Hot town, summer in the mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

19 - 24 minutes

My fundamental climate change conviction is that I hate D.C. summers, and I really hate 90+ degree weather persisting into September. Make it stop!

Some better news is that living standards have gone up by more than official data indicates when you account for improved food quality. Congratulations to Philip Jefferson on his confirmation as Fed Vice Chair. Analysts now think China’s GDP may not overtake America’s after all, good news for the world, albeit slightly bad news for “One Billion Americans” book sales. Trump is liable for defamation. Microchip factory construction is underway in Kansas. Fresh Covid boosters are coming.

Before we get to the questions, I want to flag that in recent weeks, a small number of people have been posting in threads with questions that read as kind of hostile — a sort of “debate me, bro!” tone — and that’s not a great strategy for getting your question answered. I don’t mean to be too negative; we had tons of great questions this week and I honestly just didn’t get to all of them because I went so long on this first one. Be nice is all I’m saying :)

Jeff: What is your alternative history of what would have happened if the Iraq war had not occurred? Is Sadam still in power now? Has a US fighter plane been shot down? Did the Arab Spring occur? What do you believe is the likely state of Iraq, the wider region, the world, and the US?

You guys know I love alternate history, but this is a tough one because it depends on exactly what counterfactual we’re describing. There are a lot of possible American policies toward Iraq that amount to “not invading Iraq” and they have different upshots. We could be asking “what if Al Gore had been president?” for example, in which case I think he loses in 2004 to John McCain and we get an alternate version of the Iraq War from the McCain administration.

But let’s imagine instead a narrowly different counterfactual. Things play out very similarly, including the congressional vote to authorize the use of force, Saddam backing down and letting more inspectors in, and the inspectors not finding anything.

But in this alternate reality, instead of Bush concluding that this shows the inspections aren’t working, the skeptical intelligence agencies at DOE and State manage to get through to the White House with the message “you should consider the possibility that they’re not finding the nuclear weapons program because there isn’t a nuclear weapons program.” Bush has a moment of doubt. He gut-checks with Tony Blair and other members of the coalition of the willing. President Kwaśniewski of Poland assures Bush that Poland will stand by the United States if they want to go to war, but clarifies that in his mind, this is about the Poland-U.S. relationship and not a strong judgment about the underlying merits of the policy. His personal preference is that the U.S. remains focused on great power competition, but if the U.S. does want to invade, then Poland will stand with us.

Bush realizes that he may have somewhat misunderstood the situation and calls his father for advice.

Dad says he doesn’t want to tell him how to run his administration but that, yes, he should understand that countries are supporting him based on strategic considerations that have nothing to do with the particulars of Iraq and he can’t take that diplomatic context too seriously. Colin Powell tells him that, as a former top general, he can tell Cheney and Rumsfeld are trying to box him in with assertions about the operational necessity of starting the invasion that aren’t strictly true. There’s nothing wrong with delaying for a week or two. So they do, and the inspectors keep not turning anything up. Blair comes to D.C. and says — look, I’m good to go if you are, but isn’t there a way that we can spin this as a huge political triumph for both of us where our toughness and resolution got the inspectors back in with no bloodshed? And we’re the great heroes of the day? After another week, Saddam is really getting nervous and puts it out there — look, guys, there is seriously no nuclear weapons program here. The reason I’ve been squirrelly about it is that Iraq is in kind of a tough neighborhood, and maintaining some ambiguity about your military capabilities is a strong deterrent. Ariel Sharon tells Bush that he’s worried invading Iraq under these circumstances would accelerate rather than deter an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Blair reiterates that this is arguably a huge success story for their agenda. And so Bush decides to take the win.

In this world, I think Saddam is not still with us in 2023 — he died of old age, succeeded by one of his sons.

When Iran’s secret nuclear activities are revealed, U.S. coercive diplomacy is more successful because with no troops bogged down in Iraq, the threat of force is more credible. But the Iranian regime is also less paranoid about the need for a nuclear program. Bush is more comfortable and confident with himself as a diplomat and forges an interim deal with Iran in 2004 that sets talks into motion. With no war actually occurring, there’s no groundswell of support for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. John Kerry doesn’t come across as a flip-flopper; he’s just a guy whose equivocal view of the situation was vindicated by events. Kerry wins the nomination more easily, but Bush is more popular and beats him more easily — Social Security privatization still flops, though.

With no war issue to wield against Hillary Clinton, Obama doesn’t challenge her. John Edwards does surprisingly well in Iowa and New Hampshire as a left-insurgent, but Clinton’s rock-solid African American support crushes him. The Clinton-Obama ticket wins in 2008, but she’s not as popular as our Obama and this version of Bush isn’t as discredited by the end of his term. As a result, Democrats don’t do nearly as well down-ballot in 2008 and there’s no Affordable Care Act. Instead, they do a stimulus bill that includes a permanent program to automatically enroll all kids in Medicaid and then proceed to a torturous negotiation with Republicans about financial regulation.

Finally — the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring still happens since, I think, that was driven largely by commodity prices, media dynamics, and longstanding discontents that would have been in place anyway. But the whole context is different.

But in this version of the Arab Spring, the Clinton administration does not intervene militarily in Libya because the successful diplomacy with Iraq and Iran underscores the importance of upholding the spirit of the Libyan disarmament agreement. Without the precedent of armed rebellion leading to NATO intervention, anti-regime forces in Syria are much more cautious about shifting to armed struggle against Assad and he brutally and relatively quickly puts down the uprising. The conventional wisdom in this reality is that Clinton’s decision to let the Libyan rebels get crushed was a huge mistake, that she choked off a promising efflorescence of democracy. Only cranks like me are saying that overthrowing Gaddafi and encouraging a civil war in Syria might not have turned out nearly as well as the optimists think.

The upshot of all of this is that America just gets less and less engaged in the Middle East over time. The diplomatic alignment there is more chaotic, featuring a Saudi-Iran-Iraq triad of mutual suspicion and a Syria that’s not perfectly aligned with any of them. With Iran less powerful, the Saudis and Gulf states are less eager to mend fences with Israel (though still more eager than they’d like to admit) so Israel is under a bit more practical pressure to care about Palestinians (though still not enough pressure to make them actually care). American oil and gas production keeps ramping up, and by the time Obama is in the White House, American policy is to just not care that much about this part of the world. The main priority is to try to play different players off each other to prevent OPEC from coordinating with Russia on global energy prices.

Harry W: I'm not sure if you've been asked this before but more than once you've suggested it as an underrated what if so, how do you think Reconstruction (and beyond...) would have gone had Hannibal Hamlin been Lincoln's running mate in 1864 and then Lincoln's assassination happened?

Having just done a really long counterfactual about Iraq, I’m not going to try to fully write out a Hamlin one. I’m sincerely not sure what I think and I’d love to read more about it from historians and people who are knowledgeable about the issue. That being said, here’s a few thoughts:

    Reconstruction as we know it is basically doomed by the Panic of 1873, which wrecked the economy and brought Democrats back to power in Congress.

    That was caused fundamentally by events in Europe, so changing American political history doesn’t alter it.

    The question, then, is whether a Hamlin administration could have pursued a course in 1865–68 that altered the structural situation.

Could they have? I’d love to read more specific takes on this. I’m inclined to think that a significant land reform could have been a huge long-term deal.

Kelley: Do you have a recommendation for reporting on climate and energy? I have been considering Heatmap, but I wonder what else is out there.

Heatmap is the right answer.

Outside of Heatmap, I think your best source of information for climate and energy news is really just to read a business publication like the FT or the Wall Street Journal — climate change is a really big deal, so non-niche sources of information are full of coverage of things like the rising cost of offshore wind projects or the implications of Chinese EVs for the European auto industry or Florida finally feeling the bite of climate change via rising insurance premiums.

David: On the Weeds you often seemed to dislike the practice of primaries for choosing candidates. Are there any upsides to them? Do you think we might ever get rid of them?

The upside to primaries, which is considerable, is that when you give a normal person the option of having more say in things or less, he is more likely than not to ask for more. And in the reverse direction, if you propose giving the average person less say over things, he is extremely unlikely to agree to that. As a result, the pattern you see in the United States is toward increasingly large levels of reliance on primary elections. You also see lots of foreign countries — including ones with parliamentary systems — shifting more in the direction of primaries or primary-like systems for selecting candidates or even party leaders.

I think that this is a bad trend.

Note that it was the adoption of primary-style selection that brought the U.K. to the short-lived Liz Truss fiasco and also the longer-lived but less severe Jeremy Corbyn fiasco on the Labour side. In the United States, we are right now poised to have a general election between two unpopular party leaders with well-known flaws, even though there are ideologically similar alternatives readily available to both sides. And while that blunt fact alone doesn’t discredit primaries, I do think it illustrates that the thing people think is good about them — that primaries, by empowering regular people, will give the people what they want — is actually an illusion. The idea is that the little guy is going to get more control over the political process. But the reality is that you’re actually ceding tremendous power to a weird slurry of ideologues and media figures.

Once, a long time ago, I had a meeting with a rich guy.

As a kind of power move, he invited me to brunch at a restaurant that wasn’t open until dinner on weekdays. But he was an investor in the restaurant so they opened the doors for us, sat us at a table, didn’t give us menus because they’re not open for brunch, and then a server walked over and just asked me what I wanted to eat. In theory, that’s good right? Instead of a menu, the server just asks what you want, so you can ask for anything — more control! More control is good! Except it’s not good. It’s paralyzing. I have no idea what they make. Or what would be appropriate. The choices are completely unstructured. So I kind of froze up. Then the rich guy suggested something — some kind of omelette and a side of bacon or whatever — so I just agreed to that. I got to chat once with the founder of one of the fast-casual salad bowl companies, and he said that the flexibility of the bowl model is really important for customer retention since their die-hard loyalists love the ability to tweak and get exactly what they want. But for new customers, it’s really important to have a set list of suggested salads so they can walk in and have a comfortable, low-stress experience.

I don’t want to push this analogy too far (I don’t really approve of analogies), but I think it’s a common sense demonstration that we don’t always benefit from unlimited control.

I’m very pessimistic that we can actually revert to something like an old-fashioned convention system, but I do think we could plausibly build up some more durable factional institutions that could help structure voters’ choices. I hope that in 2028, for example, the Bernie Sanders political operation will have some kind of deliberative process that selects an official Our Revolution candidate who they think would be good and really discourages anyone else in that space from running. And I hope that by then we’ll have a factional organization for more moderate Democrats that can elevate a specific person the way the DLC elevated Bill Clinton in 1992. In that world, the primary would still play a meaningful role in the process but we would not be indulging the fantasy that coming up to random people and asking them “hey, what do you want to eat?” is a useful way to make decisions.

BorgenMorgen: Do you think the declining rate of undergraduate education in the humanities represents a threat to future American leadership in government? Adjacently, do you believe the proverb “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?”

No.

The main thing, I think, is that the average person will get a lot further trying to study a humanities subject informally as an adult than they will trying to study a technical subject. So even though humanistic knowledge is extremely valuable, it makes sense for people to emphasize technical subjects in their formal education.

Jeff: Hoe do you think the Republican party will change after Trump? Will Trumpism remain, change somehow, or wither? Foes it matter how Trump leaves the scene (dead, jail, no longer engaged in politics for some reason)?

Trump was so successful at basically de-fiscalizing American politics and making it all about culture war and symbolism that I think people now believe that’s just how politics is going to be going forward.

But part of the reason Trump succeeded with that is he came along at a time of low inflation and low interest rates when the previous cohort of politicians just really wanted to argue about the budget deficit. He stepped in and said “hey, let’s fight about something more compelling to people instead.” And it worked. But federal interest payments are now rising very rapidly, which means questions about what taxes should go up and what spending should go down are going to become much more salient in the very near future.

Ptuomov: US government debt sustainability?

I’m an optimist about America and think the political system will work this out once attention is focused on it. But per the above, recently everyone has just been yelling about immigration and vaccines, so a steep rise in interest costs has kind of snuck up without attracting the attention it deserves.

Strangepolyhedrons: Do you have any ideas on how to raise the salience of state politics in the minds of voters? As you have often noted in housing discussions, states have enormous legal power to override municipal laws and regulations, as well as a whole host of constitutionally reserved powers. Police reform, for instance, by be best thought of a state issue because many states could impose stricter standards on local police departments (or even dissolve them) if they wanted to. Yet people depend on local news outlets to keep them informed on state politics. Is there maybe some kind of untapped market for “state news sources” that cover all issues within a particular state but do not associate themselves with any particular locality in that state?

On this subject, I am mostly channeling ideas I interviewed David Schleicher about for the Weeds a while ago, but I would start with the premise that we can’t force-feed people news that they aren’t interested in.

The perilous situation facing state and local media is really unfortunate, and the layoffs at the Texas Tribune are a tragedy. But one of the major roots of this is people are authentically not as interested in reading about state and local politics as they are in reading about national politics, and we need to try to reshape our institutions around that reality.

One of the biggest steps we can take there is to try to situate authority where the public’s limited news attention lies. Of all the different things that exist in the state/local politics mix, probably the one place where the public is most knowledgeable and attentive is in questions related to the governor.

    Who is the governor?

    Is the governor doing a good job?

    Who is running against the incumbent governor?

These are really basic questions, and they seem to be questions that the public knows the answer to. That’s why even though red states normally have Republican governors and blue states normally have Democratic ones, there are plenty of exceptions. People have information about Laura Kelly, Roy Cooper, Andy Beshear, Jon Bel Edwards, Chris Sununu, and Phil Scott that is different from their party label. Right now, Ned Lamont is very popular in Connecticut. But if he messes up, he will become unpopular. And if Republicans nominate a moderate to run against him, people will know that they nominated a moderate and will vote for a moderate Republican over an unpopular Democrat. Lamont knows that. So he tries hard — and so far, successfully — to be popular and well-liked even in a blue state. By contrast, there’s no way Republicans are winning a majority in the Connecticut state legislature.

So part of what we should do in state government is shift the balance of power toward governors and away from separately elected attorneys-general, insurance commissioners, and judges. And we should also shift power away from state legislatures and toward governors.

Then beyond that (but for similar reasons), we should be shifting power away from local governments (which tend to be very diffuse and confusing) and toward state governments. You don’t want the governor to be an unchecked dictator. But relative to how the typical jurisdiction currently works, there should be less power in your county commission, your school board, your sheriff, your district attorney, your attorney general, and your state senator and more power in the hands of your governor. That way the concrete, reasonably salient, reasonably well-covered question of who is the governor and what is she up to becomes a big deal.

Another related idea is to try to ban the use of the “Republican” and “Democratic” parties as entities in state elections. Massachusetts should have a Progressive Party (that is more liberal than national Democrats) and a Moderate Party (that is more moderate than national Republicans) that are institutionally distinct from the two national political parties. The Moderate Party would naturally include politicians who vote Republican in national politics, but it should also include politicians who support moderate Democrats. Instead of saying “Jake Auchincloss used to be a Republican when he worked for Charlie Baker but now he’s a Democrat,” it should be that he was a Massachusetts Moderate Party guy who’s a federal Democratic Party guy.

The point of all this would be to try to get people to actually focus on state politics when thinking about state politics. Right now, the obvious move in, say, Kentucky is for Beshear’s opponent this fall to completely ignore all actual issues in Kentucky politics and just say “Andy Beshear is a Democrat neener neener neener” and attack the national Democratic Party a lot. Then Beshear needs to either vocally distance himself from the party in a way that may only get him further trapped in discourse about national politics or else just weather the attack. The more you can create separate institutions and separate labels, the more you can try to have politics that center each state’s median voter and the actual issues that are being debated in any given state.