Midterm Mailbag

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Midterm Mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

20 - 26 minutes

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Lance Hunter: On last Tuesday's episode of Ezra Klein he interviewed Mark Leibovich and brought up this point:

“And something about the back-and-forth of stepping out for Trump a bit, then getting this blowback, then stepping out a bit more and getting this blowback. And soon your friends are totally different, your enemies are totally different, who likes you is different. And I’ve watched this in politicians before as a psychological dynamic. And I’ve actually seen it in pundits too. As a psychological dynamic, this is often a pathway to a very different politics in three years. [...] You see this a lot, the social dynamics of odd bedfellows becoming a greased path towards ending up in a place that, I think, four years ago you could have never imagined yourself being. I’m curious how much you saw that and how you understand it operating.”

Clearly you aren't a Trump supporter, but do you feel that there are any positions you've taken that have resulted in similar phenomenon of blowback and odd bedfellows? If so, were you surprised by the reaction you received or did you expect that the position would be either unpopular among those who normally agree with you or popular among those who normally disagree with you?

I think that this is a very real dynamic that progressives should try to be more self-aware about. I wrote about this last fall in the case of Dave Chappelle, but when you create a dynamic where anyone who violates one of dozens of different taboos gets shunned by progressives, more and more prominent people end up inhabiting a right-leaning information ecosystem. There’s a longstanding cliche that the right likes to search for converts and the left likes to search for heretics, and I think it’s roughly true and a serious problem.

I try really hard, personally, not to fall into this spiral because I really do care a lot about taxes and health care policy and the welfare state. Those were the issues I was known for covering a long time ago, and I think they are very important.

In terms of unexpected blowback, I’m not sure I can really think of many examples — I think I’m a pretty close student of the Discourse and tend to know how things will land.

James Schapiro: You’ve previously mentioned that you don’t really like standup comedy. I saw you also mention recently that you saw Chris Rock on your (I did too, he was incredible, some of the best standup I’ve seen) — what did you think of his set? Have your thoughts on standup comedy evolved at all?

Chris Rock is a master of the genre and it was a pleasure to see him live. I’m not like a psychotic about not seeing standup — some friends of ours invited Kate and me to the show, and I had a great time.

Standup is just still not my thing. If the set had been 10 minutes shorter, I wouldn’t have cried. And that’s my general experience watching Netflix standup specials. The ones that are widely recommended as hilarious usually are, in fact, funny. But they don’t leave me wanting more or with a personal desire to seek out standup content.

Leora: In the spirit of SCOTUS oral argument, an affirmative action question. One of the common rhetorical defenses of AA is “well, legacy admissions provides affirmative action to rich white people, why don’t you care about that?” Ignoring the non-sequitor of this argument, there’s a good question. Congress or state legislatures could outlaw legacy admissions at any time and have never bothered. It strikes me as a pretty easy populist win for Biden (who wants to publicly defend legacies?), but what do you think?

It’s a great issue for Biden, in particular, since he’s a University of Delaware guy and not someone with a super-fancy education. Honestly, I also think some revisionism on affirmative action would be a great issue for Kamala Harris, who is literally at the intersection of Black and Asian identity, but also, as an HBCU grad, a model of a different way of thinking about this whole subject.

If the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action (as they almost certainly will), politicians should also move against legacy admissions, and they should push for investing fewer resources in the Harvards of the world and more in the Delawares and Howards. See my longer post about this.

James: Should graduates of highly selective universities (or of any universities) be forbidden from listing their university affiliations when applying for jobs? Assume they can prove the credential but that where they went to school will remain obscured to employers.

I think there are some pretty obvious free speech and general implementation issues with that proposal. I gather this is some kind of troll that’s bubbling up on conservative Twitter, but I don’t really understand what set of rules we’re supposed to imagine. Like if Milan is prohibited from saying he goes to Yale, can he still post lots of photos of himself in New Haven perhaps wearing a Yale sweater or encourage me to write about how he goes to Yale so people who Google it can find out? Are professors barred from writing letters of recommendation? Can Milan’s parents tell people what their kid is doing?

It doesn’t make sense.

James B: Matt, you've alluded to having potentially benefitted in life from being of partial Hispanic ancestry despite not being of the background that the category is intended to help. Do you think that the “Hispanic/Latino” category in the US is too broad? And if so do you think an effort to “narrow” the category could work, or would that create more problems that it solves?

(To me, it would be easier if we adopted a term like “mestizo” to help differentiate “white” Hispanics from “non-white” Hispanics, but I could see that going very, very wrong)

Look, all identity groupings have an element of arbitrariness to them. But the notion that there is such a place as Latin America makes perfect sense, as does the idea that Americans of Latin ancestry have some things in common.

I think all of the problems here stem from the fact that we started trying to do a form of reparations for African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, and then in the 1978 Bakke case, the Supreme Court said you couldn’t do that but could do race-conscious admissions for the purpose of promoting diversity. That spun the whole dialogue out in dozens of different crazy ways and it also creates certain toxicity around who can and can’t claim which identities.

Taylor: I'm a member of the notorious Park Slope Food Coop. If you're not familiar, it's a grocery store where you work 2.5 hours a month in exchange for a flat 25% markup on all groceries. The groceries that regular grocery stores mark up a lot (spices, cheese, vegetables) end up being very cheap. Anyway, the Coop recently asked its 17,000 members whether they wanted to continue masking, and 51% of the respondents said no. The Coop decided to keep its all masks all the time policy anyway. One member wrote into the Coop's newspaper (yes, we are a grocery store with a newspaper) agreeing with the decision for disability justice reasons. I get that. But I think there must be some reasonable middle ground between “we must all wear masks forever to allow the disabled to participate in civic life” and “majoritarian rule, get bent.” What is that middle ground?

I would find this rule annoying. But if you’re genuinely seeking a middle ground, then I do think the Park Slope Food Coop maintaining a strict mask rule actually is the middle ground, since no other grocery store is doing that.

A Coop can, voluntarily, choose to ignore the economic fundamentals and make itself the destination of choice for people who believe strongly in masking, whether because they are high risk or simply because they’ve developed a lifestyle preference for it. I don’t necessarily recommend this course of action, but it actually is what the middle ground looks like.

Personally, I like to emphasize Olga Khazan’s point that one-way masking works, and I think the social emphasis should be on ensuring that high-quality masks are widely available to anyone who wants them. At the end of the day, it is true that if you wear an N-95 mask every time you go to a store, you will reduce the number of respiratory viruses you catch. I’m not living my life that way, but it’s not a crazy idea. I do also think we should be funding research on developing new mask designs that are either better than N-95 or more comfortable.

Antioch: There's been a lot of grousing lately about upcoming changes to twitter. As a prolific user, what are some changes that you think would actually improve the platform?

There’s this old joke that if Henry Ford asked customers what they wanted they’d have asked for faster horses, so I don’t necessarily think Elon Musk should be basing his decisions too heavily on a survey of people like me.

But I do think the key to a hopeful future for Twitter is for Musk to make whatever policy changes to moderation he wants to make, and then try to disengage from the politicking a bit and focus on applying engineering skills to improving the product.

A simple thing is that Twitter’s algorithmic judgment about which tweets to show me often isn’t that good because it doesn’t properly account for the timeliness (or lack thereof) of a given tweet. This is an objectively hard problem, but great technology companies solve hard problems. I wish the DMs were a better messaging service. I wish threaded conversations were less confusing.

JM: Give me your ranking of American secular holidays. To me, clearly Thanksgiving is tops with New Year’s Eve on the bottom. Halloween is mid (I like that my kids like it, but am otherwise meh on it). Bonus: Where will Juneteenth end up once it’s been established for a few years?

I’m a notorious grump and holiday hater, so my favorites are like President’s Day where you just get the day off and there’s no particular obligation to do anything.

In terms of real holidays with traditions and activities associated with them, Halloween is my favorite as a dad — I really enjoy taking my kid trick-or-treating and handing out candy to the kids who come by our house. But I was never a fan of “adult Halloween” where you dress up in a costume and go to a party.

My main thing is that I wish we had better alignment between days off and activities. It’s dumb to have people actually out doing stuff on October 31 but then there’s no official holiday and a week later it’s Veterans’ Day. And I feel similarly about the near-miss between the Super Bowl and President’s Day.

Brian T: Can we have some Georgism takes?

Milan is working on a deadweight loss explainer and let’s just say land value taxes don’t have any.

Sharty: Actuarially, it seems almost a given that we'll have major turnover in the national leadership of both parties over the next decade or so. Do you expect to see that flowing in more from the states, or will it look more like the elevation of career Washingtonians? Does it really matter?

Changes in the structure of the media environment are going to encourage more and more celebrity-type candidates. As it happens, Dr. Oz and Hershel Walker are both distinctly sub-par. But Kari Lake and others are showing us that local television news personalities have incredible potential. And if Oz lived in a giant house in the suburbs in Pennsylvania rather than in New Jersey, he might have been a strong candidate. Right now the demographics don’t work, but at some point a YouTube streamer or TikTok personality is going to be a formidable candidate as the audience of those platforms ages into mattering more in the electorate.

Nicholas W: If Democrats manage to retain the senate next week should Sonia Sotomayor, 68, plan on retiring in 2023? The senate map makes it unlikely Dems hold the senate in 2024 regardless if Biden wins. If Biden were to lose, it seems highly unlikely we would have 3 consecutive one term presidencies. Meaning at best the the next Democratic Presidency and Senate Majority after the 118th could be as late as in 2033…… do we risk a 7-2 majority on a woman living to 80?

Yes.

Matthew: What are your thoughts on rising antisemitism? Can anything be done about it? And how concerned do you think Jews need to be?

I am against antisemitism. I would caution a little against the assumption that it is “rising” since it’s a little bit hard to tell if that’s true or even how you would possibly know. One thing that has clearly happened is a general deterioration of public safety, which has put visibly Jewish people at elevated risk of antisemitic violence. Discerning whether or not that’s a genuine increase in distinctively antisemitic violence or just a symptom of a broadly rising level of violence is hard, but it’s a legitimate subject for concern.

The other question is about antisemitic ideation — the spread of antisemitic ideas and memes through the internet.

Here, the basic issue is that the internet, by its nature, widens the aperture of content distribution. So we know there were antisemitic sentiments around in 1998, but they are easier to distribute in 2008 and even easier in 2018 and so forth. Most internet platforms, as far as I know, try to tamp this stuff down somewhat, as they should. But we also do live in a free society with free speech, and a lot of antisemitic conspiracy theories are constructed out of piles of broadly accurate facts like “there are a lot of Jewish people in the Biden cabinet relative to their share of the population.”

In terms of what is to be done, I see a dual imperative.

On the one hand, Jewish Americans have traditionally supported cosmopolitan liberalism as an ethic and a political agenda, and I think we should continue to do so and not be excessively impressed by nationalist politicians’ pro-Israel bona fides. Donald Trump’s approach to “the Jewish question” is to essentially conceptualize us (including his son-in-law!) as foreigners — as Israelis — which we are not. That’s a dangerous idea that leaves Jewish people perpetually at risk. At the same time, within the progressive community, we need to not only stand against antisemitism but stand up for the old-fashioned idea that racism is about bias, bigotry, and hatred. Reconceptualizing racism to just be about numerical inequalities leads naturally to the notion that anti-Jewish (or anti-Asian) bias doesn’t count because Jewish Americans are doing well on average. This is good for us and certainly a reason to keep contemporary antisemitism in perspective, but not at all the same as saying that antisemitism doesn’t exist or isn’t important.

David Abbott: Is the optimal global climate warmer or cooler than the current climate? If 2022 is not the ideal, which past or future year is?

Relative to where we are today, cooler at the margin is better than warmer because so many more people live in the tropics than live in the Arctic. Of course that’s not a coincidence — extreme cold is worse than extreme heat, which is why the cold parts of the earth have so few people in them. So if you magically created an even population distribution across the planet, then warmer than the current temperature would be optimal.

The real-world upshot of this is that the costs of global warming can, in theory, be massively mitigated by allowing population movement out of the tropics and into Russia, Canada, the interior north of the United States, and other places where the weather is getting better. In practice, there are … a lot of challenges to making that work.

Randall: Do you have any thoughts on the Intercept report about government and social media working together to tackle misinformation (“misinformation”)? Do you see this as threatening at all? It’s odd to me how frictionless the swap was between our parties and how they feel about this kind of thing.

This is one of these stories where I feel like the more closely you read the article, the less there was to it. There’s a lot of reporting in the piece, but I think these two grafs were the key:

    “We do not coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line with the Twitter Rules,” a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a statement to The Intercept.

    There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

This sounds to me like important institutions, including the U.S. government, ask Twitter to do various things and Twitter sometimes does what it is asked to do and other times does not do what it is asked to do. I have a very similar relationship to the U.S. government! People who work there sometimes suggest stories or angles to me or else try to tell me that things I’ve tweeted or written are wrong. Sometimes they are persuasive, and sometimes they are not.

Facebook is a huge service used by literally billions of people around the world. They must get a lot of law enforcement inquiries from hundreds if not thousands of separate agencies. Creating a dedicated portal for verified law enforcement personnel to use seems smart.

The question with all of this is (a) what was actually asked for and (b) what response came forward. Maybe there’s a scandal. But the Intercept story doesn’t actually have the goods on one.

Shrikrishna Pherwani: what does the british conservative party teach us about affirmative action? from what i understand, david cameron made a very big push to have more women and ethnic minorities selected for parliament during his leadership, and if nothing else, it’s resulted in the british great offices of state having a fair amount of gender and ethnic diversity for the past decade or so.

Representational concerns have been a big part of politics since long before the idea of “affirmative action” existed. There was for a long time the notion of a “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court. FDR was from the northeast, so they had to balance the ticket with John Nance Garner from the South. Classic Tammany Hall politics was to present a balanced ticket with a mix of Irish, Jewish, and upstate WASP politicians.

But I think part of the key to practicing this kind of politics in a sustainable way is you can’t say that’s what you’re doing. Everyone knows that Clarence Thomas was selected in part because George H.W. Bush wanted to select a Black justice to succeed Thurgood Marshall. But that’s not what Bush said about Thomas when he picked him — he just praised him. I also think, obviously, that right-wing parties are viewed as erring on the side of helping white people, so practicing a little quiet diversity politics just softens and moderates their image, whereas the exact same actions could have a different impact on the image of a progressive party.

Sam: Seems like Josh Shapiro should be getting more national attention? Most coverage focuses on weakness of Mastriano, which does make it harder to get a read on Shapiro's strength. But polls/other metrics do suggest that a broad swath of voters like Shapiro. Poised to become a not-so-old, (at least initially) popular governor of an important, diverse swing state, close to NE media centers.

I agree with this. We’ll see what happens after the election.

Zack: Social media companies are often blamed for much of the polarization that exists today. Part of that I think comes from how easily accessible they were over the last decade or so. However, now that interest rates are rising, many companies are forced to change their business models. Could making habitual users pay to use their platforms help decrease some of the polarization we've been seeing?

I am skeptical that social media companies have played a particularly large role in polarization and also skeptical that charging users will be a big part of the future for any social media company.

Here’s how I think higher interest rates will influence politics. When interest rates are high, fiscal tradeoffs matter. On the internet, this mostly plays as bad news for the left, which likes to daydream about MMT, and as good news for the right, which tends to uphold orthodoxy.

But in practical terms, “fiscal tradeoffs are real and it’s important to worry about the budget deficit” is just how Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did politics. We know what Joe Biden in deficit reduction mode will look like — he’ll say we need to ask the wealthiest to pay their fair share, and he’s happy to discuss entitlement reform but only in the context of a balanced deficit reduction package. By contrast, what Trump did that worked very well for him was to increase domestic discretionary spending and also increase military spending and also allow entitlement spending to rise and also do a big corporate tax cut and also cut middle-class taxes. That was fine in an environment of near-zero interest rates, but if you created a GOP trifecta tomorrow, they couldn’t re-run that play. So what do they do? Give up on cutting taxes? Cut military spending? Go after retirement programs that their elderly base relies on?

Thomas L. Hutcheson: Why doesn’t the Treasury have intermediate tenor Treasury Inflation protected Securities (TIPS) It has a 10 year and a 5 year TIPS, but what about 1, 2, 3 and 7?

Why does the treasury not have a security “indexed” to NGDP. It could be very useful for Fed policy making (or a policy instrument, but not both.)

I think these are good ideas, and they should do it. To the extent that I can explain why they don’t, it’s mostly because the Treasury is small-c conservative and there isn’t some overwhelming clamor for this or anything.