Slow Boring's fourth year. By Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias

14 Nov 2023

www.slowboring.com

13 - 16 minutes

Today is the first day of the fourth year of Slow Boring, a good time to take stock of both the trajectory of the site and the broader political circumstances.

First, a brief update on the site itself.

Our annual revenue rose a bit over 15% over the course of Year Three, which represents an acceleration relative to eight percent revenue growth in Year Two.

And I’m really happy that we’ve been able to achieve that without raising prices. Obviously our supply chain is not heavily impacted by inflation. But it’s still true that when we launched, a month of Slow Boring was 44% the price of a month of Netflix, and we’re now down to 35%. I like to think we offer a quality editorial product, but I understand that no one is in danger of running out of interesting things to read, so having the price become more affordable over time seems good.

One upside of revenue growth is that we’re able to expand the scope of the operation. With Ben joining the team full-time, we’ll be able to be more consistent in our community-building efforts and hopefully expand the scope of our editorial output a bit. I’m also really hoping to increase our audio offerings this year and to get a more regular podcast off the ground soon. And maybe this will be the year I finally deliver on the promise to sell t-shirts.

But the point is, it’s been a great year of growth thanks to Kate and Claire and Milan and Maya, but fundamentally, it’s thanks to all of you who subscribe.

I’m truly grateful from the bottom of my heart to everyone who supported this project at launch and to everyone who has given it a try since then. It’s an immense privilege to be able to write for a dedicated, paying audience and not be held hostage to the vagaries of tech platform distribution fads and digital advertising trends.

Thank you all.

Slow Boring has prospered, but I think that only underscores the need for more complex forms of institution-building.

Because while I absolutely, 100 percent believe in the importance of takes in shaping the world of political possibilities, it’s also clear to me that certain things can only be achieved by something more tangible than columns.

In many ways, this has been a topsy-turvy three years. When we launched, I thought Joe Biden was likely to inherit a labor market in the toilet and a GOP-controlled Senate that would extract a heavy price for any fiscal stimulus. Instead, because Democrats won a pair of senate races in Georgia and the narrowest of majorities enacted the boldest of stimuluses, we got a record-beating labor market recovery and have since been making policy in a world of full employment and non-zero interest rates. We are also living through a much more eventful period in international relations than I was expecting. I’ve written sporadically about that this past year, but in Year Four I’d like to step back a bit from the specific debates over Ukraine and Israel and try to think about the implications of a world in which competition with China isn’t just a catchphrase.

But for all that has changed or gone differently than expected, I think three structural aspects American politics that haunted my thoughts when I launched are still with us:

    Donald Trump is a corrupt, authoritarian menace whose term in office ended up going much better on a practical level than it might have, but whose fundamental lack of shame or principle risks inflicting massive long-term damage on the country.

    The Democratic Party, as currently constituted, does not have a realistic plan for winning senate majorities and governing the country. A lot of people who spent 18 months furious at Joe Manchin got a sinking feeling in their stomach when he announced his retirement.

    America’s blue states are wealthy and in some ways prospering, but their share of the national population is declining, and they are not systematically delivering the progressive goods in terms of more egalitarian economies and better public services. 

I think it’s important to aggregate across all three of those points.

There’s a Mainstream Democrat view that looks at Gretchen Whitmer’s solid polling and what Democrats have been able to achieve in Michigan and Minnesota with very narrow legislative majorities and decides that everything is basically fine. Biden might lose in 2024, which would be bad, but that’s explainable purely as a factor of his age. All Democrats really need to do is work on candidate recruitment and getting people like me to shut up.

This is just much too modest a vision in my view. It stakes too much on Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester winning re-election and living forever, and it promises to leave the country in a state of permanent emergency, while ceding governance of half the country to a party of maniacs. Biden’s basic ideological positioning would be fine if there were a robust wing of right-of-Biden Democrats or if the mainstream party could be positioned further right such that national candidates are winning in landslides. But the status quo is sleepwalking toward disaster while actually making any ambitious progressive policy change extremely unlikely.

To get re-elected in 2024, Biden needs some good luck and some savvy political tactics, and I hope it happens. But America needs something bigger than that, which is going to require a significant institutional revival of pragmatic politics and commonsense ideology.

One of the major changes over the course of my career is that public opinion and public policy has generally shifted to the left. Not everything about that has been good, but on balance I think it’s very much been change for the better.

But in parallel with that change, the set of institutions that used to anchor the moderate wing of the Democratic Party has largely collapsed. There are a bunch of small-bore details to that story, not all of which I fully understand. In broad terms, though, I think the most important thing is that the DLC and related institutions made a very bad bet on the invasion of Iraq and then stuck with fiscal austerity as a concept, even in the depths of the Great Recession. Those debates were high-profile and substantively important, and poor judgment on those topics decimated the New Democrat brand and left the associated institutions in shambles.

On one level, that was just deserts.

But on another level, it’s been a catastrophe. It’s not like all contemporary Democrats are hardcore progressives — far from it. But the moderate side of the party has largely lost the capacity to be proactive and constructive rather than just saying “no” to a subset of agenda items elevated by the left. Younger moderate staffers don’t have good networks to plug into. And someone who’d like to run for state legislature in an R+4 seat can’t affiliate herself with a broadly recognizable moderate Dem brand identity.

I worry in particular about the incentives facing longshot candidates.

If you’re Colin Allred running against Ted Cruz in Texas, then you know the fact that everyone hates Cruz gives you a chance. But to win, you need the votes of a swathe of people who voted twice for Trump, who routinely vote Republican down ballot, and who, all things considered, just don’t love mainstream Democrats. At the same time, you look at guys like Beto O’Rourke and Jamie Harrison, charismatic politicians who ran ideologically banal races and performed in line with the fundamentals. And then you look at people like Heidi Heitkamp or Joe Donnelly or Brandon Presley, who ran well ahead of the fundamentals but lost tough races anyway. Right now, losing conventionally is rewarded in a way that overperforming with heterodoxy is not. The reality is that no matter what Allred does, he’s going to be an underdog in this race. I want a world where he tries as hard as possible to win, and is rewarded for overperforming, whether or not he wins. Longshot candidates usually need some good luck to win, but a world with those incentives is a world in which candidates are making smarter choices and putting themselves in a position to maximize the benefits of good luck when it arrives. I fear that we instead live in a world where the best thing for Allred’s career is to run as if Texas is identical to Minnesota.

The good news is that we are belatedly starting to see some institutional renewal.

I’m affiliated with the Niskanen Center, which had some leadership turmoil in recent years, but is back in gear and able to offer things like constructive criticism of the Build Back Better childcare proposals and creative solutions to military recruiting shortfalls. The Niskanen proposal to improve the targeting of EV subsidies to generate larger environmental impact at lower cost is another great example. Politicians who have broadly correct instincts about how to position themselves very much need this kind of policy support and legislative subsidy so that efforts to engage in moderate politics can be substantive.

The YIMBY movement, broadly speaking, is a great institutional success story with two different national networks of chapters, recognized leaders in electoral politics, and the ability to share best practices and learnings across the country.

I’ve recently learned more about groups like Effective Government California and GrowSF that are getting into the nitty gritty of how to make blue state governance better. They’re focused on procedure but also willing to wade into the fight of electoral politics. There’s a new Effective Transit Alliance in New York City, trying to bring technical insights to bear on how to reduce the waste in NYC infrastructure spending and get more out of it. On the more political side, Lauren Harper and Liam Kerr have the Welcome PAC, which aims to recruit and support Democratic candidates who can appeal to swing voters and what they call “future former Republicans.” And I’m excited about Blueprint 2024, a new polling and messaging initiative that aims to provide a little bit more real talk about which aspects of the Democratic policy agenda actually appeal to voters — something Democrats tend to do well when crafting their paid ads, but much less so when it comes to daily communication with the media.

This is all good stuff (and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some worthwhile projects), but we’re going to need more.

Of course, I don’t want anyone to think I’m saying that the way to win a statewide race in Texas or Ohio is by talking about zoning or mass transit through-running.

But I do think the questions of urban reform and becoming competitive in red state politics are connected. One reason runs through a kind of meta-politics. People in Iowa and Ohio know that electing Democrats isn’t going to give those states the weather of California or the hiking opportunities of Colorado or the unique cultural amenities of New York City. And if you talk to people who are thinking of moving to or from New York or California, those are the things they cite as appealing about those places. Nobody says “if we leave Los Angeles, we’re going to miss the excellent ratio of public services to taxes.” And that just makes for a terrible national advertisement for progressive governance. You want to be able to say, look the taxes are higher, but in exchange X, Y, and Z are better. That means safe streets, effective public school systems, high-quality transportation infrastructure, affordable housing, a climate where it’s easy to start or expand a business, and all around good governance.

The second issue is talent development. Most red states have liberal cities, and you’d like to see at least some mayors of those liberal cities be viable candidates for statewide office. But for that to work, the mayor in question can’t be a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who spends his time catering to the national constituency of progressive nonprofits. It has to be a moderate reformist mayor — ideally one who’s part of a national network of commonsense Democrats with an identifiable brand — who fixes problems and is about to take that same pragmatic approach to Washington or the governor’s mansion.

Last but not least, the media landscape has really changed.

Unless you very intentionally hire with ideological goals in mind, pursuing the most cost-effective hiring approach will lead you to employ a digital media workforce that is a lot younger, better-educated, and more urban than the national population. This generates a massive ideological skew relative to the national population, which generates all kinds of distortions in coverage. Some of those distortions push policy to the left, but some of them just generate electoral backlash or create bad incentives for practical politicians. Slow Boring is, of course, a business that charges money and cares about costs and revenue. But part of what I’m trying to do here is hew to a line that I think is constructive and useful and that helps highlight good work and advance good ideas. Building more media outlets that actually care about pragmatic, workable politics is a necessary part of fixing the overall landscape — there is (I hope) a flywheel between media work, policy work, electoral work, and organizing and fundraising. So I’m very grateful for all the support over the past three years, and hope our best days, for both the site and the country, are still to come.