If the compromise in Casey had been to stick to the trimester framework and strike down all the restrictions for the first trimester and permit them all for the second (rather than permit some and ditch others), then I suspect the abortion debate could have been very different.
You’re correct on the specifics, but too specific to be correct on the broader level I was working on.
One can certainly cast Roe’s trimester scheme as “not maximalist”, but this ignores the fact that it basically overrode every state’s existing laws in an absolutely maximalist fashion.
Abortion was simply not a polarized issue at that time, and Roe’s maximalism is what changed that. A different Casey might well have mooted/averted Dobbs, but that’s a VERY large possibility space you’re talking about. Moreover, the generation of abortion activism that Roe started was a key influence on the Casey that we got - we don’t get *this* Casey without millions of liberals believing that abortion is a core human right that derives from privacy.
So, the point remains that Roe sowed the seeds of its demise.
All of that is true - but any decision that permitted early abortions in states that didn't want to legalise them would have been "maximalist" in your sense, and any such decision would have to come from the idea that abortion is a core human right.
Within the space of possible Supreme Court decisions that legalise abortion, I think it's hard to regard Roe as maximalist.
If your criticism of Roe is that "a Supreme Court decision that legalises abortion is maximalist", then sure. But then I don't think you're criticising Roe, the specific decision, but the entire concept of a constitutional right to abortion without a constitutional amendment.
>> If your criticism of Roe is that "a Supreme Court decision that legalises abortion is maximalist", then sure.
More or less. But it didn’t JUST legalize abortion, it overrode every state’s existing laws regardless of to what extent they themselves legalized it.
>> Within the space of possible Supreme Court decisions that legalise abortion, I think it's hard to regard Roe as maximalist.
Again, though, you’re applying the absolute wrong frame to this. The problem wasn’t WHICH legal abortion scheme it imposed on the whole country, it was THAT it imposed a scheme on the whole country before it was ready.
The rule of Roe was that the only valid restrictions in the second trimester were ones that protected the woman's health. Fetal interests didn't become compelling until the third trimester. This is one key element people see as maximalist; until Casey, the Supreme Court took a pretty hard line on all pre-viability restrictions, particularly ones it understood as being about the fetus. Casey held that states could regulate abortion out of respect for fetal life even pre-viability, such as by trying to inform/persuade a woman's choice, as long as it didn't impose an undue burden. But Casey didn't allow pre-viability bans either, even with exceptions.
Many people are more uncomfortable with second trimester abortions than first trimester abortions, but I don't think the American constitutional law of abortion ever really internalized that (at least not officially). My personal view is that I would accept restrictions on second trimester pre-viability abortions in exchange for more solid guarantees of real access in the first trimester, particularly for women who have difficulty traveling or paying for care.
It drew two lines, one at the boundary between the first and second trimesters and the other at the end of the second trimester which was presumed to be viability. Abortions had to be legal to viability, but could be restricted in the second trimester. The problem was that it didn't come up with a framework for what was an OK regulation and what wasn't, the lower courts just threw all regulations out, and then Casey threw the whole trimester framework in the bin.
Roe *did* protect women's rights for those five decades which, as Pyrrhic victories go, wasn't *that* Pyrrhic. You could say it was an undemocratic way to protect those rights but that's what we want the Supreme Court to do.
Yes, it energized the most conservative part of the Republican base and helped push the drive to get more conservative justices on the Supreme Court, but I doubt that, absent Roe, the two parties would both be moderate groups happy to find common ground today.
To be clear, I’m not blaming Roe for this current crisis, nor positing a magical alternative history.
To that point, I believe that Roe and abortion politics in general can be characterized as an adjuvant of the polarization spiral kicked off by the Sixth Party system. It didn’t conclusively accelerate the spiral, but it *did* profoundly shape how it took place.
But I do think that if Roe had essentially been Dobbs - ruling that abortion was an issue for the states - that abortion would have been a mostly moot issue by the 90’s, because all of the state-level politics would have fully played out by then.
Without abortion as a rallying cry for social conservatives like Evangelicals, and especially as a focus of campaign promises for their politicians, the GOP would have had to turn to other cultural issues much sooner. We don’t have to make any overconfident/unjustified pronouncements about alternative history merely to observe the mechanics we’ve seen play out over the last 50 years, and note that those mechanics would have proceeded very differently.
I agree that things would have turned out very differently. Better or worse, who's to say.
I think the whole debate turns on whether one thinks abortion should have been decided by the democratic process or that it was a right that deserved being protected from majority action in certain locations.
I think that entire question you pose, that entire framing of abortion as potentially a "right", is not something most people at the time Roe was decided would have recognized.
I won't insult you by saying your opinions about abortion might not be deeply nor sincerely held, nor well-considered. But I *will* say that they are quite obviously profoundly shaped by Roe. Specifically, by the fact that Roe framed abortion as a core civil right and therefore shaped what its supporters would believe about it.
But before Roe, abortion was widely considered even by its supporters to be a social question, not a question of civil rights. That's part of why it was so easy for politicians in both parties to have wildly varying opinions on it.
My point is, it's really easy to frame it as "democratic process vs. rights" after 50 years of framing it that way. But that doesn't necessarily mean people HAD to frame it that way. Absent Roe (or in "Roe = Dobbs" world), it's possible -- and I deeply suspect so -- that abortion would have continued being seen as a social question, one that might as well fall under "states' rights". A handful of activists might call it a "human right", and they might even have a sizeable minority of public sentiment behind them, but we'd all be side-eye-ing them the way we do people who insist that "healthcare is a human right", even if many of us still vaguely supported abortion-on-demand.
David, you also can't ignore the fact that other areas of life, such as contraception, and even zoning, were being discussed in terms of privacy and individual basic rights. Wasn't Roe "just" another step, though certainly major because of the moral issue,another step along the trail of increased autonomy of individuals as developing after WW2 and through the 60's and 70's?
That assumes some sort of moral arc of history that may or may not exist, and also that abortion resides somewhere on that arc, which it doesn’t necessarily have to.
As one would expect for a deeply personal political argument among competing views of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
David M. is correct that Roe circumvented those debates from happening and they are happening now instead of in the 1970s. State-level elections are turning on this questions, as should have happened years ago.
Sure, because we’ve spent 50 years polarizing on it, and things finally exploded when Dobbs reopened the question.
But rancor in the current timeline is NOT definitive proof that rancor would have happened in an alternate one.
Dobbs happened because Republicans worked for 50 years to get their judges on the bench so they could constrain women's rights in a way they could not via the ballot box.
Annnnd Roe was any different?
Plenty of states could have banned abortion “at the ballot box”, but Roe kept them from doing that. I’m not asking you to abjure your beliefs here, I’m just asking you to consider other perspectives.
More importantly, Roe deflated political momentum within individual states to liberalize abortion laws.
Agreed, it is critical that in the Niemöller quotation, the democracy was already lost.
This comment puts me in an odd position because on the one hand I agree with the analysis, but on the other hand I feel like events have overtaken it in some sense, at least in some parts of the country. I'm thinking specifically about the recent laws in Florida, where the initial action was pretty explicitly against trans people, but that grew into a more general anti-gay attack. I think a lot of people claimed that you could do the sports fight while still supporting gay marriage or being okay with gay people, and instead it looks pretty clearly, at least to me, like the Niemöller analysis holds: the initial attack was just the leading edge of a campaign against a much broader group of people.
And I think you see a similar dynamic in other areas; education issues immediately come to mind (i.e. an attack on gender studies is the leading edge for we should just eliminate tenure and maybe chop the humanities in half and hold history programs to nakedly partisan rewrites). Dobbs is another good example; no sooner had the ink dried on Alito's high-minded defense of sending it back to the states than conservatives began talking about the necessity of a national ban and state legislators began looking for ways to extend anti-abortion sovereignty across their borders.
If Niemöller was wrong, the obvious result would be that people take power and go this far but no farther. But I feel like the actual evidence for that proposition is somewhat lacking. I'm a huge fan of the civil rights movement, but they really WERE planning to use this victory to move forward to THAT victory, and the racists were, in some sense, totally correct to respond with maximum force, even though that also made them (in my opinion) evil.
So like I said, I prefer your analysis, but I'm not actually sure that I buy it.
"If Niemöller was wrong,...."
It's not a question of whether he was wrong, or whether my analysis is right. The cases will vary, and he'll be right about some cases, and wrong about others. That's why it's "creeping Niemöllerism:"
First they applied Niemöller's dictum to Hitler, and they were right!
Then they applied it to some unclear cases, and it's unclear whether they were right or wrong.
Then they applied it to every little intra-faction spat, and politics became intractable.
Neither Niemöller's dictum nor its opposite can be employed as universal guides to politics. You've got to look at the facts of the case, and at your opponents.
I'm just saying that the widespread adoption and over-employment of Niemöllerism is one of the factors making politics unworkable by making compromise seem like total surrender.
Yeah, and I agree.
I guess what I should have written is that it feels to me like maybe the Niemöller analysis holds more often than makes me personally comfortable. I am basically pretty onboard with both your analysis of the risks of turning things into zero-sum / absolutist fights and with MY's argument about the necessity of advancing by half steps and not throwing people out of the tent.
But my training as a historian coupled with my own observations of events in my lifetime as a broadly-read person with an interest in politics make me feel unsettled about that position in a sense of "maybe I should be quicker to view certain kinds of actors as inherently bad-faith or unsafe as partners for compromise."
I don't know; I think I'm having a hard time articulating how I feel about it, and I'm still not sure I have done so very eloquently. Partly I think I am grappling with an interesting dysjunction in my life, which is that these questions are in some ways similar to, yet also very different from, moral and ethical questions that come up in my role as a health care worker. But also hard problems are hard. That's just the nature of the game.
I think Niemöller applies when rights start getting taken away (I think about it all the time, like someday They will start apply a carefully twisted AI /LLM to our comments on this Substack and then come for us), but I'm doubtful that anyone suddenly jumps on the trans wagon or whatever because of Niemöller. There are a lot of other sociological/psychological factors going on ... "we need a new issue so we can feel virtuous!" "I wanna be a victim too!" (some of my imprecise ways of judging people I don't agree with.)
Viewing Putin as implacably evil is positively dangerous. He’s been in power for 20 years and has fought two wars, both contesting territory his country controlled within his lifetime. Russias claims to Ukraine are not so difference than France’s claim to Alsace in 1914. Was Poincaré an unfathomable monster? Putin has probably killed a smaller portion of his subjects in foreign wars than the enlightened monarch and early vaccine adopter Catherine the Great. He has been far less sanguinary than the men of 1914.
Moreover, Ukraine cannot defeat Putin on the battlefield and will have to negotiate with him. The alternative is a material risk of nuclear war. Containment is still a thing.
Comparing 2023 leaders to 1914 leaders on the morality scale is like saying that the benchwarmers on the Detroit Pistons are better NBA players than the 1950s Celtics were.
On some sense it might be true but it's a useless comparison, and we need to compare people to their own lifetimes.
If France had unilaterally declared war on Germany to reclaim Alsace, they’d have been the villains of WWI (which also wouldn’t have been as big a conflict because there’s no chance Britain and Italy, and maybe even Russia, would have joined them).
so instead they cheered on russia to take a hard line against serbia and then invaded alsace immediately after germany declared war.
never forget the paper trail from the summit between poincaré and nicolas ii during the july crisis were destroyed.
That World War I was more devastating than the Ukraine war is undeniable; the question is about responsibility for devastation. Poincaré did what he did, but to get World War I Russia also had to do what it did, Serbia what it did, Austria and Germany what they did, Britain had to declare war over the Belgium treaty…all of it was horrible but the analogy to Putin's "I want to dominate Ukraine so here I go declaring war" does not hold up.
Take it from someone who’s been amply accused of being absurdly on the wrong side of these debates... just quit while you’re still merely just *losing*.
France didn’t start the war over Alsace. The Germans attacked first. And Alsace was not a formally independent sovereign for nearly a century before 1914, nor did it ever achieve de facto independent sovereignty for the most recent 3 decades.
You’re grasping at straws.
Also, Poincaré wasn’t a dictator who threw domestic opponents out of windows.
You may want to rethink that Ukraine=Alsace analogy.
Ukraine absolutely can defeat Russia on the battlefield. If Afghani guerillas could defeat the Soviet Union, Ukraine can defeat Russia. Will it? We'll see. But the capability exists, and Ukrainian forces are advancing right now and bombing Moscow. Wars are unpredictable and topple governments all the time.
I just read a (non-paywalled, I don’t subscribe) piece from Matt Taibbi, and it’s striking how his faction (for which I’m grasping for a name) subscribes to basically this mode of thought.
To him, everything is about the criminalization of dissent, and also follows a very “first they came for _____” pattern. I sort of get it: he was rightly skeptical of the “Trump-Russia collusion” hypothesis and got professionally and personally burned for it, which I agree sucks. That experience, though, clearly radicalized him to the point of turning him from opposing Trump to regarding Trump as a persecuted martyr to be mentioned in the same breath as Julian Assange.
Some of his basic precepts aren’t wrong, exactly: there really are consensuses that relegate dissenters to the status of moral perverts, and there really is some nexus of state, corporate and cultural power that is used to enforce those consensuses. But his increasing tendency to see - again - _everything_ in those terms, and his sort of reverse-Niemöllerism are unnerving. Because I like historical comparisons, I see him as a modern-day Desmoulins whipping up enragés, or at least self-styled enragés.
You're overthinking it.
In terms of social issues, people feel they're losing their rights right now--not just "tiny marginal" groups but the broad population. Abortion comes to mind.
That triggers loss aversion, which is more radicalizing than, say, aversion to thwarted gain.
Not only do they feel directly impacted by a right taken away that they previously took for granted, they're going to see actual tiny groups (trans, etc.) and their shrunken freedom through the same lens.
Niemoller and his logic has bupkis to do with this. People don't need to use him as an analogy. They can feel the loss of their rights in their everyday lives.
(Of course, if you don't know anyone who feels that right now, that's a different story.)
You've presumed the outcome, that leftists are as deluded as Jones and Beck. I think it's obvious that they're not, even though MattY's right that their anti-pragmatic approach to politics sucks
Some of them *are* that deluded. Seems to me that equating people who don't want to defund police and are skeptical of transition care for minors with Hitler is just as crazy, and is the same logical error, as equating the Affordable Care Act to the works of Stalin.
In the grand scheme of things, the issues we're currently debating around minority rights are tiny in comparison to the violent bigotry that used to be routine, but some people insist on equating the denial of their preferred policy on these topics with genocide. That is simply insane and we shouldn't mince words about that.
Who are the left wing equivalents of jones and beck?
I just think that's a pretty small, specific group of people to focus on, relative to, say, Tea Partyers back in 2013 who thought Obama was doing a "Socialist takeover" or, say, people in 2018 who were worried about Trump doing a "fascist takeover."
Super agree.
The modern left is directionally correct on principles, but atrociously bad at securing them.
Glenn Beck, now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
“He was a pupil of mine before he turned to the Dark Side.”
As a big Scott Glenn fan, I really hope this isn’t true.
First they came for Glenn Beck and I did nothing. Then they came for Bill O’Reilly and I did nothing. Then they came for Tucker Carlson...
MY makes some great points, but I don’t think he fully engages with the problem. In his quotes from the representative non-compromise camp there is talk of gop wanting to “eradicate” people (presumably the trans) and literally supporting de jure (?) racial discrimination.
It’s worth dwelling on this rhetoric a bit. Are we to take it literally? If so I’d argue these Uber educated and connected peole are unhinged form reality and it’s very much worth pondering why.
If however it’s hyperbole, it’s again worth considering why they resort to it? Is it because they implicitly realizing that the no compromise position isn’t very convincing when considers in realistic terms ?
‘Stop trans genocide’ is a common refrain. It only makes sense when you realise it is ideology speak, and ‘genocide’ has a meaning other than the dictionary definition.
I find this rhetoric extremely offensive.
This is the problem with Substack comments. I have no idea what comment you're replying to.
Sorry for the confusion. I’m not referring to anything done by anyone in the comments section but those consciously using “genocide” as “ideology speak” which they are fully aware has little and less to do with any reality.
For real...I wish there was some kind of limited quote functionality, where you could take an excerpt of what you're replying to and address that directly (similar to the reddit > tag)
I don't think so, it's more that denying trans people gender transition results in a massive increase in their suicide rate.
When I talk to middle-aged trans people, they talk about the numbers of other trans people of their age (most trans people know other trans people who came out at the same time; they form mutual support groups to get through the legal and medical obstacles) that have died of suicide and it (anecdotally) reminds me of gay men in their 50s and 60s talking about how many of their generation died of AIDS.
There are a bunch of studies that show that trans people who have successfully transitioned have an elevated risk of suicide compared to cis people, but that risk has fallen over the years (presumably because they face lesser levels of discrimination and hatred now than in the 1980s when the earliest studies were done). But the elevated risk of suicide for trans people who were denied the ability to transition is much higher and there's no evidence that it's come down - the relative risk of not transitioning keeps going up.
Would you describe the Reagan Administration's deliberate lack of effort in medical research on AIDS as a "gay genocide"? It's perhaps a bit of hyperbole, but there's certainly something to it: an awful lot of gay men died and a different policy could (perhaps) have saved them, and the policy was motivated by prejudice against gay men. It's not outrageous to use similar language about trans people dying of suicide as a result of being denied medical and social transition.
...and it's worth pointing out that there's a fraction of anti-trans people who like talking about the high suicide rate for trans people, especially whenever they encounter a trans person having mental health problems, which certainly looks (from the trans / trans-advocate side) like trying to talk people into suicide.
> Would you describe the Reagan Administration's deliberate lack of effort in medical research on AIDS as a "gay genocide"?
No. It was negligent, short-sighted, and bigotry was an obstacle to turning it around. But none of that amounts to genocide, and the inability to distinguish between the two phenomenon robs you of the ability to reason about social problems or grapple constructively with political constraints, especially in a society where people are allowed to disagree with each other.
For some, I am not sure that "a society where people are allowed to disagree with each other" is the end goal.
Indeed. Extremists on both ends show a lack of tolerance for disagreement or dissent. It's a big part of the reason why extremist regimes tend to do a lot of damage to the countries they rule.
Yeah, this is my point that it's hyperbole. I'd say that, as someone more cynical about the Reagan Administration's motives, that it's on the continuum that has genocide at one end, but not especially close to that end.
My view of the median view in the Reagan Administration is roughly: it conveniently removed a group they were bigoted against and therefore were entirely content to see die, though they weren't prepared to go as far as killing them, but they didn't see themselves as having a responsibility to go out of their way to save them.
I don't agree that it's hyperbole: it isn't on that continuum at all, and treating it as if it were fails to make basic distinctions, which calls every single thing you say into question.
"denying trans people gender transition results in a massive increase in their suicide rate."
I'm gonna ask for a cite for this. My understanding is we just don't have good numbers on this, but perhaps I'm behind the times.
Being cruel to people who then commit suicide is a terrible thing, but it does not fit the definition of “genocide.” Using the word genocide in order to associate transphobia with something like the Holocaust seems less likely to work than to simply degrade the meaning of “genocide” and make it harder to take seriously.
"Being cruel to people who then commit suicide is a terrible thing, but it does not fit the definition of 'genocide.'"
Can't it, though? Genocide is the systematic eradication of the cultural practices of an ethnic group (against that group's will). It doesn't require gas chambers — the Rwandans managed just fine with machetes. It doesn't even require murder weapons: it's hard to argue the American Indian boarding schools weren't implements of genocide.
*If* you believe that trans people are an ethnic group, and *if* you believe that there is a systematic conspiracy to eliminate trans people by degrading their mental health until they commit suicide, then I think that would qualify as genocide. Now, I think those claims lack empirical support. But I don't think your original claim (that suicide-inducing cruelty is never genocidal) is justified either.
Saying trans people are an ethnic group when they have no biological similarities to one another as far as ethnicity goes isn't just something that "lacks empirical support" but "absurdly scientifically wrong on the level of saying that humanity originated on Mars"
Trans people being an ethnic group isn't an empirical question, is it? It's a definitional question.
Just like the famines in Bengal and Ireland, Reagan probably lacks the willfullness inherent in genocide, but there's a reason the position that the British colonial governments committed genocide is an accepted minority view
Agreed about that last point. There were the same comments about gay people - "they have more depression/etc, they can't be good parents", when a significant source of those things was feeling discriminated against/forced to stay in the closet.
Slight pushback on your first point though. I can't speak to trans adults, but "Massive increase in their suicide rate" has been also used about teens to support teen medical transition and seems to lack good evidence (vs the control of therapy without medical transition). I could easily see it being different for adults if nothing else for a "wait until 18 is a finite time, unlike wait until never"
The problem with waiting until they are adults is that if they get reassignment hormone therapy as teens, they can mature into the physical appearance of the gender they identify as, rather than their birth sex. A person who looks like the sex they identify as is less likely to suffer discrimination in work and in life. It is why this should only be done under specialized medical supervision by professionals who are best able to distinguish true gender dysphoria from other gender issues.
Right. Like it or not, the question has to have some sort of answer during a period of time when people aren't deemed to be adults. And it's not a question that has an easy answer, each case should be evaluated individually.
Even there, the information we have today is strongly suggestive that a large majority of those cases resolve during or as a result of puberty with only supportive treatment/therapy. It is *normal* for pre-teens and teenagers to be uncomfortable in their body including questioning its changing shape and their gender. Preemptively medicalizing that anxiety is *not* a good thing and does not lead to good outcomes.
Setting this as the framework for “acceptable” early intervention basically ensures that every pre-adolescent who presents with gender dysphoria will transition to the other gender. I do not find it coincidental that the folks pushing most strongly for this standard are the ones who believe that a few percent of the population is innately trans.
99% agree (slight caveat at end)
To be clear, I wasn't saying that I insist that we make teens wait.
I was only positing why suicide rates among "teens denied transition until 18" might not match the suicide rates among "adults denied transition forever"
My understanding is that even "true gender dysphoria" can _sometimes_ resolve itself over puberty. That is, some % of teens with "true gender dysphoria" will end up not needing any medical intervention whatsoever. Others, I believe, _can_ benefit from it for exactly the reasons you state.
Equating suicidal tendencies to genocide is obviously political rhetoric gone too far, but I thought Richard laid it out well at how suicide is a real risk.
And I have to think whether or not trans attitude is as positive now as it used to be. From my memory of the 1990s, it was more of a novelty that may not have had deep acceptance, but also didn't rile people as much as it does now. The most famous trans person at the time was Chaz Bono, who didn't elicit much attention one way or the other, and there were a wide array of movies involving trans or drag characters (The Birdcage, Mrs. Doubtfire, To Wong Foo..., and (with its climax not aging well) Ace Ventura) that I really wonder what the reaction to would be today. We're going through a really weird and intense part of history right now with this, and at some point I think and hope that emotions will dial down a bit.
I don't think any of those movies are about trans characters but rather drag characters, but that might be splitting hairs. The bigger point I'd make is that the actual treatment of trans people was EXTREMELY negative in this era (here's a Wikipedia page to depress you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_being_transgender), and it's hard to imagine that a few crossdressing characters used as comic relief balanced the scales there.
But the other problem I have with the idea that attitudes towards trans people today (which definitely are very hostile and scary, and that's absolutely bad) are more harmful than they were in the past is this: the current attacks on trans people are a backlash to increasing assertions of trans people's rights to get medical treatment and to live as the gender they identify. If the effect of that has been to make things *worse* for trans people, what does that say about the movement? My perception is definitely that life for gay people post-Stonewall was better than it was before, and I certainly would want to think that's true for trans people today as well.
There has been a fall in trans suicide as the availability and acceptance of transition has gone up: I think a major explanation of the increase in trans identification is that so many fewer trans people kill themselves, and therefore they live longer. If you're looking at a 60-70% suicide rate by the age of 30 and you can drop that to a (still amazingly high) 10% suicide rate, then the population is going to treble even without any other changes.
Teen suicide among cis people is an entirely separate phenomenon and requires entirely separate explanations.
It isn't insane at all, it's just that "genocide" is a very loaded word so no one is going to post the Norman Rockwell painting and say "actually, I think genocide is good!" But obviously, Republicans would prefer it if there were no trans people, and occasionally take legislative (or at least rhetorical) steps to stop trans people from existing. That's very much textbook genocide--preventing anyone from transitioning is "the intentional destruction of a people" (definition from Wikipedia). You don't have to kill the humans to kill the people; for instance, it was once common to force Jews to convert to Christianity or face expulsion or death, and if that's not genocide, it's close enough that the distinction isn't interesting to make. And to reiterate, these are very loaded terms, so making the comparison I just did might make people upset, but the situations are really very similar.
Funny identity disclaimer: I am ethnically Jewish but not trans, for what it's worth.
(1) This analysis breaks down when one considers whether there can be such a thing as a "people" who can exist only through *active* surgical/pharmaceutical intervention.
(2) That first point also goes to the inapplicability of your Jewish/Christian analogy. As you describe it, Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or face expulsion or death. Accepting that qualifies as genocide, the actual analogy would be if someone was proposing to hunt down trans people, force them to renounce being trans, and make them behave in gender conforming ways. As far as I'm aware, even in the most bonkers red states no one has introduced legislation or otherwise proposed that trans people must publicly profess to not be trans.
You left out an important part--hunt them down, force them to renounce being trans *and* kill them if they refuse. I think it's that last bit that makes it genocide.
I omitted that because of the "expulsion" part. I think most human rights organizations these days include not-expressly-lethal depopulation efforts as part of genocide and imposing specific state-level restrictions on trans people could be generously construed as a form of passive "expulsion." (E.g., the Nazis banned kosher slaughter of animals and imposed other restrictions on Jewish religious and cultural activities.)
The bigger issue is really point #1 in any event -- can you have a "people" who (in their telling) must depend on continuing medical intervention to bring about their existence?
Yeah, I agree that they haven't proposed legislation to do things like that, but I'm sure some Republicans secretly or not so secretly would like to. For example, I googled "Republican transphobic remarks" and found this fun quote:
"'The lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,' Barnaby said. 'That’s right, I called you demons and imps, who come and parade before us and pretend that you are part of this world.'"
So that's what one elected Republican has to say about trans people. He apologized afterwards; of course, this is my opinion, but I feel that his apology reflects political expedience while his real views are, well, what he said. So it seems pretty clear that at least some Republicans want to do something like genocide to trans people. I am not that emotional about this topic, honestly, but if you are, especially if you are trans yourself, it's easy to make the mental leap from "some" to "most" and say "Republicans want trans genocide."
Your first point is interesting but I think there can be some trans people who don't medically transition and still pass, which would surely still qualify them as an imp or a demon or whatnot. I don't think the people going on anti-trans rants are checking their prescriptions first.
Of course it is also true that many identity groups are prone to hysterically exaggerating their plight, which is common among trans people but definitely not unique to them. No, wanting people to play on the sports team that matches their chromosomes isn't genocide, but there are many people who are way past that on the anti-trans scale.
In the discourse one repeatedly hears—and not from internet randos but from the various Matt Walshes that are riding high these days—that transgender people are suffering from a bizarre delusion and their identification should be given zero weight. That certainly seems to support your point: viewing trans identity as a pure aberration is tantamount to believing it should be stamped out.
Are gay people a people? I think they are. And trans people at least arguably existed (though extremely rare) before medical intervention. So defining transgenderism as a pitiful mental illness to be treated into oblivion, as many seem to prefer, would eliminate this people in the same way attempts to cure homosexuality aimed at eliminating that one.
(1) I'm skeptical that gay people are at least traditionally "a people," because (absent modern medical technology) there is no continuity of "gayness" as a culture outside of people choosing to specifically participate in it -- even gay people who had biological children (typically due to social pressure or coercion) more often hid their sexual orientation and didn't try to pass on "gay cultural traditions" to their descendents. The situation of gay people pre-1970s advances in medicine would seem more analogous to Roman Catholic religious orders or the Shakers, neither of which would I presume you would characterize as a "people."
(2) You're the person who used "pathetic" to describe transgender people, not me. That said, yes, the state of being transgender is a mental illness. That isn't being mean, it's ***LITERALLY*** what the statement that you believe you were "born into the wrong body" means, unless you are espousing the faith-based viewpoint that there are gendered souls that make your consciousness a distinct entity from your physical body. If we are not throwing out the last 350 years of philosophy and science that overwhelmingly went to establishing that your consciousness is an emergent property of your brain, which is part of your body. As such, from a "first do no harm perspective," resolving the mental illness should focus from the outset on trying to reconcile your subjective self-perception with your objective body and only if that is unsuccessful should medical professionals move on to trying to alter your objective body to conform to your subjective self-perception.
(3) I 100% agree that trans people existed prior to medical intervention, but that just goes to the point about why limiting the availability of medical transition is not "genocide." If male infant circumcision was made less readily available would that be a "genocide" of Jewish people?
(4) As mentioned elsewhere, I oppose all proposals to restrict medical transition for adults and think the only limitation for minors should be needing the consent of both custodial parents. But I take those positions because I believe people should have the right to do what they want so long as they aren't harming anyone else, not because I believe it's "genocide" if people don't get to do that.
I think the word "genocide" has been used outside the context of "exterminationist mass killing of an ethnic group" almost since its origin and while I don't like or employ that usage it's hard to say that it's "wrong." To give another Jewish example, the post-Stalin Soviet Union didn't do mass killings of Jews but did repress Jewish religious and cultural expression in a pretty brutal and coercive manner. Lots of people call this "cultural genocide." And that's what the far right wants to do to trans people: use the force of law to make being publicly trans impossible, forcibly detransition both medically and socially. I still wouldn't use "genocide" for this. But that's what people are talking about.
Unless one is a language prescriptivists, usages are never "wrong." But they can be counterproductive and can undermine the speaker's credibility.
I don't think you'll find many prescriptivists here, so when someone makes a comment that sounds like they're saying a usage is wrong, I usually take them to mean something closer to "ridiculous".
Interesting point. I think if someone uses "dog" to mean "cat" then their usage is wrong, in that they either are ignorant about the word's meaning or they are speaking in a deliberately confusing way. This is not usually true of someone who talks about "cultural genocide." People who talk about "trans genocide" are invoking a real tradition of broadly understanding "genocide" in the context of thinking about state oppression of minority groups, particularly oppression that seeks to end a group's existence as a social group (whether or not this is sought to be done by mass killing). This may be a counterproductive usage because it turns off so many listeners or maybe the provocative nature of the claim successfully raises the salience of the issue; I don't know. But it's not really my call.
I don't like it because I think it makes sense to reserve "genocide" for a case involving destruction of a group by mass killing, bearing in mind the special moral significance of intentional killing as a greater wrong than most anything else. But it's a longstanding thing that the usage doesn't conform to my preference and it seems like a losing battle to fight about it.
What is unhinged about the trans eradication point there does seem to be a faction of Republicans who are seriously pushing for something that seems aimed at driving them out of public life and renormalizing what was rather common in my lifetime casual de facto legal violence.
Jim Crow actually drive black people from public life and yet it was not eradication and genocide. Genocide is genocide. Come back to me when they open the gas chambers. Until then shut up with this disgusting hyperbole. Some of us lost family members to actual genocide so we care about our tragedy being misused for cheap points. Thanks.
I agree with your first two sentences (I don't think actual gas chambers are needed before "genocide" is reached though), but it's trivially easy to find people claiming that the US was and still is engaged in a "genocide" of black people. (That's not even a particularly recent bit of hyperbole -- it was being used at least as a early as 1951, when you'd think everyone involved would have had a very fresh understanding of what genocide looked like: https://depts.washington.edu/moves/CRC_genocide.shtml )
Lynching in the south was not anything like genocide. Genocide is about eliminating an entire group from the human gene pool. Lynching was about political and social control.
White southerners wanted most Black people to remain alive and in the south in order to continue working in agriculture, domestic labor, and other low paid jobs. It was dehumanizing and very damaging to both groups of people in different ways, but it not genocide or even approaching genocide.
I agree there's nothing comparable happening in the US currently. I just brought up the historical point there because I Googled "black genocide" to get an example of someone using the terminology (thinking I would grab something from the last few years) and was rather amazed to see how early the usage of "genocide" in this context was.
People being murdered with the tacit endorsement of the state, or even its explicit order and by its official agents is insufficient in and of itself to be defined as genocide. There is a fundamental difference in both intention and outcome. This is very basic stuff.
It's happened before in the US. Assuming that the maximalist goals of a political movement will be accomplished is hubris. Political movements can even lose ground. Look at what happened in Afghanistan and Iran in the 20th century.
but the dispute is over whether describing republicans as "wanting to eradicate" trans people is "unhinged from reality," not how likely we think they are to succeed
Perhaps the issue is what is meant by “eradicate”--is a trans person “eradicated” when they are deliberately misgendered? When there are barriers to gender reassignment treatment? Given all the comparisons of far right to Nazis, using the word “eradicate” suggests that someone wants to exterminate transgender people (and maybe black people, too)
well, I'd like to start by pointing out that correcting someone where i think they've misstated the terms of a debate is a purely formal intervention and doesn't mean that i think or must be committed to thinking that they're wrong on the first-order substance, and I'd hope this community would be the sort capable of maintaining that distinction, but to step into the fray:
1) "eradicate" isn't anyone's paraphrasing or editorializing, it's a direct quote from a cpac speaker. you can make whatever interpretive points you like about what the proper referent of "transgenderism" is supposed to be, but certainly "[the social phenomenon of] transgenderism" cannot be a ridiculous candidate, nor can use of the word "eradicate" constitute being "unhinged from reality."
2) to the extent that states are passing or attempting to pass laws which forbid cross-sex hormone therapy for adults, or ban crossdressing in public, they are eliminating what it is that makes trans people trans, conceptually, socially, and physiologically. to say that "eradicate" is a completely inappropriate word to use in this context is at least as uncharitable to the left as you're accusing the left of being to republicans, and
3) yes, i think if you repeatedly accuse a certain group of people of perpetrating sex crimes against children, you are at the very least hoping someone will eradicate them for you
I agree with your point 2. However, with point 1, I think taking one speaker’s use of that word to mean that the party as a whole supports eradication is an unjustified inference. And I just disagree on point 3: accusing a population of heinous crimes does not equate with calling for their extermination. In my experience people have often overstated, either in jest or seriously, the prevalence of sex abuse among priests or the Boy Scouts (to be clear, both are very serious problems that I would never want to minimize). However, I don’t think even the most extreme guilt-by-association positions here could be equated with wanting Catholics, priests, or Boy Scout leaders exterminated.
Are they eradicated when they kill themselves? The argument is that compelling trans people to pretend to be of their birth gender constitutes a form of torture, and torturing people until they commit suicide isn't a vast improvement over deliberately killing them.
It's not a very compelling argument, because "if you don't let me act as my gender you are torturing me" is a pretty flimsy starting point and the next step "and therefore I'll surely kill myself" is also pretty weak.
Torturing someone until they kill themselves (doesn't usually happen, btw, people usually try to live) is pretty bad and isn't really analogous to very many other situations.
Such nonsense. You can do better. Lgbt people of all kinds were socially forced into the closet just about everywhere h til a couple of decades ago. That was bad and disproportionate numbers committed suicide, Yet nobody tried to eradicate them. In some places past and present there is even a death penalty, sometimes *enforced* and even that isn’t an actual attempt at eradication. The only exception is Nazi germany (for whom it was very much secondary properly to the eradication of the Jews). Eradication actually means something because it is genuine historic phenomenon that might conceivably happen again. Hence it’s both in the interest of respect for victims AND prudence (as well as the small matter of truth) that we should use that term with care.
I just don't know how seriously to take these statements, which suggests a political position of moderation. Which doesn't seem to by what the trans movement is pursuing.
How should people respond to a high-profile media personality saying ‘transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely’, which I’m assuming is the basis of that statement. Why should we spend time dwelling on how people react to those sentiments rather than the actual person calling for the ‘eradication’ in the first place?
By winning elections so that that person doesn't have political power over us?
Maybe back up a step...what if we went back to referring to adult female persons as “women,” while acknowledging transgender women as legal women. I always thought it was crazy when British “terfs” claimed that women were being erased by trans women, until suddenly it became unacceptable to refer to female persons collectively as “women.” I think some feminists were so enamored of the idea of men getting pregnant that they forgot the reason for wanting that was so males could see what it was like, but transgender men aren’t male. the cosmic justice notion isn’t there, so saying “men can get pregnant” just sounds unhinged.
I think there are some people that want to insist that the word “women” should always only be used in a way that includes both cis and trans women, and there are others that want to insist that the word “women” should always only be used in a way that only includes cis women. I think that trying to insist that one of these usages is technically correct and the other is wrong is going to be about as successful as insistence that “North America” always includes Canada, USA, and Mexico, or insisting that “North America” is always only Canada and USA. There are two closely related concepts here, and both are equally deserving of the name (because names are arbitrary social markers that get used in varied ways depending on context), and no one is going to succeed in getting people to use the word only their preferred way.
But separating pregnancy from the idea of womanhood is either unhinged or deliberately provocative. That’s something more than accepting trans women as women. If you want to give birth to a child, you are identifying as a woman; it’s not a minor detail for someone who otherwise identifies as male. Pretending otherwise reminds me of the interrogation scene in 1984 where O’Brien tries to get Winston Smith to say that 2+2=5. It’s a marker for ideological fealty, much like MAGA and election denial.
What about women who don't want to have kids, or who were born infertile? What about intersex people who identify with one of the two overwhelmingly dominant gender options, which may or may not have anything to do with their ability to reproduce?
"Womanhood" is a social construct. That doesn't mean it doesn't matter, or that we should get rid of it. It just means that it isn't going to match perfectly to any cleanly defined biological or medical standard, because the people who invented the idea did so with only the most rudimentary understanding of what they were defining. If we as a species had held off on developing cultural preconceptions about gender until we'd figured out this whole genetics business, we wouldn't be in this mess now.
Geographically, Mexico is absolutely in North America. It is culturally distinct from the Anglophone countries, but that doesn't change its location.
But also, geographically, Mexico is absolutely in Central America. And in any case, continents are a cultural thing as much as a geographic one (note that most people around the world count Europe as a continent, regardless of how they treat the Americas and Australia). People are going to use the word each way, and insisting that only one is correct is a fools errand.
Wait - there’s people who think Mexico isn’t in North America?
Should efforts to win those elections compromise on criminalising drag performances or removing children from their homes?
If presented with the hypothetical compromise of "if you let us criminalize drag performances, we will let you have a medicare-based public option", lol yes I would absolutely take that deal!
Everyone has to draw a principled line somewhere. I'd argue opening the door for the criminalization of free speech is absolutely not worth the trade. This isn't some narrow identity politics issue - it would be trading away a foundational right for everyone.
We’ve already accepted bans on indecent exposure and restrictions on campaign finance. These are literal criminalizations of free speech. The bills that cause problems for drag are written in a way that probably actually exempts most drag performance, but instead fits in with obscenity laws by criminalizing things like “sexually suggestive performances” in “places where people under 18 could be”. I absolutely think these bills should be stopped, but they’re really more about posturing than about actually restricting rights, and thus they could be part of a meaningful compromise if the other things are good enough.
Ok! If ever you find a candidate who endorses those views you can vote for them. I simply would not!
Understood. It's not clear to me that your policy preferences are shared by the population at large.
That's a -tactical- decision, like Obama's 2008 position on gay marriage.
It’s a yes or no question though. To win elections, should Democrats support candidates who take these positions?
It’s also not at all like Obama’s position on gay marriage. One is ‘Do we accept the status quo in favour of the potential for future progress. The other is ‘Do we accept policies that actively introduce harm onto people?’
A better example would be whether Democrats should have supported a candidate in 2008 that not only opposed same-sex marriage but actively believed we should overturn Lawrence v Texas.
You are assuming that the political struggle is won, there is a new status quo, and all that is required is to defend it. I don't think that is the case here. Medical treatment of trans kids is contested as is trans participation in sports.
I think it depends a lot on what that looks like. A West Virginia Senator that has a chance of winning? Yes. A Connecticut Senator? No way.
For president, absolutely not. For state or congressional races, it depends on the electorate of the state or district. Of course, what constitutes “support” depends on circumstances: if we’re talking about a House district where a Dem only had a chance of election by calling to reinstate laws against sodomy, it could probably only *help* that candidate’s chances for Obama to say “I strongly disagree with Candidate X on this issue.”
Those would be very stupid compromises. Smarter compromises could include allowing each school district to decide its own policy on gender and sports, requiring schools notify parents if a minor requests pronouns other than those typically associated with gender assigned at birth.
Some part of the American right thinks it’s popular to marginalize drag queens, but they are delusional. Compromising on a couple of the most controversial trans issues takes the juice out of the anti-gay and anti-drag policies. Frankly, it curbs the anti-trans energy as well.
As long as we have a First Amendment, criminalizing drag shows will be blatantly unconstitutional. Have not heard about the "removing children from their homes," but that also sounds like a constitutional violation as well (fundamental right of parents to raise their children)
What's your position on how people should react to statements about "eliminating whiteness"?
Do you believe the effort to “eliminate whiteness” (whatever that means) is substantially similar to efforts targeting trans people?
No, but the rhetoric is quite similar, which makes relying on rhetoric rather than action a bit difficult...
I don’t think rhetoric about ‘eradicating transgenderism’ would be sparking the same reaction if there *wasn’t* a demonstrable political effort accompanying it.
I think the reaction to 'eliminate whiteness' demonstrates that this is not, in fact, correct. There has not been any real demonstrable political effort accompanying it, and yet there's still a massive reaction.
More broadly, if that's the case...why are we talking about rhetoric rather than action?
I'd agree that the *efforts* are not "substantially similar" at this stage, but I think both expressions are defendable in identical ways -- that they do not mean that anyone should literally be killed, but that a mode of thought should be made unacceptable or otherwise discouraged.
Ummm... because how people react is key to -winning-. And if you don't win, you lose -- and accomplish nothing. And your enemy gets what he wants. So, are you interested in -accomplishing- something, or are you posturing in front of the mirror to demonstrate 'virtue'?
I’m unclear what your point is?
That 'all or nothing' often results in getting... nothing.
But compromising everything to get power also results in getting nothing.
Giving everything to the other side gets nothing. Compromising is give and take. By definition it gets some things.
Who said "everything"?
It's a matter of priorities. If you try to get everything you want, you usually end up getting nothing, because human existence is made that way. Decide what you want -most-, and then calculate the odds of getting that, as opposed to something that you may want less but which can be attained.
Who is advocating all or nothing? It’s simply a question of values about *what* we are willing to concede to gain ground.
You are advocating it, basically. If you don't gain ground, you get... nothing. Politics is a struggle for power. No power, no results at all.
In principle, basically anything *could* be an appropriate concession, if there is enough other progress on things that matter significantly. In practice, some things don’t ever come in useful packages and they aren’t worth compromising on for the smaller wins they could sometimes come with.
Well, some people and all politicians should just ignore it an not feed the troll. But some different people should reply with different visions about how society should respond to the range of issues that are "transgenderism." We can't afford "no enemies on the Left."
I’m struggling to understand why an explicit call for ‘eradication’ is something we should ignore, but people’s reaction to that message is instead something that is ‘worth dwelling on’ as OP suggests. I’m especially unclear on why we should ignore the former when there are clear efforts to enact policies that demonise and marginalise trans people.
Who said anything about ignoring something? It's just one more reason to win elections and trounce the people making these calls. Just because people aren't talking about something all the time doesn't mean they are ignoring it. But you know, losing elections have consequences, and if we lose elections, we might get policies that demonize and marginalize trans people. So, the question is, what's the best way to prevent that?
The question is, do you want those efforts to -succeed- or not?
Thank you for this comment! I wasn’t aware of this quote, which is horrifying, and as averse as I am to “cancel culture” I do think such quote should be a fireable offense in many workplaces (including esp media outlets) and also bannable if used on sb (quotes excluded obviously!). You’d have had a point if it were made by an elected gop official, esp one in top position of leadership. As it is to my understanding it was made by one Michael Knowles who is a private individual.
I guess I don’t entirely disagree that there’s a distinction between a gop official saying it and a private individual, but I also think it carries a bit more weight when the private individual is speaking at a major political conference in which GOP officials are in attendance and none of them come out to condemn those words. It’s not like Knowles was just speaking them on his Twitter or YouTube page.
I agree that this is an important point. As I said I wasn’t aware that the language originated on the right and was just being quoted! This doesn’t excuse the hyperbole used by the leftist people quoted by MY but is “mitigating circumstances” so to speak.
It’s a bigoted opinion but not much different from when homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name” or the Puritanical impulse to discourage any discussion of sex or sexuality in public.
Some conservatives have used genocidal rhetoric when it comes to trans rights:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/michael-knowles-calls-for-eradication-of-transgender-people-at-conservative-political-action-conference
It’s a near universal phenomenon to see people on one side of a political divide describe those on the other side as morally inferior. You can see this throughout history. And it is very symmetrical, suggesting that it’s best viewed as an evolved coalitional ingroup:outgroup behavior. Moral repugnance strengthens coalition.
And a clear signal of group commitment is to be more outraged than most. Which is why MY considering compromise will be viewed by some progressives as moral betrayal.
I recommend looking at pew research on attitudes towards race and other cultural things. Today's Republicans are less tolerant than Democrats, but they are far more tolerant than Democrats were ten or twenty years ago. Rhetoric aside, GOP voters aren't actually getting more bigoted. There's little hope of the "destroy" rhetoric gaining traction nationally.
It's hyperbole, but it's understandable why they resort to it: Loss aversion.
Previous eras, like the Nineties, were characterized by slow, grinding progress for LGBT rights. When you're gaining, not losing, you're more willing to compromise.
I would argue that trans rights (for example) are being clearly whittled away in the current era, especially on the state level. Retrenchment breeds less willingness to compromise.
I don't think it's a coincidence that social conservatives radicalized behind Trump shortly after gay marriage was legalized nationally by the Supreme Court--they felt cornered, even if their "loss" was minor. It's the same reason suburban NIMBYs characterize upzoning laws as "destroying the suburbs"--any perceived loss, however incremental, radicalizes far more efficiently than missing out on big gain.
Compromise is something people are okay with in an era of progress. Less so the opposite. Hence the hyperbole.
Well, that escalated quickly.
Actually, not really; I just wanted to say that. I mean, there was some mildly heated debate, but pretty chill compared to what you get from some quarters. I mean, no one that I saw used the word “groomer” or “mutilation,” which is pretty good! And while there was discussion of whether anti-trans discrimination amounts to “genocide,” no one (again, that I saw) said “it definitely is genocide, and if you disagree you’re a moral pervert!”
So I’m going to call this thread a win for relatively civil discourse on trans issues and have a celebratory [something currently in my fridge].
Per, Politico: The new law labels seven nations as a “foreign country of concern” — China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and Venezuela — and restricts property ownership for some residents from those countries.
Now, one can debate the inclusion of China with those other countries. But to call it a 19th-century style alien land law is not accurate and perhaps intended to inflame more than inform.
why would the inclusion of other countries be evidence one way or the other here?
Because all of those other countries are subject to various travel restrictions and economic sanctions regimes and part of them are officially classified under US law as "state sponsors of terrorism"?
Because laws motivated by racial superiority/inferiority and laws based on geopolitical rivalries/threats are pretty different? You can't see that?
Also, there seems to be a sleight of hand in the way you're using the term "Chinese People" which in the 19th century could have only be thought of as a racial categorization - there were no "Asian American" people, at least not in the public conscienceless. If your grandparents are from China but you're an American citizen the law doesn't target you.
I guess I really don’t see how the motivation is relevant. A law that says that legal permanent residents are banned from owning land because of their national origin seems equally pernicious whether it’s because you think they are an inferior race or because you think such people can’t be trusted.
I don't think you really think that motivations of laws and rules are irrelevant. Especially in a world where disproportionate impact is likely to be felt by virtually any legal or economic change, it's important to have some trust and transparency around why, for example, proposing to raise taxes on higher incomes is motivated primarily by fiscal considerations and not by dislike of people white, asian or urban professionals, for example.
If you want to debate about whether the law in question is pernicious, that's fine, but I don't see any of the objectors here recognizing that there are valid security concerns and valid concerns within the Chinese-American community over CCP efforts to police, oppress, harass and even abduct them. Instead there's some kind of strawman argument that this is a referendum on racism
More recently, there was Trump v. Hawaii, and this law seems to be very similarly tailored to the travel ban to get constitutional signoff from SCOTUS if it gets that far. (Though to be clear, I think that case was wrongly decided and I largely agree with you, and even if not deemed unconstitutional it's a bad and counterproductive law.)
Why should the US allow foreigners to buy arbitrary amounts of land in the US? Particularly when their countries are hostile to the US?
Because these “foreigners” are valid legal permanent residents of the United States and thus count as “American persons” for most constitutional purposes.
My understanding is that the law under consideration covers foreign inhabitants who are not US residents. That is, that they do not live in the US. If that is not true, then we are discussing something different here. Some of the people on this thread seem to be suggesting that foreigners who reside outside of the US have some sort of constitutional right to buy land in the US.
The draft bill they considered in Texas made no mention of where people were living or whether they were US citizens - it said that if they held citizenship of China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia, then they couldn’t buy property.
If the bill really just prevents people who reside in those countries from owning property in the state, that would be pretty inoffensive (and maybe even a good idea to apply more broadly than just to citizens of these countries).
Because if your state wants to attract companies which need incredibly smart people, making many of those people feel unwelcome is bad. (Also, "arbitrary" is I guess a house now?)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-17/ken-griffin-reshaped-law-banning-chinese-real-estate-purchases
Again, this is a policy choice. It might be a bad idea, but it is certainly constitutional and letting the CCP run wild among the Chinese diaspora in the US has its own costs.
As someone with a lot more skin in the game on this front than you, I have to point out that my entire household supports these restrictions, including the green card applicant, the green card holder, the naturalized citizen and the native born citizen.
The Party-state has a vast apparatus for maintaining the “loyalty” of its diaspora which necessitates that the US take steps against its “whole of society” and “civil-military fusion” approaches.
That, unfortunately, includes measures which damage or even destroy Chinese “private” firms and a few genuinely private ones at home, discriminating against her citizens abroad, and likely banning her firms from operating in the US in a great many spheres of endeavor.
Where we need to get better is at poaching and offering a path to naturalization for her best and brightest in at least 4-5x the current numbers, but barring non-resident, non-citizens from buying property is very much a nothing-burger.
I don't have much heartburn from restricting Chinese national purchase of land near military bases (and airports, but whatever) but I don't get the restriction on buying agricultural land. What's the fear about that?
I’m not sure. If anything I’d *want* Chinese nationals, private firms, and SOEs owning a bunch of commoditized, non-sensitive, low-value-added assets in the West so I can seize them all in the event of a war, along with zeroing every debt instrument owned by those same entities and confiscating dollar and Euro assets wherever possible.
I’d not have written the law quite how they did, lol.
"Stereotyping all Chinese citizens as CCP agents is bad".
Complete straw man. No one is doing that. The idea is that the CCP (along with other governments that make no secret of their animosity towards the US) will use agents to further CCP goals.
The anti-Japanese laws targeted US citizens of Japanese descent with no connections to the government of Imperial Japan. Somehow you don't seem to be able to see or acknowledge the difference.
It is constitutional to discriminate between US citizens and non-citizens and we do it all the time.
Kind of. You can discriminate between citizens and noncitizens regarding privileges and immunities, but you can't discriminate between citizens and noncitizens on issues of due process or equal protection.
Also, in this case, based on how you all have described the law above, it looks like it is *not* discriminating between citizens and noncitizens. Rather, it is discriminating between noncitizens who came from some countries vs. noncitizens who came from other countries. That seems more questionable.
Also, from a policy standpoint, a Chinese or Russian or Venezuelan national might be a dissident, and that might in fact be the reason why they're here. Seems pretty unfair to people like that.
One of the important things to understand about this law is that it doesn't discriminate against anyone who is here --- it doesn't even distinguish between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants.
It only prohibits ownership by people “domiciled” in China who don’t have U.S. citizenship or permanent residency from owning property in Florida.
So, I went and looked it up, and 'Foreign Principal' is defined as:
"Any person who is domiciled in a foreign country of concern and is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States."
or
"A political party or member of a political party or any subdivision of a political party in a foreign country of concern;"
Putting aside the corporate/partnership limits. That second one I wonder about, but the first one I think doesn't apply to our potential asylee? At that point, I wouldn't expect them to be domiciled in China, right?
This is all assuming I found the right bill language: https://flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/264/BillText/er/HTML
Now the misdemeanor for everyone else, felony for China distinction is something I'd like to hear justified/explained.
How would you be able to tell the difference between a dissident and an agent of a foreign government? I'm agnostic on whether this law is a good idea or not, but I don't understand how you would in practice be able to tell the difference between foreign agents who wish the US harm and people who claim to be dissidents.
This entire subthread is an is/ought cesspool. How can "its constitutional" even theoretically be a response to "its racist"?
How is 'it's racist" even being considered when we're talking about China, Russia & Venezuela? What race is that?
The implication of your statement is that the US can't discriminate between citizens and non-citizens in its laws, or act against citizens of foreign powers who are hostile or in a state of war with the US. How is that going to work exactly? If we end up in a shooting war with North Korea (who we only have an armistice but no peace treaty with) and China intervenes, we can take no action against Chinese citizens in the US?
Mike, does this law have any effect against people of Chinese birth but US citizenship? Which of these two very different statuses is "origin" to you?
A law making it illegal to nationalize for Chinese citizens wouldn't be discrimination on national origin? What am I even reading here
"nationalize"? I don't think that's been said here. The whole thread is about land ownership by foreign nationals. Foreigners (US citizens included when we are in other countries) never have all the same rights as citizens. You can't live in another country or work there without visas. You can't be accepted at their schools or vote in their elections, etc...
What the rules should specifically be is always up for debate, but I can't believe the idea that foreigners are sometimes treated differently is even being discussed, in part because every institution and government around the entire globe operates this way.
We do this all the time. Different foreigners enter the US under different Visa laws. Some countries have visa-free relationships and some don't. Some countries are sanctioned.
You neglect to note that in the 19th century, there were severe restrictions on people of Chinese origin becoming -citizens-.
And there aren't now.
Discriminating between citizens and non-citizens is absolutely and completely kosher. And discriminating between non-citizens of different origins is too.
Everyone has an inalienable right to be on their own side.
It's somewhat disingenuous to talk about foreign origins. The law in question isn't about origins, it's not about people who have come here, it is specifically about people who are still domiciled, that is still live, in those countries. People who may seek to own land here but have not ever even set foot on US soil and never intend to.
Try buying land in China, any of the other countries on that last, or dozens of other countries that the US does actually gets along with. Buying land in a foreign country is not an inalienable right.
Try to exercise free speech in one of those countries then. Or demand to be treated equally regardless of your skin color and ancestry. Tell me how that goes.
"even discriminating based on citizenship is illegal as long as the person had work permission". Btw there's plenty of US-citizen preference written in to employment laws.
Mexico! There are places in Mexico where I, a US citizen, am not allowed to buy land. Is that discrimination?
>> This is discriminating against people based on national origin.
No it isn’t. You literally don’t understand the term.
No, it passed an alien land law directed at people who are -not American citizens-. Which is to be judged on prudential grounds alone.
Or does this law forbid land ownership by American citizens of Chinese descent? -That- would be discriminatory.
Banning land ownership by legal permanent residents seems deeply problematic.
good thing it doesn't do that then
Does it not? The Texas one I saw very much did - it said nothing about where people reside, and just said that their citizenship would ban them from purchasing property.
It very much does not. In addition to foreign officials and GSE:
"Any person who is domiciled in a foreign country of concern and is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States."
It also isn't a restriction on owning any property - but a subset of some property.
Is that what this law is actually suggesting? Because my impression is that this law does not apply to legal permanent residents.
Why?
Non-citizens are allowed residence on conditions set by citizens, through the political system. Citizens do that because it benefits -them-, either individually or collectively. They can change their minds about it anytime they please. The country belongs to them, after all. That's why non-citizens can't vote.
Beginning to believe this is hopeless but answering "this is problematic" with "this is legal" is incoherent. I would find expelling all non-citizens problematic, as (presumably?) you would as well.
By “Chinese people” do you mean Americans of Chinese descent or aliens of Chinese nationality?
It includes American permanent residents of Chinese citizenship, and probably also dual citizens (the Texas one very explicitly included dual citizens in the ban).
Yes, what you describe would be unconstitutional. I should read the law more carefully.
China does not allow dual citizenship for adults, period. It takes *great* precautions to discover if someone has left a foreign country using a foreign passport and sought admission at the Chinese border with a Chinese passport, requires all people applying for visas to certify they’ve never held a Chinese passport, and checks the information thus provided against domestic data for basically anyone with a Chinese-origin name.
Anyone working to hold both passports is, frankly, worthy of considerable suspicion.
But yes this is obviously unconstitutional.
Neither of these sound constitutional!
That's not what the law does. In order to debate the merits of any particular policy it would be helpful to accurately describe what it does.
I think there's some truth to this post and I don't want to debate it exactly so much as raise another issue: even highly educated people can still be stupid about various subjects and easily fold to pressures to believe and/or support stupid things. This isn't to say the educational divide doesn't increasingly matter or that higher intelligence people don't have advantages over lower intelligence people. However there is not some bright light that says 'no person above x intelligence threshold or y educational achievement will believe this.' The quintessential example is Matt's discussion of how poor and nonsensical Tema Okun's work is, yet versions of it turn up all over the place, especially places with a lot of high intelligence, high educational achievement people.
So I am all for political pragmatism, but I think there is more going on when it comes to some of these issues. Being smart does not make someone ahead of his or her time on every issue characterized as one of morality. Sometimes they're just being stupid. So next time any of us correctly wonders how the right got so stupid it became a hot bed of vaccine skepticism we should take care to make sure we aren't doing the same thing on some issue.
High IQ and educational qualifications simply make people better at rationalizing what they want to believe anyway, usually so they can feel comfortable fitting in with their social reference group and avoid getting 'pecked'. That's an unconscious process, usually, by the way.
Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning rule all.
I think we're relatively rational when we are pursuing personal rewards and have good feedback on how we're doing. Science, sports, work, etc., to varying degrees. Socio-political chatter has somewhat perverse, often hidden incentives, as you say, but people can still be (approximately) rational in general.
Not really. Reason is a tool, a means. There’s no rational reason to even want to exist: that’s your DNA talking
> High IQ and educational qualifications simply make people better at rationalizing what they want to believe anyway,
Hell, there's a whole community devoted to this - they even call themselves rationalists!
I might be taking you too seriously here but I think the raison d’etre of the rationalists is to acknowledge this rationalizing tendency and try to resist it, to be more rational. I found The Scout Mindset to be a good guide to this. Of course, I’m sure results vary wildly among different self-proclaimed rationalists.
I was mostly having fun, but I also think they take themselves too seriously. Julia Galef (author of The Scout Mindset), for example, has completely disappeared from public life, which suggests one can only be perfectly rational for so long.
I'm not sure what being in public life has to do with being perfectly rational?
I highly doubt disappearing without warning a few months after dropping a new book was a purely rational decision.
That's disappointing about Galef. I checked her Twitter account and indeed, no tweets in over a year and a half. That's a shame, I liked what she had to bring to the table.
Not to mention her podcast just stopped putting out anything, which I had started listening to after Matt interviewed her.
Her disappearing from public life seems like a non-sequitur to anything we're talking about? Plenty of them keep on going for years, kind of incessantly to be honest.
We are not, even -in potentia-, rational beings. We are rationalizing animals. "Reason" in the human sense evolved as a means of social solidarity, to render one's in-group (and close relatives, in that context) more effective competitors for resources and hence more likely to pass on their DNA.
I actually think a bigger part of it is more directly related to the relationship between wealth and social influence and education insulating people from the consequences of taking abstract positions.
As Matt suggested, if you think hard about a proposition to trade boring medicare expansion that directly helps millions of people for some sort of trans rights bill that is abstractly righteous but helps an extremely small sliver of people, the only way that trans wins is if you don't perceive either of the outcomes to impact you at all.
100% agree with Matt for a simple reason. In the moralist progressive logic, there are no roadblocks between their current position and the complete eradication of all unfairness in life under the guise of the term “rights” - which is implausible for at least two reasons - the sheer complexity of life which will always yield a decent amount of unfairness, and the sheer subjectivity of the concept.
Also, even if the body politic magically grants the moralists every position they hold, within about a week they will find a new crusade - that’s just how many people are wired.
The subjectivity of things that get one cancelled is one of my biggest frustrations with modern left-leaning discourse. Like, reasonable people can disagree on whether trans girls she be allowed to play girls sports, but then if you’re persona-non-grata for disagreeing with someone on this, well-you can no longer agree to disagree
I don’t think you have to aspire to fairness in every aspect of life, to aspire to fairness in every exercise of government power, or perhaps more expansively social power. The point of going around calling everything “socially constructed” is that we can just choose better fictions to believe in.
Mike, I have to disagree - and for the reasons you have just stated. If the struggle is an eternal one, the moralist side will never be satisfied. How often have you been inclined to compromise with someone you know will never be satisfied? For this reasons, the moralists risk resigning themselves to a minority which is deadly in our system.
Politics is all about how we live together despite no one being completely satisfied ever. Telling people that they need to pick an endpoint that will satisfy them so that they stop engaging in politics just seems to miss the point.
And they did by compromising along the way to achieve incremental change towards a long term ideal - that is literally the point of Matt’s article!
Did the civil rights movement get long-term victory? Because to me it seems like a 400 year struggle with partial victory with lots and lots of compromises along the way.
More on the active margin, not deep behind the lines.
What constitutes "unfairness?" Opinions differ... and all opinions are equal. You can argue logically -from- a moral premise, but you cannot argue -to- a moral premise; those are inherently arbitrary and subjective. They're a "just because".
Another sure-fire way to inflame and confuse any debate: misuse the terms "existence" and "existential".
If I ask you to turn down your music, I am asking you not to be noisy. "So you're saying I shouldn't BE!" No, I said you shouldn't be noisy. "But you're saying I should't be! You literally want me not to exist!! My existence is being threatened!!!" Actually, I have no objection to your existence, it's only your volume that I'd like you to modulate. And you can change your volume without losing your existence.
"What do you mean, you want to eradicate racism in America? You must mean you want racists not to exist! You are literally threatening their existence!!!" No, I'm quite happy for those people to continue existing, but I'd like them to lose their racist attitudes. Becoming less racist will not kill them -- they will just stop being racist. "You see? You just said you want them to stop being! This is an existential threat! You want to kill millions of Americans!" Here we see the sequential fallacies of sliding from "end -ism" to "end -ists" to "kill the -ists".
And of course, you can ratchet up the misuse of "existence" by tossing in some "genocides" here and there.
"Oh, so you wish there were fewer people with COVID? In other words, you want those people not to exist! You are advocating for the genocide of people with COVID!!!" Umm, no, I just want them to get better. It's true that I would like fewer copies of the virus to exist -- that really is a matter of existence -- and I might even be okay with genocide for the genus of COVID viruses. But so far as their human hosts go, I am not attacking their existence at all, just trying to cure them. I don't want the people not to be, I just want them not to be sick.
And on and on it continues, confusing "being F" with "being" in the sense of "existing". It's a cheap trick, and I wish it were not so prevalent among people with whom I otherwise agree.
Wouldn't this logic also apply to rhetorical cheap tricks like "silence=violence"?
But they RHYME! How can you argue with that kind of logic?
Anybody want a peanut?
If there be a rhyme, it must be time!
It's a different cheap trick, not confusing "is F" with "is", but confusing "equals" with "is correlated with and may cause."
I mean, someone could say "smoking = death," and then defend it by saying that "smoking is statistically correlated with several leading causes of death to such a degree that we can confidently posit a causal relation." It just wouldn't make as good of a slogan.
So too, "in some cases, silence about a particular social evil may be statistically correlated with increases in violence surrounding that evil, and may even play a causal role," would be true but less punchy.
But, yeah, I wish people would not abuse the equals-sign, either.
equal signs=abuse! (sorry for the troll)
"You want people not to abuse the word "existence" -- so you're saying that "existence"-abusers shouldn't exist! You want to kill them!!!"
I'm glad I read the comment section before typing this up myself. Saved me some time!
Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!
There have been times when I've wished the constantly barking dog next door not to exist.
Yes! I have also had wishes of that sort, too.
But I could at least distinguish that wish from the wish that it stop barking, and I did not confuse "I want that dog to stop barking" with "I want the barking dog to stop existing."
One reason not to confuse these things is to that you can demand greater clarity from people. Some public figure says, "we should eradicate racism!" It's worth pressing them to clarify: do you just want to eradicate an ideology, or do you want to eradicate the people who hold it? And do you want to eradicate the holders of the ideology only in the innocuous sense that you want to change their minds, or do you want to shed blood?
"I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends," said Lincoln, who also knew when and how to destroy his enemies by ending their biological activity. He may have toyed with the figure for rhetorical effect, but he knew how to distinguish destroying your enemies by making them your friends, from destroying your enemies by putting Minie balls through their skulls.
“…and I did not confuse ‘I want that dog to stop barking’ with ‘I want the barking dog to stop existing.’”
Reminds me of the “Charlie X” Star Trek episode.
This is very logical.
On the other hand, my emotions tell me that, yes indeed, I want that damn effing dog to cease existing.
It’s literally a dysphemism treadmill!
I would love to ban the usage of conjugations of exist in this usage as political rhetoric. AGW discourse is also infamous for excessive use of the word.
I think there can be some myopia among those who consider themselves pragmatists. They may think there are opportunities for gains if they allow for compromise and tactical retreats in some areas, but in fact they are just giving up ground and getting nothing in return.
To use your Texas example. It's true that Medicaid expansion would be a huge benefit to an enormous amount of currently-uninsured people in our state. But Medicaid expansion also currently has a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon. As frustrating as it is, we are a conservative state and we're unlikely to have anything other than Republican majorities for another two or three cycles, at the least.
Meanwhile, our governor and attorney general have been actively weaponizing the state government to attack trans people. Parents are getting investigated for child abuse for helping their child get gender-affirming care. Providers are being targeted for harassment. Trans people who had gone through years of psychological evaluations, social transition, and are now finally beginning their hormonal transition are getting cut off midway through their treatment and told they have to wait and re-start after they turn 18 (after which it will be a much more arduous process).
So when "pragmatic" progressives are unwilling to come to the defense of trans people because some trans issues are unpopular, they aren't actually helping any uninsured people in Texas. What they are doing is leaving the rest of us in the lurch. Yeah, school sports bans were always going to pass, but things like having CPS going after families with trans kids are morally shocking enough that it could be stopped. Calling out that horrible situation and advocating for its end is the moral and pragmatic option.
I don't quite understand what the position you're taking is here. Are moderate democrats failing to condemn CPS going after families with trans kids (for what?)? If so, that is bad, but I'm not aware of MY or similar democrats taking the position that one shouldn't condemn things like that because that would be bad politics. At the same time, there is clearly significant disagreement within the democratic coalition regarding the use of puberty blockers and such, so if that's what you're talking about then well, yeah. Many moderates literally disagree with the progressives on the merits and think that we should be far more cautious in the use of puberty blockers on children.
More fundamentally, I think that even if we accept that moderates and progressives align on a given issue (e.g., protecting trans people) and, even if their view on it is unpopular somewhere, want to try to make that view more popular, you still run into the same problem that MY is discussing in this post. If trans activists scold people as bigots for their attitudes towards sports or skepticism towards puberty blockers, they're not likely to win many converts. I just don't see how moderates joining in and scolding these people is useful, even if their failure to do so offends progressives. You have to persuade them, and, frankly, persuading the moderates in your own party that you're right is the first step, and trans activists haven't exactly been nailing that.
I agree mostly with what you said here but would take it a step farther. Handing out puberty blockers like their aspirin is morally shocking to use the language of the previous post. When does affirmation become encouragement? When does support become a nudge?
There is one very simple truth that people like Lance don’t acknowledge in their pursuit of being an ally - all other things being equal it is best for one to live their life as the sex Mother Nature (not a doctor) assigned them at birth. That has to be part of the equation. The reason for this is also simple - physically changing one’s body to align with the opposite sex comes at a price to one’s health. No parent should want their kid to pay that price unless it is absolutely necessary. The lefts disregard to confused young people by cheering them on through the gender affirming care ladder that ends with taking a knife to a healthy human body is morally shocking.
Except that around 1in 4,000 (based on google search) children are actually born with both sets of genitalia and traditionally a doctor decided which to go with. Trans advocates overdo it when they say gender is a spectrum, but conservatives overdo it when they say it’s a simple binary. Of course people who identify as their sex at birth (which is almost everyone) are better off, but that doesn’t help those who don’t.
Sex is a simple binary. The only way to make a new human is with one of column A and one of column B. There are only two columns.
Of course, in very rare cases, some humans don’t fit neatly into either column, but that doesn’t mean there are more than two sexes.
“Except that around 1in 4,000”. Are your own words not landing with you?
That number is waaaaayyyyy off. There are literally like 100 known cases ever of people being born with genital *tissue* (not functional genitalia) from both sexes. In nearly all cases these are XX people with some anomalous internal testicular tissue that does not work.
1/4000 might be the number for something like the “true intersex” population, but that is not the same as “genitals from both sexes”, it’s more like “it’s truly ambiguous and we can’t tell without chromosomal testing”. Caster Semenya is one of the those people.
There are zero cases of “child born with two functional sets of genitals and the doctor decided which to pick”. I’m not sure where you heard that, but it’s clearly been run through a few games of “telephone”.
Back before it was hug, I remember hearing that part of the transition process was working with a therapist to make SURE this is what you wanted. Seems sad that we’ve lost that, though I’ll add it is great that the people who are truly dysmorphic are no longer marginalized.
It's a Motte-and-Bailey style of argument.
What you consider to be “gender-affirming care” seems to me, despite being on the left, to be something akin to child abuse. The more data we get, the more disastrous it looks.
The need to talk about this subject with such a euphemism goes a long way towards explaining why it is so concerning, once people understand what it entails.
The nearly-uninhibited use of chemical castration drugs once used to punish homosexuality on minors under the guise of a “reversible” course of treatment?
Ya, little bit concerning.
Once again warning people to watch where they tread when discussing these things.
How does a reference to the origin of “puberty blockers” come anywhere near falling afoul of this board’s (unwritten) rules?
I really need some clarification here as this is the second time you’ve singled me alone out in discussion of this topic for a similar comment.
“Child abuse” seems like a dysphemism, not a euphemism.
I understood "gender affirming care" to be the euphemism
I feel like you’re underrating the odds of Republican state legislators and governors folding on Medicaid expansion: it’s happened in Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, etc.
They've basically only folded to ballot initiatives, and my very poor understanding of Texas politics says they aren't really a thing there, unless someone who knows better can correct me
Right but as Texas gets bluer and bluer Republicans will face pressure to reverse their (unpopular) position on this (high-salience) issue in order to keep winning elections there.
We have about as many issues on the ballot as California does in recent years, but in Texas these are all constitutional amendments that got initiated and passed by the legislature. I believe there is no way to get a ballot measure around the legislature.
Re "Medicaid expansion also currently has a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon" Is 2027 soon? Given Dem Gov wins in KY, LA, KS etc, there's certainly a chance we win TX-Gov in 2026. And as in NC (https://governor.nc.gov/news/press-releases/2023/03/27/governor-cooper-signs-medicaid-expansion-law) a Dem gov, with a veto point in hand, can force a medicaid expansion compromise. Winning in red states is not impossible, especially in non-federal, non-gerrymandered races.
I think it's disingenuous to not acknowledge the peculiarities in those races. Andy Bershear didn't win because Kentucky is going blue, he won because he was a dynastic candidate going against one of the least popular governors in the country. Same with Kelly; she followed absolute insanity from Brownback
The TX GOP could nominate someone insanely right-wing like Dan Patrick. They've done a good job of nominating normal Republicans for governor, but that can always change.
I agree a normal Republican like Abbott or Perry will beat a Democrat, but a moderate Democrat would have a real shot against a Dan Patrick type
I'm more pessimistic: I think Dan Patrick would have to actually be a shit governor first in order to lose that race
I agree, but the Democrat would still have a real shot, maybe 33%
No, a Democrat is not winning Texas statewide in 3 years. Maybe a decade.
I'm not holding my breath for a Democratic governor in Texas any time this decade. Part of the problem is that the state party is an absolute shambles. The party's organizing has been a mess and we have a very weak bench of potential candidates. Hell, Beto O'Rourke had to practically be forced to run in the last gubernatorial race because nobody else was stepping up to the plate.
If Trump wins in 2024 I’d bet Democrats flip some statewide offices in Texas in 2026.
1) It will take longer than that. The AG easily won while not only being under indictment, but while being viewed by most attorneys in the state in both parties as a complete moron. If he can’t be beaten, Democrats are a long way off.
2) Democrats haven’t even been able to competent people to run. The state party is very much stuck in the mud because it’s entirely made up of county officials from 4-5 urban counties jockeying for power amongst themselves. None of them run in competitive races except in their primaries. So you end up with people like Lupe Valdez “running” statewide but just being a terrible candidate in every way possible. Or Beto running on a gun control platform in the most pro-gun state in the country. Or Wendy Davis running on a pro choice platform in a pro life state.
3) When it flips, it will likely be all at once, except the Texas Legislature. Statewide elections are almost entirely referendums on the two parties and nothing else.
Are you in Texas? What are you doing to organize the Texas Democratic party?
If the outlook for Texas Democrats is that bleak then I don’t know how they can hope to stop the measures you’re talking about. Unless those measures are unpopular…which would make it pragmatic to fight against them!
I'm very confused by how you think the Democratic party that is so weak in Texas that it cannot get a popular Medicaid expansion done is going to push for much less popular trans rights?
Plenty of red states, several redder than Texas, have implemented Medicaid expansion. It's just false to imply that Texas being a Trump +5.5% state makes Medicaid expansion impossible.
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/
This speaks to a common frustration I have with Matt's popularism articles. They bring up electoral trade offs and encourage rigorous thinking about them, which is good advice. However, they then only ever expound one type of compromise, take the author's preferred policy prioritization as self-evident, and castigate anyone uneasy with these implicit statements as unserious. Now Matt has a large corpus of writing. He's overall pretty clear about what issues he ranks as most important, but a lot of "moralists" also do an implicit ranking. In fact, the person he's responding to is actually pretty clear about ranking certain issues as more important than others. I think a lot of progressives understand that trade offs exist, but they're skeptical that the compromise that popularists want will be in their best interest.
But this is what Matt’s last sentence is about: that as the Dems have gotten more educated, the economic/safety net stuff has gone into their “we can compromise on this” column, even though it affects more people, because it doesn’t affect the educated as keenly.
I think Matt's point is that to the extent Democrats see various identity issues as non-negiotable, that hurts their odds of winning elections which makes it harder to enact the economic/safety net agenda. The outcome is broadly similar but the mechanism is — importantly — different; when in power, Democrats still try to pass the economic/safety net priorities: see ARP.
That was my read as well. My take is that, setting the morality of it aside, these trade offs are likely harder to exploit than Matt and other "popularists" claim.
He's criticizing someone for not taking compromises and prioritizing, when this person is making their priorities clear. Matt is, in turn, showing a compromise on different issues and taking a stand on Medicaid Expansion. That's fine, but he's treating one the person doing this as fundamentally unserious and "moralizing". Popularism, as it's described, is often just the writer's political agenda dressed up as the most politically pragmatic option.
But Medicaid expansion, and Obamacare generally, is itself a compromise—there are and were certainly people (many of them big fans of the senior Senator from Vermont) arguing that Dems should have held out for single-payer, but Matt wasn't one of them.
Yes, a compromise that gained them something. People get health insurance. What does acquiescing to transphobia net progressives? I haven't seen any evidence that it's helpful to their strategy. Conservatives are still all too happy to go after LGB people. Compromise and issue prioritization can be a useful tool, but it's not always going to give you the leeway you want. It requires actually looking at the specific issue and the trade offs involved. Matt and most self-described popularists quickly make pronouncements about the appropriate trade offs and call anyone with a different view of them moralizers.
Yes—a compromise that gained them something! So you agree that it's not that everyone is taking absolutist stands and the question is just which issues to stand on.
As for your question, well, what did "acquiescing" on gay marriage get for people who care about LGBT rights? It seems to me it got us Bill Clinton, who appointed two Supreme Court justices and Barack Obama who appointed two more—in other words, it got us same-sex marriage, along with most of the other ways in which legal discrimination against gay people has been undone. So when you ask "what does acquiescing to transphobia net progressives," I would need to know what you mean by acquiescence and what are the contexts in which people are proposing to do it.
Well, the example Matt uses is Democrats compromising on LGBT-phobia by supporting civil unions but not gay marriage. And it arguably helped them win elections. That seems to be the compromise that gained them something, which eventually they were able to discard once they had the public on their side.
Yes, this point needed to be emphasized much earlier and much more strongly.
> So when "pragmatic" progressives are unwilling to come to the defense of trans people because some trans issues are unpopular, they aren't actually helping any uninsured people in Texas. What they are doing is leaving the rest of us in the lurch.
What would pragmatic progressives coming to the defense of trans people in your state actually look like? Tweeting about it? Because unless they win power and pass legislation they're not defending anyone
What does "come to the defense" mean here? What is it that you want the Texas Democratic party to do?
I assume there is a beef here, but would be good to get a view on @ettingermentum’s view that: “that trans people and trans rights are not liabilities to any left-wing movement in any sense of the term”
Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/ettingermentum/p/the-modern-electoral-history-of-transphobia?r=7w7z3&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
[fwiw I agree with @ettingermentum’s take]
It seems like when either side indulges its most extreme partisans on the issue, it becomes a liability. Even when gay rights were solidly unpopular, it hurt the Republicans to put Pat Buchanan on stage. So I agree that that Rufo is probably hurting the Republicans, but I don’t think it follows that issues like trans women playing women’s sports are not a potential liability for Democrats.
Nobody likes weirdos.
To normies, a regular trans person is not that high up on the weirdo scale, less high up on the weirdo scale than the straight dude who talks about trans people all the time. When DeSantis for examples starts to turn into that dude, it's weird, and people don't like it.
People also don't like 15 year old biological males competing against girls in sports, because those males are also seen as weirdos.
But fundamentally, the weirdo rule holds.
More importantly, the normie voter thinks the way to deal with that is a school board election, or maybe a legislate election, not it be one of the main points of a Presidential race.
Right, a lot of activists often ignore that agree/disagree is not the only factor. There's also "how much does this matter?" and for most voters, all this stuff doesn't matter much. Kind of similar to gun control for the left.
Republicans can spend all day talking about how people don't want a 16 year old with a penis to run girl's track and they'll get tons of people including me to say "yes that makes sense" but it's not going to turn me into a Republican because it's a minor policy issue. Same with Democrats and background checks for guns.
To put it another way, there is a lot of (well-deserved) moral outrage over the obviously-inhumane razor-wire buoys that our governor has put in the Rio Grande. If someone was trying to say that it isn't worth arguing that they be removed because illegal immigration doesn't poll well in Texas and they only appear to have killed a couple of people, that person would be making both a tactical and moral error.
Agree, but it's helpful to have a position that (however hard razor wire proponents try to lie about it) is not no border controls at all.
> obviously-inhumane razor-wire buoys that our governor has put in the Rio Grande
FWIW, you're conflating two separate things: the buoys and razor wire fences put on land (I checked because I agree it sounded pretty awful if combined!).
For me, the first thing to ask is why are these obviously inhumane things happening and how to stop them. What's your plan for getting them removed?
Is it just me, or are fewer people being screamed at these days for saying that women are people with two x chromosomes and only women should play women’s sports?
i spend great effort defining my own categories. i am unlikely to ally with anyone who calls my categories bigoted, and leery of allying with politicians who sneer at my categories.
Not if it is a popular defense. Find a position from which "decent people in Texas" find the State Legislature extreme.
Medicaid expansion is more realistic than you think it is. One, federal legislation has been proposed to make it more enticing slash get around the hold out issue. So, for that, the block is controlling congress, not Texas. In that context, pragmatism makes more sense. Two, things happen in red states! Medicaid expansion is reasonably popular if, for example, it gets on the ballot. Although that’s not an option in Texas, it’s not as much as a political deadweight as you’re making it out to be.
When did giving puberty blockers and double mastectomies to healthy kids become the status quo?
The fact was there were no laws about those things in either direction, and they are happening regularly. Boston Children's Hospital, for example, has been doing them for 15-20 years, at least.
Which demonstrates Mike's point
The point that I, observer from abroad, and many other commenters here is that sterlizing children is bad. And people in favor of sterilizing children are not a majority ("status quo"), but are using euphemisms to generate sympathy and confusion.
How are the Democrats compromising on abortion? They seem to be winning outright every time it comes up for a vote. Getting Roe v Wade back on the books requires Supreme Court justices and for that you need a Democratic president and Senate.
They're not really, and I think that's Mike's the point. In the past Matt suggested that Dems triangulate on the issue to build Democratic support. For a variety of reasons, that isn't happening. Public disapproval of 2nd trimester abortions seems to be pretty soft, and the GOP seems to be overreaching even on that. I've seen a few state legislative races in VA and polling in other places suggest that state-level triangulation (which would be different from federal changes) isn't what voters want.
I think it depends. Democrats aren't compromising in general. One question is whether Mike would rather Democrats drive the governor of Louisiana out of office over it.
Unless Mike lives in Louisiana or spends his time interfering in Louisiana politics in an unhelpful way, it's hard to see why what he 'would rather' matters (or what you or I would rather, for that matter).
I feel like I’m missing something. Isn’t this post and discussion about political strategy? So it’s completely legitimate to express our hopes about what Louisiana Democrats do. It feels almost like saying “you’re not Joe Biden so what do you care what he does”
I would say they're not having to compromise right now because they're playing defense for a popular status quo from Roe v. Wade.
If they pushed for national legalization across all three trimesters (as _some_ activists want) they'd get hammered.
The compromise position that seems popular is somewhere in the middle of letting people have abortions in the first N weeks(9-15? unsure) so any time you're pushing away from that (Republicans currently) you're going to have trouble.
Basically the Democrats(relative to the maximalist position) are pushing for the current compromise position already.
Yes, but the actual status quo, not the most extreme version of the status quo. And playing defense politically has the advantage of not having to spell out the exact line of defense unless it's tactically helpful.
Yes, this is important. Playing defense inherently requires fewer compromises.
I think where I come down is basically that the moralists are correct that you shouldn't, "compromise on rights". The problem being that they're mostly kind of idiots who don't understand what "rights" are. The rights that are so important are all right there, in the 14th Amendment mostly. "Equal protection" is a right. It's something everybody is entitled to in equal measure. It's not about gay rights, or women's right or hell even black rights, despite the historical context, because it's just a "right". It's fundamental to what a right is that it applies to all those groups.
Which brings us to the Civil Rights Act. What is that then? Well, that's where the pragmatism has value. The government hadn't been doing a very good job recognizing the rights the 14th Amendment obligated them to defend. So they had to write some laws, which are inherently compromises, to better secure the recognition of those rights. The Civil Rights Act didn't create "rights" they were already there.
The modern activist seems to believe the legislature can grant a "right" to all sorts of things that aren't in the Constitution already, and are really fundamentally incompatible with the concept of a "right". This isn't really either thing. This is embracing moralist language to advance a material interest that is neither a right, nor a pragmatic goal in advance of one. This is a grift.
Which again brings us back to the pragmatists, who are dangerous, because they don't really care if the thing is or isn't a right or not, or is or isn't constitutional or not. They are unconstrained. They care about wielding power. They will typically make any promise, violate any right, so long as it expands their capacity to do so.
I'm not that person. I side with the moralists, rightly understood, even where it makes it harder to do things I might consider good. Maintaining the constraints of the constitution is more important than efficient, pragmatic, technocracy.
You make some good points but "Should these people have this right" actually is a political question. Questions don't become apolitical because they're important or because they have obvious answers. Democracies take rights from people all the time (felons lose the right to vote for instance)
If your answer is that yes people deserve a certain right, you need to actually do politics to make that outcome happen. And that involves compromise sometimes, unless you decide violence is better than compromise and then you try to take it by force. Which is sometimes justified but hard to fathom in 2023 America.
I think part of the core of my "people should use the word 'right' carefully" take is that, to me, a right is a thing one would be ethically justified in resorting to violence to vindicate. When I hear someone claim a right to something it implies they should be able to literally put a gun to someone's head and demand it. It's a high bar.
In a broad, more historically common sense, "politics" doesn't care about rights. It doesn't care about the justification. It's "pragmatic". It's just about who's holding the gun. The liberal democratic tradition is supposed to be different. The state is supposed to be constructed in such a manner that it will secure your rights without you having to demand them by force of arms with "politics", or democracy if one prefers, constrained to more a proper sphere.
As you probably know, a very broad amendment like the 14th Amendment can be contorted by really smart SCOTUS justices to mean whatever they want it to mean. The recent SFFA v. Harvard/UNC cases are a great example: both sides had conflicted views of what the 14th Amendment meant with regard to affirmative action: one side said the 14A bars it, while the other side said that the 14A gives Congress a compelling reason to impose it as restorative justice, while both sides rejected a *third* view that had held for over 40 years, the wishy-washy "diversity only" rationale Powell made up.
The bottom line is that stated rights are only as good as the people are willing to interpret and enforce them.
I agree with you in principle, and think you're right that the language of rights has been abused beyond all recognition and taken a lot of people down some seriously strange and misguided paths. But I also think these things are to a significant degree dependent on each other. It's no coincidence that the societies most protective of rights (properly understood) are also the wealthiest, most productive, and well functioning. These things go hand in hand, and without a well run state, and some degree of shared prosperity, rights (again as properly understood) tend to be the first thing on the chopping block.
Aren't the parties also shrinking? I know there is state-to-state variation, but it feels like I see more headlines pointing out that independents are outnumbering either registered Democrats or Republicans. If that is true, then when does the "demographic realignment of the parties" just become a purity spiral that pushes out moderate and heterodox voters?
When I read about "Republican voters" these days, it seems that what I'm actually reading about is the MAGA cultists, not the sane, rational, conservatives that I know. And when I read virtually anything touching on trans issues, the quotes in the articles are not even close to representative of the view of Democrats / progressives or Republicans / conservatives in my social circles. (And those are markedly less fervent and ideological than they were 10-20 years ago, but maybe that is just a function of aging.)
I cannot even be bothered to come up with a label for my own views let alone fathom the worldview of someone who is capable of writing about the taxonomy of progressives. Am I in the minority or are people who think out loud on the Slow Boring comments section while waiting for their morning blood-caffeine levels to stabilize just a somewhat quiet majority?
I think I saw a stat that today's independents are more loyal to one party in voting behavior than partisans were a generation ago, so while in name there are more independents, in actuality we are more polarized than ever.
I see that statistic discussed nationally, but the local paper tells me that our Independents tend to view both parties as too extreme. That does (again, according to the local paper) translate into something like 80% of Independents reliably voting for one party—against the other party, really—but because Independents are now a plurality, that other 20% decides elections. (Only statewide, due to gerrymandering.)
That is why I wonder if the parties are shedding membership and are in a purity spiral. Say a center-right voter leaves the GOP because they feel it has been taken over by the far-right wing, but still ends up voting straight Republican because they feel that the Democratic party has been taken over by the far-left wing, which they view as more dangerous. The result is an increasingly polarized electorate, but the cause is, ironically, moderates leaving the two major parties, which then become even more reliant on a shrinking base of ideologically extreme partisans.
The reality, though, is that elections are basically a binary choice. Voting behavior is not totally reliable because the choices are so constrained.
This substack is very self-selecting. It's filled with people who pay to read about politics and economics.
Im pretty sure American Independents are a mix of people that just people that don't know anything about politics and partisans that don't want the party labels for essentially PR reasons, I don't think declining party membership would indicate anything about political views
Well, as a possibly representative member of the Slow Boring comments section, I've been an Independent since I was old enough to vote and I don't think I fall into either those categories. In fact, precisely because I am interested in politics the baseline function of party affiliation as a voting guide is not particularly useful to me. And I don't vote straight party line anything, so I don't think it's a PR thing. If there were a serious political party that represented my priorities I'd have no problem joining it. But this is also an age of declining party power, so there is really no downside to staying an Independent.
I go out of my way not to discuss politics with people in meatspace, so I lack anecdotes about other people's proclivities vis-a-vis party affiliation. I do see that the local paper talks about declining party membership a lot and tries to do "person on the street" stories to explain it, but those articles are never satisfying. The only people I know for sure are registered Democrats and Republicans are my parents and they're about the same age as the likely Republican nominee. They describe their own party as representing their views, but see the opposing party as increasingly extremist.
>as a possibly representative member of the Slow Boring comments section
i would say probably not, most people here seem to be some variety of liberal (since Matt himself is one). I don't know what your priorities are but almost no one takes the party line 100%, they just pick the party that they agree with on more things, a compromise you might say.
Pretty sure I am some variety of liberal.
I don't mean to say that you have to agree 100% with a party to be a member. But you have to agree directionally and you probably should be on board with the big issues. I respect the "I am going to change things from the inside" mindset, but I came of (voting) age in the Clinton era, where both parties (and public opinion) were opposed to the things I was for and for the things I opposed. And I'm not an activist, so it never made sense to me to join a party that I disagreed with on issues that were important to me.
The Mason philosophy makes you much less effective at democratic politics, but the *reason* why it makes you less effective is that it's a rejection of democracy in concept. Taken to its logical conclusion, it means that if there was a way to impose your own views on these "non-compromisable" issues on the country through non-democratic, non-electoral means, then you would not only be allowed to do that, but you'd be morally obligated to do it. I'm sure that people like Mason envision doing it through the courts a la Brown v. Board of Education, but the courts are ultimately responsive to democratic politics too, if indirectly rather than directly. If the voters aren't with you, then the voters are wrong and a vanguard should overrule them. You can frame it in terms of "false consciousness" if it makes the medicine go down easier, but that's the bottom line.
That has quite literally been the MO of groups like the Transgender Law Center, who recognize the unpopularity of many of their goals but, believing that are fundamental human rights issues, they’ve quietly lobbied for laws to be changed without the public knowing.
I found Mason’s claim regarding principles on which there can be no compromise interesting. If, “no compromise,” is to make any sense, then it has to be on a binary yes/no principle, not one with any continuous free parameters. If there is a free parameter, some will think 0.5 is the right level, and others will think 0.6 is the right level, neither can claim principled truth, and compromise is 0.55…just like taxation. But then Mason claims that there can be no compromise on the grand principle of treating African Americans equally: “We can’t compromise on whether Black Americans should be treated equally as white Americans.” Interestingly, this is precisely a topic where grand principle confronts a policy approach with free parameters, but it is the *conservative* side that is the grand principle, while progressives favor policies with free parameters on which compromise is unavoidable. The grand principle was enunciated succinctly by John Roberts, “The way to stop discriminating on race is to stop discriminating on race,” whereas the progressive view is to employ some degree of race-conscious policy to offset other race-associated disadvantages. For example, progressives usually believe in some sort of boost in college admission for African Americans, but how much? Should it be the equivalent of 30 SAT points, or 50? Setting that level is something on which views will differ, and compromise is unavoidable.
Reading your comment made me realize that I've read countless takes in support and in opposition to affirmative action and I've never heard one advocate try to quantify how many SAT points being Black should be worth.
The cynic in me fears that this may be part of reason for the movement to eliminate standardized testing in college admissions.
The Supreme Court actually made setting a precise number illegal in Gratz v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 244 (2003), although I think the decision makes little sense as a piece of jurisprudence -- I think all preceding cases on affirmative action strongly indicated that this was by far the best way to implement their holdings. The Court was just uncomfortable seeing this reduced to an actual number.
The court is *always* uncomfortable whenever the end result starts getting reduced to a number. That's why they gave up in Rucho v. Common Cause, and why Excessive Fines jurisprudence is a mess.
These are (supposedly) the smartest, most convincing lawyers in the nation. You'd think they could handle a little math. But apparently not.
Well that, and so that it's harder to prove (anti-Asian) discrimination in court.
It would basically just be some function of a regression coefficient. If I had my way, income and a lot of other stuff would be in that regression, and the income coefficient would be larger than the other stuff, and race coefficients might just be small enough to call zero
Did working class whites leave the Democratic Party or did the Democratic party abandon working class whites? It was kind of a mutual separation. Working class living standards were basically stagnant from 1974 to 2016. Working class whites noticed this. (Black voters noticed it too, but they are more dependent on maintaining the safety net, so they largely stayed Democrat. Even a successful black businessman probably has plenty of cousins who get benefits and is probably sees many of them socially).
Why vote on economic issues when that strategy has failed for a generation?
The basic problem with the American safety net is it does much more for the underclass (roughly the bottom 20%) than for the working class. Successful blue collar workers (eg self employed plumbers) pay fairly stiff taxes and get few benefits until they retire. The chronically unemployed get medicaid basically for free.
Working stiffs could tolerate this situation while their standard of life was increasing. But when the elevator stopped working and hadn’t worked for 40 years, cultural symbolism became irresistible.
I do not think "Even a successful black businessman probably has plenty of cousins who get benefits and is probably sees many of them socially" accurately describes why upper class blacks are democrats. You really think "my cousin gets food stamps" is more likely than "this party contains prominent figures who look like me and expresses concern regarding discrimination against people like me" not to mention "people who hate me because of the color of my skin almost uniformly support the other party" ?
A recent Boston story that is dead on this topic with a scathing counterattack. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/05/opinion/massachusetts-left-is-fighting-left/
The Boston DSA moved to expel one of the most liberal state reps (Mike Connelly) for insufficient purity in several areas (he had a 100% score from Progressive Mass in 21-22). Next, from the Globe:
--State Senator Lydia Edwards is even more scathing. ... “The ‘let them eat cake’ wing of the left is so out of touch with the lived struggle of so many people. They will hold their breath for purity and throw a temper tantrum, while they are stably housed, food secure, and healthy.” Edwards, the first woman and first person of color to represent her district, also calls DSA members “progressive white supremacists.” Asked why, Edwards said: “They are progressive. They also believe they know what is better for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) people. And whether they want to admit it, trusting your perspective of what is better for people of color than people of color telling you … is white supremacy.”--
Further:
--She’s also very outspoken when it comes to criticizing progressive stands such as defunding the police. That, Edwards said, is “overwhelmingly a white suburban mantra. Say that in Mattapan.” Another example of progressives being out of touch is the willingness of protesters to get arrested. “I can’t think of a greater way to say, ‘I am white, rich, and privileged. So privileged I can afford to have an arrest record,’” Edwards said.--
Although I appreciate Senator Edwards’ defense of pragmatism, describing these misguided DSA purists as “white supremacists” isn’t reasonable, accurate, or, for that matter, especially pragmatic.
Well it is Massachusetts, and it is greater Boston, and this is the DSA: the median primary voter is a click or two to the left of your average Warren supporter.
I suppose this kind of fiery identitarian rhetoric may be pragmatic in the very narrow sense of “popular with Edwards’ own constituents” (I don’t know), but it doesn’t seem healthy for the Democratic Party or the progressive movement in general for liberal elected officials to be directing meritless allegations of “white supremacy" at potential coalition partners on the left. Even if they're annoying.
The point is that is pragmatic for Edwards.
But why should anyone care what's pragmatic for Edwards personally unless there's a risk someone worse will take her seat? If "pragmatism" simply means "anything that could conceivably help one Democratic politician get from 96.6% to 97.3% in her deep blue district," it just amounts to individualized campaign strategy. To my mind, the point of pragmatism is to get better policy outcomes, which may require that Democratic politicians in very blue districts think about the interests of the statewide or national party when speaking in public.
And if the idea is that Edwards should talk like this to avoid getting unseated by a DSA firebrand, I'm not sure how calling leftists "white supremacists" would help. (In any event, a successful challenge from the left seems unlikely; in 2021, Edwards won 60 percent of the vote in the Dem primary, with the other 40 percent going to a slightly more conservative candidate from the working-class suburb of Revere. This is a very blue district, but it's not Cambridge or Amherst.)
In a world where individual donations matter far more than party money, Edward's job is to get money from people who will click on a link on her Twitter page or whatever and throw her $20, not to keep the guys and gals who work in shiny towers in downtown Boston happy at a $500/plate dinner, or whatever.
Sounds like fun though.
Why, it's almost as if well-educated latte liberals on the coasts know that refusing to prioritize coalition politics maximizes the chances their own taxes won't go up any time soon. I wouldn't be shocked if a few of these folks even oppose housing abundance.
The 3D chess view of politics is overrated; most political actors are sincere in their beliefs.
That’s correct, and yet they usually tend to align with their self interest. People rationalize that which is fine for them personally.
What one percieves as in their self interest isn't always so: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-against-meta
They are sincere about wanting low taxes. Many even used to be Republicans.
I am quite sure most coastal liberals did not use to be Republicans.
How long is the timeframe? 5 years ago no. But 15? 20? George Pataki was governor of New York up until 2006. Scott Brown was elected in 2010. New Hampshire and Washington still don't have income taxes.
These states used to be more Republican, sure. I think the question is how we define the "well educated latte liberals" that Jasper is talking about—it's true that educated voters used to run more Republican, but the cultural signifier of "latte" 15-20 years ago meant cities and the educated people in the cities were quite liberal.
Anyway, if these voters are sincere about wanting low taxes, why aren't their taxes lower? (New Hampshire is not a "latte liberal" state at all, though Washington, home of Starbucks, obviously is.) I live in California and I can assure you that the "socially liberal, economically conservative" side is not running rampant here. There isn't even momentum to bring back the SALT deduction.
I think the better question is why aren't taxes higher in those states? If they truly are so economically progressive, why did single-payer healthcare fail so badly in California and Vermont? Why aren't there any major efforts to raise taxes even more? What would happen in California if there was a serious push to raise property taxes? (Which, btw, California should raise property taxes, so they can lower capital gains and income taxes and make state tax revenue not so utterly dependent on the stock market). Broad-based social spending requires broad-based, high taxes on everyone. The "high-tax" states have high taxes on high earners, but that is not enough to fund European levels of social spending.
George Pataki and Scott Brown were outliers, which is why you remember them.
They won because they won a bunch of non-Republicans. If you are defining "Republicans" as "people who have voted for a Republican for a major office at least once this century" then 75% of Americans are Republicans but it isn't a useful definition.
I believe that, pursuant to Internet Traditions™, a photo of Hillary Clinton as a "Goldwater Girl" should now be posted.
She wasn't on the coasts!
Chicago has a coast!
Maybe trite, but the brain is a survival machine first and not strictly a truth-seeking apparatus. There’s something beautiful and awe-inspiring about how progressives manage to (1) sabotage their coalition’s ability to raise their taxes and (2) posture as pure and better than everyone else, all while (3) remaining 100% sincere internally.
I agree with you. The six figure PMCs upon whom the Democratic Party increasingly relies for votes and funding are quite sincere in their desire not to see their taxes increase, even if it's not something they're noisy about (they are noisy about mandatory housing scarcity, though).
Except as noted above, when you look into referendums that would actually raise taxes, these PMC's vote for the higher taxes at higher rates than the rural voters. Look at the results of Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increases, etc. It's consistent.
Now, I'm sure there's a random neighborhood or town where that isn't true, but in general, there's been no widespread proof that when they can vote specifically one way or the other, these new suburban voters are secret anti-tax Republican's who just like gay people.
I understand among both some of my fellow far lefties and the social centrists who are uncomfortable with current change, might both be nostalgic for a time when the left-wing of the party was a bunch of union voters with a variety of views on social issues, but that simply isn't true anymore.
No, the future of a social democratic state in US is likely going to be led by wine moms in the suburbs and urban liberals of all sorts of education and backgrounds in Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, and Texas, not non-college educated white voters in rural Michigan or Kentucky, no matter if that was true in 1971.
Not that it means the Democrat's should just bottom out amongst these voters, but there shouldn't be nostalgia for a section of voters that don't really exist anymore.
They’re definitely sincere, but it is funny, not as in haha but hmm interesting, that the strategy works as well as it does for economic self interest and in-group reputation.
As someone who has spent my entire life around “well-educated latte liberals from the coasts,” I can assure you that their cultural politics are sincere, and they are not engaging in some complex Machiavellian plot to thwart progressive taxation or universal health care. I agree with Matt’s arguments in this essay, and have spent a lot of time debating with friends who are closer to the moralist position. They are not cynics; in fact, their unwillingness to think strategically is (from my perspective) kind of the whole problem.
> acting like latte liberals are cartoon villains in the comments of an essay explaining why acting like conservatives are cartoon villains is unproductive
I propose to add to “latte liberals” also “cappuccino liberals” “Americano liberals” and “tea drinking liberals”. Discuss.
Oh man- you beat me to it! Yeah, it’s an ingenious way to keep your taxes low AND still be able to have lots of cool progressive friends (who you would lose if you came out as a Republican and said you prioritized low taxes). Win-win!
I can't believe it hasn't been said yet as I burn through at least the top level comments while I continue to be a person experiencing Westernness, but that last paragraph is an absolute banger that really turns things upside down at the moralists identified in this article, with the Scoville heat units similarly turned up. That's the type of paragraph that's well designed to get the moralists to yell at Matt a bunch on Twitter when it should be challenging their devotion as to which issues they deem uncompromisable.
As a person experiencing vestigial midwesternness, I superlike™️ this comment.
Yes. It’s the classic Yiglesian twist/denouement that’s such a rare and delicious treat.
And I do see that he tweeted that paragraph out, and so far the engagement is quite low.
It’s best served as the dessert of the main dish rather than in isolation.
If I felt my existence were threatened, I’d probably push to put a book in school libraries other than the one with a picture of a young person giving a blow job to a dildo (NPR had a story about librarians liters organizing to get this book on shelves). I would probably choose something geared a bit more toward normal people to represent me. But I don’t feel my existence is threatened and maybe I’m just bad at politics. Maybe the librarians and activists are doing the right thing.
This would be a reasonable statement if you pretend there is only one book at the center of book-banning efforts and not hundreds of them. Maybe you are in fact bad about politics if you don’t understand the actual issue!
You’re giving a really good example of MY’s thesis here. Should public schools have such a book in their libraries? Just say “no, public schools shouldn’t have those books in their libraries, we’re talking about books that should be in school libraries. Books with poetry. Books about this country’s history with slavery and Jim Crow. No one wants this book in school libraries. It’s entirely irrelevant.” But maximalists can’t bring themselves to say that. So a book like that ends up becoming the issue, essentially giving a win to the other side.
I mean I guess I would be giving a good example of MY’s thesis if my comment was “I feel very strongly about this specific book being made available in schools” rather than what I actually wrote.
If progressive literary maximalists organize around the opinion that the book should be in schools, progressives who say “I’m not sure I agree but they are part of the coalition so it’s not my place to suggest they might be wrong,” are effectively allowing maximalists to define progressives.
The problem isn’t that sincere maximalists on any one specific issue are too abundant-I don’t think there are many of them. The problem is that maximalists on any one issue in the coalition are becoming maximalists on all issues to signal solidarity. It makes for some unpopular messaging overall and weird positions that hurt advocacy groups. Unions end up weighing in on cultural issues that their membership isn’t really on board with. Etc.
I strongly agree with the position that I do not need to have a deeply held opinion about everything all of the time
You’d be a lot more convincing if there were any evidence of book bans.
You’d be a lot more convincing if you made an interesting point!
But there is a point there. Books are not being "banned" in the sense that they cannot be published, or cannot be purchased, or cannot be accessed. A few books are being not put on the very small number of shelves in very small school libraries.
My kids are now in their low 20s. The library in their middle class public high school was about the size of two classrooms, maybe half that space, if that, was dedicated to shelved books --- very few students read any of them.
Outside of mandated textbooks I'm not sure how long it's been since my kids read a physical dead tree book. Every book that we're talking about can be purchased and read easily online or even accessed and read for free via the many public libraries that allow for online access even if you live outside their area.
Maybe even apropos to Matt's point today, compromising by advocating for greater access for kids to the internet might be more useful than fighting for actual shelf space in a few school libraries where most of the books won't ever be checked out anyway.
It’s only a point in a very specific, pedantic sense. The people who want to remove these books from libraries are very specifically saying “Children should not have access to LGBTQ-focused material and we should restrict access to them.”
You are moreover misrepresenting the issue as saying it is about books “not being put on shelves”. They are being removed from shelves. Nobody who favours removing books from libraries is advocating it on the grounds that ‘very few students read’ physical books. On the contrary, they are overtly trying to prevent kids from accessing these books. I’m not sure how that isn’t clear.
My point is that the restrictions they're trying to put in place are near trivial. Yes, they would like children to not have access to LGBTQ focused material. With today's technology and easy access in many different ways to these same materials they might as well be commanding the tides not to change.
The people trying to suppress these works are trying to prevent their kids from "turning gay" they may not realize it, but that's not how things work. These are stupid acts being perpetrated by ignorant people with probably near zero effects. It's good to oppose these efforts, but it's also good to keep in perspective how small a problem this actually is.
"Not being put on shelves" and "being removed from shelves" is virtually the same thing. I suppose a perfectly accurate version would be "not being allowed on shelves", that way you don't have to distinguish between a book that's already purchased vs. one that could be or is being purchased.
I’m sorry you do not find the newsflash “no one is banning books” to be sufficiently engrossing.
Some books are going to be excluded and some included. The only issue is -who- gets to say which is which, and -what- books will be included/excluded. And that's simply a question of the power to force your opinions on others.
“People should have access to this book and choose for themselves whether to read it” is not equivalent to “People should not have access to this book and not be able to choose for themselves whether to read it”
Ummm, actually, yes it is.
Because not all books will be included in any collection. A collection implies choice -- including some, which necessarily means excluding others.
Is every school library to be infinite? Nobody is to be directed to certain books? Because to be directed to certain books -- making them available -- implies excluding others.
You have your opinions on which volumes should be used; others have different opinions; you fight to see who gets to prevail. QED.
State-financed education is a process of indoctrination in a State-approved narrative.
The only question is -whose- narrative. That's what people fight about.
"Is every school library to be infinite?"
Hypothetically, a school library could be made infinite with the emergence of technology. The barriers in its way are expense, copyright considerations, and--as you say--who should be directed to what books.
Your condescending ‘umm actually’ aside, I don’t disagree with you here, but that’s not the debate. The argument is not to remove certain books and replace them with others. It is simply ‘These books (and more specifically this subject matter) should not be made available.’
I don’t agree that merely making a book available is an endorsement of the book’s content. It does not affect an individual’s choice to read the book beyond simply enabling them to make that choice. Restricting access, however, does affect that choice specifically be impeding it. What would be analogous would be making those books mandatory reading which, as far as I can tell, is not a position that is being broadly taken.
The fact that this one book is at the center of this controversy is so weird. Like, I could not imagine having an opinion on its inclusion one way or the other.
It's at the center of the controversy because: (1) there's a visual (always easier to get people worked up when there are pictures); (2) the specific picture -- as critics of the book would point out -- is something that is plainly outside what mainstream culture considers acceptable to depict in media available to minors without parental supervision (that sort of scene even in animated form would get a film an "R" rating and it would not be shown on network television); and (3) the defenders of keeping the book have to comedically tie themselves into pretzels to justify keeping the book in high school libraries, but aren't willing to just let go of the anchor, so people who want to ban it are going to keep pressing because it discredits the defenders with "normies."
Really??? It's not blatantly obvious that it's inappropriate to you?