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36 - 46 minutes
I don’t want this newsletter to get too mired in intraleft conflict, which is fundamentally boring to most normal people, but hey, it’s the end of the month and this comment from reader Rick Gore on my last post sparked a lot of stuff in my brain:
So many people seem to think that if you keep pulling an (already ringing) fire alarm it will somehow put out the fire. Yes — everybody — or at least everybody who is willing to hear it — functionally the same thing — knows that Trump is bad. The fire alarm has been pulled many, many times. What we actually need to do is to start FIGHTING the fire, which means either (a) figuring out how to peel some Trump supporters away from him or (b) figuring out how to turn out current non-voters and get them to vote for the Trump alternative or (c) some combination of (a) and (b). An article talking about how we would go about doing THAT would actually be helpful, but I’ve seen precious few of those.
I find the lack of self-awareness among many thought leaders and consultants in Democratic and progressive politics really striking. It was a bad enough warning alarm that Donald Trump got elected in 2016, which we all knew totally could never happen. But then, while 2020 didn’t turn out to be a nail-biter per se, it wasn’t a blowout, either! All that chaos, all that scandal, all those ridiculous, and in many cases, frankly menacing actions on the part of Trump, and he. . . came pretty close to winning again! More alarmingly, the groups supposedly threatened by Trump — non-white minorities — moved toward him. (Update: Not long after this post went up, my brother, who follows electoral politics more closely than I do, texted me to argue against my phrasing here. “The last election was absolutely a nail-biter,” he said. “People don't seem to understand this. The margin of victory was three states that had Biden winning margins of 0.63, 0.3, and 0.23 percentage points.” That would be Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, respectively. Reasonable people can differ on whether this constitutes a nail-biter given that Trump would have had to win all three to earn a 269-269 tie — at which point things would have gotten super weird — but fair enough.)
If your job is to get Democratic/progressive candidates elected, this pattern of events should jolt you a little bit. You and your colleagues have been railing nonstop about how dangerous Donald Trump is, about how antidemocratic and racist he is, and how much of a threat to vulnerable people he is. After all that railing, Trump. . . picks up support among many of the groups you’re claiming to want to protect! If that doesn’t inspire a crisis of conscience about the quality of your work and the accuracy of your beliefs about effective politics, what would?
Shortly after the election Politico published an article that nicely explained some of this, headlined “Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote.” In it, the independent immigration reporter Jack Herrera examined one of the most alarming facts about 2020, which concerned a border county in Texas: “Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Zapata County’s vote in a hundred years.”
“To many outsiders,” wrote Herrera, “these results were confounding: How could Trump, one of the most virulently anti-immigrant leaders, make inroads with so many Latinos, and along the Mexican border no less?”
Herrera explained that actual residents of the county didn’t buy this framing at all:
In Zapata, however, these questions have been met with mild chuckles to outright frustration. The shift, residents and scholars of the region say, shouldn’t be surprising if, instead of thinking in terms of ethnic identity, you consider the economic and cultural issues that are specific to the people who live there. Although the vast majority of people in these counties mark “Hispanic or Latino” on paper, very few long-term residents have ever used the word “Latino” to describe themselves. Ascribing Trump’s success in South Texas to his campaign winning more of “the Latino vote” makes the same mistake as the Democrats did in this election: Treating Latinos as a monolith.
Ross Barrera, a retired U.S. Army colonel and chair of the Starr County Republican Party, put it this way: “It’s the national media that uses ‘Latino.’ It bundles us up with Florida, Doral, Miami. But those places are different than South Texas, and South Texas is different than Los Angeles. Here, people don’t say we’re Mexican American. We say we’re Tejanos.”
Though not everyone in the Rio Grande Valley self-identifies as Tejano, the descriptor captures a distinct Latino community—culturally and politically—cultivated over centuries of both Mexican and Texan influences and geographic isolation. Nearly everyone speaks Spanish, but many regard themselves as red-blooded Americans above anything else. And exceedingly few identify as people of color. (Even while 94 percent of Zapata residents count their ethnicity as Hispanic/Latino on the census, 98 percent of the population marks their race as white.) Their Hispanicness is almost beside the point to their daily lives.
It’s not just that the most successful mainstream progressive journalists / consultants / campaign staffers / activists and others like to talk and write about race in the deeply essentialist and condescending and tokenizing way that bounces right off both Zapata voters and so many other members of the United States’ linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse non-white population. At this point, I’d argue this sort of identity talk is a prerequisite to get any sort of desirable position in these fields (at least if the position in question entails discussing identity). It’s everywhere, and it has absolutely exploded during the Trump years.
This style of discussing identity is stifling and elitist and does not reflect how real people talk — it’s an extension of the longtime tendency, shared in very different ways by both right-wing racists and left-of-center social justice types, to flatten groups of hundreds of millions of people into borderline useless categories, and to then pretend they share some sort of essence.
It’s telling that in August 2020, Pew published polling which revealed that members of one such group still preferred Hispanic, which had long since been discarded by most progressive organizations (though I’ve seen signs of a comeback here and there), to Latino by a 3-to-1 margin:
Note that, while the title of the chart uses Hispanics, right under the polling stating that members of this group vastly prefer to be called that, Pew reverts to calling them Latino. As I was saying. . .
Other research suggests that many members of these groups at least partially reject the idea that they’re a member of any such giant pseudogroup. As Pew research published the next month noted, significantly more members of these groups prefer to describe their identity with reference to the country of their heritage, or as simply American, than as Hispanic or Latino.
The point is, a lot of people who are supposedly very invested in beating Trump don’t seem willing to compromise on even the smallest of linguistic or symbolic issues. To reference this Freddie deBoer post for the 1,000,000th time, sometimes it seems like they care more about their standing in their own group than about whether their group wins out there in the real world.
(Important caveat: there’s always a risk of overgeneralizing here. I strongly believe everything I’m saying applies, undeniably, to a certain class of public-facing writer and intellectual type who tweet a lot and who wield disproportionate influence over progressive policies and messaging. I also believe that there are hardworking, on-the-ground organizers who don’t have much of an influence on this discourse who are well-attuned to these groups and actually know how to talk to them without sounding like WokeBot 5000.)
At the end of his post, commenter Rick Gore notes that “An article talking about how we would go about doing THAT would actually be helpful, but I’ve seen precious few of those.” I think I slightly disagree with that last part — it feels like there’s been a fairly robust conversation about this in progressive spaces, with the wunderkind progressive data scientist David Shor’s arguments about electability serving as a major focal point (this Google search will give you a sense of how much coverage there was of him and his arguments).
The problem is less that no one is talking about this and more that anyone who does talk about it quickly gets shellacked by others on the left as, at best, reactionary-adjacent. Shor himself is a great example. In May 2020 he tweeted research from the black Princeton scholar Omar Wasow suggesting that after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, race riots harmed Democratic prospects in surrounding counties, whereas nonviolent protests were beneficial to Dems.
One could not imagine a more milquetoast, inoffensive electability argument than this one. And yet quickly, a deranged freakout descended on Shor. An activist named Ari Trujillo, for example, responded by calling the take “tone deaf,” arguing that it “removes responsibility for depressed turnout from the 68 Party and reeks of anti-blackness.”
After Shor responded, arguing that Trujillo was misunderstanding the study, Trujillo dug in deeper, and tagged in Shor’s then-boss, Civis Analytics founder and CEO Dan Wagner.
Wagner, in a move that should permanently besmirch his name unless and until he apologizes or provides exculpatory context, responded by firing David Shor. Shor has since moved on to a very successful career running his own outfit, but it was still an astonishing turn of events that highlighted the risk of even mildly criticizing the radical chic types who wield undue influence over Democratic affairs.
I’m not going to pretend 2023 is as crazy as 2020. In some ways things have calmed down, and there is more space for Shor and figures like him to make their arguments. So it’s not that there’s no discussion of this. But those who engage in it still face very real and very unfair attacks on their reputations from the same brand of bad actors.
Take Matt Yglesias. Yglesias has been a major participant in this discussion for years. He criticized Shor’s firing at the time. Then he left Vox to start his own newsletter in part because his colleague publicly said that his decision to sign the Harper’s Letter (to which we will return, I regret to inform you) made her feel “less safe” working at Vox. “[I]f you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work,” he told The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.
These days, he is increasingly despised by the more online segment of the Democratic establishment. He is Part of the Problem. Why? In part because he keeps unapologetically explaining something that was common sense 30 seconds ago: to win elections, particularly national ones, you have to. . . well, do politics. You have to make trade-offs or choose to abandon or de-emphasize certain smaller fights for the sake of winning larger ones.
This belief is constantly caricatured as “Oh, so you’re saying we should let the GOP feast on the bones of our oppressed Latinx comrades??,” but Yglesias says nothing of the sort. He simply argues that the way to prevent people’s bones from being eaten in the first place is to win elections, and winning elections involves being strategic. For this he is constantly slammed as some sort of traitor to the cause.
Two examples nicely highlight the hollowness and pettiness of his opponents’ arguments. In February, Yglesias tweeted: “I advise everyone to engage in mindful tweeting and talk more about this and less about identity politics for librarians.”
This, as indicated by Yglesias’s screencap of a Josh Barro article, is a reference to Ron DeSantis’s established record of fiscal hawkishness regarding Medicare and Social Security, both of which he wants to cut severely. Dave Roberts responded by asking Yglesias if “by identity politics for librarians,” Yglesias meant the discussions over books being banned (from school libraries), and Yglesias replied: “Yes: My contention is that more cross-pressured and sporadic voters care about the future of Social Security and health care programs than about which books are available in which libraries.” (A cross-pressured voter, in this context, is one who feels pushed in different directions by different issues or arguments. “X makes me want to vote blue, while Y makes me want to vote red.”)
Now, Yglesias probably shouldn’t have used the phrase “identity politics for librarians.” Surely you can understand how that might come across as dismissive to someone concerned about the Republican fixation on LGBT content in libraries and classrooms. But, to be fair, the people mad at Yglesias aren’t generally that sensitive about language. A lot of them regularly call their opponents pieces of shit, fascists, reactionaries, and so on — they tend to be selective about when they cheer on abusive language versus when they collapse onto their fainting couches.
And if they could see past that one snide phrase, it wouldn’t be that difficult for them to understand Yglesias’s point: he is saying that you can potentially win some voters to the Democratic side by focusing more on meat-and-potatoes issues than on what books are available in which libraries — and I really think he (and Roberts) should have said “school” libraries, because that’s where 95% of these debates are taking place, notwithstanding the existence of some jerks trying to yank books out of public libraries.
This seems like a straightforward argument. A “sporadic” and “cross-pressured” voter is the sort of voter who is perhaps susceptible to persuasion, because they are unlikely to have a strong, locked-in partisan identity. If they view the Democrats primarily as “the party that wants to protect Social Security,” they’re probably more likely to vote blue than if they view the Democrats as primarily “the party that wants to keep dirty books in school libraries.” So in this view, Democrats have some agency over their electoral prospects; they can act in a strategic manner and choose which fights to emphasize.
Let’s get a bit more specific about how that would look in practice. The most common book that comes up in this discussion is probably Gender Queer: A Memoir. It’s a trans coming-out graphic novel that includes sexually explicit scenes, including one involving a strap-on and a blowjob that is not blacked out as it is in this image I stole from The American Conservative:
I read half of it, planning to write about it in this newsletter, before I got distracted by other stuff. The half I read was. . . fine. Most of it is just normal coming-of-age stuff from a trans perspective. I’m skeptical of certain elements of progressive orthodoxy about gender identity reflected in the book — I’d return to that same word, essentialist, to sum up my critique — but of course “I disagree with this book’s philosophy” is no reason to want it banned from school libraries.
As for the saucy parts, though. . . I’m torn on what the right approach is to a book like this. Gender Queer has shown up in some middle school libraries, and I do think it’s probably inappropriate for that age group. On the other hand, I think it’s fine for high school–aged teenagers to have access to a graphic novel that, in addition to 90% nonsexual material, includes a couple of static cartoon sex scenes. There are sex ed materials that contain similar fare.
Mostly, I think the controversy over this has grown so large — it’s truly a national story — because some of the most politically locked-in people in the country see it as a sacred battleground on which to fight for their values. If you’re a conservative, this is just proof that liberals are trying to — and I recognize the word choice issues here, trust me — thrust all this LGBT stuff down your throat. If you’re a liberal, this is just proof that those conservatives are censorious, anti-LGBT, would-be tyrants. But the actual stakes, or the actual number of people affected, by the question of whether this book can be checked out of a specific library. . . it is not a large issue. It’s the symbolism that really drove this fight into the national spotlight as well as how it connects to broader GOP efforts to exert more control over school libraries and curricula.
Let’s set aside, or concede, the middle school question to the book’s skeptics, because Google suggests that most of these fights involve high school libraries. Here, I can’t really understand spending much time freaking out about this, to be honest. I’m sure at least a few of my readers who are parents will get mad at me for saying this, but it seems undeniably true that any teenager with an iota of technological expertise has access to much more lascivious material than anything in Gender Queer. If you’re complaining about this book’s availability in your kid’s high school library, and your kid has any unrestricted internet access, you’re in for a very rude surprise.
Anyway, there’s certainly some complexity here, not least because traditionally, the worst examples of “government censorship” of books have involved outlawing the possession or printing of a book. Local decisions over which books can or can’t be included in a school library are very different — even the most ardent social justice activist would agree that some books don’t belong there. So it’s really just a question of which books go too far, and often that question comes back to individual citizens’ values.
Blah, blah, blah. What it comes down to is that, in light of all this, a hypothetical enlightened progressive could potentially hold two nonconflicting opinions about Gender Queer as regarding some hypothetical race in a swing state or district:
1) The various conservative attempts to ban Gender Queer from even high school libraries reflect, in part, a censorious or anti-LGBT streak, and an overreach of government power on the part of supposed “small government” conservatives.
2) This is probably not an ideal controversy for progressives to focus on in this instance. The philosophical principles and specific merits aside, the simple fact is that given how Republicans will endlessly frame this, the book’s defenders will be forced to explain why it’s very important for teenagers to have access to an image of someone getting a strap-on blowjob. That image will come up, often in the form of oversized placards wielded by conservative activists, at every town hall and small-town diner, and will dominate the campaign. There are many voters — and not just decided Republicans — for whom the pro–Gender Queer position will not resonate, even if it’s morally or philosophically correct. There are all sorts of morally or philosophically correct positions we table or even abandon for the sake of winning larger battles. And sometimes the abandonment is temporary: once we win the election, we can then make sure to get Gender Queer into school libraries, if we decide it’s important enough to spend our capital on.
That’s what Yglesias was getting at. Maybe it’s right or maybe it’s wrong, but it’s a strategic argument: focus on the prospect of voters’ Medicare and Social Security getting cut, not on whether kids who are one Google search away from downloading Gender Queer can also check out a physical copy from their library.
In response to Yglesias’s brief tweets, Parker Molloy wrote an article denouncing him for hypocrisy: he had signed the Harper’s Letter — yes, we are still talking about the Harper’s Letter, because among Molloy and her colleagues, it is basically a modern-day Munich Agreement, except perhaps more important and more shameful — and now he was excusing a book ban? Are you freaking kidding me???
Speech is under attack, and it’s not “oh, these random people on the internet criticized me” or “Twitter roasted a guy for saying something they disagreed with” or “this student protest was a bit overzealous!” No, no, no. It’s the “Hey, the state is trying to purge libraries of books that feature LGBTQ people or discuss racism!” variety of speech that’s under attack. Seems like the Free Speech Brigade who signed on to the Harper’s Letter would be all about that!
And yet, there Matt Yglesias is, a man who, again, signed a letter that said, “If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public for the state to defend it for us,” characterizing government-initiated limits on what can be discussed in schools, what books can be taught in class, what books are allowed in the school and public library, and so on, as “identity politics for librarians.”
This is who the pundit class has always been.
It’s probably worth noting that Yglesias has argued, in depth, why he thinks the most famous of these laws (DeSantis’s, in Florida) is bad and likely to have a chilling effect due to its “deliberately broad, deliberately vague language,” but might not be the all-out attack on free speech or academic freedom some have made it out to be. (I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern in which progressive outlets and pundits spread misinformation about these laws that tends to exaggerate their impact, though my own most in-depth peek at one of them concerned a different law.) So it’s not as though Yglesias is oblivious to these issues or hasn’t chimed in — rather, he’s making an electability argument about what deserves the most focus and emphasis.
Molloy doesn’t even entirely disagree! Toward the end of her post, she admits that “It may, in fact, be better politics to focus on DeSantis’ Social Security comments versus his attempts to censor and restrict content he dislikes, but then that makes you wonder why a bunch of writers decided that it was not only worth saying, but that it was essential that people hear this message during the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and looming elections. At minimum, I think it at least speaks to the inconsistent application of the ‘free speech’ commitments.”
This is not a small point to grant. Molloy and Yglesias both agree that (1) Ron DeSantis is bad, (2) Ron DeSantis is worse for LGBT rights than a Democratic alternative, and (3) it may be better politics to focus on economic issues rather than the book stuff. So what is there to be mad about? The letter, the letter, the letter! It’s exceptionally important — how could that asshole have signed it?? Molloy really tips her hand with the word essential. I thought it was important enough to sign, sure, and that the language was thoroughly unobjectionable, but no, I would not phrase things this strongly.
In Molloy’s world, though, the Harper’s Letter was, again, a signature event. Its symbolic importance cannot be overstated. In the rest of the country, what percentage of Americans have heard of the Harper’s Letter? Would 10% be an unfair underestimate? Twenty percent at most? She’s making Yglesias’s point for him exactly.
We’re basically left with this:
Yglesias: We spend too much time fighting over stuff that is relatively symbolic and niche, rather than more meaningful policies that affect far more Americans, and this prevents us from winning battles that will allow progressives to better influence the outcomes of both large and small policy disputes.
Molloy: Yeah but you signed the Harper’s Letter!
Eighty percent of Americans (if we’re being generous to Molloy): What is the Harper’s Letter? What does this have to do with anything?
One last bit from Molloy’s screed:
Where’s the “Harper’s Letter” about the states enacting laws restricting speech? Where’s the “Harper’s Letter” that makes clear that whatever beliefs you have about “cancel culture,” state-sponsored censorship is a much more extreme version of that?
I’m just a humble blogger who doesn’t know much about all this fancy politics stuff but to me, the single best way to prevent states from enacting censorious laws is to defeat the politicians advocating for those laws. One could argue that in terms of real-world impact, this is even more important (if that’s possible) than an open letter printed in a magazine that, while a consistently good read, probably has a five-figure print subscription at this point.
In short, when it comes to the progressive cause, only a person absolutely batshit obsessed with internecine internet feuding — and this is quite an accusation, coming from me! — could possibly think it makes more sense to focus on who signed what letter than who has the best ideas for beating Republicans. Other than noting, briefly, as though it’s an unimportant aside, that Yglesias might be right, Molloy has nothing to say about that. She has hundreds of words more to say about the letter, though, and how angry she is about it. Three years later. Can we get some sort of statute of limitations in place on this?
But that’s a huge part of how Molloy and her colleagues make their money — by endlessly attacking others on the left who refuse to parrot their own preferred arguments in exactly the way they demand. Because they have no substantive ideas about how to win, and in some ways benefit from not winning, all they do is naysay, and lest they run out of targets, they must constantly patrol the grounds of the left to find new ones. As a result, no one on the left who has any tactical sense or ability to see the bigger picture goes unbothered by this crew. It’s gratifying to me that they’ve failed so spectacularly when it comes to big names like Yglesias, who has a huge and growing platform, but they’re still quite annoying.
Anyway, yes, Yglesias has made these points about electability repeatedly. In another, more recent article on the subject, he argued that “the most fundamental divide in progressive politics today” concerns whether “there is a set of identity-linked issues that are beyond the scope of normal political give and take[.]” This, he wrote, strikes him as “[a] divide so important that it transcends disagreements about everything else.” I think there’s a lot of evidence to support this view.
This is probably the most important part of Yglesias’s argument:
In particular, I think it’s worth considering the impact of this way of thinking on cross-pressured voters. Imagine a Texan who favors Medicaid expansion but thinks student athletes should play on chromosomally-appropriate sports teams. Well, you could tell that person that Medicaid has enormous concrete stakes for 1.4 million uninsured Texans while the sports issue impacts a tiny number of people.
But if progressives take the view that identity issues are fundamental moral principles and are too important to brook any compromise, that encourages people with the non-progressive view to see it the same way. And when you’re on the unpopular side of the fundamental issue of conscience, that just means you lose elections and lose on both policy issues.
Yglesias’s post elicited a scathing rebuttal from Chris Geidner, a.k.a. Law Dork, who attacked not only Yglesias but other alleged too-centrist types, myself included (I’m going to ignore the me stuff). The post was titled “Confronting a pair of dangerous arguments as trans people remain under attack.”
Dangerous!
Here’s most of what Geidner says about Yglesias, with numbers added by me:
The same day that [Judge Barbara Lagoa] issued [an opinion allowing an Alabama ban on youth gender medicine to go forward] for a three-Trump-appointee panel of the Eleventh Circuit, (1) Matt Yglesias wrote a lengthy piece, ultimately, criticizing Democrats for being unwilling to “compromise” on transgender rights.
He goes through a bunch of moves to suggest that’s not what he’s doing, but when you brush away the filler, that is his argument — pointing to Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, and F.D.R.’s “compromises” as a model and arguing that today’s progressives and, increasingly, Democratic Party elites are “more interested in ideological purity and uncompromising moral stands.”
The problem with his argument is two-fold: first, (2) he uses poor historical examples, in which the compromises were a matter of moving forward more slowly, and, second, he (3) ignores the vast majority of the legislation being passed today, focusing solely on sports — and even framing that in an anti-trans way.
Yglesias writes of the civil rights movement, from F.D.R. forward as such:
[I can’t figure out how to double-blockquote this, so I’m italicizing it:]
Throughout it all, the civil rights movement was pressing for more, and there were always people urging them to be more moderate and more compromising, saying “you’re going too fast.” And they rejected that. But they also clearly weren’t totally uncompromising, either. They treated all kinds of half-measures as meaningful and lots of deeply flawed politicians as worthy of support. There was no categorical distinction between civil rights and economic issues; it was all politics.
This is setting up a false analogy. The proper analysis here is not the Civil Rights Era. (2, cont.) This isn’t a matter of righteous questions about a too-slow forward movement. This is an issue of rapid backwards movement. Similar with his discussion of Howard Dean and civil unions in 2000 before Massachusetts became the first state with marriage equality in 2004. 1996’s Defense of Marriage Act, arguably, was a backward step, but it was putting in place limits against something — same-sex couples’ marriage rights — that were not legal in any state at the time. (This is relevant shortly.
(3) This leads to Yglesias’s second flaw. He ignores the key questions of the day, instead focusing solely on transgender people’s participation in school sports — which he characterizes as a view, from the perspective of a Texan, that “student athletes should play on chromosomally-appropriate sports teams.”
Of course, there was no reason why Yglesias had to describe even that issue in the way his hypothetical Texan might characterize it, but, putting that aside, he is ignoring far more damaging legislation and laws that are already causing significant harm.
One thing I’ve found, in my frequent and frequently unpleasant interactions with folks in the Molloy and Geidner camp who are furious that anyone on the left criticizes the left or believes there are any problems with groupthink, tolerance, and purity testing in our shared space, is that they have a profound, almost pathological inability to accurately render their opponents’ arguments and respond to them with integrity and honesty. They just can’t do it. They can’t. As soon as they see the byline of someone they hate, like Yglesias, the words on the screen under that byline rearrange themselves into something significantly worse and stupider, at which point they get mad about the imaginary article and respond to that one — the one that exists in their head — instead. So nothing that follows should be a surprise: asking Chris Geidner to offer a substantive, good-faith response to Matt Yglesias’s work is like asking a toddler to fix a dishwasher.
Let’s take a look at the numbered points one at a time:
(1) “Matt Yglesias wrote a lengthy piece, ultimately, criticizing Democrats for being unwilling to ‘compromise’ on transgender rights.”
Geidner faces a challenge right off the bat. It is important to his article’s argument for him to be mad at Yglesias over trans stuff, but Yglesias’s article wasn’t really about trans stuff. Rather, his argument was much bigger and broader than any one issue, and he used one instance of a trans controversy (sports, a particularly potent electoral loser), among others, to illustrate his point. So like all good legal writers everywhere, Geidner inserts a fairly meaningless wriggle word — ultimately — to allow him to evade the accusation of misrepresentation. (In his next sentence, Geidner notes, “He goes through a bunch of moves to suggest that’s not what he’s doing. . . ,” but again, you can really just read the piece and see that it’s not about trans rights per se.)
(2) “[H]e uses poor historical examples, in which the compromises were a matter of moving forward more slowly. . .” [and] “This isn’t a matter of righteous questions about a too-slow forward movement. This is an issue of rapid backwards movement.”
This is really silly and almost a non sequitur. In almost every case, the “backwards” movement is a backlash to recently passed laws or recently introduced norms. Whatever you think about the merits of these issues, until recently, giving young teenagers puberty blockers and hormones and (sometimes) mastectomies was almost unheard of in the States, as was gender self-ID in high school and college sports leading to biological males playing on girls’ or women’s teams. Again, Yglesias doesn’t mention any of these issues and it’s weird for Geidner to pretend his piece was focused on trans issues, but whether the policy debates being had are construed as instances of potential forward or backwards movement has genuinely nothing to do with the question of whether and under what circumstances compromise should be brooked.
(3) “This leads to Yglesias’s second flaw. He ignores the key questions of the day, instead focusing solely on transgender people’s participation in school sports[.]”
Yglesias’s article, again, wasn’t solely about trans issues — that’s why he didn’t go into more depth on that subject. And it makes sense that in his one mention of trans issues in a post about compromise, he references a facet of this debate he has previously identified as a worthy candidate for compromise.
As Yglesias wrote last year:
. . . I think progressives have grown somewhat overconfident about the broad popularity of some of these issues and are not paying enough attention to the potential electoral ramifications of supporting trans participation on women’s sports teams. The Transgender Law Center itself says that in their message testing that “our opposition wins the debate on trans youth in sports against any and all arguments we have tried for our side.”
The Biden administration, for one, agrees — it has not pursued a hard-line approach on this issue, instead pushing for a policy that gives high schools and colleges wide latitude to maintain fully sex-segregated sports if they can argue the necessity of this policy on the grounds of fairness to female athletes.
A closer read of Yglesias’s article would have revealed to Geidner that, not long after mentioning sports, Yglesias explicitly pivots to one of the most important current public policy debates, arguing that even there compromise is useful:
Of course, not all Democrats see it that way. Joe Biden is old-fashioned and talked during the primary about how when he first got to the Senate, he was serving alongside segregationists and learned to work with them on other issues. He took a lot of criticism for that in some quarters, but he won the primary, won the election, and has passed some bipartisan bills.
Or to take an even sharper example, John Bel Edwards has signed some very draconian anti-abortion bills in Louisiana. I think he’s dead wrong on the merits of this topic. And in most of the country that would be terrible politics, too — abortion rights are generally more popular than the Democratic Party, and Democrats do well post-Dobbs to talk a lot about their support of a woman’s right to choose. But there is state-to-state variation, and in lots of Southern states, abortion is less popular than the Democratic Party due to the presence of significant numbers of anti-abortion African Americans. So in Edwards’ case, by giving ground on abortion, he’s been able to expand Medicaid and accomplish other things. Unlike with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, I have absolutely no problem with abortion rights advocates slagging Edwards, because he is genuinely right-wing on this issue. But my old-fashioned view is that nothing is beyond compromise.
So while Geidner accuses Yglesias of “ignor[ing] the key questions of the day” that pertain to trans issues, that’s because — this is the last time I’ll repeat this, I hope — his piece wasn’t really about trans issues. Yglesias is transparent that he thinks that even on one of the key issues of the day, abortion, he’s also pro–strategic compromise. Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s wrong, but Geidner doesn’t come close to responding to his substantive point. I don’t think Geidner has any real response to this, because it would be fairly delusional, given the state’s politics, to say “Well, why don’t the Louisiana Dems just nominate a much leftier candidate for governor, and then have him or her win the primary and the general?”
There’s a pattern here: you see few substantive answers to electability arguments like Yglesias’s. Instead, you get a lot of name-calling and smearing and kvetching that comes across as elitist and arguably narcissistic. Folks like Molloy and Geidner spend surprising amounts of time criticizing people who want Democrats to win, and who make arguments seeking to secure that outcome, solely because those folks refuse to do so in exactly the manner they’d prefer, spouting the right buzzwords and toting the proper radical-chic symbols. This is exceptionally strange and misguided, given that if Democrats won, it would help ameliorate all the problems they claim to be most concerned with. I can’t prove this, but it does come across as though, deep down, they are more worried about bolstering their in-group status — and what better way to do so than by signaling your aversion to compromise, and by being the 10,000th person to scream about how bad Matt Yglesias is, or how he’s a “serious threat to the political health of the nation” (!!!)? — than winning anything.
To be clear, everyone involved here is an elite — we all get to write for a living, which is a rare privilege. Yglesias went to Harvard and is a Substack millionaire at this point. I’m some podcasting jerk in Brooklyn; I’ve somehow spent more than $10 on iced coffee today and it’s not 3:00 p.m. yet. Much of this infighting and backbiting is really about our own egos and our own desire for drama and validation and content, at the end of the day.
But beneath the insufferable online circus lies the vitally important question of who will have power in America, and what sorts of arguments will advance progressive causes. There are real stakes there, and I will always hear out the guy or gal who has given some thought to the question of how progressives can actually win, while doing my best to ignore Twitter’s roving bands of argumentatively underpowered intraleft morality cops.
Questions? Comments? Criticisms about this newsletter’s lack of purity? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. The lead image is a preview of what the United States might look like from early 2025 to early 2029 if the views of pundits like Parker Molloy and Chris Geidner win out.
MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE - APRIL 27: Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on April 27, 2023 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Trump, who is currently dealing with a growing number of legal cases against him, is the Republican frontrunner for the Republican presidential ticket. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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