A thread about what is wrong with the influence of Elon Musk and other tech billionaires. By Daron Acemoglu

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Daron Acemoglu

@DAcemogluMIT

A thread about what is wrong with the influence of Elon Musk and other tech billionaires. Another thread about content moderation will follow later this week.

Obviously, the problem isn’t that Musk is expressing his opinions, which is his freedom of speech. It isn’t that Musk has turned into a big supporter of Trump. It isn’t even that Musk is posting AI-generated fake images of Kamala Harris: https://cnn.com/2024/09/03/media/elon-musk-x-kamala-harris-trump-misinformation/index.html

My concerns are more sociological and political economic.

My starting point is that in any society some individuals have more, much more power than others. Once upon a time, this may have been linked to physical strength or military prowess. Today, it is often related to what Simon Johnson and I called “persuasion power” in Power and Progress. 

https://amazon.com/Power-Progress-Thousand-Year-Technology-Prosperity/dp/1541702530/

Persuasion power is rooted in status or prestige: those with greater status can more easily persuade others. Where status comes from and how unequally it is distributed vary greatly across societies.

In the United States, status became linked to money and wealth, and income and wealth inequality skyrocketed. This meant a very steep status hierarchy.

That is problematic for several reasons.

First, status – and relatedly persuasion power – are largely zero-sum affairs. More status for somebody means less status for another. A steeper status hierarchy makes some people happy, and others unhappy and dissatisfied. Investment in zero-sum activities is often inefficient and excessive, as compared to investment in non-zero-sum activities. Compare, for example, the social value of spending money on pure gold multi-million-dollar Rolex watches versus spending time to learn some new skills. Both may have intrinsic values for the investors (due to the beauty of the watch and the pride of acquiring new knowledge). But, on the whole, the first type of investment signals that you are richer and more able to undertake conspicuous consumption, and it can easily get out of hand – with people spending huge sums in order to edge ahead of others they see themselves in competition with. The second type of investment, on the other hand, increases your human capital also contributes to society. The first is largely zero-sum the second is largely non-zero-sum.

Second, there are evolutionary and social foundations for linking persuasion power to status and prestige – it is individually rational to learn from people who have expertise and it is reasonable to link this expertise to success. This type of learning is also good for communities, because it enables them to coordinate on certain best practices.

https://amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domesticating/dp/0691178437/

But when status gets linked to wealth and wealth inequality becomes very large, this social justification is lost. Consider the following thought experiment. Who has greater expertise on carpentry? A good, master carpenter or a hedge fund billionaire? If we think about it this way, we would probably conclude the former. But when wealth becomes status, we may start attaching more and more importance to views of hedge fund billionaires on carpentry. This example was purposefully simple and sharp. Let’s take another one to see why the “wealth is status” social equilibrium is problematic. Whose views on freedom of speech you want to attach more importance to? A tech billionaire or a philosopher who has grappled with ethical questions related to the freedom of speech?

Third, even more problematic is the fact that in most societies, wealth inequality has an arbitrary dimension. Take Wilt Chamberlain and Lebron James. We may argue endlessly about which one is better, but clearly, they were both exceptionally talented basketball players. Chamberlain is estimated to have had a wealth of $10 million at the time of his death. Lebron James’s wealth today is estimated at $1.2 billion. These different outcomes are largely arbitrary. Chamberlain happened to live at a time when there were sports stars did not get compensated as much. This is partly about technology (everybody can watch Lebron James today), partly about norms (we’ve have made it much more acceptable for people to be paid hundreds of millions of dollars), and partly about taxes (if the US today had the kinds of tax rates that it had in the 1950s, it would not generate such large wealth inequality). Similarly, if the tech sector did not become so central to the economy and did not have a winner-take-all aspect (which was also partly a choice of how we organize several markets and sectors), tech billionaires would not have become so rich. Bill Gates or Elon Musk are not any wiser because they are taxed less. But they have much more wealth because they are taxed so little. But then in a “wealth is status” social equilibrium, their status and social influence multiplies because they are taxed so little.

Fourth, there is something even more pernicious which Simon Johnson and I explored in Power and Progress using the example of Ferdinand de Lesseps. In fact, we thought this was so important that we devoted the first full chapter, Chapter 2, of the book to it. Lesseps gained tremendous status in late 19th century France, coming to be identified as the “Le Grand Français” (the great Frenchman), because of his success (and luck) in successfully completing the Suez Canal. He showed great skills in convincing politicians both in Egypt and France and some foresight in seeing that maritime international trade would become very important. He was also tremendously lucky in that his hopes that technological solutions to the way that he wanted to build the canal (without locks, which was initially impossible because of the amount of digging excavation that would be necessary) were developed just-in-time to save the project. But then what did Lesseps do with this prestige? He became reckless, unhinged and cocky, pushing the Panama Canal project in an unworkable direction, which ultimately led to the deaths of more than 20,000 people and to financial ruin for many more (including his own family). Persuasion power also makes you unrestrained, which can be socially dangerous and disruptive. Simon and I thought that Lesseps’s story was relevant precisely because the same dynamics were being played out with many tech leaders today.

Fifth, some very rich people choose not to use the status conferred on them by their wealth to centrally influence critical debates (think of Warren Buffett). Some like Bill Gates or Elon Musk do. It follows as a corollary of what I have argued so far that this is not desirable, because their status is excessive, and they are now influencing key social choices beyond their expertise. It is not tech billionaires’ fault that US policy is fueling massive inequality (though they benefit from it handsomely and many of them then use their status in order to keep taxes low and regulations light). But it is their responsibility if they start misusing the huge status that this wealth inequality affords them. It is their responsibility if they turn into bullies and start punching down on people who disagree with them, because they themselves start believing that everybody should respect their opinion on every topic. It is absolutely their responsibility if they use their platform for further polarizing society.

Finally, if we are in such a situation the last thing we want is to give even bigger forums – for example, in the form of their own social network – to these people who already have excess status and influence, and this is doubly true if they have a tendency to punch down.

10:30 PM · Sep 4, 2024

Even a Harris Transition Would Be Challenging. By Matthew Yglesias

Trump’s chaotic transition planning is getting a lot of headlines, but same-party handoffs are fraught in their own way.

September 1, 2024 at 12:00 PM UTC

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

If she wins, Kamala Harris will face one of the rarest tasks in American politics: the same-party presidential transition. Although it wouldn’t be as chaotic as the transition her opponent appears to be planning, it would come with its own set of challenges — both professional and political.

Outgoing presidents are almost never succeeded by a fellow party member who won the election. This is mostly a coincidence (Richard Nixon, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton all came extremely close), but it’s happened only twice in the last century: George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1989, and Herbert Hoover took over from Calvin Coolidge in 1929.

In theory, a same-party transition should be easier than a partisan turnover. In practice, it’s more fraught. Precisely because a partisan transition involves a large gap in policy perspectives, there’s nothing personal about people losing their jobs. Joe Biden didn’t “fire” Donald Trump’s cabinet, he just became president.

But suppose Harris wins and really wants to put in place her own EPA chief or Interior secretary, but Deb Haaland or Michael Regan are reluctant to leave. Then she’d have to fire them, which would be awkward both personally and politically. That’s why Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, sent a letter in 1988 asking Reagan’s political appointees to tender their resignations after the election so that Bush would be able to start with a clean slate. The problem, as Andy Card later recalled, is that many of them didn’t do it.

What’s more, new presidents tend to rely on people with experience from prior presidencies. Even Trump brought back many who’d served in some capacity in the Bush administration, while the Biden team is full of Obama veterans. Three members of Reagan’s cabinet, including the attorney general and the Treasury secretary, were retained by Bush, while Coolidge’s secretaries of State, Treasury and Labor served under Hoover.

Given this reality — as well as today’s charged political climate — there is a certain logic to not asking Biden appointees to resign.

Technically, presidential appointees remain in place until they resign or are fired, which means that if Harris kept Biden’s people around, she wouldn’t need to confirm new ones.1 This is an appealing option if Republicans win back a majority in the Senate.

The last time a newly inaugurated president lacked a Senate majority was, again, 1989 — when politics was much less partisan and polarized. In 2025, it might be extremely difficult to get anyone confirmed. So instead of asking for resignations, Harris might find herself begging people such as Merrick Garland, Janet Yellen and Lloyd Austin to stay in office.

I know from reporting on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 transition planning that she essentially had two blueprints: one to be used if Democrats retook the Senate, and one if Republicans retained control. I do not know if Harris’ contingency planning has reached that level of detail, but I do know that she has had far less time to get a transition team organized, and that trying to plan two transitions simultaneously takes a lot more time.

Meanwhile, Biden has been strikingly indecisive on a number of personnel matters. Essentially nobody has been fired from any significant role, and vacancies at Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs haven’t been filled. Within the White House, there are a handful of senior advisers who wield significant influence but lack defined portfolios, and agency officials tell me it’s often not clear who exactly is in charge of what.

Last but by no means least, the stakes of all these personnel changes will be elevated because Harris’ factional positioning inside the Democratic Party is unclear, maybe deliberately. Since she didn’t need to win a party primary, she wasn’t forced to run the usual gauntlet of interest-group demands. That’s mostly a plus, but it could give small-bore personnel decisions outsized ideological significance.

The impulse to avoid getting bogged down in detailed discussions of policy arcana has served Harris well so far. But deferring decisions now only raises the stakes of choices later. And there are few decisions more consequential than the ones a president-elect makes about personnel. Kamala Harris’ transition could be far more difficult than it appears.

Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious. The Atlantic - Politics / by Michael Powell

 / Aug 30, 2024 at 7:42 PM

The section of Arlington National Cemetery that Donald Trump visited on Monday is both the liveliest and the most achingly sad part of the grand military graveyard, set aside for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Section 60, young widows can be seen using clippers and scissors to groom the grass around their husbands’ tombstones as lots of children run about.

Karen Meredith knows the saddest acre in America only too well. The California resident’s son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was the fourth generation of her family to serve as an Army officer. He was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and laid to rest in Section 60. She puts flowers on his gravesite every Memorial Day. “It’s not a number, not a headstone,” she told me. “He was my only child.”

The sections of Arlington holding Civil War and World War I dead have a lonely and austere beauty. Not Section 60, where the atmosphere is sanctified but not somber—too many kids, Meredith recalled from her visits to her son’s burial site. “We laugh, we pop champagne. I have met men who served under him and they speak of him with such respect. And to think that this man”—she was referring to Trump—“came here and put his thumb up—”

She fell silent for a moment on the telephone, taking a gulp of air. “I’m trying not to cry.”

For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president; treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace; honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”

[Read: Trump calls Americans killed in war “suckers” and “losers”]

But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs up for his campaign photographer and videographer.

Few spaces in the United States join the sacred and the secular to more moving effect than Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres set on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River and our nation’s capital. More than 400,000 veterans and their dependents have been laid to rest here, among them nearly 400 Medal of Honor recipients. Rows of matching white tombstones stretch to the end of sight.

A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, “abruptly pushed” her aside.

Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”—the Biden administration—“took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”

Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared to what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.

There was, of course, another way to handle this mistake. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah had accompanied Trump to the cemetery, and his campaign emailed out photos of the governor and the former president there. When challenged, Cox did what is foreign to Trump: He apologized. “You are correct,” Cox replied to a person criticizing the event on the social-media platform X, adding, “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending out an apology.”

[Read: Trump dishonors fallen soldiers again]

This was not a judgment call, or a minor violation of obscure bureaucratic boilerplate. In the regulations governing visitors and behavior at Arlington National Cemetery, many paragraphs lay out what behavior is acceptable and what is not. These read not as suggestions but as commandments. Memorial services are intended to honor the fallen, the regulations note, with a rough eloquence: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”

As the clamor of revulsion swelled this week, LaCivita did not back off. On Wednesday, the Trump adviser posted a photo of Trump at Arlington Cemetery on the social-media site X and added these words: “The Photo that shook the world and reminded America who the real Commander in Chief is …August 26th 2024 ..Mark the day ⁦@KamalaHarris⁩ and weak ⁦@JoeBiden.”

The Army, which is historically loath to enter politics, issued a rare statement yesterday rebuking the Trump campaign, noting that ceremony participants “had been made aware” of relevant federal laws “prohibiting political activities”and that the employee “acted with professionalism.” The Army said it “considers this matter closed” because the cemetery employee declined to press charges.

Meanwhile, an unrepentant Trump team kept stoking the controversy. Yesterday, LaCivita posted another photo of Trump at Arlington and added this: “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy”—the Army secretary’s office.

It had the quality of middle-school graffiti, suggesting that Trump viewed the controversy as but another chance to mock his critics before moving on to the next outrage. For grieving families with loved ones buried in Section 60, moving on is not so easy.

How old, I asked Meredith, was your son at the time of his death? “He was 26,” she replied. “He did not have time to live. I didn’t get to dance at his wedding. I didn’t get to play with grandkids.”   

This week, all she could do was call out a crude and self-regarding 78-year-old man for failing, in that most sacred of American places, to comport himself with even the roughest facsimile of dignity.

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The Far Right Is Becoming Obsessed With Race and IQ. By Ali Breland

Read time: 9 minutes

“Race science” has returned.

An illustration of a marble bust of a head wearing a MAGA hat.

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Updated at 6:34 p.m. ET on August 20, 2024

“Joining us now is Steve Sailer, who I find to be incredibly interesting, and one of the most talented noticers,” Charlie Kirk said on his internet show in October. Kirk, the 30-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organization, slowed down as he said “noticers,” looked up at the camera, and coyly flicked his eyebrows.

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological. In his interview with Kirk, Sailer noticed that “Blacks tend to commit murder about 10 times as often per capita as whites, and it’s not just all explained by poverty.” Sailer, one of the most prominent peddlers of race science in the United States, has made a career out of noticing things. (Last year, he published an anthology of his writing titled Noticing.) He has claimed that Black people tend to have lower IQs than white people (while Asians and Ashkenazi Jews tend to have higher IQs). Sailer says that nurture plays a role, but generally concludes that differences between racial groups exist in large part because of inherent traits.

Sailer has written for decades about race science, but his appearance on Kirk’s show—one of the most popular on the right—came amid a year in which he has earned newfound prominence. In June, he also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s web show. “Somehow you became a mysterious outlaw figure that no one is allowed to meet or talk to,” Carlson said from inside his barn studio in Maine. Sailer chuckled in agreement. “For 10 years—from 2013 into 2023—you basically couldn’t go see Steve Sailer give a speech anywhere,” he said. Now he was free to speak.

Sailer’s move into the spotlight, though significant on its own, marks something larger: Race science is on the rise. The far right has long espoused outright racism and anti-Semitism, especially in the Trump era. But more right-wing gatekeepers are shrouding that bigotry in a cloak of objectivity and pseudoscientific justification. They see race not as a social construction, but as something that can be reduced to genetic facts. Don’t take it from us, they say; just look at the numbers and charts.

Race science is hardly a new idea. During Jim Crow, the idea was used as justification for sterilizing Black people. In Nazi Germany, the veneer of science and biology was used as a pretense for genocide. In recent decades, race science has chugged along in the U.S., mostly subterraneously. It has occasionally popped out into public view, in many cases to be met with swift condemnation. A version of that played out in 1994, when Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which argues, in part, that race and intelligence are linked.

More recently, after the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, early in the Trump presidency, race science was boosted by far-right figures such as Stefan Molyneux and Richard Spencer, though not to the extent or with the conviction it is now. In 2016, Spencer, the white supremacist who gained traction in the early Trump years, said that “race is genetically coherent,” but also that “it’s not just about genes and DNA” but about “the people and the spirit.” Both Molyneux and Spencer had real followings, but were treated as fringe oddities by the mainstream right. Molyneux, who once reportedly said that immigration is “akin to importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy,” was banned from YouTube in 2020. Spencer was also seen as politically radioactive, which curbed his potential influence.

What’s different now is that race science is moving into the open. Sailer may have once been a fringe oddity as well, but these days his views are broadcast to the millions of people who listen to Kirk and Carlson. Neither Carlson nor Kirk pushed back on Sailer’s views: “Steve, what you’re doing is so important,” Kirk told him. Over email, I asked Sailer why he believes he’s now accepted into relatively more mainstream circles after having been pushed to the margins for years. Society is “drifting back toward sanity,” he claimed.

Other peddlers of race science also have the ear of those in power on the right. Take Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist whose many followers call themselves “Groypers.” He has repeatedly argued that white people are intellectually superior, and praised people who believe in race science. In a single podcast interview in 2022, Fuentes said that “there is a genetic basis” for Black people committing criminal acts and that Black people are “more antisocial and have higher incidences of sociopathy and on average a lower IQ.” His ideology has proved so infectious among Gen Z that last year, disciples of his brand of politics appeared to have taken over dozens of campus conservative groups. He has also made inroads with elected Republicans; in 2022, Fuentes dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Like Fuentes, Bronze Age Pervert, a prominent far-right influencer on X who has dabbled with race science, is especially popular with young conservatives. His book, Bronze Age Mindset, reportedly became a popular read among congressional and White House staffers during the Trump administration. Much of his message essentially boils down to this: Some people are better than others, there is a natural order, and Black people are definitely at or near the bottom of it. Bronze Age Pervert’s real name is Costin Alamariu, and he holds a Ph.D. in political science from Yale. In a modified version of his thesis that he self-published last year to fanfare among the online right, titled Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, Alamariu writes that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”

Other anonymous far-right accounts have accrued more than 100,000 followers by posting about the supposed links between race and intelligence. Elon Musk frequently responds to @cremieuxrecueil, which one far-right publication has praised as an account that “traces the genetic pathways of crime, explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Musk has also repeatedly engaged with @Eyeslasho, a self-proclaimed “data-driven” account that has posted statistics supposedly illustrating the inferiority of Black people. Other tech elites such as Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Paul Graham follow one or both of these accounts. Whom someone follows in itself is not an indication of their own beliefs, but at the very least it signals the kind of influence and reach these race-science accounts now have.

The gospel of race science has not fully caught on with the broader MAGA masses yet, but you can see how it’s starting to trickle out. Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test. There is more to the complicated genetic, cultural, economic, and historical realities of race than a few lines on a chart. When I asked Sailer to explain the links between race and intelligence, he said that he doesn’t “see strong reasons to assume that intelligence is all that different from a trait like height, which is clearly driven by both genes and environment.” He cited regions of Serbia and South Sudan as having tall populations despite being relatively poor, suggesting that health and nutrition are not the primary explanation for average national height.

Genetics may play some role in the average height in these two countries, but intelligence is not like height. As three prominent psychologists have written, “Modern DNA science has found hundreds of genetic variants that each have a very, very tiny association with intelligence, but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score.” Furthermore, that race is not a biological phenomenon is the consensus view among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, building on generations of empirical research.

Despite this, race-science adherents remained undeterred. Attempts to legitimize racial animus have a clear purpose. Even though racism persists in the U.S., overt racism is still extremely unpopular. Attempts to advance racist beliefs have to work within that paradigm. Trump’s Muslim ban was racist, but it hid under justifications of national security and counterterrorism. Trump’s attempts to stake his claim as a “law and order” candidate are a revival of Richard Nixon’s similar strategy in the 1960s to energize racist voters without being racist out loud. When Trump has accidentally pierced the veil, as he did when he referred to predominantly Black nations as “shithole countries,” he has tried to deny having said so in the first place. Race science is used as a crowbar to try to overturn the idea that racism is bigoted. Instead, its adherents insist, they are simply acknowledging a cold, hard truth about the world.

This can be particularly attractive in an era of data fetishism. Numbers and metrics have become a codex through which everything is processed: Rotten Tomatoes percentages, box-office sales, Spotify streams, Instagram followers now play an outsize role in determining what is culturally valuable. People quantify themselves by obsessively tracking their sleep cycles, heart rates, and other types of health data. To a racist, race science offers a similar certainty to another thing that’s not actually quantifiable. Sailer has likened himself to a “statistics analyst.”

The allure of a supposed truth of racial statistics is about more than data, of course. For certain white people, it can be appealing to believe that you have been shut out by a “system that doesn’t recognize your genius, because it’s set to the demands of the grubby many,” as the conservative thinker Sohrab Ahmari, who has written about the creeping eugenic tendencies of right-wing youth, told me. DEI measures in the workplace may not be why a white person hasn’t succeeded in their career, but they become easy scapegoats. This feeling of racial aggrievement can fester at a time when the cost of housing, food, and health care have all hit new highs relative to income. Economic vulnerability helps keep ideas like race science fertile. Studies have shown that, in Europe, negative perceptions about the economy correlate with upticks in support for the far right.

For those at the top of society, a belief in a natural hierarchy can work in the opposite direction: as a justification of their genius. Bronze Age Pervert speaks to disaffected right-wingers who have not attained what they thought they would, but also to those rising through the ranks of elite conservative institutions for a similar reason: “Natural inequalities exist” and “certain men are naturally more fit to rule than others,” as the former Trump staffer Michael Anton summarizes what he calls “the most reasonable of BAP’s premisses.” In other words, we are rising through the ranks of the elite because it is our natural right to.

What makes the return of race science such a problem is that once the logic has taken hold, it is hard to root out: The natural order has already been settled. The poor are dysgenic and disgusting. The rich are heroic and smart. Everything is in its place.

UPDATE / CORRECTION: 

This article originally misstated that the X account @Eyeslasho has posted about the “genetic inferiority” of Black people. In fact, the account has not directly attributed group differences to biology.

About the Author:

Ali Breland is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Why Rich Lowry Is No Longer An Anti-TrumperPosted by Martin Longman

Progress Pond

Why Rich Lowry Is No Longer An Anti-Trumper

Posted by Martin Longman | Aug 26, 2024 | Elections, Media | 0 |     

Why Rich Lowry Is No Longer An Anti-Trumper. 

When I saw the New York Times had invited National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry to write a guest column entitled “Trump Can Win on Character,” my eyes almost rolled off the edge of the Earth. After reading it, I’m a little more sympathetic. After all, Lowry isn’t writing for us, he’s writing for an audience of one. He’s giving advice to Donald Trump about how he can effectively improve his messaging. What better way to get his attention than to argue he can win on character?

As for the Times’ decision to print this piece, Lowry actually provides pretty good advice. The trick is that he’s not arguing that Trump can convince the American people he has better character than Kamala Harris. When Lowry talks about character in the piece, he doesn’t mean things like honesty, marital fidelity, or not committing sexual assaults or leading political coups. He’s talking about the character you need in a president. If that sounds absurd, I’ll let Lowry speak for himself:

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

It’s nice that Lowry acknowledges that it’s a political plus to be trustworthy. And I can’t really argue that his somewhat cynical take about how presidential elections are won and lost is wrong. So, the job for Trump then is to convince voters he cares about them more than Harris does, and that he’s a strong leader while Harris is a weak one.

Again, I think that’s right. And Lowry identifies a path toward doing that that is not about rank insults and demeaning nicknames. Trump should focus on Harris’s 2019-2020 campaign for president which was a pretty spectacular failure in which she went very far to the left on the issues in a desperate and fruitless effort to avoid getting outflanked.

Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.

The idea is to tie everything into her being weak compared to Trump. In theory, this would just bolster the ingrained bias that men are more natural leaders than women, but it’s not gender-dependent. As Lowry points out, Dubya Bush effectively used the flip-flopping charge to make John Kerry look weak. Harris has flip-flopped on several issues, like fracking, since her 2020 campaign. The point is, strength provides dependability, which is an element of trustworthiness.

The other prong is winning the argument about who cares about the average voter. Lowry uses the example of Barack Obama successfully convincing voters that Mitt Romney was an out-of-touch plutocrat who couldn’t be trusted to look out for the average American. Here’s how Lowry would use the same strategy to go after Harris:

She didn’t do more as Vice President to secure the border or to address inflation because she didn’t care enough about the consequences for ordinary people. She doesn’t care if her tax policies will destroy jobs. She has been part of an administration that has seen real wages stagnate while minimizing the problem because the party line matters to her more than economic reality for working Americans.

Here the argument is that Harris is out of touch with ordinary Americans, either because she’s from Berkeley or ensconced in power or because her ethnic background is unique. She’s not one of you, so she doesn’t care about you. It’s not all that different for the successful argument against Romney.

I really have two thoughts about Lowry’s piece. The first is that Trump would improve his chances if he followed Lowry’s advice, but it’s not so simple. Trump uses the feedback he gets from his social media posts and his MAGA rallies to hone his messaging, and he discovered long ago that meanness and cruelty are his most effective tools for attracting fervent support. Thoughtfulness, even if he were capable of it, lands with a thud with his base. He occasionally offers something substantive, and he always abandons it immediately when it doesn’t get likes and applause. What I’m saying is that there’s not much use offering advice to someone who is incapable of following it. I think the fatal problem is that there’s no way for Trump to feel the effectiveness of a pitch to moderate or undecided voters because they don’t give him a response. An ordinary politician would look for a response in the polling data, but that takes patience. Trump has no patience.

The second thought I have is to wonder why Lowry is trying to help Trump. His publication, the National Review, was fervently anti-Trump in 2015-2016. Did this prediction come true:

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

As for strength, here’s what Lowry wrote in 2016:

For someone who wants to project strength, he has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug. All in all, Trump knows approximately as much about national security as he does about the nuclear triad — which is to say, almost nothing.

Is there anything that’s happened since to make Lowry reconsider that judgment?

No? Well how about this for January 6th prescience?

His obsession is with “winning,” regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power.

And here is Lowry’s conclusion:

If the [Republican Party] cannot advance a compelling working-class agenda, the legitimate anxieties and discontents of blue-collar voters will be exploited by demagogues. We sympathize with many of the complaints of Trump supporters about the GOP, but that doesn’t make the mogul any less flawed a vessel for them.

Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

It’s pretty clear that by attempting to assist Trump now, Lowry is flip-flopping. And it’s a bigger more substantial flip-flop than Kerry on Iraq War funding or Harris on fracking and single-payer health care. And this isn’t a case where you change your position because you realize your previous analysis was wrong. Lowry has been proven correct about Trump’s crude and heedless populism and his trashing of the “the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP.” He was right about Trump’s susceptibility to flattery and inability to stand up to Putin. He even knew that he’d put “winning” over “ordered liberty” and the “limits of government power.”

But, you know what?

It turns out that the National Review cares about likes and applause just as much as Trump does. They have revenue to raise, and opposing the Republican nominee for president won’t raise it. They can get on board or they can look for new jobs, because the National Review will cease to exist before it endorse a Democrat.

 

Kamala Harris Is Rerunning Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign. The Atlantic - Politics / by Yair Rosenberg

 Aug 26, 2024 at 9:12 PM.

The Democratic National Convention is over, and the verdict is in: It was a remarkable heist. “They stole traditional Republican themes (faith, patriotism) and claimed them as their own,” the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote. “Democrats Show That Republicans Aren’t the Only Ones Who Can Wrap Themselves in the Flag,” read a New York Times headline. “Speaker after speaker,” CNN reported, “struck themes that have long been hallmarks of Republican rhetoric: tributes to service, sacrifice, American leadership and, above all, a repeated reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.” Or, as The Washington Post put it, “Democrats claim patriotism, God and American exceptionalism at convention.”

Oh, wait—my mistake. Those last two quotes are from coverage of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, when Hillary Clinton accepted her party’s nomination. And they’re not the only part of last week’s DNC that felt like a rerun.

In 2016, retired four-star Marine Corps General John Allen endorsed Clinton alongside dozens of Democratic veterans and former military officials, while delegates throughout the hall waved giant American flags and thunderously chanted “U-S-A!” This past week, the Arizona congressman and Marine Corps veteran Ruben Gallego took the stage with fellow Democratic elected veterans, before a sea of flags and a giant backdrop of Old Glory, to declare, “We stand united as Democrats and patriots to fight for anyone who serves.” In 2016, the billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg assailed Donald Trump and his business acumen. In 2024, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker told delegates, “Take it from an actual billionaire—Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Kamala Harris defines herself—but not too much]

At first glance, these parallels are not encouraging for Democrats. After all, they know what happened in 2016. So should liberals elated after their convention be concerned that its seeming success might actually be a mirage that will be dispelled in November, just as it was eight years ago? Not quite. Although Kamala Harris is reviving the Clinton playbook, she has so far managed to avoid its biggest fumbles.

Some of this is due to political skill. But much of it is because Harris has one key advantage that Clinton lacked: Thanks to the unusual way she assumed the nomination, the vice president sidestepped a bruising primary—which meant that she did not have to spend the convention mollifying left-wing critics. In 2016, Clinton had to contend with 1,831 Bernie Sanders delegates, close to half of the convention’s roughly 4,000 total. Many of them went “Bernie or Bust,” accused Clinton of stealing the primary, and repeatedly disrupted her acceptance speech and other proceedings. Harris, however, had to reckon with just 30 uncommitted delegates protesting Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, who—regardless of the merits of their critique—could ultimately be turned away with little consequence.

Freed from the need to appeal to internal opponents, Harris was able to appeal to her skeptics across the country—to embrace elements of moderation not just in style but also in substance. Consider: In her 2016 acceptance speech, Clinton barely addressed Trump’s signature issue, immigration, gesturing only briefly to “a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are already contributing to our economy” and “comprehensive immigration reform.” Harris, by contrast, backed up her pivot to the center on the same issue with an explicit promise:

After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Last year, Joe [Biden] and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal. Well, I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border-security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.

In Chicago, Harris acknowledged that “there are people of various political views watching tonight” and promised “to be a president for all Americans.” So did Clinton in Philadelphia, saying, “I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans, and independents; for the struggling, the striving, and the successful; for those who vote for me and those who don’t; for all Americans.” But from the vantage point of wavering Republican voters, Clinton also muddled that message by delivering broadsides against the wealthy and making unpopular pledges to the activist class. “When more than 90 percent of the gains have gone to the top one percent, that’s where the money is,” she said, echoing her primary rival, “and we are going to follow the money.” She also declared that “Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all.” For Clinton, these were necessary concessions to the Sanders supporters in the room, but because Harris has not had to constantly look over her left shoulder, such rhetoric was conspicuously absent from her acceptance speech.

[Franklin Foer: It’s Sorkin again in America]

This is not the only area where Harris has been buoyed by being able to shed concerns that dogged her predecessor. In 2016, Clinton, as the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party, had to contend with skepticism over her gender. But in 2024, Harris has largely been able to avoid the issue, thanks to Clinton normalizing the idea of a woman as commander in chief, just as Barack Obama normalized the idea of a Black president. “Together, we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton told delegates on the opening night of last week’s convention. She is personally responsible for many of them.

There are still 71 days to go until the election. In the months ahead, Harris will need to sidestep the same factional traps that snared Clinton, while also navigating press conferences and media interviews where she will face questions that she has thus far evaded about her policy shifts. But if she succeeds in maintaining the approach that made the convention so effective, her 2024 campaign may prove to be the rare reboot that exceeds the original.

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DNC: The Breakout Star Was Actually YIMBY - Bloomberg. By Matthew Yglesias

August 25, 2024 at 12:00 PM UTC

Read time: 4 minutes

Barack Obama’s speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention marks what is almost certainly the high-water mark for the political visibility of the YIMBY movement.

Taking a cue from one of the main themes of the week — “We’re not going back” — the former president noted that the nation needs “to chart a new way forward to meet the challenges of today.” For example, he noted, “if we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.”

For us veterans of the land-use reform movement, it was a thrilling moment. Not that these ideas are brand new to Obama. His administration embraced the basic analytic viewpoint of YIMBYism during his second term, most clearly in its 2016 Housing Supply Toolkit but also in various budget requests and remarks by administration officials over the years. President Joe Biden’s administration has similarly been officially YIMBY in a low-key way.

What we never got from either president, however, was the kind of high-profile endorsement that Obama delivered last week. Under the circumstances, it would be extremely churlish to offer any reaction other than a simple, “Thank you.”

And yet here I am.

While tackling regulatory barriers to housing construction in high-demand areas is absolutely an important long-term issue for the US economy, in the short term federal policymakers have more powerful tools.

For better or worse, the US is currently building dense housing at the highest rate since the mid-1980s. It’s true that anti-density rules are still too strict, and that rolling them back would have large economic benefits. But restrictions on apartments don’t explain very much about why housing-cost pressures are so much more severe today than they were a decade ago. What’s happened instead is that construction of single-family homes is running at a dramatically slower rate than in the 1990s, to say nothing of the aughts.

Focus on Mortgage Rates, Not Building Regulations

Homebuilders would increase their pace of construction if the federal government made it easier for homebuyers to borrow money

In 2010 or 2014, nobody found the low rate of housebuilding remarkable. There had just been an enormous housing market crash, after all, and homebuilding was recovering from a low level. But the slow recovery has basically plateaued since the pandemic, even though demand keeps rising. What gives?

Some analysts, such as Kevin Erdmann at the Mercatus Center, point the finger at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac noting that tighter lending standards adopted after the financial crisis mean that mortgage lending to lower-income families has dried up.

Without any eligible purchasers of cheap starter homes, it doesn’t really make sense to build them. Despite the hype around private equity funds investing in single-family homes as rental properties, single-family rentals are a very small and unproven business. The majority of investment in purpose-built rental housing is multifamily apartments, just as it’s always been.

Investment in this sector is in fact up in response to the rise in demand, but it is running into the regulatory constraints Obama is talking about. Lifting these constraints is important and useful, but a series of state-by-state, city-by-city, zoning-board-by-zoning-board battles is a generational struggle — it’s not a quick fix for suffering families. Mortgage lending standards, by contrast, are set nationally by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (and to an extent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) and could simply be made more lax.

Would this be courting another financial catastrophe?

I’m skeptical. For starters, the rules can be altered without going all the way back to the “liar loans” of yesteryear — there’s such a thing as an overreaction to a real problem. More to the point, trying to avoid financial crises at that end of the funnel is just a slightly odd idea. The federal government regulates the overall riskiness of banks’ loan portfolios with regulations on stuff like capital and liquidity. The recent trend at the Federal Reserve has been toward weakening these rules in pursuit of economic growth. It would make more sense to be lax on mortgage lending and strict on bank capital, letting investors risk their money on loans if that’s what they want to do.

There is also the construction market, which is significantly influenced by the interest-rate environment. Democrats are aware of this when they talk about their hope that the Fed will cut rates this fall. But they are less aware that the capacity of long-term rates to fall — unless unemployment surges — is limited by the size of the budget deficit.

Fiscal discipline and bank deregulation was the housing-policy formula of another former Democratic president who spoke last week: Bill Clinton. But ever since the financial crisis, he hasn’t liked to talk about it so much — even though, as housing policy, it worked pretty well.

America’s current home dearth is a reminder that every choice in life comes with trade-offs. There are downsides to getting too lax with mortgage origination rules, and downsides to getting too strict. And over time, the US does really need to address zoning and other land-use practices that block apartment construction from too many communities.

But America suffers from a housing shortage right now, and if Democrats want to fulfill Kamala Harris’ pledge to end it, then they will need some powerful, fast-acting tools. That means making use of the federal government’s vast power over home financing instead of its limited influence over local building regulations.