Read an article in the Times this morning profiling Black farmers in Georgia. A common complaint is that they are disappointed in promises they felt were made by Biden that never materialized. One farmer in particular holds Biden responsible for an loan forgiveness program that never happened because white farmers sued to stop it, as it was a program that was targeted at Black farmers.
Two other farmers were also featured, with one saying she doesn't see Biden as any better for Black farmers than Trump, and the other going further and saying he's just going to vote for Trump this time (while wearing a shirt quoting MLK "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere").
I feel the dynamic is based on the fact that people were in fact extremely ready for Trump to leave office as things sucked really bad, but they're holding Biden accountable for every disappointment and challenge since then, while forgetting that the source of their misery in January 2021 was in fact Trump.
Not the point of your post but it’s a good jumping off point for me to note that I have extreme skepticism of “man on the street” news stories about people’s politics. After that HoffPo takedown of Selena Zito.
To refresh your memory, Zito got famous for these dispatches from Trump country and parlayed the popularity of these pieces into a gig at National News outlet and a book deal*. Problem of course is her anecdotes with “regular” folks strained credulity and in a few cases appeared to be outright lies. The most egregious (to me) was claiming someone was a “lifelong Democrat” who switched to voting for Trump who with two seconds of googling you can see is a local RNC chair (there’s a reason this became a running gag with NYtimespitchbot).
The thing that was amazing to me was seeing how prevalent this was everywhere! Zito just took this kind of reporting to an extreme. But over and over again I’d read an article of some reporter interviewing some “regular” voter and with 5 seconds of googling I find out he/she is the head of an activist group with a very particular agenda.
So upshot of this. I’d be very curious if there is any background info of these people and looking up their backstories. If past is any guide, I’d guess at least one has very relevant backstory that puts into question how “random” this interview was
*The fact these dispatches from Trump country was so good for Zito’s career is almost certainly a big driver of why so many of these trips diners in Trump country stories were written from 2017-2020
It's a really interesting form of journalism (like I would love to interview random people about their political preferences) but I put it much more on the entertaining side than informative. That's what cold hard polls are for!
It's also kind of bizarre, since we know empirically that there are in fact a lot of people who voted for Obama and then Trump, so it should not have been that hard to find such people. But reporters kept interviewing regular Republicans, probably because they made up more dramatic and interesting lies than the truth the actual Obama-Trump voters said (which was probably just 1000x variations of "oh yeah I like Obama, but Hillary's so status quo. I like change")
Big agree on that. And it's all based on the media's complete shock that Trump could've ever been elected in the first place, so they went narrative hunting.
Honestly I think yeah the local RNC people cosplaying as undecided just give better material to talk about than actual undecided voters and writers are going to be onto that like catnip. A focus group of actual undecideds would be pretty boring i think.
Yup, undecided voters aren't "well, Biden didn't do this, so I'm not voting/voting for Trump (outside of young college-aged voters), it's more 'well, stuff was cheaper and I'm bored, so why not?'
Almost certainly. The RNC chair, or head of an activist group or even a heavy news watcher is very likely going to know the "correct" talking points, especially the first one. The RNC chair is very likely very aware or been coached to give answers that are going to fit pre-existing narratives. Like right now, I'm betting there is a reporter interviewing said "man on the street" who's giving some answer like "You know, I voted for Joe in 2020 and Hilary in 2016. I though the could bring some calm to the country. But we're more divided than ever and I see him on today and he looks so lost. How's he supposed to stare down America's enemies? I've never voted for a Republican in my life, but sometimes you gotta make that hard choice and vote for the candidate who's just more with it".
Of course Trump has displayed way more signs of cognitive decline than Biden. But that answer would be the perfect "both sides" anecdote for the Peter Bakers of the world.
Or reasons that were just plain incoherent or based on actual falsehoods. Voters often have extremely esoteric reasons why they vote they way they do. But given what we know about "swing" voters, this is especially likely true with this group. So an actual "swing" voters response as to why they switched their vote from Obama to Trump or heck from Trump to Biden in 2020 has a decent chance of being one that doesn't fit any pre-existing narrative and probably kind of bizarre.
Yeah, there are people who voted for Trump in 2016 because they wanted to keep Obama and Hillary Clinton replaced him, so they think she's responsible for him leaving office.
There are people who think that Trump was a good president apart from COVID, so we brought in Biden to fix COVID and now we can go back to Trump.
There are people who heard any of a variety of nonsensical conspiracy theories.
But also there are people who have a bee in their bonnet about some very specific issue. Like there's a railroad crossing down the road and they want a bridge, or gates, or they want the gates removing so they can make their own judgment, and they'll determine their vote on the entire presidency on this.
In the UK, I've literally knocked on a door and been told that whether the bins are collected weekly or every two weeks is the most important factor in how they will vote. The best bit was that was a European election, and when I asked "do you think the EU should be deciding that?" they were offended...
I think you live in the UK, but, eerily, your "bee in the bonnet" issue is exactly what is being hotly debated between Amtrak and a town in the county adjacent to mine. And you make a good point about people voting on their own weird niche issues.
People are people everywhere, and the same issues come up everywhere.
The mainline from London to Norwich has been steadily sped up over the last decade or so, and much of that has involved removing crossings, either just closing them, or consolidating several into a single bridge or whatever - if there are no crossings, the train can run faster. People have very strong opinions on what should happen with a crossing that they drive over every day on the way to and from work.
I did a bit of campaigning for a friend in Suffolk, and a bunch of people had exactly this issue. Stuck in my head as an example. Especially as all of them said "everyone thinks X" when, in fact, three doors down their neighbour had said "everyone thinks Y".
Chris Hayes' article on this from the 2004 election is great. (But click this link at your own risk: my browser's giving me some sort of warning about it. https://chrishayes.org/articles/decision-makers)
I genuinely would like to know the vetting process of how these focus groups or “man on the street” stories are put together. Because I’m pretty certain on multiple occasions I’ve seen the same supposed “undecided” voter interviewed for multiple elections. Who with two seconds of googling you see is a pretty down the line GOP voters.
Like genuinely, what is the vetting process. Is it like, “I know a guy who knows a guy in Georgia. We’ll just interview him”? Do these news organizations know these people are not actually undecided? If I had to guess the real issue is certain people have learned where to show up to be part of these panels and then just lie about being “undecided”. But that’s still not a great look for news orgs if that’s what’s going on.
It wasn't just about, "I like change." A major aspect of Obama's appeal was, "No Black America, no White America, etc." -- & Hillary was playing identity politics to the hilt. To top it off, she had all the appeal of Nurse Ratched -- or as Obama himself put it (ever-so-wryly), "You're likeable enough, Hillary."
Misogyny? Not quite: just the sort of personality (& attitude) that gave Trump an opportunity to portray himself (in contrast) as McMurphy.
A much more trivial version of this is that when media outlets run "lifestyle trends" articles spotlighting one or two or three young people, invariably living in Brooklyn or whatever, as examples for the trend in question, it often turns out that the young people spotlighted are in the writer's personal friend group (or are friends of their friends) and are not representative of anything.
Yeah, although I'd say those "trend" pieces are kind of famously obnoxious and get dunked all the time sort for that reason. I remember there was one that tried to argue that "Chinatown" was the new hip place to live. And they had a quote from someone that said "Anyone who's anyone, lives in Chinatown". My reaction was only Niles or Frasier Crane in the show "Frasier" would say anything like this. There's zero percent chance someone unprompted used this statement. What likely happened is a reporter said "would you say anyone who's anyone lives in Chinatown" and the response was some version of "I guess".
Also, narrator voice; Chinatown is not a "trendy" place to move in NYC.
Incidentally, I could not figure out why I was disappointed in that article, and you've put your finger right on it. Not that it was badly written or uninteresting, but it's the type of content I simply wish journalists wouldn't indulge in. I know I probably just shouldn't let it bother me, but it annoys me a lot more when it's *my* side/writers who give in to this indulgence.
(Or perhaps I should simply lean into this and find 94 other things that I think everyone else is doing wrong and post it on a church door somewhere)
Not to pick on Milan, but I was amused that his lead-in to the article was that only 2 of the 5 friends were voting for Biden, and then it turned out that actually a third would have been willing to vote for Biden but just won't be in the country for the election.
Sure, but what's the point of writing it unless b) is being asserted? In general, the number of people who care what Milan's specific circle of friends think is measure 0.
Yes. It’s often just lazy reporting. E.g., Trump campaign provides contact information of supporters. Well, with that sample, you’re going to find some Black farmers supporting Trump. It isn’t even necessary that they are fictional-they simply are really rare.
But so much of political reporting is infected by this “non-random sample” problem. Stories exist because they are pitched by the candidates’ teams. Facts are fed by the two teams.
Yeah, at this point, I discount this sort of reporting as noise at best and actively fake at worst. News outlets go for it anyway because it’s more click-generating than observing the extremely consistent polling data showing immigration, inflation, crime, and Biden’s age as key issues for his disapprovers (and concern about reproductive rights and Trump’s fitness for office weighing heavily on the other side.)
Remember when the pro-choice and pro-life demonstrators were yelling at each other in front of the Supreme Court, and then they all spontaneously started chanting "Fuck Joe Biden"?
Half my Twitter feed is Muslims denouncing Biden as an evil Zionist puppet, but that's because I'm not a typical American. I imagine a lot more voters consume the kind of social media that attacks him for being an anti-Semite.
I wonder how representative are these farmers though? Obviously, Biden is polling worse than his 2020 performance, but it's like 3-5% worse in the two way.
If we look at mainstream media voter coverage he's lost 40% from every single demo. But, at least they found a successor to the Trump supporters at a diner genre.
Key note "While 64,574 of Georgia’s farmers are caucasian, the ethnic makeup of Georgia’s producers is more diverse than expected. There are 2,870 African American producers; 922 Hispanic producers; 524 American Indian producers; 494 Asian producers and 43 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander producers."
The fact there is a whole deep dive feature in the New York Times is just another example to me that the idea of "real" Americans being farmers just won't die despite being wildly outdated for decades.
My husband grew up on a farm in the South. I am frankly shocked that there are still over 65,000 farmers of any race in Georgia. I wonder how they are classifying farms.
Wouldn't shock me at all if we found out these "farmers" weren't actually farmers. If I had to guess, they probably are. But again, given what I noted above wouldn't surprise me if there is more to the story about their occupations.
Another thing is that at least one of those farmers seems to be a Trump 2020 voter. Can't be sure because I don't think he said, but when explaining his Trump support he cited aid he received in 2019...
Because black farmers in the South were historically discriminated against by USDA, and because the Supreme Court hadn't yet issued the college-admissions ruling which banned affirmative action for groups that have suffered historical discrimination?
The loan forgiveness may or may not have been a good idea but it wasn't "blatantly illegal" until the courts said it was. USDA had been running preferential programs for black farmers well before Biden took office, so this wasn't a radically new initiative.
There should be a term for things that exist for a long time,but everyone knows they will be struck down in court. I think it is common in tax structures and selection policies.
The term is desuetude: "a doctrine that causes statutes, similar legislation, or legal principles to lapse and become unenforceable by a long habit of non-enforcement or lapse of time. It is what happens to laws that are not repealed when they become obsolete. It is the legal doctrine that long and continued non-use of a law renders it invalid, at least in the sense that courts will no longer tolerate punishing its transgressors."
Perhaps the most prominent example of it today is federal marijuana laws. A previous example was laws against contraception, which prompted the Supreme Court to say in Poe v. Ulman, "'Deeply embedded traditional ways of carrying out state policy ...' – or not carrying it out – 'are often tougher and truer law than the dead words of the written text.'"
After a while it also becomes an equal protection violation to prosecute one person for violating a law that everyone else is openly and flagrantly violating without prosecution.
I think this is right to a large degree — but with the nuance that the source of people’s misery in January 2021 was not Trump, but another wave of Covid, schools being closed, high crime, higher unemployment, etc.
So people looking back on 2021 focus on how they hated Covid, rather than how they disliked Trump irrespective of Covid. And since Covid caution ended up being coded to Democrats — and lack of Covid caution coded to Trump — that makes them angry at Biden.
Democrats overpromising a populist racial agenda to farmers that any halfway literate judge can see violates Civil Rights law and Trump talking about how McKinley's tariffs were neat is truly on the nose. Now they just need some progressives to start hawking an alternative currency before some nutjob from Portland murders Trump in his second term, and we can get an eccentric Vice President JD Vance distrusted by the Republican business wing. All of this has happened before and will happen again.
It exasperates me that no one points out the obvious here: the Doha Agreement fixed the go-to-zero date for US forces at a point three months beyond the 2021 inauguration. The timeframe was already too short to allow for any real adjustment on the Afghan government's part, so it would have made hardly any logistical difference to make it a little shorter and have the withdrawal in midwinter, outside the fighting season.
The whole point, fairly obviously, was to give Trump the opportunity to reassess after the November election. If he'd won he could have torn it up and kept the force structure at Obama's levels. I doubt that would have worked, because the Taliban would have resumed attacks on US troops, but whatever went wrong in Trump's second term would have been less dramatic than a Saigon-style collapse.
When Biden won, Trump's initial impulse was to go to zero before the inauguration, to make things as chaotic as possible for his team. His military advisors talked him out of that but he still drew down to just 2500 troops, which probably wouldn't have been enough to defend Kabul alone in the face of a determined attack. At that point Saigon 2.0 was more or less inevitable, and I can't help thinking it may have been the outcome Zalmay Khalilzad (also a Republican) wanted all along.
A-fucking-men. It’s downright embarrassing any time I hear someone say that *BIDEN* was responsible for the shit show withdrawal.
It’s an epistemically disqualifying litmus test. In my book, anyone who lays the blame at Biden’s feet instantly identifies theirself as a fundamentally unserious person and a bad fucking pundit.
I'm going to pull rank here and point out that I probably know more about this subject than most SB readers, because it's been one of my little obsessions since coming back to Kabul.
There were definitely major operational errors, mostly made by the State Department, but I don't think better White House leadership would have made a lot of difference. (And I also think people don't acknowledge the incredibly disruptive effect that COVID had: partly because government employees were locked down, and partly because hardly anyone was paying attention to Afghanistan.)
Agree. Afghanistan was about a decade of my life as an intelligence analyst. There’s lots of blame to spread around but the effort to absolve the Biden admin from any of it is just wrong. We (the US) made fundamental and unequivocal mistakes in the Spring and Summer of the withdrawal that cannot be pinned on Trump.
To be clear, I'm not trying to *absolve* him of "any of it". I'm just saying that anyone who STARTS by talking about his errors is missing the forest for the trees.
A couple months of fumbling a hot potato sure looks dramatic, but it's downright idiotic when pundits fail to FIRST ask how it got so hot in the first place.
Anyone who starts on Afghanistan with Trump's errors is also missing the forest for the trees.
The key errors were made by Bush. Obama then made the error of being afraid to pull out. Trump made a deal that forced a pullout, and Biden executed it. Trump and Biden are, at least comparatively, the good guys in this story. They removed the US from a place we had no business being in, where we continued to be because hawks are too immature to accept the notion that we might ever lose a war.
I agree with the caveat that Trump made a *cynical and cowardly* deal, and then squib-kicked the hot-potato to make sure it was maximally uncatchable besides being hot in the first place.
There are quite a few puzzles still to be unraveled. For me the biggest one is "who gave the order to evacuate Bagram, and why?" I don't think it could have been anyone but the commander-in-chief.
Follow me on Twitter if any interest in Afghanistan survives :)
The simple answer is that the force reductions didn’t allow holding Bagram, the embassy, and Kubul airport at the same time.
The fundamental error, which cannot be blamed on Trump, is the assumption that government forces would hold at least the capitol and core areas for months at least. Hence why there was no sense of urgency to process Visas for Afghan allies. There wasn’t a contingency plan in place in case that assumption was wrong.
However, the signs of a potential collapse were becoming pretty clear by mid June to the open source community - I have a hard time believing no one in government saw them as well.
We won’t know the full story because no one is interested in lessons learned and the various agencies (WH staff, DoD, State, Intel community) are all pointing fingers at each other.
So how long should Biden have put a halt on moving forward after inauguration to allow him to make appointments and for those people to hire their people and for those people to reevaluate the plans and adopt their own? People acting like Presidents show up with their people in place to implement their plans on day 1. Trump had withdrawn 86% of American forces from Afghanistan before Biden was even inaugurated.
The Afghanistan War Commission will come up with some answers, but that's years in the future.
You may be right about Bagram (I'm not a military guy and can't judge) but it's striking that there's been so little transparency about the decision process. If it wasn't defensible in July, they should say so.
I mean, that's totally true, but as you say, it's not really Biden's fault.
Like, sure, under the "Green Lantern Theory Of Governance", of course he could have just willed himself to do a better job.
But the GLToG is a by-joke because that's an absurd way of thinking about things! So, I maintain that even *starting* any analysis of what happened by looking at *Biden's* errors alone is just a fundamentally misguided framework.
It’s not Biden’s personal fault, that is true. But the errors that were made were made by the Biden Administration and the administration is responsible for them.
I don't see how Trump leaving them a 3-month window for deciding what to do is an "error" the Biden administration made.
Again, I'm not disputing that errors were made during the execution or during the entire 7-month stretch leading up to it. I'm just saying, 3 months is not much time to make a major geopolitical decision, and 4 months after that is not much time to plan a major withdrawal, especially if the last guy left the whole State department a mess.
Three months is plenty of time. After all, when push came to shove, the no notice emergency withdrawal was planned and executed in a bit more than a week.
The military had already planned for the 1 May date and just needed the order to execute. The delay was because the WH was reviewing Afghanistan policy in part because the military and others didn’t want to withdraw. The WH eventually overruled that desire and extended the withdrawal date after which the military immediately began drawing down.
The whole notion that 7 months is not enough time to plan and execute the withdrawal of 2,500 troops is factually not true. The problem is that these decisions get stuck churning in the political and bureaucratic halls in DC.
There's also just no way for a major military withdrawal to go down with *no* events. And reporters wanted something to report on, and Republicans wanted something to cynically complain about. Everybody got their wish.
What are some good sources or at the time reporting about this, if I wanted to go down the rabbit hole? I'm also really interested in the withdrawal and it's sad how, to some, it seems to have set the tone for the rest of Biden's term.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held hearings on the withdrawal last autumn. They've published lightly redacted transcripts of most of their interviews, though not yet all of them.
There are also two CENTCOM internal investigations of the Abbey Gate bombing. A redacted version of the first one was FOIAed by the Washington Post and a redacted version of the second one by me. You can find the full text of both reports posted to my Substack:
That's thousands of pages of documentation, so it's a very deep rabbit hole. If you want to start with something shorter check out the State Department's After Action Review on Afghanistan, released last June:
Note that this is an 87-page report, but that pages 21 through 84 are missing. I recommend following my Substack or Twitter account just in case the missing pages turn up at some point in the future... 🙄
Were the failures to get interpreters out on State? Does the fact that State answers to the WH affect your view, or is it something where the fuckup is only apparently higher up the chain ex post?
One of the biggest sources of the chaos at the airport was that some genius at the State Department decided to send out entry permits via text message, which of course were immediately copied and sent to thousands of ineligible people. (QR code, hello?)
I agree in theory that the President is ultimately responsible for anything that a cabinet department gets wrong, but if any individual president was responsible for gutting and demoralizing the bureaucracy at State I'd say it was Trump, not Biden.
I also get the sense that US military personnel were unhappy with the way the British government handled its side of the evacuation process. But everything in the public record that looks as if it may have been criticism of the UK has been redacted.
The visa process for interpreters and others had been a complete shit-show for at least a decade. State under Biden started to make efforts to speed things up but they hadn’t really gone anywhere.
Right. Focusing on the ephemeral chaos of that final week withdrawal, instead of the preceding years of policy failure and kicking the can down the road, when it was obvious there was no light at the end of the tunnel in the previous policy but nobody had the courage and leadership to end it, is the epitome of short-term thinking and missing the forest for the trees.
The biggest failure was not getting our Afghan allies out of the country. I've got no clue how Trump would have handled them, likely because he thinks they are all "suckers." But Biden had seven months to figure something out, and for someone who is supposedly so empathetic, he just, didn't.
How high would tariffs need to be raised to in order to replace income tax? I suspect the level would be so high that it would defacto ban legal imports of anything, meaning no tariffs would be raised at all. You would end up with people smuggling mangoes and coffee into the US as though it was fentanyl.
There aren’t many things that would make me fall back on my Italian heritage and try to join the mob, but “becoming a parmesan cheese kingpin” would be one of them.
The GOP when discussing optimal income tax: "laffer curve means the optimal rate is lower than {whatever the current rate is}"
The GOP when discussing optimal tariff rates (they are playacting to please their totemic Father/cult-leader): "there is no effective cap on the revenue from tariffs, we can just keep raising them higher to get more money out of the money machine"
I don't think there's that much thought going on. People generally just don't understand how large government spending actually is, hence the constant "we could have gold-plated single payer healthcare if the military was a bit smaller" arguments.
A tariff is essentially a VAT at the point of import. To raise revenue sufficient to phase out the income tax as the primary source of federal revenue, that VAT system at the border would probably have to be gradually extended domestically until we had a full federal VAT system.
Well, the question would be, if Democrats have leverage in Congress, is a deal possible where Trump gets what he wants - tariffs and less income tax - and in return Democrats get a foothold and pathway for a federal VAT to replace the income tax as the primary federal revenue source.
There have been a number of Brookings-ish proposals for a VAT coupled with some form of abatement at the bottom end of the income distribution to address the inherent regressivity of a VAT -- a UBI, refundable credit, payroll tax offset, etc. It's usually seen as a revenue adder to address looming deficits rather that a wholesale replacement to income tax, but it could be deployed in addition to something like eliminating all income taxes for incomes under $100,000 to make it politically palatable (I think I read somewhere that this would eliminate over 100 million federal tax returns, but we might need to inflation adjust that threshold). One advantage of this kind of VAT is that it would be nice vehicle for a border-adjusted carbon tax.
Don't know. But if Democrats are the party that "believes in science" and "follows the evidence", as I've heard, and economists generally agree based on the evidence that a VAT is a superior, less distortionary way to raise revenue than an income tax (is that true?), then shouldn't Democrats want a VAT?
I will be the first cheerleader for any party or politician that wants to repeal the 16th Amendment and replace all income taxes with a VAT. But Democrats want to replace income taxes with a VAT? I don't believe that. Democrats want to add a giant VAT to higher income taxes.
Fentanyl is really easy to smuggle because it's so compact. One kilogram of fentanyl can produce 1 million to 1.5 million pills. They would be /trying/ to smuggle mangoes and coffee as though it were fentanyl!
Personally I blame the media. I definitely don't want to understate the seriousness of January 6, the fake electors stuff, the infamous phone call to Brad Raffensperger. There is some vindication there for the people that went most into a panic about Donald Trump.
However, prior to that I think his presidency was best characterized by farcical episodes like the week of the Mooch as communications director or the much hyped meeting with Kim Jong Un that accomplished... nothing. His entire presidency was full of strange stuff that seemed like it could have come from the writers of Veep. Even at the end there was the Four Seasons Total Landscaping thing.
But instead of that being the endless headline, we had Democracy Dies in Darkness, Russian interference, an impeachment that never stood a chance of removing him, and on and on. I don't want to over estimate the level of attention Normie America paid to day to day politics or the accuracy of their memories but defining the guy as a fascist instead of a buffoonish punchline set the bar in a place he could be seen as exceeding. The result is that it is nearly impossible to get anyone to pay attention to basic questions of policy and competence.
I don't really think you can blame the Democrats for impeaching Trump. When the president commits crimes, you indict him for the crimes.
The fact that there was never any chance of convicting him is something to blame on the Founding Fathers. They didn't think political parties should exist, so they never anticipated a level of partisanship that would make it impossible to get a Senate supermajority against any president.
To be fair, even the rest of us mostly didn't expect the polarization to get so bad that senators would cover for the kind of things Trump did. But that's on the Republicans, isn't it?
The Ukraine extortion was, in fact, really bad. And looks even worse in retrospect.
But to circle back to the post's theme, I have a Polish immigrant neighbor who has a "Russia Out of Ukraine Now!" Bumper sticker and a Trump 2024 sticker...
Yep, the inability of strike while the iron is hot is just basic incompetence. The time to press the advantage was when the Russians were on the run. Now dribbling aid into a frozen conflict isn’t going to accomplish much, and if the Russians end up grinding them down it will be very bad for Western morale and future proxy battles.
This is not a defense or endorsement of the decisions the US has made along the way, but frozen conflict seems like the most likely path to Ukrainian victory. When smaller nations defeat larger invaders as has happened numerous times in the past 75 years or so, they don't typically drive the invaders off the field. What usually happens is that the defenders bog the invaders down in a quagmire until the latter get exhausted and leave on their own. Russia is an autocracy, but autocracies are only partially shielded from public opinion. Eventually people tend to get tired of losing their sons for no reason.
Yes true. But the Ukrainians *were* driving the invaders off the field, and could have kept going if their western allies hadn't been so afraid of offending Putin -- there may still have been a frozen peace but the territory controlled by Russia would have been smaller. Now the Russian economy has been retooled to a war footing and that opportunity won't come again; any territory Ukraine regains now will be at a higher cost.
Just about the only thing that could make me say that Biden has done the best job possible under the circumstances, as opposed to just a merely adequate job, would be if the real reason he's been slow walking aid to Ukraine is that the US military readiness is in such poor state that the US can't give more within putting our own defense at risk, but for obvious reasons he thinks he can't say that publicly.
Trump has pretty publicly been the face of being against the very idea of helping Ukraine. It is only recently softened to "we shouldn't help them at all but under me it wpuld magically not be a problem". I doubt someone who thought Biden should more decisively back Ukraine would support Trump because of it.
I think miscalculation of impeachment 1 made the odds of impeachment 2 being successful much less likely. And no, I'm not going to blame the founding fathers when the rules of the game are well known by all the players and have been for over 2 centuries.
Perverting Ukraine policy for electoral advantage sure seems like a "high crime" to me.
It's true that if the Democrats had foreseen January 6th they probably would have saved their firepower and just done the one impeachment, but how could anyone have predicted that?
The only question dictating the success of the second impeachment was whether conservative media was willing to give cover to elected Republicans. The same conservative media that pickled their supporters in election-steal lies for the previous two months. I don't know enough about conservative media dynamics to say whether a collective change-of-heart was in the cards. But I know that their calculations had nothing at all to do with the first impeachment.
Why did impeachment 1 make impeachment 2 less likely to succeed? If impeachment 1 had good grounds then that should have made impeachment 2 more likely, not less.
The Ukraine impeachment was so warranting impeachment and so obviously doomed in the Senate that any objective observer must conclude that the self-destruction button of the US is simply waiting for the right hostile actors to put in the time and effort. It’s basically as certain as the US burying the Soviets under eventual economic collapse by keeping the Cold War focused on otherwise irrational arms production.
I'm not sure why you think the first group of examples was policy-centric, and the second group wasn't. Veep episodes aren't policy oriented. And the Mueller Investigation wasn't a damp squib because the public was fundamentally disinterested. Mueller was an ineffectual snob that got played by Barr and Rosenstein and didn't fight back at all. (Though, in fairness, he was trying to learn a lesson from Comey's disastrous flouting of the rules.)
I also think it’s worth again stressing that the “Russia stuff” is not at all the equivalent of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election (I’ve seen this “both sides” comparison from reporters). As much as people like Chair got way over their skis with stuff like “Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987” I’d say we have some real unanswered questions about financials ties. The person who actually knows what they are talking about here is David Farenthold and the real tragedy is other reporters and Democrats didn’t rely on his reporting.
But even now. We have some serious unanswered questions about why Trump is so pro Putin. Point being focusing on the “Russia stuff” I really don’t think is some distraction
I think for at least some far-right conservatives, the answer is simple:
1. What they consider to be "our country" is different from what you consider to be "our country." You consider "our country" to be the United States as a formal legal institution, and that "our countrymen" are all people who are U.S. citizens under U.S. citizenship law. They don't.
2. Who they consider to be "our enemies" is different from who you consider to be "our enemies." Not only do they consider certain United States citizens to be enemies rather than countrymen, but they also feel like certain foreign regimes that are hostile to the United States (qua formal legal institution) are potential allies against those enemies. Philosophically they share more in common with those foreign regimes than the do with their "domestic" (though they don't see them as truly "domestic") opponents, with the biggest point of commonality being their shared common primary enemy.
But it... IS... true. When you have their biggest media personalities carping for Putin on live TV, and a significant faction of their congressional caucus holding up Ukraine funding for months on end, this isn't some sort of unchecked bias, it's a verifiable fact bordering on common-ass-knowledge at this point.
While I agree it's important to understand what went wrong with GOP voters to get them to this point, reducing the entire thing to that question alone is dangerously myopic and concern-troll-ish at this historic juncture.
For a historical comparison... one did not need to understand what drove Lindbergh's America First supporters in order to understand that they were a threat to global democracy.
I don't think these points connect as well as you seem to. Specifically, the accusation that failing to approve Ukraine aid funding is evidence that the GOP loves our enemies more than America. It seems rather obvious, but objecting to spending tens of billions of dollars to support a country that nobody really considered a stalwart geopolitical ally of the United States 5 years ago isn't exactly loving your actual enemies. I think it's easy enough to reconcile that policy disagreement on good faith grounds rather than accusing tens of millions of people of secretly loving communists and Russia more than America.
This thread seems to be going off the rails a bit below your comment, so I'm just chiming in to say that I think the questions being posed are doing more to obscure a meaningful discussion than to illuminate one.
ETA: Just to be clear- I support funding for Ukraine. I just don't think that those who disagree with me do so because of a hatred of America or love of Russia. I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it was bad policy, so I am familiar with how these kinds of policy disagreements can devolve into attacks on patriotism that allow the other side to avoid addressing people's actual objections/concerns.
I don't want to get too personal, but when 90% of your comments are stream-of-consciousness partisan talking points that extend charity to no one but your friends, you shouldn't wonder when your super-power is instigating long comment chains without getting upvoted yourself.
[Edit] One more thing - if we're looking for ways to improve the quality of conversation in the comments, I recommend adding "accuses people of or hints at people being concern trolls" to the list of ban-able offenses.
Nonsense! I note your comment has not addressed the Steele Dossier. Russiagate was fundamentally a rat fucking operation by the Hillary campaign, supported by the IC and MSM.
Do you want to address the open letter signed by the IC about Hunter’s laptop?
Even worse, they'd actively bend over backwards to pretend Trump had a coherent and principled policy agenda. Trump doesn't want to hand Ukraine to Russia because he loves Putin, Trump is "isolationist". He also genuinely cares about fraud despite the fact that he's never said anything that was even remotely true about voter fraud. But hey guys Democrats aren't perfect so they're all the same.
Had the media treated Trump like it did every other candidate in 2015, he would have died on the vine. Instead, they took his bait and turned politics into a circus in the name of ratings gold. Trump took advantage of this and was able to control the narrative with his nonsense. Biden’s main fault is that he took over this circus but thought he could go back to the way things were before. Trump is still controlling the narrative and he will continue to until he dies unless someone rises up and takes the spotlight away from him.
Yea, the biggest issue with Trump's administration is that it completely went off the rails at the literal very end. Before that point there had been a persistent campaign to mix in genuine critique with liberal hysteria which I'm not sure was a great idea to do for 70 percent of the administration.
I genuinely find it frustrating that there has been nearly no non-partisan anger on Covid with like a high profile truth and reconciliation type commission.
It seems to me like large numbers of excessive deaths have been hand waved away by just like invoking polarizing parts of the other side.
I think there’s a fairly large amount of bipartisan bad outcomes that no one can do much about because zero sum polarization is the most important thing in the world.
We desperately need a non partisan Covid commission. Everyone on every side got a lot of stuff very wrong, so it’s not as if it would only be embarrassing to one side.
We will have another pandemic and it’s going to be important to do stuff that works with minimal negative effects on society. My fear is that the response will be driven by politics and we’ll have the ineffective policies favored by whatever party is in power and a bunch of people will needlessly die.
I usually try not to do pedantry, but please, everyone: Stop saying "disinterested" for "uninterested" or "not interested".
"Disinterested"="Has no skin in the game/no ulterior reason to favor one side of a dispute over any other/neutral"
"Uninterested"="Doesn't care"
"Not interested"="Uninterested"
A judge should have no stake in any given case before them, but should care about it in the sense of adjudicating it fairly, efficiently, and respectfully. An uninterested judge is deeply frustrating; a disinterested judge is essential. Conversely, you can often find people who have a material interest in some issue who just don’t care about it. (Ahem.)
I am not doing a pedantry for pedantry's sake here. This is a useful distinction and I beg everyone to respect and preserve it.
Kareem, I gave up on this battle a long time ago. I'm just totally disinterested in fighting with people who don't understand the distinction anymore. Irregardless of the amount of people like us who still care, it's not worth the battle.
Nope. The wonderful thing about language is it is democratic, and that the public, not elites, get to set meanings.
And the fact that elites get all upset about disinterested, and flout/flaunt, and less/fewer, is GOOD. They should get upset. Because when elites are whining, that's how we know democracy is working.
If you try to impose elite rule over language, you get France, where everyone says "le weekend" and "Internet" despite the government trying everything it can to stop them. It doesn't work.
Using disinterested the way Matt does is CORRECT English. It's in the dictionaries. If you don't like the language as it is, you can choose to speak another one. But you don't get to impose INCORRECT rules you just made up on other English speakers.
I'm with you on principle, but I'm with Kareem insofar as I regret how the change in usage indicates a lack of appreciation for a valuable idea or distinction and precipitates its continued decline.
I always hear these arguments and I think they are silly.
Did you actually have ANY doubt what Matt meant? Nope. Because we aren't idiots. We can see context. If someone says "he is flaunting the rule", nobody thinks that he is putting the rule on ostentatious display. When the supermarket says "10 items or less", we understand that. And when Captain Kirk says he is boldly going where no man has gone before, we get that too.
So no, nothing valuable at all is being lost here.
Your point is well taken but misses my thrust. This is a demand for a democratic movement to insist on a particular meaning of a particular word wipe out alternate meanings to preserve/create a useful distinction. It is GOOD that someone thought there should be a single word for "has no skin in the game". Call it linguistic Bismarckianism--applying democratic means to conservative ends.
But there are ways to say someone has no skin in the game already. You can say neutral, conflict-free, unbiased, impartial, etc. etc. etc. So the word taking on a meaning in addition to the one you prefer doesn't rob English of a way to express what you're seeking. Heck, no skin in the game also works! Although it is more cumbersome than neutral or unbiased.
Trying to stand in front of these changes/evolutions and shouting "no!" is a pointless endeavor. It won't work, and if it did our language would be less beautiful and expressive than it is.
I always hear these arguments and I think they are silly.
Did you actually have ANY doubt what Matt meant? Nope. Because we aren't idiots. We can see context. If someone says "he is flaunting the rule", nobody thinks that he is putting the rule on ostentatious display. When the supermarket says "10 items or less", we understand that. And when Captain Kirk says he is boldly going where no man has gone before, we get that too.
It's not incoherent at all. It's the reason we don't say words anymore or employ usages that are all over The Death of King Arthur and The Canterbury Tales and Hamlet. What changed? Answer: language evolves. And how does it evolve? Not because "authorities" change it, but because the public does.
And nobody objects to this except in these stupid instances of pedantry where a few elites decided to tilt at windmills. Nobody objects to the fact that e-mail became email. Nobody objects to the fact that we now use "wife" as a verb. (Well, I playfully object to it, but no, I don't say "it's incorrect English". Because if enough people use it, it isn't.) Nobody objects to their friend saying "what up?" instead of "what's up?".
And your last sentence is wrong. It's not "trying to get people". It's falsely saying there's a rule when there isn't. It's LYING to get people to change. It's posing as an authority of correct English while being ignorant of what correct English actually requires.
I'm not sure I understand what the "this" you're referring to when you say "no one actually believes this" is? No one actually believes that language evolves and develops via actual usage amongst the real population of speakers?
And the fact that a word may be used by two large communities of people, with incompatable meanings isn’t a problem? Sometimes the meanings are diametrically opposed, like “inflammable”. Wouldn’t it be good if we had an authority to adjudicate which of those meanings is correct?
Literal still means literal, it's just that in context it can also sometimes mean figurative. Just like with everything else involving language, the context clues you in to the meaning. People who make big deals about this seem to do so purely for pedantic reasons while ignoring that the meaning is almost always perfectly clear in context (and if it's not, it's almost always because of poor writing/speaking rather than confusion created by a more expansive definition for a particular term).
Neutral, unbiased, impartial, objective, conflict-free, etc. etc. There are lots of words that can efficiently and effectively convey what the apparently original meaning of disinterested was.
The public gets to choose what to eat, too, but there's nothing wrong with saying that some foods taste better than others, or are more nutritious. There's nothing wrong with saying some movies are better than others, or with saying that bad movies squeeze good movies out of the marketplace. It's only with language that no one can offer a criticism of usage without others self-righteously coming in to democratically insist that no one voice an opinion.
I think there's a big difference between saying "caviar tastes better than hamburgers" and saying "caviar is correct and hamburgers are incorrect".
Indeed, I think the latter statement is both incorrect and represents profound ignorance about food.
And that's exactly how I feel about people who believe in fake "rules" of language and try to "correct" people who actually know the rules and use the language correctly.
I don't believe that Kareem used the words "correct" or "incorrect," though I guess you could say he implied it. But he wasn't insisting on "correctness" for its own sake, but to maintain a particular usage as primary. The key statement he made was, "This is a useful distinction and I beg everyone to respect and preserve it." To me this is comparable to Anthony Bourdain saying, "I beg everyone to shop at local restaurants, because they're worth preserving" or Wendell Berry saying "I beg everyone to buy seasonal food from local farmers, because the agricultural chain is worth preserving" (or, to switch media, any number of critics saying "I beg everyone to see non-Marvel movies in the theaters, because cinemas and a diversity of film genres are both worth preserving"). It's partly an aesthetic preference, partly resistance to a social change with perceived negative effects. There's no reason I can see that this would be invalid for language where it's valid for everything else.
Of course you can disagree that it's a useful distinction, and I gather that you do disagree because you say we'll just figure out what is meant from context clues. But that's a disagreement on the merits. The Academie Francaise or the principle of language being democratic is neither here nor there, because no one is calling for people to be forced to speak a certain way. We're appealing to them to do so, which grants the premise that the choice is theirs.
Merriam Webster actually has a good explanation of what they call the "tangled history" of "disinterested" and "uninterested", which have flipped meaning at least once and (partially) flipped back. It's a better explanation than the one they give for caving on "literally"...
I'm incredibly anti-Trump... and I'm a cross pressured voter in a key swing state, and this line of argumentation is just not very compelling. It's mostly true and correct, Trump 1 was a big mess, but I'd agree that was true of basically every administration I can remember? Being a huge mess in these mostly mundane ways is par for the course in presidential politics. The JCPOA is a good example, it was a mess when Obama negotiated it, it was a mess when Trump killed it, it's a mess with Biden trying to necromance it back into existence. The primary continuity between admins is being a giant mess.
The worst thing about Trump is that he's polarizers the electorate along coalitional lines that empower the worst people. The identitarian populists on both sides of the spectrum will absolutely drive the country straight off a cliff if they hold the wheel for too long, and that's what Trump does that's so terrible. He puts those coalitions in the driver's seat by setting the terms of the arguments.
The second worst thing about him is his personal greed/will to power/amorality/total lack of ideological constraint. Basically the dictator stuff. He'll directly destroy the institutions if he can manage it. Luckily he's pretty incompetent and the institutions are pretty robust in that regard.
This "he's a kinda incompetent mess at administrating the state" concern is a third tier issue, even if you fully embrace the perspective that Biden is actually a substantial upgrade.
What made the JCPOA a mess when Obama negotiated it beyond the Israelis claiming it to be so? (I don’t know enough to have an opinion but my heuristic is that engagement + inspections was far preferable to proliferation + war as the only recourse.)
1) Obama negotiated a deal that had so little congressional support he couldn't get it through a majority vote in Congress, much less get it through as an actual treaty.
2) Why did it have so little support? Because it was going to allow significant amounts of money to flow into Iran when they were going to continue to find proxy groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc. who would act against the US and it's allies.
This really isn't much of a metric -- the U.S. has ratified almost no new treaties in the last 25 years or so because there are almost always enough members of the opposite party in the Senate to vote against a proposed treaty (even if it otherwise has majority support) to deny the President a "win."
Sure, but not only did he not have a 2/3 majority in the Senate to do this with Iran, he didn't have a congressional majority to ratify his executive agreement. The president shouldn't attempt to bind the US without congressional backing.
But he got an agreement that locked Iran's nuclear program down and, absent Trump's idiocy, would have continued keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
Why on earth wouldn't he have taken that deal, with or without congressional support?
Because the President of the United States does not dictate policy, they are supposed to execute policy passed by Congress. Its perfectly fine for them to craft an agreement and bring it to Congress to be affirmed or denied, but it Congress doesn't approve it, then it isn't law. If Obama had gotten congressional buy in, then it would have been much harder if not impossible for Trump to just abandon it.
(I'll note that I edited my earlier comment to make it 25 years rather than 27 years, as the late 1990s were more productive for treaty ratifications than I had originally recalled.)
My go-to example is when Bob Dole lobbied to get the US to join a UN treaty on disability rights and it failed because not enough Republicans joined it:
"The Barack Obama administration, along with senior Republicans and Democrats, tried to gain entry into a United Nations treaty that would compel other nations to upgrade their standards in treating the disabled, a personal issue for Dole, who co-authored the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.
Supporters included the top Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar (Ind.), and Armed Services Committee, John McCain (Ariz.), who, like Dole, had suffered disabling wartime injuries.
But just eight Republicans joined all 53 members of the Democratic caucus in voting yes, falling six votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to approve a treaty; 38 Republicans rejected the treaty."
It seems like the BATNA on the table and the situation in which we now find ourselves is that Iran funds those groups anyway (maybe with less cash than it would otherwise have?) and now they also have a nuclear program that makes the prospect of crushing the regime in a conventional war for its misbehavior significantly less plausible.
The alternative is that they have slightly less nuclear progress, but a lot more money to fund these groups with. Maybe that's a great trade off, but it's not that obvious to me.
A small reduction in the risk of a nuclear weapon detonating in Tel Aviv is worth a significant increase in the risk of conventional rocket attacks, I would think. Plus, Israel had spent the last 10+ years keeping Iranian clients in check. It's not like 2014 Obama could predict the security failures that led to 10/7.
"A small reduction in the risk of a nuclear weapon detonating in Tel Aviv is worth a significant increase in the risk of conventional rocket attacks, I would think."
This makes sense logically, but that logic takes you weird places. Wouldn't the most effective way for Iran to operate in that space be to gain nuclear weapons, and then require the US/Israel to pay them not to use them...?
You also need to ask what % change in a nuclear attack vs how many rockets. If it decreases the odds from .01% to .005%, how many rocket attacks is that worth? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?
B) Where and how would they use such a nuclear weapon? They don't have a way to attack the US with one. Their missiles can't even reach Israel, they don't have super long range bombers with capable fighter escorts, and they don't have a capable navy. They are like the USSR in the 1950s: a theoretical nuclear threat but not a practical one.
I believe that Iran does have launch vehicles that can hit Israel at present (although I don't know if the payload capacity is big enough to accommodate the mass of a likely nuclear warhead), and to the extent they don't I strongly suspect the Iranians could, like the North Koreans, develop sufficiently-sophisticated launch vehicles to reach Israel (and possibly given enough time the U.S.) because (1) this is fundamentally not an intractable technical problem and has been solved by many other nations, (2) Iran has more resources and access to the outside world than the Norks; (3) the Iranian military-industrial complex is getting a shot in the arm from exports to Russia due to the Ukraine war.
The basic way the problem goes is:
(1) Iran does bad things.
(2) U.S. threatens to topple Iranian regime (e.g., because they're backing Russia, or Hamas, or Hezbollah, or because we're just sick of their shit as a perpetual spoiler / Axis of Evil member / reason the rest of the world can't have nice things)
(3) The Iranians threaten to nuke Israel with some level of MAD-level credibility. Hell, they can even claim (truthfully or not) that they smuggled a nuke overland in to Israel already.
(4) The U.S. holds off due to the credibility of the threat and the fact that Israel's incredible geographic concentration means that it's comically susceptible to a small number of WMDs basically destroying it as a country
(5) Iran goes back to the bullshit it was doing in part (1), with impunity.
The whole point of nonproliferation to ensure that step (3) never happens, whereas my current understanding is that the consensus view is "Iran doesn't have a nuke but could build one in months."
The US doesn't have a NATO-like agreement with Israel, and Israel has shown it is capable of shooting down Iranian missiles. Why can't Israel engage in MAD with Iran? Pakistan and India do it. Heck, if Iran actually builds a nuclear weapon, Pakistan and India will also engage in MAD with Iran.
One such weapon detonated about 300 miles up over the middle of the country would cause an EMP that would devastate the country.
The government EMP commission estimates 90% casualties within a year (mostly due to starvation, dying of thirst, sickness and of course LOTS of violence)
That Iran could somehow smuggle a nuclear warhead and a cruise missile launch system onto a ship in another country outside of the Persian Gulf (because America monitors ship traffic within the Persian Gulf), and then get that ship into cruise missile range of America without getting caught at any step is like, impossible. That won't happen.
"One such weapon detonated about 300 miles up over the middle of the country would cause an EMP that would devastate the country."
ROTFLMMFAO! That would require a nuclear weapon of -- at barest minimum -- 1.2 *megatons* yield. That's literally a couple orders of magnitude larger than anything Iran is plausibly going to be capable of producing in the foreseeable future.
I point you to the chart in Matt's post about enriched uranium on hand. Was that part of the "mess"? I mean it's not like "the perfect being the enemy of the good"; it's more like "the totally effed-up being the enemy of the good" in that alternative.
And yes, Iran got its own money back which gave them more flexibility to pursue their nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, that's what negotiated agreements are all about. Would we be better off keeping the money and their keeping all that uranium?
"Would we be better off keeping the money and their keeping all that uranium?"
That's the scenario we're living in now. The actual unknowns are
1) would we be better of if they had less nuclear material, but had somewhere between 75 and 200 billion more dollars in the intervening years if sanctions were lifted.
2) if sanctions were lifted, would the Iranians have been able to make significantly more progress on their missile tech. Fissile material is not the only concern that the US has about Iran gaining nuclear weapons.
3) would the agreement be stable, or would the Iranians access the money for a while, then violate the agreement and resume enriching uranium.
I don't actually know the answer to all of these. Perhaps the world is much better with the US maintaining the JCPA maintained, but I think we should not assume it would be.
The mess was that Obama was basically propping up the Iranian regime that was having serious internal issues, when the core problem is the regime. It was negotiating with terrorists. The logic is they can always just pull out the "nuclear proliferation" card again whenever it suits them and we'll bend over backwards to perpetuate their power.
I don't think there's ever been a great likelihood of a full blown collapse of the Iranian government. I do think there's a reasonable counter-factual where instead of the JCPOA, US policy focus is on promoting internal divisions and constraining resources such that the regime is weaker and too busy dealing with internal issues to be flexing their muscles via proxy wars. The risk being that we end up having to use airstrikes or whatever to eliminate nuclear facilities. Even if that happened I'm not convinced it's a worse place to be than where we've ended up in reality.
The JCPOA negotiations allowed the regime to re-consolidate power after serious internal fracturing in 2009-13. We let them off the hook just when it seemed like they were finally losing it.
The protests peaked in 2009, as I recall, and the protests of 2022-2023 seemed like they were at least as intense, though I didn't study it closely. Either way it's not at all clear to me what role money had in all of this.
This was right after the failed Green Movement. The Islamic Republic's regime has been through worse. The point of the JCPOA was to turn down the temperature and show Iran that the US could be worked with. Trump showed that notion was nonsense, though.
I never suggested that Trump handled things in a manner that was less of a mess. There were however, serious internal disruptions in Iran during the Obama years that we should, and probably would but for the JCPOA, have responded to very differently.
Iran entered into the JCPOA negotiations because they needed to relieve external pressure and focus on consolidating control internally. They succeeded.
I personally have a problem with how Obama and now Biden administrations have handled Iran with kid gloves and are seemingly naive and think that the Iranian regime are logical actors that want the best for their citizens and if only given the right carrot/stick will join the brotherhood of nations.
I’m sorry but the regime is evil and rotten to the core. They have proven again and again. I don’t know what it is with Democrats that they are, at best, naive or worse, sympathetic to the Ayatollah.
I know Iran is not 1A on the foreign policy priority list right now, but it’s up there!
I don’t think they care about their people’s well being but they care about their own (ie the regime’s) survival. Anyway, what are sanctions if not a calculation that the regime will care about suffering imposed on their people?
This is right. They are very logical actors. And even an amoral regime that doesn't care about its people's suffering as such *will* care if if it thinks (as is often though not always the case) that suffering will make the people less supportive of the regime. Autocracies are partly insulated from public opinion, but not fully - if things get bad enough it can mean danger for the regime.
This comment is moralising nonsense that ignores 60 years of history. Iran didn’t support a brutal American dictator that ruled as a tyrant for 20 years. I think this comment almost makes more sense if you change “Iran” for “USA”. People who live in America often have a real blind spot for the evil things their country has done.
I think the hope was that JCPOA was about more than nuclear proliferation, that it would tone down Iranian operations as a whole and thaw things out but it didn't. In an objective sense, it's probably worth paying them in sanctions relief not to be a nuclear power, but i don't know if you could actually sell that to americans.
This speaks to how Trump is basically graded on a scale. Not only is Trump bad for all the reasons we don't normally worry about in a President (like their commitment to Democracy and respect for the Rule of Law for example) but he's also just at being President for the normal reasons someone might be bad at it, he's just incompetent. I find it genuinely depressing that people seem to have memory holed how bad he was at President for the "normal reasons" that Matt highlights.
A game I like to play with my conservative friends is, “Which era-defining social protest movement of the Trump years is your favorite?”MeToo? George Floyd? Covid vigilantism? and then try to predict the social protest movements that will materialize in a second term…
Matt soft pedals the best explanation for Trump nostalgia. The economy was doing really well in 2019. Household incomes were at a record high and poverty was at a 50 year low. Blacks, Latinos and lower wage workers had seen bigger income gains than people at the upper end.
Matt is certainly correct that this happened because Republicans stopped sabotaging the economy. But the 2019 economy still happened and swing voters aren’t great at adjudicating macroeconomic causation.
Trump’s situation in 2019 was eerily like Regan’s in 1984. There was a good economy in 1984 because 1) Volker and the Fed had finally loosened the screws and 2) the Regan tax cuts and ensuing deficit spending were stimulative. Neither Regan nor Trump found any supply side magic, they just had the good fortune to govern when old school Keynesian dynamics made them look good. Yet this is all voters require. It was morning in America in 1984 and the Trump economy of 2019 was pretty awesome.
Voters did punish Trump for his erraticism and incompetence and for the pandemic. Regan got 58% of the vote and won. Trump got 47% and lost. That’s a yuge difference. If Trump were facing a generic Democrat, he would get crushed. The thing is, he’s running against an unpopular 82 year old.
But the mystery isn't really Trump's popularity. It's Biden's unpopularity. If people are willing to look at good economic performance and ignore Trump's horribleness, why can't they look at the continuing good performance and ignore Biden's oldness?
If the answer is "because inflation, even though wages rose faster than prices" then doesn't that imply that voters are irrational to care about inflation per se?
Inflation is bad (in some circumstances) because it interferes with the functioning of the economy and makes GDP growth slower than it otherwise would have been. So shouldn't a rational voter just ignore the inflation rate and look at the growth rate alone?
I think a persuasive answer is interest rates which aren’t directly included in the dropping rate of inflation but do continue to clearly impact people’s lives and pocketbooks. See Peter Coy’s last two pieces.
Also Noah Smith’s literature review on this, to the effect of “yes, it looks like in general the increases in prices outpace the capacity of workers to negotiate higher wages due to nominal wage rigiidity / ‘sticky wages.’”
In general, yes, but was that specifically the case for the US over the past two years? Some of the price increases did go into higher corporate profit margins, but I thought real wages had also risen in the aggregate.
Yes, but I am unsure of wage gains at different income levels. Wages have risen fastest for the lowest wage workers, who make up a minority of the population. This has led to goods and services becoming more expensive for the middle class, who are a majority of the population. I don't know if real wages have risen for the middle class, but I do know that things that used to be inexpensive for the middle class are now not.
This only really applies to folks buying homes or cars. It’s mostly a millennial effect right now. People are still miffed by inflation even though it abated.
Right, and people are going to be understandably miffed until their wages rise enough to cover. It's not a small deal. The rate of change slowing doesn't ameliorate the loss of earning power and savings.
It’s vibes. There are people who are claiming the economy is worse than the Great Depression, all while their cars get fancier, houses bigger, and homes are filled with more crap than ever.
Biden is too old. His age is a massive outlier. I’ve dealt with senior judges. Plenty of judges in their early 70s can come in for a week and preside over a trial and do ok. Of course, they are doing basically the same thing they have done for 20 or 30 years. They are not dealing with novel situations to the degree a president must. After a week, they get to go home and play golf if they are fit enough or read and watch TV if they are not.
I don’t know a single octogenarian who I would want to preside over a jury trial. Being president is much harder. It is an unrelenting grind for four years. It isn’t like being a supreme court justice where you get three months off a year, don’t have to ask questions during oral argument and can delegate as much as you
like to your clerks because 95% of your work product is written. This is intuitive. Why can’t Dems see what’s in front of their face?
Trump isn't much younger, he just has the advantage that he has been basically senile since 2016 so no one notices. Actually Presidents can and do delegate quite a bit - and with Biden or Trump that's what you are going to get, a low energy President who hands most of the work off to the staff. So the question is, whose delegates do you trust more, Biden's or Trump's?
Trump’s speaking style is more forceful than Biden’s. Biden stutters and slurs his speech. Ergo, Trump gets more style points even though Biden is far more cogent. If you like cogent arguments, you probably prefer Biden. If you like vapid muscularity, you probably prefer Trump.
But what does "too old" mean? He's clearly capable of performing the job. But he's not great at performing the performance. Democrats can "see" that clearly enough, but what's the fix? Not only is it a bummer to punish a good performer because of optics and vibes, ditching Biden will make low information voters think that he was dropped because he was bad at both the optics and the substance. Neither Biden nor Democratic officials are as delusional as you think. The naysayers gripe about imperfections without ever seriously wargaming an alternative.
It's also strange how reflexively VP Harris gets dismissed as the alternative. Ditching Biden is called for as a severe option for a severely old man. But Harris is somehow *also* unacceptable, despite unremarkability being basically her chief flaw. It makes me question whether this is really about Biden, and not just about festering anxiety and impatience over a drawn out election cycle.
"Most" Americans think angels are real. We are not depending on them to see things as they really are. I think the author meant it's "clear" to those of us not distracted by arcane conspiracy fantasies and ghost stories.
lol when the discussion turns to who will win an election, you don’t get to casually discard the majority view on the basis of those people not being part of your right-thinking tribe.
Kamala gets you sexism x racism x California/San Francisco phobia x objectively poor performance in the "performance" part (why she dropped out of the race in 2020) x higher propensity to cave to the wackiest left constituencies (at least while campaigning -- I expect she would do better if she were actually in the Oval).
The reason I think Joe Biden is too old is that I literally haven't known any 85-year-old men. I know they exist, but while I've known plenty of women who made it to the upper 80s and beyond, most men seem to die before that. So many men I've known were also fine right up until their last year or even months, but then they experienced rapid decline.
When Biden was elected at 77 years old, he heavily implied he wasn't going to run for reelection, and I think most of us wanted to believe him because he seemed likeliest to save us from Trump. But now he's running to finish a term at 85, and I think many, many people are afraid he's going to have severe health problems and then die in office.
I would much rather Kamala just be the nominee. Maybe it's because I'm from California and therefore understand her as a politician, but I think she can win.
I'm having a hard time really understanding what people mean by "too old". He's clearly able to do that absolute bare minimum. He delivered the SOTU. Nobody in his cabinet wants to 25th Amendment him. He's offered appointees for pretty much every relevant office including the upper eschelons of the military. He doesn't, like, forget to sign things into law.
So, "too old" isn't meant to be taken literally, right? It's just stating a personal preference, like saying that someone is too old to get into a relationship with. Honest question.
Look, at 80, my grandfather was in great shape. He was active in his clubs and volunteer activities, still doing performances with his barbershop quartet, still traveling with my grandmother. At 81, he started getting some health problems that slowed him down, and at 82, he was dead. My preference would be to not have a president where I'm not confident that they won't die in office. Dying in office is chaotic and disruptive and pretty significant in terms of changing the course of history. I like Joe Biden and I think today, he's a good president. I've resigned myself to the fact that I will be voting for a guy I think might die in office because the alternative is worse. But if we had an open Democratic primary this cycle, there is no way in hell I would've wanted someone this old running because of this concern.
It’s obvious to everyone that this is a weekend at Bernie’s situation. Like, everyone was relieved that he managed to read a speech. Sorry team but I am going to believe my lying eyes.
Harris is a non-starter because of her race. We just had two terms of a half black president. It didn’t fix racism. African Mulattos are less than 10% of the population. Do we really want 3 out of 5 presidential terms filled by exotics? Anyone with a basic understanding of identity politics understands the answer is “no.”
1) Approximately no one votes based "the economy" (in general), they vote on how the economy manifests in their lives and communities.
2) Neither economic gains nor harms have been distributed equally.
3) The benefits have been concentrated on those least likely to vote (the young and poor) while the harms have been concentrated among likely voters (rich and old).
Additionally, I would bet the incremental improvements haven't produced significant, _qualitative_ positive changes to the lives of the beneficiaries. Life at the bottom of the income distribution is still economically precarious, and the most common stabilizing forces—a college education and home ownership—are still out of reach or worse, getting farther away.
Admittedly, this is only a theory, but it's based on inferences of generally uncontested observations: that real wages improved the most at the bottom of the income distribution and rich/old people vote more than poor/young people.
“I’ve been toying with a different theory of the president’s woes, one that makes better sense of his peculiar demographic weaknesses: Voters with low levels of trust in society and the political system are shifting rightward.”
I think that makes sense. And the Democratic Party has had its head in the sand for a long time about this, particularly with regard to black voters.
The near-unanimous support that Democrats expect from the black community is very unusual and it has a specific historical explanation... such that declining levels of anti-black racism are exactly what you'd expect to undermine it. And since most humans are naturally conformist and think the same way their friends and neighbors think, the shift wouldn't necessarily be gradual. Monolithic black support could collapse very suddenly, like an ice shelf.
If that happens before college-educated voters turn into another solidly Democratic bloc, it won't be good news.
I feel Hispanics are an even more egregious case of "head in the sand." They're a much bigger group, and once they are legal citizens, there's no reason for them to prefer Democrats over Republicans more than comparable white voters do. They've been taking Hispanic voters for granted for forever and somehow still think dovishness re: illegal immigration is what they need to do to get/keep their votes.
My working mental model is that they aren't impressed by the incremental improvements in their material conditions, and the things that could really make a difference seem too far out of reach.
Unfortunately, Biden's unpopularity is not a mystery. *Every* national leader is unpopular. Biden is among the most popular of the group!
I'm not sure why turning against incumbents has suddenly become an international phenomenon, but there you are.
I would flip David Abbott's point and note that if the *Republicans* were running a generic candidate, that person would probably be leading Biden by ten points rather than being tied with him.
If you mean his unpopularity relative to Trump's unpopularity then... yeah, no major updates.
I'd be *less* worried about another Trump presidency if Trump were as obviously feeble and checked-out as Joe Biden is. But that doesn't seem to be a widespread view.
(Incidentally didn't libertarians used to say things like "I don't want an effective government or a government that works smarter, I want a government that does as little as possible?" Where are those people now that we need them?)
Hate is a strong word, but very few people who are nov partisan Democrats like him.
I actually do. Biden’s done a pretty good job at being President, at least a B+. The problem is he’s getting a D as a candidate and is at profound risk of that becoming an F.
Moreover - an 82 year old who (as Matt correctly points out) simply never bothered to address inflation! You want to say it’s hard? Great. We’re grading Biden on quite the curve, where every challenge he faces is hard - Iran is hard, inflation is hard, illegal immigration is hard, legal immigration (not like we’re getting tons of H1B visas flowing) is hard. Even then, Biden never bothered to address it, except to name his climate bill “inflation reduction act”.
Operation Warp Speed is going to be his PEPFAR - the one good thing he did that saved millions of lives but likely still doesn’t make up for all his bad.
Also the elimination of the marriage penalty for couples making less than $500,000. And increasing the standard deduction. And eliminating SALT deduction for high earners. I mean, as much as people flip out about the top marginal rates coming down by a couple percentage points, his tax bill had a lot of good structural features.
It does seem like many of those structural features were intended to spite the upper middle class suburbanite Romney-Clinton voters in blue states - but since that group is probably the most over-favored group by policy generally, it ended up being a bunch of good structural reforms.
Matt spins the decision to keep pumping the economy and more importantly to pressure Powell to keep interest rates low as an orthodox one. I happen to remember 2017 well enough to recall plenty of Democratic pundits railing against the regressive tax cuts that were going to overheat the economy.
Trump’s two best decisions - OWS and Powell+economic stimulus - were actually tremendously impactful and the reason many have nostalgia for his presidency is that they were, in fact, perhaps sufficient to make up for all the other less consequential failures.
Still not voting for him myself because I don’t want to rely on him getting lucky a second time.
For me, the best thing he ever did was firing James Comey. Totally wrong reasons of course, but that coward got so scared of what the New York FBI office might do that he felt he had to interfere in the 2016 race at the last minute and arguably was the final nail in the coffin that elected Trump and unleashed all that horror.
I disagree with that premise. PEPFAR wasn't a terribly obvious thing for someone like GWB to champion (and and as such had some pretty odious components in the early going). So he gets credit because it's against character.
OWS was literally "give some giant companies a bunch of money up front to solve this problem", and I can't imagine anyone, even Trump, saying no to that except in counterfactual where he had actually fired Fauci and Birx and put like that insane Florida Surgeon General in charge of the NIAID.
And yet no other country tried anything like it. Given how insistent all the supposed experts were that vaccines would take years, I doubt that Hillary or Biden would’ve given something like OWS a chance. You know, follow the science…
I think the EU is the only other nation-like entity that had sufficient expertise at all levels of the process to do something similar. I don’t know what their involvement was like, but obviously huge parts of the manufacturing chain of both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines was in the EU. I don’t know if something paralleling OWS was possible with the EU structure.
China obviously also tried something similar, but wasn’t near enough to the cusp of mRNA vaccines to get such effective products.
I think there were logistics challenges at various stages. Sometimes things like getting access to filled syringes and cold chain transport, sometimes even just things like expediting delivery of monkeys needed for early rounds of animal testing.
Sorry, I wasn't doubting that there *were* logistics challenges, just that most of them occurred during vaccine *delivery*, which Biden was responsible for.
I don’t agree with that last part. Forget even millions of lives - if we didn’t have a vaccine as promptly as we did, we were going to have full blown social crises over COVID, with health and government authorities insisting on maximalism and normal people simply blowing off the rules. To say nothing of the economic damage.
I’m not voting for Trump because I think he got lucky. But hard to argue that OWS actually doesn’t come close to making up for all the bad.
If I were the judge sentencing Trump, I would cut his prison time substantially in honor of operation WARP speed, but enhance it just as much for January 6.
What about OWS wasn't a gimme though? I guess Trump could have literally said "vaccines are fake, let's spend that money on more tax cuts", but other than that, you're leaving the bar pretty damn low.
Trump will be terrible for domestic policy but that’s not really what scares me, I think we can bounce back from four years of bad leadership on domestic issues. But the foreign policy implications of another Trump presidency terrify me deeply. It’s a very pivotal time in world affairs and the fact that Trump would abandon Ukraine and likely Taiwan to the forces of totalitarianism mean that four years would be plenty long enough for the US/West to lose our primacy in geopolitics and the end of Pax Americana. You can say that’s inevitable and perhaps over some time scale it is, but a world in which America just allows autocrats to do what they want is very different than one wherein we form coalitions across Europeans and Asian democracies and push back hard against things like territorial encroachment.
And I don’t even want to think about what happens if Russia invades a NATO country like Estonia during a second Trump presidency.
We're already losing primacy. Europe is making plans for a post-US future. Even if Trump loses this time, we are too close for comfort. If he wins, it will be much worse, but even the threat of it is scaring our allies.
Netanyahu called himself Mr Security and oversaw the worst security disaster in Israeli history, in Britain Osborne and Cameron were small-government true believers whose party is leaving behind the magic combination of tax increases, debt increases, and deteriorating public services. As a more extreme example of course Hitler did not leave behind a Greater Germany than the one he took office in. In the end reality usually catches up with people whose real skill is misleading rather than leading, the only question is how much damage is incurred before the con ends.
Totally, just like Biden said he was going to give us a great economy and be the “adult in the room” on foreign policy, and instead we got inflation because telling the various groups “no” would be rude, and two backwards gas stations with a flag attached [Russia and Iran] that have successfully deterred the United States. Looks like reality will catch up with him too, sadly.
What does this comment even mean? What is the US being “deterred” from doing to Russia and Iran? Are you implying that in early 2021 you personally knew the exact level of deficit spending that would close the output gap without creating inflation, while also factoring in the supply shocks that happened after the bill was passed? I’m very confused what it is you’re implying here
If you’re unclear about the ways in which the US is deterred by Iran then you might need to open a newspaper.
Similarly if you want to read about Biden’s blunders on inflation I suggest you read Matt’s post about how he failed to pivot (linked in the article we’re both commenting on.)
Do you really want the U.S. in a shooting war with in a 636,000-square-mile country with 86 million people that is six thousand miles away? Because if you think that "regime change" is the thing in Iran that the U.S. is somehow "deterred" from effecting, you should wake up to the fact that boots on the ground is the only way Iranian regime change becomes a reality, and recalibrate what exact combination of sticks and carrots the U.S. should be using but isn't.
"Mess" does not really capture it. There were bad policies.
1. The Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act 0f 2017 [Actually, the corporate tax cut part was good but not the revenue reduction rom cutting personal tax rates.]
2. The trade wars. [Nothing about reducing strategic dependence on China or China-interdictable supplies.
This is a… strange article. I don’t have a better word than that. It kind of deserves a much longer response in the old school blog style “fisking” and, well, I’m not a full time borer of hard boards so I don’t think I’m going to be the one to do it.
But it’s bizarre to read this for two reasons:
1) how do we go through a whole rundown of Trump’s performance without noting the one decision he made that was both more important than anything else, hands down, and more heterodox than any of it - namely Operation Warp Speed. (And if it’s not abundantly clear in 2024 that Biden or Clinton would never have done similarly, I don’t know what could convince you otherwise.)
2) most of this could easily be written about Joe Biden in reverse. In particular trying to brush off Biden’s economic failures as a minor detail while giving no credit to Trump for making the somewhat heterodox, at the time, call that the economy was *not* at full capacity - I mean Matt was one of the people tweeting that Trump was risking tipping the economy into inflation in 2017! Clearly that did not happen.
But more importantly, the claim that I should give Joe Biden a pass on economics for blundering through inflation - a hard problem to solve but an easy problem to diagnose - but give Trump no credit for making an easy call and following that course? Again, just weird.
It’s a lot easier to be baffled by the nostalgia if you give Trump no credit for his successes and Biden no blame for his failures. (Iran was and is tough - did Biden do anything remotely resembling an effective response to address it? Frankly, the opposite. At a certain point Biden is responsible for his own administration’s bad responses to admittedly hard problems.)
> more heterodox than any of it - namely Operation Warp Speed.
What exactly was "heterodox" about OWS? "Fund vaccine development" is about as basic a task as you could ask the federal government to do in the modern era.
> (And if it’s not abundantly clear in 2024 that Biden or Clinton would never have done similarly, I don’t know what could convince you otherwise.)
I beg of you to at least give it the old college try, because that seems absurd on its face. Like, what is your model of the world that makes you think up this scenario and call it likely:
Biden advisor: I think we should fund COVID vaccine development and pre-purchase enough doses for everyone
"Matt was one of the people tweeting that Trump was risking tipping the economy into inflation in 2017"
I don't recall this. Matt has moved around on immigration, on class populism, on when it is acceptable for writers left of center to say provocative things that might vaguely hurt Democrats in national elections, but I thought he was rather consistent on this particular track. He argued Trump's tax cut deficits *reinforced* his Keynesian model on the long march out of the 08 recession and the dovish case for more stimulus[1].
BTW it's worth quoting this because I think it relates to why Biden is losing:
"But I do want to emphasize that low odds does not equal zero odds, and all presidencies end up dealing with a certain amount that can’t be addressed by returning to ideological baseline. Having a president in office who has no idea what he’s talking about and is too intellectually lazy to find out poses a wide range of risks."
I think this is a great argument (and indeed gets at why I would never support Donald Trump for President). But, we could reword it. I am going to play Trump Supporter for a second:
"But I do want to emphasize that low odds does not equal zero odds, and all presidencies end up dealing with a certain amount that can’t be addressed by returning to ideological baseline. Having a president in office who is old and decrepit and can neither communicate his policies nor have an awareness of his job, or is senile or suffering dementia, or even hospitalized or could be dying in office, poses a wide range of risks."
The point I am really making here is that we forfeited the power of Matt's accurate critique when we nominated Biden. Biden doesn't pose EXACTLY the same risks as Trump, but he does pose the same SORT of risks-- that even though we like his team and his appointments and his liberal policies, he also can very well fall into situations where his presidency poses immense dangers.
I'm very nervous about the election but I don't understand why everyone keeps saying "Biden is losing." It's basically tied. Indeed, today's 538.com forecast shows it as Trump winning in 50 out of 100 simulations and Biden in 49 out of 100; in previous days Biden sometimes won in a few more trials than Trump.
It's almost certainly in part a hangover from earlier polling that showed Biden losing by such large margins that Matt and Milan were talking about Trump not just winning an Electoral College victory, but an actual popular vote victory too. Look at the second chart ("Electoral College 2024 Excluding States Where the Candidates are Statistically Tied") here in particular: https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Pres/ec_graph-2024.html
This is a silly chart because being within the margin of error is not a statistical tie, and no pollster who understands statistics and is not trying to get clickbait would use that term.
OK, but, at the end of the day, within the past six months, Matt was acting like it was practically a foregone conclusion that Trump would not just win the EC, but win the popular vote, and, when I snarkily expressed disbelief at that, Milan jumped on me about how the polling he's seen made that look entirely possible.
Trump definitely could win the popular vote but it's also far from a foregone conclusion and I'm not even sure it's >50% chance if the election was today. I'd lean towards saying Biden is favored in the popular vote right now albeit narrowly.
Are you agreeing with that sentiment or disagreeing, I can't tell.
I have *NEVER* thought Trump could win the popular vote in 2024. I view it as being so improbable as to approach a physical impossibility (a Trump EC win is also unlikely, IMO, but certainly far more possible than a popular vote win) and I've commented about being annoyed at Matt for dooming and glooming over it.
So that simulation is based on the fundamentals, and the problem with the fundamentals is it is pretty clear that politicians around the world are being punished for inflation despite inflation rates coming back down. And further, it doesn't factor in Biden's age.
Looking at actual polls only, Biden's significantly behind. He literally only has one path to election-- he needs to win PA, WI, and MI, and hope there are no faithless electors and no court challenges upheld and he holds on to win 270-268. All Trump has to do is win one of those states, even by one vote, and he's President again.
And Biden, as of right now, is down between 0.6 and 2 points in Pennsylvania, and is also at best even and most likely down in Michigan. He was behind in Wisconsin for a while too, though he seems to have tied it there.
And if you look at national polling the picture looks A LOT worse. Trump is winning by 1.1 points. Most analysts felt going in that the GOP has a 3 point advantage in the electoral college, meaning Biden needs to win by 3 or more to win the election, which would make him 4 points down.
Finally, and most importantly, the polls are steady. We keep on hearing from Biden partisans about how this or that-- the state of the union, or the criminal conviction-- will flip the race, but it never does. At best there is very slow movement in Biden's direction.
In betting markets, Biden is +205 to win the election; basically, that puts him at just over 32%. I think that's about accurate.
Biden has 2 ways to win the election. The Blue Wall, or polling error. We've seen polling error in 2012, 2016, and 2020, so I am not sure why you are excluding it as a path to victory.
You undermine your rationality and join the crazy anti-trumpers the when you say "...or exactly what Trump meant when he suggested using disinfectant on people’s lungs..." He didn't suggest anything like that. He asked a question to the medical experts.
Trump had been told at a news conference that ultraviolet light and bleach were effective in killing the covid virus on surfaces. That is correct. He then did his usual disjointed, inarticulate riff on what he'd heard and said:
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."
Please check the facts or you become just as bad as Trump and his acolytes.
Read an article in the Times this morning profiling Black farmers in Georgia. A common complaint is that they are disappointed in promises they felt were made by Biden that never materialized. One farmer in particular holds Biden responsible for an loan forgiveness program that never happened because white farmers sued to stop it, as it was a program that was targeted at Black farmers.
Two other farmers were also featured, with one saying she doesn't see Biden as any better for Black farmers than Trump, and the other going further and saying he's just going to vote for Trump this time (while wearing a shirt quoting MLK "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere").
I feel the dynamic is based on the fact that people were in fact extremely ready for Trump to leave office as things sucked really bad, but they're holding Biden accountable for every disappointment and challenge since then, while forgetting that the source of their misery in January 2021 was in fact Trump.
Not the point of your post but it’s a good jumping off point for me to note that I have extreme skepticism of “man on the street” news stories about people’s politics. After that HoffPo takedown of Selena Zito.
To refresh your memory, Zito got famous for these dispatches from Trump country and parlayed the popularity of these pieces into a gig at National News outlet and a book deal*. Problem of course is her anecdotes with “regular” folks strained credulity and in a few cases appeared to be outright lies. The most egregious (to me) was claiming someone was a “lifelong Democrat” who switched to voting for Trump who with two seconds of googling you can see is a local RNC chair (there’s a reason this became a running gag with NYtimespitchbot).
The thing that was amazing to me was seeing how prevalent this was everywhere! Zito just took this kind of reporting to an extreme. But over and over again I’d read an article of some reporter interviewing some “regular” voter and with 5 seconds of googling I find out he/she is the head of an activist group with a very particular agenda.
So upshot of this. I’d be very curious if there is any background info of these people and looking up their backstories. If past is any guide, I’d guess at least one has very relevant backstory that puts into question how “random” this interview was
*The fact these dispatches from Trump country was so good for Zito’s career is almost certainly a big driver of why so many of these trips diners in Trump country stories were written from 2017-2020
It's a really interesting form of journalism (like I would love to interview random people about their political preferences) but I put it much more on the entertaining side than informative. That's what cold hard polls are for!
This would be a fun column or podcast that I would consume.
It's also kind of bizarre, since we know empirically that there are in fact a lot of people who voted for Obama and then Trump, so it should not have been that hard to find such people. But reporters kept interviewing regular Republicans, probably because they made up more dramatic and interesting lies than the truth the actual Obama-Trump voters said (which was probably just 1000x variations of "oh yeah I like Obama, but Hillary's so status quo. I like change")
Big agree on that. And it's all based on the media's complete shock that Trump could've ever been elected in the first place, so they went narrative hunting.
That did NOT include non-stop coverage of "emails!"
My biggest frustration with that whole line of coverage was when an article said "but it raises questions".
What were those questions? No one will ever know.
Well… for a narrative that didn’t involve free air time and buttery males, anyway.
Honestly I think yeah the local RNC people cosplaying as undecided just give better material to talk about than actual undecided voters and writers are going to be onto that like catnip. A focus group of actual undecideds would be pretty boring i think.
Sarah Longwell actually does that as a podcast and it’s less boring and more infuriating.
Yup, undecided voters aren't "well, Biden didn't do this, so I'm not voting/voting for Trump (outside of young college-aged voters), it's more 'well, stuff was cheaper and I'm bored, so why not?'
Almost certainly. The RNC chair, or head of an activist group or even a heavy news watcher is very likely going to know the "correct" talking points, especially the first one. The RNC chair is very likely very aware or been coached to give answers that are going to fit pre-existing narratives. Like right now, I'm betting there is a reporter interviewing said "man on the street" who's giving some answer like "You know, I voted for Joe in 2020 and Hilary in 2016. I though the could bring some calm to the country. But we're more divided than ever and I see him on today and he looks so lost. How's he supposed to stare down America's enemies? I've never voted for a Republican in my life, but sometimes you gotta make that hard choice and vote for the candidate who's just more with it".
Of course Trump has displayed way more signs of cognitive decline than Biden. But that answer would be the perfect "both sides" anecdote for the Peter Bakers of the world.
And the content would be hated because regular people don’t like content that exposes just how uninformed and irrational regular people usually are.
Or reasons that were just plain incoherent or based on actual falsehoods. Voters often have extremely esoteric reasons why they vote they way they do. But given what we know about "swing" voters, this is especially likely true with this group. So an actual "swing" voters response as to why they switched their vote from Obama to Trump or heck from Trump to Biden in 2020 has a decent chance of being one that doesn't fit any pre-existing narrative and probably kind of bizarre.
Yeah, there are people who voted for Trump in 2016 because they wanted to keep Obama and Hillary Clinton replaced him, so they think she's responsible for him leaving office.
There are people who think that Trump was a good president apart from COVID, so we brought in Biden to fix COVID and now we can go back to Trump.
There are people who heard any of a variety of nonsensical conspiracy theories.
But also there are people who have a bee in their bonnet about some very specific issue. Like there's a railroad crossing down the road and they want a bridge, or gates, or they want the gates removing so they can make their own judgment, and they'll determine their vote on the entire presidency on this.
In the UK, I've literally knocked on a door and been told that whether the bins are collected weekly or every two weeks is the most important factor in how they will vote. The best bit was that was a European election, and when I asked "do you think the EU should be deciding that?" they were offended...
I think you live in the UK, but, eerily, your "bee in the bonnet" issue is exactly what is being hotly debated between Amtrak and a town in the county adjacent to mine. And you make a good point about people voting on their own weird niche issues.
People are people everywhere, and the same issues come up everywhere.
The mainline from London to Norwich has been steadily sped up over the last decade or so, and much of that has involved removing crossings, either just closing them, or consolidating several into a single bridge or whatever - if there are no crossings, the train can run faster. People have very strong opinions on what should happen with a crossing that they drive over every day on the way to and from work.
I did a bit of campaigning for a friend in Suffolk, and a bunch of people had exactly this issue. Stuck in my head as an example. Especially as all of them said "everyone thinks X" when, in fact, three doors down their neighbour had said "everyone thinks Y".
Chris Hayes' article on this from the 2004 election is great. (But click this link at your own risk: my browser's giving me some sort of warning about it. https://chrishayes.org/articles/decision-makers)
I genuinely would like to know the vetting process of how these focus groups or “man on the street” stories are put together. Because I’m pretty certain on multiple occasions I’ve seen the same supposed “undecided” voter interviewed for multiple elections. Who with two seconds of googling you see is a pretty down the line GOP voters.
Like genuinely, what is the vetting process. Is it like, “I know a guy who knows a guy in Georgia. We’ll just interview him”? Do these news organizations know these people are not actually undecided? If I had to guess the real issue is certain people have learned where to show up to be part of these panels and then just lie about being “undecided”. But that’s still not a great look for news orgs if that’s what’s going on.
You can't see voting history but they could at least check party registration or if they have voted in a primary right?
It seems like some level of vetting should be possible.
This is exactly what Sarah Longwell does in "The Focus Group" podcast. (https://www.thebulwark.com/s/thefocusgroup)
It's really great, except that you have to listen to voters explain their positions in a way that sometimes makes me want to slit my wrists.
It wasn't just about, "I like change." A major aspect of Obama's appeal was, "No Black America, no White America, etc." -- & Hillary was playing identity politics to the hilt. To top it off, she had all the appeal of Nurse Ratched -- or as Obama himself put it (ever-so-wryly), "You're likeable enough, Hillary."
Misogyny? Not quite: just the sort of personality (& attitude) that gave Trump an opportunity to portray himself (in contrast) as McMurphy.
I feel similarly when they have "undecided voters" panels and it turns out have voted for the same party for the last 10 elections.
"undecided" voters are people who have made up their minds but are "just asking questions"
A much more trivial version of this is that when media outlets run "lifestyle trends" articles spotlighting one or two or three young people, invariably living in Brooklyn or whatever, as examples for the trend in question, it often turns out that the young people spotlighted are in the writer's personal friend group (or are friends of their friends) and are not representative of anything.
Yeah, although I'd say those "trend" pieces are kind of famously obnoxious and get dunked all the time sort for that reason. I remember there was one that tried to argue that "Chinatown" was the new hip place to live. And they had a quote from someone that said "Anyone who's anyone, lives in Chinatown". My reaction was only Niles or Frasier Crane in the show "Frasier" would say anything like this. There's zero percent chance someone unprompted used this statement. What likely happened is a reporter said "would you say anyone who's anyone lives in Chinatown" and the response was some version of "I guess".
Also, narrator voice; Chinatown is not a "trendy" place to move in NYC.
To be fair, Milan did one of these himself fairly recently.
Incidentally, I could not figure out why I was disappointed in that article, and you've put your finger right on it. Not that it was badly written or uninteresting, but it's the type of content I simply wish journalists wouldn't indulge in. I know I probably just shouldn't let it bother me, but it annoys me a lot more when it's *my* side/writers who give in to this indulgence.
(Or perhaps I should simply lean into this and find 94 other things that I think everyone else is doing wrong and post it on a church door somewhere)
Yup - the actual polling was fine, but Milan then put his finger on the scale by putting the focus on his buddies.
Not to pick on Milan, but I was amused that his lead-in to the article was that only 2 of the 5 friends were voting for Biden, and then it turned out that actually a third would have been willing to vote for Biden but just won't be in the country for the election.
It's fine if (a) it's disclosed, (b) the writer isn't arguing that it's a trend.
Sure, but what's the point of writing it unless b) is being asserted? In general, the number of people who care what Milan's specific circle of friends think is measure 0.
For context. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/columnist-salena-zito-trump-swing-voters_n_5b8581afe4b0162f471cf3ac
Yes. It’s often just lazy reporting. E.g., Trump campaign provides contact information of supporters. Well, with that sample, you’re going to find some Black farmers supporting Trump. It isn’t even necessary that they are fictional-they simply are really rare.
But so much of political reporting is infected by this “non-random sample” problem. Stories exist because they are pitched by the candidates’ teams. Facts are fed by the two teams.
Yeah, at this point, I discount this sort of reporting as noise at best and actively fake at worst. News outlets go for it anyway because it’s more click-generating than observing the extremely consistent polling data showing immigration, inflation, crime, and Biden’s age as key issues for his disapprovers (and concern about reproductive rights and Trump’s fitness for office weighing heavily on the other side.)
Remember when the pro-choice and pro-life demonstrators were yelling at each other in front of the Supreme Court, and then they all spontaneously started chanting "Fuck Joe Biden"?
This is all so exasperating
That happened at a Gaza protest too
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/unity-pro-palestine-and-pro-israel-protestors-chant-fck-joe-biden-in-unison/
Even more predictable.
Half my Twitter feed is Muslims denouncing Biden as an evil Zionist puppet, but that's because I'm not a typical American. I imagine a lot more voters consume the kind of social media that attacks him for being an anti-Semite.
I wonder how representative are these farmers though? Obviously, Biden is polling worse than his 2020 performance, but it's like 3-5% worse in the two way.
If we look at mainstream media voter coverage he's lost 40% from every single demo. But, at least they found a successor to the Trump supporters at a diner genre.
I would say the bigger problem with this type of story is there extremely few farmers and even fewer black farmers in Georgia. https://www.gfb.org/news/ag-news/post/ag-census-results-show-size-of-georgia-farms-shifted
Key note "While 64,574 of Georgia’s farmers are caucasian, the ethnic makeup of Georgia’s producers is more diverse than expected. There are 2,870 African American producers; 922 Hispanic producers; 524 American Indian producers; 494 Asian producers and 43 Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander producers."
The fact there is a whole deep dive feature in the New York Times is just another example to me that the idea of "real" Americans being farmers just won't die despite being wildly outdated for decades.
There are nearly 600,000 people employed in the meatpacking industry. I'd be interested in an nyt profile on their voter preferences
I imagine most of them are not eligible voters.
I would be interested in whether the rate of veganism among them is higher or lower than the national average...
I was just at a diner outside Macon and *all* the black farmers said they're voting for Trump
What was her reason?
My husband grew up on a farm in the South. I am frankly shocked that there are still over 65,000 farmers of any race in Georgia. I wonder how they are classifying farms.
Yeah, there are definitely all sorts of "farms" in every state that are likely legally classified as farms for tax reasons. For my home state of NY. https://www.tax.ny.gov/research/property/assess/valuation/ag_overview.htm
Wouldn't shock me at all if we found out these "farmers" weren't actually farmers. If I had to guess, they probably are. But again, given what I noted above wouldn't surprise me if there is more to the story about their occupations.
But it was the Biden admin, not the New York Times, that had the idea to focus on this!
Another thing is that at least one of those farmers seems to be a Trump 2020 voter. Can't be sure because I don't think he said, but when explaining his Trump support he cited aid he received in 2019...
Why was Biden promising a program that was blatantly illegal?
Because black farmers in the South were historically discriminated against by USDA, and because the Supreme Court hadn't yet issued the college-admissions ruling which banned affirmative action for groups that have suffered historical discrimination?
The loan forgiveness may or may not have been a good idea but it wasn't "blatantly illegal" until the courts said it was. USDA had been running preferential programs for black farmers well before Biden took office, so this wasn't a radically new initiative.
It was always illegal the court had just not issued a ruling stating such yet (technically). They were interpreting existing law not legislating.
There should be a term for things that exist for a long time,but everyone knows they will be struck down in court. I think it is common in tax structures and selection policies.
The term is desuetude: "a doctrine that causes statutes, similar legislation, or legal principles to lapse and become unenforceable by a long habit of non-enforcement or lapse of time. It is what happens to laws that are not repealed when they become obsolete. It is the legal doctrine that long and continued non-use of a law renders it invalid, at least in the sense that courts will no longer tolerate punishing its transgressors."
Perhaps the most prominent example of it today is federal marijuana laws. A previous example was laws against contraception, which prompted the Supreme Court to say in Poe v. Ulman, "'Deeply embedded traditional ways of carrying out state policy ...' – or not carrying it out – 'are often tougher and truer law than the dead words of the written text.'"
After a while it also becomes an equal protection violation to prosecute one person for violating a law that everyone else is openly and flagrantly violating without prosecution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude
Unqualified Immunity?
To get votes from ignorant rubes? Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As they say…
I think this is right to a large degree — but with the nuance that the source of people’s misery in January 2021 was not Trump, but another wave of Covid, schools being closed, high crime, higher unemployment, etc.
So people looking back on 2021 focus on how they hated Covid, rather than how they disliked Trump irrespective of Covid. And since Covid caution ended up being coded to Democrats — and lack of Covid caution coded to Trump — that makes them angry at Biden.
Fauci has lot to answer for!
Democrats overpromising a populist racial agenda to farmers that any halfway literate judge can see violates Civil Rights law and Trump talking about how McKinley's tariffs were neat is truly on the nose. Now they just need some progressives to start hawking an alternative currency before some nutjob from Portland murders Trump in his second term, and we can get an eccentric Vice President JD Vance distrusted by the Republican business wing. All of this has happened before and will happen again.
Well, these voters have a point. I mean, Roe got overturned on Biden's watch, right?
More and more, this is turning into the FAFO election.
Well said on Afghanistan.
It exasperates me that no one points out the obvious here: the Doha Agreement fixed the go-to-zero date for US forces at a point three months beyond the 2021 inauguration. The timeframe was already too short to allow for any real adjustment on the Afghan government's part, so it would have made hardly any logistical difference to make it a little shorter and have the withdrawal in midwinter, outside the fighting season.
The whole point, fairly obviously, was to give Trump the opportunity to reassess after the November election. If he'd won he could have torn it up and kept the force structure at Obama's levels. I doubt that would have worked, because the Taliban would have resumed attacks on US troops, but whatever went wrong in Trump's second term would have been less dramatic than a Saigon-style collapse.
When Biden won, Trump's initial impulse was to go to zero before the inauguration, to make things as chaotic as possible for his team. His military advisors talked him out of that but he still drew down to just 2500 troops, which probably wouldn't have been enough to defend Kabul alone in the face of a determined attack. At that point Saigon 2.0 was more or less inevitable, and I can't help thinking it may have been the outcome Zalmay Khalilzad (also a Republican) wanted all along.
A-fucking-men. It’s downright embarrassing any time I hear someone say that *BIDEN* was responsible for the shit show withdrawal.
It’s an epistemically disqualifying litmus test. In my book, anyone who lays the blame at Biden’s feet instantly identifies theirself as a fundamentally unserious person and a bad fucking pundit.
I'm going to pull rank here and point out that I probably know more about this subject than most SB readers, because it's been one of my little obsessions since coming back to Kabul.
There were definitely major operational errors, mostly made by the State Department, but I don't think better White House leadership would have made a lot of difference. (And I also think people don't acknowledge the incredibly disruptive effect that COVID had: partly because government employees were locked down, and partly because hardly anyone was paying attention to Afghanistan.)
Agree. Afghanistan was about a decade of my life as an intelligence analyst. There’s lots of blame to spread around but the effort to absolve the Biden admin from any of it is just wrong. We (the US) made fundamental and unequivocal mistakes in the Spring and Summer of the withdrawal that cannot be pinned on Trump.
To be clear, I'm not trying to *absolve* him of "any of it". I'm just saying that anyone who STARTS by talking about his errors is missing the forest for the trees.
A couple months of fumbling a hot potato sure looks dramatic, but it's downright idiotic when pundits fail to FIRST ask how it got so hot in the first place.
Anyone who starts on Afghanistan with Trump's errors is also missing the forest for the trees.
The key errors were made by Bush. Obama then made the error of being afraid to pull out. Trump made a deal that forced a pullout, and Biden executed it. Trump and Biden are, at least comparatively, the good guys in this story. They removed the US from a place we had no business being in, where we continued to be because hawks are too immature to accept the notion that we might ever lose a war.
I agree with the caveat that Trump made a *cynical and cowardly* deal, and then squib-kicked the hot-potato to make sure it was maximally uncatchable besides being hot in the first place.
Biden wasn't forced to do anything. We never should have pulled out
There are quite a few puzzles still to be unraveled. For me the biggest one is "who gave the order to evacuate Bagram, and why?" I don't think it could have been anyone but the commander-in-chief.
Follow me on Twitter if any interest in Afghanistan survives :)
The simple answer is that the force reductions didn’t allow holding Bagram, the embassy, and Kubul airport at the same time.
The fundamental error, which cannot be blamed on Trump, is the assumption that government forces would hold at least the capitol and core areas for months at least. Hence why there was no sense of urgency to process Visas for Afghan allies. There wasn’t a contingency plan in place in case that assumption was wrong.
However, the signs of a potential collapse were becoming pretty clear by mid June to the open source community - I have a hard time believing no one in government saw them as well.
We won’t know the full story because no one is interested in lessons learned and the various agencies (WH staff, DoD, State, Intel community) are all pointing fingers at each other.
So how long should Biden have put a halt on moving forward after inauguration to allow him to make appointments and for those people to hire their people and for those people to reevaluate the plans and adopt their own? People acting like Presidents show up with their people in place to implement their plans on day 1. Trump had withdrawn 86% of American forces from Afghanistan before Biden was even inaugurated.
The Afghanistan War Commission will come up with some answers, but that's years in the future.
You may be right about Bagram (I'm not a military guy and can't judge) but it's striking that there's been so little transparency about the decision process. If it wasn't defensible in July, they should say so.
I mean, that's totally true, but as you say, it's not really Biden's fault.
Like, sure, under the "Green Lantern Theory Of Governance", of course he could have just willed himself to do a better job.
But the GLToG is a by-joke because that's an absurd way of thinking about things! So, I maintain that even *starting* any analysis of what happened by looking at *Biden's* errors alone is just a fundamentally misguided framework.
It’s not Biden’s personal fault, that is true. But the errors that were made were made by the Biden Administration and the administration is responsible for them.
I don't see how Trump leaving them a 3-month window for deciding what to do is an "error" the Biden administration made.
Again, I'm not disputing that errors were made during the execution or during the entire 7-month stretch leading up to it. I'm just saying, 3 months is not much time to make a major geopolitical decision, and 4 months after that is not much time to plan a major withdrawal, especially if the last guy left the whole State department a mess.
Three months is plenty of time. After all, when push came to shove, the no notice emergency withdrawal was planned and executed in a bit more than a week.
The military had already planned for the 1 May date and just needed the order to execute. The delay was because the WH was reviewing Afghanistan policy in part because the military and others didn’t want to withdraw. The WH eventually overruled that desire and extended the withdrawal date after which the military immediately began drawing down.
The whole notion that 7 months is not enough time to plan and execute the withdrawal of 2,500 troops is factually not true. The problem is that these decisions get stuck churning in the political and bureaucratic halls in DC.
There's also just no way for a major military withdrawal to go down with *no* events. And reporters wanted something to report on, and Republicans wanted something to cynically complain about. Everybody got their wish.
What are some good sources or at the time reporting about this, if I wanted to go down the rabbit hole? I'm also really interested in the withdrawal and it's sad how, to some, it seems to have set the tone for the rest of Biden's term.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee held hearings on the withdrawal last autumn. They've published lightly redacted transcripts of most of their interviews, though not yet all of them.
There are also two CENTCOM internal investigations of the Abbey Gate bombing. A redacted version of the first one was FOIAed by the Washington Post and a redacted version of the second one by me. You can find the full text of both reports posted to my Substack:
https://anacard.substack.com/p/abbey-gate-documents
That's thousands of pages of documentation, so it's a very deep rabbit hole. If you want to start with something shorter check out the State Department's After Action Review on Afghanistan, released last June:
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/State-AAR-AFG.pdf
Note that this is an 87-page report, but that pages 21 through 84 are missing. I recommend following my Substack or Twitter account just in case the missing pages turn up at some point in the future... 🙄
Were the failures to get interpreters out on State? Does the fact that State answers to the WH affect your view, or is it something where the fuckup is only apparently higher up the chain ex post?
One of the biggest sources of the chaos at the airport was that some genius at the State Department decided to send out entry permits via text message, which of course were immediately copied and sent to thousands of ineligible people. (QR code, hello?)
I agree in theory that the President is ultimately responsible for anything that a cabinet department gets wrong, but if any individual president was responsible for gutting and demoralizing the bureaucracy at State I'd say it was Trump, not Biden.
I also get the sense that US military personnel were unhappy with the way the British government handled its side of the evacuation process. But everything in the public record that looks as if it may have been criticism of the UK has been redacted.
The visa process for interpreters and others had been a complete shit-show for at least a decade. State under Biden started to make efforts to speed things up but they hadn’t really gone anywhere.
Also highly affected by COVID, because the in-person interviews stopped
Fauci has a lot to answer for.
Right. Focusing on the ephemeral chaos of that final week withdrawal, instead of the preceding years of policy failure and kicking the can down the road, when it was obvious there was no light at the end of the tunnel in the previous policy but nobody had the courage and leadership to end it, is the epitome of short-term thinking and missing the forest for the trees.
The biggest failure was not getting our Afghan allies out of the country. I've got no clue how Trump would have handled them, likely because he thinks they are all "suckers." But Biden had seven months to figure something out, and for someone who is supposedly so empathetic, he just, didn't.
Pulling out was a bad idea. Trump was wrong, Biden should have reversed.
The war in Ukraine almost certainly happened because of Afghanistan
How high would tariffs need to be raised to in order to replace income tax? I suspect the level would be so high that it would defacto ban legal imports of anything, meaning no tariffs would be raised at all. You would end up with people smuggling mangoes and coffee into the US as though it was fentanyl.
Paul Krugman said yesterday he's crunching the numbers on that. He thinks it might be around 133 percent.
For reference >> https://x.com/paulkrugman/status/1801296665451593868
Or parmesan cheese.
There aren’t many things that would make me fall back on my Italian heritage and try to join the mob, but “becoming a parmesan cheese kingpin” would be one of them.
I believe the preferred nomenclature for a parmesan kingpin is "The Big Cheese."
That would be grate(d).
Oh come on, it was hanging right there!
"I would be a grateful customer if you'd kindly deliver some to Chicago".
Well, I would.
D.O.P.
!!!!
The GOP when discussing optimal income tax: "laffer curve means the optimal rate is lower than {whatever the current rate is}"
The GOP when discussing optimal tariff rates (they are playacting to please their totemic Father/cult-leader): "there is no effective cap on the revenue from tariffs, we can just keep raising them higher to get more money out of the money machine"
I don't think there's that much thought going on. People generally just don't understand how large government spending actually is, hence the constant "we could have gold-plated single payer healthcare if the military was a bit smaller" arguments.
Yep, the social democrat lovers are (probably willfully) math illiterate.
Also journalists.
It would just greatly reduce American’s standards of living and the GOP would blame Obama for it.
A tariff is essentially a VAT at the point of import. To raise revenue sufficient to phase out the income tax as the primary source of federal revenue, that VAT system at the border would probably have to be gradually extended domestically until we had a full federal VAT system.
I am torn by my desire of solving the revenue issue vs my offense at Trump’s asinine idea.
Consumption taxes are better than income taxes, but not like this.
Well, the question would be, if Democrats have leverage in Congress, is a deal possible where Trump gets what he wants - tariffs and less income tax - and in return Democrats get a foothold and pathway for a federal VAT to replace the income tax as the primary federal revenue source.
Do Democrats even want a VAT?
There have been a number of Brookings-ish proposals for a VAT coupled with some form of abatement at the bottom end of the income distribution to address the inherent regressivity of a VAT -- a UBI, refundable credit, payroll tax offset, etc. It's usually seen as a revenue adder to address looming deficits rather that a wholesale replacement to income tax, but it could be deployed in addition to something like eliminating all income taxes for incomes under $100,000 to make it politically palatable (I think I read somewhere that this would eliminate over 100 million federal tax returns, but we might need to inflation adjust that threshold). One advantage of this kind of VAT is that it would be nice vehicle for a border-adjusted carbon tax.
Don't know. But if Democrats are the party that "believes in science" and "follows the evidence", as I've heard, and economists generally agree based on the evidence that a VAT is a superior, less distortionary way to raise revenue than an income tax (is that true?), then shouldn't Democrats want a VAT?
NB, a VAT was proposed during the Trump administration and the Democrats lambasted it.
I will be the first cheerleader for any party or politician that wants to repeal the 16th Amendment and replace all income taxes with a VAT. But Democrats want to replace income taxes with a VAT? I don't believe that. Democrats want to add a giant VAT to higher income taxes.
Fentanyl is really easy to smuggle because it's so compact. One kilogram of fentanyl can produce 1 million to 1.5 million pills. They would be /trying/ to smuggle mangoes and coffee as though it were fentanyl!
We're going to end up with mangos concentrated to a purity where a couple of cubic centimeters will kill a horse, aren't we?
They'll just hide the mangos in their calf muscles.
Oh, that was watermelons, wasn't it?
"You would end up with people smuggling mangoes and coffee into the US as though it was fentanyl."
Hey, buddy. You lookin' to buy a…lassi? I might know a guy.
135% according to Krugman.
Personally I blame the media. I definitely don't want to understate the seriousness of January 6, the fake electors stuff, the infamous phone call to Brad Raffensperger. There is some vindication there for the people that went most into a panic about Donald Trump.
However, prior to that I think his presidency was best characterized by farcical episodes like the week of the Mooch as communications director or the much hyped meeting with Kim Jong Un that accomplished... nothing. His entire presidency was full of strange stuff that seemed like it could have come from the writers of Veep. Even at the end there was the Four Seasons Total Landscaping thing.
But instead of that being the endless headline, we had Democracy Dies in Darkness, Russian interference, an impeachment that never stood a chance of removing him, and on and on. I don't want to over estimate the level of attention Normie America paid to day to day politics or the accuracy of their memories but defining the guy as a fascist instead of a buffoonish punchline set the bar in a place he could be seen as exceeding. The result is that it is nearly impossible to get anyone to pay attention to basic questions of policy and competence.
I don't really think you can blame the Democrats for impeaching Trump. When the president commits crimes, you indict him for the crimes.
The fact that there was never any chance of convicting him is something to blame on the Founding Fathers. They didn't think political parties should exist, so they never anticipated a level of partisanship that would make it impossible to get a Senate supermajority against any president.
To be fair, even the rest of us mostly didn't expect the polarization to get so bad that senators would cover for the kind of things Trump did. But that's on the Republicans, isn't it?
The Ukraine extortion was, in fact, really bad. And looks even worse in retrospect.
But to circle back to the post's theme, I have a Polish immigrant neighbor who has a "Russia Out of Ukraine Now!" Bumper sticker and a Trump 2024 sticker...
Maybe they’re not fans of Biden’s hemming and hawing with the Ukrainians.
“You can have this, but not the tanks” six months later…”ok, you can have the tanks “
Repeat with aircraft, allowing Ukraine to fire over the Russian border, etc
Not saying the Trump administration would be morally righteous hawks, but the foot dragging by the Biden administration has been infuriating
Yep, the inability of strike while the iron is hot is just basic incompetence. The time to press the advantage was when the Russians were on the run. Now dribbling aid into a frozen conflict isn’t going to accomplish much, and if the Russians end up grinding them down it will be very bad for Western morale and future proxy battles.
This is not a defense or endorsement of the decisions the US has made along the way, but frozen conflict seems like the most likely path to Ukrainian victory. When smaller nations defeat larger invaders as has happened numerous times in the past 75 years or so, they don't typically drive the invaders off the field. What usually happens is that the defenders bog the invaders down in a quagmire until the latter get exhausted and leave on their own. Russia is an autocracy, but autocracies are only partially shielded from public opinion. Eventually people tend to get tired of losing their sons for no reason.
Yes true. But the Ukrainians *were* driving the invaders off the field, and could have kept going if their western allies hadn't been so afraid of offending Putin -- there may still have been a frozen peace but the territory controlled by Russia would have been smaller. Now the Russian economy has been retooled to a war footing and that opportunity won't come again; any territory Ukraine regains now will be at a higher cost.
Just about the only thing that could make me say that Biden has done the best job possible under the circumstances, as opposed to just a merely adequate job, would be if the real reason he's been slow walking aid to Ukraine is that the US military readiness is in such poor state that the US can't give more within putting our own defense at risk, but for obvious reasons he thinks he can't say that publicly.
Trump has pretty publicly been the face of being against the very idea of helping Ukraine. It is only recently softened to "we shouldn't help them at all but under me it wpuld magically not be a problem". I doubt someone who thought Biden should more decisively back Ukraine would support Trump because of it.
Yes, the Theme 😖
I think miscalculation of impeachment 1 made the odds of impeachment 2 being successful much less likely. And no, I'm not going to blame the founding fathers when the rules of the game are well known by all the players and have been for over 2 centuries.
Perverting Ukraine policy for electoral advantage sure seems like a "high crime" to me.
It's true that if the Democrats had foreseen January 6th they probably would have saved their firepower and just done the one impeachment, but how could anyone have predicted that?
The only question dictating the success of the second impeachment was whether conservative media was willing to give cover to elected Republicans. The same conservative media that pickled their supporters in election-steal lies for the previous two months. I don't know enough about conservative media dynamics to say whether a collective change-of-heart was in the cards. But I know that their calculations had nothing at all to do with the first impeachment.
"We can't impeach him for this obvious crime now because we have to reserve our ammunition for no doubt far more serious crimes to come."
Why did impeachment 1 make impeachment 2 less likely to succeed? If impeachment 1 had good grounds then that should have made impeachment 2 more likely, not less.
The Ukraine impeachment was so warranting impeachment and so obviously doomed in the Senate that any objective observer must conclude that the self-destruction button of the US is simply waiting for the right hostile actors to put in the time and effort. It’s basically as certain as the US burying the Soviets under eventual economic collapse by keeping the Cold War focused on otherwise irrational arms production.
I allocate blame to the GOP and their own moral rot. The are active criminal co-conspirators in Jan 6 and the extortion scheme against Ukraine.
If the Senate Republicans had been smart, they would have done it to take back the party. Though just imagine the base rage if that happened.
I'm not sure why you think the first group of examples was policy-centric, and the second group wasn't. Veep episodes aren't policy oriented. And the Mueller Investigation wasn't a damp squib because the public was fundamentally disinterested. Mueller was an ineffectual snob that got played by Barr and Rosenstein and didn't fight back at all. (Though, in fairness, he was trying to learn a lesson from Comey's disastrous flouting of the rules.)
I also think it’s worth again stressing that the “Russia stuff” is not at all the equivalent of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election (I’ve seen this “both sides” comparison from reporters). As much as people like Chair got way over their skis with stuff like “Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987” I’d say we have some real unanswered questions about financials ties. The person who actually knows what they are talking about here is David Farenthold and the real tragedy is other reporters and Democrats didn’t rely on his reporting.
But even now. We have some serious unanswered questions about why Trump is so pro Putin. Point being focusing on the “Russia stuff” I really don’t think is some distraction
Why does the GOP love our enemies more than our own country? That is the real Russia question.
I think for at least some far-right conservatives, the answer is simple:
1. What they consider to be "our country" is different from what you consider to be "our country." You consider "our country" to be the United States as a formal legal institution, and that "our countrymen" are all people who are U.S. citizens under U.S. citizenship law. They don't.
2. Who they consider to be "our enemies" is different from who you consider to be "our enemies." Not only do they consider certain United States citizens to be enemies rather than countrymen, but they also feel like certain foreign regimes that are hostile to the United States (qua formal legal institution) are potential allies against those enemies. Philosophically they share more in common with those foreign regimes than the do with their "domestic" (though they don't see them as truly "domestic") opponents, with the biggest point of commonality being their shared common primary enemy.
Given how outrageous it would be if that proposition were true, shouldn't your question be "what don't I understand about GOP voters?"
But it... IS... true. When you have their biggest media personalities carping for Putin on live TV, and a significant faction of their congressional caucus holding up Ukraine funding for months on end, this isn't some sort of unchecked bias, it's a verifiable fact bordering on common-ass-knowledge at this point.
While I agree it's important to understand what went wrong with GOP voters to get them to this point, reducing the entire thing to that question alone is dangerously myopic and concern-troll-ish at this historic juncture.
For a historical comparison... one did not need to understand what drove Lindbergh's America First supporters in order to understand that they were a threat to global democracy.
I don't think these points connect as well as you seem to. Specifically, the accusation that failing to approve Ukraine aid funding is evidence that the GOP loves our enemies more than America. It seems rather obvious, but objecting to spending tens of billions of dollars to support a country that nobody really considered a stalwart geopolitical ally of the United States 5 years ago isn't exactly loving your actual enemies. I think it's easy enough to reconcile that policy disagreement on good faith grounds rather than accusing tens of millions of people of secretly loving communists and Russia more than America.
This thread seems to be going off the rails a bit below your comment, so I'm just chiming in to say that I think the questions being posed are doing more to obscure a meaningful discussion than to illuminate one.
ETA: Just to be clear- I support funding for Ukraine. I just don't think that those who disagree with me do so because of a hatred of America or love of Russia. I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it was bad policy, so I am familiar with how these kinds of policy disagreements can devolve into attacks on patriotism that allow the other side to avoid addressing people's actual objections/concerns.
I don't want to get too personal, but when 90% of your comments are stream-of-consciousness partisan talking points that extend charity to no one but your friends, you shouldn't wonder when your super-power is instigating long comment chains without getting upvoted yourself.
[Edit] One more thing - if we're looking for ways to improve the quality of conversation in the comments, I recommend adding "accuses people of or hints at people being concern trolls" to the list of ban-able offenses.
Nonsense! I note your comment has not addressed the Steele Dossier. Russiagate was fundamentally a rat fucking operation by the Hillary campaign, supported by the IC and MSM.
Do you want to address the open letter signed by the IC about Hunter’s laptop?
I mean, the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign.
*Chait not “chair”. Stupid autocorrect
FYI- you should be able to edit the original comment to clear that up.
Fair enough. No one made any mistakes and we're just on the verge of losing again for reasons entirely outside of our control.
Don't blame me for your struggles coming up with a plausible theory for what's going on.
Dude in the comment you’re responding to he named at least one person who made a mistake.
Even worse, they'd actively bend over backwards to pretend Trump had a coherent and principled policy agenda. Trump doesn't want to hand Ukraine to Russia because he loves Putin, Trump is "isolationist". He also genuinely cares about fraud despite the fact that he's never said anything that was even remotely true about voter fraud. But hey guys Democrats aren't perfect so they're all the same.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping! Great callback - thank you for that lol today...
Had the media treated Trump like it did every other candidate in 2015, he would have died on the vine. Instead, they took his bait and turned politics into a circus in the name of ratings gold. Trump took advantage of this and was able to control the narrative with his nonsense. Biden’s main fault is that he took over this circus but thought he could go back to the way things were before. Trump is still controlling the narrative and he will continue to until he dies unless someone rises up and takes the spotlight away from him.
Yea, the biggest issue with Trump's administration is that it completely went off the rails at the literal very end. Before that point there had been a persistent campaign to mix in genuine critique with liberal hysteria which I'm not sure was a great idea to do for 70 percent of the administration.
Thinking a Presidency is “characterized” by a weeklong dalliance in communications directors is decadent. Swing voters forgot that before they voted.
I wish I could like this comment a thousand times
I genuinely find it frustrating that there has been nearly no non-partisan anger on Covid with like a high profile truth and reconciliation type commission.
It seems to me like large numbers of excessive deaths have been hand waved away by just like invoking polarizing parts of the other side.
I think there’s a fairly large amount of bipartisan bad outcomes that no one can do much about because zero sum polarization is the most important thing in the world.
We desperately need a non partisan Covid commission. Everyone on every side got a lot of stuff very wrong, so it’s not as if it would only be embarrassing to one side.
We will have another pandemic and it’s going to be important to do stuff that works with minimal negative effects on society. My fear is that the response will be driven by politics and we’ll have the ineffective policies favored by whatever party is in power and a bunch of people will needlessly die.
I usually try not to do pedantry, but please, everyone: Stop saying "disinterested" for "uninterested" or "not interested".
"Disinterested"="Has no skin in the game/no ulterior reason to favor one side of a dispute over any other/neutral"
"Uninterested"="Doesn't care"
"Not interested"="Uninterested"
A judge should have no stake in any given case before them, but should care about it in the sense of adjudicating it fairly, efficiently, and respectfully. An uninterested judge is deeply frustrating; a disinterested judge is essential. Conversely, you can often find people who have a material interest in some issue who just don’t care about it. (Ahem.)
I am not doing a pedantry for pedantry's sake here. This is a useful distinction and I beg everyone to respect and preserve it.
Kareem, I gave up on this battle a long time ago. I'm just totally disinterested in fighting with people who don't understand the distinction anymore. Irregardless of the amount of people like us who still care, it's not worth the battle.
Like, literally...
We've just got to come up with a new word that means what "disinterested" used to mean.
I'm totally down with that!
And luckily I happen to have that word with me right now. And that word is "dysinterested."
lol
How about dysenterysted?
Now don't be silly.
Isn't that almost "impartial"?
REGARDLESS of what people you're talking about (LOL)
Hey that's my music
No seriously, that's exactly why I chose this handle lol
I’m here for a good pedantry! Co-signed as long as you co-sign my insistence that we all stop using “refute” as a synonym for “rebut”.
Refuting someone doesn’t mean you contradicted them, it means you PROVED they were wrong.
But to out-pedant you, "disinterested" has a second meaning that is equivalent to "uninterested".
Through confusion. And which we should ask be ended.
Nope. The wonderful thing about language is it is democratic, and that the public, not elites, get to set meanings.
And the fact that elites get all upset about disinterested, and flout/flaunt, and less/fewer, is GOOD. They should get upset. Because when elites are whining, that's how we know democracy is working.
If you try to impose elite rule over language, you get France, where everyone says "le weekend" and "Internet" despite the government trying everything it can to stop them. It doesn't work.
Using disinterested the way Matt does is CORRECT English. It's in the dictionaries. If you don't like the language as it is, you can choose to speak another one. But you don't get to impose INCORRECT rules you just made up on other English speakers.
I'm with you on principle, but I'm with Kareem insofar as I regret how the change in usage indicates a lack of appreciation for a valuable idea or distinction and precipitates its continued decline.
I always hear these arguments and I think they are silly.
Did you actually have ANY doubt what Matt meant? Nope. Because we aren't idiots. We can see context. If someone says "he is flaunting the rule", nobody thinks that he is putting the rule on ostentatious display. When the supermarket says "10 items or less", we understand that. And when Captain Kirk says he is boldly going where no man has gone before, we get that too.
So no, nothing valuable at all is being lost here.
The problem isn't that it's hard to understand Matt, it's the downstream effect on usage.
When people start using the word for "doesn't have a dog in the fight" to mean "doesn't care", it introduces confusion into more ambiguous cases.
Your point is well taken but misses my thrust. This is a demand for a democratic movement to insist on a particular meaning of a particular word wipe out alternate meanings to preserve/create a useful distinction. It is GOOD that someone thought there should be a single word for "has no skin in the game". Call it linguistic Bismarckianism--applying democratic means to conservative ends.
But there are ways to say someone has no skin in the game already. You can say neutral, conflict-free, unbiased, impartial, etc. etc. etc. So the word taking on a meaning in addition to the one you prefer doesn't rob English of a way to express what you're seeking. Heck, no skin in the game also works! Although it is more cumbersome than neutral or unbiased.
Trying to stand in front of these changes/evolutions and shouting "no!" is a pointless endeavor. It won't work, and if it did our language would be less beautiful and expressive than it is.
I always hear these arguments and I think they are silly.
Did you actually have ANY doubt what Matt meant? Nope. Because we aren't idiots. We can see context. If someone says "he is flaunting the rule", nobody thinks that he is putting the rule on ostentatious display. When the supermarket says "10 items or less", we understand that. And when Captain Kirk says he is boldly going where no man has gone before, we get that too.
So no, nothing useful at all is being lost here.
No one actually believes this, though. It’s a weird ideological commitment linguists have that is fundamentally incoherent.
Look at yourself: chastising someone for trying to get people to use a word differently by insisting that language is a democracy.
It's not incoherent at all. It's the reason we don't say words anymore or employ usages that are all over The Death of King Arthur and The Canterbury Tales and Hamlet. What changed? Answer: language evolves. And how does it evolve? Not because "authorities" change it, but because the public does.
And nobody objects to this except in these stupid instances of pedantry where a few elites decided to tilt at windmills. Nobody objects to the fact that e-mail became email. Nobody objects to the fact that we now use "wife" as a verb. (Well, I playfully object to it, but no, I don't say "it's incorrect English". Because if enough people use it, it isn't.) Nobody objects to their friend saying "what up?" instead of "what's up?".
And your last sentence is wrong. It's not "trying to get people". It's falsely saying there's a rule when there isn't. It's LYING to get people to change. It's posing as an authority of correct English while being ignorant of what correct English actually requires.
I think you should definitely log off until the feeling goes away.
I'm not sure I understand what the "this" you're referring to when you say "no one actually believes this" is? No one actually believes that language evolves and develops via actual usage amongst the real population of speakers?
No one actually believes in the toy version of that thesis offered here, which is what's required to power Dilan's disdain.
I don’t think we have polling on this. Many people use “disinterested” to mean “uninterested”. Many do not (hi!)
Why should we assume that the new meaning is the preferable one?
We’re just as much the Common Man as you are — shouldn’t we push for our own lexicography?
So long as enough people use it in reasonably formal register, it's correct English. That's all that is required to get it in the dictionary.
Language snobs use all sorts of words the public uses less often. Doesn't mean their usages are incorrect either.
And the fact that a word may be used by two large communities of people, with incompatable meanings isn’t a problem? Sometimes the meanings are diametrically opposed, like “inflammable”. Wouldn’t it be good if we had an authority to adjudicate which of those meanings is correct?
It’s not a settled issue, like using “terrible” to mean bad rather than awe-inspiring.
On this one, the war is still ongoing, and we haven’t lost yet!
That's cool.
Now, can you give me a good word that means "Has no skin in the game/no ulterior reason to favor one side of a dispute over any other/neutral"?
Like how if now "literal = figurative," we still need a word that means what "literal" used to mean.
I'm literally going to fall on my sword over this issue.
Literal still means literal, it's just that in context it can also sometimes mean figurative. Just like with everything else involving language, the context clues you in to the meaning. People who make big deals about this seem to do so purely for pedantic reasons while ignoring that the meaning is almost always perfectly clear in context (and if it's not, it's almost always because of poor writing/speaking rather than confusion created by a more expansive definition for a particular term).
Neutral, unbiased, impartial, objective, conflict-free, etc. etc. There are lots of words that can efficiently and effectively convey what the apparently original meaning of disinterested was.
The public gets to choose what to eat, too, but there's nothing wrong with saying that some foods taste better than others, or are more nutritious. There's nothing wrong with saying some movies are better than others, or with saying that bad movies squeeze good movies out of the marketplace. It's only with language that no one can offer a criticism of usage without others self-righteously coming in to democratically insist that no one voice an opinion.
I think there's a big difference between saying "caviar tastes better than hamburgers" and saying "caviar is correct and hamburgers are incorrect".
Indeed, I think the latter statement is both incorrect and represents profound ignorance about food.
And that's exactly how I feel about people who believe in fake "rules" of language and try to "correct" people who actually know the rules and use the language correctly.
I don't believe that Kareem used the words "correct" or "incorrect," though I guess you could say he implied it. But he wasn't insisting on "correctness" for its own sake, but to maintain a particular usage as primary. The key statement he made was, "This is a useful distinction and I beg everyone to respect and preserve it." To me this is comparable to Anthony Bourdain saying, "I beg everyone to shop at local restaurants, because they're worth preserving" or Wendell Berry saying "I beg everyone to buy seasonal food from local farmers, because the agricultural chain is worth preserving" (or, to switch media, any number of critics saying "I beg everyone to see non-Marvel movies in the theaters, because cinemas and a diversity of film genres are both worth preserving"). It's partly an aesthetic preference, partly resistance to a social change with perceived negative effects. There's no reason I can see that this would be invalid for language where it's valid for everything else.
Of course you can disagree that it's a useful distinction, and I gather that you do disagree because you say we'll just figure out what is meant from context clues. But that's a disagreement on the merits. The Academie Francaise or the principle of language being democratic is neither here nor there, because no one is calling for people to be forced to speak a certain way. We're appealing to them to do so, which grants the premise that the choice is theirs.
Merriam Webster actually has a good explanation of what they call the "tangled history" of "disinterested" and "uninterested", which have flipped meaning at least once and (partially) flipped back. It's a better explanation than the one they give for caving on "literally"...
(PS - big fan of pedantry - keep it coming...)
I'm incredibly anti-Trump... and I'm a cross pressured voter in a key swing state, and this line of argumentation is just not very compelling. It's mostly true and correct, Trump 1 was a big mess, but I'd agree that was true of basically every administration I can remember? Being a huge mess in these mostly mundane ways is par for the course in presidential politics. The JCPOA is a good example, it was a mess when Obama negotiated it, it was a mess when Trump killed it, it's a mess with Biden trying to necromance it back into existence. The primary continuity between admins is being a giant mess.
The worst thing about Trump is that he's polarizers the electorate along coalitional lines that empower the worst people. The identitarian populists on both sides of the spectrum will absolutely drive the country straight off a cliff if they hold the wheel for too long, and that's what Trump does that's so terrible. He puts those coalitions in the driver's seat by setting the terms of the arguments.
The second worst thing about him is his personal greed/will to power/amorality/total lack of ideological constraint. Basically the dictator stuff. He'll directly destroy the institutions if he can manage it. Luckily he's pretty incompetent and the institutions are pretty robust in that regard.
This "he's a kinda incompetent mess at administrating the state" concern is a third tier issue, even if you fully embrace the perspective that Biden is actually a substantial upgrade.
What made the JCPOA a mess when Obama negotiated it beyond the Israelis claiming it to be so? (I don’t know enough to have an opinion but my heuristic is that engagement + inspections was far preferable to proliferation + war as the only recourse.)
1) Obama negotiated a deal that had so little congressional support he couldn't get it through a majority vote in Congress, much less get it through as an actual treaty.
2) Why did it have so little support? Because it was going to allow significant amounts of money to flow into Iran when they were going to continue to find proxy groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc. who would act against the US and it's allies.
"much less get it through as an actual treaty."
This really isn't much of a metric -- the U.S. has ratified almost no new treaties in the last 25 years or so because there are almost always enough members of the opposite party in the Senate to vote against a proposed treaty (even if it otherwise has majority support) to deny the President a "win."
Sure, but not only did he not have a 2/3 majority in the Senate to do this with Iran, he didn't have a congressional majority to ratify his executive agreement. The president shouldn't attempt to bind the US without congressional backing.
But he got an agreement that locked Iran's nuclear program down and, absent Trump's idiocy, would have continued keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
Why on earth wouldn't he have taken that deal, with or without congressional support?
Because the President of the United States does not dictate policy, they are supposed to execute policy passed by Congress. Its perfectly fine for them to craft an agreement and bring it to Congress to be affirmed or denied, but it Congress doesn't approve it, then it isn't law. If Obama had gotten congressional buy in, then it would have been much harder if not impossible for Trump to just abandon it.
Does USMCA not count?
Yes, but I said, "almost no new treaties," not "none"? The US has only ratified eight treaties since 2000, versus eight treaties that were ratified between 1995 and 1999 alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_treaties
(I'll note that I edited my earlier comment to make it 25 years rather than 27 years, as the late 1990s were more productive for treaty ratifications than I had originally recalled.)
My go-to example is when Bob Dole lobbied to get the US to join a UN treaty on disability rights and it failed because not enough Republicans joined it:
"The Barack Obama administration, along with senior Republicans and Democrats, tried to gain entry into a United Nations treaty that would compel other nations to upgrade their standards in treating the disabled, a personal issue for Dole, who co-authored the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990.
Supporters included the top Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar (Ind.), and Armed Services Committee, John McCain (Ariz.), who, like Dole, had suffered disabling wartime injuries.
But just eight Republicans joined all 53 members of the Democratic caucus in voting yes, falling six votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to approve a treaty; 38 Republicans rejected the treaty."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/11/dole-un-disability-treaty/
Is that a lot or a little? What's the comparison to say Canada or the UK?
This is entirely correct (and I would like it if I were not blocked).
It seems like the BATNA on the table and the situation in which we now find ourselves is that Iran funds those groups anyway (maybe with less cash than it would otherwise have?) and now they also have a nuclear program that makes the prospect of crushing the regime in a conventional war for its misbehavior significantly less plausible.
The alternative is that they have slightly less nuclear progress, but a lot more money to fund these groups with. Maybe that's a great trade off, but it's not that obvious to me.
A small reduction in the risk of a nuclear weapon detonating in Tel Aviv is worth a significant increase in the risk of conventional rocket attacks, I would think. Plus, Israel had spent the last 10+ years keeping Iranian clients in check. It's not like 2014 Obama could predict the security failures that led to 10/7.
"A small reduction in the risk of a nuclear weapon detonating in Tel Aviv is worth a significant increase in the risk of conventional rocket attacks, I would think."
This makes sense logically, but that logic takes you weird places. Wouldn't the most effective way for Iran to operate in that space be to gain nuclear weapons, and then require the US/Israel to pay them not to use them...?
You also need to ask what % change in a nuclear attack vs how many rockets. If it decreases the odds from .01% to .005%, how many rocket attacks is that worth? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?
"Slightly less nuclear progress." Do look at Matt's chart.
A) Iran doesn't have even on nuclear weapon yet.
B) Where and how would they use such a nuclear weapon? They don't have a way to attack the US with one. Their missiles can't even reach Israel, they don't have super long range bombers with capable fighter escorts, and they don't have a capable navy. They are like the USSR in the 1950s: a theoretical nuclear threat but not a practical one.
I believe that Iran does have launch vehicles that can hit Israel at present (although I don't know if the payload capacity is big enough to accommodate the mass of a likely nuclear warhead), and to the extent they don't I strongly suspect the Iranians could, like the North Koreans, develop sufficiently-sophisticated launch vehicles to reach Israel (and possibly given enough time the U.S.) because (1) this is fundamentally not an intractable technical problem and has been solved by many other nations, (2) Iran has more resources and access to the outside world than the Norks; (3) the Iranian military-industrial complex is getting a shot in the arm from exports to Russia due to the Ukraine war.
The basic way the problem goes is:
(1) Iran does bad things.
(2) U.S. threatens to topple Iranian regime (e.g., because they're backing Russia, or Hamas, or Hezbollah, or because we're just sick of their shit as a perpetual spoiler / Axis of Evil member / reason the rest of the world can't have nice things)
(3) The Iranians threaten to nuke Israel with some level of MAD-level credibility. Hell, they can even claim (truthfully or not) that they smuggled a nuke overland in to Israel already.
(4) The U.S. holds off due to the credibility of the threat and the fact that Israel's incredible geographic concentration means that it's comically susceptible to a small number of WMDs basically destroying it as a country
(5) Iran goes back to the bullshit it was doing in part (1), with impunity.
The whole point of nonproliferation to ensure that step (3) never happens, whereas my current understanding is that the consensus view is "Iran doesn't have a nuke but could build one in months."
The US doesn't have a NATO-like agreement with Israel, and Israel has shown it is capable of shooting down Iranian missiles. Why can't Israel engage in MAD with Iran? Pakistan and India do it. Heck, if Iran actually builds a nuclear weapon, Pakistan and India will also engage in MAD with Iran.
Iran could launch one from a freighter at sea.
One such weapon detonated about 300 miles up over the middle of the country would cause an EMP that would devastate the country.
The government EMP commission estimates 90% casualties within a year (mostly due to starvation, dying of thirst, sickness and of course LOTS of violence)
That Iran could somehow smuggle a nuclear warhead and a cruise missile launch system onto a ship in another country outside of the Persian Gulf (because America monitors ship traffic within the Persian Gulf), and then get that ship into cruise missile range of America without getting caught at any step is like, impossible. That won't happen.
"One such weapon detonated about 300 miles up over the middle of the country would cause an EMP that would devastate the country."
ROTFLMMFAO! That would require a nuclear weapon of -- at barest minimum -- 1.2 *megatons* yield. That's literally a couple orders of magnitude larger than anything Iran is plausibly going to be capable of producing in the foreseeable future.
I point you to the chart in Matt's post about enriched uranium on hand. Was that part of the "mess"? I mean it's not like "the perfect being the enemy of the good"; it's more like "the totally effed-up being the enemy of the good" in that alternative.
And yes, Iran got its own money back which gave them more flexibility to pursue their nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, that's what negotiated agreements are all about. Would we be better off keeping the money and their keeping all that uranium?
"Would we be better off keeping the money and their keeping all that uranium?"
That's the scenario we're living in now. The actual unknowns are
1) would we be better of if they had less nuclear material, but had somewhere between 75 and 200 billion more dollars in the intervening years if sanctions were lifted.
2) if sanctions were lifted, would the Iranians have been able to make significantly more progress on their missile tech. Fissile material is not the only concern that the US has about Iran gaining nuclear weapons.
3) would the agreement be stable, or would the Iranians access the money for a while, then violate the agreement and resume enriching uranium.
I don't actually know the answer to all of these. Perhaps the world is much better with the US maintaining the JCPA maintained, but I think we should not assume it would be.
The mess was that Obama was basically propping up the Iranian regime that was having serious internal issues, when the core problem is the regime. It was negotiating with terrorists. The logic is they can always just pull out the "nuclear proliferation" card again whenever it suits them and we'll bend over backwards to perpetuate their power.
I admire all those brave Iranians who take to the streets in protest.
They are, however, no threat to the regime, not until some major state institutions join them in turning on the regime.
In no way did Obama "prop up" a regime that did not need propping up.
I don't think there's ever been a great likelihood of a full blown collapse of the Iranian government. I do think there's a reasonable counter-factual where instead of the JCPOA, US policy focus is on promoting internal divisions and constraining resources such that the regime is weaker and too busy dealing with internal issues to be flexing their muscles via proxy wars. The risk being that we end up having to use airstrikes or whatever to eliminate nuclear facilities. Even if that happened I'm not convinced it's a worse place to be than where we've ended up in reality.
It's not 1953 anymore and there's no Mossadegh in the wings.
I do actually lean towards "Iran tries democracy" has better outcomes than a lot of other middle eastern experiments have.
So in absence of JCPOA, you think the Iranian regime was likely to collapse? I notice they haven’t collapsed since the money stopped.
The JCPOA negotiations allowed the regime to re-consolidate power after serious internal fracturing in 2009-13. We let them off the hook just when it seemed like they were finally losing it.
The protests peaked in 2009, as I recall, and the protests of 2022-2023 seemed like they were at least as intense, though I didn't study it closely. Either way it's not at all clear to me what role money had in all of this.
This was right after the failed Green Movement. The Islamic Republic's regime has been through worse. The point of the JCPOA was to turn down the temperature and show Iran that the US could be worked with. Trump showed that notion was nonsense, though.
Then why didn’t it collapse after Trump pulled out?
I never suggested that Trump handled things in a manner that was less of a mess. There were however, serious internal disruptions in Iran during the Obama years that we should, and probably would but for the JCPOA, have responded to very differently.
No, but you said the JCPOA was propping up Iran. They continued to have serious internal issues after Trump pulled out but the regime didn’t fall.
So, if the JCPOA was propping them up, why didn’t they fall after we pulled out?
Iran entered into the JCPOA negotiations because they needed to relieve external pressure and focus on consolidating control internally. They succeeded.
I personally have a problem with how Obama and now Biden administrations have handled Iran with kid gloves and are seemingly naive and think that the Iranian regime are logical actors that want the best for their citizens and if only given the right carrot/stick will join the brotherhood of nations.
I’m sorry but the regime is evil and rotten to the core. They have proven again and again. I don’t know what it is with Democrats that they are, at best, naive or worse, sympathetic to the Ayatollah.
I know Iran is not 1A on the foreign policy priority list right now, but it’s up there!
And your proposal is what, exactly?
I don’t think they care about their people’s well being but they care about their own (ie the regime’s) survival. Anyway, what are sanctions if not a calculation that the regime will care about suffering imposed on their people?
This is right. They are very logical actors. And even an amoral regime that doesn't care about its people's suffering as such *will* care if if it thinks (as is often though not always the case) that suffering will make the people less supportive of the regime. Autocracies are partly insulated from public opinion, but not fully - if things get bad enough it can mean danger for the regime.
Its more about denying them the money to do more bad things.
This comment is moralising nonsense that ignores 60 years of history. Iran didn’t support a brutal American dictator that ruled as a tyrant for 20 years. I think this comment almost makes more sense if you change “Iran” for “USA”. People who live in America often have a real blind spot for the evil things their country has done.
I think you’re in the wrong Substack. You are probably looking for the Chapo Trap House Substack.
I think the hope was that JCPOA was about more than nuclear proliferation, that it would tone down Iranian operations as a whole and thaw things out but it didn't. In an objective sense, it's probably worth paying them in sanctions relief not to be a nuclear power, but i don't know if you could actually sell that to americans.
Because it guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuke
This speaks to how Trump is basically graded on a scale. Not only is Trump bad for all the reasons we don't normally worry about in a President (like their commitment to Democracy and respect for the Rule of Law for example) but he's also just at being President for the normal reasons someone might be bad at it, he's just incompetent. I find it genuinely depressing that people seem to have memory holed how bad he was at President for the "normal reasons" that Matt highlights.
A game I like to play with my conservative friends is, “Which era-defining social protest movement of the Trump years is your favorite?”MeToo? George Floyd? Covid vigilantism? and then try to predict the social protest movements that will materialize in a second term…
Matt soft pedals the best explanation for Trump nostalgia. The economy was doing really well in 2019. Household incomes were at a record high and poverty was at a 50 year low. Blacks, Latinos and lower wage workers had seen bigger income gains than people at the upper end.
Matt is certainly correct that this happened because Republicans stopped sabotaging the economy. But the 2019 economy still happened and swing voters aren’t great at adjudicating macroeconomic causation.
Trump’s situation in 2019 was eerily like Regan’s in 1984. There was a good economy in 1984 because 1) Volker and the Fed had finally loosened the screws and 2) the Regan tax cuts and ensuing deficit spending were stimulative. Neither Regan nor Trump found any supply side magic, they just had the good fortune to govern when old school Keynesian dynamics made them look good. Yet this is all voters require. It was morning in America in 1984 and the Trump economy of 2019 was pretty awesome.
Voters did punish Trump for his erraticism and incompetence and for the pandemic. Regan got 58% of the vote and won. Trump got 47% and lost. That’s a yuge difference. If Trump were facing a generic Democrat, he would get crushed. The thing is, he’s running against an unpopular 82 year old.
But the mystery isn't really Trump's popularity. It's Biden's unpopularity. If people are willing to look at good economic performance and ignore Trump's horribleness, why can't they look at the continuing good performance and ignore Biden's oldness?
If the answer is "because inflation, even though wages rose faster than prices" then doesn't that imply that voters are irrational to care about inflation per se?
Inflation is bad (in some circumstances) because it interferes with the functioning of the economy and makes GDP growth slower than it otherwise would have been. So shouldn't a rational voter just ignore the inflation rate and look at the growth rate alone?
I think a persuasive answer is interest rates which aren’t directly included in the dropping rate of inflation but do continue to clearly impact people’s lives and pocketbooks. See Peter Coy’s last two pieces.
Also Noah Smith’s literature review on this, to the effect of “yes, it looks like in general the increases in prices outpace the capacity of workers to negotiate higher wages due to nominal wage rigiidity / ‘sticky wages.’”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-do-people-hate-inflation
In general, yes, but was that specifically the case for the US over the past two years? Some of the price increases did go into higher corporate profit margins, but I thought real wages had also risen in the aggregate.
Yes, but I am unsure of wage gains at different income levels. Wages have risen fastest for the lowest wage workers, who make up a minority of the population. This has led to goods and services becoming more expensive for the middle class, who are a majority of the population. I don't know if real wages have risen for the middle class, but I do know that things that used to be inexpensive for the middle class are now not.
But the group swinging away from Biden most is the working class minority population, right?
Not the upper middle class whose services got more expensive.
This only really applies to folks buying homes or cars. It’s mostly a millennial effect right now. People are still miffed by inflation even though it abated.
It's not just the rate of inflation it's the price level. Price levels haven't gone back to where they were before.
They never do. "Price levels" went up by 8.5% over Trump's term.
That lines up with polling which shows Biden has not lost any ground with seniors but has lost significant ground with voters under 40.
The peak was two years ago so probably another year of mentally adjusting to new price levels. I refuse to buy an $8 CAD jar of jam. For now.
Well there is your problem. Canadapoor. (The Canadian economy has been stagnant for a long time, almost European in some respects.)
Indeed https://twitter.com/JohnPasalis/status/1725151045406318710
Do you mean that prices have settled back to 2022 levels, or that inflation has stopped rising?
I said inflation, the rate of change, has abated.
Right, and people are going to be understandably miffed until their wages rise enough to cover. It's not a small deal. The rate of change slowing doesn't ameliorate the loss of earning power and savings.
It’s vibes. There are people who are claiming the economy is worse than the Great Depression, all while their cars get fancier, houses bigger, and homes are filled with more crap than ever.
Cue Mitt Romney's "he made the economy worse..." theme in 2012...
Biden is too old. His age is a massive outlier. I’ve dealt with senior judges. Plenty of judges in their early 70s can come in for a week and preside over a trial and do ok. Of course, they are doing basically the same thing they have done for 20 or 30 years. They are not dealing with novel situations to the degree a president must. After a week, they get to go home and play golf if they are fit enough or read and watch TV if they are not.
I don’t know a single octogenarian who I would want to preside over a jury trial. Being president is much harder. It is an unrelenting grind for four years. It isn’t like being a supreme court justice where you get three months off a year, don’t have to ask questions during oral argument and can delegate as much as you
like to your clerks because 95% of your work product is written. This is intuitive. Why can’t Dems see what’s in front of their face?
Trump isn't much younger, he just has the advantage that he has been basically senile since 2016 so no one notices. Actually Presidents can and do delegate quite a bit - and with Biden or Trump that's what you are going to get, a low energy President who hands most of the work off to the staff. So the question is, whose delegates do you trust more, Biden's or Trump's?
Trump’s speaking style is more forceful than Biden’s. Biden stutters and slurs his speech. Ergo, Trump gets more style points even though Biden is far more cogent. If you like cogent arguments, you probably prefer Biden. If you like vapid muscularity, you probably prefer Trump.
But what does "too old" mean? He's clearly capable of performing the job. But he's not great at performing the performance. Democrats can "see" that clearly enough, but what's the fix? Not only is it a bummer to punish a good performer because of optics and vibes, ditching Biden will make low information voters think that he was dropped because he was bad at both the optics and the substance. Neither Biden nor Democratic officials are as delusional as you think. The naysayers gripe about imperfections without ever seriously wargaming an alternative.
It's also strange how reflexively VP Harris gets dismissed as the alternative. Ditching Biden is called for as a severe option for a severely old man. But Harris is somehow *also* unacceptable, despite unremarkability being basically her chief flaw. It makes me question whether this is really about Biden, and not just about festering anxiety and impatience over a drawn out election cycle.
He isn’t “clearly capable”. Most Americans think he is too old. At absolute minimum the “clearly” part is incorrect.
"Most" Americans think angels are real. We are not depending on them to see things as they really are. I think the author meant it's "clear" to those of us not distracted by arcane conspiracy fantasies and ghost stories.
lol when the discussion turns to who will win an election, you don’t get to casually discard the majority view on the basis of those people not being part of your right-thinking tribe.
Or YouTube supercuts
"He's clearly capable of performing the job"
This isn't clear at all
Short of letting you job shadow the Oval Office, what would it take to convince you, mathew?
You aren't going to convince me. I've been very unhappy with his job performance.
Nor do I think 80 year old people should be president of the United States. He's had WAY too many public examples demonstrating why.
President is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Look at how it aged Obama
Kamala gets you sexism x racism x California/San Francisco phobia x objectively poor performance in the "performance" part (why she dropped out of the race in 2020) x higher propensity to cave to the wackiest left constituencies (at least while campaigning -- I expect she would do better if she were actually in the Oval).
The reason I think Joe Biden is too old is that I literally haven't known any 85-year-old men. I know they exist, but while I've known plenty of women who made it to the upper 80s and beyond, most men seem to die before that. So many men I've known were also fine right up until their last year or even months, but then they experienced rapid decline.
When Biden was elected at 77 years old, he heavily implied he wasn't going to run for reelection, and I think most of us wanted to believe him because he seemed likeliest to save us from Trump. But now he's running to finish a term at 85, and I think many, many people are afraid he's going to have severe health problems and then die in office.
I would much rather Kamala just be the nominee. Maybe it's because I'm from California and therefore understand her as a politician, but I think she can win.
I'm having a hard time really understanding what people mean by "too old". He's clearly able to do that absolute bare minimum. He delivered the SOTU. Nobody in his cabinet wants to 25th Amendment him. He's offered appointees for pretty much every relevant office including the upper eschelons of the military. He doesn't, like, forget to sign things into law.
So, "too old" isn't meant to be taken literally, right? It's just stating a personal preference, like saying that someone is too old to get into a relationship with. Honest question.
Look, at 80, my grandfather was in great shape. He was active in his clubs and volunteer activities, still doing performances with his barbershop quartet, still traveling with my grandmother. At 81, he started getting some health problems that slowed him down, and at 82, he was dead. My preference would be to not have a president where I'm not confident that they won't die in office. Dying in office is chaotic and disruptive and pretty significant in terms of changing the course of history. I like Joe Biden and I think today, he's a good president. I've resigned myself to the fact that I will be voting for a guy I think might die in office because the alternative is worse. But if we had an open Democratic primary this cycle, there is no way in hell I would've wanted someone this old running because of this concern.
It’s obvious to everyone that this is a weekend at Bernie’s situation. Like, everyone was relieved that he managed to read a speech. Sorry team but I am going to believe my lying eyes.
Biden ain't no JFK, and neither is Snotty Kamala.
Harris is a non-starter because of her race. We just had two terms of a half black president. It didn’t fix racism. African Mulattos are less than 10% of the population. Do we really want 3 out of 5 presidential terms filled by exotics? Anyone with a basic understanding of identity politics understands the answer is “no.”
This comment is solid evidence that the Obama presidency did not fix racism.
Surely part of the story is that:
1) Approximately no one votes based "the economy" (in general), they vote on how the economy manifests in their lives and communities.
2) Neither economic gains nor harms have been distributed equally.
3) The benefits have been concentrated on those least likely to vote (the young and poor) while the harms have been concentrated among likely voters (rich and old).
Additionally, I would bet the incremental improvements haven't produced significant, _qualitative_ positive changes to the lives of the beneficiaries. Life at the bottom of the income distribution is still economically precarious, and the most common stabilizing forces—a college education and home ownership—are still out of reach or worse, getting farther away.
Admittedly, this is only a theory, but it's based on inferences of generally uncontested observations: that real wages improved the most at the bottom of the income distribution and rich/old people vote more than poor/young people.
But then how to explain the fact that Biden's weakness in the polls comes from his surprisingly weak margins among the young and poor?
“I’ve been toying with a different theory of the president’s woes, one that makes better sense of his peculiar demographic weaknesses: Voters with low levels of trust in society and the political system are shifting rightward.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/351563/one-explanation-for-the-2024-elections-biggest-mystery
I think that makes sense. And the Democratic Party has had its head in the sand for a long time about this, particularly with regard to black voters.
The near-unanimous support that Democrats expect from the black community is very unusual and it has a specific historical explanation... such that declining levels of anti-black racism are exactly what you'd expect to undermine it. And since most humans are naturally conformist and think the same way their friends and neighbors think, the shift wouldn't necessarily be gradual. Monolithic black support could collapse very suddenly, like an ice shelf.
If that happens before college-educated voters turn into another solidly Democratic bloc, it won't be good news.
I feel Hispanics are an even more egregious case of "head in the sand." They're a much bigger group, and once they are legal citizens, there's no reason for them to prefer Democrats over Republicans more than comparable white voters do. They've been taking Hispanic voters for granted for forever and somehow still think dovishness re: illegal immigration is what they need to do to get/keep their votes.
My working mental model is that they aren't impressed by the incremental improvements in their material conditions, and the things that could really make a difference seem too far out of reach.
Why can’t they just be dumb? It’s not like anyone believes the opposite, that they’re actually smart.
Unfortunately, Biden's unpopularity is not a mystery. *Every* national leader is unpopular. Biden is among the most popular of the group!
I'm not sure why turning against incumbents has suddenly become an international phenomenon, but there you are.
I would flip David Abbott's point and note that if the *Republicans* were running a generic candidate, that person would probably be leading Biden by ten points rather than being tied with him.
Is Biden’s unpopularity still a mystery to you?
If you mean his unpopularity relative to Trump's unpopularity then... yeah, no major updates.
I'd be *less* worried about another Trump presidency if Trump were as obviously feeble and checked-out as Joe Biden is. But that doesn't seem to be a widespread view.
(Incidentally didn't libertarians used to say things like "I don't want an effective government or a government that works smarter, I want a government that does as little as possible?" Where are those people now that we need them?)
But inflation is the Fed's fault, not Biden. His mistake was not trying to pin it on the Fed from day 1.
There's no widespread "hate" toward Biden. He doesn't have enough panache to be the object of hate.
Hate is a strong word, but very few people who are nov partisan Democrats like him.
I actually do. Biden’s done a pretty good job at being President, at least a B+. The problem is he’s getting a D as a candidate and is at profound risk of that becoming an F.
Moreover - an 82 year old who (as Matt correctly points out) simply never bothered to address inflation! You want to say it’s hard? Great. We’re grading Biden on quite the curve, where every challenge he faces is hard - Iran is hard, inflation is hard, illegal immigration is hard, legal immigration (not like we’re getting tons of H1B visas flowing) is hard. Even then, Biden never bothered to address it, except to name his climate bill “inflation reduction act”.
Isn't it mostly the Fed's job to address inflation?
All true and very, very sad.
Trump’s record on covid is more complex than this—his administration also sponsored Operation Warp Speed.
Operation Warp Speed is going to be his PEPFAR - the one good thing he did that saved millions of lives but likely still doesn’t make up for all his bad.
The Abraham accords were also very good (best thing happening in ME since Clinton). But these two are about it, I think?
I was going to add the change in mortgage interest deduction. There’s actually a surprising number of these things on the side I guess.
Also the elimination of the marriage penalty for couples making less than $500,000. And increasing the standard deduction. And eliminating SALT deduction for high earners. I mean, as much as people flip out about the top marginal rates coming down by a couple percentage points, his tax bill had a lot of good structural features.
It does seem like many of those structural features were intended to spite the upper middle class suburbanite Romney-Clinton voters in blue states - but since that group is probably the most over-favored group by policy generally, it ended up being a bunch of good structural reforms.
"There’s actually a surprising number of these things on the side I guess."
Secret Congress at work, I guess?
Matt spins the decision to keep pumping the economy and more importantly to pressure Powell to keep interest rates low as an orthodox one. I happen to remember 2017 well enough to recall plenty of Democratic pundits railing against the regressive tax cuts that were going to overheat the economy.
Trump’s two best decisions - OWS and Powell+economic stimulus - were actually tremendously impactful and the reason many have nostalgia for his presidency is that they were, in fact, perhaps sufficient to make up for all the other less consequential failures.
Still not voting for him myself because I don’t want to rely on him getting lucky a second time.
For me, the best thing he ever did was firing James Comey. Totally wrong reasons of course, but that coward got so scared of what the New York FBI office might do that he felt he had to interfere in the 2016 race at the last minute and arguably was the final nail in the coffin that elected Trump and unleashed all that horror.
Keep your mouth shut next time, idiot.
May he rot in hell.
I disagree with that premise. PEPFAR wasn't a terribly obvious thing for someone like GWB to champion (and and as such had some pretty odious components in the early going). So he gets credit because it's against character.
OWS was literally "give some giant companies a bunch of money up front to solve this problem", and I can't imagine anyone, even Trump, saying no to that except in counterfactual where he had actually fired Fauci and Birx and put like that insane Florida Surgeon General in charge of the NIAID.
And yet no other country tried anything like it. Given how insistent all the supposed experts were that vaccines would take years, I doubt that Hillary or Biden would’ve given something like OWS a chance. You know, follow the science…
That’s clearly not true. The Pfizer vaccine was jointly developed in several countries, and Sinovax was quite obviously from China.
I think the EU is the only other nation-like entity that had sufficient expertise at all levels of the process to do something similar. I don’t know what their involvement was like, but obviously huge parts of the manufacturing chain of both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines was in the EU. I don’t know if something paralleling OWS was possible with the EU structure.
China obviously also tried something similar, but wasn’t near enough to the cusp of mRNA vaccines to get such effective products.
It wasn't just giving them a bunch of money. They also smoothed a bunch of regulations, and even logistics challenges.
What logistics challenges? I recall Biden having to deal with that, actually.
I think there were logistics challenges at various stages. Sometimes things like getting access to filled syringes and cold chain transport, sometimes even just things like expediting delivery of monkeys needed for early rounds of animal testing.
Sorry, I wasn't doubting that there *were* logistics challenges, just that most of them occurred during vaccine *delivery*, which Biden was responsible for.
I don’t agree with that last part. Forget even millions of lives - if we didn’t have a vaccine as promptly as we did, we were going to have full blown social crises over COVID, with health and government authorities insisting on maximalism and normal people simply blowing off the rules. To say nothing of the economic damage.
I’m not voting for Trump because I think he got lucky. But hard to argue that OWS actually doesn’t come close to making up for all the bad.
If I were the judge sentencing Trump, I would cut his prison time substantially in honor of operation WARP speed, but enhance it just as much for January 6.
What about OWS wasn't a gimme though? I guess Trump could have literally said "vaccines are fake, let's spend that money on more tax cuts", but other than that, you're leaving the bar pretty damn low.
Which he has to ironically downplay so as to not upset his base.
The most profound comment on the American voter I've read in a while:
"So Trump, by being not just ignorant but willfully disinterested, comes across as more in touch with the electorate than a typical politician."
Trump is more in touch with the average voter, because he's as mind-numbingly stupid as the average voter. Ooh, the truth hurts.
See also, H.L. Mencken's dictum, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
Not stupid, but uneducated. There's a (subtle) difference.
Trump will be terrible for domestic policy but that’s not really what scares me, I think we can bounce back from four years of bad leadership on domestic issues. But the foreign policy implications of another Trump presidency terrify me deeply. It’s a very pivotal time in world affairs and the fact that Trump would abandon Ukraine and likely Taiwan to the forces of totalitarianism mean that four years would be plenty long enough for the US/West to lose our primacy in geopolitics and the end of Pax Americana. You can say that’s inevitable and perhaps over some time scale it is, but a world in which America just allows autocrats to do what they want is very different than one wherein we form coalitions across Europeans and Asian democracies and push back hard against things like territorial encroachment.
And I don’t even want to think about what happens if Russia invades a NATO country like Estonia during a second Trump presidency.
We're already losing primacy. Europe is making plans for a post-US future. Even if Trump loses this time, we are too close for comfort. If he wins, it will be much worse, but even the threat of it is scaring our allies.
Netanyahu called himself Mr Security and oversaw the worst security disaster in Israeli history, in Britain Osborne and Cameron were small-government true believers whose party is leaving behind the magic combination of tax increases, debt increases, and deteriorating public services. As a more extreme example of course Hitler did not leave behind a Greater Germany than the one he took office in. In the end reality usually catches up with people whose real skill is misleading rather than leading, the only question is how much damage is incurred before the con ends.
Totally, just like Biden said he was going to give us a great economy and be the “adult in the room” on foreign policy, and instead we got inflation because telling the various groups “no” would be rude, and two backwards gas stations with a flag attached [Russia and Iran] that have successfully deterred the United States. Looks like reality will catch up with him too, sadly.
What does this comment even mean? What is the US being “deterred” from doing to Russia and Iran? Are you implying that in early 2021 you personally knew the exact level of deficit spending that would close the output gap without creating inflation, while also factoring in the supply shocks that happened after the bill was passed? I’m very confused what it is you’re implying here
If you’re unclear about the ways in which the US is deterred by Iran then you might need to open a newspaper.
Similarly if you want to read about Biden’s blunders on inflation I suggest you read Matt’s post about how he failed to pivot (linked in the article we’re both commenting on.)
Do you really want the U.S. in a shooting war with in a 636,000-square-mile country with 86 million people that is six thousand miles away? Because if you think that "regime change" is the thing in Iran that the U.S. is somehow "deterred" from effecting, you should wake up to the fact that boots on the ground is the only way Iranian regime change becomes a reality, and recalibrate what exact combination of sticks and carrots the U.S. should be using but isn't.
"If you’re unclear about the ways in which the US is deterred by Iran then you might need to open a newspaper."
Links to articles or it didn't happen.
"Mess" does not really capture it. There were bad policies.
1. The Tax Cuts for the Rich and Deficits Act 0f 2017 [Actually, the corporate tax cut part was good but not the revenue reduction rom cutting personal tax rates.]
2. The trade wars. [Nothing about reducing strategic dependence on China or China-interdictable supplies.
3. Reducing legal immigration
4. Cost ineffective (when legal) ways to reduce illegal immigration, "Muslim ban."
5. Pandemic: a) PPP, b) no reform of unemployment insurance, c) industry bailouts
6. Jawboning the Fed for lower interest rates [Substantively right at the time but improper.]
7. Scuttling the Iran deal
8. Failure to keep pressure on Israel to stop and reverse "settlements" in the Occupied Territories
9. Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem
10. Grudging support for Ukraine
11. Refusal to accept election results/Capitol insurrection
12. SOCTUS appointments
13. Others. [Failure to list a policy does not imply approval.]
That many of these were "messily," ineffectively carried out was a blessing. We can count on such blessings in a Trump II regime.
This is a… strange article. I don’t have a better word than that. It kind of deserves a much longer response in the old school blog style “fisking” and, well, I’m not a full time borer of hard boards so I don’t think I’m going to be the one to do it.
But it’s bizarre to read this for two reasons:
1) how do we go through a whole rundown of Trump’s performance without noting the one decision he made that was both more important than anything else, hands down, and more heterodox than any of it - namely Operation Warp Speed. (And if it’s not abundantly clear in 2024 that Biden or Clinton would never have done similarly, I don’t know what could convince you otherwise.)
2) most of this could easily be written about Joe Biden in reverse. In particular trying to brush off Biden’s economic failures as a minor detail while giving no credit to Trump for making the somewhat heterodox, at the time, call that the economy was *not* at full capacity - I mean Matt was one of the people tweeting that Trump was risking tipping the economy into inflation in 2017! Clearly that did not happen.
But more importantly, the claim that I should give Joe Biden a pass on economics for blundering through inflation - a hard problem to solve but an easy problem to diagnose - but give Trump no credit for making an easy call and following that course? Again, just weird.
It’s a lot easier to be baffled by the nostalgia if you give Trump no credit for his successes and Biden no blame for his failures. (Iran was and is tough - did Biden do anything remotely resembling an effective response to address it? Frankly, the opposite. At a certain point Biden is responsible for his own administration’s bad responses to admittedly hard problems.)
(Full disclosure: I’m voting for Biden)
> more heterodox than any of it - namely Operation Warp Speed.
What exactly was "heterodox" about OWS? "Fund vaccine development" is about as basic a task as you could ask the federal government to do in the modern era.
> (And if it’s not abundantly clear in 2024 that Biden or Clinton would never have done similarly, I don’t know what could convince you otherwise.)
I beg of you to at least give it the old college try, because that seems absurd on its face. Like, what is your model of the world that makes you think up this scenario and call it likely:
Biden advisor: I think we should fund COVID vaccine development and pre-purchase enough doses for everyone
Biden: no
"Matt was one of the people tweeting that Trump was risking tipping the economy into inflation in 2017"
I don't recall this. Matt has moved around on immigration, on class populism, on when it is acceptable for writers left of center to say provocative things that might vaguely hurt Democrats in national elections, but I thought he was rather consistent on this particular track. He argued Trump's tax cut deficits *reinforced* his Keynesian model on the long march out of the 08 recession and the dovish case for more stimulus[1].
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/11/17844278/trump-economy-credit
BTW it's worth quoting this because I think it relates to why Biden is losing:
"But I do want to emphasize that low odds does not equal zero odds, and all presidencies end up dealing with a certain amount that can’t be addressed by returning to ideological baseline. Having a president in office who has no idea what he’s talking about and is too intellectually lazy to find out poses a wide range of risks."
I think this is a great argument (and indeed gets at why I would never support Donald Trump for President). But, we could reword it. I am going to play Trump Supporter for a second:
"But I do want to emphasize that low odds does not equal zero odds, and all presidencies end up dealing with a certain amount that can’t be addressed by returning to ideological baseline. Having a president in office who is old and decrepit and can neither communicate his policies nor have an awareness of his job, or is senile or suffering dementia, or even hospitalized or could be dying in office, poses a wide range of risks."
The point I am really making here is that we forfeited the power of Matt's accurate critique when we nominated Biden. Biden doesn't pose EXACTLY the same risks as Trump, but he does pose the same SORT of risks-- that even though we like his team and his appointments and his liberal policies, he also can very well fall into situations where his presidency poses immense dangers.
I'm very nervous about the election but I don't understand why everyone keeps saying "Biden is losing." It's basically tied. Indeed, today's 538.com forecast shows it as Trump winning in 50 out of 100 simulations and Biden in 49 out of 100; in previous days Biden sometimes won in a few more trials than Trump.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
Economist Yougov insists Biden is "losing" in that he's behind in 5/6 swing states. I have no idea how much credence to give their polling operation.
Based on all the polling, this won't be a "swing state" election like 2000 or 2004 it will be a "blue wall" election like 2016.
Either Biden wins the 3 Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, or Trump wins the election.
Georgia and Arizona (especially Georgia) are essentially irrelevant.
It's almost certainly in part a hangover from earlier polling that showed Biden losing by such large margins that Matt and Milan were talking about Trump not just winning an Electoral College victory, but an actual popular vote victory too. Look at the second chart ("Electoral College 2024 Excluding States Where the Candidates are Statistically Tied") here in particular: https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Pres/ec_graph-2024.html
This is a silly chart because being within the margin of error is not a statistical tie, and no pollster who understands statistics and is not trying to get clickbait would use that term.
OK, but, at the end of the day, within the past six months, Matt was acting like it was practically a foregone conclusion that Trump would not just win the EC, but win the popular vote, and, when I snarkily expressed disbelief at that, Milan jumped on me about how the polling he's seen made that look entirely possible.
Trump definitely could win the popular vote but it's also far from a foregone conclusion and I'm not even sure it's >50% chance if the election was today. I'd lean towards saying Biden is favored in the popular vote right now albeit narrowly.
Are you agreeing with that sentiment or disagreeing, I can't tell.
I have *NEVER* thought Trump could win the popular vote in 2024. I view it as being so improbable as to approach a physical impossibility (a Trump EC win is also unlikely, IMO, but certainly far more possible than a popular vote win) and I've commented about being annoyed at Matt for dooming and glooming over it.
So that simulation is based on the fundamentals, and the problem with the fundamentals is it is pretty clear that politicians around the world are being punished for inflation despite inflation rates coming back down. And further, it doesn't factor in Biden's age.
Looking at actual polls only, Biden's significantly behind. He literally only has one path to election-- he needs to win PA, WI, and MI, and hope there are no faithless electors and no court challenges upheld and he holds on to win 270-268. All Trump has to do is win one of those states, even by one vote, and he's President again.
And Biden, as of right now, is down between 0.6 and 2 points in Pennsylvania, and is also at best even and most likely down in Michigan. He was behind in Wisconsin for a while too, though he seems to have tied it there.
And if you look at national polling the picture looks A LOT worse. Trump is winning by 1.1 points. Most analysts felt going in that the GOP has a 3 point advantage in the electoral college, meaning Biden needs to win by 3 or more to win the election, which would make him 4 points down.
Finally, and most importantly, the polls are steady. We keep on hearing from Biden partisans about how this or that-- the state of the union, or the criminal conviction-- will flip the race, but it never does. At best there is very slow movement in Biden's direction.
In betting markets, Biden is +205 to win the election; basically, that puts him at just over 32%. I think that's about accurate.
Voters care about price levels not the rate of inflation. Price levels are up, that's why they are pissed
Biden has 2 ways to win the election. The Blue Wall, or polling error. We've seen polling error in 2012, 2016, and 2020, so I am not sure why you are excluding it as a path to victory.
You undermine your rationality and join the crazy anti-trumpers the when you say "...or exactly what Trump meant when he suggested using disinfectant on people’s lungs..." He didn't suggest anything like that. He asked a question to the medical experts.
Trump had been told at a news conference that ultraviolet light and bleach were effective in killing the covid virus on surfaces. That is correct. He then did his usual disjointed, inarticulate riff on what he'd heard and said:
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."
Please check the facts or you become just as bad as Trump and his acolytes.
That was an intensely stupid thing for Trump to say and even more stupid for people to defend it by quoting the nonsense.
I don’t think this quibble is the difference between being as bad as Trump or not.
It’s a wild quibble to begin with. Last I checked, he wasn’t asking anyone anything, he was just doing his normal extemporizing!