Post-midterm mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Post-midterm mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

22 - 27 minutes

It’s over! I am exhausted. But also excited for a three-day weekend (thank you veterans!) and for the year to come.

Here’s some questions.

Lindamc: Following a trail of Substack breadcrumbs, I read a very interesting take recently: “What American culture lacks most is an adult understanding of what motivates evil.” The writer, Erik Hoel, links this to the cartoonish black-and-white nature of good and bad characters in American entertainment, primarily Disney movies. He contrasts this with the moral complexity on display in the characters in films made by Japan's Studio Ghibli (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc).

I found this fascinating and fairly persuasive even though I've never seen most of the referenced films (and despite really disliking the whole “Karen” meme, which in fairness seems to kind of apply to the sequence of events described in the post).

I'm curious to hear your take on this theory, as a parent and movie guy.

It’s an interesting post, though I have to say I found the connection to the Karen meme to be the least convincing part of it.

The way I would put it, I guess, is that large swathes of American pop culture aimed at children really prepare you for “bad guys” to be a huge problem in the world. And over the past generation, the idea that entertainment products with this kind of childish core (Harry Potter, the MCU, Star Wars) should be at the center of adult pop culture as well has really taken hold. But historically, at least, most really big harms are done by people who have plausible stories to tell and aren’t necessarily extreme outliers in terms of their bad personal characteristics. I always liked the Mr. T Experience song “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend” which is sort of a joke about this — a guy who doesn’t get that world-historical political evil and being a bad date are basically unrelated.

My reference point for our mass culture’s failures in this regard wouldn’t be Disney so much as the MCU Thanos saga. The basic idea of an antagonist who is killing a lot of people out of a totally sincere belief that this course of action will lead to a better outcome is kind of deep and sophisticated. But they never really dramatize it. How did Thanos come to this conclusion? What counterarguments did he consider? Who besides Thanos was persuaded by Thanos Thought? Did any Avengers have a moment of doubt that they might be on the wrong side of this? Superficially, Thanos has been given a sophisticated adult movie. But the whole story plays out as if he’s just a “bad guy.”

Marshall: You tweeted recently that the NY Times had instituted a policy of adversarial coverage of the Tech industry. Casey Newton and Kevin Roose took vigorous exception to that on a recent episode of Derek Thompson’s podcast. I’d be interested in your perspective and response.

These are both good journalists, but I was surprised by how controversial this was.

Roose covers tech for the New York Times. On December 27 he wrote a column titled “The 2021 Good Tech Awards” where he explained that “every December, partly to cheer myself up after a year of covering tech’s scandals and shortfalls, I use this column to lift up a handful of tech projects that improved the world during the year.”

I do think this shows that Kelsey Piper’s follow up to my tweet in which she said there is literally a policy against ever running positive tech stories is wrong — Roose sets aside one column per year to do it. But that’s still a striking editorial choice, and I think broadly indicative of the NYT’s approach to these issues over the past five years.

Now a lot of these negative stories are good pieces. And I have written negative things about tech companies. But on balance, I think “tech bros are bad” is a much smaller problem for today’s world than things like “anti-telemedicine regulations that were temporarily lifted during Covid-19 are coming back and preventing tech from helping to solve a big problem” or “bad parking rules make it hard to take full advantage of new transportation technology.” One of the good news narratives that Roose highlighted in that December column was some alt-meat companies. I’ve written that I think investing in alt-meat innovation is underrated by climate philanthropists. Why? Well, I think in part because the media, most of all the NYT, has sent the signal to people that it is un-progressive to be interested in and optimistic about technology.

Ray: Democrats have successfully turned any public discussion of cost-saving reforms to SS into a political non-starter. But the program does seem doomed to accounting insolvency in the next 20 years.

What, if any, reforms should supporters of robust Social Security support? Is the best strategy to fix this to wait for the crisis and assume the GOP will blink, to spend political capital on a reconciliation bill that increases funding, or try and compromise with the GOP on some combination of cuts and new funding?

I just want to flag that I reject the idea that Democrats are the reason we haven’t been able to have a reasonable discussion of Social Security solvency — the issue is that Republicans rule out any approach to deficit reduction that involves any tax increases, and an all-cuts approach is (rightly) a nonstarter for Democrats. Second, the budget reconciliation rules prohibit any changes to Social Security, so that’s not going to be the solution.

In terms of what to do, here are my broad thoughts:

    We need to increase taxes. Part of the solvency problem is that growing income inequality has pushed a larger and larger share of national income above the FICA cap and drained the system of money. That needs to be reversed.

    We should make the benefits flatter. Social Security has this quasi-insurance design where people who had higher earnings while working receive greater benefits. We should cut benefit growth for people in the top half of the distribution while actually raising benefits for people in the bottom 15 percent or so.

    Discourage early retirement. Even though the age at which you can claim full benefits has been bumped up to 67 and rising, most people actually claim benefits at 62, and the “rise in the retirement age” is really just a benefit cut. We should be trying to rework this system to encourage more people to work longer and then collect higher monthly checks for fewer years. Even if that doesn’t save money in a fiscal sense, it’s better for the economy. 

But look, this is politics, and members need to work out the details in a negotiation. I think Democrats have held the line that fixes should be fixes and not a sleight of hand privatization, and also that we need a balanced approach that includes revenue. I agree with both of those things. Within those broad parameters, potentially anything should be on the table.

Stephen: Would the YIMBY movement do more good trying to align with the ideological left and focusing on making progress in blue big cities/states or in being ideologically heterodox and working anywhere and everywhere?

I’m for the heterodox strategy. My read of American political dynamics is that it’s really pretty harmful to a cause to get sucked into the maw of polarization and conflict extension. Elon Musk deciding to become a right-wing figure is bad for the country, but almost certainly good for the cause of electric vehicle adoption.

City of Trees: Alternate history question: the 2003 Iraq War doesn't happen, most likely with Al Gore winning the 2000 election. How much longer do sanctions and no-fly zones exist in Iraq? Does a future Republican president (most likely John McCain) end up invading Iraq anyway? And how much longer could Saddam Hussein's rule have lasted, particularly with the Arab Spring on the horizon?

My headcanon version of this is that yeah, John McCain beats Gore in 2004 and proceeds to initiate a war with Iraq.

Now, if that doesn’t happen and Saddam limps all the way into the Arab Spring era, you get some interesting possibilities. There would be a sectarian dynamic similar to what played out in Syria except with the reverse alignment — protestors would be mostly Shia and the regime is Sunni. Does Saddam manage to make nice with the Gulf monarchies in order to secure their support to put down a protest/rebel movement he portrays as pro-Iranian?

Pancake: Do you think Congress will take any significant action during the lame duck, and if so what will it be?

There is going to have to be a National Defense Authorizing Act and some stuff is bound to end up attached to it. The most interesting question is whether some version of the Manchin permitting reform proposal ends up in there.

Nathan Barnard: Why is the conventional wisdom that having independent central banks was important to stop governments from overstimulating the economy prior to elections? Inflation seems to hurt everyone and especially old people who vote a lot whereas unemployment hurts fewer people and people less likely to vote. Is the explanation that there's some lag between the positive employment effects and the negative inflationary effects of overstimulating an economy?

I always thought this logic was a little dubious, but the idea is that because of lags, there’s a time-consistency problem where the elected officials always prefer that monetary tightening happen a little bit in the future rather than right now.

But my big problem with the hegemony of central bank independence is that it ignores how different all the other elements of political institutions are from place to place. The Bank of England is operationally independent from His Majesty’s Treasury, but the nature of UK political institutions is there is nothing stopping a simple parliamentary majority from changing that. That’s not to say independence is meaningless (just ask Liz Truss), but it’s extremely limited and the putative contrast between “democratically elected officials” and the “independent central bank” is really quite weak. In the UK, everyone who does anything is appointed rather than elected, but the elected parliament is ultimately sovereign over everything.

On the other end of the spectrum, European Union decision-making is so clunky and has so many veto points that once the European Council selects an ECB governing board, they really do have carte blanche to just do whatever with no accountability to anyone. That seems very bad to me. But again, the problem isn’t the bank’s operational independence, it’s the way the EU doesn’t allow for any efficient decision-making process by its elected elements.

Marie Kennedy: Critical question. Two weeks ago when you said “Vigilante Shit” reminded you of “Music is my Hot Hot Sex,” did you mean “Karma” (not Vigilante Shit)? I ask because your post prompted me to check out the songs you and a few other commenters liked, and the CSS song, and I thought you were really reaching to compare them. But today I heard Karma and thought, “why does this song sound so familiar??” Anyway I’m a fan of the single, Anti-Hero. Thematically reminded me of the excellent “I’m the Villian in My Own Story” from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Thank you for your time.

Yes, that is correct. Specifically, the similarity is the CSS song has the lines “music is my boyfriend / music is my girlfriend / music is my dead end,” while Swift’s Karma goes “karma is my boyfriend / karma is a god / karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend.”

Closer to the main themes of this blog, I think the CSS song (especially with the accompanying music video) “City Grrrl” from about a decade ago is a really good illustration of the links between urbanization, gender politics, cosmopolitanism, and the openness to experience facet of personality. And you also see the internationalization of politics as we live through these divides. The policy issues in Brazil, where the band is from, must be totally different from the issues in the United States. But you watch the video and it’s obvious that this band would hate Bolsonaro and that Bolsonaro’s voters would hate them. But that applies just as well to Trump or Meloni in Italy or anywhere else.

Jackie Blitz: Where do you come down on abolishing cash bail? I've read some strong arguments in favor. but given the current crime surge, it seems like poor timing. Illinois abolishes starting in 2023, and I'm expecting strong political backlash.

“People not convicted of any crime shouldn’t be languishing in jail due to inability to pay” seems like a compelling argument to me.

The problem with even perfectly sound criminal justice reform ideas, though, is that the people in the driver’s seat of this movement have a generalized dislike for enforcement, punishment, and coercion. You need answers to the question of what we do if someone out on bail is arrested again. I think the lodestar of sound thinking about how to make the criminal justice system more humane is that swift and certain sanctions can substitute for extreme harsh and cruel ones. But in effect, the jail/bail system was the swiftest and most certain part of the criminal justice system. If you kick that stool out, you need complementary changes to get trials done faster, to intensively monitor people out on bond, to punish violators quickly, etc.

The Road Monkey: How does the average Democrat help change the emphasis of the national conversation (especially in Democratic circles) towards popularism and moderation? I feel like we've bought into the narrative of victimhood so deeply that we can't see when we're beclowing ourselves.

In all seriousness, you are what you post.

I follow a lot of academics on Twitter, usually because I’m interested in the main elements of their scholarship. But of course, frequent Twitter posters don’t just post about their work, they also post about what they are interested in. And it seems to me that they are not that interested in Texas/Florida Medicaid expansion or minimum wage politics compared to their level of interest in getting down in the mud with Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis on culture war topics. But these are smart people. They know that the blueing of Texas’ big metro areas is being offset by a reddening trend in working-class Mexican American areas. They know the cross-pressured voters in those communities probably agree with Abbott about participation rules for girls’ sports teams but probably disagree with him about Medicaid. So it’s just on the shoulders of literally everyone who cares about Texas politics enough that they bother to post about it to say “what I am doing to portray the major dividing line in Texas politics as being about our governor’s cruel and petty decision to deprive millions of Texans of health insurance with the federal government picking up 90 percent of the tab?”

Mark_J_Ryan: You recently commented on the necessity of some type of diplomatic/negotiated resolution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What should Ukraine be prepared to give up to Russia in this sort of negotiation?

I think it’s important to keep this front and center on the proximate stumbling block, which is that whatever Russia gets out of a settlement, what are they prepared to offer as reassurance to Ukraine and other frontline states (Poland, Finland, the Baltics) that they aren’t going to just go start shit again if sanctions are removed and they can rebuild their military?

The most obvious Ukrainian concessions are around Crimea, where I think the New Ukraine emerging from the war on some level is genuinely better off without incorporating a bloc of people who aren’t participating in the revival of Ukrainian national consciousness. But that’s a concession that’s hard to make if Ukraine thinks Russia is going to turn around in two years and go back to blockading Black Sea ports. One way to create reassurance would be for Ukraine to join NATO and benefit from the broad NATO security umbrella. But it seems like Moscow really doesn’t want that outcome. So maybe the outcome involves the West actually stepping up its arming and training of the Ukrainian military so it can guarantee its own independence. Well, it seems like Moscow doesn’t want that either.

So we’re back to where we’ve been ever since Moscow successfully pressured a pro-Russian government in Kyiv to back out of a trade deal with the EU: is Russia, in fact, prepared to acknowledge that Ukraine is an independent state? If they are, then questions like “what are the precise boundaries of the state” become negotiable. But the evidence of the past decade is that they aren’t.

Brian T: Apple recently made changes to ad tracking on iPhones in ways that had a substantial impact on Facebook. Now, Apple is looking to expand its own advertising initiatives. Given that you tend to be dovish on tech antitrust issues, what are your thoughts on this?

I don’t think of myself as “dovish.” What I do think is that people who dispositionally don’t like big technology companies have gotten too eager to make up new antitrust doctrines as a way of checking companies they don’t like. But this App Tracking Transparency (ATT) controversy is a case in point for why you actually need a principles-based, rule-governed framework for thinking about these issues, because it’s just two different unsympathetic companies slagging each other.

And in that framework, I don’t see a case for sanctioning Apple. I will concede that I have not researched this question deeply and I am open to changing my mind, but the way I see it, Apple is just not a monopolist in the phone market so there is no antitrust question here — it’s two big companies slugging it out to divide some rents.

Note that Apple cleverly does allow you to opt in to ad tracking! This is important, because I think it skewers Facebook on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they want to say that ad-tracking is good for consumers (you get more relevant advertising!) so making it go away is harmful. But on the other hand, they want to say that Apple asking you whether or not you want ad tracking is kneecapping their ad-tracking business. The latter is probably true, but it’s only true because the former is wrong.

Shrikrishna Pherwani: Is Tony Blair (without the iraq stuff ofc) the ideal western politician?

I don’t think you can just yadda yadda past “the Iraq stuff,” but what I do think it’s important to say about both US and UK politics is that the Iraq War was extremely bad, people are right to be extremely upset about the war, people are further right to be upset about a lack of accountability for the war, and it’s all genuinely very bad.

But that specific thing was bad, not “Blairism” or the idea that effective politicians need to pander to public opinion.

Pete: It looks like the Fed’s rate hikes are really starting to cool down the housing market. Lending is down, starts are declining, rents have peaked. But we still have a 3 million shortage of units nationwide, millions of households who are cost burdened, and prices and rents are still much higher than before the pandemic. What policies could help increase the total housing stock and affordable housing stock in this environment? What’s politically feasible?

Two points:

    To the extent that you worry about the negative long-term impact of interest rate hikes on the capital stock (of which housing is the most important component), you should favor deficit-reduction measures. If we implement scheduled Medicare provider payments, that helps. If we cap tax deductions or find some other way of raising revenue from affluent people, that helps. You want to avoid fiscal measures that hammer investment or the poor, but there’s a broad menu here.

    Zoning! Interest rates are cooling housing demand, but there continue to be many, many neighborhoods around the country where the price of housing drastically exceeds the replacement cost of structures. Allowing more building on the highest-value parcels will preserve construction activity, even in a weak housing market.

Srynerson: Over the last few years it at least feels to me (not sure if stats corroborate this) like there's been a big upsurge in American progressives making claims along the lines of, “America has never been a democracy,” “America only became a democracy in 1965 and it ended with Citizens United/Rucho/[Insert Other SCOTUS Decision Here],” etc. My question is this: do you think talk like this is actually constructive in any context? I ask because my gut reaction is that if you're telling people the US “wasn't a democracy” for most or even all of the 20th Century, that at best damages your credibility with anyone familiar with history and at worst seems like it implicitly defines authoritarianism down so far that it doesn't seem like a threat anymore.

I dunno — factually speaking, the political system operating in the Jim Crow South did not meet the contemporary standards of democracy.

I strongly recommend V.O. Key’s classic book “Southern Politics in State and Nation,” where precisely because Key is writing before the Civil Rights Movement without a contemporary sensibility, he really just lays out the facts of how herrenvolk democracy worked (or “worked”) and how distorting it was on political outcomes. These are facts. And you will wildly misunderstand the politics of everything over the past 100 years if you don’t grasp the significance of the battle for democracy in the Old Confederacy.

Now separately, I think we see a persistent ambiguity in the democracy discourse between the idea of political equality (which Jim Crow flagrantly violated and which the Senate continues to violate in a low-key way today) and the idea of an authoritarian regime. Jim Crow politics was competitive — they had contested elections, organized factions, and the basic elements of democratic politics. They just didn’t let a huge share of the population vote.

Is it smart to say the United States “wasn’t a democracy” until the Voting Rights Act? I dunno. Maybe you should say the democratic project has been evolving over time and we took a significant step forward in 1965.

Braised Pilchard: What do you think will happen if the Rs win a filibuster-proof trifecta in 2024?

It’s really hard to predict. But I think a lot of people have developed a sense of contemporary politics where the stakes of this are either really small (we say nice things about the cops and adhere strictly to the 2012-vintage understanding of women’s sports) or else sort of cosmic and abstract (the end of democracy), when the reality is that Republicans will probably try to make very large changes to the basic structure of American economic policy.

longwalkdownlyndale: Is Matt on Team Green or Team Black for House of the Dragon? How about Milan?

We are both for the Blacks — but as I said in Tuesday’s post, the show has really loaded the dice here. Rhaenyra is the legitimate heir, she’s blessed by prophecy, the rival claimant is a rapist, and her primary antagonist is a scoldy religious fanatic. The only motivation given in the show for anyone to be on Team Green is misogyny or rank opportunism.

It would be more interesting to give us a glimpse of some lords who feel that Alicent and Otto have been making good decisions, that the Black camp is full of bitter has-beens who were on the wrong side of those decisions, and that Rhaenyra taking the throne would be bad for the realm.