In praise of courtyard apartments. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

10 - 12 minutes

Kate and I went to Paris in July with our son and another family and their three kids. We all stayed in an apartment near the Ménilmontant Metro station that turned out to be built around a really adorable courtyard.

Because the courtyard is an enclosed space, people feel comfortable letting their kids roam and play more or less unsupervised. And because it’s right outside your doorstep, the kids can play there while the adults are inside cooking or cleaning or working or whatever it is we adults do — just like a backyard in the suburbs.

But because it’s not a backyard in the suburbs, other people are there, too. Our son doesn’t speak any French, but thanks to the global language of soccer, he got into a pickup game with some random French boys who lived in the building.

The courtyard is nice for adults, too. As you can see in the top photo, it creates a semi-enclosed environment for people to park their bikes, somewhere safely away from thieves but not taking up precious space inside your apartment.

Of course if you prefer a single-family detached house in the suburbs as a lifestyle gestalt, I think this style of apartment still wouldn’t appeal to you. But for people who do feel the pull of walkability and urbanism, this courtyard lifestyle is a great version of it and one that is rarely offered in the United States. To an extent, that’s just a question of markets and style — the idea of raising kids in the city is so against the grain in the United States that I’m not sure anyone even thinks of trying to do family-friendly developments.

But part of the issue is a tedious aspect of public policy: Building codes in the United States and Canada normally require that multi-family dwellings have access to multiple physically separated staircases as a fire safety measure, while European building codes do not. And single staircase architecture is an important part of how these courtyard apartments work.

The workhorse of the modern American apartment building is the double-loaded corridor, which is a long, dark hallway with a staircase near both ends and apartments branching off on both sides. This ensures that, in case of a fire that blocks access to one staircase, everyone could rush over to the staircase on the other side of the hallway and evacuate through that route instead.

One issue with this construction methodology is it doesn’t lend itself to large family-size floor plans. Another is that the hallway takes up a lot of space, raising the per-square-foot costs. A problem that often strikes me walking around D.C. is that the double-loaded corridor is pretty hostile to infill projects because it incentivizes developers to make buildings really large. As long as you need two staircases separated by a long corridor, you really want to make it a loooooong corridor. For a small parcel, building two different means of vertical circulation is a big expense.

But even larger buildings often avoid the double-loaded corridor in Europe. The alternative is what Mike Eliason, who’s been evangelizing on this subject, calls a point access block. His tweet below shows an example from Germany — one big building but no hallways, just three different vertical circulation points, each of which serves a small portion of the overall structure.

That’s how our courtyard building on Rue Oberkampf was structured. There are a bunch of separate entryways, each of which has its own staircase (and mailboxes) and provides access to a small stack of dwellings.

These point access blocks are critical to the success of the project. Because of the way this neighborhood grew up over the decades, for some of the units, the only window is the one facing the interior courtyard — the building butts up against other buildings.

If this building vanished and had to be rebuilt according to American building codes, you’d have to reconfigure it as a long, skinny building in the center of the parcel with setbacks on either side. But with European single-stair construction, you can put the open space in the center of the building and create a friendly courtyard.

And it really is friendly. I emphasized the kids playing part before. But another nice thing about the courtyard lifestyle is that because it’s a somewhat private space, people do things like maintain the lovely plants you see here. You can also see that the kids feel comfortable doing stuff like leaving the soccer balls lying around; you don’t live in fear that your ball or scooter or stroller is going to be stolen.

That’s nice for parents and kids who get to do less fussing about toy storage. But it also means that any kid who wanders out is likely to find a soccer ball to play with.

There’s also a spot sheltered from the elements where people do a kind of community book swap.

And if I understood the sign I read correctly, they have a kind of monthly courtyard potluck for everyone in the building to come hang out. I’ve heard a lot of people on urbanism Twitter speculate that car dependency is a cause of the apparent surge of loneliness in the United States. I’ve been looking into that and haven’t really found much clear information either way. But I do believe this kind of courtyard design promotes a sense of the building as a community, and the single-stair entryways generate sub-communities within the larger community.

To underscore the specific value of the courtyard, I think it’s useful to contrast it with my Washington, D.C. neighborhood, which, though highly walkable, has a totally different structure. A typical block near where I live consists of a mass of narrow 3.5-story row houses, each of which faces out onto the street. Behind each townhouse is a small backyard, a bit of off-street parking (required by law), and then an alley that runs through the middle of the block.

Kids can play in those small yards, but they don’t naturally encounter each other. This design doesn’t encourage casual conversation between adults or lend itself to community events. Here, two families are enjoying an outdoor dinner together, but they’ll inevitably say hi to passing neighbors. Meanwhile, a little girl who may or may not be related is playing on her tricycle.

Of course the parking piece of this is extremely important. In D.C., a new multi-family building would need to have one parking space for every two units in most cases, though in some areas you could do one for every three units. That doesn’t mean you can’t build a courtyard, but it means in a practical sense you have a pretty overwhelming incentive to use open space for car parking.

My sense is that most residents of this apartment don’t own cars (after all, you’d have to pay to park them somewhere), but it was by no means car-free. You were even allowed to drive your car into the courtyard to load or unload, which I saw some families doing in advance of their Bastille Day trips. But you definitely couldn’t park a car in the courtyard, and bicycles are small enough that there’s plenty of room for them to share space with people.

Of course, one important issue is that maybe this American fire safety rule is really good, and legalizing European-style, single-stair buildings would get a lot of people killed. I’ve become a little disillusioned with data and evidence as tools of persuasion, and generally prefer to discuss this single staircase issue with people in informal terms. For example, have you ever stayed in a European apartment and worried about your personal fire safety? If you heard that a friend was going to Rome on vacation and planning to stay in an Airbnb, would you ask him if it was a building with a double-loaded corridor? If your kid was studying abroad in Europe, would building code safety be anywhere on your list of concerns?

It just seems to me that in practice, Americans are plenty comfortable with single-stair buildings. A little bit to the west of my home in D.C., there are several older apartment buildings that were constructed before the era of the double-loaded corridor, and I’ve never heard anyone propose demolishing them for safety reasons.

For the record, though, in the most recent FEMA data we could find (which admittedly is pretty old), the U.S. had a higher fire death rate than France and other Western European countries.

Part of the issue is that the double-loaded corridor’s fire safety merits are actually a bit ambiguous. Compared to a point access block, you are less likely to end up in a situation where your route to a safe means of egress is impeded, but you’re likely to be further away from a staircase, which has its own problems. There are also, of course, multiple dimensions to fire safety, including choice of materials and the use of sprinklers. We could, at a minimum, allow architects and engineers to choose one of several paths to fire safety. Or we could emulate the countries that allow single-staircase buildings up to the height of the big ladders they carry on fire trucks so you could use that as a rescue option. But it’s also worth noting that house fires in general have receded as a problem thanks to diminished rates of smoking and will probably further recede as more people switch to induction cooktops.

On some level, though, you can’t really deny that things could always be safer with even more requirements — it is a question of tradeoffs. This is why I return to the intuitive point: everyone has some notions and stereotypes about Europe, and I just don’t think anyone particularly believes that midrise European apartment buildings are death traps.

It occurred to me while thinking about this that my college dorm was also constructed in a broadly similar way to the Parisian courtyard apartment — a single building composed of multiple point access blocks for vertical circulation. And of course a college dorm is a great locus for community. You hang out with your friends, you say “hi” to casual acquaintances, you chit-chat, it’s nice. There is such a thing as too much privacy; it’s nice to have shared spaces.

Jared Kushner and Vivek Ramaswamy also lived in this dorm, and while I won’t be voting to put either of those guys in charge of the country, maybe if the fates hand that to us, they’ll advocate for the kinds of policy changes that would make it feasible to build new structures like this one.

Jordan Peterson's Anti-Leftism Pulls Him Towards Fascism. By Noah Berlatsky

www.everythingishorrible.net

8 - 10 minutes

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC

In the United States, opposition to fascism and communism are often seen as compatible, even as necessarily complementary. Sensible centrists should hate the extreme right and the extreme left equally, we are told, since both lead to the dystopia of Big Brother and 1984.

Railing against communism and the excesses of the left is a protection against fascism, in theory. Some on the right even argue that fascism was really a leftist movement, or that leftists are the real fascists. The truth, though, is that rabid anti-communism and red-baiting can lead people who allegedly oppose fascism into a fever swamp of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and alt-right hate. To understand how this can happen, you have only to look at the career of Jordan Peterson.

Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor turned hugely successful pop philosopher and self-help author. His book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has become a blockbuster bestseller, and Peterson has been profiled extensively in major outlets, including The New Yorker.

Like many self-help authors, Peterson preaches the gospel of individualism—though he's much more explicitly political about that gospel than some of his peers in the genre. For Peterson, embracing individual achievement and popularity goes hand in hand with rejecting totalitarianism on both the left and right.

The introduction to 12 Rules for Life, by psychoanalyst and popular author Norman Doidge, talks at length about Peterson's hatred of regimes that repress personal liberty. "I had never before met a person, born Christian and of my generation, who was so utterly tormented by what happened to the Jews in Europe," Doidge writes. He adds that Peterson's home is decorated with a "huge collection of original socialist-realist paintings of Lenin and the early communists commissioned by the USSR." Peterson, we learn, collected this art to remind himself of the atrocities of the Soviet Union, in which "a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia."

Doidge rather nervously acknowledges that Peterson's Leninist wall-paper aesthetic is a bit creepy. And indeed, despite Doidge's and Peterson's best efforts, the obsessive anti-communism sits uncomfortably with Peterson's supposed anti-fascism. The main opposition to Adolf Hitler's rise, after all, came, not from high-minded conservatives like Peterson, but from German socialist and communist worker's parties. And Hitler secured support domestically and internationally in part by promising to crush that leftist opposition.

Anti-leftism has continued to be a central part of far-right and fascist ideology, often mixed, inevitably, with antisemitism. A prime example is the right-wing rhetoric around "cultural Marxism"—a conspiracy theory that Peterson has helped bring into the mainstream.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the right-wing theory of cultural Marxism holds that the Jewish, Marxist philosophers of the 1930s Frankfurt School hatched a conspiracy to corrupt American values by promoting sexual liberation and anti-racism. Far-right ideologues like William Lind and Holocaust-denier Kevin MacDonald argue that cultural Marxism is at the root of political correctness. Efforts by academics to advance equal rights for gay people or Black people or women are seen as part of an insidious Jewish plot to undermine white solidarity and culture.

Peterson has tweaked this argument a bit. In his lectures, he mostly traces cultural rot to postmodernists like Derrida (whose work Peterson comically garbles) rather than to the Frankfurt School. In Peterson's book, though, he does explicitly link postmodernism to the Frankfurt school, and in other venues he regularly uses and approves the term "cultural Marxism." One of his videos is titled "Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism." On Facebook, he shared a Daily Caller article titled "Cultural Marxism Is Destroying America" that begins, with outright racism, "Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters." The article goes on to blame racial tension in the U.S. on ... you guessed it: the Frankfurt School.

Peterson isn't an ideological antisemite; there's every reason to believe that when he re-broadcasts fascist propaganda, he doesn't even hear the dog-whistles he's emitting. Still, when you share the Daily Caller, those dog whistles are there—and they make Peterson's own conspiratorial and foam-flecked rhetoric even more disturbing. "The Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education?" he says in his cultural Marxism video, "that bloody thing is a fifth column! The people who are producing the educators who emerge from that institute, they should be put on trial for treason!" He goes on to claim that these educators are targeting kindergartners to infuse them with "these radical post-modern Marxist ideologies." There's a grand conspiracy to indoctrinate good, righteous Canadians in their cribs. Those Marxists are sneaky—and when you're channeling fascist propaganda about sneaky Marxists, you are also targeting antisemitism, even when, as with Peterson, that isn't what you intend to be doing.

Because Peterson says he hates Nazis, some of his proponents argue that he's an antidote to the alt-right. Angela Nagle, for example, writing in The Atlantic, muses that Peterson, "who has decried political correctness but claims to be as suspicious of the radical right as he is of the radical left, suggests one alternative path" for disaffected young proto-Nazis.

But how does Peterson suggest an alternate path to fascism when his philosophy is suffused with barely hidden fascist talking points and conspiracy theories? If Peterson is really "suspicious of the radical right," why does he swallow whole their red-meat rhetoric and then regurgitate it for his followers? And, moreover, why is a supposed anti-totalitarian literally calling for educators who disagree with him to be subject to McCarthyite purges and tried for treason?

The answer in each case is the same. Peterson's rabid anti-leftism makes him an easy mark for fascist propaganda. Right-wing antisemites in Hitler's day spun elaborate conspiracy theories linking Jews and leftists, and supposedly centrist politicians who hated and feared Communism believed them. Today, right-wing antisemites spin elaborate conspiracy theories linking Jews and leftists, and Peterson, gazing at the Soviet-era art on his walls, believes them. If Yair Netanyahu can be dragged into antisemitism via anti-leftism, there's no reason to expect Jordan Peterson to resist.

Of course, it is possible to criticize the left without falling into fascism. Joseph Stalin was a murderous monster; Communist regimes have done horrible things that led to the deaths of millions of people. But the left in the U.S. and Canada is not promoting armed revolution or mass murder. In his cultural Marxism video, Peterson argues that, whether you're talking about Leninist insurrection or folks criticizing sexism or racism in cultural products, "the end result is much the same." That's dangerous nonsense, which can easily be used to justify any extreme of violence. If your gender studies professor is the equivalent of Lenin ... well, we'd better destroy her, right?

Jews, like all people, have a wide variety of political beliefs. The idea that there is some sort of essential underlying connection between Jewish people and Marxism is a Nazi fantasy. That fantasy has power though. People who put Leninist posters on their walls to remind themselves to hate communists all day, every day, are leaving a door open to other kinds of hate too. Peterson does not want to be a member of the alt-right. But he shares their hatred of the left, and, as a result, he makes their arguments for them.

This originally ran at the much lamented Pacific Standard in 2018.

Vivek Ramaswamy's "cold, cultural civil war". By davidrlurie

www.publicnotice.co

13 - 16 minutes

Ramaswamy talks to members of the press after the August 23 GOP debate. (Scott Olson/Getty)

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Events are proceeding according to plan for Vivek Ramaswamy. He’s using a destined-to-fail run for the presidency as a vehicle for becoming one of the most prominent right-wing extremists in the nation. 

Ramaswamy is employing the same kind of cold calculation that Ivy league careerists like him have long used to climb corporate ladders and amass large fortunes. But his ultimate goal is to become the leader of a nascent fascist movement.

Ramaswamy is a proudly strategic person. He knows that his open embrace of conspiracism and increasingly direct appeals to racism are not formulas for “mainstream” political success. But Ramaswamy has made a different calculation than any of the other GOP presidential candidates who joined him on the debate stage last week.

The other non-Trump GOP candidates are struggling to come up with a way to beat Donald Trump without daring to challenge Trump. A near impossibility. Unsurprisingly, each of them is failing badly.

By contrast, Ramaswamy hardly offers the pretense of running against Trump. He unreservedly praised Trump during the debate, declaring him to be the greatest president of this century and excusing his alleged crimes (which he declared Trump should be pardoned for). Ramaswamy hardly bothers trying to convince the GOP’s Trump-devoted base that he would be a better choice to serve as the party’s 2024 nominee.

RELATED FROM PN: Republicans love RFK Jr. because his conspiracies are theirs

Rather than actually pursuing a doomed effort to beat Trump, Ramaswamy is selling himself as a “hardcore” Trump follower who’s as devoted to the former president as any member of the MAGA base. By praising the movement’s current leader, Ramaswamy is plainly planning to become the inheritor of the extremists’ allegiance after Trump leaves the scene, the self-appointed heir apparent.

And just like his past successful bets in the capital markets, Ramaswamy’s political wager may well turn out to be an astute one. 

In the increasingly likely scenario that Trump wins the GOP nomination, and then proceeds to lose the general election (and possibly trundle off to prison), Ramaswamy — who has taken to declaring that America is in the midst of a “cold, cultural civil war” — may well end up best positioned to become the next leader of the neo-Confederate side.

Ramaswamy’s rapid rise as a reactionary demagogue was anything but predictable. He’s the 38-year-old Ivy League educated child of Brahmin Indian immigrant parents (a doctor and a lawyer) and a practicing Hindu — making him an unlikely leader for a embryonic neo-fascist movement grounded on Christian nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. But Ramaswamy is a careful student of his target audience.

Ramaswamy’s first career was as a hotshot in business and finance. After working on Wall Street and graduating from Yale Law School — where he received a fellowship from a foundation established by George Soros’s brother — Ramaswamy made an early fortune as the CEO of a pharma company, Roivant. In 2021, after he had resigned as the company’s CEO (but while he remained its chairman), Roivant touted its founding of Roivant Social Ventures, a non-profit focused on “building DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] opportunities for future leaders in biopharma and biotech.”

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During his years in the business world, Ramaswamy developed a long history of disengagement from electoral politics; he didn’t bother to vote in the 2008, 2012, or 2016 presidential elections, and even skipped the 2022 GOP primary.

But Ramaswamy now says that, even as he was planning his exit from the equity- and diversity-infested corporate world, he was rapidly transforming into one of Trump’s “hardcore” supporters, and indeed was planning to become an outspoken combatant in the “cold cultural civil war” he’s since declared.

A scene from a Ramaswamy campaign event in Milwaukee on August 22. (Scott Olson/Getty)

In 2021, Ramaswamy founded a money management firm, Strive, which was expressly focused on not pursuing social justice. Peter Thiel (a gay right-wing venture capitalist most recently known for his backing of a strictly straight MAGA dating service called The Right Stuff) and Ramaswamy’s law school classmate (and notorious xenophobe) JD Vance were among the backers.

Also during 2021, Ramaswamy announced his coming out as a right wing culture warrior with the publication of his first book, Woke, Inc., largely comprised of an attack on corporate DEI efforts, as well as a diatribe against the outrageous notion that corporations should play any role in endeavoring to create a “more diverse, environmentally-friendly world.” Ramaswamy declared the very idea of such corporate beneficence to be a “hoax” (a term that has since proven to be among his favorites).  

MORE FROM DAVID LURIE: Kevin McCarthyism: The GOP’s culture war on the troops

Ramaswamy rapidly published a couple of more books with equally arresting titles and claims. Next came Nation of Victims (2022), in which he claims that “identity politics” is destroying the nation; to illustrate the point, the book pictures a broken arm of the Statue of Liberty on the cover. The most recent Ramaswamy tome, published this year, is particularly conspiratorial. In Capitalist Punishment, Ramaswamy posits that a shadowy “Wall Street cartel” is forcing “racial equity audits” and similar evils upon the nation. 

In February, Ramaswamy made the widely ignored announcement of his putative candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination. The announcement excited virtually nobody — until Ramaswamy began trumpeting his new identity as right wing demagogue.

While each of the other GOP candidates struggled with how to present themselves to GOP voters as Trump without the baggage, Ramaswamy sought to accumulate as much baggage as he could, as quickly as possible.

From the outset of his “candidacy,” Ramaswamy has made it his singular goal to appear as unhinged and extreme as he can be on as many hot button topics as possible. He’s been willing to do more than any of his opponents to say the quiet part out loud, including by openly appealing to bigotry.

At the same time, while DeSantis and other GOP also-rans have been flailing about in vain efforts to come up with a way to criticize Trump without alienating his base of GOP voters, Ramaswamy has enthusiastically embraced Trump and his most egregious conduct, appearing more like a surrogate for the former president than one of his opponents.

Ramaswamy’s unique approach was on full display during last week’s GOP presidential debate — to the incredulity of his opponents — and has been throughout all the press attention he’s received since what CNN described as Ramaswamy’s “standout” debate performance.

While both remain far behind Trump, Ramaswamy has cut into DeSantis’s support. (Win McNamee/Getty)

Presumably because he has little interest in, or expectation of, impressing GOP donors or party opinion leaders as a “credible” alternative to Trump, Ramaswamy has been free to suck up the attention of cable news stations, as well as “hardcore” Trump loving extremists, by mouthing the most outrageous, divisive, and transparently mendacious statements he can.

The GOP has a crowded field of habitual liars. But Ramaswamy is perhaps the current master of what Kate McKinnon’s SNL version of Laura Ingraham described as “feel facts, which aren’t technically true but just feel true.”

Ramaswamy’s favorite rhetorical tactic is to label a transparent falsehood as a “truth,” and to then declare that a corresponding fact is a “hoax.” For example, during the debate, as the other candidates bobbed and weaved when asked whether they accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that man-made climate change is real, Ramaswamy evinced no hesitation in denying the relevance of the facts and science entirely, and simply declared climate change to be a “hoax” — an evidence-free (and conspiratorial) assertion he got more press for repeating.

Ramaswamy’s failure to back up his purported “truths” with an iota of evidence is, for him, a feature and not a bug.

In an April CNN interview, Ramaswamy insisted to an incredulous Don Lemon that the Civil War was fought to give Black Americans the right to own guns and that the civil rights movement was led by the NRA — two bald-faced falsehoods that Ramaswamy, characteristically, claimed to be “facts.”

Ramaswamy was plainly encouraged by the results of his audaciously false history lesson. CNN management reportedly expressed “exasperat[ion]” that Lemon had failed to give Ramaswamy’s falsehoods a pass during what was supposed to be a feel-good morning cable program, and he was fired shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, Ramaswamy’s lies about the Civil War and the civil rights movement made him an instant hero of the large neo-Jesse Helms cohort within the GOP.

Fast forward several months, and Ramaswamy is now avidly seeking every possible effort to promote the most outrageously false and deliberately divisive claims regarding racism in America he can come up with. Nonetheless, media outlets are scrambling to schedule Ramaswamy for appearances, which are sure to generate fireworks.

For example, during one of two Sunday show appearances on August 27, this one on CNN, Ramaswamy embraced his prior claim that African American member of Congress Ayanna Pressley is the equivalent of a “modern Grand Wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan.

But he didn’t stop there. Ramaswamy went on to suggest that Black people who favor affirmative action bear blame for the recent mass murder of patrons at a store in Jacksonville by a white nationalist. Ramaswamy contended that diversity advocates have “throw[n] kerosene” on white racism by “tak[ing things] away” from whites “on the basis of their skin color,” then asserted that efforts to address racism are “fueling racism” in the country, including the mass murders of Black people by white nationalists.

Ramaswamy did not invent this inversionary claim that the victims of violence by bigots are responsible for their fate. It has long been favored by white nationalists in this country, and has an even more heinous history, dating back to Adolf Hitler’s declaration that the alleged crimes of the Jews merited retribution.

Ramaswamy claims to be telling “hard truths.” But, of course, the opposite is true. By setting out to say outrageous things, he signals to hardcore right-wing extremists that he’s willing to embrace the lies they most favor, regardless of how repugnant other Americans may find them. 

While Trump declared the neo-Nazis who participated in the Charlottesville riot to be “very fine people,” Ramaswamy is readily willing to go one step farther and to openly embrace their most racist and conspiratorial claims. Ramaswamy has been endorsing, of course without evidence, conspiratorial claims favored by Trump and Tucker Carlson that the mob of January 6 insurrectionists was laced with “federal agents.”

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But Ramaswamy has taken those claims one step farther by signaling an affinity with so-called 9/11 truthers, who claim the World Trade Center was taken down by the federal (and/or Israeli) government, saying: “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.” He was just asking questions, Ramaswamy explained; but — in the process — he offered “legitimacy” to the most repugnant of conspiratorial claims. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene long ago gave in to pressure to (at least publicly) distance herself from such paranoia as part of her effort to become a “legitimate” GOP leader. But Ramaswamy is rushing forward to embrace it.

As Ramaswamy told a conspiracist at a recent campaign appearance: “I think what we have a lot in this country are a lot of conspiracy realists. And so, I’m one of them.”

The fact that Ramaswamy is only more ostentatiously embracing racist and conspiratorial positions as his prominence is increasing confirms that this savvy careerist is playing a far different political game than DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Like any strategic player, Ramaswamy is planning beyond the current GOP moment, dominated as it is by Donald Trump, to what will be left behind after Trump loses another election for the Republican Party and (finally) exits the scene.

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Ramaswamy clearly believes that the resentful masses that Trump managed to marshal to achieve one presidential campaign victory will be searching for a new leader who shares their nihilistic vision. And Ramaswamy will be there, ready and willing to be the chief executive of their movement.

We’ll be back with more Monday. Have a great weekend, and to our readers in the US, here’s to a wonderful Labor Day.

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Things were better when things were worse. By Jeremiah Johnson

www.infinitescroll.us

11 - 14 minutes

I recently came across a Facebook post that’s archetypal of a certain type of social media sentiment:

Image

Facebook is ground zero for this kind of stuff. It’s boomer-bait, with this particular post clearly being from the UK. Reading through the list, it’s obviously nostalgic for a long-gone time period. It’s insulting and suspicious of other, newer cultures which weren’t prominent back in the day. It’s obsessed with food. In some ways, it’s unremarkable and you’ve probably seen quite a lot of social media posts like it.

But what’s interesting to me is how explicitly anti-progress it is. The implicit tone of the whole list is ‘The past was superior’, but they’re usually talking about the things they didn’t have. Things were better because… we had never heard of pizza or kebabs or sushi. Because we ate ‘anything edible’. Because ‘crisps were plain’. In short, things were better because they were worse.

To some extent this is just normal kvetching about Kids These Days, and how easy they have it. Every generation does this, even as they complain about the last generation doing it. You’ll see millennials post extremely millennial memes about a grandparent’s walk to school uphill both ways stories, while also posting about how great their primitive 90’s kid video game setups were. Simple nostalgia will always exist.

Where this takes a turn is when you start to see to see the claims that advances in technology, culture and society have actually been negative things. This goes beyond ‘Remember this thing we all used to do’ or ‘Remember how much we all liked this particular old gadget’. And this isn’t a claim that things were better because the old thing was objectively superior in terms of choice, quality, capabilities, etc. It’s explicitly a claim that the old thing was worse, that we used to not have nice things, and yet we were all somehow better off for it.

No photo description available.

The comments on this one (per usual, from Facebook) are revealing. “Whoop whoop still alive 😎”. “Better without shots or fancy cures”. “I still do it, who needs any more bother”. Reading the comments on these kinds of posts, there’s a pride at having survived a time that was objectively tougher. But more than pride, there are a set of virtues imposed upon the past. We used to work so much harder than kids these days. Men were real men, stronger, disciplined, and more manly. Women were real women, more virtuous and feminine and graceful. “We didn’t have much”, they say, “But by God we were happier because of it.”

Yes, back then we were happier. People were friendlier and more cheerful to neighbors. We worked hard and took pride in ourselves and our communities. These opinions are delivered with rock-solid confidence. And either explicitly or implicitly, there’s a link drawn in these comments between the relative lack of nice things and the ways in which society has changed for the worse. Call it the virtue of suffering. We didn’t have all these nice modern things back in my day, we suffered, and that was good in some ineffable way.

Probably the greatest piece of comedy ever done on this subject is the Four Yorkshiremen by Monty Python. If you’ve never watched this bit before, it’s three minutes that is absolutely worth your time:

We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for twopence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor…

As funny as this sketch is, it’s also a broadly correct summarization of the viewpoint of a whole lot of people.

I’m a fairly political person, but I mostly try to keep things here at Infinite Scroll non-political and focused on social media analysis. But you can’t honestly analyze the massive phenomenon that is nostalgia posting and worse-therefore-better-ism without diving headfirst into politics.

Things were worse, therefore better expresses itself in different ways in different countries. There’s a fantastic piece on ‘proper binmen’ that I highly recommend you read about how this plays out in UK discourse. In the UK as with most instances, it’s inextricably linked with political conservatism, nationalism and reaction.

Conservatism itself doesn’t have to be this backwards looking. For all that I think George W. Bush made a bunch of terrible decisions, his politics was forward looking. He argued that tax cuts for wealthy people and regime change in Iraq would make the world a better place - not because it would ‘return us to the old days’, but because it would lead to new advancements in the political and economic sphere. Despite being wrong, he was (for the most part) trying to move forwards, not backwards. But while conservatism doesn’t have to be backwards looking, this backwards looking posting is itself virtually always conservative. And it’s becoming a bigger and more prominent part of the conservative political movement.

You can see how worse-therefore-better infects conservative politics in hundreds of ways, both small and large. You can see it in the rise of Statue Profile Picture accounts on Twitter that relentlessly post about how depraved and weak modern society is, and practically bust a nut looking at old architecture. Sometimes these accounts disguise themselves as just ‘promoting classic works’, but sometimes they say the quiet part out loud:

Breaking one’s back is a virtue, for unexplainable reasons. Freedom from a lifetime of drudge is bad. Return to subsistence agriculture.

These accounts barely bother to disguise their nationalist, reactionary politics, because that politics is now in vogue. The most prominent and influential conservative commentators hit these points explicitly. Here’s a video of Tucker Carlson, which I will quote below if you can’t stomach watching several minutes of Tucker speak:

"People who are working for big banks, living in crowded conditions, very often alone, in big soulless cities, having their food delivered by immigrants, and spending their time glued to a screen. What does that sound like to you? It sounds like prison, actually."

"Who are the people who oppose this? Where do they live and how do they live? Well, they are poorer generally on paper. But are their lives worse if you live in a place where you can see the sky? Where you can make your own food? If you can go outside and identify three species of trees or hear birds, or experience silence, the rarest commodity in the modern world. Those are the people who are not with the program.”

Tucker admits that technically, we’ve gotten richer. And even in his rant against modernity, he admits that the modern world has nicer things and better technology. But it’s ‘soulless’. He later calls people who live with these conveniences ‘enslaved’. You won’t have as many nice things, but you’ll have vibes that Tucker thinks are superior.

Brexit in the UK and Trump in American politics are two of the most obvious examples of this at national scale. The campaign for Brexit was woefully short on the practical economics of the situation, but it was vibrant and rich in describing how glorious the return to a pre-EU existence would feel. And this strategy of ignoring reality for nostalgic vibes worked - Take Back Control was such an effective catchphrase it has its own Wikipedia page. And as the UK was leaving the EU, we all know that Trump was promising to Make America Great Again.

Implicit to those phrases is the idea that things were better in the past. I’m not an expert on British politics by any means, but my sense is that in the UK you’ll often see this reflected as nostalgia for the British Empire, for the postwar generation, and in loyalty to the monarchy. In the US, it’s often nostalgia for an imagined 1960’s suburban lifestyle or factory jobs. But the universal features are the same.

There’s a sense that something valuable used to exist, but has been lost due to modern progress. You can’t Take Back Control unless you think that you used to have control. It’s not Make America Great, it’s Make America Great Again. And what’s to blame is usually some combination of bureaucracy, government, liberalism, progressivism, technology, feminism and modernity. The solution is almost always an appeal to nationalism - witness the spite at foreign food in the very first image of this blog post. Kebabs! Curry! Sushi! Muesli!!!!

This appeal to nationalism assures us things will be better if we can undo progress. Let’s get rid of technology, accept that we might be poorer, they say. Stop making new art, books, and movies and go back to Greek philosophy and architecture. Go back to when police could rough you up without the media getting mad. Bring back corporal punishment for kids, and capital punishment for criminals. Roll back social progress for women and minorities, bring back imperialism. Get back to farming the land and being in touch with nature. We had fewer rights and less money and more sickness back in the day, but those days were better because of it. As the children’s memes tell us, RETVRN.

The shame of all this is that it’s promoted by people who are fundamentally full of shit. Tucker Carlson grew up attending prestigious boarding schools and married an heiress. He lives in mansions surrounded by every possible modern convenience. He’ll tell his credulous audience that being poorer is just a technicality and that farming their own food has immense spiritual benefits from the comfort of his air-conditioned villas. He’s never had to do the backbreaking work. He’s never participated in the lifestyle he advocates, and never will. And this is typical of the folks posting about this kind of stuff.

There’s an important point to remember about our broadly liberal society - it allows for dissent and it allows for exit. Think modernity sucks? Want to live in a 1970’s sized home with 1970’s terrible quality appliances and no air conditioning? Want to live a traditional marriage where the wife has few rights? Want to eat shitty food and reject modern medicine?

You can go do that. Nothing is stopping you.

The Amish exist. Nothing is stopping you from joining them, or creating your own version of the Amish centered around the 1960s. But the thing about the Amish is that they’re actually committed, and they live the life rather than posting about it on social media.

There are perhaps a tiny, tiny number of better-therefore-worse posters who are actually living their values. But if we’re being honest, the Venn Diagram of ‘living the values’ and ‘posting the values on social media’ is basically two separate circles. If you think technology is harmful, then don’t use it. If you think mechanized agriculture robs you of your spiritual connection to the land, then grow your own. If you think working for a bank in a city is soulless, then be a farmer. Defect from society! That was always allowed.

But nobody really makes this choice. When they’ve personally got skin in the game they choose the nicer, modern solution almost every time. They’re not giving up their smartphone, their big TV. They’re not going back to shitty casseroles five nights a week and they’re not unplugging the AC or the heater when the weather gets too hot or cold.

The truth is this - the world for the most part is getting better over time. Almost nobody would willingly return to live like they did decades in the past. Nostalgia on its own is all well and good, but it’s infecting our politics in ways that are incredibly harmful. It feels incredibly silly to write this down, but good things are good. It’s better when things get better. It’s banal and self-referential and definitionally true, but somehow also a point that needs more emphasis in the modern world. And we should reject any argument that things used to be worse, therefore they were better.

Who else remembers proper blog posts? Not these weak posts you see today! Click the share button if you remember.

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The Politics of Posting

Denying Sex Differences Doesn’t Actually Help People, Part One Million. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

9 - 11 minutes

The New York Times recently published an article by reporter Catherine Pearson headlined “When One Partner Wants Sex More Than the Other.” Subheadline: “Libido differences are a common part of relationships, sex therapists say. Here’s how to manage.” Seems helpful for couples in this situation!

It’s an interesting and touching article, to be sure, that features real-life stories. With an assist from sex therapist types and other experts, Pearson helps people better understand this phenomenon and what to do about it. She writes that “Many factors can influence libido: interpersonal dynamics, physical and mental health, the social messages around sexuality that people absorb during childhood and adolescence. The list goes on, and there are seldom easy fixes. But Dr. Fogel Mersy and other experts said more communication could help couples bridge gaps in sexual desire.” Another expert is paraphrased as saying that libidinal differences could be attributed to “anything from relationship concerns to work stress.”

I couldn’t help but notice a certain omission, though: the article contains no mention of sex differences. Absent are any of the terms men, women, male(s), female(s), or any discussion of sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone.

I don’t want to risk falling into the “She didn’t write the article I wanted her to write!” critique trap, because that’s silly, but aren’t these strange concepts to leave out given the subject? After all, the vast majority of couples are heterosexual, and we have a ton of evidence to suggest men have higher sex drives than women.

No, this does not mean that every man wants sex more than every woman. I’m saying that at the level of averages, men want significantly sex than women.

The largest meta-analysis I could find on this question was published just last year, and included more than 620,000 American adults. Here’s how one of the authors, Malte Friese, later translated her team’s findings on the Society for Personality and Social Psychology website, arguing that we shouldn’t overstate the magnitude of the differences they found:

    The “how big” question can be looked at in comparison with other known gender differences. The difference we documented is in a similar range as the gender difference in weight for U.S. adults, but less than half the size of the gender difference in height for U.S. adults. Most researchers would label the sex drive difference as “moderate to large.” Looked at another way, our results mean that about three-quarters of men will have a somewhat stronger sex drive than the average sex drive among women. But our data also indicate that when a woman with an unknown sex drive walks down the street, her sex drive will on average exceed that of every third man she encounters. Thus, although a gender difference is clearly observable, there is still much variation between men and women.

Fair enough. But roughly speaking, and to oversimplify some of the work the team did to conceptualize these questions (you can read the meta-analysis if you want those details), they did find that if you’re a random straight man, there’s a very good chance you’ll have a higher sex drive than a random girlfriend/wife/partner, and if you’re a random straight woman, there’s a very good chance you’ll have a lower sex drive than a random boyfriend/husband/partner. 

Now, especially as the world moves toward greater and greater freedom of choice with regard to long-term romantic partners, it seems likely these average-level differences are somewhat mitigated by people selecting into relationships with folks with similar libidos. And even these rather significant average-level differences leave us with plenty of couples whose libidinal travails run contrary to stereotype, of course. Plus, we’re glossing over a huge amount of complexity, because (as Pearson’s article notes) mental and physical health problems, time, and other factors affect libido in complex ways. 

But we can nuance ourselves to infinity and back and it won’t really change the overall equation much. Given the average-level differences in libido and the sheer number of heterosexual couples, if we ask the questions “Who is most affected by libidinal differences, how, and why?,” it seems obvious that the answers are “Straight couples, where men want sex more than women, because men naturally have higher baseline libidos, on average, than women.”

I’m not sure why this is all absent from Pearson’s piece, which mentions biology only in the context of mental illness, but this is a long-standing issue among progressive ideas-types: there’s a lot of pushback to the idea that it’s okay to pin these differences on biological sex, or even that these differences exist in the first place. In my experience, subpar studies supposedly pushing back against these claims are taken much more seriously than the clear, consistent picture painted by meta-analyses taking the best published research into account.

There’s something similar going on when it comes to the (I think) even more contentious issue of the “people/things” divide. Supposedly, according to the best research we have, on average — again, I implore you to understand that I am saying on average and am not claiming a lack of any overlap between the sexes — men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people. Last I checked, researchers like Richard Lippa had published some work showing that the magnitude of these differences isn’t really any smaller in nations with more gender equality. This is a pretty strong blow against the theory that these differences can be largely explained by culture. The average Swedish woman is much freer to pursue her intrinsic interests than the average Afghan one, for example, and receives far fewer cultural cues that she ‘must’ work in (say) caretaking roles. So if culture were driving these wedges, you’d expect the sexes to be a lot closer together, interests-wise, in the world’s Swedens than in its Afghanistans — but that isn’t what researchers have found.

That doesn’t dispositively prove, in some reductive way, that biology “explains” these differences, but it should certainly nudge us in that general direction. (Here’s some more recent research on this subject pointing in the same direction.)

In both instances, I think there’s really solid evidence to suggest that biology contributes meaningfully to baseline differences between men and women that social engineering is unlikely to be able to dispel. We’re probably stuck with a situation where men are more into sex and things than women, whereas women have less sex drive and more interest in people. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! It isn’t right or wrong to be more or less into sex or people or things. 

But what we do with this knowledge — how we apply it to our understanding of society, our attempts to improve it, and our interpersonal relationships — is another question. If my read of the literature is correct and these differences are significantly rooted in biology, it means that it might be helpful for couples to know that it’s perfectly normal for the male partner to have a higher sex drive than the female one, or for parents to know that we shouldn’t expect elementary school–aged girls to be as interested in engineering as their male peers, or for boys to be as likely to pursue careers that involve the careful management and navigation of personnel and personal relationships. 

I totally understand why people are inherently skeptical of the scientific establishment to deliver clean answers on these sorts of questions. A lot of scientists have done shoddy work over the decades, often to support prevailing, wrongheaded types of thinking. A century ago, “progressives” were very much in favor of horrific eugenics practices, and they took a lot of cues from famous scientists spreading these ideas! So when science comes at us with a conclusion like “It turns out women might be more nurturing and people-oriented, on average,” we should approach it with some skepticism, because it does reinforce certain overblown stereotypes.

But, as I’ve tried to emphasize in my work whenever I can, “Bad people could use these findings for bad ends” is not, on its own, a sufficient reason to deny a scientific claim. Yes, social conservatives could take male-female differences and run with them to dangerous extremes. But the solution to that is to forcefully make the case for progressive values regarding gender, not to stifle science or suppress findings that make us feel icky. 

Questions? Comments? Differences between myself and a hypothetical female version of myself? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. The lead image was generated by DALL-E in response to the prompt “a photorealistic image of a man and a woman having a disagreement” — I guess DALL-E ignored the ‘photorealistic’ part.

I Have To Admit I Still Don't Fully Understand Why You Can't Change Your Race. By Jesse Singal

jessesingal.substack.com

8 - 10 minutes

A couple weeks ago NBC News ran an article by Emi Tuyetnhi Tran, a summer intern there, headlined “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race.” Subheadline: “Practitioners of ‘race change to another,’ or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to truly become a different race.”

It’s a very of-the-moment story, and it includes some fascinating details. Here’s how it starts:

    Since before she hit double digits, Alisa, 15, said she has felt a special connection with Japan. The high school student, who asked to be anonymous for fear of being doxxed online, was born in Ukraine and lives in Maryland, but she now goes by the Japanese name Miyuki and listens to “subliminals” that promise she will wake up and be Japanese. So far, she believes that by listening to YouTube videos with lo-fi music and photos of East Asian facial features while she sleeps, her vision has cleared, her eyelids have become smaller and her hair is just a bit darker.

    Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”

Wild stuff! But I also found it interesting how much effort the article spent to make it clear that you really can’t change your race. It’s such an important point that Tran deployed Experts to make it.

The article continues:

    But experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race.

    “It’s just belief,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of cultural and media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. “It doesn’t ever really work, because it’s not doing anything, but they have convinced themselves that it works because there’s other people who have convinced themselves, as well.”

    …

    Experts agree race is not genetic. But they contend that even though race is a cultural construct, it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.

    David Freund, a historian of race and politics and an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, corroborates the idea that a “biological race” does not exist. What we know today as “race” is a combination of inherited characteristics and cultural traditions passed down through generations, he said.

    In addition, Freund said, the modern concept of race is inseparable from the systemic racial hierarchy hundreds of years in the making. Simply put, changing races is not possible, because “biological races” themselves are not real.

This all seems confusing. . . or maybe confused. For one thing, we have “race is not genetic” coming merely one paragraph prior to the assertion that race is, in part, “inherited characteristics.” For another, we have those experts — sorry, Experts — telling Tran that “it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.” The second half of the sentence doesn’t really latch onto the first; it can certainly be true both that a certain identity brings disadvantages with it, but also that that identity can be changed! Genuinely don’t understand the logic here.

Maybe I’m an ignoramus on this subject, but it certainly seems like race can be “changed” in a sense in certain outlying instances, at least. A Sephardic Jew who traces his recent lineage to Iraq might “look” “blacker” than a light-skinned African American whose grandparents are all from Nigeria, by the standards of the made-up racial category of American blackness. The Sephardic Jew could perhaps “change his race” by simply starting to claim to people he’s just met that he’s black (when the subject comes up), and the African American could pass as white by doing something similar. In this situation, haven’t they effectively “changed their races,” regardless of the particular “systematic inequalities” they face?

That being said, I can’t even tell whether my example applies, because the article doesn’t really define what is meant by “changing race” in the first place. If race is just a social construct — supposedly the progressive orthodox understanding — why couldn’t you change it? If, on the other hand, all Tran is saying is that the “listen to this subliminal audio to change your DNA” part of this online trend is nonsense, then sure, of course that’s true, but wait, I thought race isn’t genetic anyway, so of course that can’t be what’s meant by “changing race,” except race is somewhat genetic (“inherited characteristics”), and. . . well, I’m kind of lost. It’s hard even to hold this all in your head at the same time.

But despite all this confusion, the article is very clear that whatever race is, and whatever changing your race is, you can’t do it — it’s impossible. That very term is used twice. It’s very important that people recognize that while race is (mostly) a fiction (except when it isn’t, because it has a partial genetic footprint), you just can’t change yours.

Why? I’ve never quite understood that. The article contains a lot of somewhat perfunctory-seeming moralizing about how some people are offended by the idea of someone changing race, the overarching theory, I think, being that you can’t “identify into” an oppressed group, but “this thing offends people” is obviously not the same as “this thing is impossible to do.”

The obvious comparison here is another instance in which we do let people identify into an oppressed category — male-to-female transgender folks — but Tran doesn’t really address that comparison either. She simply cites an activist who says that transracialism “is fetishizing, and it’s objectifying, and it reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of color,” without mustering any argument as to why someone couldn’t say the same thing about transitioning gender. (I wrote about this parallel before in my defense of Rebecca Tuvel, a philosopher who got in trouble for authoring an article arguing that the logic used to support gender transitions should, if we’re being consistent, lead us to support some forms of transracialism. Tuvel wrote her article from the perspective of someone who does support individuals’ right to transition.)

I don’t want to be too harsh here: Emi Tuyetnhi Tran is, again, a summer intern. And the article does have some genuinely interesting reporting on these wacky wannabe Asian kids. But it was published in NBC News, which is very much a major outlet, and it’s interesting to me how much of the article is dedicated to making sure readers are not led into temptation: into believing you can change your race (or can’t change your gender). Let’s be SUPER clear about this; NBC News is telling us: You cannot change your race. It’s impossible. You can change your gender. These are treated as indisputable facts rather than foggy and contested battlegrounds.

It’s all part of the broader sacralization of race that has gone on in progressive spaces in recent years. It seems pretty obvious to me that the only way out of racism, in the long run, is for people to recognize that race is mostly made up. Even if it’s not a complete fiction (see haplogroups), of course it’s bad to see people as “black” or “Asian” or “Latino” rather than, first and foremost, individual human beings. These categories are much too broad and they’ve done far more harm than good.

But this view feels moribund in progressive spaces. Instead, it’s important to talk about race all the time. Someone with dark skin is capital-b Black, and this is a very important part of their identity, because race is an essential component of each individual’s identity. Race is so important that we don’t dare violate its sanctity by crossing boundaries that are best left alone.

Doesn’t it seem obvious that this obsession — that’s what it is, at this point — is going to have downsides, in the long run? Shouldn’t mainstream journalism outlets demonstrate some appetite to actually investigate this worldview? Or is the point of mainstream journalism to simply remind everyone, over and over and over, what good progressives are supposed to believe?

Questions? Comments? Ideas for how I can switch to a much cooler race, perhaps by quaffing some sort of tonic? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. The lead image, of Cartman effectively changing his race, is from here.

Back to school mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

21 - 26 minutes

DCPS started back up this week, which is good news for those of us who like routines. It was also good to see that the city’s test scores bounced back last year from their pandemic lows, though we’re still short of full recovery.

In other good news, PEPFAR has saved millions of lives. Cheaper prescription drugs are coming thanks to Medicare price negotiation. Spot rents are now falling. Rudy Giuliani is guilty of defamation. Election deniers take a loss in Iowa. Marijuana rescheduling is moving forward and so is Brightline expansion in Florida. Plus there’s a new Metric song!

Have a happy Labor Day Weekend, everyone!

Tyler G: As someone who relies on social science research, do you have thoughts on the replication crisis? It seems huge deal that much of knowledge we thought we'd gained over the last few decades turned out to be nonsense.

Has this changed your view on anything, or the way you approach academic research? What should the policy implications be? My intuition is that there's been no real accountability — like, whole departments, and maybe institutions, should've been disbanded for neglectfully producing misinformation using public funds, no?

To try to be precise here, the “replication crisis” as I understand the concept refers specifically to experimental stuff done in psychology and related fields. When you do an experiment and report the results, the idea is that it should be possible for other people to repeat or copy (“replicate”) your experiment and get the same result. In many cases this is relatively straightforward, but because experiments on human beings come with a lot of logistical and administrative barriers, there were a lot of psychology results that got published without having been replicated. And then it later turned out that many of these results don’t replicate — the authors were either just reporting flukes or in some cases faking things.

Social science generally doesn’t have this exact problem because most social science results aren’t experimental at all.

That’s mostly bad news in the sense that experimental data would, in principle, give us better evidence than the stuff social scientists need to rely on. In terms of the specific dynamics of the replication crisis, though, it’s good news because no halfway responsible person has ever treated social scientists’ statistical inferences as definitive.

That said, if you roll back time 20 years, I was part of a cohort of young journalists who were trying to infuse the field with more information gleaned from academic research. Part of that was we were maybe more quantitatively sophisticated than the average working journalist. Part of it was that the internet made academic research much more accessible than it had been in the past. Part of it was that blogs made it easy to put charts and maps and tables into your article, whereas in a print workflow that’s challenging and time-intensive. And a big part of it is that career ladders shifted. Instead of covering city hall for a mid-sized daily newspaper and then going to a statehouse and then going to a D.C. bureau and then getting a job at a bigger paper, it started to become the case that people would start out covering national politics and then kind of work their way up the food chain.

I now have somewhat mixed feelings about that whole process, because what I think began as an earnest effort to produce better-informed coverage has devolved somewhat into a lot of sloppy work and over-generalizing from single studies.

The best advice I can give on empirical social science is that precisely because it’s not experiments that you can try to replicate, you really need to try to read literatures and not just individual papers before drawing conclusions. A good example from my recent social science reading: Massimo Pulejo and Pabloc Querubín look at Italian municipal officials and find that when salaries go up, susceptibility to taking bribes declines, but that as a result, the better-paid and more honest bureaucrats are more likely to be murdered by the mafia. That’s a fascinating result and it obviously has implications for things like endemic corruption and organized crime activity in Mexico. But I don’t want to draw any strong conclusions until I see studies of similar issues conducted in several other countries. Otherwise, even if the study is totally flawless, it could just be capturing something about Italy rather than illuminating the general issue.

Entertainment Strategy Guy: What are your thoughts on tinted windows, as a frequent pedestrian? Personally, as someone who walks children to school, I loathe them with a passion. Also, anecdotally, it sure feels like someone with tinted windows is much more likely to be an aggressive driver on the roads. Like illegal plates, most jurisdictions have rules against overly tinted front windows, it just seems like police forces choose to not enforce a easily enforced rule. Thoughts?

I completely share your sentiments that these tinted windows seem bad. But, in the spirit of the answer above, I have to confess that I haven’t seen persuasive research on the subject, so I try to avoid asserting that there’s a huge problem here. I hope more people will study this, and that if there’s anything I’m missing, someone will email it to me.

Danny: You recently tweeted about how post-presidency Obama hasn’t followed his strategy as a candidate of moderating on cultural and racial issues. Do you think this is because he has actually been very progressive on these issues all along — as evidenced by his racial consciousness in his first memoir, the thoughts in his unpublished political manifesto revealed last year, and his ties to figures like Jeremiah Wright and Derrick Bell — and was simply biting his tongue as a presidential candidate and as president? Or is he genuinely the moderate he presented himself as during his presidency and just biting his tongue now to placate progressives?

I don’t really like that characterization, and I think you’re creating a bit of a false dichotomy here.

My read of Obama, which is probably best exemplified by this Timothy Shenk piece on the unpublished political manifesto, is that all along he has been influenced by the somewhat pessimistic views on race expressed by Derrick Bell. Except he rejects Bell’s brand of fatalism and retreat from political engagement in favor of something more like Bayard Rustin’s views. And I think it would be simplistic to see Rustin as offering a “more moderate” take than contemporary progressives. What he’s saying, I think, is that to advance the interests of the majority of Black Americans, you need the kind of large-scale social and economic transformation that is only possible through majoritarian politics. That, to him, meant relying primarily on solidaristic appeals to the self-interest of economically downscale white people. And while Rustin became particularly known for taking this line in the 1970s, it wasn’t unique to him. I have in the past quoted Martin Luther King Jr. on political strategy from “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

    Within the white majority there exists a substantial group who cherish democratic principles above privilege and who have demonstrated a will to fight side by side with the Negro against injustice. Another more substantial group is composed of those having common needs with the Negro and who will benefit equally with him in the achievement of social progress. There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are Negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Negro’s. In the South they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture they were fitting not only the Negro but themselves. Yet there are already signs of change. Without formal alliances, Negroes and whites have supported the same electorate coalitions in the South because each sufficiently served his own needs.

King’s point here, and I think Rustin’s point more directly, was made most pointedly of all by Obama in his unpublished draft where he complains “those blacks who most fervently insist on the pervasiveness of white racism have adopted a strategy that depends on white guilt for its effectiveness.” I think that’s a little bit of an unfair dig by Obama as written, but it captures the spirit of something that I think is correct, which is that if you take racism seriously as a political force in American politics, that suggests a strategy of not dwelling on racial issues.

By contrast, a lot of what’s contemporarily popular in progressive circles is the idea that basically most white people are extremely kind-hearted, so if you guilt-trip them with facts about slavery or redlining or the Tulsa massacre, they’re going to open their wallets and embrace reparations.

Obama, as a practicing politician, mostly took the advice of Obama the analyst and tried to avoid racial conflict as a topic. Not coincidentally, during Obama’s presidency, his political opponents were obsessed with race. Rush Limbaugh would talk about how the Affordable Care Act was a form of reparations. But Obama studiously tried to avoid talking about the ACA as closing the racial health insurance gap, which is I think exactly what Derrick Bell or Jeremiah Wright or Bayard Rustin or King himself would have advised him to do.

What’s annoyed me a bit about post-presidential Obama is that I wish he’d be a little more forceful in putting out the ideas of Obama-the-analyst in order to create more space for Kamala Harris and Hakeem Jeffries to act more like Obama-the-politician. I am fascinated, though, that one thing post-presidential Obama is doing is serving as a producer on a biopic about Rustin. The film, based on the trailer and on what I know of the screenwriters, seems to heavily focus on Rustin as a gay intersectional figure and not really get into his views on class politics.

But it’s possible that’s wrong and the stuff I’ve been writing about here will be in the movie. Either way, though, it’s clear that Obama is familiar with that side of Rustin’s life and work, and the release of the film is inevitably going to lead to more people publishing Bayard Rustin takes (I will certainly do one) and (I hope) even checking out his collected writings.

Tom: You’ve written or tweeted periodically about how Kamala Harris should revert to her 2000s-vintage ideological roots rather than posturing as a progressive firebrand. This seems like indisputably good advice. Why do you think that she, and politicians in general, act in ways and say things that are so obviously politically senseless and forgo doing things that would be obviously politically beneficial? Is it because they’re just ignorant, or because they’re captive to special interest groups?

Interest group capture can certainly play a role.

There was a hilarious story in Politico the other day about GOP strategists urging Republicans to be more vocal in condemning the Biden administration’s prescription drug pricing moves. This is by far the most popular thing Democrats have done during the past two years. The industry is currently trying to get GOP-appointed judges to toss this out, and of course they are hoping that Republicans will win in 2024 and repeal these rules. Literally the best thing that could possibly happen for Democrats next year would be for Republicans to vocally state their intention to repeal these rules. If you think, on the merits, that Biden is wrong, you should hope Republicans talk about literally anything else, win the election, and then repeal the rules on the sly. So what are the strategists smoking?

Well my guess is that some people in the pharmaceutical industry are worried that even if Republicans win in 2024, they might decide not to expend political capital on carrying water for them.

So the industry has a certain interest in kicking the tires on the GOP’s level of support for them. And a lot of “Republican strategists” who have pharmaceutical clients actually earn much more money from their industry work than they earn from their campaign work, so they are incentivized to give bad advice. On the Democratic side, you see some broadly similar dynamics. If you’re a Democratic pollster, then the odds are that working for actual campaigns is more like a hobby or a passion project and the bulk of your revenue comes from working for progressive advocacy groups. That creates a conflict of interest where principals don’t always get the best advice.

But my guess is that the even bigger issue, beyond interest groups, is just purely psychological. I think you could see during the 2020 cycle that the people Bernie Sanders was most comfortable listening to were the most hardcore Berners — his guys — when in practical terms he’d have gotten better advice from listening to half-hearted fans (like me!) who were trying to get him to address his actual weaknesses. By the same token, now that Harris is a little bit down, the most comfortable thing for her is probably to listen to people who say everything she’s doing is amazing and all her problems are due to other people being unfair to her (many people, including some in the Slow Boring comments, attribute the bad advice to her sister, but I don’t have specific information on that beyond D.C. gossip).

But she should listen to people (like me!) who don’t have any particular relationship to her but recognize that she’s objectively one of the most important people in American politics and would like to see her be more popular and successful.

In these terms, early-career politicians benefit from the fact that they attract less flattery.

PW: Given her now indisputable reign over pop culture, what one policy issue should Taylor Swift spend her social capital on? (a la Bob Barker’s animal rights)

There’s a huge gender gap on views of nuclear energy, so I know advocates are constantly looking for women to put forward as spokespeople. She takes flak for her personal emissions footprint, but I think could easily more than offset this by telling people about the need for reform at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

SS: How would you approach land use and transportation in Bar Harbor, Maine? (And by extension, other seasonal tourist destinations.) The town is extremely crowded in summer and half-empty in winter. Housing is expensive for residents, hotels are scarce for tourists, and businesses have trouble housing seasonal workers. The streets are packed with people and cars in summer. There are restrictions on Airbnbs, a typical mix of zoning, and controversy over how many cruise ships to allow. Would you adjust the YIMBY playbook to preserve touristy charm?

The “charm” and “seasonal destination” aspects of this cut in somewhat different directions. In charm terms, I do think it’s plausible that quaint New England towns generate economic benefit from quaintness and that should be taken into consideration when thinking about land use issues. But Maine is not running short of quaint New England towns, and I don’t think policymakers should apply that specifically to Bar Harbor, which has particular attraction as a tourist destination because of Acadia National Park. And the park itself is obviously a park, so that’s going to be preserved, as is the ocean. The “job” of Bar Harbor, in that context, is to provide ancillary services related to visiting the park and visiting the ocean.

Thinking about this kind of tourist destination just underscores why localism in land use is a bad idea.

It’s also why I’ve never loved the verbiage of YIMBY vs. NIMBY. Because while I personally actually am a YIMBY about my neighborhood and absolutely favor upzoning it, I think it’s unreasonable to ask a resident of Bar Harbor to take a subjectively YIMBY attitude toward the town. What we’re talking about is an upscale coastal community with very few residents. From the standpoint of those residents the current volume of tourism is a nuisance, and welcoming even more tourists would be an even bigger nuisance. The relevant policy issue is that Maine as a whole is a relatively poor state, and Maine would benefit from much more intensive economic development of Bar Harbor. It’s not like it would ever turn into a big city, but it really could be full of medium-sized modern hotels and mid-rise apartment buildings.

Juan-les-Pins on the Mediterranean coast of France is full of this kind of structure, often offered as seasonal rentals. I can 100% sympathize with Bar Harbor residents who wouldn’t want to see their town look like this.

But from the overall standpoint of Hancock County or the state of Maine, having that kind of more intensive economic development would be an incredible boon. Instead of banning Airbnbs, they’d be a source of tax revenue. And the state could use that revenue to invest in the University of Maine or reduce sales taxes or whatever else.

It’s become customary in the United States to think of land use as a local issue, but it’s just not true that the implications of Bar Harbor land use decisions are purely local.

Seth Chalmer: What do you think of Lee Drutman’s “More Parties, Better Parties” paper/agenda?

The problem with a job like Drutman’s is that it’s institutionally inevitable that he’s going to end up overstating his case. So I have a lot of caveats and qualifications that I would want to add to his analysis.

I see evidence of the same basic trends that are afflicting the United States all around, even in places like the Netherlands where the political institutions are completely different. That said, I broadly agree with what he’s saying. In a multi-party system, political leaders have a stronger incentive to make the affirmative case for themselves and less incentive to simply tear down their rivals. After all, even if your criticisms are really convincing, it’s always possible that some other party will benefit.

Proportional representation also makes gerrymandering much less significant, which has a good number of downstream benefits. So I’m for it.

Miles: Did TX Gov Abbott's strategy of bussing migrants to NYC actually kind of work, in a way? Now he's got the Mayor of a very liberal town making lots of noise about needing billions of dollars from the Feds, and that plays right into right-wing arguments about the costs of excessive migration. What's to be done now?

Abbott has been incredibly successful at making his point, but I would say a lot less successful at getting what he wants.

I placed this after the Drutman question because I think that duality illustrates some of the problems with the American political system, one of which is that Abbott’s main idea of how to get what he wants is just “beat Joe Biden” because the two parties are in zero-sum political competition. The flip side of that is that if Abbott were to ask for something specific and then Biden were to give Abbott what he asked for and then Abbott said “hey, this is great, thanks Joe!” that would be seen by the whole Republican Party as a huge betrayal of the larger cause of sticking it to Joe Biden. So it’s actually not 100% clear what Abbott specifically does want and we’re not making any progress on the issue.

Now, what I’ve been saying since March of 2021 is that Democrats should admit they don’t disagree that much with Republicans.

It is just not, in fact, true that Joe Biden and other major figures in the Democratic Party want to see large numbers of people arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border and find asylum here. When border crossing numbers go down, they brag about that. When numbers go up, they worry about their politics. When asylum-seekers are sent to blue cities, the mayors complain. Their view is not identical to Trump’s or to Abbott’s, but it’s honestly pretty similar. And I think it should be okay to say that. Biden and Mitch McConnell have the same views on Ukraine, even as they have very different views on climate change. By the same token, I think Biden and McConnell have very different views on a path to citizenship for people who’ve been living here a long time illegally — even as Biden and George W. Bush have the same view on that.

But I think Biden has been somewhat paralyzed by a post-Trump reluctance to just say “look, I agree with Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell and Greg Abbott that it’s very undesirable to have all these people showing up to make asylum claims and I want to sign a law that addresses that.” It would be kind of divisive intra-party, but it’s clear that Democrats who need to run in tough races are not prepared to say “chaotic asylum arrivals are good,” so they should admit they think this is bad and triangulate.

Michael Adelman: You've been among the people on Twitter calling attention to Republican proposals for lethal military force at the border and into Mexico. Do you think people underrate the probability that this is really going to happen?

This was followed by a bunch of political strategy questions, but the one thing I want to say here is that I find it vexing the extent to which I have very little sense of how serious anyone in the GOP is about this.

Rank-and-file progressives have a lot of flaws, but they really do enjoy hearing people argue about policy proposals. They sometimes enjoy this to a fault, such that Democrats spent the whole 2020 primary campaign arguing about ideas that were fantastical. That said, you could at least tell from watching the primary debate that the ideas were fantastical. Bernie and Warren were arguing about how to pay for Medicare for All, but Amy Klobuchar was right up there on stage saying she wouldn’t vote for Medicare for All. And Amy Klobuchar is not the most conservative member of the Democratic Caucus. She’s not even close. So if you were just idly curious about whether Bernie Sanders was going to pass a $16 trillion tax increase, the clear answer was no.

When it comes to using military force against Mexico, there are very few institutional barriers, so I don’t entirely rule it out.

On the other hand, these guys mostly seem like bullshitters who like the idea of “getting tough” but wouldn’t actually do it. Then again, maybe they would! Most of all, I would like to know which of the people in the field is most likely to actually go through with the craziest fads in conservative politics. But I don’t know how to tell that either.