Weekend Update, March 13

Weekend Update, March 13

By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

On March 12, 2020, I published my first ever COVID-19 article, and I think it holds up pretty well!

Factional brands

(Photo by NewOrleans1944)

Niskanen Center colleagues of mine published two good pieces about the utility of factional identities for specific situations — here’s Steven Teles on urban Republicans and here’s Kal Mundis and Robert Saldin on rural Democrats.

I just wanted to add a slightly more superficial point to everything they say, which is that I think branding matters. Today the Blue Dog Caucus is a thing in the House. Everyone knows broadly that they are “moderate,” but nobody has a very clear sense of how exactly they are different, or even what’s the difference between being a Blue Dog because you hold a tough seat and being Nancy Pelosi who wants her members in tough seats to win re-election. Back in the heyday of the Democratic Leadership Council, things were different — it really meant something that Joe Lieberman was a New Democrat and that the New Democrats were torching Howard Dean and that John Kerry was a non-factional candidate who New Democrats regarded as acceptable without being their dream choice.

Today’s equivalents in terms of having a strong brand identity are The Squad and the Justice Democrats as aligned groups outside of Congress — which is to say that there are people who have cool feelings about the Democratic Party but warm feelings about the Squad, and there are people who have the opposite set of feelings. I don’t know exactly what went into making that brand. But it’s more than just policy — it’s media work and literal branding.

It would be healthy, politically, to have something like a Country Democrats brand (probably needs a better name) that could include Joe Manchin and Jon Tester and Jared Goldin and various state legislators from rural areas. It would need distinctive policy views on select issues. But it would also need a cool name and a logo and some affiliated cheerleaders who talk shit on Twitter. And we could use the same for City Republicans.

Unpopular versus unfashionable ideas

Paul Graham says he stands up for unpopular ideas because popular ones don’t need defenders.

Twitter avatar for @paulg

I think we are probably mostly in agreement about this, but I want to draw a fussy distinction, which is that lots of perfectly popular ideas tend to become passingly unfashionable.

One I’ve been thinking about lately is rioting and looting. Obviously the vast majority of people think that rioting and looting are bad, because if pro-looting politics were popular you’d have cities burning to the ground constantly. But last year, when we had looters mixed in with people protesting on behalf of a good cause, it became sort of stigmatized to notice or talk about the looters. Now you have a situation where things have largely calmed down, but there is an exceptional situation in Portland, Oregon where a small number of anarchists persist in trying to smash or burn a federal courthouse. Covering these people and saying that they are bad has become an obsession of right-wing folks with bad politics, so chiming in to say “hey it’s bad that we have anarchists rioting in Portland” continues to be an unfashionable thing to say, even though — again — obviously anarchist rioters are not popular.

I continue to think that this kind of gap between popularity and fashionability is an underrated opportunity for Kamala Harris (whose numbers lag behind Joe Biden’s, according to the people I know who watch these things) to go west and reclaim the Kamala is a Cop brand by saying people should go to jail if they set a courthouse on fire and that these jackasses are counterproductive to real social justice causes. It’s worth saying precisely because it’s popular.

The problem of focus

I enjoyed this Freddie de Boer post about faddish social justice concerns versus trying to meet people’s real needs. As he says, “when the national conversation about race is rapturously attentive to the trials of the Duchess of Sussex, there is no time or energy for the real work.”

But here’s the thing. The very same week that we were busy talking about the Duchess of Sussex, the President of the United States was signing legislation that makes historic investments in meeting the material needs of low-income families of all races.

In other words, there is maybe less of a zero-sum tradeoff here than de Boer thinks. But what’s true is that the historic investments of the American Rescue Plan overwhelmingly take the form of one-off stimulus or COVID-19 relief — it’s not a new, permanent welfare state à la FDR or LBJ or even the Affordable Care Act. But Democratic leaders want to make things like the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent. Whether or not they are able to do so is a big deal. And whether or not they will be able to hinges, in part, on the public reaction. It’s true that if everyone is talking about the Duchess of Sussex’s problems instead, that would be bad. But it would also be bad if everyone is complaining that there’s too much talk about the Duchess of Sussex.

At a certain point, if your view is that the most important thing is to focus on people’s concrete material needs, you yourself need to spend a good amount of time actually focusing on them. That’s why here at Slow Boring, I always try to have a decent ratio of tedious policy posts to culture war complaining.

Journalism needs revenue

Huffington Post did major layoffs this past week which cost several great journalists I know their jobs. It’s sad. And frankly, it’s infuriating to watch what’s happening to the industry. But reactions like this from Andy Campbell, who works at HuffPost, honestly aren’t going to help anyone.

Twitter avatar for @AndyBCampbell

The reality is if you want journalists to get paid, you need a story about revenue.

In my view, journalism is an underrated avenue for philanthropy. But having worked at two different non-profit journalism entities in my life, I can assure you that donor-financed journalism still has a revenue model — it’s the donors. If you want to make it work, you need to think about that. Journalism as a profession attracts a lot of disagreeable personality types, which sort of makes sense given the nature of the job, but which can be counterproductive to thinking these things through.

In “the good old days,” a big city daily newspaper was a kind of franchise, and it just sat on a gusher of ad revenue facing very little competition. In that context, you could tell journalists that it was “ethics” to be proudly ignorant of how the underlying business worked and encourage everyone to develop a pain-in-the-ass attitude about the bosses, the business side, the advertisers, etc. But that’s not going to work today. I’m very grateful to have all of you who subscribe here supporting my business.

To have great journalism going forward, we’re going to need more models and more paying customers, and that’s going to require generosity on the part of people in the audience but also creativity and a certain amount of humility from practitioners that we can’t just expect money to flow to us for no reason. We have to make it worth your while to give it to us.

Why is there so little private school entry?

There was a weird kind of freakout this week about too much “woke” politics at a handful of specific private high schools, mostly in New York but also in Los Angeles.

I found the whole discourse weird, but it raised the more specific question of why there seems to be so little new entry into the field of prep schools. There do not actually appear to be a ton of regulatory barriers. The prices that the existing schools charge show there’s a lot of demand. Clearly, not everyone is happy with the current offerings. And even at the high prices charged, the top schools are able to turn students away — it’s non-trivial to get into Dalton separately from the very high tuition — so there’s a clear customer base.

After asking around on this a bit, I got a few speculative theories but no really good answer. There’s not like a definitive paper that someone has written or a famous cautionary tale.

In lots of ways, the paucity of entry is probably good. In D.C., where I live, the population has surged from 572,059 in 2000 to 705,749 in 2020. At the same time, the city has gone from 30% white to 45% white, and the average income has gone up. But the big increase in the number of affluent white people living in D.C. has not inspired the launch of any major new prep schools to compete with St. Albans, Sidwell Friends, or Georgetown Day. Instead, what’s happened is D.C. has seen explosive growth in charter schools, but charter growth hasn’t taken students out of the mainstream DCPS system. Instead, total public + charter enrollment has grown 30% since 2008 — massive charter growth plus incremental growth in public enrollment. And the public school system has become less segregated.

So I’m not exactly complaining that few people are launching new private schools. But it seems a little puzzling.