Two years of strong and slow boring of hard boards

www.slowboring.com

Two years of strong and slow boring of hard boards

Matthew Yglesias

18 - 23 minutes

Two years ago I launched this website with a lot of enthusiasm about the editorial mission of re-establishing a direct personal relationship with readers and declaring independence from algorithmic content distribution and media groupthink. At the same time, I must admit that I had a lot of trepidation about the business model. Would anyone read? Would anyone subscribe?

I felt comfortable taking the plunge thanks to a much-misunderstood financial offer from Substack that gave me a guaranteed minimum income in exchange for limiting my share of the upside if the site succeeded.

But it did succeed, enormously, to the point where that deal ended up being massively unfavorable to me. In our just-completed second year, Substack took only 10 percent of the gross revenue, which was nice for Kate and me but has also really expanded the range of things we’re able to do. I’m proud to say we have over 13,000 paid subscribers, and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to each and every one of you.

That money supports us writing and editing and running the site, and has allowed us to bring on Milan and Claire to research and copy edit.

It also lets us pay reasonably generous fees for freelance content that we think is meritorious, but that doesn’t necessarily pencil out in the ad-supported journalism world where a story really only makes sense if it has a high likelihood of going viral and/or editors have reason to believe lots of writers are searching for it. We did a bunch of paid pieces, but the one I would point to most clearly as evidence of the merits of this program was Natalie Sure’s debunking of the “Havana Syndrome” energy ray concept. A lot of people had grave doubts about the narrative that was being pushed by the Intelligence Community and the media, but nobody really wanted to stick their necks out and argue clearly that the emperor had no clothes. It’s a great, utterly convincing story that doesn’t happen to have done bonkers traffic, but it’s been I think completely vindicated by the outbreak of a war in Ukraine that has made it really clear that Russia doesn’t have any secret death ray technology.

We’ve also now run two iterations of the Slow Boring Book Club for paid members with more to come, had a few informal meetups in New York, New Haven, and Denver (with, again, more to come), and have been able to financially support GiveWell’s Top Charities fund with 10 percent of our revenue while 5 percent goes to direct air capture of carbon dioxide. The site has succeeded far beyond my hopes and expectations when launching it, and I’m excited about continued growth in our third year now that we know a little bit more about how to actually execute this stuff on a practical level.

We work hard to generate a lot of copy here, but it’s ultimately the people who read and share with others who make it work, so thank you all.

Of course, the launch of the site closely corresponds with the 2020 election, so today I want to reflect not so much on two years of Slow Boring, but on how the past two years have gone from my preferred standpoint of values and analytic framework.

When historians look back on the 117th Congress, I think they’re going to struggle to capture what an emotional rollercoaster it was from the standpoint of progressive policy ambition. Slow Boring launched the week after the 2020 election, and it appeared at first glance that the primary problem facing Biden was whether he could get a cabinet confirmed in the face of a GOP-run Senate. The idea of pulling off two runoff wins in Georgia, though not out of the realm of possibility, seemed like it would defy history.

But Biden did it, emerging with razor-thin congressional majorities. He then took a big swing with the American Rescue Plan — a swing so big that, as I’ve said before, I assumed when first briefed on it that it was an opening bid in a negotiation with moderate senators. I assumed that Joe Manchin would balk, but frankly, I assumed that some of the frontline members from states like Arizona and New Hampshire would also balk. I assumed that some of the older-school safe seat moderates like Mark Warner and Chris Coons would balk. When they all said yes — and in particular, when they all said yes to a one-year pilot of a historic expansion of the Child Tax Credit — my expectations for policymaking soared. The CTC, after all, was clearly intended to be a permanent program and not just Covid-19 relief, so the presence of 50 votes for a pilot suggested to me — and to others — that we were on the verge of a historic expansion in the welfare state.

In retrospect, this optimism stemmed from a confusing political situation in which Manchin agreed to a one-year expansion while retaining fundamental objections to the concept. If he had communicated his own opinion about this more clearly, a lot of ill will and wasted time could have been avoided.

What followed from this confusion was the long, fruitless wrangling over the Build Back Better proposal. This started with a fumble by Manchin, but it evolved into what I think was one of the progressive movement’s least-fine hours in which, with their fingers in their ears regarding inflation, they failed to set priorities, failed to design their policy proposals rigorously, and most of all, failed to listen to what the pivotal senator was actually saying. I don’t want to say that I single-handedly rescued American climate policy, but I do think this piece Jeff Stein wrote in February is interesting:

    “A lot of people in the White House are spending time looking at what they can do to make deficit reduction central to Build Back Better, with a strategy of appealing to an audience of one,” said one person in close communication with senior administration officials. “More so than at any other time in this administration, deficit concerns are driving a lot of policy and rhetoric inside the building.”

    The precise ideas on the table are not clear, and the people familiar with the discussions cautioned that they are preliminary and that no written plan has emerged. White House officials have circulated internally a column by the liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias suggesting that the party could approve $500 billion in climate programs and $400 billion in health-care initiatives — and still unify behind enough tax increases so that the legislation would curb the deficit over 10 years by $800 billion.

The numbers ended up being different, but the Inflation Reduction Act happened because other Democrats started paying attention to what Manchin was actually saying.

Ever since the IRA came together, I think there’s been a lot of memory-holing of the extent to which the mainstream progressive attitude was to keep whining that Manchin was acting in “bad faith” and pushing stories about how he’s corrupt because he has financial interests in the coal industry. Once the IRA passed, climate groups were largely pleased and pivoted to taking credit. But the strategy they were running of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the progressive infrastructure, of repeatedly slandering Manchin, and of deep reluctance to give ground to his interest in nuclear, carbon storage, and hydrogen had us on the verge of catastrophe.

A parallel claim advanced by the left in the early days of the Biden administration was that his belief that he could bring the parties together and pass bipartisan bills was a forlorn hope. This was wrong. The left significantly underrated the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act rather than admitting they were wrong. And while the CHIPS and Science Act that ultimately emerged wasn’t as good as the original Endless Frontier proposal, it’s still a good law. I’m hopeful we can still get a bipartisan permitting reform bill done in the lame duck, there has been a lot of bipartisan legislating relating to Ukraine, and broadly speaking, it has been nice to see a functioning legislative process.

I think it’s easy to forget, but this site launched at a time when much of the mainstream media was in a kind of fever-dream mode.

The leadership of the Democratic Party always and consistently rejected the idea of “defunding the police,” but it was extremely common to see this idea taken seriously in the press, and there was all kinds of misinformation floating around about the actual size of American school budgets, the empirical research on the relationship between crime and policing, and the reality that crime was rising sharply in 2020. There was a big fad during my last year at Vox to refer to looting and arson as “unrest” and to pretend that people who were clearly engaging in opportunistic thievery (in my neighborhood, the liquor store and the immigrant-owned phone repair shop had their windows smashed and their inventory stolen, while the gentrifier coffee shops and fast casual lunch shops were unmolested) were in fact political dissidents. Mainstream progressive publications were running openly pro-riot articles, while David Shor famously got canned from a progressive analytics firm for tweeting a link to Omar Wasow’s research quantifying the political benefits of peaceful protest and the cost of violence.

I never thought it made sense, logically, to vote for Donald Trump or down-ballot Republicans because of this stuff; actual Democratic Party politicians were much more responsible.

But a lot of mainstream progressive groups tweeted hasty endorsements of police defunding, and the leaders of other groups have told me they faced considerable pressure at the time from staff and donors to do the same. It was understandable that some voters felt the movement was going off the rails, and it also represented a catastrophic failure of judgment and good sense on the part of the people in charge and a failure of courage among those in the media and academia.

Today, good sense has returned on these issues. Trump warned that rioting would get worse under a Biden administration, and he was wrong. Murder appears to be heading downward slightly after a spike that did, after all, occur during Trump’s presidency. And there is a climate of perestroika in the media now that the intense emotions of 2020 have faded.

But it’s not good enough to have media figures who’ll talk about things squarely after the storm has passed. A lot of us who said things in the summer and fall of 2020 that are unremarkable today — that voters of color were actually shifting toward Trump amidst the tumult, that arsonists are not useful allies in the quest for social justice, that an active urban police force is important to public safety, and that wide-ranging debate is important to maintaining solid epistemics — continue to suffer reputational damage for having said these things when it was unfashionable to do so.

That’s unfortunate. And what I think is equally unfortunate is that there’s a set of pundits who made their bones being unfashionable that year and who haven’t moved on at all even though the world has changed (see Andrew Sullivan’s confession of error). Being a mono-line anti-woke crank is no better than being a maniacal canceller.

By Slow Boring’s second year, I would say that the “woke” issue had become massively overrated in centrist circles as a problem relative to issues around climate change. The American left had entered a bubble of fossil fuel extremism that left them unable to reckon with the massive economic inefficiency of “supply-side” climate policy, the reality that cheap natural gas made emissions lower rather than higher, and that we absolutely do not have all the technology we need to beat climate change.

A few weeks ago the New Republic published a piece that mentions “the scientific consensus that we have roughly a decade left to initiate the changes needed to preserve a living planet capable of supporting a complex civilization.”

There is no such consensus. What’s happening instead is that climate doomers have confused the IPCC’s worst-case scenario (RCP 8.5 in which global coal usage increases massively) for a “business as usual” scenario. The fact that someone could make an assertion like that so casually and without further exposition in a serious publication is telling — even as progressives have become increasingly alarmed about “misinformation,” they are blind to misinformation in their own ranks.

I think I was right about a lot of important things over this past year, but I was too pessimistic about Democrats’ prospects in the midterms. The polls were right, and once again, the election results proved that while Nate Silver’s forecasts aren’t perfect, it’s hard to do better than him.

But separate from the specific focus on the polls, I want to confess to a few analytic errors here.

    I thought student loan relief was costing Democrats politically. This was dumb on my part. I thought this was a bad policy on the merits, and I let that cloud my judgment. I knew all along that the specific thresholds the White House picked in terms of means-testing and how much debt was forgiven were either heavily workshopped with pollsters or else by remarkable coincidence lined up with what pollsters told me was optimal for public opinion. I argued that the impact on inflation offset this kind of superficial read from the polls, but no loans have actually been forgiven yet, so it’s simply not possible that would happen. This was wrong, and I should have known it was wrong.

    I also thought that Dobbs wasn’t hurting Republicans as much as it should have, because Democrats were refusing to give any ground to the popularity of restrictions on late-term abortions. I do stand by the idea that this is a political error, but Democrats’ television ads about abortion rights were extremely well-crafted and that let them really punish the GOP on this without moderating their stance.

    This relates to my third error, which is that I’ve often accused Democrats of overrating what can be achieved with paid media versus through positioning in the free press. I continue to believe that earned media matters more than paid — see Jared Golden winning in a very tough seat despite being outspent because he got coverage for taking moderate stances — but paid media is more effective than I thought. Catherine Cortez Masto did basically nothing outside of her advertising to be anything other than a totally generic Democrat, and it worked out. 

In life, it’s important to guard against overcorrection. I think a lot of people had exaggerated ideas about “firing up” young voters with student loan forgiveness or the ability to work miracles with pure campaign work. But that led me to tilt too far in the other direction. Democrats skated close to a real danger zone with this midterm, but in the end it worked out fine thanks to some very skillful political work and some good luck.

I think that counterfactual reasoning is important — it’s critical to remember that things could have come out differently as we process this midterm.

In particular, as mad as everyone got at Joe Manchin, Democrats would have been in a world of pain if the Senate had rubber-stamped the Build Back Better bill that passed the House. That was a giant bill that would have prompted some natural thermostatic backlash. But it was also a bill that used 10 years of tax revenue to pay for less than five years of spending, which would have driven up inflation in the short term. Some of the ideas in that bill had real merit, but as a whole, the bill was poorly designed and out of step with the economic situation. Manchin saved progressives from themselves.

The Biden administration was also saved by the courts at a few crucial junctures, with right-wing judges forcing them to give up on mask mandates and efforts to block new oil and gas leases.

By summer/fall of 2022, the White House was correctly positioned on both Covid-19 and energy — vaxxed and relaxed, while pursuing a technology-neutral approach to increasing zero carbon energy production without strangling America’s existing fossil fuel resources. But we could have been in a world where Russia-related gas price spikes coincided with a ban on new oil leasing or where the fall campaign continued to feature debates over airplane masking as a wedge issue dividing Democrats.

There were also lost opportunities.

Progressive champion Mandela Barnes ran a good race in Wisconsin, but he came up short. If he’d run as strong as Tim Ryan then he would have won, as would Cheri Beasley in North Carolina. Or perhaps a more relevant comparison would be Pennsylvania, where Democrats nominated John Fetterman, a Bernie endorser and progressive favorite who made some strategic moves to the center — criticizing mask mandates, supporting fracking and nuclear power, etc. Golden won handily in a Trump +8 state.

Slow Boring launched before the horror of 1/6 at a time when I was not that focused on Trump’s election fraud nonsense.

But I was nonetheless worried about the state of American political institutions. We’d just seen the largest electoral college skew on record. The Senate’s longstanding rural bias mattered more than ever to partisan politics as the electorate polarized on population density lines. The Supreme Court was firmly in conservative hands. Gerrymandering was becoming more efficient and more one-sided. These are not criminal threats to the constitutional order, they are political threats to the democratic legitimacy of the system. They threatened — and continue to threaten — a situation in which Republicans win big, govern hard-right, and then weather a sharp backlash through counter-majoritarian institutions and move to entrench their power.

Insurrectionists and election deniers took a big blow on Election Day, and I don’t want to minimize that or muddy the waters between Trump’s attempted putsch and the Texas state legislature getting aggressive with redistricting.

But it does all matter. There continues to be an urgent need for a serious national anti-gerrymandering bill. I would like to see politicians making the case for binding statehood referenda in D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam. And while I don’t see any reasonable prospect for an “expand the court” initiative at this juncture, I would like to see Democrats take up the mantle of popular constitutionalism and offer a more strident critique of the conservative judiciary.

Two days after the election, the Federalist Society held a big party in D.C. with four of the Dobbs justices in attendance and a standing ovation for Justice Alito as he talked about his ruling. The Biden presidency thus far has been heavily shaped — from student loans to mask mandates to abortion — by the conservative judiciary. The election had a historically shocking outcome thanks to a backlash to that judiciary’s decision-making. But the architects of Dobbs, their financial backers, and their intellectual support network is undeterred, unafraid, and unashamed. They believe they are entrenched and untouchable and are prepared to continue rolling out aggressive new constitutional doctrines. There’s not going to be some political knockout blow in either direction. But restoring and preserving popular sovereignty over the nation is going to take a lot of strong and steady boring over the years to come.