Spooky mailbag

Spooky mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 16 minutes

Spooky mailbag

Dune sequels, Midnight, and more talk about the Panic of 1873 than you were expecting

No offense to those who enjoy it, but Adult Halloween was always my least favorite time of the year. One of the greatest things about being a parent is finally being able to get out from under that and become just a supervisor at Kid Halloween, walking around while some youths score candy. That’s the reason for the season.

Emma: Given what you have written in the past about the downside of bringing up race in campaign messaging, what do you make of Ian Haney Lopez and Heather McGhee's research that when the left ignores race, Republicans will predictably bring it up—either overtly or as a dog whistle—and split the electorate? Haney Lopez's research in particular seems to suggest that progressive messages ignoring race and just talking about popular policies are actually less effective than messages fusing race and class into a "better for everyone" proposition. Thoughts on the research and this approach?

I like McGhee’s book a lot, but I find the dialogue around “race-class narrative” to be a little bit vexing.

When I first encountered RCN, I thought I agreed with it because I took it to be addressing a very real dilemma of Obama-era politics. Obama would often advance a very sound economic agenda only to be greeted with racial provocations from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who was constantly saying the Affordable Care Act was reparations. Obama’s main approach was to try to duck the issue and not take the bait. What I took RCN proponents to be saying was that this is a limited strategy that meant the only messages on race people were hearing were the Limbaugh messages. But they agreed that it would be unproductive to sideline the health care issue in favor of arguing with Rush about racism. The idea of RCN was to acknowledge the racial provocation and try to expose it as a tool of class domination, while ultimately returning to the economics-focused substantive agenda.

The tendency I have been most critical of is the one where progressives play the Limbaugh role, and say things like “High Hardship Among Black and Latinx LGBTQ Renters Underscores Need for More Housing Vouchers.” Who is that an argument for?

So I thought I was basically agreeing with RCN’s analysis, but leading RCN people have made it clear that they don’t agree with me. I think that’s partly because Haney López seems to take a very expansive view of what constitutes a racist “dog whistle” in American politics. It is obviously possible to discuss topics like immigration and crime in highly racialized or racist ways. But I also think it is pretty clear that people of all ethnic backgrounds get upset when people get shot in their neighborhoods, dislike more low-key forms of disorder (street urination, verbal harassment, shoplifting), and at a minimum struggle with the logistical aspects of coping with a big influx of asylum-seekers.

Philip Wallach: Given your emphasis on politics as the art of the possible, and securing incremental gains rather than taking moral stands that lead to political losses, what is your take on the Radical Republicans of the 1860s and Reconstruction more generally? The old-fashioned view characterized Radical Republicans as oblivious to the political realities of the South (and bent on revenge). That’s now mostly dismissed as Southern apologism, but maybe there’s something to it, even for those of us who think the Confederacy was abominable? Was there a path to biracial Southern politics?

First off, while Radical Reconstruction was ultimately abandoned and thus in some sense “failed,” it’s important in Slow Boring terms to say that it didn’t backfire and somehow leave the cause of civil rights worse off than it was under Andrew Johnson’s policies.

Second, looking back on the politics of the 1870s and 1880s, it seems to me that Reconstruction was in fact the most important issue of the day. I’ve often criticized Biden-era Democrats for not setting priorities in a clear or reasonable way. But it was totally reasonable for the Grant administration to prioritize Reconstruction over pursuing GOP goals on the tariff or whatever else they were up to. So in a narrow sense, I don’t think the Radical Republicans did anything wrong.

In a broader sense, though, they didn’t actually accomplish what they set out to accomplish, so there is an interesting question of how things could have turned out differently.

Academic historians don’t like to formally consider counterfactuals, which I think is unfortunate. But one way of putting the “old” view of Reconstruction is that it was always doomed to fail for some racist reason — freedmen were incapable of self-government or peaceful coexistence of people from different racial groups was impossible — so the Radicals were foolish to try and only caused harm. I think the “new” view tends to be equally fatalistic, just putting the blame on racism — white supremacist ideology was too deeply ingrained in American civic culture — and holds up the Radicals as noble (albeit doomed) heroes. But I do wonder about contingency.

One scenario to consider is what would’ve happened if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t dumped Hannibal Hamlin from the ticket in 1864 in favor of Jackson the War Democrat. In the original 1860 GOP ticket, Lincoln was the midwestern moderate and Hamlin was there to provide representation to the more hardline faction of the party. Lincoln swapped Hamlin for Johnson to help secure re-election, but in the end the 1864 election wasn’t very close. The Lincoln-Hamlin ticket maybe wins a bit more narrowly but they still win. And now instead of Lincoln’s assassination bringing to power a white supremacist Democrat, it puts a Radical in office at a time when the military is still publicly mobilized and the population is primed for vengeance. I think a Hamlin-led Reconstruction would have been much harsher from the outset, potentially featuring things like real land reform that could have led to a durable Reconstruction order.

The other is that as best as I can tell, GOP political fortunes were dealt a heavy blow both in the 1874 midterms (where Democrats gained the House majority) and in 1876 by the fallout from an economic crisis known as the Panic of 1873. The quality of economic data from this era is not great, but Andrew Jalil’s paper on the history of American banking crises suggests it kicked off a pretty serious recession. Could this have been prevented? I don’t know — historians seem a little uncertain as to why the panic happened at all. But Grant did veto a controversial piece of legislation in 1874 known as the Inflation Bill and the economy instead experienced deflation. Perhaps if they’d given it a better name like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Grant would have signed it, the economy would have prospered, and the Reconstruction coalition would have stayed in place longer.

So the real lesson here, as always, is that the best thing you can do as an incumbent is make flawless decisions about macroeconomic management. But it’s hard.

Trace: If the Weeds were to have a reunion episode to do a Weeds Time Machine episode, what trio would you be most interested to be on a panel with again, and what esoteric piece of legislation from the country's history would you be most interested in having a discussion of the ramifications of that we're still living with today?

I think it’d be a blast to get together with Ezra and Sarah to talk about the Social Security Amendments of 1965 (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid) or go really nuts and do the Coinage Act of 1873 (which Milton Friedman says really was bad, as the Bryanites would later go on to argue) with Dara and Jane.

srynerson: I've seen it said, many, many, many times over the years that cutting taxes for upper income households has basically no stimulus effect. However, with inflation having shot up this year, I've seen a bunch of people including yourself: argue that part of the way inflation can be brought down is raising taxes on upper income households. To be blunt: if upper income tax cuts don't stimulate consumption in any meaningful way, then how they can have any broad inflationary effects?

The basic argument is that rich people have a lower marginal propensity to consume so shifting their taxes has less demand impact than putting money into or out of the hands of people of more modest means.

I accept that basic theory, but during the long disinflationary era I always thought progressives were understating the stimulative potential of tax cuts for the rich. In 2012, I wrote that Mitt Romney winning would generate better short-term growth via larger budget deficits. In 2018, I wrote that Donald Trump deserved credit for pursuing stimulative fiscal policies. Back when I thought president-elect Biden was going to be faced with a GOP-controlled Senate, I said he should strike a deal on tax cuts with Mitch McConnell to stimulate the economy. So I plead personally innocent of inconsistency or hypocrisy here — I think rich-people tax policy has a meaningful influence on the demand situation and I’ve always said that.

Lisa: What did you think of Midnights? Favorite / least favorite tracks?

It’s pretty great. I think my favorite Taylor Swift is still the mid-period Red/1989 phase, but I have “Midnights” provisionally penciled in after those two. “Vigilante Shit,” “Anti-Hero,” “Snow On the Beach” — great stuff.

I’m not really sure why this is bothering me but the similarity between the chorus of “Vigilante Shit” on the new album and this 2007 song from CSS called “Music is My Hot Hot Sex” keeps bugging me. Why should that bother me? I don’t know. And I assume most people who hear this album will not be familiar with the work of a no-longer-extant Brazilian band from 15 years ago.

Zach Thomas: What are your thoughts on approval voting versus ranked choice voting? They are both on the ballot for Seattle primaries this election (currently our primaries are ‘top two.’) I like the potential of ranked choice voting to get more moderate people in office, though some say approval voting is better or worse on that account. What do you think?

Approval is better. With ranked choice you can get a scenario where Rightist gets 35%, Leftist gets 35%, and Centrist gets 30% and the winner comes down to who was the more popular second choice for Centrist voters. Under approval voting, the Centrists should just win. Of course the real answer is that we should have proportional representation and not bother figuring out how to optimally structure elections for single-member districts.

Greg Ellingson: Should Jerome Powell plead with the young couples of America to move in together to lower OER?

Yes, if you and your girlfriend are currently maintaining separate residences, you owe it to The Economy to either move in together immediately or else recognize that it’s not working out and break up so you can find someone else to cohabitate with. But note this doesn’t work if you move into a 2br and use the spare as a home office. A 1br + den is fine, but the idea is to economize on housing. But won’t the extra spending on what you save on rent just fuel inflation in other areas of the economy? Yes — that’s why you need to put the money into a Series I bond to start saving to make a downpayment on a house.

Estate of Bob Saget: Any thoughts on Hanania's piece A Psychological Theory of the Culture War?

I’ve always thought it’s a little funny that cultural conservatives are much more likely to talk about the importance of IQ than are cultural progressives, but there’s a very robust finding that higher IQ people have more progressive cultural views.

Hanania’s piece is one of the few cases I’m familiar with of a conservative acknowledging this inconvenient point, but I don’t think he quite wrestles it into submission in a convincing way. Of course to some extent progressives have the even worse end of this paradox, since they simultaneously clearly do believe they are smarter than conservatives while also being ideologically committed to denying that intelligence is a meaningful concept. That leads to the tedious idea that if we could only correct everyone’s “misinformation,” they would come to agree with us about everything.

James: Exactly how much of the blame for democrats upcoming losses in the midterms falls at the feet of woke politics?

I think you could argue that “woke politics” contributed to the rise in crime in 2020 and to the slow recognition that this was a problem in 2021 and that clearly hurts Democrats. But I think the more straightforward way of saying it would be that the run-up in crime over the past few years has hurt Democrats.

Broadly speaking, I think Joe Biden has actually done a really good job of defusing the political correctness issue as both a matter of substance and politics. The bad news is that inflation-adjusted incomes are falling! Democrats are actually holding up remarkably well given that context.

JD: This is a question about Dune. How do you treat the sequels? I read the first one when the movie came out and was really eager to see where the story went from there. Dune extensively builds out an interesting world and group of intriguing characters, and culminates in a dramatic final series of events. And then... Oof. It's just a few hundred pages of Paul mumbling to himself in a castle and comparing himself to Hitler (a reference that should not be very salient on Arrakis)? And noticing how hot his adolescent sister looks naked? I was stunned to find out that there are several more sequels beyond that point. As I am new to Dune fandom, I'm not really sure how we as a people treat the rest of the books. Do we pretend they don't exist? Do they get better? Are we supposed to find them charming because we're attached to the characters? And, most importantly, should they be adapted into films?

So in defense of Dune Messiah, I first read these books when I was a kid, and I didn’t really understand Dune until I read Dune Messiah. I think from an older, more mature perspective, Messiah is a kind of bad book because it’s dedicated mostly to telling you what you should think about the events of Dune.

And Dune is actually a very sophisticated book that shows you what you should think, if you read it correctly. But I read Dune as a 12-year-old reading an uncomplicated Hero’s Journey about a young warrior who overthrows an evil empire and avenges his dead father — exactly the way I interpreted Star Wars when I first watched it. So to me, Dune Messiah’s slightly hacky approach was good. But Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune are substantially better books. Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, the final two of the books that he actually wrote, get really weird. But I like them.

In terms of adaptations, Dune Part I is a long movie at just over 2.5 hours, and it also doesn’t have a proper end at all. It’s just pretty literally “we have to stop the movie now because it’s too long, please come back for the sequel.” I hope the sequel will be great, and we’ll have what amounts to a great, annoyingly long five-hour movie. But I think you could craft an interesting and exciting 90-100 minute movie out of the kind of boring book of Dune Messiah. Then Children of Dune would also be a great movie. The difficult question is the fourth book, which involves coming up with a non-laughable way to depict a human-sandworm hybrid.

MosesZ: How would the existence of dragons affect zoning laws?

This is my biggest problem with House of the Dragon. Game of Thrones (and the books Martin has managed to actually finish and publish) worked best with the dragons kept largely off-stage and somewhat hypothetical. We got a pretty grounded, “realistic” story with sporadic magical elements.

But as dragons are really in the foreground of HOTD, it raises a lot of sort of annoying questions about how exactly this works that the show doesn’t have answers for. Like at King’s Landing, the dragons are in the dragon pit. And on Dragonstone, they live in the caves of the Dragonmont. But when young princes ride their dragons to Storm’s End to treat with the Baratheons, how does the dragon parking work? Are there trained valets just sitting around at every major castle? It would be boring to dedicate large amounts of time to exposition about dragon logistics. But it makes the stories much less compelling and much closer to “please don’t think too hard about it” superhero movie fare.

Matt F: Matt, as a philosophy major, you seem to have a great grasp of economics and you explain the issues to us laypeople better than most economists. Since the economy is a major issue now with interest rates, inflation, etc, I'd love to read more from you on this, but I'm curious how you developed your base economics knowledge comes from?

I’m glad you think I understand it, I always worry economists will disagree! But I’ve been interested in the subject for a long time and have always been able to benefit from conversations with my grandfather and my uncles Paul and Andrew who are all economists. Plus shout-out to Geoffrey Gund, my AP Economics teacher in high school.

But the other thing I did in the early years of my career was read a bunch of undergraduate economics textbooks. I read both the Greg Mankiw and the Krugman/Wells intro textbooks very thoroughly, and then when they came out also gave the Cowen/Tabarrok and Wolfers/Stevenson textbooks more of a skim. There’s a lot of repetition and overlap between these books, which is why once you’ve already read two you find yourself starting to skim. But to an extent, that overlap — the stuff that these guys all agree on — is what “economics” is. Then there are a lot of working economists who, using the tools of their training, have developed a lot of ideas. But I think the core point is that even though these writers have a lot of different interests and ideas and very different personas as economics columnists, there really is a core corpus of knowledge and ideas that constitutes the fundamentals of economics.

Ignacio Marquez: Apart from the immigration debate, which is mostly confined to Central America (and now Venezuela), Latin America as a whole, and especially South America, is basically absent from mainstream American political discourse. Is this a missed opportunity for the US? Should US foreign policy be any different towards the countries in the Americas? Or is it just what is is, i.e., just not that relevant a continent absent a big crisis?

Once back in the peak War on Terror days, I was at a conference in Los Angeles and very tired after a day of travel and jet lag and speaking on a panel that went for 90 minutes before the Q&A started. Then someone from the audience asked why we hadn’t said anything about South America and I blurted out “because it’s less important than the other continents.” Which was tough but, I think, an accurate assessment of the state of things in 2007.

In 2022, though, as policy is reorienting around great power conflict with China, I do think American policymakers need to reassess that. The fact that no Latin American countries have joined the sanctions against Russia doesn’t have a huge practical impact, but I do think it’s a “bad look” for the West in terms of the values we claim to be upholding with this venture. My sense is that rightist political tendencies in Latin America have a lot of substantive sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while leftist tendencies are very skeptical of American hegemony, so we’ve stranded ourselves with no friends and a situation in Brazil where Bolsonaro and Lula disagree about everything except that neither will support the U.S. line on Russia. This seems like something we need to work on.

My big idea is that part of a post-“engagement” approach to China should be actively encouraging supply-chain migration to Latin America. Outsourcing certain manufacturing tasks to poorer countries makes a lot of sense. And we should encourage that to mean Mexico and Colombia and Brazil, not flip from excessive integration with China to a doomed charge for autarky. I’d also like to see Latin America get more routine high-level respect from the American government. Have we had a Spanish-speaking Secretary of State? A presidential visit to the Anglophone Caribbean? You started with “apart from the immigration debate,” but I think the centrality of the immigration debate to American politics underscores how odd the general neglect of the region is in the United States since it turns out that events in Venezuela and beyond do end up influencing us very directly. And it would be good to see that acknowledged comprehensively, rather than just as a distant echo of a domestic political disagreement.

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