Last mailbag of 2023. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

17 - 21 minutes

The stretch between Christmas and New Year’s is always a slow news week, but a few good and noteworthy things have happened. Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine turns out to be more effective than previously known. Zepbound is similar to, but even more effective than, Ozempic. And we’ve got a ceasefire in the destructive-but-little-noticed conflict in eastern Congo.

Now to questions!

Marie Kennedy: Thoughts on the “Substackers Against Nazis” debacle? I don’t believe I saw your name on either open letter- is this a post-Harpers letter philosophy to avoid open letters, or no one asked you, or you just don’t have a strong opinion either way?

One lesson I learned from that Harpers experience is that you should be very careful what you sign. But as you can see, I’m not out here demanding that Substack deplatform anybody, which means that I am, on some level, in alignment with Elle Griffin’s “Substack shouldn’t decide what we read” letter, though I don’t endorse 100 percent of what she wrote.

Something that I hope Substack will think seriously about going forward is the very real tension between their desire to be seen as a content-agnostic software vendor and their desire to create useful network effects. Nobody does takes like “Microsoft Word has a Nazi problem” or “Ikea shouldn’t sell office furniture to companies.” There are lots of companies out there selling products that are very generically useful, which includes being useful to bad people. If a company told me proudly that they were the preferred desk provider of Nazis, I’d find that incredibly disturbing and off-putting. But the reality is that Nazis probably buy desks from normal mainstream companies, and it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to try to get America’s furniture companies to try to deplatform Nazis. Substack is mostly like that — a software product that I find useful and so do lots of people who have lots of different political opinions, potentially including Nazi opinions.

But it’s not entirely like that.

Substack does a lot of little things like recommendations and leaderboards to try to make the platform more valuable and lucrative. And I like that, in the sense that I certainly want to maximize the readership of Slow Boring. But it does get you into a conversation in which it’s hard to just plead pure neutrality. What if an overtly white supremacist site were number two on the politics leaderboard? That’s a bad look. So I’m not saying Substack should be trying to deplatform Nazis. But Substack should also constantly be trying to make business and product decisions that are consistent with their desire to be doing minimal content moderation.

Lost Future: What should US-Cuba policy be these days? As I vaguely understand it, relations warmed a bit under Obama, obviously cooled under Trump, and then Biden has loosened things a bit since then but maybe not gone full Obama. They are somehow still a semi-functioning autocratic country, 70+ years after the revolution. Let's assume Biden wins and now no longer has to worry about winning Florida again- how should the US approach our relationship with Cuba?

While the electoral calculus around Cuba has changed, this doesn’t mean the politics are irrelevant.

Any opening to Cuba that Biden could make would likely be reversed under a Republican administration, and because the Cubans are aware of that, they won’t be willing to make any significant concessions — and because the Cubans will be hesitant to make concessions, Biden would have a hard time coming up with a deal that either Congress or the American public would find appealing.

Beyond that, the big problem in US-Cuba relations is that at this point, it’s really a conflict about nothing. If you go way back to the origins of the dispute, it’s about Cold War geopolitics. The American government had a plausible fear that Fidel Castro would align Cuba with the Soviet Union, which led the United States to take anti-Castro actions that only increased Castro’s inclination to align with the Soviet Union. Under the circumstances, while it would have been very difficult to improve US-Cuba relations, it’s also clear what an improvement would have looked like: Cuba would have disavowed the Soviet alliance, and in exchange, the United States would treat Cuba like any other country.

The problem is that the conflict has gone on for so long (outlasting the Soviet Union itself by more than thirty years!) that the United States is now really dug in on the fundamentals of regime change. But while it’s true that the Castro regime is bad, that can’t really be the basis of the policy. The United States has perfectly normal trade and diplomatic relationships with lots of bad regimes. The human rights concerns and so forth aren’t fake, but there’s an element of bad faith to it. What we would like is for the Cuban government to not be anti-American. But what does that mean in concrete terms these days? We want them to say nice things about Israel? To send weapons to Ukraine? That wouldn’t amount to very much. I do think the key, though, is really to drop the pretense that we are arguing about Communism or human rights and try to zero-in on geopolitics. The foundation of America’s steadily improving relationship with Vietnam is a shared understanding that the point of an improving relationship is a mutual interest in checking China.

Just Some Guy: Weird hypothetical: a deadly tropical cyclone is headed for North Sentinel Island. What should the rest of the world do?

Per the discussion in comments, I’m not really sure a cyclone would be so bad for the Sentinelese because they’re not dependent on infrastructure that would be destroyed in a storm.

But the spirit of the exercise, I take it, is to generate something like a Prime Directive dilemma from Star Trek. Suppose we know with our advanced technology that the Sentinel Islands are doomed and we have the ability to save them, but the only way to do so involves breaking their isolation. I guess this doesn’t seem like that hard of a question to me. As things stand, upholding their desire to be left alone seems like the correct choice, but I don’t think there’s any incredible moral weight behind the issue of uncontactedness, per se. If they’re all going to die, you come in and save them.

Sean O: With you being in LA this week, the Rose Parade and Rose Bowl are coming up, and both prominently feature a B2 flyover. Whenever there is a public display of America’s awesome military technology, I see a lot of complaints online that are like “This is why I don't have healthcare.” How true is this? How much, if any, does America's military spending crowd out spending on healthcare? On the flipside, how much does Europe's relatively low military spending allow them to spend more on healthcare?

Specifically with regard to healthcare, it’s completely wrong. European countries’ relatively low military spending doesn’t explain anything about their ability to spend more on healthcare because they don’t spend more on health care. What they do is use price controls to push the unit cost of healthcare services much lower than what we pay in the United States, which makes it more feasible to finance a very large proportion of the spending out of explicit tax revenue.

What’s true is that over and above universal health care, European countries generally have more generous social safety nets, including better Unemployment Insurance and some form of a child allowance. Cutting back on military spending would make it easier for the USA to copy that. Though even so, I think semi-principled resistance to the idea of giving money to non-workers is probably a larger stumbling block than scrounging up the money.

Jeremy K: Your post about the number of period pieces coming out lately got me wondering, what movies set in the past do you think use their setting most effectively? Do they have anything in common in terms of the way they deal with the past? Is there an approach to historical movies that you find generally effective, or is it purely a case-by-case thing?

Since I wrote that piece, I’ve seen three more movies set in the past — “The Holdovers,” “Maestro,” and “Ferrari” — and one thing this clarified for me is that I should have distinguished a little more clearly between fictional stories set in the past and historical stories, which is what a lot of distinguished directors have been churning out lately.

“The Holdovers” frankly just doesn’t have a lot of the problems that have been annoying me about the historical movie trend because it’s something that the filmmakers made up. Alexander Payne decided he wanted to do a movie set in a prep school and he’d read a television pilot about a prep school that David Hemingson had written, so Payne reached out to Hemingson to collaborate and Hemingson reworked his ideas into a feature film. Because it’s made up, you can just invent facts that tell a story. Barton Academy has a bunch of alumni who fought in the world wars, but just one who fought in Vietnam — a poor Black kid who only went there because his mother ran the cafeteria and who had to enlist because he couldn’t afford college tuition and who died overseas. That’s laying it on a bit thick in terms of pounding home the point about the American elite’s shifting relationship to military service, but that’s the power of fiction: You make up the plot points to tell the story that you want to tell. Paul Giamatti’s character has a lazy eye and Fish Odor Syndrome because they wrote him that way. And it’s crafted so that you get the exposition you need about the setting, and the stuff you don’t know isn’t important.

By contrast, a big chunk of the dramatic stakes in “Ferrari” revolves around a business deal they are trying to close but which the movie leaves unresolved in an odd way. The reason it’s not resolved is history — the movie is set in 1957, but in reality, Fiat’s major investment in Ferrari doesn’t happen until 1969. That’s bad writing to have the deal neither be consummated nor definitively collapse. Except it’s not “bad writing,” it’s history. It just happens to be the case that relatively few actual historical events have the level of intentionality and sound plotting of a well-written story. I liked “Tár” a lot better than “Maestro” in part because I appreciated the contemporary setting, but mostly because all the made-up stuff happens happens for a reason.

So I don’t think period pieces are bad. But I do think Hollywood needs to think harder about taking on these specifically historical projects. Why are we telling these stories? Are we illuminating something people don’t know? Are we deliberately mythologizing certain figures to make a point? It’s not that this can’t be done well, but a lot of historical movies I’ve seen recently seemed to me to be leaning on “well, that’s what happened” in lieu of real creative intention.

With all that said, the original point I wanted to make wasn’t that there’s anything bad about period films or fantastical settings. But I do think something is missing when that’s all we get.

I liked “The Holdovers” a lot and don’t have any problem with it. But it’s still true that back in 1999, when Alexander Payne made a movie set in a high school, he made a movie set in a high school in the late 1990s. Now, nearly 25 years later, he’s gone back in time. Which is fine, but I think it’s important to have some skilled people working with real budgets and talent focused on telling some stories set in the present. A friend of mine suggested that people shy away from the present less because they hate smartphones than because they are trying to dodge political criticism of various kinds. You set a movie in Italy in the 1950s and you can have people going on about “he deserves an heir” and bankers conspiring with their clients to keep a mistress secret, and that’s just how it was back in the day. If Michael Mann were to set a movie in the present, then whatever point of view his characters seemed to have about gender roles would displease someone or other and we’d be arguing about it.

That’s a kind of annoyingly plausible theory, but I think it also speaks to why it’s a shame. Part of what’s great about art is it can illustrate human complexity with more nuance than a tweet or a column. And I want to see writers and directors and actors attempt to portray human characters who deal with contemporary realities.

Brian: Thoughts on Mickey Mouse's upcoming release into the public domain.

For context: Congress did several rounds of retroactively extending copyright term length, with Disney heavily involved in the lobbying and a purported desire to prevent “Steamboat Willie” from falling into the public domain an allegedly important motivator for them.

That was really bad public policy, I am glad congress isn’t doing it anymore, and I welcome Steamboat Willie’s arrival. But the actual implications of this, I think, are pretty modest. Mickey Mouse remains under copyright in all his other works, and Disney has lots of lawyers who will try to sue anyone who attempts to commercialize the character outside of some very narrow contexts. Which is all fine — it’s part of the reason the retroactive extensions were such a bad idea.

Charles Ryder: Any thoughts on NYC vs LA? It's a very broad topic, I know, but you are something of an expert on urban America (and you grew up in Manhattan).

The differences between New York and LA are so vast that in a lot of ways it feels pointless to compare. What I’m more struck by is the differences between LA and Chicago, because Chicago is also really large and geographically amorphous but has a totally different form of urban organization.

The key thing about Chicago is the Loop. Of course, most people in Chicagoland don’t live in the City of Chicago, most of them don’t work in the Loop, and most of them probably only rarely even visit. But it’s still true that (at least pre-Covid) there was a very, very large share of the metro area’s total employment within the relatively small confines of the Loop. Which in turn meant that even in a metro area that’s in some ways incredibly sprawling and car oriented, there were lots of people commuting by train specifically to downtown office jobs and supportive retail. And then not only is the Loop small and dense, but key attractions like the Field Museum, the Art Institute, and the Miracle Mile are directly adjacent to it. Spending all this time in Hyde Park at the beginning of the year felt really odd because you are very much not having the canonical Chicago experience.

By contrast, LA doesn’t really have a canonical experience. It has a downtown (where we’ve been staying) that certainly has hotels and office buildings and municipal functions and the Lakers. But the movie business is a really big deal in Los Angeles and the movie studios aren’t here. The beach is a really big deal in Los Angeles, and the beach is really far from here. Unlike in most cities, the fancy neighborhoods aren’t particularly well-located for rich corporate decision-makers to commute to downtown. If anything, it’s the opposite and rich decision-makers have pulled office jobs out of downtown to be accessible to their preferred westside residential locations. There are lots of different LA neighborhoods that have hotels in them (though not the neighborhood my sister-in-law and her wife live in, which is part of how we ended up downtown), and there are lots of different tourist attractions (Griffith Observatory! Expo Park! Walk of Fame!) all around in different places.

The result is a city that I think is a bit less than the sum of its parts, but then compensates for bad logistics by having what’s obviously dramatically nicer weather than Chicago. But it’s a lot of great parts!

John E: In 1995, the Senate came one vote short of passing a balanced budget amendment (would require a 2/3 vote in both house and Senate to run a deficit during the year).

If that had passed, it probably is a bad thing...but maybe not? Every tax cut passed after that probably gets repealed or not passed. There is probably sufficient votes to pass stimulus in 2009 and 2020, but since everyone knows it will be really hard to pass additional stimulus there is a bigger impetus to do one really big push. Matt has mentioned that politics got so weird because budgeting stopped mattering and we just paid for everything with more debt. This would have forced most attention back to the budget and avoided that.

I think you’re really underselling the difficulty here. The US was running substantial budget deficits all during George W. Bush’s term in office, which was often for bad reasons (like invading Iraq) but was reasonably well-suited to an environment in which interest rates were pretty low and the labor market was pretty weak.

Charles Ryder: Should Claudine Gay resign?

On one level, sure. The job of the president of the university is to make the university look good, make donors happy, and make it easier for everyone else to do their jobs, and she is not currently succeeding in that role.

Beyond that, I have no idea what she values or cares about. I guess my advice to her if she wants to hold onto her job would be to forge an alliance with prominent reformist faculty like Steven Pinker and ex-president Larry Summers and pitch herself as the ideal person to help chart a new course.

I will say that it was as a result of this whole controversy that I came to read Gay’s 2013 paper, “Knowledge Matters: Policy cross-pressures and Black Partisanship” which I think previewed a lot of themes that we’ve explored in Slow Boring in posts like “Black Democrats are Moderate,” “The Misinformation Cope,” “Progressives’ Mobilization Delusion,” “Should Democrats Talk More About Their Values,” and elsewhere.

Which is just to say that there her research contains much of the information you’d need to predict that the style of left-on-everything intersectional politics that’s moved from academia into the nonprofit world into electoral politics doesn’t work, including with many of the voters it’s supposed to appeal to.