I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating: the value of Slow Boring to me has been teaching me, at a very embarrassingly late stage, that 1) empirical analysis is important and 2) politics (in a practical, not definitional sense) is negotiation, compromise, consensus-building and just generally the slow boring of hard boards.
Neither of these are revelations - but boy howdy, did I not even dimly grasp them in my younger, much dumber days when I thought “politics” was either inscrutable performative critique* or table-pounding maximalism coupled with sneering contempt for people who don’t agree with you.
* people like to blame “postmodernism” for this, and there’s some truth to it, but really it was the product of a midwit army of social science / humanities grad students (of which I was part and have endeavored to escape from) trying to clumsily apply Foucault, Derrida, “la French theory,” etc.
Maybe because my first full-time jobs were in policy, or maybe because politics weren’t much of a spectator sport back then (in the 90s), but this trajectory is interesting to me because I experienced nothing like it!* Normies didn’t follow politics or most jurisprudence closely and certainly didn’t know the minutiae of legislative procedure. I have never thought that governing, at least, was about anything other than negotiation and compromise. Thus I am and have long been baffled by the current political discourse.
*speaking here to your second point; the first sunk in a bit later
My first thought was similar to yours. I've always believed politics was sausage making, and it is what I was taught in all my poli-sci classes -- during Reagan's term. Curious generational differences.
I have to add, I think it's much worse on the right, in that it rises right up to the level of elected lawmakers who's job it is to make sausage --- and they refuse to do so. The Freedom Caucus makes people like Bernie and AOC look like soft, weak kneed squishes.
This is true, in that the Rs and Ds have both adopted a kind of purity ethos that makes actual governing much much harder. One is more obvious than the other, because everything bagels and performative wokeness are readily visible in a way that recalcitrant obstinance about taking 'no action' isn't. I'm not sure which is worse in practice, or if there's a stable/consistent answer to that question.
Yes to all of this! If I may indulge in a bit of my life story... as a budding young liberal I really wanted to go to a college well known for its super liberalism. But it was very $$$ and my parents said, nah, you should go to UVA. Which at that time had a conservative-leaning student body. And I am truly glad. It meant I couldn't engage in a lot performative activism bc just being a Democrat was OUT THERE. So instead I did boring normie things like, try to get a Democrat elected governor. And took Larry Sabato's class which was basically how politics is sausage making and why that's actually a good thing. Sad that this now seems very old fashioned.
Different times. I went to UVa in the mid-70s and even though I majored in political science I got no sense about the student body's political leanings at all. At that time, even with Watergate etc, no one seemed to care much at all about politics. I can't recall a single discussion outside of class.
But it was a long time ago. Long enough that Larry Sabato was my in-residence dorm advisor, being a year or so older than me.
Same. I went to college in Tennessee and Kentucky, instead of S Florida, where I was from. I learned a lot about compromise and sausage making, and helped a D Governor get elected in TN.
I think it's more complicated. People rarely want to see how the sausage is made. I think when a lot of normie non-politico's see how the sausage is made they don't come away more respectful of the process. In fact, they become more radicalized against it. I believe in the Slow Boring ethos, but more and more what I see is people prefer a burn it down mentality and a much stronger desire for radical change vs incrementalism particularly among swing voters and low-engagement voters who voted for Trump. The incrementalism is not going to expand the tent in a significant way. It may lead to the tent not shrinking more but it won't expand the majority of voters who are disengaged and dissatisfied with the process.
And to preemptively respond to one of Freddie DeBoer’s admittedly funnier drive-by shitposts from a few days ago: yes, Freddie, I am trying to catch the eye of Matt-senpai (or hell, Ben-senpai, why not).
A few months ago I had a conversation with someone where I said that, basically, no one born since the mid-80s (which includes me) has ever actually seen an American president negotiate with an enemy, except from a position of overwhelming military advantage. Obviously that doesn't mean we've always won, not by a long shot, but I do think it has helped shape two generations' opinions by making it much easier to think that real negotiation is low status, unnecessary, and weak. It also makes it a lot easier to look down on the past for making pragmatic or necessary compromises.
AIUI Obama actually did try genuine negotiation with the Republican majority on budget issues, but the consensus at the time was that
(1) Boehner wants to get the deal done, but
(2) Boehner doesn't have the votes to get the deal through.
And so you had big-ticket initiatives (chiefly budget issues and immigration reform) that ended up petering out in the face of the filibuster, McConnell's intransigence, and Boehner's lack of control of his caucus.
He did, yes. But, of course, Boehner is not an enemy of the US, and I find it to be a good example of my general point that that feels like a natural response to my comment. These days we do, in fact, treat negotiations between party leaders that way, and it's a problem.
I would also note that Obama did, in fact, also successfully negotiate a deal with Iran, who while not an enemy in the sense of the USSR was certainly not an ally. He was a good negotiator. Obviously we know how that fared afterwards, and it's didn't look like incremental progress by his successors, such as they were and are.
Ah ok, I see. Yeah, I meant it pretty literally. But yeah, I think we treat the other party today with about as much distrust as we used to treat our actual geopolitical enemies.
The Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban and it's hard to argue that it was from a position of overwhelming military advantage because the US military was not able to beat them after close to 20 years of fighting.
I don't think that was a problem of military power, but rather of us having inconsistent/unclear goals that weren't attainable through military power, at least not in the forms we were prepared to deploy it. For many reasons, most of them quite good and the rest quite well intentioned, we're no longer willing to actually deploy overwhelming military force in the conflicts we get into. and can't credibly pretend otherwise. In WWII, we carpet bombed cities and deployed nuclear weapons because we were engaged in total war until our enemies, which were unified nation-states, surrendered unconditionally. In the Cold War, we had thousands of nukes on hair trigger and threatened to destroy global civilization and plunge the world into nuclear winter if the USSR attacked us or our close allies. But there was never a moment where anyone considered (or would have believed) that we were willing to render Afghanistan indefinitely uninhabitable, or that we would mow down civilians by the millions, if they didn't do what we wanted, even though that was definitely physically within our capabilities.
You’re moving goalposts here. Your original comment was about how no one in your generation has seen a US President negotiate with an enemy. I gave you an example that contradicts that. End of story.
I disagree, because I don't think that your example satisfies the condition in the latter part of the sentence in which I made that claim. And also because that claim was the frame for my comment which was actually about people moving towards thinking that negotiation - the kind where multiple parties who despise each other and who all actually have bargaining power nevertheless respect one another and sit down and make concessions and follow through on their commitments - is low status/unnecessary/weak.
But in any case, sure, I will happily grant that my claim as written, which as specified was a one sentence summary paraphrasing a conversation I had months prior, was probably false. I could have spent several pages of text defining all my terms and tightening up my reasoning and phrasing, but this is a comment on a blog post, not a research paper.
I graduated from Berkeley 10 years ago, so the Foucault/Derrida crowd was more or less the oxygen I breathed for a long time. Not that I ever agreed much with them, but I came to think they represented the center of political discourse on my side of the aisle. (A fun aside: I remember attending a Robert Reich speech during an Occupy protest in 2011 and I was flabbergasted by the bounty of "Free Palestine" posters. I didn't know the phrase "message discipline" then, but that's exactly what was missing. As a haughty 18-year-old, I saw myself a lot like that one brilliant Far Side cow among a sea of lemmings: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/1dlhzf0/i_relate_to_claire/)
Slow Boring taught me that that sort of maximalism is a dead end, which has rendered most comments by said college crowd inert in my mind. I feel genuinely grateful for the development, too -- in the vein of other things Matt has written, I can see how their preferred intellectual traditions have made a lot of them hopelessly depressed.
And the thing is that Foucault, Derrida et al. are fine as far as they go, as long as you keep them in perspective. Foucault’s insights about power and discourse are genuinely useful, if you use them analytically and not ontologically. Like many other thinkers, it’s derivatives of their thought and not necessarily the original article that produces the worst of the dreck.
But otherwise, yeah - I hear you. Grad school was weird.
I can imagine. Not sure if you feel differently, but I do think the experience was more rewarding than tiresome on the whole. It gave me a lexicon that I wouldn't have otherwise, regardless of whether I use it personally.
Score one for intentionally cultivating ideological diversity!
As a counterpoint: the currently dominant political party isn't doing much negotiation, consensus-building or empirical analysis. And they keep winning elections, particularly when the policy nerds are running on the other side.
Postmodernism probably deserves more blame/derision for the state of politics than it receives. After Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin, a bunch of French intellectuals reinvented themselves by inaccurately analyzing historical events and science producing a weird nihilistic philosophy that made a lot of them rich. When Alan Sokal exposed them in the 1990s, they should have been consigned to the dustbin of history. But incredibly these nitwits made a comeback through low information TikTok leftists. Hopefully this all goes away someday but the damage it has done to politics is incalculable.
From my experience, in schools, it is taught that the culmination of Black civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at Lincoln Memorial. As if in some Sorkin-esque way, King's speech that day settled the Black civil rights debate forever. All the work and negotiation in Congress, LBJ, Robert Byrd, and Strom Thurmond aren't taught. And I think the way it is covered in schools makes a lot of people believe that all you have to do to win any public debate is say the correct magic words.
The same is true for how the rise of Nazism in Germany is taught, with similar detrimental effect for public life (the inability to protect society against fascism/extreme right take over). Most people seem to think it was all due to the charisma and powerful oratory skills of Adolf Hitler. In fact, he was seen by most Germans as a weird Austrian until 1933 although he was good at riling up his base.
The Nazi take over in Germany had many causes - hyper inflation, the Versailles treaty, how ww1 ended, antisemitism, the threat of Soviet/Bolshevism, extreme political polarization and violence, the splintering of the left and murders of Liebknecht and Luxembourg, the dysfunction of the Weimar constitution, the cowardness of conservative elites etc etc. Hitler’s oratory skills play a minimal role, if any.
Hitler's oratory explains why Hitler rather than someone else was the leader of the Nazi party, but not why a Nazi-type party took over.
You can't explain the BUF (Britain) and the blueshirts (Ireland) and the Falange (Spain) and Action Français (France) and Mussolini (Italy) and Austrofascism (Austria) and the Arrow Cross (Hungary) and the Iron Guard (Romania) and so on (in every European country) because of one person.
Hitler also really mattered because the leader of a fascist country has enormous (not unconstrained, but enormous) power and he chose specific directions to take Germany down where other fascist leaders did not go.
Feel obligated to point out that a lot of those parties didn’t actually get any power. There was never any realistic chance of the BUF getting to Downing Street, for example
Falange, Mussolini, Dollfuss, the Arrow Cross and the Iron Guard all seized power, though. 5-out-of-8 countries is still enough to conclude that the key factor wasn't Hitler, it was the downfall of a monarchy.
I can’t speak for all of these, but it’s kind of strange to suggest that the Arrow Cross party gained power for any reason other than the Nazis. These weren’t independent events
It also tends to gloss over the anti-Jewish policies and actions throughout Europe over centuries, and especially the restrictions on where Jews could live and what work they could do across the Austrian and Russian empires.
A great point I heard somebody make (maybe Ian Kershaw? maybe on The Rest Is History?): If you said to someone circa 1900, "There is going to be a European country that commits mass slaughter of Jews in the next half century," very few people would have guessed that that country would be Germany, where Jews were integrated and successful, and where there hadn't recently been a Dreyfus affair or series of pogroms.
It was deflation and austerity in response to the Great Depression by Weimar in the 1930s that made people turn to Nazis not the short postwar hyperinflation.
Yeah keep in mind that the hyperinflation that gets in the news was because of a very deliberate policy of printing money to pay every single striking miner to resist French occupation. It was not particularly difficult to reverse, either. The emegency decree (Bruning) period is much more proximate to Hitler's rise to power and that comes down mostly to Hindenburg and his cabal wanting to tighten their grip on power.
Well, surely they played a role in his consolidation of leadership over the party, pushing out economically leftist Nazis like the Strasser brothers and Röhm. That would have been a pretty different party, and might not have come to power in the first place!
To some extent, but there was also a powerful class of wealthy elites who wanted to get rid of the socialists in the Nazi party (who were better at reaching the working classes than Hitler was). But yes, his oratory skills mattered internally for sure.
I can't speak for the entire country, but I can say in New England, American history classes spend way too time on the colonial era and basically rush through everything from 1900 onward in basically the last two weeks of school before summer break. Condensing the Civil Rights era into just one speech helps with that condensed approach.
It's very hard to teach history without taking sides. Taking sides on anything that happened after 1969 will wind up angering some set of parents. So it's easier to just hand-wave away the whole era.
One thing that is related (also New England experience) is that colonial through the civil war is taught as continuous history but after the civil war it's rushed through as a site seeing trip with just random highlights and no connection between events.
Thinking back to my time in public school, the way we were taught about the Industrial Revolution (and thus how we were taught about all American history after the industrial revolution) was so bad. Instead of helping kids understand how it made the modern world, it was presented as dry as possible without any real connective tissue to anything. In the pre-internet era, I was assigned to write about this very specific type of lathe that had maybe about four paragraphs in total dedicated to it in our entire local library. I don't know what I was supposed to take away from that beyond how to write a stub Wikipedia article on a word processor. The librarian was my friend's mom and I felt so bad for her for having to help me research that.
Yes and has worked great for improv but is terrible for social studies.
I genuinely want to keep beating this drum. Social studies in Elementary school is a joke subject despite its central role in the culture wars. I enjoy teaching it and it’s a dumping ground for projects but it’s fundamentally not taken seriously.
More people should read about the post-1965 failures of the Civil Rights Movement, like the “War on Slums” in Chicago.
As David Garrow documents, King and others were *constantly* being warned that they had overly vague policy demands for their “War.” The reply was always that they’d figure something out soon enough.
But by the time they actually ended up at the negotiating table with the mayor and other big players, they still didn’t have a clear plan, and they found themselves in a weak position, pinned to their past demands. Unsurprisingly, the resulting deal was not terribly impressive, and local activists were quite down on King by the time his SCLC wrapped up its main efforts in the city.
All this despite King’s willingness to make personal sacrifices for the cause. (Moving his family to a slum apartment, e.g.) Good intentions weren’t enough.
I wonder how much of that was just the fact there were not a lot of Black leaders who had any experience of exercising real power. Like, if a 2010s version of Jim Clyburn or John Lewis had been there to advise them, would it have gone differently?
It’s notable that MLK was given lots of credible advice about the infeasibility of the War on Slums, e.g. from Bayard Rustin.
The SCLC had no ground game in Chicago, and the strategy of mass protest wasn’t very well-suited to the political and economic problems associated with housing. (Rustin’s “From Protest to Politics,” partly masterminded by Tom Kahn, looks prophetic in hindsight.)
Another interesting example is the Poor People’s March, which was going to take place in summer 1968. On one of the last nights of his life, King met with a major donor to the SCLC who tried to convince him that the March lacked a clear vision and set of demands. My sense is that she was absolutely right, though of course King was assassinated in April, so we can’t be sure what the March would’ve been like with him there.
It probably doesn't help that the most powerful black elected Democrat at the time, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., seems to have not exactly been the biggest fan of Rustin's either.
My experience was the same for the end of Apartheid as well. It wasn't nearly as extreme, but the coverage of the end of slavery and the gilded age were similarily compressed to a "Great Speech" model of history (along the lines of Great Man historical interpretations). I am endlessly thankful for having my high school history teacher in 11th and 12th grade tailor the IB world history curriculum to emphasize the slow, messy progress made via compromises throughout the 20th century.
The bit I still don't know is how the US got from passing the 1964-65 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which were very controversial because racial equality itself was still very controversial and the stage when I was first becoming politically aware in the 1980s where there was a broad consensus that racial equality was right and segregation and Jim Crow were shameful features of the past and not active political debates with people wanting to reinstate them.
Because it seems to me that the process by which the implementation of those laws entrenched racial equality as a basic American value - a value so basic that even most racists appeal to "racism against whites" - is really important. Why did those become entrenched, but abortion didn't?
Matt seems to imply in his discussion that the ACA could become entrenched because it was good policy while policing cuts couldn't because they weren't, but I don't think that approach can be applied to questions like racism, sexism, abortion, etc.
A partial answer is that racism and abortion are not alike.
Jim Crow and segregation were an open, obvious ongoing assault on the founding ideals of the United States.
Likewise discrimination against women, and now formal equality is deeply embedded in our national culture, extremist trolls on the left and right notwithstanding.
But abortion isn't structured like that. It's not tied to the common ideals that underlie our national identity. Arguments to the contrary are complicated and weak.
I agree with this in a way that may look like radical disagreement, but isn't.
What gives the debate its intractable character is not that issues surrounding abortion are not "...tied to the common ideals that underlie our national identity." Rather, the trouble is that both sides can plausibly lay claim to those common ideals. The Declaration declares that we possess "...unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Just within that triplet, you have the raw ingredients for claiming that women's right to abortion is either profoundly American, or a betrayal of American values.
I'm not taking sides on abortion here, nor am I disagreeing with you about the differences between segregation and abortion. But I think I am disagreeing about whether positions on abortion are "...tied to the common ideals etc." They are tied only too tightly.
Many political disputes in the U.S. take the form of competing appeals to our founding ideals, but I'm skeptical that either side of the abortion debate is meaningfully grounded in the principles of the Declaration, at least not in a way that plays a serious role in public sentiment or activism.
When people invoke "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the abortion debate, I think they're usually retrofitting the language to arguments that are really moral, religious, or personal in origin. The appeals feel post hoc. For example, pro-life rhetoric focuses overwhelmingly on the moral status of the fetus, often grounded in religious or metaphysical claims about when life begins, not on constitutional or Enlightenment ideals.* Likewise, pro-choice activism tends to center bodily autonomy, privacy, and freedom from state interference: more aligned with 20th-century liberalism than 18th-century republicanism.
I agree that one 𝘤𝘢𝘯 construct an argument on either side using the Declaration’s language. But doing so requires a series of loaded assumptions: that the fetus is a rights-bearing individual from conception, that those rights supersede the mother’s, or conversely, that liberty and autonomy are absolute and trump any claims made on behalf of the fetus. These aren't trivial premises; they’re enormous philosophical commitments that don't follow straightforwardly from the text itself. So when both sides claim to be heirs of the same founding ideals, it feels more like rhetorical maneuvering than a shared grounding.
Contrast that with the civil rights movement. Appeals to the Declaration and Constitution were central and sustained, not just as rhetorical flourishes, but as the movement's moral core. "All men are created equal" wasn’t a strained analogy. The contradiction was open, glaring, and widely felt. With abortion, the conflict is more metaphysical, less tethered to a common national narrative.
This is good stuff, Deadpan, and I appreciate your willingness to engage.
Here's Stephen Douglas, Senator from Illinois, from the Debates:
"The signers of the Declaration of Independence never dreamed of the negro when they were writing that document. They referred to white men, to men of European birth and European descent, when they declared the equality of all men. I see a gentleman there in the crowd shaking his head. Let me remind him that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that document, he was the owner, and so continued until his death, of a large number of slaves. Did he intend to say in that Declaration, that his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves? It must be borne in mind that when that Declaration was put forth, every one of the thirteen Colonies were slaveholding Colonies, and every man who signed that instrument represented a slave-holding constituency. Recollect, also, that no one of them emancipated his slaves, much less put them on an equality with himself, after he signed the Declaration. On the contrary, they all continued to hold their negroes as slaves during the revolutionary war. Now, do you believe-are you willing to have it said-that every man who signed the Declaration of Independence declared the negro his equal, and then was hypocrite enough to continue to hold him as a slave, in violation of what he believed to be the Divine law? And yet when you say that the Declaration of Independence includes the negro, you charge the signers of it with hypocrisy."
You write that, "...with the civil rights movement,..."All men are created equal" wasn’t a strained analogy. The contradiction was open, glaring, and widely felt."
Well, no. There was a "metaphysical" point at issue here, too. Reading the Declaration our way depends on construing the Declaration in such a way as to treat black people as human beings. That strikes you and me as uncontroversial -- it should be uncontroversial! But it was in fact central to the controversy.
(I have always thought Alexander Stephens in the Cornerstone Speech had the advantage over Douglas in point of consistency: Stephens agrees that the Declaration clearly applies to black people, and since he is a consistent racist, he rejects the message of the Declaration altogether. Another reminder that the pursuit of consistency will not keep you from being a horrible human being.)
I concede that if you push hard enough on any point, it's metaphysics all the way down,* and I can see how my comments might imply that there was a perfect consensus on the metaphysical issues you raised, which is untrue.
I should put it this way: I won't pretend that I know what was and wasn't central to the controversy over slavery in the 1850s (it's been a long time since I've read carefully about it). But we do know that the constitution's compromises were bitterly opposed, by enemies of slavery. Additionally, despite being a slaveholder himself, Jefferson expressed regret and opposition to it on many occasions.
Douglas asked "Did [Jefferson] intend to say in that Declaration, that his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves?" I think the evidence suggests that yes, he intended to say exactly that! Jefferson was full of contradictions but I think a handful of quotes show that he was at a minimum troubled by his own behavior. He wrote in "Notes on Virginia":
> Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
Or in a 1791 letter to Benjamin Banneker:
> No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America.
Douglas, by contrast, was pragmatic and opportunistic: a policy entreprenur trying to sell the public on his case by any means necessary. He shouldn't be taken to stand for a majority position on ontological questions.
I stand by the idea that "the contradiction was open, glaring, and widely felt". It was not *universally* felt, but civil rights activism had an unbroken, continuous lineage that went all the way back to the founding of the United States. More to my point, by the mid twentieth century, approximately zero people held Douglas' position that black people were not human. I don't think pro-choice activists can lay the same claim.
I’d like to thank you both for a lively enlightening discussion that as a bystander felt like I was gaining insights into historical perspectives not conceived in the 1700’s nor appreciated in the 2000’s. I can’t wait to listen in to a similar discussion around AI and the time periods.
I don't think it's as crazy if you understand the question of slavery then de jure racism as being at odds with day 1 founding principles that still matter a lot, albeit hazily, in US culture. No not everyone's principles, but enough that once the dam burst under the pressures of World War 2 and the early days of the Cold War it found a population ready enough to accept it (or maybe no longer willing to put up more than token resistance), at least in an 'equal before the law' kind of way.*
*Yes, yes a million exceptions but I don't think the broader cut is wrong. The issue has preoccupied American politics since the beginning.
More accurately, slow relative to my prior before the first time Matt posted that it only got over 50% approval in the 1990s. I wasn't properly politically aware until the Obama administration, but my sense from older family members and friends was similar to Richard's statement that there was a broad consensus against racism within 20 years of the Civil Rights Act. Before seeing the Gallup polling, I would have guessed that it hit 50% by the early 1980s.
That doesn't seem like a huge difference compared to your prior, especially given:
1. We don't have the data on "don't know" or "don't care."
2. Some disapproval might be of the "marriage is hard enough" or "the children will have a hard time" sort, an attitude which I heard expressed by people who I know for a fact were very supportive of civil rights.
3. Most importantly, we don't have any data about how strong anti-racism attitudes really were at the time in question.
I wonder how geographically bound this sentiment was/is?
My experience in far northern New England was that people were baffled by race relations and didn't really have negative opinions because there was only one or two black people around. Even the very Republican county I grew up in ranged only from blasé to very tolerant even in the 80s, while Boston is one of the most racist places in America.
I find that quite believable. It’s an unverifiable story, but supposedly the tiny town in rural Colorado my father grew up in the 1950s treated the one black family like everyone else and was instead divided on Catholic-Protestant lines.
On the other hand, anti-immigration sentiment seems to be strongest where there are the fewest immigrants.
That seems slow in objective terms - i.e. not adding a value judgement.
The long evolutionary movement with a bounce up in the mid-1990s is quite illustrative that Lefty Proggy mass convert-the-heathen to true and correct thinking is a fine path to short and medium term failure (and probably closing the door to longer-term success or at least making it more an up-hill battle)
My sense is any marriage to an "other" group was frowned upon in the pre-war era, be it race, religion or ethnicity. My great grandparents were an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant and it caused a huge amount of issues in the family. So much so that b/c the kids were being raised Catholic, the Protestant side of the family wouldn't let them in their homes. And from what I can tell, both sides felt like it was an acceptable response b/c inter-faith marriages were just not done back them.
I do not have the total answer, but here's an important part of it:
Much of the American right during that era was far more concerned about the threat of Communism than it was about defending the views of segregationists from central government and dominant cultural influencers.
In fact, the subjugation of American blacks was seen by many as a vulnerability against the Communists. At the very least in the international arena. But also as a means of Communist agitation undermining the US internally.
Add in the fact that culture at that point was FAR less splintered -- folks were pretty much all watching the same TV shows and movies as well as the same network TV news. The result was that much of the country grew up with a pretty unambiguous image of segregationists as beyond the pale.
Of course, even this issue eventually fell prey to how policies actually worked for folks. It was not possible to get a hearing on "Maybe Blacks are inferior" or "Maybe Blacks are not inferior, but the races should be kept separate." But it was possible to argue (with increasing success) that the methods of achieving integration and equality were working out badly.
The rise of television news was very important too. For the first time, people got to see the predations of Southern racists on their TV screens and they did not like it. It also helped a lot that they could point the accusing finger of racism at a geographically-defined part of the country. When the civil rights movement began looking at the rest of the country, the response was not as warm.
It was because racism was seen as a Southern problem, and from a legal point of view that was generally correct. People began turning against civil rights efforts when it left the South and went after more socially-generated phenomena, like residentially-based school segregation. Busing became a *huge* issue around the nation (see "On Common Ground" or read about what happened in Los Angeles). And then of course it went into areas like affirmative action and preferential hiring and other things that directly affected whites.
In a way this is essentially the right wing message on this topic.
Basically as far as I can tell the story is this; yeah it probably wasn’t great black people had to sit in the back of the bus (though no one really cared until those elite Yanks ‘stirred up trouble), but MLK said “I have a dream” and this was all solved (and oh yeah MLK was definitely a conservative). And ever since real racism is racism against white people and now a bunch of race baiters are trying take my money and give it ungrateful black people who dont appreciate all we did for them.
This is a simplification for sure. I’m quite aware there are conservatives (some of whom comment on this site) who are quite aware of the real story and understand that at least some of Trump’s appeal is about bigotry.
But honest to god, take the last 20-25 years of talk radio, Fox and Newsmax (let’s me real, this is the true ID of the conservative movement in modern times), feed it to AI and is the summary that’s spit out all that different from my summuary*
* honest to god this feels like a good use of AI. Andrew Sullivan did this apparently in his interview with Ungar-Sargon. And honestly I think Sullly came across pretty bad; basically he accused of Sargon of all sorts of positions and statement she never actually said.
In schools defense we introduce mlk in kindergarten because of the holiday and black history month and If your 11th grade teacher does a fear job on that stuff it’s amazing but it’s likely not as deep as the hero worship that starts when people are five.
When I first started teaching the path of least resistance was to do king for the holiday and saints Martin, Jackie and Rosa in February. 3rd graders know Martin but think he was an incredibly popular president or something.
It’s all very weird. I teach kids about American music in February and feel better now teaching about Etta James and Scott Joplin et al. for a month.
Yeah, I learned that Rosa Parks just woke up one day and said enough is enough and then got famous, which is an insult to all the hard work, restraint, and careful planning that the bus boycott took.
I think this is a really good idea for civics education. That subject seems like a failure as a standalone but I like the idea of having modules on the actual political fights.
I don’t know if it’s practical but I like the idea.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Broad high-school-level survey courses cover things superficially because that's what all broad survey courses do. They're also aiming for a level of complexity that's comprehendible to the significant portion of the audience that isn't going to college. To me, oversimplified narratives that flatter our national pride are unexceptional.
As a Delawarean and someone who has met Representative McBride on many occasions, I am so proud for her to be representing us in the House. Seriously, she is a gifted politician who understands how the world really does work
I would like to see her go on podcasts of people who disagree with her before passing a judgement on her political skills. Ezra is a softball interviewer on these issues. She refused to go on Andrew Sullivan's podcast, which tells me something about her.
I don't think NYTimes would have published his opinion piece if that was the case. It's extremely difficult for Democrats to accept that their positions on trans issues are extremely toxic and unpopular. The success of gay marriage has convinced them that it's just a matter of time before they can successfully change public opinion on irreversible transitions for minors and trans women in women's sports.
I didn't read his NYT piece. I've read his Substack for years.
I'm actually uncertain if she made the right choice. On the one hand, it's best to go into the lion's den and try to win over people who don't already agree with you. On the other hand, she's just human and having to deal with people like Sullivan might just be too much to ask of a person.
Like I said, Andrew Sullivan is a very respectful podcast host. If you cannot have a reasonable discussion with him and defend your positions, you're almost certainly not going to convince other people who are openly hostile towards some of these extreme positions on trans issues.
After listening to the Ezra Klein interview and frequently listening to Sullivan's podcasts, I expect that they'd be able to have an engaged, and respectful conversation. I disagree that Sullivan is off the deep end, whether or not you or I agree with him. His argument is cogent.
What I suspect is that she doesn't want to be branded as "the trans politician" and is smartly avoiding media where the focus will be overwhelmingly on that issue.
Sometimes people are just exactly where they need to be in life and don't need to do more. Michelle Wu is excellent as a mayor but I don't want her to be president. And Sarah McBride is doing an excellent job as the first trans member of the house but I similarly don't want her to be president. (And just for some gender balance I'll throw Scott Wiener on that list too)
He's a very respectful podcaster. What she could accomplish is to defend her positions for an audience that's skeptical of them. I totally understand why she wouldn't want to do that if she doesn't have strong arguments other than she believes in them.
Pretty much everything that he criticized the trans movement for has now become the mainstream opinion in the US and Europe.
I think calling the audience “skeptical” is putting it pretty mildly.
I actually agree that going into a hostile environment with solid arguments has value. But claiming that her not appearing is revealing seems foolish.
She chose not to go to a podcast that has very few persuadable audience members.
Andrew is very smart, he is aware of the best arguments in favor of trans people, he chooses not to make those arguments himself because he is on the other side of them.
Andrew Sullivan is a moderate and almost certainly not a hostile podcast host. I think the trans movement has to persuade moderate liberals before moving on to centrists and center right people. That would seem like the logical progression of a movement that's heavily underwater in the court of public opinion. Obviously, trans activists are still in their epistemic bubble where they think cancel culture and monopoly over educational institutions is enough to win the argument.
Andrew is a moderate in some senses, but he’s a dog with a bone on this issue.
He’s made up his mind and his audience is largely in agreement with him.
Again, I think it could have value for her to articulate an argument to him and his audience, but it’s not because they are particularly persuadable on this.
I agree that she should start with persuadable liberals, that is not his audience. If she went on Andrew’s podcast it would be to humanize trans people to an audience that is pretty anti-trans.
I think one shift in American politics that would really shock people from a century ago, is the almost complete lack of any regional elements. Nevada Democrats should back Mike Lee, but they won't even when it is clearly in their state and regional interest.
I think the lack of pork is more downstream of the nationalization of politics. It came back more than five years ago and it hasn't moved the needle. The problem is this: how would you feel if your legislator betrayed your party for a nice new project? In the old days, people would see the project way more than the betrayal, nowadays, nobody would even see the upside, even if they thought it might make a difference.
“small dollar donations are spurred by bad hateful rhetoric”
I agree with the overall gist of your comment, but I’m also old enough to remember when Obama broke records for small-dollar donations. My then-boyfriend (now husband) donated to him because Obama was bright and inspiring and said things like “There are no red states or blue states, only the United States of America!” Those were the days 😢
While yes that's a fine example of a poorly thought through naive-inellectual abstraction based "good governance" reform I would put before that the idiocy of "democratizing" party primaries and making them mini-pre-elections - progressives naive slogan based thinking more democracy always better.
Instead ended up creating a perversely non-democratic factions based opening to take over internally political parties where in our rigid two party structure (and a structural end-result of overall electoral structure not to be naively wished away) becomes a major threat to democracy internally.
The sort of thing that political-obsessive intellectualisation (which I see to be clear myself / this kind of commentariat being party of unless one actively says to oneself, wait a minute...) comes up with thinking everyone should be just like them, but blunders into handing over to radical and potentially anti-democratic minority factions levers to be essentially political viruses (as in biological analogy as viruses hijact in general cell machinary for own purposes of reproduction to destructive effect to the cells in question)
I don't disagree, but also, critiques of the primary system portray moderate voters as having no agency.
"Primary elections are dominated by extremists of both parties, so come the general election, moderate/centrist voters have to choose between two extremist candidates, both of whom the moderates hate! Poor moderates, what are they to do?"
Well gee, maybe the moderates could take more interest in the process and get off their couches and vote in the primary? Then they wouldn't have such extreme candidates in the general election, problem solved! What's stopping them?
I give no fucks as to what is stopping them, they don't give the same fucks you do or I do, they don't want to / are not so motivated and there it is.
People are people.
And most people across most populations are not political obsessives. And do not vote in primaries. Nor give a damn most of the time. And that's ... well that's liberty.
Basing your political demarche on Soviet New Man-ism where your fundamental disappointment is - like many political obsessives - that most people don't give much of a damn, you are building failure.
This is the root source of a lot of egg-head intellectual reform failure - abstractionism and ideal (as in intellectuals ideal of what Should Be) man demarche.
Rather better success to be had in accepting populations as they are not as one wants them to be in interest, in motivation, in habits.
Ok, legit, but then you, the median voter, don't get to complain about how extremists run the show.
You can't simultaneously say "I wish I had a moderate in the general election to vote for" AND "but I can't be arsed to get to the polls for a primary election." That's like saying "I wish to be slim AND I can't be bothered to change my eating or exercise habits." Not how it works!
This article is all about how the population of America hates whenever anything gets done or changes. Pork is the way around democracy to do things that are actually good via republicanism.
The population of Human Beings generally hates change. Good change, bad change, in aggregate people initially hate it.
A significant explainer of NIMBY knee-jerking.
Pork is a good way to grease wheels. A bit of bribery - well quid pro quo to be nicer that in human relations (when one is not in naive-intellectual abstractions) ends up being needed
40 years ago, the cancellation of millions of dollars of green energy projects in red states would have raised hell among Republicans. Now they are happy to go along with it. It's crazy.
they wouldn't and shouldn't because the privatization of public lands is an incredibly unpopular position. it's one of the proverbial 80:20 issues and even more unpopular than that among democratic voters. a nevada democrat signing on with mike lee would be breathtaking political incompetence.
matt is wrong, btw, that this illustrates a backlash or negative polarization effect. it was an incredibly unpopular issue long before mike lee tried to sneak it into this bill.
This Nevada Democrat disagrees that it's in our best interest, given how much vacant/underutilized land we have in our existing urban footprint, and the negative externalities that come with facilitating more sprawl (especially given the low likelihood of public investment in transit). I understand that a certain amount of suburban sprawl is inevitable as Reno and Las Vegas grow, but the last thing I want to do is deliberately grease the wheels for it. There are better ways to increase housing supply.
The arrogance of moral superiority in the progressive movement is killing it on live television. She made great points and it’s absolutely worth a listen.
But like there was a harassment campaign of asking annoying questions of people who were not activists.
Like I’d make a vegan cookie review and get bombed but like 15 kind of argumentative questions about hunting and plant suffering and I was just making a video comparing the oatmeal cookies from sprouts and Whole Foods.
It’s like the actual conditions that line was replying to was the online equivalent of street harassment.
That's very fair. I think saying "You don't seem to be engaging in good faith, and I've got other people to talk to" might be better than "It's not my job to educate you."
I remember that vividly, as well as the feeling of urgency to stem the flow, develop some immune response. But I am also pretty sure in retrospect that generalized hostility and suspicion toward any person asking critical questions was not the right medicine for it. I am truly unsure what would have been and I don't judge the individual people who developed that suspicion in defense of the fabric of their online and IRL communities (they include, after all, many of my friends and communities), but I think it has already left us worse off culturally and less able to digest complex or contentious issues productively.
I think the issue is that most people don't remember sea lioning as a harassment strategy because it didn't happen to them. To have had that experience, you needed to be an online social justice type at a specific time. Most people were not. However, many more people had the experience of going on a progressive forum, stating that they liked a lot of the ideas but found this or that point to be excessive/vague/contradictory, and getting accused of being an enemy agent in disguise.
McBride certainly nails it. Positive, durable change is always incremental.
I now know all I need to know about Roberts as a political advisor.
As I see it, the core problem is that far too many people on the left perceive politics as perpetual struggle against a secular Satan. It's not a pragmatic labor to make things better for folks, but rather a war for good against evil. And in a war against evil, majority opinion is irrelevant. Actually, majority opinion being opposed to you is pretty much expected, considering the fallen state of humanity (in a secular sense, of course).
And then shock that the general public does not find it persuasive that siding with us against the other political pole is unambiguously a defense of democracy.
Yes, I see the point that Obama passed the ACA despite its initial lack of popularity, and it worked. But as you say here, this was predicated upon the idea that it would be popular once folks experienced it.
When I hear progressives on a variety of issues -- Gaza, trans rights, environment -- what I hear is absolutist to the point of authoritarian. It's going to be our way, quite independent of majority views now or in the foreseeable future. Because right is right. And if it sounds that way to me, a person who shares a lot of their goals, imagine how it sounds to the general public.
These progressives' authoritarianism may pale in comparison with the Trumpists' authoritarianism, but they aid the Trumpists in that they remove any clearly non-authoritarian option from the menu.
Has there been an issue with the moderation? I've been in number of the threads on the subject and it's never seemed like Ben or Milan have struggled with policing the rare instances where people have crossed the line.
Can’t speak for Ben but I personally did not enjoy dealing with the 500+ comments before noon on any article in which trans people or trans issues were mentioned.
Everyone here has been pretty respectful thus far. I have made a few one day bans. Discuss trans issues all you want, just follow the rules and that includes the incredibly rude act of misgendering someone.
Well no objection to your rules etc. but "incredibly rude" is rather overdone characterisation. Deliberate rudeness perhaps but hardly incredible. Although I suppose in Lefty circles, but still
Is your argument as to why a warning is unnecessary bringing up the fact that people have repeatedly been banned for the behavior warned against? I’m not sure that’s as compelling as you’d like it to be.
I don’t think it was weird at all, I think, sadly, in today’s cultural climate it was a fair warning. There are always new commentators who need to be told the rules.
Having seen some really crappy comments on other Substacks *cough*ACX*cough*, I’m grateful to Matt Y for being preemptively clear on this.
So, one the one hand I see your point, but on the other hand, I think it's better to be up front than ban someone afterwards. On the gripping hand, a 24-hour ban is mild enough that maybe it could have just happened.
I think he's thinking about something more than "insulting" a politician. Kind of like writing a post about Chuck Schumer and having to warn commenters not to call him "Christ killer," "Shylock" etc.
They’re saying that obeying a ban is easy, not that the issue is not a big deal. Like if I said “refraining from spitting on the floor is not a big deal,” that doesn’t mean spitting on the floor is inoffensive.
I'll accept your read, but I'll point out that insisting that correctly referring to sex (rather than whatever self applied identity someone claims) is offensive, is precious and somewhat passive-aggressive, like a PhD getting snotty about not being called Doctor.
I would characterize referring to someone in this way, in defiance of their obvious personal presentation and social positioning, because of this detail you happen to know about them, to be bad faith provocation and not any kind of neutral, objective "correctness." Well-akshuallying someone's socially established gender is the snotty behavior here.
The people who insist on calling a transgender person by their birth sex remind me of how I behaved as an edgy teenaged atheist. I made a big deal of saying that God didn't exist. I was correct, but I wasn't doing this out of a sense of accuracy; I was doing it to be obnoxious.
I'm not referring to gender, which is fabricated, subjective, and frankly irrelevant. I'm referring to sex, which is real, exists in the physical world, has objective qualities, and is entirely relevant socially and before the law.
What an interesting example! A PhD is officially a doctor (that’s what the D stands for). But I agree that the official/literal/paper definition is not the only or even the predominant determinant of when we use the term, let alone the etiquette of it. Isn’t that more parallel to the argument that “correct” pronoun use is not necessarily determined by objective facts, but socially?
In certain professional contexts, it would be considered disrespectful to not refer to someone with a PhD as a doctor. Additionally, people with PhDs do have a legal right to demand that their certification be listed on certain official documents.
The reason we think PhDs that make people call them "doctor" in all contexts are snooty is because they demand an authoritative suffix be used in social contexts where their authority isn't relevant. If instead our language assigned people different pronouns depending on if they did or didn't have PhDs, using the wrong pronoun on a doctor would probably be considered very rude and probably an implication that you don't think they earned their qualification.
Understanding was not the issue. I simply disagree that it's useful or a correct moral or ethical position, and I'm saying so. Avoiding the subject is accepting the premise, which I do not.
Well you are free to engage in the modern day equivalent of monks heatedly debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and get yourself worked up over the "morality" or "ethics" of an author making his own rule on his own bloody blog post.
And I shall be free to regard that as precious thin skinned egg-head twattery of zero functional utility.
I can easily avoid referencing the person's changed gender... and voila. Nothing disruptive, easily ignored.
It's amazing that you look at “gender woowoo sex isn't real” academic nonsense and say that the objections to that is precious, thin skinned, egg-head nonsense. A perfect example of DARVO. You think the ‘sex is real’ camp is the one engaging in angel counting sophistry
“I'm going to make incredible new demands, and if you object, you're the one getting worked up.”
Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla's policies are good and I want to see Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla get more attention. Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla's campaign manager, Rafaella Gabriela Sarsaparilla, was on a podcast recently and Rafaella Gabriela Sarsaparilla said many things I like.
This hard policy seems at odds with McBride's views, who repeatedly mentioned the importance of extending grace, assuming good intentions and not making people feel like they might be shamed for honest mistakes.
I wouldn't knowingly misgender someone, but also had no idea who Chase Strangio is or what their preferred pronouns are.
That’s the reason for mentioning the ban at the beginning. A lack of grace would be banning without warning, treating it as self-evident that anyone who uses the wrong pronoun is doing so maliciously.
You have a point there, though I suspect this was done because we can pretty much take it as a given that everyone commenting here knows who she is, and anyone referring to her otherwise is choosing to do so to make a political point or stick their fingers in people's eyes.
Also let's be real, I have a hard time believing that any hypothetical uninformed reader who has never heard of Sarah McBride before and doesn't have an axe to grind on trans issues would walk in here, see her name and likeness, and call her anything other than a woman in innocent error.
Why? Commenters here are pretty decent overall. But lots of comment sections would have people misgendering the trans people under discussion. It's a distraction and an irritant.
When has there ever been such a warning on a slow boring post? It just contributes to the idea that there can be no rational disagreement or discussion on this issue in left-leaning spaces without a huge thumb on the scale. Which imo annoys people and pushes them to the right, leading to the opposite of its intended effect.
What other topic or issue would necessitate such a warning? I can only think of two: holocaust denial and the n-word. So the core moral failure of the west in the 20th century, the core moral failure of America... and something that became mildly rude a few years ago. Makes zero sense to be so heavy-handed .
That’s not true, there have been warnings in the past. For example on one of the trans-related articles published when I worked here I pinned a comment saying “be nice and stay respectful while discussing this controversial topic.” Did that because the previous few trans-related articles ended up with a bunch of comments section discussions devolving into really nasty stuff and I had to tell people off or hand out bans.
I guess the question is why is heavy-handed moderation needed on this topic, and basically only this topic when the slow boring comment section is usually very rational and not particularly nasty. And I believe it's because the discourse has been very aggressively policed to a place where the audience isn't really and however many years into that policing even left-leaning intellectual types still aren't convinced.
I don't think more discourse policing is going to solve that problem. You have to convince people you're right not just make them use the right words.
Not on your own substack, you don't. It's Matt's blog and he can make the rules. If people find them arbitrary, they can go over to the Blocked and Reported comment section, where people spend half their lives deliberately misgendering trans people.
Absolutely true they can do what they want. Hopefully we can still opine on the rules while following them without getting banned. The comment section would be a much worse place if every topic had such heavy-handed moderation imo
Most of the language I've seen is "formerly male" and "biologically male", which arent banned because they're not actually misgendering, but they're headed in that direction.
I thought it was a little unnecessary but after reading the post it is especially unnecessary. The post isn't even about a contentious issue! Just a description of thermostatic opinion.
I found McBride to be persuasive in her Ezra Klein show appearance. I’m sort of wired towards incrementalism and caution so she was pushing on an open door.
What I think concerning is it seems like liberals could retreat on all these issues and I’m not sure it would reach any more defensible a line anywhere else. It doesn’t seem obvious that it would result in more acceptance about discrimination, bullying, violence and such. The core fight is cultural of are these people human and entitled to fair respect or not.
I have no empirical evidence for this, but my sense of the vibes is that the median American is not 100% accepting of transgender identities but also does not care that much and is not a bully. The reason the anti-trans crowd make such a big deal out of sports, bathrooms, and preemptive pronouns is that they're the few issues that potentially impact other people*. My anecdata is that even my grandparent's extremely conservative friends find obsessive deadnaming to be weird and offputting. My prior is that if liberals retreat on the few parts that the mass public actually cares about like sports, the anti-trans crowd will have a hard time getting people to care. We can't legislate better social treatment of trans people, but if the temperature of the issue is turned down, we can probably make it harder to pass discriminatory laws against them.
*With the obvious caveat that the bathroom thing is fearmongering because it's not like there is a force field keeping people identifying as men from entering the women's bathroom to commit sexual assualt.
The defensible line is treating it as a matter of self expression, rather than an objective or innate, immutable feature requiring accommodation. Asking people who don't to either try really hard to believe Zeus sits on Mount Olympus or at least pretend that they do for the sensibilities of others will never succeed.
But then like my ex makes warhammer figurine videos and gets a tirade of people screaming at her. Or any straight trans woman about their experiences with men and the amount that don’t get killed or beat up looms in their lives.
And that’s like nothing compared to the invisibility of abuse of the most low status trans people. I just dont think laws are that central to people’s feelings. The chase Strangio line that people lost their mind over was about if you can be a woman with a penis.
I mean.. you can't be a woman with a penis. It isn't possible, at least not with current technology. But besides that I think we probably have at least some common ground. I do not think the conduct you describe towards your ex is acceptable. Being an abusive a-hole just because someone is different is never the solution and it's never right. Period. End of story. The golden rule always applies, even when for whatever reason someone finds it difficult.
One question I do have is where the responsibility on the trans side begins, particularly with respect to women? I think an adult man has a right to be trans, whatever that encapsulates, but does that also include the ability to go mop the floor with female athletes? Does it mean they get access to womens prisons? I ask because I struggle to see those sorts of highly visible instances of trans accomodation ever getting a warm reception, even in the most tolerant plausible world. And that includes women feeling threatened by certain demands, even if not by any trans person in particular, but by the logic of something like self ID taken to its natutal conclusion.
My biggest confusion around the whole debate has been the lack of empathy for those who express any resistance to full trans acceptance. I recall the situation at the Korean clinic in LA (I think I have the details right there) where a woman complained about seeing a penis in the women's locker room. The response from many was to attack the woman who complained and call her transphobic, which I always found perplexing. The movement had gone so far in one direction that it couldn't even empathize with a woman who was uncomfortable with seeing an exposed penis? Even if you think that the policy should be that a pre-op trans woman should be able to enter the locker room of the gender they identify with, we can't also turn around and say "I understand why that can make reasonable people uncomfortable, but I think that the balance of interests means that discomfort is secondary to the interests of the trans woman and her sense of self"?
I think that was the part that really started rubbing so many people the wrong way. It was a kind of gaslighting where reasonable discomfort with some of the policy choices being made was labeled as horrific transphobia driven by animus.
Wi Spa, and the trans woman was a repeat sex offender with half an erection in the actual spa where children were. Culminated recently in a trial where the prosecution had to, I believe, convince the jury what a half mast erection was and that it counted as one. Bizarre stuff.
I think on sports I've thought a lot about this. I think more inclusion can happen easily especially on individual sports which are currently forbidden by law where a trans girl would be allowed to be at team practices and in every way included a huge range of sports. I know some people will say that they want full inclusion or nothing but I'm skeptical that most athletes would feel this way and choose nothing as a protest option when they've been getting up at the crack of dawn to be in the weight room or on the track for years and years.
They could then have their results recorded and go on to olympics and ncaa. With respect to team sports the move to travel sports really does open up some opportunities for people to be entrepreneurs and see what works.
I genuinely don't know what to make of the prisons situation and would probably defer to what wardens have to say on this issue. It's actually really hard to imagine any of these being wholly safe environments for all involved. Shelters run a similar mess.
I don't think that's a very good analogy. A better one is that a Christian can't refuse to hire a Muslim at his NASCAR t-shirt stand for being a Muslim, nor can he refuse to sell him a t-shirt just for being Muslim. But he does not have to say there is one God and Muhammad is his prophet, nor endorse any particular tenet of Islam. Trans people already have this level of protection, and it's all they need.
Do you think this is a constructive comment? Or that it contributes in any way to what was (I thought) a pretty good exchange between people who don't see eye to eye on the subject? I actually came out of it with a little more empathy, in light of Andrew's anecdote. Way to suck it back to the internet is full of implacable ideologues vibes.
Maybe I misunderstood where you perceive the line is for trans stuff. When you said accomodation, I was thinking of things like appearance at work and names. I agree that we shouldn't try to enforce thoughtcrime.
I think most people recognize that the bathroom issue is a non-issue and the offputting nature of a lot of the hardcore anti-trans people is much more apparent with it ("please get into line for genital screening before entering the women's bathroom").
I mean, it doesn't make logical sense that women would feel more comfortable if a man like Eliot Page is forced BY LAW to share a bathroom with them simply because he was born a woman.
This exact situation has recently emerged in the UK, where the equalities watchdog announced that people should go to a bathroom that aligned with their birth sex, but also that trans men should at the same time not do that, and also that businesses had to make sure that trans people were included and equally provided for in terms of bathroom provision. Since it's clearly impossible to square all parts of this, businesses just did . . . nothing at all to enforce it, which was always the likely outcome.
Eh, I think this is kind of where the pro-trans bathroom counterarguments veer off into a kind of willful blindness. It's not actually a "gotcha" to their opponents to point to FtM people in these contexts because no actually cares about women using the men's bathroom because respective risks of assault and inappropriate behavior are wildly asymmetric, which is the actual rub that people care about here. No one gives a shit if women use the men's in a crowded bar and no one gives a shit if a beard-sporting FtM individual uses the men's.
Logically speaking, there is perhaps a side point to be made that a "use the bathroom associated with your natal sex" law creates the Eliot Page situation above, but I think in practice more or less all of the nominal concern is about people with penes using the womens' room and no one even pretends to substantively care about the reverse situation, whether as a matter of legislation or a matter of (non-)enforcement. As a result, making this a central point of a rebuttal comes across rhetorically as extremely weak: it's a point that interlocutors genuinely holding the position don't actually care about and would instantly concede. Let Eliot Page use the men's room -- fine, whatever. As a result, treating it as if it's "checkmate, transphobes!" suggests implicitly that the speaker neither understands nor has any stronger rebuttals to the opposing position.
'As a result, making this a central point of a rebuttal comes across rhetorically as extremely weak: it's a point that interlocutors genuinely holding the position don't actually care about and would instantly concede. Let Eliot Page use the men's room -- fine, whatever.'
You can say this is 'rhetorically extremely weak' if you want, but the *actual law* has to be written on a firmer basis than 'fine, whatever' - either something is legal or it isn't. And making something legal for trans men but not for trans women poses certain 'equal in the eyes of the law' problems.
Honestly I think asymmetric legislation in this context could conceivably pass intermediate scrutiny, unless the Court wants to hold that men's and women's rooms themselves are unconstitutionally discriminatory (which, to be clear, I could see a future more liberal SCOTUS doing in 10-20 years if the AIs haven't killed us all in the interim).
The broader difficulty with your point (which I conceptually agree is a good one) is that forced symmetry in passed legislation on an equal protection basis is just an artifact of governing constitutional rulings made in different contexts rather than something that the natal-sex-for-MtFs side thinks is affirmatively desirable. I don't think it's especially convincing to try to rebut people's substantive concerns with "well, due a spandrel that you probably think is also dumb in this context you'd have to make legislation enacting your preferences counterproductively overbroad." The takeaway from that isn't "this is violating equal protection concerns in a way that should make you reconsider your position" it's "applying equal protection sufficiently broadly to apply in this context is dumb."
In a very weird way, I think that this might be an example in which a racial discrimination analogy might actually be *less* inflammatory than other ones. Consider a proposed regulation: "No one may enter a public park when the UV index is over 5 without wearing at least SPF 15 sunscreen." -- The rational basis of this is easy and benevolent: reduce skin cancer rates and pass a formal law whose imprimatur is probably good even if enforcing it seems kinda hopeless (similar to seatbelt laws). Of course, if you're Black, you might reasonably object to this law on the basis that (1) applying sunscreen is inconvenient, costs money, and makes one's skin feel greasy and (2) you are at much lower risk of sunburn and skin cancer from UV exposure than white people are, so you should be exempt from such a law, and in fact it would be a Pareto welfare improvement to apply it only to white people.
To a proponent of the law seeking in good-faith to reduce aggregate skin cancer rates, the argument that "You would need to apply this law in a way that is facially race-neutral due to equal protection concerns, even if this unjustifiably subjects Black people to costs without commensurate benefits" doesn't suggest that reducing skin cancer rates is an unworthy goal, it suggests that this is a context in which the general principles underlying equal protection are not applicable.
Right, I think the whole point is that having any LAWS policing being in a bathroom is silly. Let people do what they feel most comfortable doing, and if they engage in skeevy behavior, have laws against that (hey, same-sex sexual assault is a thing too!)
Public policy should generally let people police themselves through norms unless there is a harm, and the right has ginned up a harm that doesn't exist in order to win votes.
I mentioned this in a top-level comment, but this is the core of progressives' argumentation on quite a few matters. They think using some rhetorical trickery is a good substitute for actual persuasion. "We don't want men in the women's facilities" gets countered with "great, trans women are not men" as if that's anything more than sophistry.
But on substance: yes I think retreat from areas of mass public sensitivity: Sports (which of course Lefty nerd culture disfavors and so has been blind to), pronouns, and under-18 transition as an absolute medical approach, etc. - bathrooms as as ostentious thing (here I have always been baffled by both sides as... I mean in real life who the hell polices going into a specific bathroom? And if you are a stall user, no one is going to know the least bit about your private parts... really this has always struck me as pure performative on all sides)
I think the line is kids. I actually have an acquaintance who I learned went over to MAGA because of urban legends about school teachers persuading kids that they're trans, kids being allowed to have surgery without their parents' knowledge, etc.
The sports issue is more effective for the anti-trans side than other issues are largely because it's an issue that primarily affects kids.
Indeed in fact it was Andrew Sullivan’s observation somewhat recently I recall that the gay rights movement internally had a clear internal rule - do not go into under-18 zone at all. All about adults. That said Sports is not just kids - people into sports do take this seriously, notably in certain kinds of competitive sports. Since Political Activist Lefties are heavy weight on non-sports liking nerds, this seems extremely misunderstood in Lefty circles. [me I am utterly indifferent to sports but well understand the sensitivities there]
This is roughly my take as well. The right wing is really good at finding an edge case and using it to push their whole agenda. Elite trans girl athletes are like an edge case of an edge case.
From the perspective of actual trans people, though, I can imagine it's hard to see how far you have to retreat to find that "defensible" line. A "bathrooms but not locker rooms" position might be it for most people, but we know where the right wing wants to go.
This reminds me a bit of the "civil unions" position on gay marriage from the early 2000s. It was short of full equality, but definitely seen as a pro-gay position.
"With the obvious caveat that the bathroom thing is fearmongering because it's not like there is a force field keeping people identifying as men from entering the women's bathroom to commit sexual assualt."
There's no force field keeping murderers from murdering either, but you would agree that the law against murder is an important protection that you wouldn't want to lose.
Until recently there was a social understanding that a man in a women's bathroom could be expelled by force of law.
Also, saying that a male person 'identifies as a man' is losing the plot. Your self identity, whatever that is, is not germane to the situation.
As a weary veteran of this topic, I’ve come to believe the real insidious problem with the bathrooms is that it allows a free for all for any male person to enter women’s restrooms and locker rooms—and now there’s no way to get them *out* until actual assault happens.
One need only look to the recent actions of Lily Tino at Disney World, proudly taking photos and videos of herself in the bathrooms to prove that she was there, and ranking her experiences in each of them based on how good or bad the vibes from women were. (I believe Tino is being sued by a woman whose face was clear in one of the videos/photos and that Tino plastered online).
"There's no force field keeping murderers from murdering either, but you would agree that the law against murder is an important protection that you wouldn't want to lose."
Exactly. This is why we have laws against sexual assual. The laws do not magically preempt it from happening, but we prosecute people who do it and lock them in a concrete box to keep it from happening again.
You're arguing against yourself! Which is it, that we don't need laws because they're not a force field, or laws are necessary to prosecute offenders after the fact?
We prosecute people for disorderly conduct and indecent exposure, and should continue to do that when men enter women's locker and bath rooms. We don't need new laws for this, we just need men to follow the law as it is.
Have you ever been in a women’s room? It’s all stalls. I have never seen a woman’s privates in a women’s bathroom and if a trans woman has used a women’s room with me, I wouldn’t know because I haven’t seen their privates either. If a woman assaults me in a women’s room, it’s illegal and bad. If a man assaults me in a women’s room, it’s also illegal and bad. Using a bathroom stall next to me is fine.
I've made other replies to drill on this, but extend the argument to locker rooms, prisons, shelters etc. because that's already happening.
Also, to be a bit technical, assault as a crime is usually defined as making a reasonable person afraid of bodily harm or injury, and a women seeing a grown man in a women's bathroom could reasonably fear for her safety.
How do you keep males out of women's spaces if you allow anyone to simply say they are trans and get access?
The sneaky argument is conflating things that harm other people (sexual assualt, murder) with a transwoman using the women's bathroom. Outside of a prison, the women's bathroom consists of a bunch of stalls and sinks. There is no indecent exposure because you go to the bathroom inside of the stall. Even if they're pre-op, nobody sees their genitals. Likewise, there is no disorderly conduct or public disturbance. They're using the bathroom in the same way as everybody else.
The real issue is that self ID allows any man, trans identifying or not, to enter any women's space with impunity.
And you're arguing about bathrooms like this isn't going to be applied to locker rooms and spas and women's shelters and prisons, oh, wait, it already is.
If you want, we can simply change the terms to locker rooms, where there aren't stalls, or prisons, where people are literally locked into boxes with each other, and proceed from there.
I don't think Jackson is arguing against himself. Many years ago, there were several incidents of girls being assaulted in an isolated women's room in a local public building. The assailant didn't get prosecuted because he was a man entering a women's room. He got prosecuted for the assaults.
So a person walks into a bank, crosses the counter and starts making conversation with the tellers from their side of the window. He hasn't committed a crime yet, but clearly there is something threatening and wrong about that, correct? The bank tellers would be within their rights to object and call the police, who might reasonably arrest this person on disorderly conduct and possibly assault (making someone fear for their safety).
This person does not belong where they are, and the reason they are not allowed there is commonly accepted as preventing access to people who are up to no good, who have no legitimate reason to be there.
I think we all agree this is well and right.
If you want to argue the legitimacy of a man in a women's locker room or shelter or bathroom, we should have that conversation about why men aren't allowed in these places to begin with.
I feel like my prior is the opposite. People will, correctly internalize that laws and institutions aren’t for them. Between the trans people I know and myself growing up as a weird person it’s a consistent experience of finding that rules don’t really protect us only actively accepting people can.
You would have to make the case with evidence that current laws are not sufficient. The supreme court has already ruled that trans is covered under the framework of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You cannot legislate social acceptance. That’ll take time and trans activists have made things worse by being obnoxious and trying to bully people into accepting extreme positions.
I am also a weird person so I am familiar with how rules are ineffective at protecting people socially. They are effective procedurally though. People can treat me poorly in social settings, but employers cannot fire or refuse to hire me for being autistic and I have legal recourse if they try to do so.
I have never seen this to be true. Conceptually I understand that Bostock is law but it doesn’t seem to stop anyone from mystery firings of trans people especially in low stakes service work.
There are lots of reasons a person can be fired, and if they're employed at-will, their employer doesn't even need to provide a reason.
If there are many possible reasons a person can be fired, and "just because their boss wanted to" is a valid reason, then it's hard to prove under these circumstances that an ex-employee would not have been fired without discrimination. Even if that was the boss's real motive, if there's no written record saying "I fired worker A because they're [protected group]," can you prove it?
(I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I'm assuming that at-will employees are theoretically protected from discrimination, but I imagine this is not feasible to enforce in practice. I think most low-end service jobs are at-will. If I'm wrong, I invite commenters who know better to correct me.)
Sure, and all other kinds of discrimination persist despite all the laws. If you can prove the discrimination (very hard to do!) you have legal recourse, which is an improvement. There is also the hope that eventually the law will affect attitudes as well. But anti-discrimination laws don't magically make everything all better in the trenches.
As an aside, this is how most issues work - the core group holds the maximalist position but understands that certain aspects or edge cases aren't popular with the broader public, so they downplay or concede those. If you want to abolish zoning, for instance, and people ask if you're ok with meatpacking plants in suburbs, you'd say that of course we should have some restrictions on industrial use cases (even if you believe otherwise). Or if you're pro-sanctuary city and someone asks what about sex offenders picked up by the LAPD, you'd say of course you can work with immigration authorities to deport violent criminals, just not every offense.
These debates hew closest to religiously held beliefs, where hardline Christians say you're not a 'real Christian' if you're ok with abortion.
This whole thing is an illusion. If you retreat on those parts, the conservative media will find other parts to push on, until one day you're negotiating about the "should they be given basic human rights" piece.
That's not to say you can't try it. Just be aware that (1) it's not going to work, and (2) you're going to regret it.
Calling someone by the name they used before they transitioned. My qualitative prior is that most people think that it is both not a huge deal to accidentally do so and also think that it's weird and offputting to make a big deal out of always doing it.
To go back to my grandparent's friend group, one of them used to make a big deal of calling divorced women "Mrs. Ex-Husband's Name". It's been decades since he stopped and my grandpa and his other friends still make fun of him for it.
Indeed though weird and off-putting to insist on / do ostentiously deliberately (speaking from a position of generalised indifference to the whole subject so long as not personally subjected to pronoun lectures etc)
> The core fight is cultural of are these people human
Nope the core fight is not whether the people are human. Nobody's fighting about whether anyone is human. That's just so disingenuous. The core disagreements are whether biological men are entitled to compete in women's sports, whether parents should be informed when their children declare they have different pronouns in school, and whether states can and should legislate certain types of surgeries for minors.
I agree, but I would note that (some) trans activists are not the only ones pushing the envelope here—the Tennessee ban is of all gender treatment for minors, not just surgeries.
Can you explain to me the relationship between why trans women who date men feel scared to reveal their trans status to any of these? Why it’s often said things like law enforcement isn’t for me?
Trans women are afraid to reveal they’re trans to male partners because a significant majority of men would consider sleeping with a trans woman a homosexual act, especially a trans woman with a penis.
If you think that’s unfair of men, then you have to explain how sexual orientation is actually about gender and not about sexed bodies, and that’s where we run into whether trans ideology is fundamentally homophobic or not.
As a bi, or probably more accurately pan, person It’s very strange when you realize the disgust people feel about it. But when I was single I approached men a lot and never felt the need to protect myself. Attracted to gender feels to me totally much more apt for my own experience but admittedly bi men are super rare. Genetalia aren’t super foundational.
But aside from my own thing I think it’s unfair that there’s fear of violence associated with it which 25 years ago was the case for my attraction to men but basically has gone away.
Approaching a man is different from, as you said in your prior post, *dating* a man and not telling him your trans status. Arguably, it’s an attempt at sex by deception, and while violence is not an acceptable response, I think it’s an understandable one in some cases.
Are you really trying to say that because you find people of both sexes and all genders attractive, you are confused as to how anyone else could have a narrower sexual orientation?
What would you define as retreat? I don't think anyone is proposing, certainly not even the most "give the people what they want on culture" version of a MY would countenance any kind of retraction of anti-discrimination rules and laws regarding same sex attraction.
I think Matt constantly seems to want to go back to a world where social shunning and casual violence was a lot higher against gender non-conforming people and trans people.
If we like suspend the game of telephone where at least liberal norms are being shaped by pro-trans messages on our side I don't know how we'd control the reaction of the only game of telephone happening is trans people are "traps" and trying to hurt your daughter . It seems like that would result in a lot more bad things.
I think that’s a really big claim and I can’t see any evidence for it. I think you tend to think that, since greater acceptance of trans people has correlated with wider legal protections for them, people who think that the push to continue expanding those protections is politically unsustainable want to go back to a world with less acceptance for trans people. But I think a premise of the post is that policy doesn’t change attitudes by itself: the results of policy change minds. The maximalist approach has led to thermostatic reactions against trans acceptance (and even against, like, gay marriage, at least among Republicans). We need to find the policy package people will get on board with. It’s maybe parallel to how affirmative action never got especially popular, but scaling it back hasn’t led to a disdain for POC as far as I can see.
An alternative view is that for McBride to win, they would have to upend all understanding of biology in human society. It is hard enough to change minds about taxation or immigration and they don't require all understanding of reality to change.
From about 38 minutes on that podcast, McBride suggests that politicians should not make any laws regarding trans issues, even using the word 'libertarian'. This is not how we approach anything in any other walk of life. Certain trans issues do not impact anybody else, but sometimes they do.
We can get into specifics, but the argument is usually not that biology is wrong, it’s that biology is less relevant than it’s sometimes treated. Biology has been used to justify all sorts of sex- or gender-based discrimination that in retrospect we find unjustified.
Don't forget "biology is a lot more complicated than a lay-person's casual understanding of it". Very few people who insist on using "he" to refer to a trans woman seem to have a comprehensive and coherent model of behavior that also incorporates the intersex.
I think your first sentence is overlooked by a lot of people in these debates. We don't have to define "woman" and "man" the same way in every context.
In the context of this article, it makes sense to treat Sarah McBride as a woman. In the context of a sports league, it might not make sense to treat Sarah McBride as a woman.
I think you are attributing hard-line stances of the broader trans movement to McBride in particular. She is clearly trying to meet people where they are and stake out a compromise position, so that people don't have to upend their understanding of biology. And it takes a lot of moral courage to stake out that middle ground and have both sides tell you that you're wrong.
"But I cannot help but note that McBride offered no change in policy, no reassessment of self-ID, no retraction of 73 genders, “chest-feeding,” mandated pronouns, and the crazy rest — let alone an end to child sex changes. On women’s sports, she wants decisions made at a local level and biological men competing with women. It’s a start, I suppose. But it’s going to take sterner stuff to protect vulnerable children from being transed with no safeguards in place, and to recognize that binary sex is a biological reality that is integral to a functioning human society and indispensable for gender variation to exist at all."
McBride is smart, in that they recognise that waving placards with 'hang terfs' on them does not win hearts and minds. But ultimately, they have the same beliefs as the most hard-line trans activists. At one point (from about 58:00 in the video), McBride suggests that government has no place at all in regulating sex changes for children. Radical libertarian for this one particular thing?
Yes, his article today in the NYT where he talks about what a big supporter of trans people he is rings a bit false when elsewhere he uses language about kids “being transed.”
He goes much further than that. In his own column, he repeatedly refers to trans women's genitals as "open wounds," describes the prospect of trans women in women's restrooms and locker rooms using lurid language of hairy, muscular people with big dicks swinging that sounds like he's writing erotica for himself, and insinuates that trans people and their allies are a homophobic cabal trying to exterminate the gays by turning all of them into ersatz straight people through transition. I don't know where he gets off, or how he is able to see himself as in any way supportive of trans people's dignity.
B) I, McBride, insist that every Democratic politician believe and support these things.
I think she's _helpfully_ pushing back on B, even if I disagree with her on some of A - there's also room for _me_ to support people I don't 100% agree with.
I think we should judge people 60% on their actions, 30% on their words, and 10% on the secret contents of their heart. You seem to be assigning basically all of the weight to that last category.
I think the durability of inflation indexing doesn't really get at what people mean by Regan's success in shaping the subsequent political environment. Instead, he changed the terms in which American politics was fought -- he gave ideological conservatism a real foothold, he made aggressive foreign policy part of the conversation, he ended the Republican detente with the new deal state. A smaller example: JFK didn't just create the peace corps and USAID, he made the idea that the US would do good works as part of soft power a standard one. Obama was a successful president and the ACA is durable policy but basically all of the debates of the Obama era are still with us and on the same terms.
Right, Shore's case that Reagan's success was all about the economy ignores his VP convincingly winning the election to succeed him (which neither Clinton nor Obama managed), and the guy who beat his VP having to make significant rhetorical and policy concessions to do so.
The latter is consistent with Matt's "it's durable policy rather than rhetoric" take, but it's hardly the work of an economic environment merchant.
A last note about Obama, it's pretty clear at this point that Trump has reshaped public discourse at least as much as Obama has. Will it last, who knows, but immigration, trade, and foreign policy have all been upended, as has the rhetoric around taxes and welfare, even if actual policy has been slow to follow.
I think it would be instructive for Matt to lay out his ideas about how one DOES in fact try to change public opinion and advocate for policies that are currently unpopular. He does a lot of telling people to meet the public where they are and to avoid backlash and so forth, which is all fair enough. But the public does sometimes experience enduring shifts in political opinion (an obvious, recent one is gay marriage), and I think it would frame Matt's other arguments if he clearly laid out who he thinks should advocate for change and how they should do it.
Having someone like McBride who by all accounts seems like a pretty normal woman and a pretty normal person probably helps.
As a young not-yet-out gay man I was considering joining the college gay group when I had just gotten to college by the flamboyant presentation of their ambassadors.
I ended up joining a much more 'normie' group a few years later.
For gay rights, I think it came down to what values were most important to Americans. For example, job protections for gay people appealed more to Americans' fairness values that people should work hard, pull their weight, and pay taxes, then it did to the competing value of not exactly liking gay people. And gay people saying they want to be a part of the system and pay their taxes made them more likeable.
The success and quickness of the gay right movement, I think, rested a lot of the fundamental conservative nature of it. Gays wanted to work, serve in the military, and get married - very conservative things! And those values were more important to Americans than excluding gays from society.
So... maybe its about educating people in how an issue actually does appeal to their values?
Ideas may be changed, but I think values are very hard to change.
Well one difference is that vastly more people saw Will & Grace than Transparent, because it aired at a time when there were fewer quality alternative entertainment options.
Which is certainly the main problem with the 'hope someone ends up making a helpful mass media product that makes people feel better about my maligned sub-group' idea nowadays.
Not sure how I feel about obvious [click|rage]bait subhead + post image on an article that starts off a bit on The T Question, but then segues right back into safe non-controversial SB Classic Hits, and never actually circles back. Which, to be clear, I'm always here for! But it kinda has the same...editorial aftertaste as that one anniversary piece in October which was, uh, poorly received by many on timing grounds. And I don't even particularly care about pride, personally? Still feels weird though. Trans life and my expected reactions to related things ironically made a lot more sense back when my subgenre lifestyle was less accepted..."enclave politics", as Freddie recently wrote in a sadly-paywalled actually-reasonable post.
The Ezra Klein interview was legitimately good too! I was hoping Matt would go more in-depth on it, especially since one of my favorite pieces of his on the issue has a similar bait-and-switch transition:
I, too, thought it seemed a little shoehorned in. Kept waiting for MY to circle back to McBride’s interview and/or policy ideas, but…nothing. Combined with the warning at the top, it just felt kind of provocative for provocation’s sake.
A very thoughtful post today, especially after the NYC election. McBride provides an important history lesson in how change actually happens - often incrementally. In today’s “instant everything” society one wonders whether people are willing (and strategically mature enough) to learn that lesson and adopt it. I’m reminded of Mario Cuomo’s remark that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. The true test of Mamdani’s political skill set will be whether he can pivot from his skillful approach to campaigning to an effective approach to governance. That will require compromise, incrementalism and skillful communications. We know he’s good at the latter; I hope he is going to be as good at the former. I’m optimistic he will emerge as a transformative leader who may be well placed to lead a new coalition out of the MAGA wilderness .
Minor point in the article, but Mike Lee’s plan to sell public lands was bad! Public land is awesome for hunting, camping and hiking. He specifically targeted areas near existing development, but that land is also the most accessible to public for recreation. I’m sure there are some public lands that should be sold, but selling wilderness areas is a one-way ratchet, so it should be done carefully to maintain recreation benefits.
I’m also very skeptical it would do much to alleviate the housing shortage, where the primary issue is land use regulations. The NY Times just ran a big story focusing on Summit County, Colorado, which has a massive housing shortage despite having a population of just 30k in an area of 600 square miles. To pick a random example, Lower Macungie Twp, PA fits 30k people into only 20 square miles using solely suburban/exurban sprawl.
Yes, if "encouraging more suburban subdivisions" was good way to solve our housing issue we wouldn't be in the position we are, because we already do a ton of that. It's like highway widening.
If it was part of some bigger deal that upzoned other places that would be one thing but as a stand alone long bill it's just another sop to development, mining, and logging interests that won't change core dynamics (and the fact Lee is a troll makes working with him that much harder)
I think it’s even worse than that. Even excluding the public lands, the population density in these western states is super low. Boise and Salt Lake City have population densities comparable to East Coast suburbs. These states could massively alleviate their housing problems by making it easier to build single family homes on privately owned land.
I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating: the value of Slow Boring to me has been teaching me, at a very embarrassingly late stage, that 1) empirical analysis is important and 2) politics (in a practical, not definitional sense) is negotiation, compromise, consensus-building and just generally the slow boring of hard boards.
Neither of these are revelations - but boy howdy, did I not even dimly grasp them in my younger, much dumber days when I thought “politics” was either inscrutable performative critique* or table-pounding maximalism coupled with sneering contempt for people who don’t agree with you.
* people like to blame “postmodernism” for this, and there’s some truth to it, but really it was the product of a midwit army of social science / humanities grad students (of which I was part and have endeavored to escape from) trying to clumsily apply Foucault, Derrida, “la French theory,” etc.
Maybe because my first full-time jobs were in policy, or maybe because politics weren’t much of a spectator sport back then (in the 90s), but this trajectory is interesting to me because I experienced nothing like it!* Normies didn’t follow politics or most jurisprudence closely and certainly didn’t know the minutiae of legislative procedure. I have never thought that governing, at least, was about anything other than negotiation and compromise. Thus I am and have long been baffled by the current political discourse.
*speaking here to your second point; the first sunk in a bit later
My first thought was similar to yours. I've always believed politics was sausage making, and it is what I was taught in all my poli-sci classes -- during Reagan's term. Curious generational differences.
Indeed! And what I *really* don’t understand is why so many on the left refuse to believe it despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary…
I have to add, I think it's much worse on the right, in that it rises right up to the level of elected lawmakers who's job it is to make sausage --- and they refuse to do so. The Freedom Caucus makes people like Bernie and AOC look like soft, weak kneed squishes.
Yes I think it’s fair to say that it started there earlier (RINO etc) but the left is getting clobbered over and over again.
Although I guess the right doesn’t even give a s*** about policy, or the meaning of the word “conservative,” anymore.
Regardless, you are right to note that legislators should be at least *trying* to legislate!
I like Republicans not trying to legislate. Just like I like drunk 16 year olds not trying to drive a car.
This is true, in that the Rs and Ds have both adopted a kind of purity ethos that makes actual governing much much harder. One is more obvious than the other, because everything bagels and performative wokeness are readily visible in a way that recalcitrant obstinance about taking 'no action' isn't. I'm not sure which is worse in practice, or if there's a stable/consistent answer to that question.
Same here. I learned all about sausage making in my political science classes in the 80's, and I don't understand why people today don't get it.
Yes to all of this! If I may indulge in a bit of my life story... as a budding young liberal I really wanted to go to a college well known for its super liberalism. But it was very $$$ and my parents said, nah, you should go to UVA. Which at that time had a conservative-leaning student body. And I am truly glad. It meant I couldn't engage in a lot performative activism bc just being a Democrat was OUT THERE. So instead I did boring normie things like, try to get a Democrat elected governor. And took Larry Sabato's class which was basically how politics is sausage making and why that's actually a good thing. Sad that this now seems very old fashioned.
Different times. I went to UVa in the mid-70s and even though I majored in political science I got no sense about the student body's political leanings at all. At that time, even with Watergate etc, no one seemed to care much at all about politics. I can't recall a single discussion outside of class.
But it was a long time ago. Long enough that Larry Sabato was my in-residence dorm advisor, being a year or so older than me.
Same. I went to college in Tennessee and Kentucky, instead of S Florida, where I was from. I learned a lot about compromise and sausage making, and helped a D Governor get elected in TN.
My experience was similar except that sadly there was no Larry Sabato at my school! I’m not aware of anyone today playing a similar role.*
*(Unless maybe we count this newsletter?)
I think it's more complicated. People rarely want to see how the sausage is made. I think when a lot of normie non-politico's see how the sausage is made they don't come away more respectful of the process. In fact, they become more radicalized against it. I believe in the Slow Boring ethos, but more and more what I see is people prefer a burn it down mentality and a much stronger desire for radical change vs incrementalism particularly among swing voters and low-engagement voters who voted for Trump. The incrementalism is not going to expand the tent in a significant way. It may lead to the tent not shrinking more but it won't expand the majority of voters who are disengaged and dissatisfied with the process.
And to preemptively respond to one of Freddie DeBoer’s admittedly funnier drive-by shitposts from a few days ago: yes, Freddie, I am trying to catch the eye of Matt-senpai (or hell, Ben-senpai, why not).
I’m always reading your takes!
Why are you such a Republican?!?! And you don’t even know it! 😂
Right? I thought he’d have strolled by to lob one of these by now.
A few months ago I had a conversation with someone where I said that, basically, no one born since the mid-80s (which includes me) has ever actually seen an American president negotiate with an enemy, except from a position of overwhelming military advantage. Obviously that doesn't mean we've always won, not by a long shot, but I do think it has helped shape two generations' opinions by making it much easier to think that real negotiation is low status, unnecessary, and weak. It also makes it a lot easier to look down on the past for making pragmatic or necessary compromises.
AIUI Obama actually did try genuine negotiation with the Republican majority on budget issues, but the consensus at the time was that
(1) Boehner wants to get the deal done, but
(2) Boehner doesn't have the votes to get the deal through.
And so you had big-ticket initiatives (chiefly budget issues and immigration reform) that ended up petering out in the face of the filibuster, McConnell's intransigence, and Boehner's lack of control of his caucus.
He did, yes. But, of course, Boehner is not an enemy of the US, and I find it to be a good example of my general point that that feels like a natural response to my comment. These days we do, in fact, treat negotiations between party leaders that way, and it's a problem.
I would also note that Obama did, in fact, also successfully negotiate a deal with Iran, who while not an enemy in the sense of the USSR was certainly not an ally. He was a good negotiator. Obviously we know how that fared afterwards, and it's didn't look like incremental progress by his successors, such as they were and are.
Ah, I think I misread your statement of "military advantage" as being more metaphorical than it was, mea culpa.
Ah ok, I see. Yeah, I meant it pretty literally. But yeah, I think we treat the other party today with about as much distrust as we used to treat our actual geopolitical enemies.
"He [Obama] was a good negotiator."
This is contrary to much of what I have ever read about Obama and Congress where Biden was considered to be far superior both as VP and as president.
As I understand it, Biden was better at the politics, Obama at persuasion and oration.
The Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban and it's hard to argue that it was from a position of overwhelming military advantage because the US military was not able to beat them after close to 20 years of fighting.
I don't think that was a problem of military power, but rather of us having inconsistent/unclear goals that weren't attainable through military power, at least not in the forms we were prepared to deploy it. For many reasons, most of them quite good and the rest quite well intentioned, we're no longer willing to actually deploy overwhelming military force in the conflicts we get into. and can't credibly pretend otherwise. In WWII, we carpet bombed cities and deployed nuclear weapons because we were engaged in total war until our enemies, which were unified nation-states, surrendered unconditionally. In the Cold War, we had thousands of nukes on hair trigger and threatened to destroy global civilization and plunge the world into nuclear winter if the USSR attacked us or our close allies. But there was never a moment where anyone considered (or would have believed) that we were willing to render Afghanistan indefinitely uninhabitable, or that we would mow down civilians by the millions, if they didn't do what we wanted, even though that was definitely physically within our capabilities.
You’re moving goalposts here. Your original comment was about how no one in your generation has seen a US President negotiate with an enemy. I gave you an example that contradicts that. End of story.
I disagree, because I don't think that your example satisfies the condition in the latter part of the sentence in which I made that claim. And also because that claim was the frame for my comment which was actually about people moving towards thinking that negotiation - the kind where multiple parties who despise each other and who all actually have bargaining power nevertheless respect one another and sit down and make concessions and follow through on their commitments - is low status/unnecessary/weak.
But in any case, sure, I will happily grant that my claim as written, which as specified was a one sentence summary paraphrasing a conversation I had months prior, was probably false. I could have spent several pages of text defining all my terms and tightening up my reasoning and phrasing, but this is a comment on a blog post, not a research paper.
It was also a negotiation to surrender, one that Trump didn't even follow through on.
Who was to surrender to whom?
I graduated from Berkeley 10 years ago, so the Foucault/Derrida crowd was more or less the oxygen I breathed for a long time. Not that I ever agreed much with them, but I came to think they represented the center of political discourse on my side of the aisle. (A fun aside: I remember attending a Robert Reich speech during an Occupy protest in 2011 and I was flabbergasted by the bounty of "Free Palestine" posters. I didn't know the phrase "message discipline" then, but that's exactly what was missing. As a haughty 18-year-old, I saw myself a lot like that one brilliant Far Side cow among a sea of lemmings: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/1dlhzf0/i_relate_to_claire/)
Slow Boring taught me that that sort of maximalism is a dead end, which has rendered most comments by said college crowd inert in my mind. I feel genuinely grateful for the development, too -- in the vein of other things Matt has written, I can see how their preferred intellectual traditions have made a lot of them hopelessly depressed.
And the thing is that Foucault, Derrida et al. are fine as far as they go, as long as you keep them in perspective. Foucault’s insights about power and discourse are genuinely useful, if you use them analytically and not ontologically. Like many other thinkers, it’s derivatives of their thought and not necessarily the original article that produces the worst of the dreck.
But otherwise, yeah - I hear you. Grad school was weird.
I can imagine. Not sure if you feel differently, but I do think the experience was more rewarding than tiresome on the whole. It gave me a lexicon that I wouldn't have otherwise, regardless of whether I use it personally.
Score one for intentionally cultivating ideological diversity!
As a counterpoint: the currently dominant political party isn't doing much negotiation, consensus-building or empirical analysis. And they keep winning elections, particularly when the policy nerds are running on the other side.
Postmodernism probably deserves more blame/derision for the state of politics than it receives. After Khrushchev spilled the beans on Stalin, a bunch of French intellectuals reinvented themselves by inaccurately analyzing historical events and science producing a weird nihilistic philosophy that made a lot of them rich. When Alan Sokal exposed them in the 1990s, they should have been consigned to the dustbin of history. But incredibly these nitwits made a comeback through low information TikTok leftists. Hopefully this all goes away someday but the damage it has done to politics is incalculable.
From my experience, in schools, it is taught that the culmination of Black civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at Lincoln Memorial. As if in some Sorkin-esque way, King's speech that day settled the Black civil rights debate forever. All the work and negotiation in Congress, LBJ, Robert Byrd, and Strom Thurmond aren't taught. And I think the way it is covered in schools makes a lot of people believe that all you have to do to win any public debate is say the correct magic words.
The same is true for how the rise of Nazism in Germany is taught, with similar detrimental effect for public life (the inability to protect society against fascism/extreme right take over). Most people seem to think it was all due to the charisma and powerful oratory skills of Adolf Hitler. In fact, he was seen by most Germans as a weird Austrian until 1933 although he was good at riling up his base.
The Nazi take over in Germany had many causes - hyper inflation, the Versailles treaty, how ww1 ended, antisemitism, the threat of Soviet/Bolshevism, extreme political polarization and violence, the splintering of the left and murders of Liebknecht and Luxembourg, the dysfunction of the Weimar constitution, the cowardness of conservative elites etc etc. Hitler’s oratory skills play a minimal role, if any.
Hitler's oratory explains why Hitler rather than someone else was the leader of the Nazi party, but not why a Nazi-type party took over.
You can't explain the BUF (Britain) and the blueshirts (Ireland) and the Falange (Spain) and Action Français (France) and Mussolini (Italy) and Austrofascism (Austria) and the Arrow Cross (Hungary) and the Iron Guard (Romania) and so on (in every European country) because of one person.
Hitler also really mattered because the leader of a fascist country has enormous (not unconstrained, but enormous) power and he chose specific directions to take Germany down where other fascist leaders did not go.
Feel obligated to point out that a lot of those parties didn’t actually get any power. There was never any realistic chance of the BUF getting to Downing Street, for example
Falange, Mussolini, Dollfuss, the Arrow Cross and the Iron Guard all seized power, though. 5-out-of-8 countries is still enough to conclude that the key factor wasn't Hitler, it was the downfall of a monarchy.
I can’t speak for all of these, but it’s kind of strange to suggest that the Arrow Cross party gained power for any reason other than the Nazis. These weren’t independent events
It also tends to gloss over the anti-Jewish policies and actions throughout Europe over centuries, and especially the restrictions on where Jews could live and what work they could do across the Austrian and Russian empires.
A great point I heard somebody make (maybe Ian Kershaw? maybe on The Rest Is History?): If you said to someone circa 1900, "There is going to be a European country that commits mass slaughter of Jews in the next half century," very few people would have guessed that that country would be Germany, where Jews were integrated and successful, and where there hadn't recently been a Dreyfus affair or series of pogroms.
That point is an old one. I was taught it in college in French History
It was deflation and austerity in response to the Great Depression by Weimar in the 1930s that made people turn to Nazis not the short postwar hyperinflation.
Yeah keep in mind that the hyperinflation that gets in the news was because of a very deliberate policy of printing money to pay every single striking miner to resist French occupation. It was not particularly difficult to reverse, either. The emegency decree (Bruning) period is much more proximate to Hitler's rise to power and that comes down mostly to Hindenburg and his cabal wanting to tighten their grip on power.
And unemployment.
Well, surely they played a role in his consolidation of leadership over the party, pushing out economically leftist Nazis like the Strasser brothers and Röhm. That would have been a pretty different party, and might not have come to power in the first place!
To some extent, but there was also a powerful class of wealthy elites who wanted to get rid of the socialists in the Nazi party (who were better at reaching the working classes than Hitler was). But yes, his oratory skills mattered internally for sure.
Absolutely, though those elites would have been equally OK with other anti-socialist Nazis like Göring.
I can't speak for the entire country, but I can say in New England, American history classes spend way too time on the colonial era and basically rush through everything from 1900 onward in basically the last two weeks of school before summer break. Condensing the Civil Rights era into just one speech helps with that condensed approach.
It's very hard to teach history without taking sides. Taking sides on anything that happened after 1969 will wind up angering some set of parents. So it's easier to just hand-wave away the whole era.
And using the Disneyfied version of the Civil Rights Movement makes it easier to handwave away any tough discussions.
this sounds like a skill issue
Not in my suburban Boston high school . We spent two semesters on the US since the Civil War.
That's great to hear! Wish more schools did that.
In fairness, the civil rights movement got short shrift.
One thing that is related (also New England experience) is that colonial through the civil war is taught as continuous history but after the civil war it's rushed through as a site seeing trip with just random highlights and no connection between events.
Thinking back to my time in public school, the way we were taught about the Industrial Revolution (and thus how we were taught about all American history after the industrial revolution) was so bad. Instead of helping kids understand how it made the modern world, it was presented as dry as possible without any real connective tissue to anything. In the pre-internet era, I was assigned to write about this very specific type of lathe that had maybe about four paragraphs in total dedicated to it in our entire local library. I don't know what I was supposed to take away from that beyond how to write a stub Wikipedia article on a word processor. The librarian was my friend's mom and I felt so bad for her for having to help me research that.
Yes and has worked great for improv but is terrible for social studies.
I genuinely want to keep beating this drum. Social studies in Elementary school is a joke subject despite its central role in the culture wars. I enjoy teaching it and it’s a dumping ground for projects but it’s fundamentally not taken seriously.
More people should read about the post-1965 failures of the Civil Rights Movement, like the “War on Slums” in Chicago.
As David Garrow documents, King and others were *constantly* being warned that they had overly vague policy demands for their “War.” The reply was always that they’d figure something out soon enough.
But by the time they actually ended up at the negotiating table with the mayor and other big players, they still didn’t have a clear plan, and they found themselves in a weak position, pinned to their past demands. Unsurprisingly, the resulting deal was not terribly impressive, and local activists were quite down on King by the time his SCLC wrapped up its main efforts in the city.
All this despite King’s willingness to make personal sacrifices for the cause. (Moving his family to a slum apartment, e.g.) Good intentions weren’t enough.
I wonder how much of that was just the fact there were not a lot of Black leaders who had any experience of exercising real power. Like, if a 2010s version of Jim Clyburn or John Lewis had been there to advise them, would it have gone differently?
It’s notable that MLK was given lots of credible advice about the infeasibility of the War on Slums, e.g. from Bayard Rustin.
The SCLC had no ground game in Chicago, and the strategy of mass protest wasn’t very well-suited to the political and economic problems associated with housing. (Rustin’s “From Protest to Politics,” partly masterminded by Tom Kahn, looks prophetic in hindsight.)
Another interesting example is the Poor People’s March, which was going to take place in summer 1968. On one of the last nights of his life, King met with a major donor to the SCLC who tried to convince him that the March lacked a clear vision and set of demands. My sense is that she was absolutely right, though of course King was assassinated in April, so we can’t be sure what the March would’ve been like with him there.
It probably doesn't help that the most powerful black elected Democrat at the time, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., seems to have not exactly been the biggest fan of Rustin's either.
My experience was the same for the end of Apartheid as well. It wasn't nearly as extreme, but the coverage of the end of slavery and the gilded age were similarily compressed to a "Great Speech" model of history (along the lines of Great Man historical interpretations). I am endlessly thankful for having my high school history teacher in 11th and 12th grade tailor the IB world history curriculum to emphasize the slow, messy progress made via compromises throughout the 20th century.
The bit I still don't know is how the US got from passing the 1964-65 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, which were very controversial because racial equality itself was still very controversial and the stage when I was first becoming politically aware in the 1980s where there was a broad consensus that racial equality was right and segregation and Jim Crow were shameful features of the past and not active political debates with people wanting to reinstate them.
Because it seems to me that the process by which the implementation of those laws entrenched racial equality as a basic American value - a value so basic that even most racists appeal to "racism against whites" - is really important. Why did those become entrenched, but abortion didn't?
Matt seems to imply in his discussion that the ACA could become entrenched because it was good policy while policing cuts couldn't because they weren't, but I don't think that approach can be applied to questions like racism, sexism, abortion, etc.
A partial answer is that racism and abortion are not alike.
Jim Crow and segregation were an open, obvious ongoing assault on the founding ideals of the United States.
Likewise discrimination against women, and now formal equality is deeply embedded in our national culture, extremist trolls on the left and right notwithstanding.
But abortion isn't structured like that. It's not tied to the common ideals that underlie our national identity. Arguments to the contrary are complicated and weak.
"...But abortion isn't structured like that...."
I agree with this in a way that may look like radical disagreement, but isn't.
What gives the debate its intractable character is not that issues surrounding abortion are not "...tied to the common ideals that underlie our national identity." Rather, the trouble is that both sides can plausibly lay claim to those common ideals. The Declaration declares that we possess "...unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Just within that triplet, you have the raw ingredients for claiming that women's right to abortion is either profoundly American, or a betrayal of American values.
I'm not taking sides on abortion here, nor am I disagreeing with you about the differences between segregation and abortion. But I think I am disagreeing about whether positions on abortion are "...tied to the common ideals etc." They are tied only too tightly.
Many political disputes in the U.S. take the form of competing appeals to our founding ideals, but I'm skeptical that either side of the abortion debate is meaningfully grounded in the principles of the Declaration, at least not in a way that plays a serious role in public sentiment or activism.
When people invoke "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the abortion debate, I think they're usually retrofitting the language to arguments that are really moral, religious, or personal in origin. The appeals feel post hoc. For example, pro-life rhetoric focuses overwhelmingly on the moral status of the fetus, often grounded in religious or metaphysical claims about when life begins, not on constitutional or Enlightenment ideals.* Likewise, pro-choice activism tends to center bodily autonomy, privacy, and freedom from state interference: more aligned with 20th-century liberalism than 18th-century republicanism.
I agree that one 𝘤𝘢𝘯 construct an argument on either side using the Declaration’s language. But doing so requires a series of loaded assumptions: that the fetus is a rights-bearing individual from conception, that those rights supersede the mother’s, or conversely, that liberty and autonomy are absolute and trump any claims made on behalf of the fetus. These aren't trivial premises; they’re enormous philosophical commitments that don't follow straightforwardly from the text itself. So when both sides claim to be heirs of the same founding ideals, it feels more like rhetorical maneuvering than a shared grounding.
Contrast that with the civil rights movement. Appeals to the Declaration and Constitution were central and sustained, not just as rhetorical flourishes, but as the movement's moral core. "All men are created equal" wasn’t a strained analogy. The contradiction was open, glaring, and widely felt. With abortion, the conflict is more metaphysical, less tethered to a common national narrative.
This is good stuff, Deadpan, and I appreciate your willingness to engage.
Here's Stephen Douglas, Senator from Illinois, from the Debates:
"The signers of the Declaration of Independence never dreamed of the negro when they were writing that document. They referred to white men, to men of European birth and European descent, when they declared the equality of all men. I see a gentleman there in the crowd shaking his head. Let me remind him that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that document, he was the owner, and so continued until his death, of a large number of slaves. Did he intend to say in that Declaration, that his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves? It must be borne in mind that when that Declaration was put forth, every one of the thirteen Colonies were slaveholding Colonies, and every man who signed that instrument represented a slave-holding constituency. Recollect, also, that no one of them emancipated his slaves, much less put them on an equality with himself, after he signed the Declaration. On the contrary, they all continued to hold their negroes as slaves during the revolutionary war. Now, do you believe-are you willing to have it said-that every man who signed the Declaration of Independence declared the negro his equal, and then was hypocrite enough to continue to hold him as a slave, in violation of what he believed to be the Divine law? And yet when you say that the Declaration of Independence includes the negro, you charge the signers of it with hypocrisy."
You write that, "...with the civil rights movement,..."All men are created equal" wasn’t a strained analogy. The contradiction was open, glaring, and widely felt."
Well, no. There was a "metaphysical" point at issue here, too. Reading the Declaration our way depends on construing the Declaration in such a way as to treat black people as human beings. That strikes you and me as uncontroversial -- it should be uncontroversial! But it was in fact central to the controversy.
(I have always thought Alexander Stephens in the Cornerstone Speech had the advantage over Douglas in point of consistency: Stephens agrees that the Declaration clearly applies to black people, and since he is a consistent racist, he rejects the message of the Declaration altogether. Another reminder that the pursuit of consistency will not keep you from being a horrible human being.)
I concede that if you push hard enough on any point, it's metaphysics all the way down,* and I can see how my comments might imply that there was a perfect consensus on the metaphysical issues you raised, which is untrue.
I should put it this way: I won't pretend that I know what was and wasn't central to the controversy over slavery in the 1850s (it's been a long time since I've read carefully about it). But we do know that the constitution's compromises were bitterly opposed, by enemies of slavery. Additionally, despite being a slaveholder himself, Jefferson expressed regret and opposition to it on many occasions.
Douglas asked "Did [Jefferson] intend to say in that Declaration, that his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves?" I think the evidence suggests that yes, he intended to say exactly that! Jefferson was full of contradictions but I think a handful of quotes show that he was at a minimum troubled by his own behavior. He wrote in "Notes on Virginia":
> Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
Or in a 1791 letter to Benjamin Banneker:
> No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America.
Douglas, by contrast, was pragmatic and opportunistic: a policy entreprenur trying to sell the public on his case by any means necessary. He shouldn't be taken to stand for a majority position on ontological questions.
I stand by the idea that "the contradiction was open, glaring, and widely felt". It was not *universally* felt, but civil rights activism had an unbroken, continuous lineage that went all the way back to the founding of the United States. More to my point, by the mid twentieth century, approximately zero people held Douglas' position that black people were not human. I don't think pro-choice activists can lay the same claim.
* Thanks, Derrida! >:(
I’d like to thank you both for a lively enlightening discussion that as a bystander felt like I was gaining insights into historical perspectives not conceived in the 1700’s nor appreciated in the 2000’s. I can’t wait to listen in to a similar discussion around AI and the time periods.
As the brouhaha over the University of Florida law student's award winning paper shows, the Douglas Dream Shall Never Die.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/us/white-supremacist-university-of-florida-paper.html
I don't think it's as crazy if you understand the question of slavery then de jure racism as being at odds with day 1 founding principles that still matter a lot, albeit hazily, in US culture. No not everyone's principles, but enough that once the dam burst under the pressures of World War 2 and the early days of the Cold War it found a population ready enough to accept it (or maybe no longer willing to put up more than token resistance), at least in an 'equal before the law' kind of way.*
*Yes, yes a million exceptions but I don't think the broader cut is wrong. The issue has preoccupied American politics since the beginning.
I think this is particularly interesting with how slow public opinion changed on interracial marriage.
Was it that slow? To use the dates in OP's post, Gallup says approval went from about 10 percent in 1964 to about 45 percent in the mid-1980s https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx
More accurately, slow relative to my prior before the first time Matt posted that it only got over 50% approval in the 1990s. I wasn't properly politically aware until the Obama administration, but my sense from older family members and friends was similar to Richard's statement that there was a broad consensus against racism within 20 years of the Civil Rights Act. Before seeing the Gallup polling, I would have guessed that it hit 50% by the early 1980s.
That doesn't seem like a huge difference compared to your prior, especially given:
1. We don't have the data on "don't know" or "don't care."
2. Some disapproval might be of the "marriage is hard enough" or "the children will have a hard time" sort, an attitude which I heard expressed by people who I know for a fact were very supportive of civil rights.
3. Most importantly, we don't have any data about how strong anti-racism attitudes really were at the time in question.
I wonder how geographically bound this sentiment was/is?
My experience in far northern New England was that people were baffled by race relations and didn't really have negative opinions because there was only one or two black people around. Even the very Republican county I grew up in ranged only from blasé to very tolerant even in the 80s, while Boston is one of the most racist places in America.
I find that quite believable. It’s an unverifiable story, but supposedly the tiny town in rural Colorado my father grew up in the 1950s treated the one black family like everyone else and was instead divided on Catholic-Protestant lines.
On the other hand, anti-immigration sentiment seems to be strongest where there are the fewest immigrants.
That seems slow in objective terms - i.e. not adding a value judgement.
The long evolutionary movement with a bounce up in the mid-1990s is quite illustrative that Lefty Proggy mass convert-the-heathen to true and correct thinking is a fine path to short and medium term failure (and probably closing the door to longer-term success or at least making it more an up-hill battle)
My sense is any marriage to an "other" group was frowned upon in the pre-war era, be it race, religion or ethnicity. My great grandparents were an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant and it caused a huge amount of issues in the family. So much so that b/c the kids were being raised Catholic, the Protestant side of the family wouldn't let them in their homes. And from what I can tell, both sides felt like it was an acceptable response b/c inter-faith marriages were just not done back them.
I do not have the total answer, but here's an important part of it:
Much of the American right during that era was far more concerned about the threat of Communism than it was about defending the views of segregationists from central government and dominant cultural influencers.
In fact, the subjugation of American blacks was seen by many as a vulnerability against the Communists. At the very least in the international arena. But also as a means of Communist agitation undermining the US internally.
Add in the fact that culture at that point was FAR less splintered -- folks were pretty much all watching the same TV shows and movies as well as the same network TV news. The result was that much of the country grew up with a pretty unambiguous image of segregationists as beyond the pale.
Of course, even this issue eventually fell prey to how policies actually worked for folks. It was not possible to get a hearing on "Maybe Blacks are inferior" or "Maybe Blacks are not inferior, but the races should be kept separate." But it was possible to argue (with increasing success) that the methods of achieving integration and equality were working out badly.
The rise of television news was very important too. For the first time, people got to see the predations of Southern racists on their TV screens and they did not like it. It also helped a lot that they could point the accusing finger of racism at a geographically-defined part of the country. When the civil rights movement began looking at the rest of the country, the response was not as warm.
Yes I think media changes are underrated here. If lynchings were on Youtube they’d have stopped sooner
Access to abortion in the first two trimesters has been and is still a very popular policy.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/
It was because racism was seen as a Southern problem, and from a legal point of view that was generally correct. People began turning against civil rights efforts when it left the South and went after more socially-generated phenomena, like residentially-based school segregation. Busing became a *huge* issue around the nation (see "On Common Ground" or read about what happened in Los Angeles). And then of course it went into areas like affirmative action and preferential hiring and other things that directly affected whites.
Because abortion is the "intentional killing of an innocent human life" and therefore an "intrinsic evil."
In a way this is essentially the right wing message on this topic.
Basically as far as I can tell the story is this; yeah it probably wasn’t great black people had to sit in the back of the bus (though no one really cared until those elite Yanks ‘stirred up trouble), but MLK said “I have a dream” and this was all solved (and oh yeah MLK was definitely a conservative). And ever since real racism is racism against white people and now a bunch of race baiters are trying take my money and give it ungrateful black people who dont appreciate all we did for them.
This is a simplification for sure. I’m quite aware there are conservatives (some of whom comment on this site) who are quite aware of the real story and understand that at least some of Trump’s appeal is about bigotry.
But honest to god, take the last 20-25 years of talk radio, Fox and Newsmax (let’s me real, this is the true ID of the conservative movement in modern times), feed it to AI and is the summary that’s spit out all that different from my summuary*
* honest to god this feels like a good use of AI. Andrew Sullivan did this apparently in his interview with Ungar-Sargon. And honestly I think Sullly came across pretty bad; basically he accused of Sargon of all sorts of positions and statement she never actually said.
In schools defense we introduce mlk in kindergarten because of the holiday and black history month and If your 11th grade teacher does a fear job on that stuff it’s amazing but it’s likely not as deep as the hero worship that starts when people are five.
When I first started teaching the path of least resistance was to do king for the holiday and saints Martin, Jackie and Rosa in February. 3rd graders know Martin but think he was an incredibly popular president or something.
It’s all very weird. I teach kids about American music in February and feel better now teaching about Etta James and Scott Joplin et al. for a month.
Yeah, I learned that Rosa Parks just woke up one day and said enough is enough and then got famous, which is an insult to all the hard work, restraint, and careful planning that the bus boycott took.
Who knew that academics would be biased toward Words as the ultimate power?
I think this is a really good idea for civics education. That subject seems like a failure as a standalone but I like the idea of having modules on the actual political fights.
I don’t know if it’s practical but I like the idea.
Have been watching the West Wing a bit this week and it’s not that good…
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Broad high-school-level survey courses cover things superficially because that's what all broad survey courses do. They're also aiming for a level of complexity that's comprehendible to the significant portion of the audience that isn't going to college. To me, oversimplified narratives that flatter our national pride are unexceptional.
Except it’s taught this way even in AP courses where modules like deep dives into the Salem Witch Trials are standard.
This explains most people having bad instincts - I would expect anyone who comes anywhere near the leadership of the ACLU to be wiser.
As a Delawarean and someone who has met Representative McBride on many occasions, I am so proud for her to be representing us in the House. Seriously, she is a gifted politician who understands how the world really does work
I would like to see her go on podcasts of people who disagree with her before passing a judgement on her political skills. Ezra is a softball interviewer on these issues. She refused to go on Andrew Sullivan's podcast, which tells me something about her.
Sullivan has gone off the deep end on trans issues. I'm not sure I'd want to go on his show either if I were McBride.
I don't think NYTimes would have published his opinion piece if that was the case. It's extremely difficult for Democrats to accept that their positions on trans issues are extremely toxic and unpopular. The success of gay marriage has convinced them that it's just a matter of time before they can successfully change public opinion on irreversible transitions for minors and trans women in women's sports.
I didn't read his NYT piece. I've read his Substack for years.
I'm actually uncertain if she made the right choice. On the one hand, it's best to go into the lion's den and try to win over people who don't already agree with you. On the other hand, she's just human and having to deal with people like Sullivan might just be too much to ask of a person.
Like I said, Andrew Sullivan is a very respectful podcast host. If you cannot have a reasonable discussion with him and defend your positions, you're almost certainly not going to convince other people who are openly hostile towards some of these extreme positions on trans issues.
He wasn’t very respectful to Batya Ungar-Sargon. He called her a part of the Israel lobby and when she denied that he used AI to double down.
After listening to the Ezra Klein interview and frequently listening to Sullivan's podcasts, I expect that they'd be able to have an engaged, and respectful conversation. I disagree that Sullivan is off the deep end, whether or not you or I agree with him. His argument is cogent.
What I suspect is that she doesn't want to be branded as "the trans politician" and is smartly avoiding media where the focus will be overwhelmingly on that issue.
Sometimes people are just exactly where they need to be in life and don't need to do more. Michelle Wu is excellent as a mayor but I don't want her to be president. And Sarah McBride is doing an excellent job as the first trans member of the house but I similarly don't want her to be president. (And just for some gender balance I'll throw Scott Wiener on that list too)
I don't think this has anything to do with her ambitions for higher office.
I’m seeing a theme with your comments. What would she accomplish by going on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast.
He doesn’t seem very persuadable off his stance on trans people.
He's a very respectful podcaster. What she could accomplish is to defend her positions for an audience that's skeptical of them. I totally understand why she wouldn't want to do that if she doesn't have strong arguments other than she believes in them.
Pretty much everything that he criticized the trans movement for has now become the mainstream opinion in the US and Europe.
I think calling the audience “skeptical” is putting it pretty mildly.
I actually agree that going into a hostile environment with solid arguments has value. But claiming that her not appearing is revealing seems foolish.
She chose not to go to a podcast that has very few persuadable audience members.
Andrew is very smart, he is aware of the best arguments in favor of trans people, he chooses not to make those arguments himself because he is on the other side of them.
Andrew Sullivan is a moderate and almost certainly not a hostile podcast host. I think the trans movement has to persuade moderate liberals before moving on to centrists and center right people. That would seem like the logical progression of a movement that's heavily underwater in the court of public opinion. Obviously, trans activists are still in their epistemic bubble where they think cancel culture and monopoly over educational institutions is enough to win the argument.
Andrew is a moderate in some senses, but he’s a dog with a bone on this issue.
He’s made up his mind and his audience is largely in agreement with him.
Again, I think it could have value for her to articulate an argument to him and his audience, but it’s not because they are particularly persuadable on this.
I agree that she should start with persuadable liberals, that is not his audience. If she went on Andrew’s podcast it would be to humanize trans people to an audience that is pretty anti-trans.
I think one shift in American politics that would really shock people from a century ago, is the almost complete lack of any regional elements. Nevada Democrats should back Mike Lee, but they won't even when it is clearly in their state and regional interest.
The nationalization of all politics - even regional cultural identity.
"How about the NYC mayoral primary, huh?" -- me, a guy who lives in Kentucky
I maintain the lack of pork barrell spending is the most underratedly bad thing to happen to America in my lifetime.
I think the lack of pork is more downstream of the nationalization of politics. It came back more than five years ago and it hasn't moved the needle. The problem is this: how would you feel if your legislator betrayed your party for a nice new project? In the old days, people would see the project way more than the betrayal, nowadays, nobody would even see the upside, even if they thought it might make a difference.
The project needs to be bigger then. Like the Hoover Dam.
I don't think we can afford to be giving out Hoover Dams every time you need a few votes.
Well if we gave out Hoover dams congresspeople might be more likely to support taxes
Agreed, eliminating port barrel spending. It is a policy that I thought was a great idea, but did not work out.
Although I think it's tied with campaign finance reform as a really bad policy, that sounded great.
It turns out small dollar donations are spurred by bad hateful, rhetoric.
Also, it limited the power of the political parties, which was really bad
“small dollar donations are spurred by bad hateful rhetoric”
I agree with the overall gist of your comment, but I’m also old enough to remember when Obama broke records for small-dollar donations. My then-boyfriend (now husband) donated to him because Obama was bright and inspiring and said things like “There are no red states or blue states, only the United States of America!” Those were the days 😢
Sadly I think that was at the start before loons on each side really figured out how they worked.
Kind of like social media, and how great we thought it would be in 2010
We really overindexed on the whole Arab Spring-social media nexus.
We I suppose being the liberal-Left in the aggregate...
Personally I start from the position that humans generally can be counted on to be awful as often as nice. Every sword cuts two ways
Aggregate effect as reflected in data over individual experiece.
People rather are blind that their individual experiene / mode is not necessarily the aggregate mode.
While yes that's a fine example of a poorly thought through naive-inellectual abstraction based "good governance" reform I would put before that the idiocy of "democratizing" party primaries and making them mini-pre-elections - progressives naive slogan based thinking more democracy always better.
Instead ended up creating a perversely non-democratic factions based opening to take over internally political parties where in our rigid two party structure (and a structural end-result of overall electoral structure not to be naively wished away) becomes a major threat to democracy internally.
The sort of thing that political-obsessive intellectualisation (which I see to be clear myself / this kind of commentariat being party of unless one actively says to oneself, wait a minute...) comes up with thinking everyone should be just like them, but blunders into handing over to radical and potentially anti-democratic minority factions levers to be essentially political viruses (as in biological analogy as viruses hijact in general cell machinary for own purposes of reproduction to destructive effect to the cells in question)
I don't disagree, but also, critiques of the primary system portray moderate voters as having no agency.
"Primary elections are dominated by extremists of both parties, so come the general election, moderate/centrist voters have to choose between two extremist candidates, both of whom the moderates hate! Poor moderates, what are they to do?"
Well gee, maybe the moderates could take more interest in the process and get off their couches and vote in the primary? Then they wouldn't have such extreme candidates in the general election, problem solved! What's stopping them?
I give no fucks as to what is stopping them, they don't give the same fucks you do or I do, they don't want to / are not so motivated and there it is.
People are people.
And most people across most populations are not political obsessives. And do not vote in primaries. Nor give a damn most of the time. And that's ... well that's liberty.
Basing your political demarche on Soviet New Man-ism where your fundamental disappointment is - like many political obsessives - that most people don't give much of a damn, you are building failure.
This is the root source of a lot of egg-head intellectual reform failure - abstractionism and ideal (as in intellectuals ideal of what Should Be) man demarche.
Rather better success to be had in accepting populations as they are not as one wants them to be in interest, in motivation, in habits.
Ok, legit, but then you, the median voter, don't get to complain about how extremists run the show.
You can't simultaneously say "I wish I had a moderate in the general election to vote for" AND "but I can't be arsed to get to the polls for a primary election." That's like saying "I wish to be slim AND I can't be bothered to change my eating or exercise habits." Not how it works!
This article is all about how the population of America hates whenever anything gets done or changes. Pork is the way around democracy to do things that are actually good via republicanism.
The population of Human Beings generally hates change. Good change, bad change, in aggregate people initially hate it.
A significant explainer of NIMBY knee-jerking.
Pork is a good way to grease wheels. A bit of bribery - well quid pro quo to be nicer that in human relations (when one is not in naive-intellectual abstractions) ends up being needed
40 years ago, the cancellation of millions of dollars of green energy projects in red states would have raised hell among Republicans. Now they are happy to go along with it. It's crazy.
they wouldn't and shouldn't because the privatization of public lands is an incredibly unpopular position. it's one of the proverbial 80:20 issues and even more unpopular than that among democratic voters. a nevada democrat signing on with mike lee would be breathtaking political incompetence.
matt is wrong, btw, that this illustrates a backlash or negative polarization effect. it was an incredibly unpopular issue long before mike lee tried to sneak it into this bill.
I think it is an 80:20 policy in favour in Nevada.
75% against in nevada, which admittedly is as low as the disapproval gets anywherr.
https://x.com/L0m3z/status/1935901467929407893?t=3UZrljkrgYAFPEhdg_zXtA&s=19
This Nevada Democrat disagrees that it's in our best interest, given how much vacant/underutilized land we have in our existing urban footprint, and the negative externalities that come with facilitating more sprawl (especially given the low likelihood of public investment in transit). I understand that a certain amount of suburban sprawl is inevitable as Reno and Las Vegas grow, but the last thing I want to do is deliberately grease the wheels for it. There are better ways to increase housing supply.
There might also be a timing issue here with Mike Lee.
That podcast had me thinking about this comic https://x.com/haroldpollack/status/1127226005066866690?s=46
The arrogance of moral superiority in the progressive movement is killing it on live television. She made great points and it’s absolutely worth a listen.
Freddie deBoer once pointed out that if you're an activist, it is 100% your job to educate people. Like, that's the entire job description.
But like there was a harassment campaign of asking annoying questions of people who were not activists.
Like I’d make a vegan cookie review and get bombed but like 15 kind of argumentative questions about hunting and plant suffering and I was just making a video comparing the oatmeal cookies from sprouts and Whole Foods.
It’s like the actual conditions that line was replying to was the online equivalent of street harassment.
That's very fair. I think saying "You don't seem to be engaging in good faith, and I've got other people to talk to" might be better than "It's not my job to educate you."
Sure but memes are weird and once they take off it’s hard to control them.
I was stunned to hear how decontextualized it had become and how the sea lioning that led to it had been completely forgotten.
Yes, or like, I think “sealioning” is a real and bad practice but it’s not defined as “asking one clarifying/skeptical question.”
oh no, not annoying questions.
The weird memory hole of sea lioning as a harassment strategy in that discussion was weird.
People were using just asking questions as a smoke screen for awful behavior when that phrase was at its peak.
I remember that vividly, as well as the feeling of urgency to stem the flow, develop some immune response. But I am also pretty sure in retrospect that generalized hostility and suspicion toward any person asking critical questions was not the right medicine for it. I am truly unsure what would have been and I don't judge the individual people who developed that suspicion in defense of the fabric of their online and IRL communities (they include, after all, many of my friends and communities), but I think it has already left us worse off culturally and less able to digest complex or contentious issues productively.
If someone says "I don't like X" in a place where I am and I'm an X I'm going to insist on having my voice heard, thank you.
I think the issue is that most people don't remember sea lioning as a harassment strategy because it didn't happen to them. To have had that experience, you needed to be an online social justice type at a specific time. Most people were not. However, many more people had the experience of going on a progressive forum, stating that they liked a lot of the ideas but found this or that point to be excessive/vague/contradictory, and getting accused of being an enemy agent in disguise.
Brilliant
McBride certainly nails it. Positive, durable change is always incremental.
I now know all I need to know about Roberts as a political advisor.
As I see it, the core problem is that far too many people on the left perceive politics as perpetual struggle against a secular Satan. It's not a pragmatic labor to make things better for folks, but rather a war for good against evil. And in a war against evil, majority opinion is irrelevant. Actually, majority opinion being opposed to you is pretty much expected, considering the fallen state of humanity (in a secular sense, of course).
And then shock that the general public does not find it persuasive that siding with us against the other political pole is unambiguously a defense of democracy.
Yes, I see the point that Obama passed the ACA despite its initial lack of popularity, and it worked. But as you say here, this was predicated upon the idea that it would be popular once folks experienced it.
When I hear progressives on a variety of issues -- Gaza, trans rights, environment -- what I hear is absolutist to the point of authoritarian. It's going to be our way, quite independent of majority views now or in the foreseeable future. Because right is right. And if it sounds that way to me, a person who shares a lot of their goals, imagine how it sounds to the general public.
These progressives' authoritarianism may pale in comparison with the Trumpists' authoritarianism, but they aid the Trumpists in that they remove any clearly non-authoritarian option from the menu.
I’m boycotting today’s comments because of the ban threat.
Self-deportation in action!
ThereAreDozensOfUs.GIF
I liked this comment but to be clear I like that you’re responding to the ban threat and not commenting.
I liked this because it means he won’t be in the comments.
A rare moment of agreement between us, indeed!
I think the warning was a real weird thing to include. Almost inviting a fight that didn't seem prompted by the actual article at all.
Hmm. A mystery! Perhaps the past behavior of some people in this comment section may have provoked a warning?
... No. It's the moderators who are wrong.
Has there been an issue with the moderation? I've been in number of the threads on the subject and it's never seemed like Ben or Milan have struggled with policing the rare instances where people have crossed the line.
Can’t speak for Ben but I personally did not enjoy dealing with the 500+ comments before noon on any article in which trans people or trans issues were mentioned.
I do it for the love of the game!
Everyone here has been pretty respectful thus far. I have made a few one day bans. Discuss trans issues all you want, just follow the rules and that includes the incredibly rude act of misgendering someone.
Well no objection to your rules etc. but "incredibly rude" is rather overdone characterisation. Deliberate rudeness perhaps but hardly incredible. Although I suppose in Lefty circles, but still
Is your argument as to why a warning is unnecessary bringing up the fact that people have repeatedly been banned for the behavior warned against? I’m not sure that’s as compelling as you’d like it to be.
To be clear, blorpington is paraphrasing the Simpsons and definitely siding _with_ the moderators.
(I would have assumed you understood that but then I have trouble parsing your comment that way)
I don’t think it was weird at all, I think, sadly, in today’s cultural climate it was a fair warning. There are always new commentators who need to be told the rules.
Having seen some really crappy comments on other Substacks *cough*ACX*cough*, I’m grateful to Matt Y for being preemptively clear on this.
So, one the one hand I see your point, but on the other hand, I think it's better to be up front than ban someone afterwards. On the gripping hand, a 24-hour ban is mild enough that maybe it could have just happened.
“the warning was a real weird thing to include”
It’s important that we understand we should not insult a politician that our gracious host is enamored with.
I think he's thinking about something more than "insulting" a politician. Kind of like writing a post about Chuck Schumer and having to warn commenters not to call him "Christ killer," "Shylock" etc.
I don’t think it’s anything like that. Schumer is not, in fact, a Christ killer or a Shylock.
And by the same token, Congresswoman Sarah McBride is in fact a woman and should be referred to as such. Hence the ban threat.
Well, gracious or not, he *is* the host, so he gets to set the house rules.
I would not suggest otherwise.
Matt, can you put this threat at the top of every post, then?!
Childish.
Whatever, Ms, Mr, M. whaterface politician, just use their last name and avoid characterisation. No big deal.
If it's not a big deal why would it incur a ban?
They’re saying that obeying a ban is easy, not that the issue is not a big deal. Like if I said “refraining from spitting on the floor is not a big deal,” that doesn’t mean spitting on the floor is inoffensive.
I'll accept your read, but I'll point out that insisting that correctly referring to sex (rather than whatever self applied identity someone claims) is offensive, is precious and somewhat passive-aggressive, like a PhD getting snotty about not being called Doctor.
I would characterize referring to someone in this way, in defiance of their obvious personal presentation and social positioning, because of this detail you happen to know about them, to be bad faith provocation and not any kind of neutral, objective "correctness." Well-akshuallying someone's socially established gender is the snotty behavior here.
The people who insist on calling a transgender person by their birth sex remind me of how I behaved as an edgy teenaged atheist. I made a big deal of saying that God didn't exist. I was correct, but I wasn't doing this out of a sense of accuracy; I was doing it to be obnoxious.
I'm not referring to gender, which is fabricated, subjective, and frankly irrelevant. I'm referring to sex, which is real, exists in the physical world, has objective qualities, and is entirely relevant socially and before the law.
What an interesting example! A PhD is officially a doctor (that’s what the D stands for). But I agree that the official/literal/paper definition is not the only or even the predominant determinant of when we use the term, let alone the etiquette of it. Isn’t that more parallel to the argument that “correct” pronoun use is not necessarily determined by objective facts, but socially?
I was trying to find an example that was neutral given the eggshells here today. I think the vibe is the same while not agreeing that it's a parallel.
The correct parallel is that it's absurd to expect people to refer to Rachel Dolezal as a Black woman.
In certain professional contexts, it would be considered disrespectful to not refer to someone with a PhD as a doctor. Additionally, people with PhDs do have a legal right to demand that their certification be listed on certain official documents.
The reason we think PhDs that make people call them "doctor" in all contexts are snooty is because they demand an authoritative suffix be used in social contexts where their authority isn't relevant. If instead our language assigned people different pronouns depending on if they did or didn't have PhDs, using the wrong pronoun on a doctor would probably be considered very rude and probably an implication that you don't think they earned their qualification.
It’s not a big deal to avoid the ban subject. I am sure that’s not really actually hard to understand.
Understanding was not the issue. I simply disagree that it's useful or a correct moral or ethical position, and I'm saying so. Avoiding the subject is accepting the premise, which I do not.
Well you are free to engage in the modern day equivalent of monks heatedly debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and get yourself worked up over the "morality" or "ethics" of an author making his own rule on his own bloody blog post.
And I shall be free to regard that as precious thin skinned egg-head twattery of zero functional utility.
I can easily avoid referencing the person's changed gender... and voila. Nothing disruptive, easily ignored.
It's amazing that you look at “gender woowoo sex isn't real” academic nonsense and say that the objections to that is precious, thin skinned, egg-head nonsense. A perfect example of DARVO. You think the ‘sex is real’ camp is the one engaging in angel counting sophistry
“I'm going to make incredible new demands, and if you object, you're the one getting worked up.”
Classic.
Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla's policies are good and I want to see Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla get more attention. Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla's campaign manager, Rafaella Gabriela Sarsaparilla, was on a podcast recently and Rafaella Gabriela Sarsaparilla said many things I like.
I must say at first I was entirely baffled but... now I see. Actually quite funny effect.
“but the chicken sandwiches are just so good!”
This hard policy seems at odds with McBride's views, who repeatedly mentioned the importance of extending grace, assuming good intentions and not making people feel like they might be shamed for honest mistakes.
I wouldn't knowingly misgender someone, but also had no idea who Chase Strangio is or what their preferred pronouns are.
That’s the reason for mentioning the ban at the beginning. A lack of grace would be banning without warning, treating it as self-evident that anyone who uses the wrong pronoun is doing so maliciously.
That's a fair point.
You have a point there, though I suspect this was done because we can pretty much take it as a given that everyone commenting here knows who she is, and anyone referring to her otherwise is choosing to do so to make a political point or stick their fingers in people's eyes.
Also let's be real, I have a hard time believing that any hypothetical uninformed reader who has never heard of Sarah McBride before and doesn't have an axe to grind on trans issues would walk in here, see her name and likeness, and call her anything other than a woman in innocent error.
Not an airport…
But only for 24 hours, right?
The warning is outrageous come on
I appreciate it.
Why? Commenters here are pretty decent overall. But lots of comment sections would have people misgendering the trans people under discussion. It's a distraction and an irritant.
When has there ever been such a warning on a slow boring post? It just contributes to the idea that there can be no rational disagreement or discussion on this issue in left-leaning spaces without a huge thumb on the scale. Which imo annoys people and pushes them to the right, leading to the opposite of its intended effect.
What other topic or issue would necessitate such a warning? I can only think of two: holocaust denial and the n-word. So the core moral failure of the west in the 20th century, the core moral failure of America... and something that became mildly rude a few years ago. Makes zero sense to be so heavy-handed .
That’s not true, there have been warnings in the past. For example on one of the trans-related articles published when I worked here I pinned a comment saying “be nice and stay respectful while discussing this controversial topic.” Did that because the previous few trans-related articles ended up with a bunch of comments section discussions devolving into really nasty stuff and I had to tell people off or hand out bans.
I guess the question is why is heavy-handed moderation needed on this topic, and basically only this topic when the slow boring comment section is usually very rational and not particularly nasty. And I believe it's because the discourse has been very aggressively policed to a place where the audience isn't really and however many years into that policing even left-leaning intellectual types still aren't convinced.
I don't think more discourse policing is going to solve that problem. You have to convince people you're right not just make them use the right words.
Not on your own substack, you don't. It's Matt's blog and he can make the rules. If people find them arbitrary, they can go over to the Blocked and Reported comment section, where people spend half their lives deliberately misgendering trans people.
Absolutely true they can do what they want. Hopefully we can still opine on the rules while following them without getting banned. The comment section would be a much worse place if every topic had such heavy-handed moderation imo
Blocked and Reported - good pod, shitty comments.
Disagree. There are frequent commenters who have violated it in the past.
Most of the language I've seen is "formerly male" and "biologically male", which arent banned because they're not actually misgendering, but they're headed in that direction.
I thought it was a little unnecessary but after reading the post it is especially unnecessary. The post isn't even about a contentious issue! Just a description of thermostatic opinion.
Also a failure to state the required pronouns.
They are both used in the article, but yeah it would be clearer to have it up front.
I found McBride to be persuasive in her Ezra Klein show appearance. I’m sort of wired towards incrementalism and caution so she was pushing on an open door.
What I think concerning is it seems like liberals could retreat on all these issues and I’m not sure it would reach any more defensible a line anywhere else. It doesn’t seem obvious that it would result in more acceptance about discrimination, bullying, violence and such. The core fight is cultural of are these people human and entitled to fair respect or not.
I have no empirical evidence for this, but my sense of the vibes is that the median American is not 100% accepting of transgender identities but also does not care that much and is not a bully. The reason the anti-trans crowd make such a big deal out of sports, bathrooms, and preemptive pronouns is that they're the few issues that potentially impact other people*. My anecdata is that even my grandparent's extremely conservative friends find obsessive deadnaming to be weird and offputting. My prior is that if liberals retreat on the few parts that the mass public actually cares about like sports, the anti-trans crowd will have a hard time getting people to care. We can't legislate better social treatment of trans people, but if the temperature of the issue is turned down, we can probably make it harder to pass discriminatory laws against them.
*With the obvious caveat that the bathroom thing is fearmongering because it's not like there is a force field keeping people identifying as men from entering the women's bathroom to commit sexual assualt.
The defensible line is treating it as a matter of self expression, rather than an objective or innate, immutable feature requiring accommodation. Asking people who don't to either try really hard to believe Zeus sits on Mount Olympus or at least pretend that they do for the sensibilities of others will never succeed.
But then like my ex makes warhammer figurine videos and gets a tirade of people screaming at her. Or any straight trans woman about their experiences with men and the amount that don’t get killed or beat up looms in their lives.
And that’s like nothing compared to the invisibility of abuse of the most low status trans people. I just dont think laws are that central to people’s feelings. The chase Strangio line that people lost their mind over was about if you can be a woman with a penis.
It wasn't "you can be a woman with a penis", it was "a penis is not a male organ", which is a complete denial of reason.
I mean.. you can't be a woman with a penis. It isn't possible, at least not with current technology. But besides that I think we probably have at least some common ground. I do not think the conduct you describe towards your ex is acceptable. Being an abusive a-hole just because someone is different is never the solution and it's never right. Period. End of story. The golden rule always applies, even when for whatever reason someone finds it difficult.
One question I do have is where the responsibility on the trans side begins, particularly with respect to women? I think an adult man has a right to be trans, whatever that encapsulates, but does that also include the ability to go mop the floor with female athletes? Does it mean they get access to womens prisons? I ask because I struggle to see those sorts of highly visible instances of trans accomodation ever getting a warm reception, even in the most tolerant plausible world. And that includes women feeling threatened by certain demands, even if not by any trans person in particular, but by the logic of something like self ID taken to its natutal conclusion.
My biggest confusion around the whole debate has been the lack of empathy for those who express any resistance to full trans acceptance. I recall the situation at the Korean clinic in LA (I think I have the details right there) where a woman complained about seeing a penis in the women's locker room. The response from many was to attack the woman who complained and call her transphobic, which I always found perplexing. The movement had gone so far in one direction that it couldn't even empathize with a woman who was uncomfortable with seeing an exposed penis? Even if you think that the policy should be that a pre-op trans woman should be able to enter the locker room of the gender they identify with, we can't also turn around and say "I understand why that can make reasonable people uncomfortable, but I think that the balance of interests means that discomfort is secondary to the interests of the trans woman and her sense of self"?
I think that was the part that really started rubbing so many people the wrong way. It was a kind of gaslighting where reasonable discomfort with some of the policy choices being made was labeled as horrific transphobia driven by animus.
Wi Spa, and the trans woman was a repeat sex offender with half an erection in the actual spa where children were. Culminated recently in a trial where the prosecution had to, I believe, convince the jury what a half mast erection was and that it counted as one. Bizarre stuff.
I believe you are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi_Spa_controversy
I think on sports I've thought a lot about this. I think more inclusion can happen easily especially on individual sports which are currently forbidden by law where a trans girl would be allowed to be at team practices and in every way included a huge range of sports. I know some people will say that they want full inclusion or nothing but I'm skeptical that most athletes would feel this way and choose nothing as a protest option when they've been getting up at the crack of dawn to be in the weight room or on the track for years and years.
They could then have their results recorded and go on to olympics and ncaa. With respect to team sports the move to travel sports really does open up some opportunities for people to be entrepreneurs and see what works.
I genuinely don't know what to make of the prisons situation and would probably defer to what wardens have to say on this issue. It's actually really hard to imagine any of these being wholly safe environments for all involved. Shelters run a similar mess.
Very much appreciate the response. I guess all I'd add is I am also willing to working through the weeds if others are as well.
In 2012 35% of American adults said that working moms harmed their young children (https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2015/06/acceptance-working-moms-all-time-high) and in 2019 21% of adults said that it's ideal for women to not work outside of the home when they have small kids (https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/FT_19.09.11_WorkingParents_Americans-have-different-views-ideal-employment-situation-mothers-fathers-1.png). I think we can all agree on what would happen to a manager that told their HR department that they don't want to proceed with a candidate because they have small children regardless of the manager's personal views.
I don't think that's a very good analogy. A better one is that a Christian can't refuse to hire a Muslim at his NASCAR t-shirt stand for being a Muslim, nor can he refuse to sell him a t-shirt just for being Muslim. But he does not have to say there is one God and Muhammad is his prophet, nor endorse any particular tenet of Islam. Trans people already have this level of protection, and it's all they need.
I'm sure all the trans people kicked out of the military will find great comfort from this.
Do you think this is a constructive comment? Or that it contributes in any way to what was (I thought) a pretty good exchange between people who don't see eye to eye on the subject? I actually came out of it with a little more empathy, in light of Andrew's anecdote. Way to suck it back to the internet is full of implacable ideologues vibes.
Seriously, man, save it for BlueSky or whatever.
Maybe I misunderstood where you perceive the line is for trans stuff. When you said accomodation, I was thinking of things like appearance at work and names. I agree that we shouldn't try to enforce thoughtcrime.
Most people find being needlessly antagonistic to strangers who have don’t nothing to you to be off putting.
Also, interestingly, the bathroom issue has been a lot less successful for anti-trans folks than the sports issue has.
i think the bathroom question really only gets traction when it can be slippery sloped to encompass locker rooms and other sex segregated spaces.
most people expect a degree of privacy in public bathrooms that makes use by both sexes not particularly problematic.
I think most people recognize that the bathroom issue is a non-issue and the offputting nature of a lot of the hardcore anti-trans people is much more apparent with it ("please get into line for genital screening before entering the women's bathroom").
I mean, it doesn't make logical sense that women would feel more comfortable if a man like Eliot Page is forced BY LAW to share a bathroom with them simply because he was born a woman.
This exact situation has recently emerged in the UK, where the equalities watchdog announced that people should go to a bathroom that aligned with their birth sex, but also that trans men should at the same time not do that, and also that businesses had to make sure that trans people were included and equally provided for in terms of bathroom provision. Since it's clearly impossible to square all parts of this, businesses just did . . . nothing at all to enforce it, which was always the likely outcome.
Eh, I think this is kind of where the pro-trans bathroom counterarguments veer off into a kind of willful blindness. It's not actually a "gotcha" to their opponents to point to FtM people in these contexts because no actually cares about women using the men's bathroom because respective risks of assault and inappropriate behavior are wildly asymmetric, which is the actual rub that people care about here. No one gives a shit if women use the men's in a crowded bar and no one gives a shit if a beard-sporting FtM individual uses the men's.
Logically speaking, there is perhaps a side point to be made that a "use the bathroom associated with your natal sex" law creates the Eliot Page situation above, but I think in practice more or less all of the nominal concern is about people with penes using the womens' room and no one even pretends to substantively care about the reverse situation, whether as a matter of legislation or a matter of (non-)enforcement. As a result, making this a central point of a rebuttal comes across rhetorically as extremely weak: it's a point that interlocutors genuinely holding the position don't actually care about and would instantly concede. Let Eliot Page use the men's room -- fine, whatever. As a result, treating it as if it's "checkmate, transphobes!" suggests implicitly that the speaker neither understands nor has any stronger rebuttals to the opposing position.
'As a result, making this a central point of a rebuttal comes across rhetorically as extremely weak: it's a point that interlocutors genuinely holding the position don't actually care about and would instantly concede. Let Eliot Page use the men's room -- fine, whatever.'
You can say this is 'rhetorically extremely weak' if you want, but the *actual law* has to be written on a firmer basis than 'fine, whatever' - either something is legal or it isn't. And making something legal for trans men but not for trans women poses certain 'equal in the eyes of the law' problems.
Honestly I think asymmetric legislation in this context could conceivably pass intermediate scrutiny, unless the Court wants to hold that men's and women's rooms themselves are unconstitutionally discriminatory (which, to be clear, I could see a future more liberal SCOTUS doing in 10-20 years if the AIs haven't killed us all in the interim).
The broader difficulty with your point (which I conceptually agree is a good one) is that forced symmetry in passed legislation on an equal protection basis is just an artifact of governing constitutional rulings made in different contexts rather than something that the natal-sex-for-MtFs side thinks is affirmatively desirable. I don't think it's especially convincing to try to rebut people's substantive concerns with "well, due a spandrel that you probably think is also dumb in this context you'd have to make legislation enacting your preferences counterproductively overbroad." The takeaway from that isn't "this is violating equal protection concerns in a way that should make you reconsider your position" it's "applying equal protection sufficiently broadly to apply in this context is dumb."
In a very weird way, I think that this might be an example in which a racial discrimination analogy might actually be *less* inflammatory than other ones. Consider a proposed regulation: "No one may enter a public park when the UV index is over 5 without wearing at least SPF 15 sunscreen." -- The rational basis of this is easy and benevolent: reduce skin cancer rates and pass a formal law whose imprimatur is probably good even if enforcing it seems kinda hopeless (similar to seatbelt laws). Of course, if you're Black, you might reasonably object to this law on the basis that (1) applying sunscreen is inconvenient, costs money, and makes one's skin feel greasy and (2) you are at much lower risk of sunburn and skin cancer from UV exposure than white people are, so you should be exempt from such a law, and in fact it would be a Pareto welfare improvement to apply it only to white people.
To a proponent of the law seeking in good-faith to reduce aggregate skin cancer rates, the argument that "You would need to apply this law in a way that is facially race-neutral due to equal protection concerns, even if this unjustifiably subjects Black people to costs without commensurate benefits" doesn't suggest that reducing skin cancer rates is an unworthy goal, it suggests that this is a context in which the general principles underlying equal protection are not applicable.
Right, I think the whole point is that having any LAWS policing being in a bathroom is silly. Let people do what they feel most comfortable doing, and if they engage in skeevy behavior, have laws against that (hey, same-sex sexual assault is a thing too!)
Public policy should generally let people police themselves through norms unless there is a harm, and the right has ginned up a harm that doesn't exist in order to win votes.
I mentioned this in a top-level comment, but this is the core of progressives' argumentation on quite a few matters. They think using some rhetorical trickery is a good substitute for actual persuasion. "We don't want men in the women's facilities" gets countered with "great, trans women are not men" as if that's anything more than sophistry.
But on substance: yes I think retreat from areas of mass public sensitivity: Sports (which of course Lefty nerd culture disfavors and so has been blind to), pronouns, and under-18 transition as an absolute medical approach, etc. - bathrooms as as ostentious thing (here I have always been baffled by both sides as... I mean in real life who the hell polices going into a specific bathroom? And if you are a stall user, no one is going to know the least bit about your private parts... really this has always struck me as pure performative on all sides)
I think the line is kids. I actually have an acquaintance who I learned went over to MAGA because of urban legends about school teachers persuading kids that they're trans, kids being allowed to have surgery without their parents' knowledge, etc.
The sports issue is more effective for the anti-trans side than other issues are largely because it's an issue that primarily affects kids.
Indeed in fact it was Andrew Sullivan’s observation somewhat recently I recall that the gay rights movement internally had a clear internal rule - do not go into under-18 zone at all. All about adults. That said Sports is not just kids - people into sports do take this seriously, notably in certain kinds of competitive sports. Since Political Activist Lefties are heavy weight on non-sports liking nerds, this seems extremely misunderstood in Lefty circles. [me I am utterly indifferent to sports but well understand the sensitivities there]
This is roughly my take as well. The right wing is really good at finding an edge case and using it to push their whole agenda. Elite trans girl athletes are like an edge case of an edge case.
From the perspective of actual trans people, though, I can imagine it's hard to see how far you have to retreat to find that "defensible" line. A "bathrooms but not locker rooms" position might be it for most people, but we know where the right wing wants to go.
This reminds me a bit of the "civil unions" position on gay marriage from the early 2000s. It was short of full equality, but definitely seen as a pro-gay position.
"With the obvious caveat that the bathroom thing is fearmongering because it's not like there is a force field keeping people identifying as men from entering the women's bathroom to commit sexual assualt."
There's no force field keeping murderers from murdering either, but you would agree that the law against murder is an important protection that you wouldn't want to lose.
Until recently there was a social understanding that a man in a women's bathroom could be expelled by force of law.
Also, saying that a male person 'identifies as a man' is losing the plot. Your self identity, whatever that is, is not germane to the situation.
As a weary veteran of this topic, I’ve come to believe the real insidious problem with the bathrooms is that it allows a free for all for any male person to enter women’s restrooms and locker rooms—and now there’s no way to get them *out* until actual assault happens.
One need only look to the recent actions of Lily Tino at Disney World, proudly taking photos and videos of herself in the bathrooms to prove that she was there, and ranking her experiences in each of them based on how good or bad the vibes from women were. (I believe Tino is being sued by a woman whose face was clear in one of the videos/photos and that Tino plastered online).
"There's no force field keeping murderers from murdering either, but you would agree that the law against murder is an important protection that you wouldn't want to lose."
Exactly. This is why we have laws against sexual assual. The laws do not magically preempt it from happening, but we prosecute people who do it and lock them in a concrete box to keep it from happening again.
You're arguing against yourself! Which is it, that we don't need laws because they're not a force field, or laws are necessary to prosecute offenders after the fact?
We prosecute people for disorderly conduct and indecent exposure, and should continue to do that when men enter women's locker and bath rooms. We don't need new laws for this, we just need men to follow the law as it is.
The sneaky argumentation here is pretty bad.
Have you ever been in a women’s room? It’s all stalls. I have never seen a woman’s privates in a women’s bathroom and if a trans woman has used a women’s room with me, I wouldn’t know because I haven’t seen their privates either. If a woman assaults me in a women’s room, it’s illegal and bad. If a man assaults me in a women’s room, it’s also illegal and bad. Using a bathroom stall next to me is fine.
I've made other replies to drill on this, but extend the argument to locker rooms, prisons, shelters etc. because that's already happening.
Also, to be a bit technical, assault as a crime is usually defined as making a reasonable person afraid of bodily harm or injury, and a women seeing a grown man in a women's bathroom could reasonably fear for her safety.
How do you keep males out of women's spaces if you allow anyone to simply say they are trans and get access?
The sneaky argument is conflating things that harm other people (sexual assualt, murder) with a transwoman using the women's bathroom. Outside of a prison, the women's bathroom consists of a bunch of stalls and sinks. There is no indecent exposure because you go to the bathroom inside of the stall. Even if they're pre-op, nobody sees their genitals. Likewise, there is no disorderly conduct or public disturbance. They're using the bathroom in the same way as everybody else.
You're saying trans woman like it isn't a man.
The real issue is that self ID allows any man, trans identifying or not, to enter any women's space with impunity.
And you're arguing about bathrooms like this isn't going to be applied to locker rooms and spas and women's shelters and prisons, oh, wait, it already is.
If you want, we can simply change the terms to locker rooms, where there aren't stalls, or prisons, where people are literally locked into boxes with each other, and proceed from there.
I don't think Jackson is arguing against himself. Many years ago, there were several incidents of girls being assaulted in an isolated women's room in a local public building. The assailant didn't get prosecuted because he was a man entering a women's room. He got prosecuted for the assaults.
So a person walks into a bank, crosses the counter and starts making conversation with the tellers from their side of the window. He hasn't committed a crime yet, but clearly there is something threatening and wrong about that, correct? The bank tellers would be within their rights to object and call the police, who might reasonably arrest this person on disorderly conduct and possibly assault (making someone fear for their safety).
This person does not belong where they are, and the reason they are not allowed there is commonly accepted as preventing access to people who are up to no good, who have no legitimate reason to be there.
I think we all agree this is well and right.
If you want to argue the legitimacy of a man in a women's locker room or shelter or bathroom, we should have that conversation about why men aren't allowed in these places to begin with.
I feel like my prior is the opposite. People will, correctly internalize that laws and institutions aren’t for them. Between the trans people I know and myself growing up as a weird person it’s a consistent experience of finding that rules don’t really protect us only actively accepting people can.
You would have to make the case with evidence that current laws are not sufficient. The supreme court has already ruled that trans is covered under the framework of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You cannot legislate social acceptance. That’ll take time and trans activists have made things worse by being obnoxious and trying to bully people into accepting extreme positions.
As well-described here today https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html
I am also a weird person so I am familiar with how rules are ineffective at protecting people socially. They are effective procedurally though. People can treat me poorly in social settings, but employers cannot fire or refuse to hire me for being autistic and I have legal recourse if they try to do so.
I have never seen this to be true. Conceptually I understand that Bostock is law but it doesn’t seem to stop anyone from mystery firings of trans people especially in low stakes service work.
There are lots of reasons a person can be fired, and if they're employed at-will, their employer doesn't even need to provide a reason.
If there are many possible reasons a person can be fired, and "just because their boss wanted to" is a valid reason, then it's hard to prove under these circumstances that an ex-employee would not have been fired without discrimination. Even if that was the boss's real motive, if there's no written record saying "I fired worker A because they're [protected group]," can you prove it?
(I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I'm assuming that at-will employees are theoretically protected from discrimination, but I imagine this is not feasible to enforce in practice. I think most low-end service jobs are at-will. If I'm wrong, I invite commenters who know better to correct me.)
Sure, and all other kinds of discrimination persist despite all the laws. If you can prove the discrimination (very hard to do!) you have legal recourse, which is an improvement. There is also the hope that eventually the law will affect attitudes as well. But anti-discrimination laws don't magically make everything all better in the trenches.
As an aside, this is how most issues work - the core group holds the maximalist position but understands that certain aspects or edge cases aren't popular with the broader public, so they downplay or concede those. If you want to abolish zoning, for instance, and people ask if you're ok with meatpacking plants in suburbs, you'd say that of course we should have some restrictions on industrial use cases (even if you believe otherwise). Or if you're pro-sanctuary city and someone asks what about sex offenders picked up by the LAPD, you'd say of course you can work with immigration authorities to deport violent criminals, just not every offense.
These debates hew closest to religiously held beliefs, where hardline Christians say you're not a 'real Christian' if you're ok with abortion.
Let's just say i have a less rosy view of the median American on this issue.
This whole thing is an illusion. If you retreat on those parts, the conservative media will find other parts to push on, until one day you're negotiating about the "should they be given basic human rights" piece.
That's not to say you can't try it. Just be aware that (1) it's not going to work, and (2) you're going to regret it.
What is "deadnaming"??
Calling someone by the name they used before they transitioned. My qualitative prior is that most people think that it is both not a huge deal to accidentally do so and also think that it's weird and offputting to make a big deal out of always doing it.
To go back to my grandparent's friend group, one of them used to make a big deal of calling divorced women "Mrs. Ex-Husband's Name". It's been decades since he stopped and my grandpa and his other friends still make fun of him for it.
never heard of that before....
Indeed though weird and off-putting to insist on / do ostentiously deliberately (speaking from a position of generalised indifference to the whole subject so long as not personally subjected to pronoun lectures etc)
Basically using the old name a trans person had even after you are told not to do that.
> The core fight is cultural of are these people human
Nope the core fight is not whether the people are human. Nobody's fighting about whether anyone is human. That's just so disingenuous. The core disagreements are whether biological men are entitled to compete in women's sports, whether parents should be informed when their children declare they have different pronouns in school, and whether states can and should legislate certain types of surgeries for minors.
I agree, but I would note that (some) trans activists are not the only ones pushing the envelope here—the Tennessee ban is of all gender treatment for minors, not just surgeries.
Can you explain to me the relationship between why trans women who date men feel scared to reveal their trans status to any of these? Why it’s often said things like law enforcement isn’t for me?
Trans women are afraid to reveal they’re trans to male partners because a significant majority of men would consider sleeping with a trans woman a homosexual act, especially a trans woman with a penis.
If you think that’s unfair of men, then you have to explain how sexual orientation is actually about gender and not about sexed bodies, and that’s where we run into whether trans ideology is fundamentally homophobic or not.
As a bi, or probably more accurately pan, person It’s very strange when you realize the disgust people feel about it. But when I was single I approached men a lot and never felt the need to protect myself. Attracted to gender feels to me totally much more apt for my own experience but admittedly bi men are super rare. Genetalia aren’t super foundational.
But aside from my own thing I think it’s unfair that there’s fear of violence associated with it which 25 years ago was the case for my attraction to men but basically has gone away.
Approaching a man is different from, as you said in your prior post, *dating* a man and not telling him your trans status. Arguably, it’s an attempt at sex by deception, and while violence is not an acceptable response, I think it’s an understandable one in some cases.
Are you really trying to say that because you find people of both sexes and all genders attractive, you are confused as to how anyone else could have a narrower sexual orientation?
The slow boring of hard boards is difficult and it's hard to see where it will end up. But 99% of the time, it's the only way forward.
What would you define as retreat? I don't think anyone is proposing, certainly not even the most "give the people what they want on culture" version of a MY would countenance any kind of retraction of anti-discrimination rules and laws regarding same sex attraction.
I think Matt constantly seems to want to go back to a world where social shunning and casual violence was a lot higher against gender non-conforming people and trans people.
If we like suspend the game of telephone where at least liberal norms are being shaped by pro-trans messages on our side I don't know how we'd control the reaction of the only game of telephone happening is trans people are "traps" and trying to hurt your daughter . It seems like that would result in a lot more bad things.
I think that’s a really big claim and I can’t see any evidence for it. I think you tend to think that, since greater acceptance of trans people has correlated with wider legal protections for them, people who think that the push to continue expanding those protections is politically unsustainable want to go back to a world with less acceptance for trans people. But I think a premise of the post is that policy doesn’t change attitudes by itself: the results of policy change minds. The maximalist approach has led to thermostatic reactions against trans acceptance (and even against, like, gay marriage, at least among Republicans). We need to find the policy package people will get on board with. It’s maybe parallel to how affirmative action never got especially popular, but scaling it back hasn’t led to a disdain for POC as far as I can see.
An alternative view is that for McBride to win, they would have to upend all understanding of biology in human society. It is hard enough to change minds about taxation or immigration and they don't require all understanding of reality to change.
From about 38 minutes on that podcast, McBride suggests that politicians should not make any laws regarding trans issues, even using the word 'libertarian'. This is not how we approach anything in any other walk of life. Certain trans issues do not impact anybody else, but sometimes they do.
We can get into specifics, but the argument is usually not that biology is wrong, it’s that biology is less relevant than it’s sometimes treated. Biology has been used to justify all sorts of sex- or gender-based discrimination that in retrospect we find unjustified.
Don't forget "biology is a lot more complicated than a lay-person's casual understanding of it". Very few people who insist on using "he" to refer to a trans woman seem to have a comprehensive and coherent model of behavior that also incorporates the intersex.
I think your first sentence is overlooked by a lot of people in these debates. We don't have to define "woman" and "man" the same way in every context.
In the context of this article, it makes sense to treat Sarah McBride as a woman. In the context of a sports league, it might not make sense to treat Sarah McBride as a woman.
> for McBride to win
I think you are attributing hard-line stances of the broader trans movement to McBride in particular. She is clearly trying to meet people where they are and stake out a compromise position, so that people don't have to upend their understanding of biology. And it takes a lot of moral courage to stake out that middle ground and have both sides tell you that you're wrong.
As Andrew Sullivan noted in a recent posting:
"But I cannot help but note that McBride offered no change in policy, no reassessment of self-ID, no retraction of 73 genders, “chest-feeding,” mandated pronouns, and the crazy rest — let alone an end to child sex changes. On women’s sports, she wants decisions made at a local level and biological men competing with women. It’s a start, I suppose. But it’s going to take sterner stuff to protect vulnerable children from being transed with no safeguards in place, and to recognize that binary sex is a biological reality that is integral to a functioning human society and indispensable for gender variation to exist at all."
McBride is smart, in that they recognise that waving placards with 'hang terfs' on them does not win hearts and minds. But ultimately, they have the same beliefs as the most hard-line trans activists. At one point (from about 58:00 in the video), McBride suggests that government has no place at all in regulating sex changes for children. Radical libertarian for this one particular thing?
An example of why I think Andrew Sullivan is a bad faith debater on this topic. If she doesn't toe his line in every detail then she is the enemy.
Yes, his article today in the NYT where he talks about what a big supporter of trans people he is rings a bit false when elsewhere he uses language about kids “being transed.”
He goes much further than that. In his own column, he repeatedly refers to trans women's genitals as "open wounds," describes the prospect of trans women in women's restrooms and locker rooms using lurid language of hairy, muscular people with big dicks swinging that sounds like he's writing erotica for himself, and insinuates that trans people and their allies are a homophobic cabal trying to exterminate the gays by turning all of them into ersatz straight people through transition. I don't know where he gets off, or how he is able to see himself as in any way supportive of trans people's dignity.
There's a difference between
A) I, McBride, believe these things
and
B) I, McBride, insist that every Democratic politician believe and support these things.
I think she's _helpfully_ pushing back on B, even if I disagree with her on some of A - there's also room for _me_ to support people I don't 100% agree with.
I think we should judge people 60% on their actions, 30% on their words, and 10% on the secret contents of their heart. You seem to be assigning basically all of the weight to that last category.
“McBride did not refute the list of things that are known only to me, Andrew Sullivan, because the list exists solely in my head.”
It’s such a weird complaint - did he think she was supposed to read his mind or something?
Refusing to take yes for an answer is always a red flag.
Andrew Sullivan has an extremely narrow world view and cannot handle the remotest complexity, which is why he hates trans people.
I think the durability of inflation indexing doesn't really get at what people mean by Regan's success in shaping the subsequent political environment. Instead, he changed the terms in which American politics was fought -- he gave ideological conservatism a real foothold, he made aggressive foreign policy part of the conversation, he ended the Republican detente with the new deal state. A smaller example: JFK didn't just create the peace corps and USAID, he made the idea that the US would do good works as part of soft power a standard one. Obama was a successful president and the ACA is durable policy but basically all of the debates of the Obama era are still with us and on the same terms.
Right, Shore's case that Reagan's success was all about the economy ignores his VP convincingly winning the election to succeed him (which neither Clinton nor Obama managed), and the guy who beat his VP having to make significant rhetorical and policy concessions to do so.
The latter is consistent with Matt's "it's durable policy rather than rhetoric" take, but it's hardly the work of an economic environment merchant.
A last note about Obama, it's pretty clear at this point that Trump has reshaped public discourse at least as much as Obama has. Will it last, who knows, but immigration, trade, and foreign policy have all been upended, as has the rhetoric around taxes and welfare, even if actual policy has been slow to follow.
And the increase in profanity on both sides
“Similarly, if Obama had managed to seal the deal on a grand bargain with Paul Ryan,”
Obama was trying to make a grand bargain with John Boehner, not Paul Ryan.
I fondly remember learning how Boehner’s name was pronounced…and going to town on it.
Yes, it’s not very intuitive.
I think it would be instructive for Matt to lay out his ideas about how one DOES in fact try to change public opinion and advocate for policies that are currently unpopular. He does a lot of telling people to meet the public where they are and to avoid backlash and so forth, which is all fair enough. But the public does sometimes experience enduring shifts in political opinion (an obvious, recent one is gay marriage), and I think it would frame Matt's other arguments if he clearly laid out who he thinks should advocate for change and how they should do it.
Having someone like McBride who by all accounts seems like a pretty normal woman and a pretty normal person probably helps.
As a young not-yet-out gay man I was considering joining the college gay group when I had just gotten to college by the flamboyant presentation of their ambassadors.
I ended up joining a much more 'normie' group a few years later.
And I was already on the side of gay rights.
I'd love to hear this too.
For gay rights, I think it came down to what values were most important to Americans. For example, job protections for gay people appealed more to Americans' fairness values that people should work hard, pull their weight, and pay taxes, then it did to the competing value of not exactly liking gay people. And gay people saying they want to be a part of the system and pay their taxes made them more likeable.
The success and quickness of the gay right movement, I think, rested a lot of the fundamental conservative nature of it. Gays wanted to work, serve in the military, and get married - very conservative things! And those values were more important to Americans than excluding gays from society.
So... maybe its about educating people in how an issue actually does appeal to their values?
Ideas may be changed, but I think values are very hard to change.
I dispute the notion that wanting to work, serve in the military, or get married are conservative values.
They're small-c conservative.
Not political conservative.
Do you mean that you dispute that they are only conservative values?
As far as I can tell, the answer boils down to 'hope someone films Will & Grace'
Compare "Will and Grace" to "Transparent" and you'll see the difference in trying to win the public over between gay acceptance and trans acceptance.
The whole "honey vs vinegar" thing.
Well one difference is that vastly more people saw Will & Grace than Transparent, because it aired at a time when there were fewer quality alternative entertainment options.
Which is certainly the main problem with the 'hope someone ends up making a helpful mass media product that makes people feel better about my maligned sub-group' idea nowadays.
That is true.
I think they're related.
Narrow casting allows you to be more extreme. Broadcasting forces you to be more acceptable to a larger audience.
Not sure how I feel about obvious [click|rage]bait subhead + post image on an article that starts off a bit on The T Question, but then segues right back into safe non-controversial SB Classic Hits, and never actually circles back. Which, to be clear, I'm always here for! But it kinda has the same...editorial aftertaste as that one anniversary piece in October which was, uh, poorly received by many on timing grounds. And I don't even particularly care about pride, personally? Still feels weird though. Trans life and my expected reactions to related things ironically made a lot more sense back when my subgenre lifestyle was less accepted..."enclave politics", as Freddie recently wrote in a sadly-paywalled actually-reasonable post.
The Ezra Klein interview was legitimately good too! I was hoping Matt would go more in-depth on it, especially since one of my favorite pieces of his on the issue has a similar bait-and-switch transition:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/overtreatment-in-american-health
I, too, thought it seemed a little shoehorned in. Kept waiting for MY to circle back to McBride’s interview and/or policy ideas, but…nothing. Combined with the warning at the top, it just felt kind of provocative for provocation’s sake.
A very thoughtful post today, especially after the NYC election. McBride provides an important history lesson in how change actually happens - often incrementally. In today’s “instant everything” society one wonders whether people are willing (and strategically mature enough) to learn that lesson and adopt it. I’m reminded of Mario Cuomo’s remark that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. The true test of Mamdani’s political skill set will be whether he can pivot from his skillful approach to campaigning to an effective approach to governance. That will require compromise, incrementalism and skillful communications. We know he’s good at the latter; I hope he is going to be as good at the former. I’m optimistic he will emerge as a transformative leader who may be well placed to lead a new coalition out of the MAGA wilderness .
Minor point in the article, but Mike Lee’s plan to sell public lands was bad! Public land is awesome for hunting, camping and hiking. He specifically targeted areas near existing development, but that land is also the most accessible to public for recreation. I’m sure there are some public lands that should be sold, but selling wilderness areas is a one-way ratchet, so it should be done carefully to maintain recreation benefits.
I’m also very skeptical it would do much to alleviate the housing shortage, where the primary issue is land use regulations. The NY Times just ran a big story focusing on Summit County, Colorado, which has a massive housing shortage despite having a population of just 30k in an area of 600 square miles. To pick a random example, Lower Macungie Twp, PA fits 30k people into only 20 square miles using solely suburban/exurban sprawl.
“He specifically targeted areas near existing development…selling wilderness areas”
If the land is near existing development, it isn’t wilderness.
Yes, if "encouraging more suburban subdivisions" was good way to solve our housing issue we wouldn't be in the position we are, because we already do a ton of that. It's like highway widening.
If it was part of some bigger deal that upzoned other places that would be one thing but as a stand alone long bill it's just another sop to development, mining, and logging interests that won't change core dynamics (and the fact Lee is a troll makes working with him that much harder)
I think it’s even worse than that. Even excluding the public lands, the population density in these western states is super low. Boise and Salt Lake City have population densities comparable to East Coast suburbs. These states could massively alleviate their housing problems by making it easier to build single family homes on privately owned land.