Mailbag IV: A New Hope

Mailbag IV: A New Hope

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 14 minutes

Mailbag IV: A New Hope

Popularism & civil rights, GiveWell for downballot races, and more

I want to start by acknowledging that there have been several queries about the opioid epidemic recently. I keep ducking them because I don’t have any good answers, but I am going to read this Stanford-Lancet report on the subject and try to understand their policy recommendations. Once I do that, I might have something more to say.

For now, though, on to the mailbag!

Aaron: You seem to have adopted some practices (like making and tracking predictions) designed to improve your thinking and analyses. Have they worked? Why or why not (and how do you know)? Are there any practices you’re trying to adopt? Are there any practices you’ve rejected as not worth it?

I think the best impact making quantified predictions has had on me, personally, is that it’s helped me refrain from tossing off wildly overstated predictions.

People who have strongly held prescriptive views about policy (people like me) often yoke those views to forecasts about the future that end up being overstated and unprincipled in fairly obvious ways. You see people professing absolute certainty as to how Taiwan will react to a Russian invasion of Ukraine or whether Mitch McConnell will eliminate the filibuster during the next Republican Party trifecta, when I think it’s actually really obvious that in both cases, you’re not only tackling a difficult question but one where the result hinges critically on details that have not yet been specified. If you imagine yourself fully specifying a bet and saying what odds you would give, it helps clarify how uncertain you really feel about these things. At least it does for me.

Dan Zigmond: I have a question about the limits of popularism. Ever since the MLK holiday, I’ve been reading a bit about his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. As I think you’ve pointed out, King was very unpopular while he was alive. And his Letter is addressed to eight clergymen who were essential on his side, but were advocating what we might today call a more popularist position — go slower, work within the system, make gradual progress, don’t scare people so much. But they’re the bad guys, right? They don’t get a holiday. We’re all on King’s side in this now. So what can we learn from all that regarding our various current political struggles? Was Civil Rights just a bigger deal than today’s controversies, and so worth taking unpopular stands, in ways that don’t make sense today? Or maybe another way of asking that is this: What would you have advised Democrats in King’s time on the issue of Civil Rights?

So I think it’s important here to distinguish between the popularity of the Civil Rights Act and related legislation and the popularity of the civil rights movement, which used a lot of aggressive and controversial tactics.

Civil rights was a popular cause. If you go back to a document like Clark Clifford’s 1948 campaign strategy memo to Harry Truman, the party hacks are urging Democrats to embrace civil rights to win votes in the north. Northern Democrats are reluctant to do it because it causes intra-elite tensions and forces them to fight with their southern colleagues. In “Master of the Senate,” Robert Caro recounts that Lyndon Johnson decided to push through the weak-but-not-meaningless Civil Rights Act of 1957 precisely because he felt he needed to distance himself from Jim Crow to be a viable figure in national politics. Arch-segregationist Richard Russell did not like this idea, but also understood Johnson’s analysis of the situation — he didn’t say, “no the national electorate will hate that.” He, Richard Russell, hated it because he was super racist.

Now to the movement. The problem facing King and other civil rights leaders in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and early 1960s is that while most northern whites agreed with them, they also didn’t really care that much.

So the movement’s strategy, time and again, was to provoke some kind of crisis and create a situation where northern whites can’t indulge their first choice option and just ignore the whole situation. Whenever the conflicts reached a fever pitch, northern white elites generally came down on the side of civil rights, whether that’s FDR and Executive Order 8802, Harry Truman desegregating the military, or Eisenhower sending the 101st Airborne to Arkansas.

But this strategy of deliberately provoking crises was annoying to white moderates who would rather deal with their own priorities on their own timetable. And that’s what the Letter from Birmingham Jail is about. The moderates wanted King to chill out and stop making trouble, and in the letter King says that if he forces this issue onto the agenda, he will win. But if he never makes trouble, it will never get on the agenda.

Now this is where we get to the difference between the politics of 2022 and the civil rights era: King doesn’t care what the impact of his actions is on partisan politics because the parties were genuinely not very distinct on the civil rights issue. The 1952, 1956, and 1960 elections all feature both the Democratic and Republican nominees simultaneously courting southern whites and northern blacks, creating a very confused muddle. It would have been crazy for King to be obsessed, in April 1963, with the impact of his actions on the political outlook for the Kennedy administration because Kennedy — despite some promises made during the campaign — isn’t doing anything for civil rights.

You really need to see these facts together:

Because civil rights is popular, by forcing it onto the agenda you score wins for civil rights.

Because the parties are not clearly distinct on civil rights, the electoral impact of your actions isn’t very important.

Movement leaders made a correct analysis of the situation that even if confrontational tactics made them personally unpopular in the eyes of northern white moderates, they would ultimately create wins for the cause. The trouble with applying this to contemporary politics is that our highly polarized political situation is nothing like that of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Nikhil Gupta: Was dismantling the Austrian Hungarian empire a mistake? You seem to have thoughts on the topic.

Too many thoughts for one mailbag! But look, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved as a result of World War One. And everyone knows that World War One was a mistake. It’s like the canonical example of a world-historical fuckup.

Just as an example of how what a catastrophe this was, recall that the precipitating incident was Serbian nationalists wanting to liberate Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia from Habsburg rule and create a unified South Slav state under Serbian leadership. But not only did this not work out in the long run, but contemporary Serbia is smaller than pre-WWI Serbia.

Joel D: What are your top 5 alternative history books/movies?

I always wish more alternate history were written, especially on a more diverse set of topics than just “what if the south had won the Civil War?” or “what if the Nazis won World War II?”

That said, Robert Harris’ “Fatherland” about what if the Nazis won World War II is great. So is Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle,” which is also about what if the Nazis won World War II. Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” is brilliant. I think I need to recognize Harry Turtledove’s totally bananas series of books that asks the question “what if a race of space-lizards invaded Earth midway through World War II?” Last, I’m going to pick an anthology volume of short stories called “Alternate Presidents” that came out when I was 11 and is just great.

Some day I will publish my thriller “Viribus Unitis” about an American Secret Service agent who goes undercover in 1997 to try to disrupt a plot to assassinate the heir to the still-thriving Habsburg throne and his new bride on their honeymoon visit to the United States.

Charles Greenberg: What’s the most effective method of political giving, for an individual non-rich person? Donating to candidates, parties, state/local parties, PACs, nonprofits? Wish there was a GiveWell for left wing political donations. Is it a massive waste of money for small dollar donors anyway?

Small donations are important for two reasons. One is that though the rules barring campaigns from coordinating with affiliated Super PACs are ridden with loopholes, they are not entirely meaningless. But the big one is that by law TV stations need to give a more favorable ad rate to political campaigns, so direct contributions can really help.

Now what’s true is that there’s so much cash sloshing around presidential campaigns and big governor’s races that it’s hard for your $50 to make a difference. If you’re not super rich, it’s better to focus down ballot.

But how do you know which state legislative campaigns really need money? That’s where you need a GiveWell for political donations. And the answer is the Future Now Fund’s GiveSmart list, where they try to identify the most pivotal state legislature races in the country. They don’t have a 2022 list ready yet, but I’ll make sure to flag it when they do.

Alex: I'm not sure if Americans are aware of this but many politics obssessives over here (and in the rest of the anglosphere) are dedicated followers of US Politics. To the degree that the NY Times might be have the largest paid subscriber base of any outlet in Canada. Why do you think American politics has such a big draw outside its own borders? Is it a good thing?

I think my best explanation of why American politics has a big international following is similar to why foreign basketball fans watch the NBA or why British people follow the Premier League: it’s the biggest stage in politics, it tends to attract the top talent (we have foreign-born pundits and political operatives working here), it has the biggest hive of associated commentary, and if you want to talk about it on social media you’ll find the biggest audience for your own takes.

To me the most important thing to understand about this is that if lots of Canadians and Brits and Australians enjoy participating in American politics as a spectator sport, there are also lots of Americans who enjoy it on the same level. And this kind of engagement — what Eitan Hersch calls “political hobbyism” — can be very destructive.

James: Have you receive any feedback from actual Democratic political or campaign staffers regarding your claim that the party's staffers are out of touch with their own voter base? If so, did any take the idea to heart or was it all negative pushback?

My work is reasonably widely read in the relevant circles, and as you’d imagine, some people agree and some people disagree.

Where I tend to disagree with even the people who agree with me is that I think it would behoove Democrats who want a more moderate image to be quite a bit more aggressive about it. The dominant view among the consultant class seems to be that what you want to do is (a) avoid saying or doing anything too radical and then (b) run good moderate television ads during campaign season. I certainly agree that (a) and (b) are good ideas, but I think the consultants are obscuring how much more important earned media is than paid media. And while (a) is better than attracting bad press, (b) simply can’t make up for a lack of good press.

It seems to me, basically, that even the staffers (and, frankly, elected officials) who largely agree with me don’t have the courage to get out of the foxhole and take the kind of fire that would be directed at politicians who are more assertively, aggressively moderate. And the big reason here is that whatever shortcomings the 2020 campaign had for Democrats, at the end of the day they won. And that win came on top of a big win in 2018, and a 2016 election in which Clinton won the popular vote and Democrats gained seats in the House and Senate. If they get beaten a couple of times, things will change.

Dan: Seriously, what is wrong with wealth inequality? Why can't Jeff Bezos have a ridiculously large yacht that requires disassembling a bridge AND the rest of us have a generous social safety net with single payer etc. Why are these two ideas inherently at odds or why do people on the left pretend that they are.

I think focus on wealth inequality is pretty misguided because I think that wealth is a slippery and misleading concept. I got into some of the reasons why in my January 6 post, “The Vanishing Case for Student Loan Forgiveness.”

But if you look through the other end of the telescope, that post provides a clue as to why the wealth inequality focus has become so fashionable. A lot of people in the young college graduate class have left-wing political commitments and also student loan debt. If you center wealth inequality (instead of inequality of income or consumption) then student loan relief is progressive. Most people are kinda selfish, and most people want to see themselves as the heroes of their own story. So wealth inequality is very convenient here.

A morbid fascination with billionaires also helps sustain the delusion that you could build a more egalitarian social system without changing anything in daily life except that Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have a superyacht.

In reality, though, for the uninsured and underinsured to receive more health care requires some mix of either other people consuming fewer health care services or else an expansion in the supply of health care services. And if it’s the latter — we have way more people working as nurses, say — then we need fewer people working somewhere else. Now if it were the case that Bezos employed some kind of massive army of servants then, yes, we could expand the supply of health care and child care services by redistributing Bezos’ servants. But you can’t transform a superyacht into a preschool. Creating a more egalitarian economy requires a more thoroughgoing transformation that alters the consumption patterns of a much wider set of affluent people.

So that’s wealth inequality, and I’m really against the focus there.

Other kinds of inequality I have more mixed feelings about. Why does it really matter if income or consumption is distributed unequally as long as the tide is rising for everyone? I’m not sure it does matter that much. Empirically, though, we started hearing more about inequality during a period of American life where the tide really wasn’t rising for everyone and income gains were highly concentrated among a small number of people. If you have broad-based growth, inequality will probably decline (as indeed it has in recent years). But if you did manage to get broad-based growth without any decline in inequality, I guess that would be okay.

Daniel: If you could Frankenstein a city out of elements of existing cities (location, neighborhoods, transit, local policies, however fine-grained you’d like to get), what would those be? Would this Frankenstein city be great, or what could go wrong?

Okay, what if you could have Munich’s mass transit system, but it’s grafted on Chicago’s regular grid of surface streets, but then the whole thing is situated in Los Angeles so instead of a lake you have the Pacific Ocean and great weather? I think that’d be pretty amazing. You could also throw in Singapore’s congestion pricing and Tokyo’s permissive land use.

I guess the point I’d make is that the tragedy of American urbanism is that we have an inverse relationship between the built environment and the weather. If LA or San Diego had the urban form of an east coast city, it would be a paradise for active modes or transportation or even just as a place to wait for the bus.

Joseph M. Davis: Still hoping to hear the story of Milan the Intern and the rest of the Slow Boring group. Have they all been to Nizhny Novgorod ? Do they all have in-laws in Texas, or a summer home in Maine, or parents who were screenwriters; have they too met Ivanka at a party once ? I feel that I know rather a lot about Matt — I am sure it is an illusion, but still — and then there are shadowy figures in the background who must also have stories.

Hey, it's Milan now. I do not have a summer home in Maine (though my friend’s family does have a cabin in Saco that I've visited which is very nice). I do have an uncle from Texas who is currently stationed in Rio de Janeiro for work (he's in the Foreign Service). In case you find this interesting, here's the story of how I got this job. It was July 2021, I had told Yale that I was going to take a gap year, and I didn't have a job. I was hanging out with some friends, watching a movie around 12 o'clock at night when I had the idea to cold email Matt and ask if he was looking for a new intern (Marc had recently retired). I wrote my email on my phone while sitting on the couch, then decided to hold off on sending it until I read it over with fresh eyes in the morning. The rest is history. Some other facts about myself:

I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts with my two siblings, parents, maternal grandparents, and as of 2016, a dog named Atticus (who I call Chunks due to his chunky vibe).

In 2008 when I was in kindergarten and we were doing a mock election, I recall thinking that Obama was running against George W. Bush and assuming that Bush got his name because he had hair like Bob Ross.

Outside of Slow Boring-related topics, I like cooking and baking (shoutout to Mark Bittman!). Also a big fan of nature documentaries (shoutout to David Attenborough!) and birdwatching. Not sure what I'll major in, but the shortlist right now is Economics; Ethics, Politics, and Economics; Statistics; and Computer Science and Economics.

In my opinion, driving stick is more fun than driving automatic.