We don’t talk much about the 1908 presidential election, but that I think it was fascinating. The race featured William Howard Taft for the GOP against William Jennings Bryan for the Democrats. By nominating Bryan, a candidate who had already run and lost on two previous occasions, the Democrats were practically throwing this election to the GOP. His signature issue in the 1896 (opposing the gold standard) didn’t really make sense in the context of 1908. And while his populist broadsides against the economic elite of the Gilded Age had a certain durable appeal, the economy was doing fine. Worse for Bryan, the incumbent president Theodore Roosevelt had already pivoted the Republicans in a progressive/reformist direction. This was an era of close elections, but Bryan lost by a larger margin than in 1896 or 1900, and Republicans won big majorities in the House and Senate as well.
"You didn't fall out of a coconut tree" is a saying Kamala Harris attributes to her mother -- falling out of a tree, for some reason, being the opposite of living in your context. It's become a meme among Harris fans.
I think the reason behind it is that coconuts famously fall out of trees pretty randomly and without warning, hence the "urban legend" about deaths by coconuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut#
I put urban legend in quotes because the numbers are exaggerated but people do in fact actually die from coconuts falling on their heads.
I feel like the grief Kamala's gotten for that expression is pretty indicative of the way we apply different standards to different people. If some Southern boy told a parable about the importance of his roots, most of the media would find it charming. Whereas when Kamala tells a kind of goofy anecdote about an expression that's particular to her South Asian ancestors, a lot of media figures act like she's out of touch. (To be fair, the way she went on to describe the "moral of the story" was pretty tangled up in academese. But I feel like anyone that hears the whole clip, gets the point.) And then her fans have kind of over-reacted to that by embracing it, similar to the Dark Brandon meme.
I agree with this - when I saw the clip after hearing so many references to it I was left wondering what was so odd about it, aside from it being a bit of sharp jolt to something light hearted in the middle of a serious toned discussion. That said, I do think part of the reason people jumped on it is because Kamala has earned herself a reputation for garbled / goofy speeches and taking that story out of context fit the narrative. But that reputation didn’t fall out of a coconut tree…
Yeah. It's frustrating. I quite like Kamala and I think she'd be a good president. (Her niece was a fellow member of the Peninsula Young Democrats board with me, ~20 years ago when she was the SF DA. I met her a few times.) But she doesn't have the natural code-switching skills of an Obama.
Yeah, I really don’t think people would be snarkily meming JD Vance or someone for saying he didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, or was born at night not last night; to me the hubbub around coconut trees feels pretty racist.
I'd love to understand how the Democratic Party became such a calcified institution, where risk aversion borders on self-parody and senior leaders routinely serve into their 80s and 90s or literally die in office.
For example, the unity Biden's team has shown around him I think is pretty extraordinary. I believe at this point a majority of *Democrats* say Biden is too old and they want a new nominee, yet literally zero officials have resigned and called for a change.
This does seem to be an issue that is generally restricted to federal government. As we all know, there is a very deep bench of young governors who are ready to be the fresh face of the party. The problem of course is that this is masked by our federal gerontocracy.
I think part of the problem is that being a house representative is a pretty terrible job, being an executive of some kind seems much more rewarding for the politically ambitious. I think I'd rather be the mayor of a mid-sized city than a rep. For every AOC you have several faceless and irrelevant young reps who no one has ever heard of, e.g. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) who might occasionally pop up if Pod Save America comes to Florida or something but otherwise has achieved very little in the way of gaining a national profile.
Part of why being a rep is such a bad job is that actually working on legislation is difficult-to-impossible for junior members unless they happen to wield a lot of clout from a large national profile like AOC. You're supposed to pay your dues before you get a chance to do anything real, which can take decades in the current system.
I think is argument really depends on where the Member is coming from before they entered Congress. Maybe it's a crappy job if they were once a Mayor or Governor or high powered exec. But Maxwell Frost is in his 20s and he's got a whole bunch of time to advance his profile. Meanwhile, he can keep accumulating social media followers and cash a pretty nice check.
This isn't true! Try to craft a bill that improves HUD, or that addresses some of the major issues the department of the interior has been struggling with for decades. Be a major actor in Secret Congress!
You won't get a limelight, but you can have a major impact on making things better.
A very common bit of received wisdom is that it would be better to have smaller districts and a much larger house, so that people get more fine-grained representation/a closer connection to their rep.
But this thread makes me wonder if the opposite is true: a smaller house, with more power and agency in individual reps, might have some surprising benefits in terms of rewarding ambition and being attractive to more ambitious, energetic candidates.
I think of someone like Adam Schiff. A no-name backbencher representative who found an opening in leading the fight against Trump in the House, leveraged that into huge name recognition, rode that wave to a guaranteed California Senate seat in November and then who knows? -- Governor? VP nominee? It's not a guaranteed path for everyone but it *is* a path.
Average age of state governors has gone up recently at a similar rate to the increases in average age for congress. They've all gone up a lot since 2000 after very slow increases over the course of the 20th century.
Also in the past 20 years, age 65+ workers have quickly gotten to the point where they now earn nearly as much as prime age workers, per hour, which is a big shift from the 20th century economy.
Not to be too structuralist about it, but it looks to me like something bigger is going on.
(I, as always, blame technology. All the young people are goofing off on their phones all the time so older workers/leaders win by default.)
I assume it’s about greater health meaning that a much higher percentage of people remain functioning at a high level up to 65 and beyond (with a side of more jobs being mental rather than physical).
Also, there something about this Boomer generation generally that seems unusually self-important. And perhaps some of the fault lies with Gen X, for not standing up for itself.
Maybe not the 60s but the drop drills, parents who fought in WWII, global shame over the holocaust and to some extent Hiroshima and Nagasaki, grandparents who lived through the Depression (I have been programmed never, ever to waste food) and the Spanish Flu. Awareness that Things Can Go Wrong in one's own individual life, along with a sense of having been incredibly lucky in that regard so far.
The Republicans are not much better. Only a few of them actually broke with Trump -- Romney (eventually), Sasse, Flake, Liz Cheney -- while the rest hang onto their positions.
Why would they break with Trump? He may be a grifter but his ideas are popular and even the Biden administration has adopted some of them. Can the Democratic Party win a policy debate on why letting 10+ million illegals during Biden’s term was a good idea in the court of public opinion? Of course, Trump has many bad ideas that must be rejected. The Republican Party’s biggest vulnerability is abortion but Trump has downplayed it’s importance in this election, having successfully delivered the repeal of Roe Vs Wade.
Has he successfully downplayed the significance of abortion? Overturning Roe was incredibly unpopular and he was the guy who did it. If democrats get a competent person at the head of the ticket, I think that is a great case to prosecute him on.
Is stopping intra-party fighting by getting shot at the same as successfully downplaying the significance of this issue? At best your argument would be it is too soon to say
I was pointing to multiple facts in the article that Trump has made changes in the language in the Republican Party’s platform on abortion and LGBT to expand the tent. Some will grumble but they like to win more than be a stickler for what’s in the platform.
I don’t think you need to convince me that Trump the individual is unfit for office. His ideas are not. He also favors a lot of things that are good for the country and are popular. Why did the Biden administration continue with his policies on trade with China? After letting in 10+ million immigrants why did he issue an executive order after repealing the same one on day 1 (or week)? The fact is that the Democratic Party’s leadership is weak and the ideas are stale. Someone with Trump’s policies but without his personal negatives would absolutely wipe the floor with any generic Democrat.
Trump doesn’t have policies, that’s what’s popular (most Americans aren’t into policies anyway). He was not successful in controlling the border situation when he was President (except during the pandemic), only in exploiting it. He prevented Congress and President Biden from increasing funding for border security because he wanted to use the chaos as a campaign issue. As for China trade, Biden continued the restrictions placed by Trump and seems to be adding some of his own, while Trump seems to have made nice with Xi, who appears now to be an ally of his buddy Putin. Trump is also pro-Tiktok now.
Trump’s main appeal is that he demands nothing from people, which makes him the perfect vehicle for incoherent anger and confusion that so many people apparently feel now.
> He was not successful in controlling the border situation when he was President (except during the pandemic), only in exploiting it.
The Biden administration came into power during the pandemic and chose not to continue Trump's pandemic era policies on border control. This was a self inflicted wound.
> He prevented Congress and President Biden from increasing funding for border security because he wanted to use the chaos as a campaign issue
True but what's also true is that the Biden administration was sitting on it's ass for 3+ years before it became an election year issue. It must feel terrible as a Democrat but it's actually good politics.
Being unfit for office seems like enough to break with a guy. The Senate could have just convicted Trump after 1/6 and kept any of the ideas they liked.
He was unfit for office right from the beginning, not after Jan 6th 2021.
I think Biden too is unfit for office for different reasons but I don't see any serious conversation around using the 25th amendment. Even smart people like MattY and Josh Barro were supporting his reelection till the debate even though issues with Biden's age and senility were plain obvious to normies like me at least a year ago.
Are the two issues China and immigration? This is a really interesting and terrible way of boiling down the stakes to say Democrats have no good ideas, particularly on a blog that regularly covers why the Trump policies would be bad. For example, negotiating prescription drug prices is good, having access to abortion is good, the IRA is good, and the child tax credit was good. None of these are stale. If anything, going back to tariffs and cutting legal immigration are centuries old, stale ideas.
There are other issues like trans, DEI and AA, where Democrats are on the wrong side of public opinion. The IRA is good in the opinion of wonks but few voters care about what’s in it. The child tax credit exists in different forms in other developed countries and has zero impact on fertility rates. So, wonks and others may believe that it is a new and innovative idea but that’s not true. It is stale and borrowed and hasn’t worked anywhere. Negotiating drug prices is again a borrowed idea from other countries but not comparable to supply side and regulatory reforms in terms of effectiveness. Biden is also raising tariffs. If they are so bad, why is he doing it? Rent control is the most recent idiocy, almost universally discredited by economists.
Look, you asked why they would break with Trump and people are answering you: he's a bad candidate, an unpopular guy and a poor leader. Other people with comparable ideas would outperform him electorally.
He’s popular in the Republican Party. Biden is unpopular but still the Democratic politicians are unable to force him out. Only 33% of Democrats are happy with Biden as the nominee vs 71% of Republicans with Trump. The risk for Republican politicians in acting against Trump is much higher as many have found out.
Most actual polling on the "generic ballot" currently shows generic Democrat beating generic Republican by about a point. The average gap across all generic polling is about 0.2% in favor of generic Republican.
The gap shifts back and forth quickly, but it's usually inside 1%. I would also check your "10 Million" figure, which appears to be a Republican talking point concoction rather than based on correct and consistent reading of the data.
But all that said, I think there is no question that fixing the asylum system and more aggressively addressing the dynamics that have led to the huge surge in border encounters should have been a much higher priority for the Biden administration, even with Republicans determined to block progress in order to "preserve" the chaos for Trump to use electorally. This clearly seems like a case of the Democratic party failing to use 2020-2022 to neutralize an issue that they knew or should have known would come back to haunt them. It might even have allowed them to the keep the House in 2022 given how close the result was. At the very least it was terrible political strategy. Always co-opt your opponent's best issue if you can.
I totally agree with your last point. Democrats could have neutralized Trump after he won in 2016 by moderating on illegal immigration. For legal immigration and against illegal immigration is the policy sweet spot with moderates and independents but Democrats have failed so badly on the issue of illegal immigration that Trump will use this opportunity to shut down or lower legal immigration as well.
Everyone on this blog is so smart, including MattY, that they had to wait till the debate to find out something that has been so obvious to dumb normies that Biden is not fit for the job now, let alone 4 more years.
I don't think there's much reason for them to break with Trump NOW but there was plenty of reason once he lost the election, at which time he was extremely unpopular and, as mentioned, had just lost an election, not to mention made many of them huddle in a secure basement beneath the Capitol building through his irresponsible decisionmaking.
Irrelevant. What matters is whether they could justify their vote to impeach Trump to Republican primary voters. Everyone who voted to impeach Trump either retired or got primaried. So, I would say their political instincts were pretty good on this.
The number that show up is unknown, but Biden sure could have have Been seen as trying harder, maybe by empowering his first generation immigrant VP to be the tough cop.
There’s lots of reporting that Democrat officeholders don’t think Biden or a replacement will beat Trump. I find that too pessimistic. But if somebody really believes it, the smart move is to support Biden. If Biden stands down and his replacement loses, everybody who pushes for Biden to step aside will be blamed. This will temper the normal thermostatic shift against the party in power and lessen democratic performance in the mid-terms and maybe even in 2028. By contrast, if Biden loses, he’ll get all the blame.
To be clear, this isn’t my view. I think Biden should stand down and that Trump can be beaten, even if the odds would still be in his favor.
I think this is a way to rationalize inaction, but also that it is objectively the wrong response. Two years and four years is a long time. And perhaps more importantly, that ``thermostatic shift'' you speak of probably requires losing a close election. If you get blown out in a landslide, people just get depressed. It definitely requires trying to win. If you intentionally tank the US election ... I sincerely hope there is a special place in hell for people who choose to go down that road. This is not the NBA draft.
Four years is a long time, and it is entirely possible that enough crazy stuff happens in those four years that people will just want change and be somewhat hazy on what went on in 2024. I just think there will be those with strong incentives to remind them. (When MY speaks of a Dean Phillips 2028 super pac, I think he is 83% joking...) And that is the ``good'' outcome.
Here's another way of thinking about it: If Biden is adamant that he's going to stay, it's really really hard to remove him. It will tear the party apart. And there's the collective action problem -- you may be isolated out there if not enough other party members join you.
This really isn't on the Democratic party. If Biden stays, it's on Biden. If he wins, fantastic. If he loses, we know what the first page in the history books on him will be.
I don't really buy that it will tear the party apart. The issues that do that are those that don't go away. This is a solvable problem, and resolving it can only be good for party unity.
As an Independent voter, why should I ever trust a party that knowingly nominates a candidate who is clearly not physically and mentally fit for the job now, let alone another 4 years?
It's the nature of the party that represents the class of society with the most to lose, i.e. the educated upper middle class, to be conservative. And that's exactly what we see in the parties today.
The Democratic Party is the risk-averse conservative party railing against changes happening around them. The world doesn't look like it used to. The old ways set up nearly 100 years ago, when FDR set the Democratic Party on the path and mental model of how American government and society should be organized it held to for the rest of the 20th century, has run it's course and is breaking up, and it's not clear yet what will replace it. And the Democratic Party, have become an old, conservative party, doesn't know what to do about it or how to react, except to rail against the change.
Not saying Trump's Republican Party knows where it's going either, but it's not fearing change; quite the contrary.
"educated upper middle class" Educated rings more true to me than upper middle class. Dem voter incomes don't skew very differently from Republican voter incomes.
My guess is income / education splits in the US would look basically the same as they did in the latest French election, where the Right had a little more support among lower-income groups and a LOT more support among the lower-educated:
I think it’s unclear that people are referring to income when they talk about class. Small business owners and the professional managerial class have similar income ranges and might thus both be described as “upper middle class”, but people usually use that phrase for the PMC, which is very Democrat leaning, rather than the small business owners, who are very Republican leaning.
Where's the evidence for this? I can't think of any other party in a democracy, across time and space, with leaders as ancient as Democrats have today. If it was a law of nature there should be lots of examples.
The only situation like Biden I can think of is the early-80s Soviet Union where 3 elderly leaders in a row died in office of natural causes.
Let me add that he was a long serving and well respected chancellor who was, in the end, pushed out by his own side, and not too happy about it. (I recently saw a political cartoon from that time in a German museum that roughly translates to ``Siegfried's rescue'': in the cartoon, the old man is trying to knife his successor, but is prevented from doing so by a lady wearing a CDU cape, representing his own party.)
Democracy hasn’t been around that long. And there’s the issue of the US being the only democratic “superpower” that has ever existed. American exceptionalism isn’t completely a myth.
"Conservative" isn't a very accurate word for describing a center-left party with a rising class populism (not unlike William Jennings Bryan) against the political economy status quo. "Gentry" might be the more accurate term. I've heard Democrats described as the "party of the court" compared to the Republican "party of the country"; this might echo what you're saying about disposition towards change.
I also suspect this timing on the 20th century is off. The divide on the national security/media issue in politics really goes back to right after WW2, when McCarthyism helped Republicans get on board with NATO and some form of the national security state created during WW2. For the oldest generation of Democrats, that's the only 20th century they know. But this ignores the first third of the 20th century before WW2/New Deal, or caricatures it as decadence before the storm, which is the same thing as ignorance.
So there's a gentry worldview that the main problem in American politics is populists who don't like the spending on NATO, but at the same time is pretty content to keep US military spending where it is or slightly lower. This isn't an inherently conservative instinct so much as risk aversion, as you correctly note. To leave well enough alone, and insist on the particular customs and eccentric phrases, like an Old Tory politician, over substance when asked about what to do with new problems.
As someone whose been risk-averse all my life, the risk of losing is my main reason for not being too enthusiastic about switching horses in mid-stream. Unfortunately, there's no way to really assess that risk: we can argue about polls and voter psychology forever but who knows.
Apropos of "risk aversion" I just learned from the book "Light Eaters" that some plant species and some animal communities (i.e. chipmunks) demonstrate a range of risk aversion within a given population. The bold ones have more offspring, but die sooner; the cautious ones have fewer offspring but live longer. So yeah, maybe risk aversion has just become endemic in Democrats (although FDR himself was willing to take risks.)
Dems are risk averse (but that also extends down to its membership too for various reasons) but the core identity of the Republican Party is railing against social and economic changes happening today. Trump's appeal, even in issues he bucks against the 2000s conservative consensus, is based on revulsion toward broader societal changes such as the new focus on LGBT rights and the shift toward white collar service work.
Maybe people are afraid of speaking too harshly about the effects of age because they don’t want to be disinherited.
I certainly think that, if we had a big war, lots of middle age officers would rise to high positions fairly quickly. Peace and compounding financial returns favor the old.
"For example, the unity Biden's team has shown around him I think is pretty extraordinary"
Their employment and power derive from Biden. This was discussed in 2020 when Biden was becoming the nominee, that there was zero incentive for anyone to declare he was serving one term as a transition; because he would be a lame duck and his whole staff would be hopping to look for a job midway through his term. Biden's team's interest aligns with Biden staying in power.
Having a job doesn't guarantee you hold on no matter what; plenty of people resigned from Trump's administration and indeed from Biden's too over Gaza. Biden's team is increasingly writing its name in history as the people who handed Donald Trump a second term and potentially a trifecta and I'm surprised they all seem to be committed to this.
“ plenty of people resigned from Trump's administration and indeed from Biden's too over Gaza.”
Any of the braintrust resign? Trump famously didn’t have a team of anybody he actually knew or who he was beholden do because he was not really politically active before his victory.
Democrats have been dinged by nominating leftists in the past. Democrats have a fractious coalition where they both have to appeal to moderates and appeal to vote losing leftists who will run insurgent efforts to drive down voter turnout in swing states (Sanders and Nader). The median voter is substantially more socially conservative than the donor class, so unknown quantities are riskier.
There is a lot more downside risk than upside risk for Democrats based on experience. This promotes a status quo bias.
Just look at the neurotic blindness to risk of Republicans during the worst pandemic of the last 100 years.
Can we all agree that the pandemic was a highly unusual event that people in general didn't know how to deal with, but it's over now, so let's just put it in the grave and move on without refighting these idiotic battles endlessly?
It seems that one of the most powerful drivers of our politics is the incumbents in Congress are absolutely desperate to stay in office at all times forever. But why? Is the job so much fun? Aren't these intelligent, relatively wealthy people who could succeed in lots of things? Why compromise every principle under the sun just to get your 4th term as a backbench house member from Oregon?
Ironically one of the senior leaders, Nancy Pelosi, seems to be one of the ones with the judgment to realize that Biden needs to go.
Your comment on zero officials having resigned and called for a change seems more appropriate for a parliamentary system in which you have party leaders serving in government. Multiple Democratic members of Congress have called for a change, but why would they resign?
Cabinet members can resign, but that would be a signal that they don't support Biden's actions in his capacity as president, not Biden the nominee. People working on his campaign could resign. That seems like it would highly likely be career suicide, but it is also what makes it a strong signal. Pelosi has stature and significantly less to lose than some of her colleagues.
This book was written primarily to answer that question. I highly recommend it. Matt used it to help write his "The Parties Can't Decide" piece a little while ago.
Being under threat naturally leads to risk aversion and a desire for safe choices. This instinct has served Democrats well in that they seem to have tamped down the progressive revolt for now. But I think the unwillingness to forcibly unseat Biden is part of that same instinct. It's not over until the convention though, don't give up hope yet.
Valuing seniority above merit and ability to do the job seems like an aspect of unions, maybe especially teachers' unions. If the democrats are heavily entwined with union leaders, it's not too surprising that they would pick up aspects of union culture.
1) Being like the current Republican party is not the bar for success
2) Trump is 3 years younger, and entered politics 40 years later than, Biden; Harris is 20 years older than JD Vance; Pelosi is arguably still the most powerful Democratic house member and she's 30 years older than Johnson (Jeffries is 1 year older than him). Schumer is 7 years younger than Mitch but Mitch is stepping down.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying it’s ok for the democrats to be like this because the republicans are. I’m just saying that this isn’t a problem that is any way unique to the democrats. The two parties are approximately equally dominated by the old.
This is *not* the *only* reason, just one: Gerrymandering means if you can win your first two elections, you're in for as long as you want. Winning your first election is the hardest thing, and you'll always be vulnerable in your first reelect. By the time you've been in for 8, 10, 12 years, you probably dominate the local party network (I won't say machine, because it's not that organized), and anyone who challenges you (or endorses a challenger) isn't going to win AND makes themselves a non-entity in any city council or state legislative races where they could bide their time until you retire.
One thing that strikes me so deeply about this time is just the total lack of moral fiber and courage. My god - Democrats are just willing to roll over and accept a Trump win. Both parties are so fundamentally broken.
“Democrats are just willing to roll over and accept a Trump win. ”
For many of them, the consequences will not be too grave.
I wish that they would think about the Ukrainians, for whom Trump’s win will mean death and enslavement. And the next victims of Putin’s emboldened imperialism.
And the Taiwanese, whom Trump will also happily sell into slavery when the Chinese meet his price.
Their frivolity and comfort are going to get a lot of people killed.
"And the Taiwanese, whom Trump will also happily sell into slavery when the Chinese meet his price."
Let's be real. Nothing about Biden or his team points to getting into an actual shooting war with the Chinese over Taiwan. They've been petrified of the Ukranians making Putin angry, but the US is going to fight the Chinese in their backyard? Seems preposterous.
Biden has pursued a policy of strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan, just like every administration since the 1940’s. That policy has helped to keep Taiwan free so far.
Trump will pursue a policy of lining his pockets, as he did in his first administration, and that is worse than strategic ambiguity.
>Biden has pursued a policy of strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan<
That was the policy pre Biden. It seems to me plainly the case that Biden has sought to banish ambiguity in favor of certainty. His aides haven't been enthusiastic, mind you, but they're not the commander in chief. He is:
I honestly think nobody knows exactly what to do or what we should do if China invades Taiwan. There's also going to be a massive push from the American business community and donors, and big tech, to do very little (because a hot war against China will result in massive losses for all the businesses who currently have significant supply chains and/or customer bases in China). I think the definitive pronouncements in this thread about both Biden and Trump are highly over-confident.
Most of the policy decisions on China in recent years have been the exact opposite of what you'd expect the Chamber of Commerce to want. They generally want a free hand to sell to, buy from, invest in, accept capital from anywhere, with as little government interference as possible. Certainly the actions of the last two administrations have on balance rendered making money in the world's second largest economy more, not less, challenging.
But as it happens, I think the opinions of business leaders aren't likely to matter much either way in the event of an actual shooting war because there won't be enough time to consult them. In our modern age of Executive Branch unilateral decision-making on going to war, orders to the military would surely have to be issued rapidly. In other words, it would be shocking if Congress were consulted, much less the business community! We might even face a preemptive attack from China, so the decision might not be America's to begin with.
I find the idea that America's decision to go to war will be heavily influenced by the business community, donors and big tech to be just the kind of jolt of humor I need on this Tuesday morning.
US "strategic ambiguity" regarding Taiwan is more complicated. In the 1949-50 window, the Truman administration was purportedly prepared to allow a PRC invasion of Taiwan, but after the Korean War started, US support for Taiwan strengthened significantly both in terms of supplying weapons and explicit security guarantees. The modern "strategic ambiguity" dates to Nixon's normalization of relations with China in 1971.
There's zero ambiguity when you don't let a proxy force even take the gloves off against an invading army. Biden's team doesn't have the guts to engage with China directly, they have zero appetite for a direct conflict.
But Trump will happily make a deal with Xi. He has zero reason to defend Taiwan now—he might have suggested that early in his administration when. he had old fashioned Republicans around, but it’s absurd to think he’s stick his neck out for Taiwan—what’s in it for him?
We might or might not voluntarily come to Taiwan's aid. But if (as many believe) China's initial actions in such a war would be include taking out nearby US air and naval capability, then the decision to enter a direct conflict with China will be made for us.
>Nothing about Biden or his team points to getting into an actual shooting war with the Chinese over Taiwan.<
Biden has on multiple occasions stated in the bluntest possible language he will send US forces to fight PLA forces if the later attacks Taiwan. He has also significantly increased the number of US boots on the ground on Taiwan. If those Marines aren't a hot war tripwire, I don't know what is.
Nobody has a crystal ball—maybe Joe would blink at the last moment, who knows? But it's stone inaccurate to claim "nothing" the Biden administration has done suggests a willingness to fight China over Taiwan. *Much* of what they've done suggests exactly that.
Petrified of the Taliban, so tripped his way out of Afghanistan. Petrified of Putin, so dithered and debated and lost an opportunity to potentially let the Ukranians get into a better position, unless his goal actually was a nasty stalemate. Judging by his actions, Biden's all talk on Taiwan.
You are missing a huge piece of context, which is that the opinion of the Democratic-aligned foreign policy community is that Europe and the Middle East matter dramatically less than they used to and we need to significantly reduce the resources we commit to both regions in order to pivot to Asia. This has been the view among party elites since at least Obama's first term. It doesn't really have anything to do with Biden. The earnest and sincere opinion of his foreign policy advisors is that the war in Afghanistan was a huge and pointless waste of resources and the sooner we were out the better, and that there is no reason to escalate the war in Ukraine as long as Putin remains bogged down in a quagmire there.
That still doesn’t mean that the US would risk nuclear Armageddon by directly engaging the PLA when they’re tiptoeing around the Russians because of fear of escalation.
Don’t compare him to the almighty, compare him to the alternative. Trump is the one that actually ordered the Afghanistan pullout that people blame Biden for, and Trump was literally impeached for trying to sell Ukraine out to Russia.
I would be very surprised if "slavery" ends up a reasonable description of PRC rule over Taiwan. If the Taiwanese people/government agreed with you that the consequences would be that apocalyptic, we would be in a much safer place!
As bad as a Trump win might be for Ukranians, a country with record deficits during an economic expansion has no business funding a war indefinitely. When there is a resource constraint, policies must be decided based on priorities and Ukraine is neither critical to US national interests, nor is it a part of NATO.
The US can afford to support Ukraine all the way to victory. And that will be a lot cheaper for us in the long run than allowing Putin to take land wherever he wants. Every dollar we spend in Ukraine will pay huge dividends in the future. If we let Putin win, we will pay dearly for it.
I disagree with everything that you said. There's no chance in hell that Ukraine wins against Russia even if we fund the war indefinitely. We are all paying dearly for the irresponsible deficit spending during Trump and Biden terms due to inflation and high interest rates.
This is funny and stupid as shit. The entire USSR could not conquer and hold Afghanistan, yet you consider a small-r Russian victory over Ukraine to be predestined.
I don't recognize you as a SB commentator, but this is very illuminating as to whether I should take you even remotely seriously about any topic. Hint: nope!
Ukraine is incredibly cheap for us. We are eviscerating the military of one of our two near peer adversaries at Coast Guard prices. It’s an insanely good value for us.
Make the case in this election cycle that we need to raise taxes to pay for Ukraine and win elections or stop talking about how cheap it is. It's always cheap when you don't have to pay for it. Give me a few billion dollars, no strings attached, and I'll talk about how cheap it is to own a sports team.
Yes, that's correct but the Republicans are divided on this issue (more Nos than Yays). Also, no one had to figure out how to pay for it. All of this is going to bite the Democrats in the ass because they care about saving SS and Medicare and the Republicans don't (not the politicians) and high levels of deficits will ensure cuts because people don't like to pay taxes.
"The House passed the Ukraine funding by 311-112, with all "no" votes coming from Republicans, many of whom were bitterly opposed to further assistance for Kyiv. Only 101 Republicans voted for it, forcing Speaker Mike Johnson to rely on Democratic support and prompting calls for his ouster as House leader."
First of all, I would consider it a lie to say that Russia has invaded Europe. Ukraine is not even part of Euro. They applied for Euro membership after the war started. Ukraine is not part of NATO. We're not dependent on Ukraine for anything. Imports from Ukraine are a tiny fraction of total imports and nothing that we can't get from elsewhere. Based on that criteria, it doesn't matter to US national interests if Russia wins the war and Ukraine is forced to surrender some territory to Russia.
I don’t think you’re looking at the context. Whether or not Russia *has* invaded Europe (Crimea definitely seems like part of Europe to me, whether or not the Donbas is), it seems clear that Russian ambitions don’t stop at the border of Ukraine. That fact matters to global interests, and the US has global interests beyond the bare fact of who imports what from where.
Make that argument after Russia invades a NATO country. I have zero interest in Ukraine and care more about deficits than listening to foreign policy experts in DC who have been wrong on so many issues in my adult life.
If I were a 25 year old Ukrainian at risk of being conscripted if the draft is expanded, I would want Trump to win. Better to cede Zaporizhzia than to make me die for it.
1. Britain’s position was no weaker in September of ‘39 than at the time of Munich. It was ramping up weapons production as quickly as Germany and had access to US imports.
2. Munich preserved the possibility of peace.
3. Britain and France lacked the ability to defend Poland, they had no hope of keeping Germans out of the Sudatenland.
4. This point isn’t relevant to assessing Chamberlain’s performance at Munich, but Hitler’s taste for conquest is a pretty extreme outlier. Many nations, even empires, have narrow territorial ambitions and will be content when they are achieved. Putin is like Hitler times 0.3 in terms of territorial ambitions.
5. Hitler’s writings showed strong irredentist tendencies, but it was hardly apparent in ‘38 that Hitler would invade Russia. Irredentism was standard fare in European politics, it had been present in French politics before the first world war, and was common in the Balkans.
6. There was no moral imperative to fight Hitler. Hitler wasn’t doing anything to Jews in ‘38 that China isn’t doing to Uighurs today. Yet all major nations today have diplomatic relations with China and seek to avoid war with it.
Relatedly, war was bad for Jewish life expectancies in Europe. Going to war for Poland did little to help the Jews of Warsaw, indeed it probably got more of them killed and almost certainly accelerated their deaths. War tends to be bad for life expectancies of most ethnic groups exposed to it! Best to avoid war and give peace a chance.
7. Britain’s best defense had long been her navy and the Kreigsmarine was pretty wimpy. If Hitler focused on gobbling up slices of central Europe, he might be willing to skimp on naval building, in which case an accommodation might be reached.
Well, you aren't. And the actions of the Ukrainian people over the past 3+ years illustrate how disgusting (in my opinion) your observations on what Ukrainians should be thinking is.
It takes two sides to stop fighting. If the Ukrainians quit fighting, but the Russians don't, then all that happens is the conscripted Ukrainians are now fighting with the Russians against the Poles.
"Needless?" Ukrainians stopping the fight will mean the end of their country, the subjugation of all its people, and who knows what kind of atrocities committed during and after that process.
The bloodshed is only needless because the war is only happening because of a megalomaniac old despot. The Russian & Ukrainian people deserved to live in peace and prosperity.
Russia has made it pretty clear that their aim at the very least is taking over the whole country and installing a puppet government (and very possibly a whole scale annexation down the line with attempted liquidation of Ukrainian national identity) although Russia's inability to make a breakthrough this summer does make that less likely.
Every conscript I met over there was willing to die for Zaporizhzhya. It’s not just about the land. Everyone knows someone in the occupied territories, and everyone who’s worked on the front knows exactly what conquest means. It’s not peace in a new but interchangeable country, it’s Russification, rape, torture, and being conscripted to form another meat assault on your free countrymen. I expect Ukraine would fight a slow and losing retreat absent US aid, but I’m almost certain they wouldn’t stop fighting.
I do think it's worth considering that if Trump clearly had diminished functions and was trailing in the polls, there would likely not be any hand-wringing from elected reps and media pundits. Not excusing Dems here, but worth thinking about when comparing the health of the two parties.
Sometimes you get a Slow Boring piece with a very particular target audience. :)
I know you were trying to reference less obvious examples, but RBG not retiring in 2014 was another huge decision that we will be living with for 30+ years. Or LBJ leaving open two (!) Supreme Court vacancies because of the Abe Fortas debacle.
I'm not holding my breath. As we saw with RBG and we're seeing with Biden now, the egotistical views of many leaders seeing themselves as irreplaceable is a basic force in the universe.
Nominating Fortas was a choice by LBJ, but I also think LBJ wouldn't have been LBJ if he didn't believe he could make his personal lackey Chief Justice.
I would submit that Covid in particular played a huge rule in killing popular belief in individual agency. People (particularly Zoomers) have a much more mechanistic view of society now. The lack of control during the shutdowns paired with hypersalient dopamine traps bombarding us more strongly than ever before made it very hard to exercise free will and we've all fallen into terrible habits.
In a strange sense we only see true agency among the elderly. Trump's "power of positive thinking" Boomer narcissism and Biden's Silent Gen Don Quixote intransigence are the closest things to genuine free will that still exist in our chronically anxious and prevaricating culture.
Focus on "structural" issues like racism, inequality, etc. are not helpful framings for individuals trying to navigate the world. The pop-Marxist framing that all change is derived to deterministic economic pressures and anti-liberal frameworks that many in academia teach feed into this Zoomer malaise.
I dunno. My loathing of structural inequality, especially but not only economic, has been very helpful in giving me purpose and activating my agency in at least 3 ways. (1) I became politically active in electoral campaigns, social movements, and issue-based campaigns, (2) I committed to effective altruism, despite having a lot less wealth than most SlowBorers, and (3) I became a teacher because I’m convinced understanding the world helps people navigate it individually and prepares them to struggle collectively.
All that to say that coming to see “structural inequality” as having much more explanatory power than “meritocracy” didn’t de-activate my agency, but quite the opposite. I would be very unmotivated to act much in the world if I believed the world were just and I were merely acting for my own benefit, as I’m quite happy living in a box as long as I can run and read.
I subscribe to Jonathan Haidt's substack and sometimes think of this in the context of youth mental health issues. I think the general lack of agency and the constant bombardment of things they have little to no control over probably contribute to mental health issues (at least if you agree that the issue is legitimate and not some artifact of how we measure things or from some other cause).
I also wonder about the impact of working low-level salaried corporate drone jobs with long time horizons for possible eventual promotion relative to more hands-on, hourly pay type trade skills where more hours worked generally means more money (as in overtime). I suspect things like the lazy girl job phenomenon or quiet quitting were a reaction to this. Meanwhile, trade-skill-type folks seem happier (at least until their 50s when their body starts breaking down).
I don’t think that’s right. I think that understanding how structural features of society work is actually importantly empowering, for getting you to focus on the actual levers of change, rather than just dashing yourself against the rocks in battles of wills with the people who aren’t even making the relevant decisions.
Now I think too many people do read structural things as deterministic, rather than using them to focus on where change is possible.
Honestly the kind of only structural factors matter on the left is kind of frustrating. Like you would think no one is capable of making good decisions for themselves in any context judged by left social media discourse.
I mean everyone loves an academic sounding way of excusing our bad behavior.
This is true, but I was also struck by Matt's final para - it describes so well the way the world feels right now, with people constantly complaining but also just accepting what they profess to dislike rather than trying to change anything, even only in the context of their own lives.
Dopamine culture- complaining feels good right now, working hard to try to change things only has a chance of turning out to feel good after a long time of sucking. If you fix things, you miss out on all that fun complaining!
Totally agree but IMO it’s even more insidious. In the past couple of years two of my friends—middle aged women like me—have killed themselves. It was and is shocking; I have since learned that at least in one case there was serious marital strain. Of course it’s impossible to know the thought process, but to see that as the only way out of pain is beyond tragic.
I have to give the members of Congress who are quitting the benefit of the doubt, however—they kept hammering away for years trying to get something done until they just burned out. One of our best Congressmen is taking this route. I disagree with Matt: there's no reason to expect long-term elected public servants to just keep sacrificing their lives forever.
And the science isn’t directly about “free will” - it’s about a lot of things that are clearly related, but the central conceptual challenge for free will has been clear since antiquity. Either will is law like or it isn’t. If it is, that seems to rigid for freeness, and if it isn’t, that seems to fragile for will.
I used to engage in debates about free will frequently. (I was/am the “no free will” person.) Those debates sometimes felt like real differences of understanding of the universe, but more often like differences of semantics.
Either way, my version of “no free will” is consistent with MY’s take here that individual decisions have a huge impact on the course of history (as does context, ofc), which I fully agree with.
Big forces of history shape things. So do individual choices. Whether any of that is shaped by “free will” is a separate, fascinating, probably less important question.
Structural framings are just a tool to understand social phenomena. Too many people assert it is THE tool to understand social phenomena. That is the lazy and popular reductionist way so many people frame things.
This is a half-baked thought but I wonder if, just as quantification/optimization have killed a lot of people's interest in sports, over-understanding the quant side of politics has made people feel helpless. Pre Nate Silver I really believed every close election was kind of up for grabs if we just fought hard enough. Now you can chalk a lot of that up to youthful naivete but I do think understanding the structural factors and how hard they are to overcome increased the speed and depth of my transition into "eh, what can ya do" quietism.
It's also made me chiller. Both parties will win about half the time. I mentally expect it, feel fortunate if it's our turn to win, and when we lose, figure we'll win again soon.
We’ve spoken in this space before about how conflict-averse the younger generations are. We’ve got a lot of very gifted room-readers and not enough people who are willing to get dragged on Twitter for a day or two.
It could in part, depending on the influence of their younger staff. I often can only understand a tremendous amount of stuff that happened with Fortune 500 companies and other large institutions between 2014 and 2022 by concluding that their management had no real understanding of how social media worked and were thus absurdly deferential to their (usually much younger on average) marketing/media relations staff.
This column is very much the MY equivalent of Randal's speech in Clerks:
"You sound like an asshole! Jesus, nobody twisted your arm to be here today. You're here of your own volition. You like to think the weight of the world rests on your shoulders. Like this place would fall apart if Dante wasn't here. Jesus, you overcompensate for having what's basically a monkey's job. You push fucking buttons. Anybody can waltz in here and do our jobs. You... You're so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic, so much more important than it really is. Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add! I work in a shitty video store, badly as well."
The piece is aimed directly at those members of Congress Matt has spoken to over the past five years—last paragraph. They’re the “we” here, members of a political party and governing body who >can< make decisions that alter political history. He’s saying, in effect, you lack agency only because you’re choosing not to recognize that you have it, so get it in gear and start acting as if winning elections and having power matters. It’s telling that he mentions how Dems effectively threw the 1908 election to Repubs by running a weak candidate. The implied question being, will they do the same in 2024 when they’re fully capable of choosing not to?
The actions of an individual member of Congress other than maybe the speaker or appropriations chair generally have a trivial effect upon policy and a significant effect on said member’s career
Because everyone here is a huge nerd, I have a related boardgame recommendation.
Bull Moose: 1912 Election Game is a lot of fun. You can play as either the big 3 candidates or Eugene Devs or even the Prohibition Party candidate. It's a lot of fun and packed with a ton of details about the events, factions, and political geography of the time. It doesn't take too long, and is a lot of fun.
Wow, I've never heard of that one before! For election games, I own "1960: The Making of the President" (GMT edition), "Campaign Trail" (deluxe edition), "Corrupt Bargain: The 1824 Presidential Election," "Divided Republic," and "Mr. President" (3M edition, not to be confused with the very different GMT game, which I also own).
Mr President is a great game! Glad to see a fellow owner.
My grandparents had it in their garage when I was a kid, and I actually bonded with my college best friend over the fact that neither of us had ever met anyone else who'd played the game except each other. We used to play in the common room of the dorm.
This article is well-timed given that Democratic US Senator Bob Menendez has been found guilty of all corruption charges. Of course, the reason Democrats will now have egg on their face over having a sitting Senator convicted is because they chose to stand by the obviously corrupt Menendez in 2018 even though they didn't have to. Democrats, both in the state party in NJ and in the Senate, could have shown some spine and backed a challenger and we would have been spared this embarrassment. After all, it probably would've worked. In 2018, a nobody barely running a campaign managed to get 38% of the vote against Menendez in the Dem primary. A real challenger almost certainly would have beat him.
Thankfully, we do have Andy Kim, a Democrat who was unafraid to challenge the machine (that tried to push Phil Murphy's wife as a contingency in place of Menendez) and New Jersey Democrats will have a Senator who could one day be a serious contender for the presidency or vice presidency or will at the very least end up being a high-ranking Senator.
It's amazing what can happen when you realize you don't have to stick with some old, arrogant prick due to outdated concepts of "incumbency advantage" or "party unity" and are willing to take some risk and try to aim for something better.
Looks to me like shitty policies but ones that may be political savvy at this point. I think in general rent control tends to be popular among voters (they like the idea of not paying higher rent and don’t necessarily understand the negative knock on consequences).
It's not politically savvy because people aren't paying attention to the particular policies. They're seeing the Democratic nominee not just as a "senile old man" now but as as a "senile old man controlled by the far left".
And it's not even like Bernie or AOC or the Biden campaign are even trying to pretend that's not the case.
I haven't actually seen relevant polling in swing states, but I wouldn't expect that homeowners will be significantly more or less supportive of rent control than other voters.
What political agency do I have as one of 140,000,000 voters? Not much. Indeed, it’s probably better to focus on private matters like my family and law practice than to seek increases in my political agency. Even if I increased my political agency by two orders of magnitude, sensible politicians would still ignore me.
This is the problem with thinking of voting as an individual act, rather than a collective made up of individual acts. We tell people to vote by making up myths about a single vote deciding elections, which no one has a genuine example of. But if people don’t vote, they concede power to those (collectively) who do.
I have a genuine example of a Texas state rep winning a primary by a single voter (_maybe_ it was 2 votes, but I think it was 1)
5 candidates in the primary (new district in Austin, gerrymandered to be the Republican district in Austin). With 5 candidates, it went to a runoff between the top 2 vote getters.
The runoff was lost by a few hundred votes. The losing candidate(B) quite reasonably called for a recount. Afterwards it was discovered that that candidate had _won_ by 8 votes. The other candidate(A) quite reasonably wanted to double check it.
Turns out 7 people had voted in the Democratic primary but the Republican runoff. And candidate B was the more moderate candidate, so those people were more likely to have voted for B. They were called before a judge and had to testify how they had voted (I learned that _that_ was a thing) so their votes could be stricken. B, B, B, B etc so the vote margin kept shrinking, but the last person had in fact voted for A, and so in the end, it was a 1 vote difference (plausibly a win by 2 but if you switch your vote from A->B that turns a win by 2 into a tie, which is still 1 voter)
Candidate B went on to win the general, and later a statewide office, where the earlier victory certainly helped. So there's a contingent case that the statewide office depended on that one vote much earlier.
The House district my parents live in had a primary decided by a single-digit number of votes this year (after originally being a tie, pre-recount). It happens.
As long as voting feels good, it is individually rational. If it doesn’t feel too bad, it might be in division rational even if it’s efficacy is slight
It's true that it's hard to increase one's national political agency, but you'd be shocked at how quickly one can increase one's local political agency. My mother got involved in local politics when I was little by helping organize the campaign to build a new public library, and she is now one of the most influential people in our town even though she's never run for anything. She's had a genuine impact on our city's amenities and policies and for the most part, the candidates for local office she supports get elected. Why? Because only a few thousand people are needed to elect city council and mayoral candidates in the vast majority of places and she's done the networking to be able to influence key people that make the thousand show up for her candidates.
We do a real disservice to ourselves by focusing too much on our membership in the national polity and not enough on city, county, and state civics.
Honestly assuming a Straussian reading where Matt’s making a point about the assassins reflecting individual agency, that seems both banal and not even obviously correct. Banal because “Well, yes. Duh. What’s your point?”, not even obviously correct because most would-be assassins probably are, in fact, either stopped or deterred by the Secret Service and that’s why everyone’s mad at the security fuck up (i.e. most of their putative agency is going to be moot and ineffective).
Matt also treats them as being of a piece but there’s a wide gulf between agency and contingency here. An assassination *attempt* reflects agency, but the contingent factors of which they are unaware allowing it to get closer to succeeding than would be expected are (from the perspective of the agent) indistinguishable from dumb luck and have no bearing on the issue of “agency” except to the extent that they inform the would-be assassin’s or other agen’t actions.
I think it's also interesting to consider whether the shooter was trying for a headshot on Trump. Not that a headshot would be unreasonable with a rifle at < 200 yards (even using iron sights; I haven't seen an open source report on if he had a scope or not). If he'd gone for center mass (or slightly lower) to observe impacts and walk them up as necessary (and assuming Trump wasn't wearing body armor with hard plates), I think even a civilian with minimal training on a cheap AR could have gotten off 10-15 aimed rounds in 3-5 seconds (vs. the 8 that reportedly were fired), and probably would have had 5+ torso hits (assuming the teleprompter/podium wouldn't block any).
My point is that part of the contingency here may have been a immature/video game driven obsession with achieving a headshot vs. a realistic assessment of the shooter's own marksmanship abilities and equipment quality and strengths (i.e. speed of semi-auto fire over precision).
All the diagrams of the incident that I've seen (see, e.g., https://images.wsj.net/im-979968?width=780&height=520) have the shooter being at a near right angle to Trump, so a headshot would have made the most sense -- aiming lower would more likely hit his shoulder or arm instead of his torso.
Last time I shot an AR-15, it was at an indoor range. I managed to get 8 out of 10 shots within the 4 inch circle from 25 yards, but that range is very short and I wasn’t about to receive return fire. A head shot from 150 yards has to be tough even with no wind. There’s no way he had a wind gauge, is there?
Correct. If a non-elite wants to make a big impact on the world, he couldn’t do much better than Princip. Of course Princip got hundreds of thousands of Serbs killed. He cracked eggs and got more egg shells than omlette.
Great post! I definitely consider myself on the left because I think the right has no real moral end but the deterministic structuralism that dominates a lot of left wing analysis is really off putting. Part of it comes from a sort of moral cowardice but a lot of it comes from the prevailing individual psychologies of left wing intellectuals. There's a desire to describe the world through an analytical and objective framework that overwhelms peoples natural intuition and senses. Of course it's true that a lot of what happens is the result of people choosing to do stuff when a different person with a different personality would have chosen to do something else but that's too scary and messy to accept. Hence all the 'theory'.
Excellent point...I would also add that the left wants to help people using government funds, and it is much easier to sell that idea if you can convince voters that their situation is not their fault (everyone wants to help victims of national disaster....homeless folks who have mental health and substance abuse issues - not so much). So creating a world were everyone is a victim of circumstance is probably helpful in terms of advancing policy.
I agree that most folks are not totally at fault for their situation (or, more accurately, are only partially at fault typically). That said, nuance loses debates, so developing a view of the universe where everyone's situations result from larger forces beyond their control is helpful. It is likely even true, given that the most significant determinants of success are probably factors like the country you were born in and who your parents are.
To Matt's point, your insight is also probably another reason why intelligent people who think about these things, such as government or non-profit employees, tend to have such an overly determined view of the world.
I read your link to your earlier post about the New Deal and enjoyed reading it, but you made one slight error: Harold Ickes was a strong supporter of equal rights for black Americans--and other "out" groups--but he was head of the PWA, not the WPA. Harry Hopkins headed the WPA. By the way, a catch phrase of the 30s was "I'll bet you $23.80", which was the WPA's weekly pay check. About the only time blacks got "white pay" was when they worked for the federal government.
This will seem melodramatic / Godwin's Law, but I have a better, first-hand appreciation of what happened in Germany. At least the Germans had the horrible decade of the 20s as an excuse. We just are tribal and easily manipulated.
One of the reasons modern German history is so interesting is it's a perfect case study to challenge the preconceptions and theories of both those who lean heavily on structural determinism and those who lean more towards individual agency explanations.
And that applies if you're looking at the improvisational style of Hitler as he calculated in the moment whether to be more aggressive or trim his sails, depending on how much pushback he got and how lucky he felt that day. Or at the individuals at ground level who carried out the Holocaust, as detailed in books like Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning -- were they the world's greatest coincidental collection of moral cowards and bad people, all together in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just ordinary people like the rest of us, reacting to the context in which they found themselves and carried along by structural forces much larger than them?
It's been a long time since I read it, but I as a work of history I thought it was amateurish and unpersuasive. It read more like a history written by a prosecuting lawyer than a genuine attempt to understand what happened and follow the evidence wherever it led. The gist of it seemed to be that the Holocaust happened because the Germans were (and perhaps still are) irredeemably evil as a people, and thank God we're not like them.
Ah. My memory (also from long ago) was that he was taking on the thesis that the German populace didn't know what was going on. He set out to prove that yes, they did.
From my perspective, it wasn't that the Germans were anything especially evil. But the German population as a whole wasn't innocent, as many tried to argue.
Slavery in the US, Stalin's purges, Cultural Revolution, Khmer Ruge [sp] - everyone is capable of great evil.
There is a good book called “the German war” which is largely composed of letters to soldiers and soldiers back to the home front in nazi germany. It really takes the cartoonish nature out of everything about that time and makes it much more real.
> We all exist in a particular context and our decisions, of course, are influenced by that.
Speak for yourself - I fell out of a coconut tree.
“Speak for yourself - I fell out of a coconut tree.”
Speaking for the coconut tree, I’d say: “Am I not a context?”
It actually seems pretty colonialist to deny the contextuality of the coconut tree now that you mention it.
"...seems pretty colonialist...."
Right, and let's not even get into the implicit color-coding in her mother's warning.
You're joking, but I've seen a few people giving Matt grief over his coconut emojis in his Twitter handle.
And gravity chimes in, "Dude, you didn't just 'fall' -- you were *pulled*, by moi."
I’m ashamed to say I don’t get the reference.
"You didn't fall out of a coconut tree" is a saying Kamala Harris attributes to her mother -- falling out of a tree, for some reason, being the opposite of living in your context. It's become a meme among Harris fans.
See Glamour ( https://www.glamour.com/story/whats-the-deal-with-kamala-harris-and-the-coconut-tree ) or Vox ( https://www.vox.com/kamala-harris/359072/kamala-harris-coconut-tree-context-unburden-meme-khive )
I think the reason behind it is that coconuts famously fall out of trees pretty randomly and without warning, hence the "urban legend" about deaths by coconuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut#
I put urban legend in quotes because the numbers are exaggerated but people do in fact actually die from coconuts falling on their heads.
I feel like the grief Kamala's gotten for that expression is pretty indicative of the way we apply different standards to different people. If some Southern boy told a parable about the importance of his roots, most of the media would find it charming. Whereas when Kamala tells a kind of goofy anecdote about an expression that's particular to her South Asian ancestors, a lot of media figures act like she's out of touch. (To be fair, the way she went on to describe the "moral of the story" was pretty tangled up in academese. But I feel like anyone that hears the whole clip, gets the point.) And then her fans have kind of over-reacted to that by embracing it, similar to the Dark Brandon meme.
I agree with this - when I saw the clip after hearing so many references to it I was left wondering what was so odd about it, aside from it being a bit of sharp jolt to something light hearted in the middle of a serious toned discussion. That said, I do think part of the reason people jumped on it is because Kamala has earned herself a reputation for garbled / goofy speeches and taking that story out of context fit the narrative. But that reputation didn’t fall out of a coconut tree…
Yeah. It's frustrating. I quite like Kamala and I think she'd be a good president. (Her niece was a fellow member of the Peninsula Young Democrats board with me, ~20 years ago when she was the SF DA. I met her a few times.) But she doesn't have the natural code-switching skills of an Obama.
Yeah, I really don’t think people would be snarkily meming JD Vance or someone for saying he didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, or was born at night not last night; to me the hubbub around coconut trees feels pretty racist.
You became unburdened from what has been.
I'd love to understand how the Democratic Party became such a calcified institution, where risk aversion borders on self-parody and senior leaders routinely serve into their 80s and 90s or literally die in office.
For example, the unity Biden's team has shown around him I think is pretty extraordinary. I believe at this point a majority of *Democrats* say Biden is too old and they want a new nominee, yet literally zero officials have resigned and called for a change.
This does seem to be an issue that is generally restricted to federal government. As we all know, there is a very deep bench of young governors who are ready to be the fresh face of the party. The problem of course is that this is masked by our federal gerontocracy.
I think part of the problem is that being a house representative is a pretty terrible job, being an executive of some kind seems much more rewarding for the politically ambitious. I think I'd rather be the mayor of a mid-sized city than a rep. For every AOC you have several faceless and irrelevant young reps who no one has ever heard of, e.g. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) who might occasionally pop up if Pod Save America comes to Florida or something but otherwise has achieved very little in the way of gaining a national profile.
This is so depressing. Why would we want people to aim to pop in the House as opposed to working on important legislation to improve the US?
Feels like we want/reward all the wrong behaviors from our representatives.
Part of why being a rep is such a bad job is that actually working on legislation is difficult-to-impossible for junior members unless they happen to wield a lot of clout from a large national profile like AOC. You're supposed to pay your dues before you get a chance to do anything real, which can take decades in the current system.
I think is argument really depends on where the Member is coming from before they entered Congress. Maybe it's a crappy job if they were once a Mayor or Governor or high powered exec. But Maxwell Frost is in his 20s and he's got a whole bunch of time to advance his profile. Meanwhile, he can keep accumulating social media followers and cash a pretty nice check.
This isn't true! Try to craft a bill that improves HUD, or that addresses some of the major issues the department of the interior has been struggling with for decades. Be a major actor in Secret Congress!
You won't get a limelight, but you can have a major impact on making things better.
A very common bit of received wisdom is that it would be better to have smaller districts and a much larger house, so that people get more fine-grained representation/a closer connection to their rep.
But this thread makes me wonder if the opposite is true: a smaller house, with more power and agency in individual reps, might have some surprising benefits in terms of rewarding ambition and being attractive to more ambitious, energetic candidates.
I think of someone like Adam Schiff. A no-name backbencher representative who found an opening in leading the fight against Trump in the House, leveraged that into huge name recognition, rode that wave to a guaranteed California Senate seat in November and then who knows? -- Governor? VP nominee? It's not a guaranteed path for everyone but it *is* a path.
Part of the point is that he had to wait 20 years to do so, because committee chairs take at least 10 years to obtain.
Mayor of a mid-size city is a dead end, though, if you're ultimate dream is to become president (and a lot of mayors are almost powerless).
H L Mencken said that the status of a congressman was about the same as a hog
Average age of state governors has gone up recently at a similar rate to the increases in average age for congress. They've all gone up a lot since 2000 after very slow increases over the course of the 20th century.
Also in the past 20 years, age 65+ workers have quickly gotten to the point where they now earn nearly as much as prime age workers, per hour, which is a big shift from the 20th century economy.
Not to be too structuralist about it, but it looks to me like something bigger is going on.
(I, as always, blame technology. All the young people are goofing off on their phones all the time so older workers/leaders win by default.)
I assume it’s about greater health meaning that a much higher percentage of people remain functioning at a high level up to 65 and beyond (with a side of more jobs being mental rather than physical).
I generally agree with this NYT take: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/opinion/america-gerontocracy-biden-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7U0.tilh.8j7vYnpP9Q3L&smid=url-share
Also, there something about this Boomer generation generally that seems unusually self-important. And perhaps some of the fault lies with Gen X, for not standing up for itself.
The 60s were a huge deal!
Maybe not the 60s but the drop drills, parents who fought in WWII, global shame over the holocaust and to some extent Hiroshima and Nagasaki, grandparents who lived through the Depression (I have been programmed never, ever to waste food) and the Spanish Flu. Awareness that Things Can Go Wrong in one's own individual life, along with a sense of having been incredibly lucky in that regard so far.
Literally none of them ran for president though....
The Republicans are not much better. Only a few of them actually broke with Trump -- Romney (eventually), Sasse, Flake, Liz Cheney -- while the rest hang onto their positions.
Leadership is hard.
Why would they break with Trump? He may be a grifter but his ideas are popular and even the Biden administration has adopted some of them. Can the Democratic Party win a policy debate on why letting 10+ million illegals during Biden’s term was a good idea in the court of public opinion? Of course, Trump has many bad ideas that must be rejected. The Republican Party’s biggest vulnerability is abortion but Trump has downplayed it’s importance in this election, having successfully delivered the repeal of Roe Vs Wade.
Has he successfully downplayed the significance of abortion? Overturning Roe was incredibly unpopular and he was the guy who did it. If democrats get a competent person at the head of the ticket, I think that is a great case to prosecute him on.
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/07/15/rnc-live-updates-coverage/anti-abortion-advocate-stop-protest-00168280
Is stopping intra-party fighting by getting shot at the same as successfully downplaying the significance of this issue? At best your argument would be it is too soon to say
I was pointing to multiple facts in the article that Trump has made changes in the language in the Republican Party’s platform on abortion and LGBT to expand the tent. Some will grumble but they like to win more than be a stickler for what’s in the platform.
>Why would they break with Trump?<
Perhaps because he tried to overthrow the government, and in general he favors a lot of things that are bad for the country?
I don’t think you need to convince me that Trump the individual is unfit for office. His ideas are not. He also favors a lot of things that are good for the country and are popular. Why did the Biden administration continue with his policies on trade with China? After letting in 10+ million immigrants why did he issue an executive order after repealing the same one on day 1 (or week)? The fact is that the Democratic Party’s leadership is weak and the ideas are stale. Someone with Trump’s policies but without his personal negatives would absolutely wipe the floor with any generic Democrat.
Trump doesn’t have policies, that’s what’s popular (most Americans aren’t into policies anyway). He was not successful in controlling the border situation when he was President (except during the pandemic), only in exploiting it. He prevented Congress and President Biden from increasing funding for border security because he wanted to use the chaos as a campaign issue. As for China trade, Biden continued the restrictions placed by Trump and seems to be adding some of his own, while Trump seems to have made nice with Xi, who appears now to be an ally of his buddy Putin. Trump is also pro-Tiktok now.
Trump’s main appeal is that he demands nothing from people, which makes him the perfect vehicle for incoherent anger and confusion that so many people apparently feel now.
> He was not successful in controlling the border situation when he was President (except during the pandemic), only in exploiting it.
The Biden administration came into power during the pandemic and chose not to continue Trump's pandemic era policies on border control. This was a self inflicted wound.
> He prevented Congress and President Biden from increasing funding for border security because he wanted to use the chaos as a campaign issue
True but what's also true is that the Biden administration was sitting on it's ass for 3+ years before it became an election year issue. It must feel terrible as a Democrat but it's actually good politics.
Being unfit for office seems like enough to break with a guy. The Senate could have just convicted Trump after 1/6 and kept any of the ideas they liked.
He was unfit for office right from the beginning, not after Jan 6th 2021.
I think Biden too is unfit for office for different reasons but I don't see any serious conversation around using the 25th amendment. Even smart people like MattY and Josh Barro were supporting his reelection till the debate even though issues with Biden's age and senility were plain obvious to normies like me at least a year ago.
Are the two issues China and immigration? This is a really interesting and terrible way of boiling down the stakes to say Democrats have no good ideas, particularly on a blog that regularly covers why the Trump policies would be bad. For example, negotiating prescription drug prices is good, having access to abortion is good, the IRA is good, and the child tax credit was good. None of these are stale. If anything, going back to tariffs and cutting legal immigration are centuries old, stale ideas.
There are other issues like trans, DEI and AA, where Democrats are on the wrong side of public opinion. The IRA is good in the opinion of wonks but few voters care about what’s in it. The child tax credit exists in different forms in other developed countries and has zero impact on fertility rates. So, wonks and others may believe that it is a new and innovative idea but that’s not true. It is stale and borrowed and hasn’t worked anywhere. Negotiating drug prices is again a borrowed idea from other countries but not comparable to supply side and regulatory reforms in terms of effectiveness. Biden is also raising tariffs. If they are so bad, why is he doing it? Rent control is the most recent idiocy, almost universally discredited by economists.
Look, you asked why they would break with Trump and people are answering you: he's a bad candidate, an unpopular guy and a poor leader. Other people with comparable ideas would outperform him electorally.
He’s popular in the Republican Party. Biden is unpopular but still the Democratic politicians are unable to force him out. Only 33% of Democrats are happy with Biden as the nominee vs 71% of Republicans with Trump. The risk for Republican politicians in acting against Trump is much higher as many have found out.
Most actual polling on the "generic ballot" currently shows generic Democrat beating generic Republican by about a point. The average gap across all generic polling is about 0.2% in favor of generic Republican.
The gap shifts back and forth quickly, but it's usually inside 1%. I would also check your "10 Million" figure, which appears to be a Republican talking point concoction rather than based on correct and consistent reading of the data.
But all that said, I think there is no question that fixing the asylum system and more aggressively addressing the dynamics that have led to the huge surge in border encounters should have been a much higher priority for the Biden administration, even with Republicans determined to block progress in order to "preserve" the chaos for Trump to use electorally. This clearly seems like a case of the Democratic party failing to use 2020-2022 to neutralize an issue that they knew or should have known would come back to haunt them. It might even have allowed them to the keep the House in 2022 given how close the result was. At the very least it was terrible political strategy. Always co-opt your opponent's best issue if you can.
I totally agree with your last point. Democrats could have neutralized Trump after he won in 2016 by moderating on illegal immigration. For legal immigration and against illegal immigration is the policy sweet spot with moderates and independents but Democrats have failed so badly on the issue of illegal immigration that Trump will use this opportunity to shut down or lower legal immigration as well.
This is a new commenter posting lots of dumb takes FYI.
Everyone on this blog is so smart, including MattY, that they had to wait till the debate to find out something that has been so obvious to dumb normies that Biden is not fit for the job now, let alone 4 more years.
I don't think there's much reason for them to break with Trump NOW but there was plenty of reason once he lost the election, at which time he was extremely unpopular and, as mentioned, had just lost an election, not to mention made many of them huddle in a secure basement beneath the Capitol building through his irresponsible decisionmaking.
He was not extremely unpopular among Republican voters after he lost because they believed his “election was stolen” nonsense.
How many of the elected officials actually believed that?
Irrelevant. What matters is whether they could justify their vote to impeach Trump to Republican primary voters. Everyone who voted to impeach Trump either retired or got primaried. So, I would say their political instincts were pretty good on this.
The number that show up is unknown, but Biden sure could have have Been seen as trying harder, maybe by empowering his first generation immigrant VP to be the tough cop.
Did Sasse ever meaningfully break with Trump? That would be Friday-worthy good news.
He voted to convict at the impeachment trial, so I would call that a "meaningful break".
There’s lots of reporting that Democrat officeholders don’t think Biden or a replacement will beat Trump. I find that too pessimistic. But if somebody really believes it, the smart move is to support Biden. If Biden stands down and his replacement loses, everybody who pushes for Biden to step aside will be blamed. This will temper the normal thermostatic shift against the party in power and lessen democratic performance in the mid-terms and maybe even in 2028. By contrast, if Biden loses, he’ll get all the blame.
To be clear, this isn’t my view. I think Biden should stand down and that Trump can be beaten, even if the odds would still be in his favor.
I think this is a way to rationalize inaction, but also that it is objectively the wrong response. Two years and four years is a long time. And perhaps more importantly, that ``thermostatic shift'' you speak of probably requires losing a close election. If you get blown out in a landslide, people just get depressed. It definitely requires trying to win. If you intentionally tank the US election ... I sincerely hope there is a special place in hell for people who choose to go down that road. This is not the NBA draft.
Four years is an eternity. The Republicans got blown out in 1964 and won the Presidency in 1968 (and flip that for 1972/1976).
Four years is a long time, and it is entirely possible that enough crazy stuff happens in those four years that people will just want change and be somewhat hazy on what went on in 2024. I just think there will be those with strong incentives to remind them. (When MY speaks of a Dean Phillips 2028 super pac, I think he is 83% joking...) And that is the ``good'' outcome.
That's some 12 dimensional chess.
Here's another way of thinking about it: If Biden is adamant that he's going to stay, it's really really hard to remove him. It will tear the party apart. And there's the collective action problem -- you may be isolated out there if not enough other party members join you.
This really isn't on the Democratic party. If Biden stays, it's on Biden. If he wins, fantastic. If he loses, we know what the first page in the history books on him will be.
I don't really buy that it will tear the party apart. The issues that do that are those that don't go away. This is a solvable problem, and resolving it can only be good for party unity.
As an Independent voter, why should I ever trust a party that knowingly nominates a candidate who is clearly not physically and mentally fit for the job now, let alone another 4 years?
It's the nature of the party that represents the class of society with the most to lose, i.e. the educated upper middle class, to be conservative. And that's exactly what we see in the parties today.
The Democratic Party is the risk-averse conservative party railing against changes happening around them. The world doesn't look like it used to. The old ways set up nearly 100 years ago, when FDR set the Democratic Party on the path and mental model of how American government and society should be organized it held to for the rest of the 20th century, has run it's course and is breaking up, and it's not clear yet what will replace it. And the Democratic Party, have become an old, conservative party, doesn't know what to do about it or how to react, except to rail against the change.
Not saying Trump's Republican Party knows where it's going either, but it's not fearing change; quite the contrary.
"educated upper middle class" Educated rings more true to me than upper middle class. Dem voter incomes don't skew very differently from Republican voter incomes.
My guess is income / education splits in the US would look basically the same as they did in the latest French election, where the Right had a little more support among lower-income groups and a LOT more support among the lower-educated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_election#Voter_demographics
I think it’s unclear that people are referring to income when they talk about class. Small business owners and the professional managerial class have similar income ranges and might thus both be described as “upper middle class”, but people usually use that phrase for the PMC, which is very Democrat leaning, rather than the small business owners, who are very Republican leaning.
This is a case where the Marxist "your social class is defined by your relationship with the means of production" paradigm is quite useful.
Where's the evidence for this? I can't think of any other party in a democracy, across time and space, with leaders as ancient as Democrats have today. If it was a law of nature there should be lots of examples.
The only situation like Biden I can think of is the early-80s Soviet Union where 3 elderly leaders in a row died in office of natural causes.
Well, there's Trump and Biden -- call it a wash age-wise.
There's Schumer and McConnell -- slight edge to the Dems
There's Jeffries and Johnson -- pretty much a wash.
So after a lot of thinking, I could think of another party in a democracy, across time and space, with leaders as ancient as Democrats have today.
West Germany's first chancellor stayed in office until he was 87 (and in a parliamentary system, too).
Let me add that he was a long serving and well respected chancellor who was, in the end, pushed out by his own side, and not too happy about it. (I recently saw a political cartoon from that time in a German museum that roughly translates to ``Siegfried's rescue'': in the cartoon, the old man is trying to knife his successor, but is prevented from doing so by a lady wearing a CDU cape, representing his own party.)
Democracy hasn’t been around that long. And there’s the issue of the US being the only democratic “superpower” that has ever existed. American exceptionalism isn’t completely a myth.
Vichy France was led by an old fart.
"Conservative" isn't a very accurate word for describing a center-left party with a rising class populism (not unlike William Jennings Bryan) against the political economy status quo. "Gentry" might be the more accurate term. I've heard Democrats described as the "party of the court" compared to the Republican "party of the country"; this might echo what you're saying about disposition towards change.
I also suspect this timing on the 20th century is off. The divide on the national security/media issue in politics really goes back to right after WW2, when McCarthyism helped Republicans get on board with NATO and some form of the national security state created during WW2. For the oldest generation of Democrats, that's the only 20th century they know. But this ignores the first third of the 20th century before WW2/New Deal, or caricatures it as decadence before the storm, which is the same thing as ignorance.
So there's a gentry worldview that the main problem in American politics is populists who don't like the spending on NATO, but at the same time is pretty content to keep US military spending where it is or slightly lower. This isn't an inherently conservative instinct so much as risk aversion, as you correctly note. To leave well enough alone, and insist on the particular customs and eccentric phrases, like an Old Tory politician, over substance when asked about what to do with new problems.
As someone whose been risk-averse all my life, the risk of losing is my main reason for not being too enthusiastic about switching horses in mid-stream. Unfortunately, there's no way to really assess that risk: we can argue about polls and voter psychology forever but who knows.
Apropos of "risk aversion" I just learned from the book "Light Eaters" that some plant species and some animal communities (i.e. chipmunks) demonstrate a range of risk aversion within a given population. The bold ones have more offspring, but die sooner; the cautious ones have fewer offspring but live longer. So yeah, maybe risk aversion has just become endemic in Democrats (although FDR himself was willing to take risks.)
Dems are risk averse (but that also extends down to its membership too for various reasons) but the core identity of the Republican Party is railing against social and economic changes happening today. Trump's appeal, even in issues he bucks against the 2000s conservative consensus, is based on revulsion toward broader societal changes such as the new focus on LGBT rights and the shift toward white collar service work.
Maybe people are afraid of speaking too harshly about the effects of age because they don’t want to be disinherited.
I certainly think that, if we had a big war, lots of middle age officers would rise to high positions fairly quickly. Peace and compounding financial returns favor the old.
"For example, the unity Biden's team has shown around him I think is pretty extraordinary"
Their employment and power derive from Biden. This was discussed in 2020 when Biden was becoming the nominee, that there was zero incentive for anyone to declare he was serving one term as a transition; because he would be a lame duck and his whole staff would be hopping to look for a job midway through his term. Biden's team's interest aligns with Biden staying in power.
Having a job doesn't guarantee you hold on no matter what; plenty of people resigned from Trump's administration and indeed from Biden's too over Gaza. Biden's team is increasingly writing its name in history as the people who handed Donald Trump a second term and potentially a trifecta and I'm surprised they all seem to be committed to this.
“ plenty of people resigned from Trump's administration and indeed from Biden's too over Gaza.”
Any of the braintrust resign? Trump famously didn’t have a team of anybody he actually knew or who he was beholden do because he was not really politically active before his victory.
Democrats have been dinged by nominating leftists in the past. Democrats have a fractious coalition where they both have to appeal to moderates and appeal to vote losing leftists who will run insurgent efforts to drive down voter turnout in swing states (Sanders and Nader). The median voter is substantially more socially conservative than the donor class, so unknown quantities are riskier.
There is a lot more downside risk than upside risk for Democrats based on experience. This promotes a status quo bias.
Just look at the neurotic risk aversion of Democrats during the pandemic.
Just look at the neurotic blindness to risk of Republicans during the worst pandemic of the last 100 years.
Can we all agree that the pandemic was a highly unusual event that people in general didn't know how to deal with, but it's over now, so let's just put it in the grave and move on without refighting these idiotic battles endlessly?
Macron and Zelenskyy are probably the two least risk averse European leaders, and they are both 46.
The jury is still out on just how risk averse Putin and Xi are at the ripe old age of 71.
[Nevermind -- misread the previous comment]
The risk averse thing to do would have been to take one of those turkish planes out of town on day one? What are even talking about?
Sorry, I misread what you were saying!
It seems that one of the most powerful drivers of our politics is the incumbents in Congress are absolutely desperate to stay in office at all times forever. But why? Is the job so much fun? Aren't these intelligent, relatively wealthy people who could succeed in lots of things? Why compromise every principle under the sun just to get your 4th term as a backbench house member from Oregon?
Ironically one of the senior leaders, Nancy Pelosi, seems to be one of the ones with the judgment to realize that Biden needs to go.
Your comment on zero officials having resigned and called for a change seems more appropriate for a parliamentary system in which you have party leaders serving in government. Multiple Democratic members of Congress have called for a change, but why would they resign?
Cabinet members can resign, but that would be a signal that they don't support Biden's actions in his capacity as president, not Biden the nominee. People working on his campaign could resign. That seems like it would highly likely be career suicide, but it is also what makes it a strong signal. Pelosi has stature and significantly less to lose than some of her colleagues.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691248554/the-hollow-parties
This book was written primarily to answer that question. I highly recommend it. Matt used it to help write his "The Parties Can't Decide" piece a little while ago.
Being under threat naturally leads to risk aversion and a desire for safe choices. This instinct has served Democrats well in that they seem to have tamped down the progressive revolt for now. But I think the unwillingness to forcibly unseat Biden is part of that same instinct. It's not over until the convention though, don't give up hope yet.
Valuing seniority above merit and ability to do the job seems like an aspect of unions, maybe especially teachers' unions. If the democrats are heavily entwined with union leaders, it's not too surprising that they would pick up aspects of union culture.
Are democrats and republicans in any way different on the age of their leadership?
1) Being like the current Republican party is not the bar for success
2) Trump is 3 years younger, and entered politics 40 years later than, Biden; Harris is 20 years older than JD Vance; Pelosi is arguably still the most powerful Democratic house member and she's 30 years older than Johnson (Jeffries is 1 year older than him). Schumer is 7 years younger than Mitch but Mitch is stepping down.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying it’s ok for the democrats to be like this because the republicans are. I’m just saying that this isn’t a problem that is any way unique to the democrats. The two parties are approximately equally dominated by the old.
This is *not* the *only* reason, just one: Gerrymandering means if you can win your first two elections, you're in for as long as you want. Winning your first election is the hardest thing, and you'll always be vulnerable in your first reelect. By the time you've been in for 8, 10, 12 years, you probably dominate the local party network (I won't say machine, because it's not that organized), and anyone who challenges you (or endorses a challenger) isn't going to win AND makes themselves a non-entity in any city council or state legislative races where they could bide their time until you retire.
One thing that strikes me so deeply about this time is just the total lack of moral fiber and courage. My god - Democrats are just willing to roll over and accept a Trump win. Both parties are so fundamentally broken.
“Democrats are just willing to roll over and accept a Trump win. ”
For many of them, the consequences will not be too grave.
I wish that they would think about the Ukrainians, for whom Trump’s win will mean death and enslavement. And the next victims of Putin’s emboldened imperialism.
And the Taiwanese, whom Trump will also happily sell into slavery when the Chinese meet his price.
Their frivolity and comfort are going to get a lot of people killed.
"And the Taiwanese, whom Trump will also happily sell into slavery when the Chinese meet his price."
Let's be real. Nothing about Biden or his team points to getting into an actual shooting war with the Chinese over Taiwan. They've been petrified of the Ukranians making Putin angry, but the US is going to fight the Chinese in their backyard? Seems preposterous.
Biden has pursued a policy of strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan, just like every administration since the 1940’s. That policy has helped to keep Taiwan free so far.
Trump will pursue a policy of lining his pockets, as he did in his first administration, and that is worse than strategic ambiguity.
>Biden has pursued a policy of strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan<
That was the policy pre Biden. It seems to me plainly the case that Biden has sought to banish ambiguity in favor of certainty. His aides haven't been enthusiastic, mind you, but they're not the commander in chief. He is:
https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-says-us-forces-would-defend-taiwan-event-chinese-invasion-2022-09-18/
I honestly think nobody knows exactly what to do or what we should do if China invades Taiwan. There's also going to be a massive push from the American business community and donors, and big tech, to do very little (because a hot war against China will result in massive losses for all the businesses who currently have significant supply chains and/or customer bases in China). I think the definitive pronouncements in this thread about both Biden and Trump are highly over-confident.
Most of the policy decisions on China in recent years have been the exact opposite of what you'd expect the Chamber of Commerce to want. They generally want a free hand to sell to, buy from, invest in, accept capital from anywhere, with as little government interference as possible. Certainly the actions of the last two administrations have on balance rendered making money in the world's second largest economy more, not less, challenging.
But as it happens, I think the opinions of business leaders aren't likely to matter much either way in the event of an actual shooting war because there won't be enough time to consult them. In our modern age of Executive Branch unilateral decision-making on going to war, orders to the military would surely have to be issued rapidly. In other words, it would be shocking if Congress were consulted, much less the business community! We might even face a preemptive attack from China, so the decision might not be America's to begin with.
I find the idea that America's decision to go to war will be heavily influenced by the business community, donors and big tech to be just the kind of jolt of humor I need on this Tuesday morning.
US "strategic ambiguity" regarding Taiwan is more complicated. In the 1949-50 window, the Truman administration was purportedly prepared to allow a PRC invasion of Taiwan, but after the Korean War started, US support for Taiwan strengthened significantly both in terms of supplying weapons and explicit security guarantees. The modern "strategic ambiguity" dates to Nixon's normalization of relations with China in 1971.
There's zero ambiguity when you don't let a proxy force even take the gloves off against an invading army. Biden's team doesn't have the guts to engage with China directly, they have zero appetite for a direct conflict.
But Trump will happily make a deal with Xi. He has zero reason to defend Taiwan now—he might have suggested that early in his administration when. he had old fashioned Republicans around, but it’s absurd to think he’s stick his neck out for Taiwan—what’s in it for him?
We might or might not voluntarily come to Taiwan's aid. But if (as many believe) China's initial actions in such a war would be include taking out nearby US air and naval capability, then the decision to enter a direct conflict with China will be made for us.
Trumps team has positive appetite for building hotels in China or whatever it is that Xi will offer him to look the other way.
>Nothing about Biden or his team points to getting into an actual shooting war with the Chinese over Taiwan.<
Biden has on multiple occasions stated in the bluntest possible language he will send US forces to fight PLA forces if the later attacks Taiwan. He has also significantly increased the number of US boots on the ground on Taiwan. If those Marines aren't a hot war tripwire, I don't know what is.
Nobody has a crystal ball—maybe Joe would blink at the last moment, who knows? But it's stone inaccurate to claim "nothing" the Biden administration has done suggests a willingness to fight China over Taiwan. *Much* of what they've done suggests exactly that.
All talk. Look at his actions, not his words.
Petrified of the Taliban, so tripped his way out of Afghanistan. Petrified of Putin, so dithered and debated and lost an opportunity to potentially let the Ukranians get into a better position, unless his goal actually was a nasty stalemate. Judging by his actions, Biden's all talk on Taiwan.
Oh brother.
You are missing a huge piece of context, which is that the opinion of the Democratic-aligned foreign policy community is that Europe and the Middle East matter dramatically less than they used to and we need to significantly reduce the resources we commit to both regions in order to pivot to Asia. This has been the view among party elites since at least Obama's first term. It doesn't really have anything to do with Biden. The earnest and sincere opinion of his foreign policy advisors is that the war in Afghanistan was a huge and pointless waste of resources and the sooner we were out the better, and that there is no reason to escalate the war in Ukraine as long as Putin remains bogged down in a quagmire there.
That still doesn’t mean that the US would risk nuclear Armageddon by directly engaging the PLA when they’re tiptoeing around the Russians because of fear of escalation.
Don’t compare him to the almighty, compare him to the alternative. Trump is the one that actually ordered the Afghanistan pullout that people blame Biden for, and Trump was literally impeached for trying to sell Ukraine out to Russia.
I would be very surprised if "slavery" ends up a reasonable description of PRC rule over Taiwan. If the Taiwanese people/government agreed with you that the consequences would be that apocalyptic, we would be in a much safer place!
As bad as a Trump win might be for Ukranians, a country with record deficits during an economic expansion has no business funding a war indefinitely. When there is a resource constraint, policies must be decided based on priorities and Ukraine is neither critical to US national interests, nor is it a part of NATO.
The US can afford to support Ukraine all the way to victory. And that will be a lot cheaper for us in the long run than allowing Putin to take land wherever he wants. Every dollar we spend in Ukraine will pay huge dividends in the future. If we let Putin win, we will pay dearly for it.
I disagree with everything that you said. There's no chance in hell that Ukraine wins against Russia even if we fund the war indefinitely. We are all paying dearly for the irresponsible deficit spending during Trump and Biden terms due to inflation and high interest rates.
This is funny and stupid as shit. The entire USSR could not conquer and hold Afghanistan, yet you consider a small-r Russian victory over Ukraine to be predestined.
I don't recognize you as a SB commentator, but this is very illuminating as to whether I should take you even remotely seriously about any topic. Hint: nope!
Fine with me. DGAF about random people.
Ukraine is incredibly cheap for us. We are eviscerating the military of one of our two near peer adversaries at Coast Guard prices. It’s an insanely good value for us.
Make the case in this election cycle that we need to raise taxes to pay for Ukraine and win elections or stop talking about how cheap it is. It's always cheap when you don't have to pay for it. Give me a few billion dollars, no strings attached, and I'll talk about how cheap it is to own a sports team.
If I'm not mistaken, bipartisan congressional majorities have voted for the aid multiple times.
Yes, that's correct but the Republicans are divided on this issue (more Nos than Yays). Also, no one had to figure out how to pay for it. All of this is going to bite the Democrats in the ass because they care about saving SS and Medicare and the Republicans don't (not the politicians) and high levels of deficits will ensure cuts because people don't like to pay taxes.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/long-awaited-aid-ukraine-israel-taiwan-poised-pass-us-congress-2024-04-23/
"The House passed the Ukraine funding by 311-112, with all "no" votes coming from Republicans, many of whom were bitterly opposed to further assistance for Kyiv. Only 101 Republicans voted for it, forcing Speaker Mike Johnson to rely on Democratic support and prompting calls for his ouster as House leader."
Isn’t Russia invading Europe critical to US national interests? I’m not sure what outside of US borders is if you don’t think that is.
First of all, I would consider it a lie to say that Russia has invaded Europe. Ukraine is not even part of Euro. They applied for Euro membership after the war started. Ukraine is not part of NATO. We're not dependent on Ukraine for anything. Imports from Ukraine are a tiny fraction of total imports and nothing that we can't get from elsewhere. Based on that criteria, it doesn't matter to US national interests if Russia wins the war and Ukraine is forced to surrender some territory to Russia.
I don’t think you’re looking at the context. Whether or not Russia *has* invaded Europe (Crimea definitely seems like part of Europe to me, whether or not the Donbas is), it seems clear that Russian ambitions don’t stop at the border of Ukraine. That fact matters to global interests, and the US has global interests beyond the bare fact of who imports what from where.
Make that argument after Russia invades a NATO country. I have zero interest in Ukraine and care more about deficits than listening to foreign policy experts in DC who have been wrong on so many issues in my adult life.
If I were a 25 year old Ukrainian at risk of being conscripted if the draft is expanded, I would want Trump to win. Better to cede Zaporizhzia than to make me die for it.
/
If I recall correctly, David is pro-Munich.
1. Britain’s position was no weaker in September of ‘39 than at the time of Munich. It was ramping up weapons production as quickly as Germany and had access to US imports.
2. Munich preserved the possibility of peace.
3. Britain and France lacked the ability to defend Poland, they had no hope of keeping Germans out of the Sudatenland.
4. This point isn’t relevant to assessing Chamberlain’s performance at Munich, but Hitler’s taste for conquest is a pretty extreme outlier. Many nations, even empires, have narrow territorial ambitions and will be content when they are achieved. Putin is like Hitler times 0.3 in terms of territorial ambitions.
5. Hitler’s writings showed strong irredentist tendencies, but it was hardly apparent in ‘38 that Hitler would invade Russia. Irredentism was standard fare in European politics, it had been present in French politics before the first world war, and was common in the Balkans.
6. There was no moral imperative to fight Hitler. Hitler wasn’t doing anything to Jews in ‘38 that China isn’t doing to Uighurs today. Yet all major nations today have diplomatic relations with China and seek to avoid war with it.
Relatedly, war was bad for Jewish life expectancies in Europe. Going to war for Poland did little to help the Jews of Warsaw, indeed it probably got more of them killed and almost certainly accelerated their deaths. War tends to be bad for life expectancies of most ethnic groups exposed to it! Best to avoid war and give peace a chance.
7. Britain’s best defense had long been her navy and the Kreigsmarine was pretty wimpy. If Hitler focused on gobbling up slices of central Europe, he might be willing to skimp on naval building, in which case an accommodation might be reached.
Pass.
Correct.
Well, you aren't. And the actions of the Ukrainian people over the past 3+ years illustrate how disgusting (in my opinion) your observations on what Ukrainians should be thinking is.
In our opinion, thanks. David A's opinions are not disgusting merely in your opinion.
Wanting to avoid needless bloodshed is disgusting?
It takes two sides to stop fighting. If the Ukrainians quit fighting, but the Russians don't, then all that happens is the conscripted Ukrainians are now fighting with the Russians against the Poles.
"Needless?" Ukrainians stopping the fight will mean the end of their country, the subjugation of all its people, and who knows what kind of atrocities committed during and after that process.
The bloodshed is only needless because the war is only happening because of a megalomaniac old despot. The Russian & Ukrainian people deserved to live in peace and prosperity.
What do you imagine will happen if Ukraine stops fighting?
You would rather wait to become a 26 year old Russian conscripted just to die fighting your former countrymen in the siege of Lviv, or whatnot?
Russia has made it pretty clear that their aim at the very least is taking over the whole country and installing a puppet government (and very possibly a whole scale annexation down the line with attempted liquidation of Ukrainian national identity) although Russia's inability to make a breakthrough this summer does make that less likely.
Every conscript I met over there was willing to die for Zaporizhzhya. It’s not just about the land. Everyone knows someone in the occupied territories, and everyone who’s worked on the front knows exactly what conquest means. It’s not peace in a new but interchangeable country, it’s Russification, rape, torture, and being conscripted to form another meat assault on your free countrymen. I expect Ukraine would fight a slow and losing retreat absent US aid, but I’m almost certain they wouldn’t stop fighting.
I do think it's worth considering that if Trump clearly had diminished functions and was trailing in the polls, there would likely not be any hand-wringing from elected reps and media pundits. Not excusing Dems here, but worth thinking about when comparing the health of the two parties.
Both parties are in the cancer ward, we need new ones. The dynamism of British politics makes me jealous.
Sometimes you get a Slow Boring piece with a very particular target audience. :)
I know you were trying to reference less obvious examples, but RBG not retiring in 2014 was another huge decision that we will be living with for 30+ years. Or LBJ leaving open two (!) Supreme Court vacancies because of the Abe Fortas debacle.
Isn’t there another Supreme Court justice in the same position right now?
If Sotomayor wants to wait until after the convention and the nomination process, that's fine with me, but I hope she doesn't delay past that.
I'm not holding my breath. As we saw with RBG and we're seeing with Biden now, the egotistical views of many leaders seeing themselves as irreplaceable is a basic force in the universe.
Tale as old as time.
Two actually, if you include Kagan!
How similar is sotomayor’s position? RBG was in her 80s and had pancreatic cancer.
Sotomayor is 70 and has diabetes. Not anywhere near RBG, but if Biden loses, when will we next see a D president and Senate?
Nominating Fortas was a choice by LBJ, but I also think LBJ wouldn't have been LBJ if he didn't believe he could make his personal lackey Chief Justice.
I would submit that Covid in particular played a huge rule in killing popular belief in individual agency. People (particularly Zoomers) have a much more mechanistic view of society now. The lack of control during the shutdowns paired with hypersalient dopamine traps bombarding us more strongly than ever before made it very hard to exercise free will and we've all fallen into terrible habits.
In a strange sense we only see true agency among the elderly. Trump's "power of positive thinking" Boomer narcissism and Biden's Silent Gen Don Quixote intransigence are the closest things to genuine free will that still exist in our chronically anxious and prevaricating culture.
Focus on "structural" issues like racism, inequality, etc. are not helpful framings for individuals trying to navigate the world. The pop-Marxist framing that all change is derived to deterministic economic pressures and anti-liberal frameworks that many in academia teach feed into this Zoomer malaise.
I dunno. My loathing of structural inequality, especially but not only economic, has been very helpful in giving me purpose and activating my agency in at least 3 ways. (1) I became politically active in electoral campaigns, social movements, and issue-based campaigns, (2) I committed to effective altruism, despite having a lot less wealth than most SlowBorers, and (3) I became a teacher because I’m convinced understanding the world helps people navigate it individually and prepares them to struggle collectively.
All that to say that coming to see “structural inequality” as having much more explanatory power than “meritocracy” didn’t de-activate my agency, but quite the opposite. I would be very unmotivated to act much in the world if I believed the world were just and I were merely acting for my own benefit, as I’m quite happy living in a box as long as I can run and read.
I subscribe to Jonathan Haidt's substack and sometimes think of this in the context of youth mental health issues. I think the general lack of agency and the constant bombardment of things they have little to no control over probably contribute to mental health issues (at least if you agree that the issue is legitimate and not some artifact of how we measure things or from some other cause).
I also wonder about the impact of working low-level salaried corporate drone jobs with long time horizons for possible eventual promotion relative to more hands-on, hourly pay type trade skills where more hours worked generally means more money (as in overtime). I suspect things like the lazy girl job phenomenon or quiet quitting were a reaction to this. Meanwhile, trade-skill-type folks seem happier (at least until their 50s when their body starts breaking down).
I don’t think that’s right. I think that understanding how structural features of society work is actually importantly empowering, for getting you to focus on the actual levers of change, rather than just dashing yourself against the rocks in battles of wills with the people who aren’t even making the relevant decisions.
Now I think too many people do read structural things as deterministic, rather than using them to focus on where change is possible.
Honestly the kind of only structural factors matter on the left is kind of frustrating. Like you would think no one is capable of making good decisions for themselves in any context judged by left social media discourse.
I mean everyone loves an academic sounding way of excusing our bad behavior.
Your last sentence is correct. It is the way of the narcissist to say "it's all predestined, man" as they choose to indulge their most base impulses.
This is true, but I was also struck by Matt's final para - it describes so well the way the world feels right now, with people constantly complaining but also just accepting what they profess to dislike rather than trying to change anything, even only in the context of their own lives.
Dopamine culture- complaining feels good right now, working hard to try to change things only has a chance of turning out to feel good after a long time of sucking. If you fix things, you miss out on all that fun complaining!
Totally agree but IMO it’s even more insidious. In the past couple of years two of my friends—middle aged women like me—have killed themselves. It was and is shocking; I have since learned that at least in one case there was serious marital strain. Of course it’s impossible to know the thought process, but to see that as the only way out of pain is beyond tragic.
Omg Linda- I am so sorry to read that. Heartbreaking.
How horrible. I'm so sorry.
Thank you, it was and remains surreal and I think about it all the time, how they could have gotten to that point
I have to give the members of Congress who are quitting the benefit of the doubt, however—they kept hammering away for years trying to get something done until they just burned out. One of our best Congressmen is taking this route. I disagree with Matt: there's no reason to expect long-term elected public servants to just keep sacrificing their lives forever.
Or my favorite, "there's no such thing as free will."
I was about to reply "I absolutely agree there's no such thing as free will" but then decided not to.
I use the illusion of free will to support my hard-wired fate that I will continue to advocate for the concept of free will.
I find the actual science about this both interesting and kind of incomprehensible and people saying shit about it on the internet so infuriating.
And the science isn’t directly about “free will” - it’s about a lot of things that are clearly related, but the central conceptual challenge for free will has been clear since antiquity. Either will is law like or it isn’t. If it is, that seems to rigid for freeness, and if it isn’t, that seems to fragile for will.
I used to engage in debates about free will frequently. (I was/am the “no free will” person.) Those debates sometimes felt like real differences of understanding of the universe, but more often like differences of semantics.
Either way, my version of “no free will” is consistent with MY’s take here that individual decisions have a huge impact on the course of history (as does context, ofc), which I fully agree with.
Big forces of history shape things. So do individual choices. Whether any of that is shaped by “free will” is a separate, fascinating, probably less important question.
Structural framings are just a tool to understand social phenomena. Too many people assert it is THE tool to understand social phenomena. That is the lazy and popular reductionist way so many people frame things.
This article reminded me to go for a run and have a big thing of ice water.
Help me get over the structural forces that made me play videogames all evening yesterday.
This is a half-baked thought but I wonder if, just as quantification/optimization have killed a lot of people's interest in sports, over-understanding the quant side of politics has made people feel helpless. Pre Nate Silver I really believed every close election was kind of up for grabs if we just fought hard enough. Now you can chalk a lot of that up to youthful naivete but I do think understanding the structural factors and how hard they are to overcome increased the speed and depth of my transition into "eh, what can ya do" quietism.
It's also made me chiller. Both parties will win about half the time. I mentally expect it, feel fortunate if it's our turn to win, and when we lose, figure we'll win again soon.
We’ve spoken in this space before about how conflict-averse the younger generations are. We’ve got a lot of very gifted room-readers and not enough people who are willing to get dragged on Twitter for a day or two.
Does this explain the cowardice of elder Democrats in this moment?
It could in part, depending on the influence of their younger staff. I often can only understand a tremendous amount of stuff that happened with Fortune 500 companies and other large institutions between 2014 and 2022 by concluding that their management had no real understanding of how social media worked and were thus absurdly deferential to their (usually much younger on average) marketing/media relations staff.
This column is very much the MY equivalent of Randal's speech in Clerks:
"You sound like an asshole! Jesus, nobody twisted your arm to be here today. You're here of your own volition. You like to think the weight of the world rests on your shoulders. Like this place would fall apart if Dante wasn't here. Jesus, you overcompensate for having what's basically a monkey's job. You push fucking buttons. Anybody can waltz in here and do our jobs. You... You're so obsessed with making it seem so much more epic, so much more important than it really is. Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante! And badly, I might add! I work in a shitty video store, badly as well."
This is the most brilliant connection I’ve seen in a long time
That feeling when you read a column knowing it has a very specific target audience and you're not in it.
Also not paywalled!
Think of it like getting to listen in on a telephone call between very important people.
Yes I should clarify they feeling is not “aw man” but “ooh boy”
The piece is aimed directly at those members of Congress Matt has spoken to over the past five years—last paragraph. They’re the “we” here, members of a political party and governing body who >can< make decisions that alter political history. He’s saying, in effect, you lack agency only because you’re choosing not to recognize that you have it, so get it in gear and start acting as if winning elections and having power matters. It’s telling that he mentions how Dems effectively threw the 1908 election to Repubs by running a weak candidate. The implied question being, will they do the same in 2024 when they’re fully capable of choosing not to?
The actions of an individual member of Congress other than maybe the speaker or appropriations chair generally have a trivial effect upon policy and a significant effect on said member’s career
Because everyone here is a huge nerd, I have a related boardgame recommendation.
Bull Moose: 1912 Election Game is a lot of fun. You can play as either the big 3 candidates or Eugene Devs or even the Prohibition Party candidate. It's a lot of fun and packed with a ton of details about the events, factions, and political geography of the time. It doesn't take too long, and is a lot of fun.
Wow, I've never heard of that one before! For election games, I own "1960: The Making of the President" (GMT edition), "Campaign Trail" (deluxe edition), "Corrupt Bargain: The 1824 Presidential Election," "Divided Republic," and "Mr. President" (3M edition, not to be confused with the very different GMT game, which I also own).
Mr President is a great game! Glad to see a fellow owner.
My grandparents had it in their garage when I was a kid, and I actually bonded with my college best friend over the fact that neither of us had ever met anyone else who'd played the game except each other. We used to play in the common room of the dorm.
Thank you! You appropriately judged your audience and found a target
This article is well-timed given that Democratic US Senator Bob Menendez has been found guilty of all corruption charges. Of course, the reason Democrats will now have egg on their face over having a sitting Senator convicted is because they chose to stand by the obviously corrupt Menendez in 2018 even though they didn't have to. Democrats, both in the state party in NJ and in the Senate, could have shown some spine and backed a challenger and we would have been spared this embarrassment. After all, it probably would've worked. In 2018, a nobody barely running a campaign managed to get 38% of the vote against Menendez in the Dem primary. A real challenger almost certainly would have beat him.
Thankfully, we do have Andy Kim, a Democrat who was unafraid to challenge the machine (that tried to push Phil Murphy's wife as a contingency in place of Menendez) and New Jersey Democrats will have a Senator who could one day be a serious contender for the presidency or vice presidency or will at the very least end up being a high-ranking Senator.
It's amazing what can happen when you realize you don't have to stick with some old, arrogant prick due to outdated concepts of "incumbency advantage" or "party unity" and are willing to take some risk and try to aim for something better.
Did anyone see Biden’s housing plan roll out? Is it just me or is it not good?
The two biggest points his team made are a) rent control and b) selling federal land for housing.
These don’t seem like the big, bold ideas we need right now.
Biden is trying to win over Bernie Bros to stay in power.
Looks to me like shitty policies but ones that may be political savvy at this point. I think in general rent control tends to be popular among voters (they like the idea of not paying higher rent and don’t necessarily understand the negative knock on consequences).
It's not politically savvy because people aren't paying attention to the particular policies. They're seeing the Democratic nominee not just as a "senile old man" now but as as a "senile old man controlled by the far left".
And it's not even like Bernie or AOC or the Biden campaign are even trying to pretend that's not the case.
The homeownership rate is 65%, and it’s probably even higher among voters. It’s a terrible policy politically
Good point. My (relative) youth & urbanism is showing
Same. So hard to remember that rent is not a universal experience, as it’s so core to my financial life.
I haven't actually seen relevant polling in swing states, but I wouldn't expect that homeowners will be significantly more or less supportive of rent control than other voters.
What political agency do I have as one of 140,000,000 voters? Not much. Indeed, it’s probably better to focus on private matters like my family and law practice than to seek increases in my political agency. Even if I increased my political agency by two orders of magnitude, sensible politicians would still ignore me.
This is the problem with thinking of voting as an individual act, rather than a collective made up of individual acts. We tell people to vote by making up myths about a single vote deciding elections, which no one has a genuine example of. But if people don’t vote, they concede power to those (collectively) who do.
I have a genuine example of a Texas state rep winning a primary by a single voter (_maybe_ it was 2 votes, but I think it was 1)
5 candidates in the primary (new district in Austin, gerrymandered to be the Republican district in Austin). With 5 candidates, it went to a runoff between the top 2 vote getters.
The runoff was lost by a few hundred votes. The losing candidate(B) quite reasonably called for a recount. Afterwards it was discovered that that candidate had _won_ by 8 votes. The other candidate(A) quite reasonably wanted to double check it.
Turns out 7 people had voted in the Democratic primary but the Republican runoff. And candidate B was the more moderate candidate, so those people were more likely to have voted for B. They were called before a judge and had to testify how they had voted (I learned that _that_ was a thing) so their votes could be stricken. B, B, B, B etc so the vote margin kept shrinking, but the last person had in fact voted for A, and so in the end, it was a 1 vote difference (plausibly a win by 2 but if you switch your vote from A->B that turns a win by 2 into a tie, which is still 1 voter)
Candidate B went on to win the general, and later a statewide office, where the earlier victory certainly helped. So there's a contingent case that the statewide office depended on that one vote much earlier.
The House district my parents live in had a primary decided by a single-digit number of votes this year (after originally being a tie, pre-recount). It happens.
As long as voting feels good, it is individually rational. If it doesn’t feel too bad, it might be in division rational even if it’s efficacy is slight
It's true that it's hard to increase one's national political agency, but you'd be shocked at how quickly one can increase one's local political agency. My mother got involved in local politics when I was little by helping organize the campaign to build a new public library, and she is now one of the most influential people in our town even though she's never run for anything. She's had a genuine impact on our city's amenities and policies and for the most part, the candidates for local office she supports get elected. Why? Because only a few thousand people are needed to elect city council and mayoral candidates in the vast majority of places and she's done the networking to be able to influence key people that make the thousand show up for her candidates.
We do a real disservice to ourselves by focusing too much on our membership in the national polity and not enough on city, county, and state civics.
I had a similar reaction. To be honest when I saw the title I wondered if this weren’t going to be an unusual take on Matthew Thomas Crooks.
“….I wondered if this weren’t going to be an unusual take on Matthew Thomas Crooks.”
It was.
It was also a plea to the Democratic leadership to take more drastic (though nonviolent) action.
But you can’t talk about McKinley and TR without subtweeting Leon Czolgosz.
Honestly assuming a Straussian reading where Matt’s making a point about the assassins reflecting individual agency, that seems both banal and not even obviously correct. Banal because “Well, yes. Duh. What’s your point?”, not even obviously correct because most would-be assassins probably are, in fact, either stopped or deterred by the Secret Service and that’s why everyone’s mad at the security fuck up (i.e. most of their putative agency is going to be moot and ineffective).
Matt also treats them as being of a piece but there’s a wide gulf between agency and contingency here. An assassination *attempt* reflects agency, but the contingent factors of which they are unaware allowing it to get closer to succeeding than would be expected are (from the perspective of the agent) indistinguishable from dumb luck and have no bearing on the issue of “agency” except to the extent that they inform the would-be assassin’s or other agen’t actions.
If the wind had been blowing a bit differently, Trump would be dead.
I think it's also interesting to consider whether the shooter was trying for a headshot on Trump. Not that a headshot would be unreasonable with a rifle at < 200 yards (even using iron sights; I haven't seen an open source report on if he had a scope or not). If he'd gone for center mass (or slightly lower) to observe impacts and walk them up as necessary (and assuming Trump wasn't wearing body armor with hard plates), I think even a civilian with minimal training on a cheap AR could have gotten off 10-15 aimed rounds in 3-5 seconds (vs. the 8 that reportedly were fired), and probably would have had 5+ torso hits (assuming the teleprompter/podium wouldn't block any).
My point is that part of the contingency here may have been a immature/video game driven obsession with achieving a headshot vs. a realistic assessment of the shooter's own marksmanship abilities and equipment quality and strengths (i.e. speed of semi-auto fire over precision).
I’ll defer to you on tactical matters, but hitting Trump’s ear without aiming for his head would be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it?
All the diagrams of the incident that I've seen (see, e.g., https://images.wsj.net/im-979968?width=780&height=520) have the shooter being at a near right angle to Trump, so a headshot would have made the most sense -- aiming lower would more likely hit his shoulder or arm instead of his torso.
Last time I shot an AR-15, it was at an indoor range. I managed to get 8 out of 10 shots within the 4 inch circle from 25 yards, but that range is very short and I wasn’t about to receive return fire. A head shot from 150 yards has to be tough even with no wind. There’s no way he had a wind gauge, is there?
Correct. If a non-elite wants to make a big impact on the world, he couldn’t do much better than Princip. Of course Princip got hundreds of thousands of Serbs killed. He cracked eggs and got more egg shells than omlette.
Great post! I definitely consider myself on the left because I think the right has no real moral end but the deterministic structuralism that dominates a lot of left wing analysis is really off putting. Part of it comes from a sort of moral cowardice but a lot of it comes from the prevailing individual psychologies of left wing intellectuals. There's a desire to describe the world through an analytical and objective framework that overwhelms peoples natural intuition and senses. Of course it's true that a lot of what happens is the result of people choosing to do stuff when a different person with a different personality would have chosen to do something else but that's too scary and messy to accept. Hence all the 'theory'.
Excellent point...I would also add that the left wants to help people using government funds, and it is much easier to sell that idea if you can convince voters that their situation is not their fault (everyone wants to help victims of national disaster....homeless folks who have mental health and substance abuse issues - not so much). So creating a world were everyone is a victim of circumstance is probably helpful in terms of advancing policy.
I agree that most folks are not totally at fault for their situation (or, more accurately, are only partially at fault typically). That said, nuance loses debates, so developing a view of the universe where everyone's situations result from larger forces beyond their control is helpful. It is likely even true, given that the most significant determinants of success are probably factors like the country you were born in and who your parents are.
To Matt's point, your insight is also probably another reason why intelligent people who think about these things, such as government or non-profit employees, tend to have such an overly determined view of the world.
This is a great point.
I read your link to your earlier post about the New Deal and enjoyed reading it, but you made one slight error: Harold Ickes was a strong supporter of equal rights for black Americans--and other "out" groups--but he was head of the PWA, not the WPA. Harry Hopkins headed the WPA. By the way, a catch phrase of the 30s was "I'll bet you $23.80", which was the WPA's weekly pay check. About the only time blacks got "white pay" was when they worked for the federal government.
This will seem melodramatic / Godwin's Law, but I have a better, first-hand appreciation of what happened in Germany. At least the Germans had the horrible decade of the 20s as an excuse. We just are tribal and easily manipulated.
One of the reasons modern German history is so interesting is it's a perfect case study to challenge the preconceptions and theories of both those who lean heavily on structural determinism and those who lean more towards individual agency explanations.
And that applies if you're looking at the improvisational style of Hitler as he calculated in the moment whether to be more aggressive or trim his sails, depending on how much pushback he got and how lucky he felt that day. Or at the individuals at ground level who carried out the Holocaust, as detailed in books like Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning -- were they the world's greatest coincidental collection of moral cowards and bad people, all together in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just ordinary people like the rest of us, reacting to the context in which they found themselves and carried along by structural forces much larger than them?
An excellent comment saying a lot in a few short words.
In your well-read opinion, what is your take on the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners"?
It's been a long time since I read it, but I as a work of history I thought it was amateurish and unpersuasive. It read more like a history written by a prosecuting lawyer than a genuine attempt to understand what happened and follow the evidence wherever it led. The gist of it seemed to be that the Holocaust happened because the Germans were (and perhaps still are) irredeemably evil as a people, and thank God we're not like them.
Ah. My memory (also from long ago) was that he was taking on the thesis that the German populace didn't know what was going on. He set out to prove that yes, they did.
From my perspective, it wasn't that the Germans were anything especially evil. But the German population as a whole wasn't innocent, as many tried to argue.
Slavery in the US, Stalin's purges, Cultural Revolution, Khmer Ruge [sp] - everyone is capable of great evil.
There is a good book called “the German war” which is largely composed of letters to soldiers and soldiers back to the home front in nazi germany. It really takes the cartoonish nature out of everything about that time and makes it much more real.
Thanks - I'll look for that.