Your final answer on this mailbag, sorry to say, is android-brain thinking.
If I’m reading you right, you’re saying you believe that the electorally optimal thing for Democrats to do in 2023-2024 would be to find some way—any way; primary, smoke-filled room, or magic wand—to get Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro to become the nominee—not the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris.
And I’m sorry, but guys who genuinely believe in scenarios like this do not live in the real world. Or anything approximating the real world.
I’ll spare you the reminder of Kamala’s historic nature and why that mattered; suffice it to say, very few of the Slow Boring commentariat want to hear it, again. But I will hammer this point:
Trump won the 2024 election because voters simply despised the incumbent party (the Democrats), and were bored.
They’d convinced themselves that Trump hadn’t been all that bad and that Biden had been in charge during COVID.
None of this would have been changed by Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro becoming the Democrats’ standard bearers.
Especially if they had simply been parachuted in, sans-primary, they would likely simply have reminded voters why they hated not just the ruling incumbent, but his ruling party.
And, as Matthew notes (correctly this time) an actual primary would have likely changed nothing, beyond pushing the eventual nominee’s numbers down further.
The sad truth is, Harris being drafted, when she was drafted, likely *optimized* Democratic performance. This is not a reality that either most of Slow Boring nor Matt himself want to face, because it indicates the lack of control Democrats may have ultimately had over the situation. It implies, moreover, a lack of short-term agency in general, something Matt has repeatedly tried to hammer out of the brains of liberals writ large.
And to be clear—I empathize with that general approach. In this particular case, however, I do not sympathize with it.
Democrats, to be sure, could have avoided this fascist dystopia we are living through. But drafting a different, polling-better-on-the-surface nominee is an easy-sounding, surface-adequate “solution” that likely would have disappointed us all.
Democrats would have had to take far more drastic, far less intuitive steps much earlier, above and beyond the nominee, IMO. For more on that possibility, I recommend people more eloquent than myself. Brian Beutler and (yes) Will Stancil are a good start.
Am I part of the problem? I’m enjoying the infighting because I love that the center-left is standing up for itself against the far left in a way the center-right never has against the far right. (Except for Romney of course, God bless him.)
Re the Climate & Energy & the "Here Comes the Sun" Bill McKibben item as an actual financier for Renewable Energy (and adjacent areas to RE invest on a climate agenda), I feel fully aligned with MattY's "“climate activism” is not on the whole a very productive form of activity" as generally although my bread-and-butter might be thought to be helped by them, the reality is the opposite. And I think this is tied to the 1970s style thinking they have and further the reality despite superficial denials, anti-growth and even absolute de-growth orientation.
More concerned with strangling and controlling hydrocarbons than in growing energy abundance, and via scaling up energy efficient production.
And of course neglecting the real need for accelerated investment into the enabling infrastructure and having faith that now the technology innovation now in RE and in electrification of industrial processes, energy storage is rapidly accelerating.
Hmm; this is interesting re Left Wing Online commenting: '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. ... 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!"
While anectdote is not data, this is in fact my own experience (having a general view set that seems rather like Yglesias) the Lefty commentariat over past several years in my experience across multiple platforms has been heavily if you don't agree with (latest flavor) of correct position you're actually a Russian Troll and MAGA and Trumpist.
and while I utterly despise Trump, it has had some effect of making me feel generally more unfavorable even sometimes "well maybe I should migrate"... Were it not for Trump and how much I hate him....
Walked into a Waffle House awhile ago - it was more or less a cross between a Diane Arbus photograph and Eraserhead, including a guy missing a limb without a prosthesis. If you wonder where people eat when they've literally hit the end of the line, next stop homelessness - it's Waffle House. Dennys is like the French Laundry by comparison.
All that negative polarization question revealed is that neither Brian nor Matt have ever spent a significant amount of time on a right-wing forum. 4chan will jump down your throat for double spacing because that's considered a reddit thing. 4chan isn't exactly a mainstream forum, but Tumblr and BlueSky aren't either. Matt's career just places him in much closer proximity to the left-wing keyboard warriors than the right-wing ones.
"I think roughly the same bandwagoning around the V.P. would have occurred for roughly the same (bad) reasons."
No heavyweight Democrat challenged the incumbent president in the primaries. No heavyweight Democrats challenged Kamala Harris when Biden stepped aside, 107 days before the nomination, after the primaries were over. These are facts.
From these facts MY concludes no heavyweight Democrat would have entered the primaries had Biden stepped aside, because bandwagoning.
Democrats bandwagoned around Harris because there was no other sane option. There was no time, there was no process, she was on the ticket that won the primaries, and tearing the Party asunder is not a smart career move. Those are not "bad" reasons!
NONE of them applied before the primaries. In an open primary VP Harris would have had advantages and weaknesses obvious to ambitious politicians. Big advantages and big weaknesses! IMHO her biggest weakness was her inability to run as an outsider.
Would primary voters have preferred Biden Administration part deux over an outsider promising change and free to criticize an unpopular president? I think not, reasonable people can differ, but Matt goes way farther than that, he treats dramatically different situations as nearly identical.
>it was a crippling error of Joe Biden not to stand down earlier
Only if all policy issues are ignored. An obvious one: Ukraine. If Biden announces early that he is not running, then any internal pressure on Putin* decreases immensely -- no Biden = a guarantee that the next US President will be less pro-Ukraine. There is also the prisnor swap, which included Alexei Navalny until he died. And I am sure there were many others.
So, Biden was supposed to sacrifice that, just to have Harris get the nomination, which was enormously likely given that she was the sitting VP?
Given the circumstances, "I will run and see how it goes; if push comes to shove Harris can replace me anyhow" was the correct call.
*and, yes, there was. Lest we forget, that Wagner Group guy attempted a couple, and no one does that unless he has reason to think that other elites are dissatisfied enough to support him. And then there is this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
Special elections are special, but can we learn from Catelin Drey's win in Iowa this week? She won by 10 in a district Trump won by 11.
Seems like she had some progressive bona fides as a grassroots activist, but ran as a centrist on child care, abortion, economic issues, and public education, really hammering home "affordability." Anyone closer to the area care to chime in?
There is '90's nostalgia because people who were teenagers in the 90's are now in their 40s and thus, close to the median America. That's it.
In 2050, no matter how crappy we all think things are right now, there will be 40-somethings w/ nostalgia for the 2020s, because they were children then.
That’s part of it, but I would not discount the feeling that, as Matt says, small-l liberal values were ascendant then/the arc of history was bending toward freedom and justice.
I'm going to be at the University Town Center, 4100-4255 Campus Drive, Irvine, CA tomorrow (August 30) at noon. There's an outdoor seating area between the boba place, the ramen place, and Gogi Korean Grill. I'll be sitting at one of the tables. (For anyone familiar with UC Irvine, it's across the walk bridge from the UCI campus.) I'll have my son's stuffed toy octopus with me for easy identification.
This is my last hurrah before I give birth (projected for two weeks from tomorrow). If you're planning to come, please let me know! If not, no big deal, I'll just sit around for a bit and read a book.
I'm sure I won't have the brainspace to organize a Slow Boring meetup once drosophilist jr. is born, but if someone else organizes one in SoCal, I'll try to attend, energy levels permitting!
Never have eaten at either a Cracker Barrel or Waffle house. May eat at a Waffle House but never at a Cracker Barrel. Ate at IHOP a lot in high school and college Mid to late 70s). Have eaten at Denny's but not frequently. My ranking IHOP > Denny's > Waffle House > Cracker Barrel
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?"
This is an issue as old as the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea. It's never about the external opponents, but rather the rival factions within.
I appreciate the response to my question about McKibben's book.
Perhaps I should clarify that McKibben is quite explicit in saying, e.g. on page 163 of his book, that climate "activism needs to shift its focus" away from (merely) opposing fossil fuel projects and toward pushing to build more low-carbon energy infrastructure. He and Matt may disagree about whether the former was a good or bad thing to do in the past, but I think they mostly agree on what people who care about climate should do going forward.
What bugs me is that he and Matt continue to write about each other so negatively. As I mentioned, McKibben's book misrepresents Matt's view of what people who care about climate should be doing. And now Matt says that "climate activism" isn't a very productive form of activity. Yet the main disagreement seems to be over which activities we should call "climate activism"—with McKibben trying to broaden the definition and Matt apparently wanting to keep it restricted to the activities he considers unproductive.
Your final answer on this mailbag, sorry to say, is android-brain thinking.
If I’m reading you right, you’re saying you believe that the electorally optimal thing for Democrats to do in 2023-2024 would be to find some way—any way; primary, smoke-filled room, or magic wand—to get Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro to become the nominee—not the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris.
And I’m sorry, but guys who genuinely believe in scenarios like this do not live in the real world. Or anything approximating the real world.
I’ll spare you the reminder of Kamala’s historic nature and why that mattered; suffice it to say, very few of the Slow Boring commentariat want to hear it, again. But I will hammer this point:
Trump won the 2024 election because voters simply despised the incumbent party (the Democrats), and were bored.
They’d convinced themselves that Trump hadn’t been all that bad and that Biden had been in charge during COVID.
None of this would have been changed by Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro becoming the Democrats’ standard bearers.
Especially if they had simply been parachuted in, sans-primary, they would likely simply have reminded voters why they hated not just the ruling incumbent, but his ruling party.
And, as Matthew notes (correctly this time) an actual primary would have likely changed nothing, beyond pushing the eventual nominee’s numbers down further.
The sad truth is, Harris being drafted, when she was drafted, likely *optimized* Democratic performance. This is not a reality that either most of Slow Boring nor Matt himself want to face, because it indicates the lack of control Democrats may have ultimately had over the situation. It implies, moreover, a lack of short-term agency in general, something Matt has repeatedly tried to hammer out of the brains of liberals writ large.
And to be clear—I empathize with that general approach. In this particular case, however, I do not sympathize with it.
Democrats, to be sure, could have avoided this fascist dystopia we are living through. But drafting a different, polling-better-on-the-surface nominee is an easy-sounding, surface-adequate “solution” that likely would have disappointed us all.
Democrats would have had to take far more drastic, far less intuitive steps much earlier, above and beyond the nominee, IMO. For more on that possibility, I recommend people more eloquent than myself. Brian Beutler and (yes) Will Stancil are a good start.
Am I part of the problem? I’m enjoying the infighting because I love that the center-left is standing up for itself against the far left in a way the center-right never has against the far right. (Except for Romney of course, God bless him.)
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
?!?!?
You are gobsmackingly, earthshatteringly, breathtakingly WRONG
Matt is wrong—temperamentally wrong, logically wrong, strategically, tactically WRONG—on many things of late.
But have to say, he’s right on this. 😁
Cracker Barrel > Denny’s > IHOP > Waffle House.
You will burn in Hell for eternity.
Waffle House > Denny’s > IHOP ~ Cracker Barrel
I prefer real eggs, not egg concentrate. And hash browns with cheese and onions as god intended
I don’t understand this clause; please help.
“Trump voters who agree with Republicans about 70 percent of issues and who are to the left of Democrats on 100 percent of issues”
Re the Climate & Energy & the "Here Comes the Sun" Bill McKibben item as an actual financier for Renewable Energy (and adjacent areas to RE invest on a climate agenda), I feel fully aligned with MattY's "“climate activism” is not on the whole a very productive form of activity" as generally although my bread-and-butter might be thought to be helped by them, the reality is the opposite. And I think this is tied to the 1970s style thinking they have and further the reality despite superficial denials, anti-growth and even absolute de-growth orientation.
More concerned with strangling and controlling hydrocarbons than in growing energy abundance, and via scaling up energy efficient production.
And of course neglecting the real need for accelerated investment into the enabling infrastructure and having faith that now the technology innovation now in RE and in electrification of industrial processes, energy storage is rapidly accelerating.
Hmm; this is interesting re Left Wing Online commenting: '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. ... 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!"
While anectdote is not data, this is in fact my own experience (having a general view set that seems rather like Yglesias) the Lefty commentariat over past several years in my experience across multiple platforms has been heavily if you don't agree with (latest flavor) of correct position you're actually a Russian Troll and MAGA and Trumpist.
and while I utterly despise Trump, it has had some effect of making me feel generally more unfavorable even sometimes "well maybe I should migrate"... Were it not for Trump and how much I hate him....
Walked into a Waffle House awhile ago - it was more or less a cross between a Diane Arbus photograph and Eraserhead, including a guy missing a limb without a prosthesis. If you wonder where people eat when they've literally hit the end of the line, next stop homelessness - it's Waffle House. Dennys is like the French Laundry by comparison.
All that negative polarization question revealed is that neither Brian nor Matt have ever spent a significant amount of time on a right-wing forum. 4chan will jump down your throat for double spacing because that's considered a reddit thing. 4chan isn't exactly a mainstream forum, but Tumblr and BlueSky aren't either. Matt's career just places him in much closer proximity to the left-wing keyboard warriors than the right-wing ones.
I rarely think Matt is crazy, but this is crazy:
"I think roughly the same bandwagoning around the V.P. would have occurred for roughly the same (bad) reasons."
No heavyweight Democrat challenged the incumbent president in the primaries. No heavyweight Democrats challenged Kamala Harris when Biden stepped aside, 107 days before the nomination, after the primaries were over. These are facts.
From these facts MY concludes no heavyweight Democrat would have entered the primaries had Biden stepped aside, because bandwagoning.
Democrats bandwagoned around Harris because there was no other sane option. There was no time, there was no process, she was on the ticket that won the primaries, and tearing the Party asunder is not a smart career move. Those are not "bad" reasons!
NONE of them applied before the primaries. In an open primary VP Harris would have had advantages and weaknesses obvious to ambitious politicians. Big advantages and big weaknesses! IMHO her biggest weakness was her inability to run as an outsider.
Would primary voters have preferred Biden Administration part deux over an outsider promising change and free to criticize an unpopular president? I think not, reasonable people can differ, but Matt goes way farther than that, he treats dramatically different situations as nearly identical.
>it was a crippling error of Joe Biden not to stand down earlier
Only if all policy issues are ignored. An obvious one: Ukraine. If Biden announces early that he is not running, then any internal pressure on Putin* decreases immensely -- no Biden = a guarantee that the next US President will be less pro-Ukraine. There is also the prisnor swap, which included Alexei Navalny until he died. And I am sure there were many others.
So, Biden was supposed to sacrifice that, just to have Harris get the nomination, which was enormously likely given that she was the sitting VP?
Given the circumstances, "I will run and see how it goes; if push comes to shove Harris can replace me anyhow" was the correct call.
*and, yes, there was. Lest we forget, that Wagner Group guy attempted a couple, and no one does that unless he has reason to think that other elites are dissatisfied enough to support him. And then there is this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
Special elections are special, but can we learn from Catelin Drey's win in Iowa this week? She won by 10 in a district Trump won by 11.
Seems like she had some progressive bona fides as a grassroots activist, but ran as a centrist on child care, abortion, economic issues, and public education, really hammering home "affordability." Anyone closer to the area care to chime in?
There is '90's nostalgia because people who were teenagers in the 90's are now in their 40s and thus, close to the median America. That's it.
In 2050, no matter how crappy we all think things are right now, there will be 40-somethings w/ nostalgia for the 2020s, because they were children then.
That’s part of it, but I would not discount the feeling that, as Matt says, small-l liberal values were ascendant then/the arc of history was bending toward freedom and justice.
Hi nice readers!
Signal-boosting my message from last week:
I'm going to be at the University Town Center, 4100-4255 Campus Drive, Irvine, CA tomorrow (August 30) at noon. There's an outdoor seating area between the boba place, the ramen place, and Gogi Korean Grill. I'll be sitting at one of the tables. (For anyone familiar with UC Irvine, it's across the walk bridge from the UCI campus.) I'll have my son's stuffed toy octopus with me for easy identification.
This is my last hurrah before I give birth (projected for two weeks from tomorrow). If you're planning to come, please let me know! If not, no big deal, I'll just sit around for a bit and read a book.
I'm sure I won't have the brainspace to organize a Slow Boring meetup once drosophilist jr. is born, but if someone else organizes one in SoCal, I'll try to attend, energy levels permitting!
Never have eaten at either a Cracker Barrel or Waffle house. May eat at a Waffle House but never at a Cracker Barrel. Ate at IHOP a lot in high school and college Mid to late 70s). Have eaten at Denny's but not frequently. My ranking IHOP > Denny's > Waffle House > Cracker Barrel
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?"
This is an issue as old as the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea. It's never about the external opponents, but rather the rival factions within.
I appreciate the response to my question about McKibben's book.
Perhaps I should clarify that McKibben is quite explicit in saying, e.g. on page 163 of his book, that climate "activism needs to shift its focus" away from (merely) opposing fossil fuel projects and toward pushing to build more low-carbon energy infrastructure. He and Matt may disagree about whether the former was a good or bad thing to do in the past, but I think they mostly agree on what people who care about climate should do going forward.
What bugs me is that he and Matt continue to write about each other so negatively. As I mentioned, McKibben's book misrepresents Matt's view of what people who care about climate should be doing. And now Matt says that "climate activism" isn't a very productive form of activity. Yet the main disagreement seems to be over which activities we should call "climate activism"—with McKibben trying to broaden the definition and Matt apparently wanting to keep it restricted to the activities he considers unproductive.