Mail:Bag:3

Mail:Bag:3

Some alt-history and a first grader’s hottest take

Matthew Yglesias

Feb 4, 2022

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There was a question about the Habsburg Empire in the mix that I wanted to answer but it just kept spinning out of control and I had to skip it. Sorry! But maybe on some rainy day we’ll get a post about it holding together and “the martians” turning Austria-Hungary into the scientific superpower of the 20th century.

Until then, on to more pressing matters like Star Trek and the quality of governance in Illinois.

Nathan Johnson: Sometime in the next few years we have to decide where to send the kid (and hoped-for future kids) to school. The schools where we live don't have a great reputation, blah blah blah. I think I know (from your writing, not because I am living in the bushes outside your house) that your son goes to the public school in your area. You may have already written this up somewhere, but could I ask if there is some body of work or book or school of thought that affected how you approached that decision? I gather things are going fine; do you attribute that to the factors you originally thought would be important, or have other things emerged that you didn't initially think about? In the current environment, are there other things you would also be considering if you were setting about it today?

Yeah, our kid goes to the local elementary school in our neighborhood. The neighborhood itself is quite gentrified at this point, but it’s a high-poverty majority-minority public school that has its share of struggles but also a great principal and a lot of excellent teachers.

My main thoughts on this:

I don’t really know what will happen down the road, but it’s going well so far, and I would encourage everyone who likes the neighborhood they live in to at least give the local school a try rather than preemptively moving to the suburbs or enrolling their kids in private school.

In general, I don’t see a ton of evidence that school quality has an important causal influence on objective life outcomes for high-SES kids. There is less research on this issue than one might like because most of the interest is (understandably) in finding ways to help disadvantaged kids. But it mostly seems to show that the kids whose parents are most inclined to be obsessive over their kids’ school are least likely to benefit from that obsessing.

If you’re the kind of person who’s likely to find themselves obsessing over their kids’ school and wanting to make it better, there are worse ideas than making sure it’s a school that would actually benefit from your work and obsessing.

It’s worth recalling that people end up upset with all kinds of school. I happen to have attended two fancy private schools (Grace Church and Dalton) that were in the news a lot last year thanks to controversies about bonkers DEI initiatives. So you can spend huge sums of money and still be mad. Dalton wasn’t like that when I was a student, but I was miserable there for different reasons.

To the extent that we’ve ended up having a complaint with the school, it’s really just that the national common core standards are not very ambitious. Teaching kids to add and subtract double digits by the end of second grade and then broaching multiplication in third grade seems slow to me. But that really is the national standard, not an eccentric local school idea. I liked this Miles Kimball / Noah Smith article about math education and think America is too lax about this.

We’ll see what happens!

Greg P: A while back you reviewed the entire then-existing Star Trek franchise. As their collective 100th episode approaches, what do you think of the new Paramount + Star Trek shows and the current state of the franchise?

I need to catch up on Discovery and deliver an informed opinion on this before the next season of Picard premieres. But here’s my Slate Completist feature on Trek from 2013.

Brian: Has your view of Obama’s presidency changed? If so, in what ways?

I think everyone knows that interpretations of the past change over time in light of subsequent events, but it’s been fascinating to watch that play out in real-time, especially with events I covered in detail as they were unfolding.

One example: I was never super-enthusiastic about the strategic approach or philosophy behind the Affordable Care Act, but I did completely accept its proponents’ view that the really important thing about the ACA was the construction of the marketplaces with their three-legged stool of subsidies, regulations, and mandate. Looking back, this was basically wrong. The ACA has been a big deal for coverage expansion largely due to Medicaid. The mandate was too weak to be highly effective and then got repealed, at which point it made very little difference. And the regulatory reforms to the employer-based coverage market were very important because the marketplaces ended up not expanding and not being the future of the American health care system.

So back in 2007-2008 or so, I thought this was a bad approach. But then it worked legislatively and by Obama’s second term I thought I’d been wrong. But now I think I was right all along and the whole party went down a largely pointless dead end when they could have just pushed Medicaid expansion.

On the flip side, I spent most of Obama’s term and all of Trump’s convinced that he’d made a huge mistake by not pursuing a more stimulative monetary policy. At the time, his team offered a range of justifications for what they were doing. The one that I found least plausible was that if they pulled off what I wanted, it would be super unpopular due to inflation. I said yes, there would be more inflation but there would also be higher inflation-adjusted growth, so why would that be unpopular? After watching 2021 play out, I think I may have had this badly wrong. Yes, obviously, inflation is high and obviously it would be better if it were lower. But real growth — growth that is adjusted for inflation — is also fast. Yet people hate it. This still seems irrational to me, but I can’t say that I wasn’t warned.

There are probably other things I’ll change my mind on (the jury is still out on how the decision to firmly back Euromaidan in 2014 will play out) but those are two important ones.

Alex: You've often come out in favor of parliamentary systems. On the level of constitutional design, do you have thoughts on federalism vs a unitary state?

I think there’s some reason to believe that small unitary states function better than big federal ones, but there are also virtues to being a big country and it’s hard for me to imagine a U.S.-scale country working well without a federal structure.

The main thing that I think we’re getting wrong is the Russian nesting doll quality to American federalism, where you’ll have a town that’s in a county that’s in a state that’s a member of the United States of America. In most cases we ought to be strengthening state government vis-a-vis other actors. If Connecticut were an independent country, I don’t think anyone would be saying that a Connecticut-sized entity needs to have a federal structure. A few of our states really are so big that this solution might not work. In an ideal world, I think I’d make the states smaller. But failing that, it would be nice to see California or Florida sub-divided into a few regional governance entities instead of a vast sea of counties and towns.

Walker: What blue-state is run the best? Worst?

Keeping in mind that governance quality is a long-term issue, I think Massachusetts has a solid record and Illinois is (infamously) kind of a mess. But that’s not a specific comment on J.B. Pritzker, who’s doing fine.

Jared Polis in Colorado is probably my favorite current governor. My guess is that you end up with the best governance outcomes in places like Colorado or Virginia where you have meaningful political competition. We tend to discuss the midwestern state legislative gerrymanders purely in partisan terms — it’s unfair to Democrats that Michigan and Wisconsin have such skewed maps. But it’s actually unfair specifically to the residents of Michigan and Wisconsin that they don’t really get the see-saw of political competition that you’d expect to see in a couple of R+2 states.

I’m a big believer in the partisan alternation of power. There’s this fear frequently expressed in the filibuster debate that absent tons of veto points, policy will just wildly swing from one direction to another, but I don’t think that’s what we see in swing states or in foreign countries. Instead, one party wins and makes some changes, and then some of those changes usually prove to be things people like that end up being sticky.

Adam: Are we living in a simulation? Does it matter one way or the other?

Very possibly and quite a bit less than you might think. I haven’t read David Chalmers’ new book yet but based on what I know of his thought from over the years, I think that’s what he’d say and that he’s correct.

Jack: Why do you think your audience on Substack--at least the commenters--tends more conservative than you yourself? People on Twitter take this as prima facie evidence that you yourself are a conservative deep down and intentionally cultivate an audience of conservatives, particularly on social issues, who think of you as "one of the good (liberals)". This seems obviously wrong to me and mostly a symptom of Yglesias derangement syndrome on Twitter, but I'm curious what your explanation for this is (if you agree!)

I’m not sure the premise of this is correct, but it might be interesting to try to do a survey in the future (which I believe someone suggested last week) and see if it’s true.

I do think it’s true that there is an argument in the progressive-sphere that it discredits a writer if they have conservative readers, and that argument is typical of some pathological tendencies in current American politics. For starters, I want to have lots of readers. Selling subscriptions supports carbon removal projects, supports the Maximum Impact Fund, helps me pay young journalists to write non-clickbait stories, and puts money in my pocket personally. So I’m not going to apologize for trying to get readers!

But some relevant considerations:

The average quality of conservative journalism is really low. Because of polarization by age and educational attainment, there are fewer young college graduates on the right. And due to the content of the ideology, young conservatives are more likely to be interested in a career in business than young progressives. But the conservative movement needs foot soldiers across the board — staffers, think-tankers, federal prosecutors, appellate judges, and the whole panoply of people to do all the things. That creates a very thin bench for something as marginal as internet takes. So the audience of right-of-center people needs to be more broad-minded if they want to read anything at all.

The discourse is really weird. Over the past three months, I feel like the big arguments on the internet have been about David Leonhardt’s Covid takes, Joe Rogan’s vaccine takes, the removal of “Maus” from a public school curriculum in Tennessee, and whether Georgetown is too harsh on conservative law professors who do bad tweets. On all of those issues, I lean toward the center or the right position. That being said, I’m on the left of topics like should we raise taxes and invest in an expanded welfare state and zero-carbon energy production — let’s build back better! I think abortion should be legal. Drug testing food stamp recipients is a 50-33 issue, and I’m with the 33% who think it’s a bad idea. A lot of what happens online is that people who are to the left of 98% of the public yell at people who are to the left of 70% of the public.

At any rate, I am thankful for every reader I have, and I think media outlets with primarily left-of-center staffers would do themselves (and the world) some good by being less dogmatic about what they publish and less terrified of the possibility that they would sometimes run content that right-of-center people agree with.

Nate: Repeat question: what is Jose’s hottest take?

Related to this week’s post on affirmative action, when Jose found out that students get assigned to different colleges based on academic ability, he said that made sense because you could send the kids who need more help to the best schools.

Peter M: Which post-WWII presidential election do you think would have had the most positive changed effects for the country if it had gone the other way, and why?

There are several interesting ones here, but my favorite is 1968. Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasow believes, based on a rainfall IV study, that rioting in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination caused a sufficient backlash to elect Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey and that had King not been killed, we would have gotten this electoral map instead.

Nixon ended up filling a staggering four Supreme Court vacancies in his first term and locked us into two generations of conservative jurisprudence. So Humphrey’s appointments there alone would have made a huge difference.

Due to the then-robust influence of conservative southern Democrats, Humphrey likely would not have passed particularly transformative domestic legislation. But even in the real-world timeline these were Democratic majorities, and the Nixon administration created the EPA and signed the important 1970 Clean Air Act and 1972 Clean Water Act amendments. And even though Humphrey’s win would have been pretty tenuous, by 1972 he would have had the same wind at his back that Nixon had in the real timeline — American troops coming home from Vietnam and a very strong macroeconomic situation.

I think the electoral realignment of the South probably happens faster with Humphrey in office. In 1970, for example, incumbent Democratic senators got reelected in Mississippi and Texas while in 1974 Democratic senators secured reelection in Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. At least some of those races tip the other way. Conversely, eight years of Humphrey would have sped up the process of growing Black and Latin representation in federal appointments. By today’s standards, the Humphrey Administration would have looked incredibly white but relative to the Nixon Administration it would have been a very aggressive era of bench-building.

By 1976, the Humphrey Coalition is completely exhausted but the narrative about 1960s politics is totally different, and we see a Great Society Era that’s comparable to the New Deal Era in terms of its achievements. People would be less inclined to misremember Medicare as an FDR initiative. You’d also get a broad view of Humphrey as a key actor in the Civil Rights struggle dating back to the 1948 Democratic platform fight.

Ronald Reagan wins in ’76 and starts a bracing series of attacks on “racial quotas” while aggressively slashing taxes. As inflation rises, conventional wisdom blames Reagan’s massive budget deficits and saber-rattling foreign policy. MLK’s endorsement helps Ted Kennedy win the 1980 Democratic primary but also breathes some new life into Reagan’s flailing campaign by giving him the opportunity to paint the Democratic Party as far too radical, since as a living breathing person the socialist/pacifist side of King’s politics are much more prominent. Kennedy wants to balance the ticket with a southern pick and gives very serious consideration to Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, who the Kennedy camp feels would bring some of the spirit of Camelot into the mix. But Clinton won’t turn 35 until August of 1981 which would technically make him constitutionally ineligible for the first six months of a Kennedy administration and the lawyers can’t figure out a way to finesse it. He ends up tapping Georgia Governor George Busbee1 and beating Reagan.

The upshot of all of this is that the conservative movement takeover of the GOP never really happens since Reagan’s one term is seen as a big failure and the Great Society is something that more or less has to be accepted as part of the consensus of American politics.

Jim_Ed: Most important: Best tacos in DC: Mezcalero or Habanero? Or are you going to upset everyone with a contrarian pick like Surfside?

My wife and Slow Boring’s managing editor, Kate Crawford, is from Texas and feels that I am unqualified to answer this question. Her view is that the best tacos in D.C. by far are found at the La Tejana pop-ups, and she is looking forward to them opening a brick-and-mortar location.

She also feels that while El Sol (nominated by a commenter in the thread) does not have the best tacos per se, their offerings are the most similar to what you’d find in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Texas and strongly recommends them.

I obviously would not contradict any of these opinions or express any view whatsoever on tacos or the relative merits of Mexican vs. Tex-Mex cuisine. An interesting and unrelated fact about me is that for my 40th birthday party last year we had food from Taco Bamba.

Nicholas W: David French argued in his last book that our current political problems stem from an awkward predicament of having simultaneously too much and too little federalism between our states. Similarly, with the Senate and Electoral College, it seems a primary flaw in our federalist system is how varied in size our states are. If you could ameliorate this by redrawing the United States into roughly equal subdivisions, what would produce a healthier politics:

I think my big disagreement with French on this is that I don’t think you can make the nationalization of media and political attention go away simply by changing the formal assignment of political power.

I agree with him that it would be desirable to have less nationalized politics. But everyone gets very sincerely angry when they hear about school boards in towns they don’t live in doing things that are contrary to their values. And I don’t see any way to make people stop caring about this. In some ways, it’s the most fun to care about remote politics. When you’re talking about the school system your child actually attends, you need to care about all the boring blocking and tackling that goes into actually running a school system. When you’re talking about the school system in Portland, Oregon or rural Tennessee, you can just go to town on basic expressions of identity.

Everyone should push back a little against this tendency and encourage everyone to mind their own community’s business more. But I don’t think it’s something we can address in legalistic terms.

Nick Bacarella: Do you buy the theory (espoused by Dan Pfeiffer/Crooked Media at large) that Democrats need their own propaganda machine to balance the media landscape?

I agree that this would be a worthwhile investment, especially relative to piling on ever more campaign ads.

But I do want to caveat that in an important way. The key thing about Fox News is that it’s full of content that is (a) highly motivating to rank-and-file Republican voters, and (b) at least supposed to not just be critical of Democrats but actually make Democrats look bad to most voters. Of course like anyone doing anything, they don’t always succeed, but that’s the idea.

Progressive media that marginalized far-left voices and zeroed in aggressively on 70-30 issues like raising the minimum wage, reducing the cost of prescription drugs, clamping down on abusive credit card practices, and expanding Medicare to cover dental and hearing benefits could be very helpful. Hosting on-air debates where a right-of-center economist who once served in the Bush administration explains why he favors cutting Social Security benefits and a frontline House Democrat explains why she thinks that’s wrong could be great.

Here’s the problem, though. Suppose you started a new progressive media outlet — who would work there?

Well, it would end up being a lot of young college grads who live in New York, LA, and D.C. and whose views are well to the left of the median Democrat, to say nothing of the median voter. They’d be torn over whether Elizabeth Warren is a hero or a snake who betrayed Bernie Sanders. They would worry about racism among the Real Housewives. They would name their climate vertical “Apocalypse Soon.” They would attack moderate Democrats from the left and spend a lot of time worrying about whether cities are being too harsh on the unsheltered homeless. In other words, it would be just like a lot of the existing media!

Conservatives see this and say “see, progressives don’t need propaganda media, they’ve already got the commercial for-profit media in their pocket.” But this stuff isn’t Democratic Party propaganda because it’s much further left-wing and electorally counterproductive.

An effective propaganda outlet would need to exert ruthless message discipline to keep the focus on the right kind of stuff. It would need to talk about energy independence rather than existential threats, commonsense solutions rather than transformative change, and giving the American people a small hand up rather than referring to the status quo as a nightmarish hell-country. An outlet that actually performed that message discipline would be very helpful. But by the same token, it would be helpful if mainstream Democratic Party members of Congress maintained that kind of message discipline on their social media accounts. It would be helpful if progressive think tanks and activist groups maintained that kind of message discipline. But they don’t because it’s challenging to swim uphill against the basic desire to play to the sensibilities of the donors and the staffers and the staffers’ friends.

That’s why I talk about Post-It Note Theory and the virtues of running it by the Baileys.

So, yes, by all means, someone should fund a new institution. But that new institution needs discipline. And whoever might have the means and inclination to found a new, Bailey-pilled institution could and should also try to get existing institutions to behave in a more disciplined way.