Who advises the donor advisers?

Plus Ren Fest NIMBYs, nuclear war, and Starmer’s failures

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks during this year’s United Nations climate summit. (Photo by WPA Pool)

I’m just about out of opinions about politics after this week, but I wanted to say that I really enjoyed the new movie “Bugonia” with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. It features a ton of vaguely political themes and then absolutely does not make any kind of political point whatsoever. Not in a bad way, either. It just turns out the film is playing with the tropes of a paranoid thriller and your expectations as an audience more than anything else.

A refreshing reminder that there’s more to life than the slow boring of hard boards.

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Zack Mason: The CFPB seems like a good example of an agency that did good work but never gained meaningful support from elected Republicans. Could Democrats or the civil servants there have done anything differently to build bipartisan support? And imagining a world where Democrats get to run it again, what could they do to make it more durable?

This seemed like a real lapse in judgement to me. When she was new in the Senate, Elizabeth Warren deliberately cultivated a relationship with America’s small banks, because she understood that her ideas, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, were going to need business support to be durable. They brought Holly Petraeus into the agency to lead work on veterans’ issues. Not everything Warren tried during this era worked, but she very clearly wanted to build bipartisan support for the agency by building bridges to right-of-center stakeholders.

By the time of Biden’s presidency, progressives had undertaken a real mindset shift in terms of their theory of how politics works. You can see it in articles about “deliverism” and the “Day One Agenda” in the American Prospect. The theory here is basically that doing stuff will be rewarded politically, so the way to create durable policy change is to maximize the amount of stuff that you do. As a result, second term C.F.P.B. paid much less attention to coalition building. It pursued its core mission aggressively, and also sought to expand its authority to encompass regulating most of America’s major technology companies. As progressives explained, once Trump won the election, this gave America’s major tech companies a strong motive to want the C.F.P.B. destroyed. But I think that’s actually a more realistic vision of how politics works: An agency that narrowly targets large banks can have some business community allies, while an agency that goes out hunting for new enemies can end up in trouble.

This was, of course, just one piece of the Biden administration’s larger struggles with the tech industry. But the whole mindset there was basically that “more is more” from the standpoint of political conflict.