What makes sense in ’90s nostalgia

Plus obviousness, Mayor Pete’s Black support, and the madness of Bluesky

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I wrote my first article for The Argument this week. It’s about pets and private equity and my half-assed political philosophy, which is that we should have a strong (but not insurmountable) presumption of freedom — that you should have a really good reason, not “this is annoying to me” or “I read one empirical study that says this is bad,” before interfering in people’s voluntary decisions or mutually agreed-upon commercial transactions.

While I was working on the piece, I read something that didn’t make it into the article, but that stuck with me. This article by Greg Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo documents that a certain kind of cliché that was common in my youth, like “it’s a free country” or “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” has become much less common today.

That’s a little bit different than what I’m talking about in my Argument piece, which in turn is different from the national panic about the Cracker Barrel logo changing, but I do think these things are all loosely related. We’re becoming a society in which people struggle to remain adequately indifferent to things that don’t actually impact them. We all have our different points of nostalgia but one of the things that I miss about my experience of the late 20th century was people not caring about stuff.

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Robert: You’ve written about how nostalgia for the 1950/60s is a conceptual dead end, but what about nostalgia for the 1990s? It was an era of dramatically better housing affordability (which you always argue is the most substantively important policy issue), greater social cohesion due to shared liberal protestant values, lower political polarisation, and better mental health.

The changes post 1995 have mostly been a revolution in entertainment and communications technology (which we now mostly agree is on net bad) and dramatically falling prices of manufactured goods. Meanwhile cost disease and social decay has shredded middle class family life.

I know you had a CHH guest post on this topic in Jan, but I found she hand waved away the problems with social media and smartphones and didn't touch on declining religiosity. I would love to get your personal take on 90s-stalgia.

Nostalgia is always a funny thing because if necessary you can switch frames to maintain it. So for example in 1999 when I graduated high school, New York City had nine murders per 100,000 residents. In 2021, at the peak of the post-Floyd spike, it had six murders per 100,000 and it’s been falling since then. If I told someone in 2021 that I had nostalgia for a city that had 50 percent more serious violent crime that would have sounded insane. But it’s relevant that in 1990, New York had 31 murders per 100,000. So even though the city was much more dangerous back in the nineties, my lived experience as a teenager was of a city that was becoming dramatically safer year after year.

We had greater social cohesion back then? Maybe. We also had the beating of Rodney King videotaped, a jury acquitting the clearly guilty officers, and $1 billion in property damage resulting from the subsequent rioting. Sixty-three people died.

Beyond the specifics of those riots, the recession and oil shocks in the early part of the decade were no joke. And Southern California in particular had a very rough time of things, with the general recession compounded by the negative impact that the end of the Cold War had on the local aerospace and defense industries. This part of the nineties is commemorated in movies like “American History X” and “Falling Down” that continue to be pretty well-known today, but they don’t form the dominant cultural understanding of what “the nineties” was. When people talk about the nineties they are referring to the late nineties of full employment, rapid productivity growth, and rising wages. This period of time really was a kind of local optimum. The whole period of 1995-2007 was the best productivity performance the United States has had since the early 1970s. But the 21st century portion of that period had the war on terror hanging over it like a menacing shadow and the labor market was pretty weak.

Where I think nineties-talgia really shines, though, is that it was a time of tremendous optimism about the prospects for liberalism.

The Soviet Union had collapsed, important parts of Central Europe were clearly consolidating as democratic regimes, China had embarked on a program of economic reform, the decolonization process was complete, we got the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland and the Oslo Accords in the Middle East, and it felt like these trends were all self-reinforcing. Bad things still happened, of course — the Rwandan genocide and the subsequent first and second Congo wars are some of history’s most horrifying events — but I think it seems reasonable to believe that the world was on a kind of glide path to chillness. Over the past 25 years, that’s all really unraveled. China has prospered without political liberalization, politics in the United States have become more illiberal, Europe’s clout on the world stage has diminished, Russia emerged from the disasters of the 1990s as a revanchist authoritarian power, the Israel-Palestine conflict is more brutal than ever, and even the Congo-Rwanda conflicts just keep happening.

And what’s especially unfortunate is that people seem to widely view the retreat from liberalism as self-justifying — like we were deluded to ever be optimistic, and therefore correct to pull back from the values and practices that led to happier outcomes. But these trends have all been bad and it would in fact be desirable to return to the path of enlightenment and progress.

Lindamc: Are you surprised/annoyed/frustrated by how often you have to write posts explaining things that should be blindingly obvious to any sentient observer? I’m thinking of takes such as “winning elections is good,” “when things are going well you shouldn’t try to introduce big changes,” reminding people of recent (21st century) events, and so on.

No, this is good — it makes the job a lot easier and more tractable.

Brian: Regarding Buttigieg’s low (nonexistent) support among African American voters, you recently said that it’s not a law of nature that AAs’ preferred candidate wins the nomination, even if that has been the recent pattern. I agree, but I think the problem is that if you have no AA support, then you need to clean up with white Democrats. And because white Democrats are the most progressive Democrats, cleaning up with them requires being a progressive firebrand, which Buttigieg is not. So I think he has limited upside. Thoughts?

So for starters, I think the 0 percent Black support poll is a little bit misleading, because that sample also featured Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett, Cory Booker, and Stephen A. Smith as options.

What’s true, I think, is that if Kamala Harris runs for president there is not going to be an opening for a white Biden-administration cabinet official to beat her. But I think that she probably won’t run (nor will Crockett) and that if she doesn’t run, that opens a lane for Pete Buttigieg to get some of the blah-normie-partisan-establishment support, both Black and white, that is currently going to her.

Luke Cohler: A friend is running in a critical House race in a purple district; he’s an attractive candidate from a variety of perspectives, a moderate who’s aligned to Yglesias-thought. (And currently the front runner in the primary.) Despite not knowing specifics, what advice do you have for him? Particularly as pertains to the gauntlet of the primary electorate vs. the general electorate?

There’s a working paper from Jacqueline Colao, David Broockman, Gregory A. Huber, and Joshua Kalla that is very relevant to this question.

One key thing that they find is that contrary to myth, it’s not really the case that primary voters (at least in House elections, which is what we’re talking about here) are particularly extreme compared to normal partisans. Democratic Party primary voters are more liberal than the population as a whole for the boring reason that none of them are Republicans, but the primary electorate is genuinely not dominated by hard-core leftists or anything. What’s true, though, is that primary voters don’t have much actual information about candidates’ positions on the issues. And Democratic Party primary voters tend to be favorably disposed to Dem-aligned advocacy groups. So winning an endorsement from the Sierra Club or the A.F.L.-C.I.O. or any other name-brand advocacy organization can make a big difference.

A big problem with his dynamic is that primary voters don’t actually “look through” the endorsement to see what the endorsement was about. So if the National Resources Defense Council demands that you be anti-nuclear and you refuse and they endorse your opponent, that can hurt you badly even if primary voters don’t agree with N.R.D.C.’s anti-nuclear stance.

The upshot of this is that while I think you want to stay as vague as possible during the primary and preserve maximum flexibility to run to the center in the general election, you kind of do want to go hat in hand to the dreaded groups and try to convince them privately that they should back you or at least not back your opponent. That means trying to appeal to their own sense of pragmatism that partisan control of the House of Representatives is extremely important to everything that they care about and that the way to do this is to work together to run a campaign based on talking about the issues that are bad for Republicans (the cost of living, health care, tax fairness) rather than talking about an interest-group laundry list.

In terms of your public message to Democratic Party primary voters, you want to stay squarely on “the Orange Man is bad and I am going to hold Republicans accountable.” Rank and file Democrats care a lot about beating Trump. Saying that “democracy is on the line” is not a good message to swing voters but it’s a very good message to Democrats when you are trying to appeal to their sense of pragmatism.

Brian T: Why does left-wing social media (Bluesky, vintage Tumblr, etc) seem to negatively polarize people so much more than right-wing social media?

I think you have to look at the dominant discursive strategy that’s used in these left-wing spaces, which is to essentially punish people for heterodoxy by greatly exaggerating the extent of disagreement.

So you’ll say, “I think it’s good to have a well-funded police department that arrests criminals” and the retort will be “You’re racist.” Or you’ll say, “I think only cisgender girls should play on competitive girls-sports teams” and the reply is “You hate trans people.” These styles of argument work because most people have a stronger commitment to second-order progressive values — racism is bad, we should be inclusive of L.G.B.T. people — than they do to specific policy ideas. So you can convince 50 percent of people that reserving certain sports teams for cisgender girls is bigoted and 35 percent of people that even if they privately disagree they should shut up about it. But what about the other 15 percent? The problem is that the left is not just saying to those people “Look, we disagree with you.” They are telling them that they do not belong in the left-of-center political coalition and they ought to adopt a new social identity and a personal self-conception as anti-trans.

Now I want to be clear. Everyone is responsible for their own actions and their own choices. I think Donald Trump is bad, I think abortion rights is important, I believe in progressive taxation and a more expansive welfare state, I think racial discrimination against Black people is a significant problem in American society, I think trans people should have freedom and dignity, and lots of other normie, mainstream liberal views. No matter how many times the Revolving Door Project says I’m a crypto-MAGA agent of the oligarchy, it’s my responsibility to keep a level head and continue to believe what I believe.

But it is still true that the dominant rhetorical strategy of the left is to tell anyone who is somewhat less left-wing that they should go become Republicans. And some people find this convincing!

Right-wing social media is often extreme, bigoted, or otherwise gross. But it very rarely consists of telling Trump voters who agree with Republicans about 70 percent of issues and who are to the left of Democrats on 100 percent of issues that they are actually secret leftists who love Chuck Schumer.

Dan Schroeder: In his new book Here Comes the Sun, pages 42-49, Bill McKibben accuses you of telling climate activists to “shut up and let things take their course, because they scare normal people and create a political backlash.” I don’t think you’ve ever said or written anything that could be reasonably summarized in those words, though please correct me if I'm wrong. McKibben does include some direct quotes from your writing, but in my opinion he distorts your views by omitting context.

Will you be responding to McKibben? And more generally, how can we lessen all the infighting among left-of-center people who mostly share the same goals but become preoccupied attacking each other, exaggerating and misrepresenting their disagreements? Am I making things worse just by bringing up this incident and asking this question?

I have not read the book so I can’t respond in detail to it. But the way I would phrase my own view of this is just that “climate activism” is not on the whole a very productive form of activity.

When McKibben launched the big activist campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, climate had already become a partisan polarized issue on which Democrats were systematically more interested in emissions reduction than Republicans. When that’s the situation, the best thing you can do for your cause is be good citizens of the partisan coalition and help your people win elections. Instead, activists successfully pressured Democrats to abandon the successful “all of the above” energy message of Obama’s two campaigns. But they did not successfully persuade the voters in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Alaska that this was a good idea or the voters in Michigan that they want to shut down the conventional automobile industry or the national electorate that they want to make short-term sacrifices to their living standards for the sake of the long-term benefits of emissions reduction.

If you persuade the party that is already on your side to adopt new, less moderate positions without persuading the voters to back those positions what you end up doing is making it harder to win elections and enact useful policies.

There are plenty of broadly climate- and energy-related things that people could do that would be useful. That starts with actual technical work on problems like low-carbon steel or concrete, better batteries, new forms of energy, or things like electric boats or carbon capture. But there is also advancing policy on solar deployment, promoting nuclear and geothermal energy, spreading accurate understanding of climate and agricultural issues, advocating for and developing technical work on alternative proteins, and doing a million other things. The climate issue is a hard enough problem that there is genuinely no risk of running out of useful things for people to do with their time or money. But that’s what makes it so perverse to be spending time and money on things that are politically toxic and counterproductive.

Estate of Bob Saget: Rank the following: IHOP, Cracker Barrel, Dennys, Waffle House

Cracker Barrel > IHOP > Denny’s > Waffle House. But my favorite of the chain restaurants is Chili’s.

Grigori Avramidi: Would the dems be better or worse off if they had a genuine primary before the 2024 election?

If you are a Democratic Party officeholder, aspiring elected official, or staffer then you absolutely should say that it was a crippling error of Joe Biden not to stand down earlier and for the party not to hold a proper primary election. This is clearly a thing that most people believe and the people who don’t believe it are hardcore Democratic Party partisans whose votes you don’t need to worry about. What’s more, “Dems should have had a real primary” is also a kind of horseshoe position that both leftists and swing voters agree with. Since Democrats need to do more to appeal to swing voters but also would benefit from at least minimizing the extent to which leftists feel sour and angry, it’s really important to find opportunities to do things like that. Saying “Biden should have stepped aside earlier so we could have had a real primary” is a smart move.

But is it true?

It’s definitely true that Democrats should have nominated someone who was not tied at the hip to the unpopular Biden administration. The Liberal Party of Canada showed us that it is very possible to slot in a new guy, make one or two high-profile policy changes, and dramatically alter the public’s perception of the incumbent governing party. What’s more, doing this in Canada required the slightly odd move of parachuting in a political-neophyte central banker. Mark Carney turned out great, but a reasonable person might have worried about his lack of electoral experience and skills.

In the United States there was no need for any such worries. Rather than Biden or Harris, Democrats could have easily slotted in the governor of Michigan or Pennsylvania or even just the more popular and verbally adept secretary of transportation. Literally nobody on the planet believed that Kamala Harris had more appeal in the decisive swing states than Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro and it was completely absurd to nominate her rather than one of those two.

But would holding a primary have led to a different outcome? I’m kind of skeptical. After all, nothing about the actual sequence of events prevented Whitmer or Shapiro from saying, “I think I would be better-suited than the vice president to win swing voters in the key battleground states and the convention ought to nominate me instead.” The reason Harris became the nominee isn’t that there was no primary, it was that nobody ran against her! If Biden had opted not to run for re-election earlier, I think roughly the same bandwagoning around the V.P. would have occurred for roughly the same (bad) reasons. You might have gotten a primary challenge from the left that would have made it harder for Harris to pivot to the center, and/or a more extended discussion of why Biden wasn’t resigning and letting Harris assume office — neither of which would have been constructive.

Long story short, when people say “should have had a primary” I think what they mean is “should have had a different nominee.” And I agree. But I think putting the blame for that on Joe Biden’s timing is a little too pat. There needs to be more scrutiny of what habits of mind inside Democratic Party elites led them to nominate a Harris-Walz ticket rather than successful swing-state politicians. Democrats ironically let identity politics considerations get them both coming and going, putting Harris on the ticket in 2020 even though she was unimpressive and then just assuming you could solve all problems by “balancing” the 2024 ticket with an equally unimpressive straight white man.