I’m not going to do a whole column on this, but I did want to flag that I’m concerned the upshot of the leaked draft opinion is going to be that the final decision is substantively the same but less explicit about saying “we are overturning Roe v. Wade,” and that will get covered as a big win for moderation.
Winternet: Matt was talking today about “Once [getting] an extremely boring scoop”. I would love to hear the story of the one time in his career he “broke news” as someone who was never a reporter, why hasn’t there been another scoop?
On May 24, 2017, I published “Someone killed a congressional inquiry into America’s sky-high transit construction costs,” which broke some news about an internecine struggle within the Democratic Party over whether to order a GAO report into U.S. mass transit costs. It’s a very boring scoop! But what I find most frustrating about it is that the story is actually a bit more interesting than it appears, I just can’t really explain what was interesting about it because I need to protect the sources and abide by my agreement with them.
What a good journalist would do is to take the information that I learned-but-can’t-report while doing that boring story and try to confirm it through independent channels.
Tak: You often try to center yourself and readers my mentioning something to the affect of: the median (or average) voter is a white, non-college educated person in there 50s living in the suburb of a non superstar city. with that in mind, how much do you think that median voter cares about Roe being overturned? Obviously, this will help with D base motivation — which will help a great deal for D's this election cycle — but how much does this move the needle for your hypothetical median voters and is the direction of the variance easily predictable?
The boring answer is that it depends on what actually happens.
A total ban on abortions is a classic example of the kind of thing that most Republicans favor — including the leaders of the relevant conservative activist and advocacy groups — but which polls very badly with the general population. If national Republicans start feeling pressure from their base to talk about implementing a total ban and that becomes a high-salience debate, there will be a large backlash. If the end of Roe simply means lots of new restrictions in already conservative states, then we’ll probably see only a small backlash.
But actual policy defeat tends to focus the mind and generate constructive mod-pilling. A lot of progressive overreach over the past 5–10 years seems to me to have been motivated by a sense that the worst possible thing is to not make progress toward progressive goals. But the actual worst thing is to lose ground. Becoming more scared of losing will help Democrats make smarter decisions and win more.
Stuart: Re: Bowser for DC Mayor - I agree with mayoral control of schools, but could Robert White's housing policy be superior enough to switch your vote?
If White had a truly amazing housing platform, I could be persuaded that it’s more important than mayoral control of schools. But his actual housing ideas, while fine, are really just fine — certainly nothing visionary.
Jake Wegman: OK. Trying one more time (but more succinctly). Do you think there is any realistic hope of significantly reducing gun violence in the US in the next, say decade, or do you think that given our unique 2nd Amendment culture/constitutional tradition that we basically have to accept living with far more gun violence than all of our peer countries for the foreseeable future?
Well, these are different questions.
Absent a genuinely inconceivable revolution in American gun policy, we are bound to have a homicide rate that’s considerably higher than what you see in the UK. But the homicide rate in 2022 is much higher than it was in 2014, and back in 2014 I thought there was plenty of scope for further reductions that didn’t necessarily involve huge changes in gun policy.
Something I would note here is that I think normie liberals who support gun control don’t fully realize what the hardcore criminal justice reformers are up to on this front. A very large share of the firearms used in urban crime are possessed illegally. And a classic “tough on crime” urban policing strategy was to heavily deter illegal gun-carrying. When reformers talk about lighter penalties for non-violent offenders, I think normie liberals are imagining a guy smoking a joint somewhere, but the reformers think illegal gun-carrying is an example of a non-violent offense that shouldn’t be severely sanctioned. The problem is that while your typical illegal gun-carrier doesn’t shoot anyone on a typical day, tons of people carrying guns around will lead pretty inevitably to more shootings. It is probably not possible to enact big new restrictions on who can carry which guns legally, but we certainly can punish illegal gun carrying and reduce shootings.
M.W. Abbot: An ancient space wizard grants you the power to remake Star Wars Episodes 7-9. Do you keep anything from the Disney films? Start from scratch? Stick with the Solos and Skywalkers or jump far ahead in time?
For casting and logistical reasons, they couldn’t have just done a literal adaptation of the Thrawn Trilogy of books (which are set five years after Return of the Jedi and would have required Harrison Ford to put in a lot more screen time than he wanted to), but I would have borrowed their basic world-building elements.
Maybe it’s just because the books are so influential on my thinking, but the basic premise of Leia as an official in a New Republic that continues to battle splinter elements of the old Empire just seems very logical to me. Disney even seems to be using this setup in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. The idea of a “Resistance” that is somehow separate from the New Republic and a First Order that is not just the same as the Empire (and yet maybe is the same?) always seemed very confusing to me. Within that framework, you could have Luke and Han and Leia be old and essentially passing the baton to a younger set of heroes, who then would have to go fight some bad guys in a more straightforward way.
My last thought on Episodes 7-9 is that on some level, the best thing about them is Adam Driver’s portrayal of the Kylo Ren character … if you could bend space and time and have that performance be Anakin Skywalker in the prequels, that would be great. He delivered everything that Hayden Christensen didn’t in terms of a psychologically complex characterization.
BD Anders: I enjoyed this piece this morning while sitting in the dentist's waiting room. Thoughts on it, or prospects/roadblocks for rural Democrats generally?
I liked it, but I would caution people against overthinking “rural” as a category. The authors are from Maine, which happens to be the only slice of rural America that I’m familiar with. And the thing about Maine politics is that if you go to an affluent coastal town like Blue Hill with a high level of educational attainment and a good number of yoga options, Democrats are doing very well there. But then a town or two away you’re in Bucksport or Penobscot, and people there voted for Obama twice and then Trump twice.
In other words, a very large share of the urban/rural split we see in politics is really a compositional effect related to educational attainment and, beneath that, psychological dispositions toward openness to experience. If Democrats do better at appealing to low-education, low-openness people, that will help them in inland Maine and other classic white rural areas. But it will also help them with South Texas Mexican Americans and in inner-city African American neighborhoods. Now you also need to do targeted micro-outreach in all those places, and smart outreach in McAllen looks different from smart outreach in Milwaukee or Millinocket.
But the macro-politics is the most important point. You need to think about all the different kinds of Americans who have absolutely no interest in seeing a decades-old, critically acclaimed foreign film — a genuinely diverse rainbow coalition of non-cosmopolitan people — and get all of them to like you more.
Tom Whittington: Once more unto the breach: what are the best 90s-ish era Hong kong movies from your NYC Days?
“Hard Boiled” with Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung directed by John Woo is my absolute favorite. The earlier Woo/Chow collaborations “The Killer” and “A Better Tomorrow” are also very good. Another Chow movie, Ringo Lam’s “City on Fire,” is also really good and notable in movie history for kinda sorta having the plot that Quentin Tarantino borrowed to make Reservoir Dogs. Going in the other direction, another Chow/Lam movie I like is “Wild Search,” which is basically an uncredited remake of “Witness.”
It’s worth saying most of these movies actually came out in the 1980s. They gained visibility in the U.S. in the ‘90s because Tarantino talked about them and Woo started making American movies, but except for “Hard Boiled,” these are all ‘80s movies.
Another thing worth mentioning here is Jackie Chan’s very extensive Hong Kong filmography. His best is probably “Drunken Master II” (it’s okay if you haven’t seen the original, but maybe read the Wikipedia page) which is in fact from the ‘90s, though the “Police Story” franchise is maybe most representative of his prime. Last but not least if you like “The Departed,” it’s worth checking out “Infernal Affairs,” the Hong Kong original.
Briross: Which social safety net policies should be universal and which should be targeted to the poor? What factors influence your assessment?
I don’t really know that you can answer this from first principles — it’s just a long series of tradeoffs.
But in some sense it would be better for nothing to be means-tested. If everyone paid higher taxes and everyone got SNAP, that would lead to a lot of administrative simplifications. And if middle-class people had to use the SNAP benefits management website on a regular basis, they wouldn’t put up with how crappy it is.
Casey Adams: Lighthearted question: what was the coolest moment of being a parent so far?
This is a tough one because I’d say the fun thing about parenting is that kids get really excited about stuff that’s pretty banal, so just hanging out and doing things gets peppered with routine moments of joy and delight.
But one personal peak for me was back in the old pre-vaccine days, when everything felt very difficult, I was going with my son to Baltimore and cruising around on these little electric pirate boats with me piloting the ship and him manning the fake cannons and pretending to shoot the other boats. We found another dad with a couple of kids and had some great fake battles out on the high seas. Not the most extraordinary thing in the world by any means, but just a great delightful moment during a hard time in everyone’s life. Of course zipping around fast and pretending to shoot people is just objectively fun, but as an adult people will look down on you if you do it.
[Editor’s note: This is incorrect. I’m sure those guns were cool, but the actual coolest thing about being a parent so far has been watching the kid learn to read and then learn to love reading. I’m sure at some point it will stop feeling like a miraculous development, but we’re not there yet.]
Doug Orleans: What's your take on the "greedflation" narrative?
If there’s a huge surge in demand for Slow Boring subscriptions, we just sell more subscriptions. But many goods and services can’t be produced in larger quantities without some costly investments in infrastructure. So if there is a huge spike in demand for stuff, prices will rise — and those higher prices will increase profit margins. The fact that the margins rose doesn’t debunk the idea that excess demand is the cause of the price increases; margins go up because prices go up, and prices go up because demand went up.
Okay, but don’t the high margins show that if companies wanted to be magnanimous instead of greedy they could charge lower prices and still cover their costs? It does show that. But note that if companies voluntarily refused to raise prices in the face of a demand surge, you’d get shortages. Or else to avoid shortages you’d need rationing. I can certainly think of situations in which rationing and price controls are superior to market allocation. But even so, you’d be proposing rationing and price controls as a solution to a surge in demand. There’s no scenario in which a surge in greed is the cause of inflation.
KenKras: What market failures matter most to individuals' economic security? The lack of insurance against highly individualized skill obsolescence, the lack of highly localized housing futures market, inability to hedge Medicare or estate tax restructuring, something else? Does the debacle of long term care insurance mean we'll not see attempts by markets to provide such protections?
The question mentions highly individualized skill obsolescence, but I would say the bigger issue is that experienced workers have a lot of industry-specific risk. When we shifted from film photography to digital, that didn’t just render obsolete the specific skills of the people developing film.
It wiped out a whole industry, including the jobs of individual people working in the industry whose specific function may not necessarily be obsolete. But this is then compounded by uninsurable housing market risk. So you’re living in Rochester working for Kodak and you lose your job because the film industry is dying, and then for that exact same reason the entire local housing market is collapsing, and now you’re fucked. And of course this happens for trade reasons, too. The furniture company you worked at is shifting production to China and so are all the other furniture companies in the area, and also the whole local economy is falling apart so none of the other companies are hiring either.
Simon_Dinosaur: What is Mayor Pete up to Matt? How do you rate him and his team so far are they actually doing anything useful to improve transportation with all that money Biden gave them?
They are certainly aware of the main problems. How much they can — or whether they actually will — manage to solve them is a different issue.
In general, I would say the goal of cost-effectiveness is not helped by saddling everything with the toughest-ever Buy American procurement rules, but that’s way above the Secretary’s pay grade.
A huge share of what DOT does is flush money out through various formula grants. The exception to that is what they are now calling RAISE grants, which are competitive discretionary grants that let the DOT decide which projects it thinks are good. This program began in the Obama administration as TIGER (which you have to admit is a cool name), and I think was largely misused in the streetcar fad. I cannot say that I have kicked the tires of the first round of RAISE projects in great detail, but it doesn’t seem to include any obvious boondoggles, and the one project I’m really familiar with (on Benning Road in D.C.) makes sense. So relative to the low bar, Buttigieg is making things better.
A big known unknown is what’s going to happen with all the Amtrak money. I’m eager to find out. Again, I think this is an area where they have a pretty solid grasp of the issues, it’s just not certain if that will actually be the decisive consideration. My hope for Pete, as I’ve said before, is that he obviously has grander aspirations in life than moving from Secretary of Transportation into a lobbying job. That means it’s in his interests to have some signature achievements, even if that means ruffling some feathers and taking on some entrenched interests.
Marcus Seldon: I saw a discussion on Twitter the other day about how many swing state Democratic Senators keep a low profile, to the point where they're essentially a generic Democrat going into an election year. The example in this discussion was Catherine Cortez Masto, but this seems to apply to many other Democrats in swing states. They aren't controversial, but they're also not building distinctive brands or associating themselves with particular issues in a way that breaks through the media noise.
I think this is a huge problem. The standard playbook for frontline Democrats is to keep their heads down, do low-key local media when possible, and then pound the airwaves with tons of ads from the Senate Majority PAC.
And if you look at the ads that Dem super PACs run, they are generally pretty good. But if you look at the effect size of television ads, they definitely matter but don’t move the needle all that much. If the only thing people hear about for a week in earned media is Elizabeth Warren fighting with Musk Bros about content moderation on Twitter, then people will think of that as the defining axis of American politics. If Catherine Cortez Masto is comfortable with the baseline framing of American political conflict being defined by Elizabeth Warren, that’s fine. But if she’s not comfortable with it (and I think she isn’t), then she and other mainstream Democrats need to find ways to make news in ways that they think will be helpful to them. That takes more creativity and more courage than I see from most elected officials.
Cameron Parker: Does Gavin have a chance at the Presidency? Some takes person on Twitter (can’t remember who) suggested he is the obvious choice to stand for the Dems if Biden doesn’t run. As a Californian, I scratch my head a bit, but maybe he has a good shot with the median voter?
I have no real opinion about Gavin Newsom. I think that in general, there is going to be a tremendous opportunity in the future for a skilled politician running on a back-to-basics/fuck-the-groups/just-want-to-win platform. I also think that politicians’ political identities are incredibly plastic and changeable, so really anyone — including but certainly not limited to Newsom — could do it.
In practice, though, I don’t think it’s going to be a white man who pulls this off, largely because there are a bunch of white men who would not want to agree with a white man saying Yglesias-type things but who would love to use Eric Adams or Alex Padilla or Gretchen Whitmer as a human shield for back-to-basics politics. Which, when you think about it, means that the optimal person to lead a popularist revival would actually be Vice President Kamala Harris, the former tough-on-crime District Attorney of San Francisco. She does not so far seem very interested in being that person, but she should.
Kc77: Is the Democratic Party more harshly punished in the court of public opinion by the crazy behavior of left wing extremists than the Republican Party is by right wing extremists? If so, why?
There are a lot of complex dynamics in play here but I would urge against overthinking this. The basic issue is that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals/progressives/leftists by a large margin, so if moderates split 50-50, the Republicans win and then their victory is further amplified by skewed geography.
Matthew Bays: How cynical do you think we should be about Conservative populism? Do you think they all really are just culture war-obsessed idiots that can't do analysis, but genuinely have no desire to get rid of Social Security / Medicare, etc? Or do you think a large amount of them are the same old free-market dogmatists that are opportunistically using it to wield power, and as soon as Republicans get a majority a lot of the welfare state will be rolled back and the "real populists" will gladly help them?
I favor a cynical interpretation of establishment conservatives like Mitch McConnell, who clearly does want to cut entitlements and just doesn’t want to talk about it.
The populists, I think, are not being cynical at all — through means of various slogans about how “politics is downstream of culture,” they have sincerely persuaded themselves that the question of which accounts are shadowbanned on Twitter is more significant than the allocation of a multi-trillion dollar federal budget. The problems with this are twofold. One is that it’s false. And the other is that they have not actually come up with an alternative theory of how to make fiscal policy work — Trump just happened to hit a pandemic and then lose the election before needing to deal with policymaking in an environment of rising interest rates.
David G: Are the posts on your site from Rafael Yglesias from your dad or an impostor?
Very real!
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