Spring break mailbag

Spring break mailbag

It’s DCPS spring break this week, so on Wednesday I took two seven-year-olds to play laser tag and defeated them soundly — I’m not sure Generation Alpha has what it takes to frighten Putin. But it was a fun break, especially since this week’s mailbag is awfully serious!

RustBeltJacobin: Seems clear Schumer fumbled our entire welfare state & climate agenda, but there’s not much noise about this in the public or in Congress. You wrote this up in a sympathetic schumer advice column; now that there’s been zero action to fix the fuck up, do you want to do a bit of angry name & shame and update your readers?

(To be clear before this year I myself considered Schumer top tier in terms of effectiveness and am baffled at the actual results of his teams leadership in the last D Senate majority for the foreseeable future)

I mean, it’s a really vexing situation. I also considered Schumer top tier, and as I wrote in the previous post, I literally worked in Schumer’s office a million years ago, learned a ton from his staff, and sincerely consider myself to be an acolyte of Chuck Schumer Thought. So I am both baffled by the turn he’s taken in the 117th Senate and also by the lack of public criticism of him. I have personally heard private criticism of him from several U.S. senators and a couple of White House staffers since my column, so I feel that we are right about this and he has fucked up, but there’s also a weird lack of accountability. Part of the issue is that nobody seems to actually want his job, so there’s nobody trying to take him down.

Matt F: How often do you speak with electeds and/or staff? Are most of these discussions policy based or more about messaging/communication. And a connected but maybe separate question, what would you say the breakdown among electeds is between those who are in it for policy vs those who are in it for the power/prestige? Do you think those who have been in office longer change along that spilt?

I hear from people. I’d say something that civilians probably don’t know about D.C. is that there is surprisingly little direct communication horizontally across the congressional offices or vertically from the White House down to the agencies. So a lot of the time when I talk to people in politics, they are really trying to get me to tell them what’s going on, because a lot of people believe that journalists have secret information that we’re not publishing.

So the conversation ends up being largely gossip and swapping rumors. But I talk to people about policy, too. This Biden proposal to tax unrealized capital gains was in development for months before the president officially endorsed it, for example, and I had several very earnest conversations about its merits while folks were working on it.

In terms of “in it for policy vs. those who are in it for the power/prestige,” I think that’s kind of a false dichotomy. To take two lawmakers who I’ve spoken to a bit over the years, Michael Bennet is much more of an earnest policy nerd whereas Ruben Gallego likes to go on TV and stick it to the Republicans. Gallego cares a lot about policy — but to make policy, you need to beat the Republicans. And Bennet ran for president, so he’s not averse to seeking power and prestige.

Being in Congress is kind of exhausting — the members need to travel a ton and also have very unpredictable schedules while they’re in D.C. because the machinations on the floor inevitably go awry. And right now, being a member really isn’t lucrative enough to make it worth doing for the wrong reasons.

Laszlo: Every thought leader has an incentive to change the status quo (file under: contrarian). Isn't it dangerous when the status quo might be just about right? How do you lean against “publication bias” if you still want to read interesting takes?

Years ago when we were working at The American Prospect, my friend Sam Rosenfeld and I came up with the idea of the counter-counter-intuitive take where you just make the case for the obvious position. One example is that at the time, a lot of people were doing takes with the thesis that ending Roe v. Wade might actually be good for abortion rights via some complicated bank-shot mechanism that involved mobilizing voters in a backlash. The counter-counter-intuitive take would be “Why Roe v. Wade is good for abortion rights.”

It’s a little bit different, but I think that classic Yglesias takes like “police officers’ presence on the street reduces crime,” “building more houses improves affordability,” and “taking popular positions on the issues is helpful for winning elections” have this counter-counter-intuitive quality.

Some people like to label those of us who are not Republicans but who are also not 100 percent on board with the progressive movement as “contrarians.” But I actually think that on most of these key disputes, I’m the one making obvious points, and it’s the left that is being contrarian. So my strategy is basically to try to be unafraid to be normal. Like saying that Amazon is not a monopoly feels a little bold in a world where the discourse is tilted toward haters, but Amazon is a very popular company and all I am saying is what antitrust law says. Even with Lina Khan running the FTC there’s no case!

Sam Elder: How has the experience of moving from Vox to Substack affected your political views?

When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed giving a random tax cut to owners of pass-through small business entities, I thought it was a shameful giveaway to Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and other real estate tycoons. But now that I own a pass-through entity, I see the wisdom of this important support for America’s job creators.

Michael: What do you think of Ezra Klein's “theory of attention?” That it isn't enough for Dem candidates to know and advocate for what is popular, they also need to know what will draw media attention (which usually amounts to something controversial)?

I agree with it to a point. Clearly people’s understanding of politics is mediated through the press, so simple position taking doesn’t do you that much good unless you can get attention for the positions that you are taking.

That’s why, to an extent, “hippie-punching” (deliberately picking a fight with people to your left) can be a potentially potent tactic. Joe Biden, I would note, doesn’t really do this. It’s not his position that writing is a form of white supremacy or that standardized tests are racist, but he also doesn’t seek opportunities to clarify which side of those arguments he is on. But I think Ezra meant his remarks to be a critique of popularist thinking rather than a call for Democrats to pound the table harder on moderation. Then again, I also think Ezra maybe meant to seem like he was disagreeing with moderates while in reality leading people to the conclusion that they should be more forceful in their moderation. He is fundamentally a friendlier, more agreeable person than I am.

In general, though, I think this also calls for self-scrutiny on the part of people in the takes business. People take their cues about what to pay attention to from us, and if the only things we think are interesting enough to hype up are very extreme or out-there ideas, then that has a negative influence on the political system. To an extent, it’s incumbent on us to make practical, broadly appealing ideas also seem interesting.

Brad: Do you think reunification was a bad deal for West Germany and/or East Germany?

East Germany has grown faster than any ex-communist country except Poland, so I think it’s been a pretty good deal for them, especially when you consider that a lot of people born in East Germany moved to the West.

For West Germany as a whole, I think it’s harder to say. Certainly the welfare state has transferred a lot of money from affluent westerners (which is like the whole top half or third of the income distribution, not just a handful of billionaires) to lower-income Ossis. But I don’t think there’s a conceivable political universe in which West Germany just refuses to reunify. In general, it’s not really in the interests of a democratic county with a welfare state to be territorially amalgamated with a poorer place. An independent New England would be in some sense better off being able to tax its affluent areas exclusively in order to promote development in urban Connecticut and rural Maine rather than being part of a much larger country. But I don’t think normal people think in those terms.

Ryan Oxby: I’ve heard you say that everyone needs to be, like, 20% more chill about everything and that we should avoid paralyzingly doomerism. That makes sense but it seems to be in tension with the recent end of history article where crises are useful for getting one’s act together. Have your thoughts on this changed? Do we need an Adrian Veidt after all?

Here is the synthesis: a crisis atmosphere can be a potent driver of political change specifically because it forces prioritization, which helps to overcome the entrenched interests that dominate veto points.

But precisely because it’s such a potentially potent tool, all kinds of activists have strong incentives to portray their cause in crisis terms. In theory, this could resolve itself through some kind of internal debate about what’s actually important. Today’s progressive movement, however, operates according to a strong logic of allyship and logrolling. So the statement that climate change is going to cook the entire planet within our lifetime and doom our children to a grim fate is not intended to imply “… and therefore we should stop hassling people about their gun hobby in order to maximize the size of our political coalition.” Instead of prioritization, each group in the coalition has just turned their rhetorical dial up to 11, and to be a good member of the coalition, you’re supposed to endorse all the most drastic claims.

Frederick the Great, speaking of military strategy, said that “to defend everything is to defend nothing,” and that’s what I think about the coalition politics of the omnicrisis — by saying that each group’s issue is transcendently important, all you are actually doing is failing to treat any of them as important. Because in real-world terms, what it means to say that “X is important” is that X should be elevated over Y and Z.

What the omnicrisis gets you is not a set of priorities or a plan of action, but instead the psychology of doomerism where we are paralyzed and overwhelmed. And, yes, look, the world features a bunch of different problems and many of the problems are difficult. But I really urge people who believe they are living through a historically unique set of interlocking crises to consider basically any other period in human history. There are always a lot of big problems.

Alex Newkirk: High corporate profits are invoked as a significant problem, usually accompanied by a call to action for some agenda item like M4A. Are Alphabet or Walmart posting high profits a problem?

The main point I would make about this is that I see a lot of rhetorical slippage between talking about the fact that large companies have large profits and discussions of very high profit margins.

If you think about, I dunno, a neighborhood liquor store, it probably has pretty modest profits. But if the legal framework for liquor retailing was different and there was a national chain BoozeMart that controlled 35 percent of liquor sales nationally, that company would have huge profits. But there’s really nothing untoward about that; it’s just a question of aggregating lots of small enterprises into a single large one. Large companies tend to be much less nepotistic in their management structure than small ones, so they end up better-managed and more productive while paying higher wages and offering more upward mobility for rank-and-file employees. So I am always a Walmart defender — it is better to have large chain stores than a fragmented market of family-owned retailers. And I think one thing you could do to make the economy more productive in the longer run is to look at which kinds of industries are highly fragmented and see what regulatory barriers prevent them from turning into big national chains. Because booze is unhealthy, making liquor retailing more productive and efficient is not particularly important for society. But shouldn’t there be big national brands providing services like plumbing and dental care?

What Facebook has, by contrast, is high profit margins because the marginal costs in the software industry are low and the network effects of social media mean that it’s hard to compete with the market leader. To say “and that shows Facebook is bad” is too simple, but it’s true that when you see those kinds of fat margins, you should be looking to see if there are opportunities for improvement. Facebook employees are already well-compensated, for example, but their employer is so profitable that they could clearly make very large economic gains by unionizing. Paul Romer says we should impose a progressive tax on digital ad revenue, and I tend to agree with him.

The Bad Blog: I really like this blog, and Marginal Revolution, and the YIMBY/rationalist/Effective Altruism movements, but it makes me nervous that they’re all so male (I, too, am a male). What do you think is going on there?

My guess is that whereas women who want to learn widely about the world tend to read a wide variety of sources, men are more likely to look for individual writers or ideas that cover a wide range of subjects. I don’t know why this would be, though.

Maybe also men are just more likely to read other men, and likewise for women. I dunno.

I don’t think that’s true of the YIMBY movement. A lot of the pioneering YIMBY organizers were women, really important YIMBY elected officials like London Breed and Nancy Skinner are women, women have written some of the most important YIMBY books, and in general, I think a lot of women are involved in the YIMBY movement. Conversely, I am not super deep in the world of self-identified “rationalists,” but I think a lot of the people who like and embrace that brand are playing really overtly with gender stereotypes in a way that I find off-putting, and I think lots of women probably do, too.

Effective Altruism as a brand and a concept seems more promising, especially since a lot of specific EA work addresses topics (global public health, animal welfare, poverty) that lots of women are involved in. But these days I think many institutions believe strongly in the value of affirmatively promoting gender diversity. My sense is that the nature of EA as a movement is that it’s a little skeptical of the merits of that kind of thing, at a minimum skeptical that it’s genuinely super-important and worth investing lots of resources in. And I think if you have something started largely by men that initially has a male audience, then it is likely to stay that way unless you take specific steps to change that — so it then becomes a question of whether institutional leaders think it’s important.

When I was doing Friday interview episodes for The Weeds, my rule was that a majority of the guests had to be women. That, for a variety of reasons, made it slightly harder to book guests than it otherwise would have been, but I thought it ultimately made for a better editorial product, so I did it. But the key is I really did think that was important to the growth of the show. I might be totally incorrect about this, but my sense is that while EA leaders do think it’s important that women who are involved aren’t mistreated, they don’t particularly see achieving more gender parity as important, which is a big deal in a movement that makes a big deal about trying to assess what’s actually important and what isn’t.

Trg56: A few weeks ago Jon Stewart had Andrew Sullivan on his new show to talk about race and had a rather shambolic conversation. I like both of them but thought Sullivan and Stewart were each arguing with straw men. It’s weird and depressing two smart people who probably voted for Biden feel like they are so far apart. (Makes me think Trump could win again) To me their differences seem to be mostly semantics. Curious what you thought of the exchange?

Their conversation exemplified a lot of what I find frustrating about the past few years of political dialogue in the United States, which is that it’s all kicking around these giant abstractions rather than talking about some specific ideas.

Should we expand Medicaid? Do more automatic traffic enforcement? Improve zoning laws? Invest in pandemic prevention? Expand production of zero-carbon electricity? These are all things that seem important to me, I think they would make Americans’ lives better, and I think they would help remediate the racial gaps that we see in income and health and other major indicators. But it’s actually not true that to accomplish those goals we either need to “dismantle white supremacy” or else somehow “fix” some supposed pathologies of Black culture. What we need to do is make better policy on specific questions, and that means talking about those questions in specific ways.

Henry Fyfe: I know at some point animal conservation arguments becomes another tool for NIMBYS, but OTOH you spent the pandemic going to zoos and aquariums with your kid , and presumably we should ensure future kids can enjoy animals similarly. In other words, where do the animals like the Red Wolf fit in with One Billion Americans and the commensurate land use needed to support that population?

I really wanted to put this graphic in my book, but for various reasons, I couldn’t — so here it is instead. It shows what land in the United States is actually used for, and you will see that by far the biggest land use is animal pasture followed by livestock feed. National parks and federal wilderness are tiny.

(Map by By Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby)

Personally, I would like to see national parks and federal wilderness expanded. I’m not sure I’ve ever managed to think up any particularly compelling reasons why I’m right about that, but it’s how I feel in my heart. If it were up to me there’d be a federal grant program for states to expand their state park systems, we would create some new national parks, and we would expand wilderness.

How does that align with YIMBYism? Easily, because the more you build inside the already-developed envelop, the less you encroach on natural spaces.

But in terms of One Billion Americans, there is definitely a tension. My main practical observation about this is that the tension isn’t between housing and parks/wilderness, it’s between parks/wilderness and commercial exploitation of natural resources. And that is true no matter what the population is. Even in a very sparsely populated country, you have timber companies that want to exploit woodlands for money and you have ranchers who want to graze cattle. I would like to resolve this in favor of more nature and less grazing and animal feed, but I don’t see that as a high priority, and it’s only loosely related to housing issues.

Dane: How do you imagine the past 6 years going if Martin O'Malley got the nomination and won in 2016?

I wrote a “what if Joe Biden had been the nominee in 2016 instead of Hillary Clinton?” post a while back and it basically captures what I would say about O’Malley.

At the end of the day, the point of “O’Malley would’ve won” isn’t anything special about O’Malley (though I do like him), just that Hillary Clinton had some specific weaknesses as a candidate, and thinking of the only alternative to Clinton as being a self-described socialist is a mistake. Incidentally, though, I do want to clarify here that I don’t just mean “a white man would’ve won.” Imagine a 2016 Democratic Party nominee who didn’t vote in favor of the Iraq War (most congressional Dems didn’t) and didn’t vote in favor of NAFTA (most congressional Dems didn’t) and therefore wasn’t vulnerable to those outflanking attacks by Trump, but who also wasn’t a socialist. That could be Cory Booker or Amy Klobuchar or any number of other people.

Graham: Maybe you've written about this elsewhere, but I would be very interested in your take on the charges leveled against small-l liberalism over the last few years from both the left and the right. For example, this bit by Liam Bright.

I’ve been trying to write a column in response to Bright and it’s proving challenging to wrestle my thoughts down to a manageable level. But I would say something similar to what I said after reading Charles Mills, which is that at an appropriate level of abstraction, I think this critique of liberalism is persuasive. But at the same time, Bright himself says that in practical terms, there’s nothing he’d really advise doing in the political sphere that’s clearly distinct from what a left-liberal would say you should do.

Efm: Should Obama have stuck to his “redline” in Syria? Should Biden draw a redline now with Russia? Or is posturing always bad for everyone, or are there time where it can payoff? In other words, what should Biden message privately and publicly to Putin?

I think Obama should not have drawn his redline in Syria. In terms of the Biden administration, I similarly think it is wise to avoid drawing lines. It is also worth keeping in mind that while Ukraine will of course always be asking us to do more, one virtue of doing less than everything we can is that we retain the embedded threat of escalating if Russia starts doing worse stuff. But the key leverage point here is in Europe rather than the United States.

The stiffest blow that could be dealt Russia at this point would be for Europe (especially, but not exclusively, Germany) to cut off Russian natural gas imports. People are making the case for doing that right now, and fresh Russian atrocities would give them a boost in terms of their domestic politics. Our role should be to do everything we can with our own energy policy to make a cutoff of Russian gas more economically and politically plausible.