Black Friday mailbag

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Black Friday mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

19 - 24 minutes

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Philip Reese: I feel like media outlets should stop writing profiles of mass shooting suspects after they are killed/arrested. I understand that a lot of people want to know about someone who would do something so awful, but I worry that making these assholes famous serves as motivation to future assholes. Not advocating for a new law, or anything - just for media to exercise restraint. Mainstream media already refrain from writing about most suicides, for fear of encouraging that act. Would this be much different? What do you think?

My sense is that most outlets do try to exercise some restraint about not turning these killers into celebrities. Just as a sign of the contrast, I to this day remember the names of the Columbine shooters (though per Philip’s point, I won’t repeat them here) but actually don’t recall off the top of my head the names of more recent mass shooters. The problem with pushing voluntary restraint further is that this is a substantially demand-driven business and to the extent people are interested, there’s strong pressure to deliver what they want before someone else does.

Alec Arellano: You've written compellingly about the flaws in the design of the U.S. Constitution. What, if anything, do you think the U.S. Constitution gets right or does well when it comes to how to set up the structure and powers of government?

If you think of the Constitution as an antiquated document from the late 18th century (which, after all, is what it is), then I think it looks incredibly visionary across a broad range of fronts. The constitution looks bad today largely because it’s a victim of its own success and tons of countries operate broadly within the framework it established.

The upshot is that the Constitution’s good ideas are very non-distinctive these days — what’s truly distinctive is mostly its bad ideas, not because it was written by idiots or anything, but because the world has iterated and improved on the general idea of constitutions.

Marcus Seldon: Prior to the election there was a lot of media hype about Steve Bannon training a bunch Trump supporters to disrupt the election as poll watchers. There were news stories of election administrators being driven out of their jobs with death threats and harassment. Many of my liberal friends were dooming about this prior to the election.

And yet the elections went off without a hitch as far as I can tell. Do you think the media was irresponsible for hyping this up? I feel like I’m hindsight they were manipulating liberal readers into doomscrolling through their articles and videos.

I think that with a lot of this stuff, the issue is that the press struggles to convey the idea that you should worry about a particular relatively low-probability thing because if it did happen, it would be really bad.

So if Bannon does stuff that raises the chance of violence at the polls from “so incredibly small as to worth ignoring” to “there’s a five percent chance this could happen,” it seems to me that’s worth worrying about. But five percent is still pretty low odds; that would be like Saudi Arabia beating Argentina in a World Cup match. But these things do happen.

Andy: If you could no longer live in the US for whatever reason, which country and city would you pick and why?

This is boring, but I’d probably want to live in an English-speaking city that has convenient flights to the main American cities, so like London, Dublin, Toronto, or Vancouver. I’ve never been to Vancouver, but of the other three Dublin is my favorite, so I’m moving to Ireland if they’ll have me.

Rashad: Matt, I'd love to learn more about your early days in DC and how your close friendships/roommates affected your and their career trajectories. I feel like personal network effects are understudied and would love to hear how you think about their impact on your life.

The critical text on this is Ashley Parker’s article about my group house with Kriston Capps (now with Bloomberg) and Spencer Ackerman (now the author of a great newsletter) along with some people who are not really in the game now. When I moved to D.C., Kriston was one of the first people I met because we both “knew” each other from blogging, back then when the blogosphere was a small thing. Another early introduction was to Julian Sanchez, also a pioneering blogger and at the time a writer for Reason, who was friends in college with a good friend of mine from high school.

The house that Kriston and Spencer and I lived in was across an alley from Julian’s house, and Tim Lee (Full Stack Economics) also lived there for a time, as did David Weigel (now at Semafor) and Will Wilkinson (formerly of Cato and the Niskanen Center, now doing something with crypto). Ryan Nunn, who’s with the Minneapolis Fed now but was at one point policy director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings, was also in that house at one point. So you can see just on that block you have what are very much overlapping circles of social, professional, and intellectual interest.

At least one story you can tell about this period is that in the mid-Bush years, a group of young progressives and young libertarians came together on both a social and intellectual level based on thinking that the Iraq War was bad and same-sex marriage equality was good. Those were, at the time, highly salient political issues, but the leaders of both parties took the opposite view. And even though these days nobody talks about Iraq or marriage equality anymore, a lot of ideas and themes that are prominent today emerged out of that encounter. “One Billion Americans” is a book about how we should have more legal immigration, how we should liberalize land use rules, and how we should have cash transfers to parents of young children. If you teleported those ideas back to the mid-aughts, they would have seemed completely alien to the themes of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. But they are very much ideas that emerge from that progressive/libertarian synthesis.

BorgenMorgen: What is your top 5 ranking of the “best” contemporary American politicians? And what criteria do you think makes a “great” politician?

Any junior members of Congress? Governors? Party leaders? Republicans? (Secretaries of Transportation perhaps?)

I dunno … what is best? I would say that Ron Wyden did an unheralded job putting together the bulk of what become the Inflation Reduction Act while also playing a critical role in shaping the CARES Act. But in a very different way, I also really admire the work that someone like Laura Kelly is doing holding back the red tide in Kansas.

To the extent that this is really just a question about Secretary Mayor Pete, I’ll confess to being slightly disappointed by his tenure. He continues to be great at what he’s good at — talking on television in a sensible, compelling way about a broad range of issues — but I’d kind of hoped that he’d really dig in and fix some of the dysfunctional aspects of American transportation policy, and I don’t know how much you can really point to there.

Lost Future: A very popular argument, advanced by both you & David Shor, is that Dobbs hurt Republicans in the midterms. But, a number of governors who signed abortion restrictions into law immediately after Dobbs cruised to re-election, including in purple states. Doesn't that..... totally debunk the argument? Brian Kemp signed I believe a 6 week abortion ban in a swing state and easily beat Abrams. DeWine signed a very strict abortion law- yes Ohio's a pretty red state at this point, but he also won by 63% (10 points ahead of Vance!) Greg Abbott also signed another strict abortion law, and also easily won.

Don't these examples clearly disprove the 'voters were angry about Dobbs' hypothesis? I suspect that a large number of voters are mildly pro-choice and would vote so if it's given as a single issue on a ballot. But, voters are partisan enough that they're mostly not going to switch parties just over abortion.

Whenever you’re talking about the political impact of anything, it’s important to level-set. In any given election, something like 90 percent of people just vote for the same party they voted for last time, so any time anyone says “Democrats won/lost because of X,” you can always retort “the vast majority of people aren’t going to change their mind over X.” And that’s true! But winning and losing are driven by the people who do change their minds.

In terms of Dobbs, I think there’s a pretty consistent story to tell which is that Dobbs hurt Republicans badly in a handful of swing states that have a lot of cross-pressured secular, non-college white voters. That’s basically the old “blue wall” states. In Georgia and Texas, it’s actually the opposite situation, and Democrats normally count on the votes of anti-abortion people of color.

Seffi Kogen: I was recently introduced to a 2013 paper by Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden entitled "Unintentional Gerrymandering" which makes the case quite convincingly that in at least some instances (they specifically look at Florida), the claim of gerrymandering is a total red herring and it's the urban concentration of Democrats that's to blame for a (then) 50/50 state electing more Republicans than Democrats. In their simulations, they were unable to draw a single map of Florida that followed a few basic districting parameters that would elect more Democrats than Republicans.

Do you think they were right at the time that gerrymandering was overhyped? Is it still overhyped today?

People argue in circles about this “is disproportionality about gerrymandering or about population geography” stuff, and I find it tedious. It would be better to have a proportional electoral system. It is literally impossible to draw two GOP-leaning House districts in Massachusetts and drawing even one requires extreme effort, but it’s still undesirable for the country that the ~33% of Massachusetts voters who are orthodox Republicans get zero percent of the House seats.

And I think this is undesirable not just as a question of fairness but of the way it intensifies certain kinds of polarization. If at any given time, two to four of the members of the Massachusetts House delegation were Republicans, they would have certain interests in common with their Democratic colleagues from the Bay State. And there’d be one to two Democrats from Oklahoma who’d have certain interests in common with Oklahoma Republicans. Those kinds of cross-cutting pressures are important to making a big, diverse country work, and the current strategy of achieving balance through offsetting gerrymanders (or population geography or whatever you want to call it) is bad.

J. Willard Gibbs: Jeet Heer criticized you pretty harshly for your response to the SBF fiasco. Aside from the merits of his complaint, how do you choose how to absorb or tune out criticism? As a fairly high profile pundit, you get it from a lot of different directions. By the same token, however, I'm sure you would even admit you're not always correct.

Of course, I’m not always correct.

But I actually think it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between someone who respects you as a writer and a thinker and is taking issue with a specific argument you made and someone who’s decided you’re a bad person and just needs to be taken down a peg. Jeet Heer is in the latter camp, which is fine, but “I read this article and I think you’re wrong” is a totally different thing from “I read this article and I think it’s an example of why you’re a bad person.” But since Heer is so smart and knew it was obvious that FTX was stealing customer deposits all along, I wonder why he didn’t write that story and get the scoop!

Macon Fessenden: Has the recent news about SBF shaken your resolve around EA at all? The Bruenigs has a pretty brutal takedown of EA on their podcast last week, pointing out its ends-justify-the-means approach, which I feel is not how I experience EA but is the logical conclusion of earn-to-give and other EA principles. There have also been some unflattering quotes coming out of top EA thinkers/funders like Holden Karnofsky and Will MacAskill. I’ve always been proud of my commitment to EA but it seems almost embarrassing at the moment. You and I seem to have a similar level of devotion to EA (taking the giving pledge and paying more attention to animal rights, but not getting too tied up in the AI/longtermism stuff), so I would love to hear what you think about the future of the movement.

Three points:

    I think the main claims associated with Effective Altruism continue to be true and are not significantly undermined by the revelations about Sam Bankman-Fried — I do think in particular that it’s important to say he wasn’t a meaningful funder of global health or animal welfare activities.

    Contrary to a thousand hot takes, I also don’t think these events should influence our thinking about consequentialism as a philosophy except insofar as they confirm exactly what consequentialists are always saying — doing deceptive schemes “because it will have good consequences” generally fails on consequentialist terms. All the causes SBF claimed to care about are worse off because of this!

    I have significantly less confidence in the wisdom and integrity of certain high-profile EA leaders and the institutions they run (particularly the Centre for Effective Altruism), and I think this is a big blow to EA as a set of human institutions rather than as a set of abstract propositions. 

One take that might be a little bit hot is that I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the relationship between SBF and the idea of “earning to give.” Part of SBF’s rise is that EA leaders started dramatically deprioritizing earning to give as life advice because they felt significantly less resource-constrained now that they had him plus a couple of other early FTX employees.

I think this fiasco underscores what a mistake it was to move away from the idea of a mass constituency of people earning a good living and donating a large share of money to charity. Having a broad base of donors turns out to be intellectually healthy compared to relying on a whale who becomes, in effect, too big to fail. The upshot of this needs to be re-engagement with the older idea that even without giving your life over to full-time work in some special EA cause area, you can contribute meaningfully to making the world a better place by being thoughtful and generous.

City of Trees: Do you have any takes on the ticket industry, now that the Ticketmaster drama from the sale of Taylor Swift's upcoming tour has brought renewed attention?

I’m glad that the DOJ is looking into antitrust violations because on its face, the high Ticketmaster concert fees sure look like some kind of scam based on vertical integration with venues and management services.

But I also think artists with Swift-level popularity should seriously consider charging substantially higher prices to make markets clear more efficiently. If she feels embarrassed to be soaking fans for so much money, she should give the extra revenue to GiveWell’s top charities. I know earning to give is out of style thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried, but to me it still seems like a very important and potentially powerful idea. There are a lot of situations in which people feel like efficient market-oriented solutions would have morally undesirable outcomes. If you take the surplus revenue generated by an efficient solution and give it to life-saving charities in developing countries, then I think you purge yourself of moral taint and get to do the efficient thing with potentially large numbers of lives saved as a result.

Swift, to the best of my knowledge, seems like a thoughtful and well-intentioned person and I think that by adopting this solution for her next tour, she could help thousands of people in desperate need.

Binya: What should be done to alleviate the shortage of Taylor Swift concert tickets currently devastating America?

I would simply create more Taylor Swifts.

No, but again, I think this speaks to the power of charity. Swift is clearly operating at a level of income where even though she could earn a lot more money by playing more shows, she just doesn’t want to, which is too bad for fans who’d like to see her play live. Not only could higher prices balance supply and demand, but the amount of funds for life-saving charities that could be generated might actually be more motivating for her and generate more shows.

myrna loy’s lazy twin: The US produces a lot of con artists who manage to steal a lot of money from their marks — FTX, Theranos, and those are only the ones that were in the news the last week. Even foreigners like Anna Delvey/Sorokin can scam more people. What is it about America that leads to these sorts of cons? Is it our optimism, regulators who don't have enough investigative time or power? Is the frequency of these scams the flip side of some of the things that make America so innovative and if so is there much we could do to reduce the scams without significantly reducing the innovation?

The main thing I think about this is that the U.S. has an overall pretty solid legal and regulatory system. Bernie Madoff went to prison. Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison. I’m pretty sure Sam Bankman-Fried will end up in prison.

In part as a result of this generally well-functioning system, most people assume that high-profile business ventures are not total frauds. Which in turn means that it’s relatively easy to dupe people if you want to. In a country with low trust and a weak rule of law, people will be much more suspicious. In America, you can take a lot of people in on a scam and be very successful with it, but when you get caught, you get punished. So ultimately I don’t think it’s so much that “America is full of con men because it’s also full of innovators,” it’s that one of the benefits that comes from living in a well-functioning society is you can afford to be a little naive in your day-to-day dealings.

Pancake: Why is there a media obsession (and conversation among Democrats more generally) with Biden stepping aside in 2024 after one of the best midterm performances of all time? It seems completely idiotic to me.

I mean, he’s quite old! But beyond that, he was just never the preferred choice of the college-educated Democrats who dominate the discourse.

MikeCD: What advice to you have for a politician who is aware that a policy they view as correct isn't politically viable among their voters (e.g. expanding immigration, universal healthcare, carbon tax, trans rights)? Is there a way to acknowledge political realities without reinforcing misleading talking points (“immigrants are taking our jobs,” “we can't afford it,” “it will tank the economy,” “trans people are a threat to children”), and when is taking an unpopular stand worth the political risk?

You know the old line about how if you can’t think of anything nice to say don’t say anything at all? I’d kind of flip this around. You need to pretend to agree with a position (expanding legal immigration is bad) that you think is wrong, but you don’t want to reinforce wrong ideas. So you need to think of some true stuff you can say that is positive about immigration restrictionists.

So I think I’d go with “look, nobody is going to want to talk about having more immigrants until we can get border security under control, change asylum rules, and show that the government is serious about enforcing the law. Beyond that, I don’t like it when liberals imply that everyone who worries about unlimited immigration is a racist — every country has a right to determine who can and can’t move and work there.”

I think that’s all true. It’s challenging to have a rational conversation about legal immigration as long as there’s so much asylum chaos, and it’s not the case that racism is the only reason people dislike legal immigration — many restrictionists are just wrong about the economics! But you don’t need to say they are wrong about the economics (unpopular) or that they are right about the economics (reinforces wrong ideas), you can just defend them against the racism charge, attack open borders, and kind of see if public opinion evolves.

When is an unpopular stand worth it? When it will accomplish something. Democrats clearly lost seats for the sake of the Affordable Care Act, but they also made a lot of people’s health insurance situation better.

A Nancy Pelosi appreciation post By Matthew Yglesias

A Nancy Pelosi appreciation post

By Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 9 minutes

A Nancy Pelosi appreciation post

A look back at the Speaker's finest hours

At one point during the 2018 cycle, I wrote that House Democrats would probably be better off with a leader who wasn’t Nancy Pelosi, because sometimes presenting a fresh face to the voters is a good idea.

Someone on her staff called to scold for me being sexist, saying something along the lines of “I’d watch what you say about a woman’s face.”

I think I was pretty clearly employing a widely used metaphor that has nothing to do with gender or anyone’s actual face (take a look at these old Politico headlines like “Maine Gov. LePage: GOP should pick 'fresh face' in Tampa” from 2012 or “Walker jabs at Bush, calls for a ‘fresh’ GOP face” from 2016). It’s just a fact of political life that it is often beneficial to put forward a relative newcomer rather than someone who’s been subject to years of attacks or who has amassed the inevitable track record of mistakes. I refused to apologize and never heard much again from Pelosi’s comms people. And I’ve always found that regrettable because even though I really do think that it would have improved Democrats’ electoral performance to have swapped leaders sooner, I also think Pelosi was an incredible political tactician and strategist and one of the greatest congressional leaders of all time.

With her now retiring from leadership, I thought it would be fun to look back at some of the now-underappreciated moments from earlier in her career.

A lot of people arguing about politics these days are younger than I am and don’t have much political memory before the mid-Obama years. But even though Pelosi did good stuff in the later years of her leadership, I think most of her finest hours came quite a bit earlier — as Ranking Member of the Intelligence Committee, during her brief tenure as Minority Whip, and during her first six years as the top House Democrat. And that all starts with the context that before Pelosi was a veteran leader, she was essentially a progressive factional figure.

The progressive leader

The leader represents the caucus, so Pelosi’s politics over the past 18 years have been the politics of Democratic Party consensus, with some shading toward the imperative to cover the flank of the most vulnerable members.

That makes her a bit of an anomaly representing (until this past redistricting) basically the city of San Francisco in Congress. The old pre-2021 version of her district had the second-highest share of people who self-identify as liberal in the country, following only Pramila Jayapal’s district in central Seattle. Given that district, it’s not a surprise that Jayapal is the leader of the Progressive Caucus, and it feels a bit odd that Pelosi is as moderate as she is.

But that’s a function of leadership.

For Pelosi’s first 15 years, she was a factional progressive in Congress. When Bill Clinton laid out his health care proposal in 1993, Pelosi was the one who anchored the left flank of the debate with a Medicare for All proposal. When she became the #2 figure in the leadership hierarchy in 2002, she was the progressive voice in the councils of leadership. Prior to assuming that role, she was the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, which made her one of the most prominent congressional Democrats to buck the Bush administration on the invasion of Iraq.

By the numbers, most Democrats in Congress voted “no” on the war. But the prominent ones like John Kerry and John Edwards who were running for president, Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Joe Biden, future candidate Hillary Clinton, Senate leader Tom Daschle, and House leader Dick Gephardt all voted for the war. It was Pelosi who said, no, I’m on the committee, I’ve seen the intelligence, and the case doesn’t add up. And she was right. There’s more to politics than being right about stuff, but being right is a major asset — whatever else happened over the course of Clinton’s career, I think it’s clear that she’d have been elected president back in 2008 if she’d been as correct about this as Pelosi was.

When Gephardt stepped down to pursue his presidential ambitions and Pelosi stepped up, the main media narrative was that the Democrats were going off the rails to the left. Instead, we had several years of progressives being right about stuff and Pelosi triumphing.

Leader of the opposition

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was an emotional gut punch for lots of people I know. And it was unquestionably a surprise to me, thanks to the polling. But the time that I felt was actually the moment of maximum peril for projects that I care about was George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004.

There are a few reasons for this. One is that Bush won a majority of the vote fair and square — Democrats’ critiques had, in fact, been rejected by the public and the people were not secretly on my side. Another is that given the political coalitions that prevailed in the mid-aughts, the GOP dominated campaign fundraising and enjoyed the more or less overt support of the bulk of corporate America. Today, Democrats’ advantage among the mass affluent tends to mean they win in hard-dollar candidate fundraising, even if Republicans equalize it with huge checks from billionaires. And while top corporate executives tend to like Republicans, their partisanship is tempered by attention to the views of a generally liberal-leaning white-collar workforce. Bush had a lot more clout behind him.

Bush also had what appeared to be a large and politically potent evangelical church serving as a mass social movement in his favor. This ultimately proved to be a bit of an illusion — public opinion on same-sex marriage shifted rapidly and church attendance collapsed, while education polarization greatly leveled the financial playing field. But at the time, it really felt like Bush held a dominant political hand and planned to wield it to privatize Social Security.

“I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” Bush said in his post-election press conference, “and I intend to spend it.”

You can’t alter Social Security in a reconciliation bill, so Republicans were going to need Democratic votes. But Bush got Democratic votes for his war and for his two rounds of tax cuts, so the conventional wisdom was he would get them on Social Security. That started with a media chorus demanding that Democrats put forward their own proposal for changing Social Security to serve as a basis for negotiation. And it was Pelosi who devised the winning strategy — do nothing:

As the spring of 2005 wore on, some pestered her every week, asking when they were going to release a rival plan.

“Never. Is never good enough for you?” Pelosi defiantly said to one member.

The privatization plan went down in flames and Bush’s presidency never recovered.

Madam Speaker

Having injected some progressive spine into the caucus and defeated Bush, Pelosi set about to win a majority. That meant transcending her progressive roots and working with the more moderate Rahm Emanuel to recruit a bunch of centrist candidates to run in tough districts. They ran this play in both the 2006 and 2008 cycles, and it involved running lots of people who were way more conservative than Jared Golden is today. It also generated majorities that were much larger than the ones Democrats enjoyed in the 117th Congress.

A lot of these members eventually turned out to have self-defeatingly wrong ideas about fiscal policy during a steep recession — again, it’s good to be right about everything all the time — but a lot of their moderation came on issues like guns, abortion, immigration, and gay marriage where there was simply never any prospect of those seats being held by people with progressive views. The upshot of all of this was the majorities that eventually produced the Affordable Care Act and other major early-Obama legislation.

But another important part of Pelosi’s speakerdom came during the first two years, while George W. Bush was still president.

During that time she proved flexible enough to strike deals for the good of the country on things like a round of stimulus checks and the urgently needed TARP, while also playing tough politics. House Democrats passed a lot of message bills designed to be filibustered to death in the Senate. But a “message bill” in that era didn’t mean “just ignore the Senate vote count and do the groups’ whole laundry list.” The idea of a “message bill” was to set up the message for the next election, putting Democrats’ most popular ideas on the floor and daring Republicans to block them in order to give candidates something broadly appealing to talk about.

Eventually, of course, she played a key role in getting the ACA done.

Ted Kennedy died and then Republican Scott Brown shocked the world by winning a special election in Massachusetts. Democrats were ready to panic and scatter, but Pelosi rallied the troops, prevented a rout, and got the bill done. She also, I think, overreached during this period by having the House pass a major cap-and-trade bill that proved electorally dicey and that predictably went nowhere in the Senate. But beyond that one error in judgment, she executed beautifully on both a tactical and a strategic level.

I also want to give her credit for one more thing.

Pelosi was right about China

In most areas of policy, Joe Biden has either fully or partially reversed course from the Trump-era direction.

The big exception to this is China, where Trump shattered much of the prior Clinton/Bush/Obama engagement consensus. As SARS-CoV-2 began to spread globally, Trump was singing the praising of Xi Jinping because he thought he was on the verge of reaching a breakthrough trade deal with him. For Trump, though, the point of getting tough on trade was brinksmanship to alter the terms of the arrangement. He was hoping for guaranteed purchases of American soybeans and other attempts at narrowing the trade deficit.

Biden, as president, has not reversed Trump’s anti-China position — he has instead both professionalized it and purged it of those soybean salesman aspects. And I’ve often seen this referred to as all of Washington coming around to the view that Trump was right.

But do you know who was a China hawk all this time? Nancy Pelosi.

Here she is in Beijing in 1991 with colleagues unfurling a banner dedicated “to those who died for democracy in China,” only to get rushed away by Chinese police.

She broke with Bill Clinton on the Permanent Normal Trade Relations issue in 2000 and criticized the continuation of that policy into the Bush era even more vehemently.

It’s obviously true that Trump’s campaign was a watershed moment in the evolution of America’s China policy, and that Biden’s decision to confirm, professionalize, and expand on the Trump-era approach is a huge deal. But conceptually, of the American political leaders of this decade, it’s Pelosi who was the intellectual and policy leader, and the new consensus is built largely around stuff she’s been saying the whole time.

I think it’s important to note this at the end, because for all her formidable achievements, Pelosi isn’t really known as a policy thinker. That’s largely for the best. Caucus leaders who try to also be hard-core policy designers tend not to work out — that’s why Paul Ryan was such a disaster as Speaker. Leading the caucus is about listening, forming consensus, enforcing boundaries, and papering over disagreements, not necessarily charting your own course on China. But China is an issue where Pelosi had a distinct set of views and commitments dating back to before her time in leadership that for years put her at odds with presidents from both parties. Now, as she closes out her career, those views have become the new consensus.

Hubris on the High Court Is Leading to a Legitimacy Problem By Paul Rosenzweig

Hubris on the High Court Is Leading to a Legitimacy Problem

By Paul Rosenzweig — Read time: 11 minutes

Hubris on the High Court Is Leading to a Legitimacy Problem

Conservative justices have abandoned their commitment to neutral jurisprudence for the sake of ideology

Shutterstock

Justice Samuel Alito considers it deeply unfair that the Supreme Court is losing legitimacy in the public’s eye. He told The Wall Street Journal recently: “It goes without saying that everyone is free to express disagreement with our decisions and to criticize our reasoning as they see fit. But saying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line.”

Indeed, it does. It crosses the line into reality. The simple fact is that Americans increasingly mistrust the court. According to a recent Gallup poll, fewer than half of the Americans surveyed had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the judiciary. This is a remarkable 15-point drop over the last two years ago. It’s the poorest showing for the judicial branch in the history of Gallup polling.

Perhaps worse yet, Justice Alito suggests that this is the result of substantive disagreement with the court’s decisions (in particular the abortion decision in Dobbs earlier this year). Chief Justice John Roberts made a similar statement at a conference for judges in Colorado Springs this summer: “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the court.”

With great respect to the two jurists, they are misdiagnosing the cause of the problem. The American people are not throwing a petulant tantrum over a single case. There are several deeper, more systemic, reasons for the declining respect for the court.

Politicizing Judicial Appointments

What makes a court legitimate? Without getting too metaphysical, there are three factors that almost everyone can agree justifiably contribute to the perception of the court’s legitimacy.

The first, which is manifestly outside the justices’ control, is the appearance (if not the reality) of independence from the political process. The politicization of nominations challenges the image of the court’s neutrality. To be fair, nominations have always been political. But there can be little doubt that the politicization has taken a step-function increase in recent years.

Senator Mitch McConnell denied a hearing to Merrick Garland, President Barak Obama’s choice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia after his sudden demise in 2016 because, McConnell insisted, an election was coming up and the new president should get to decide. However, he rushed through a hearing and confirmation for Amy Coney Barrett after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—even though an election was similarly coming up. He might have acted lawfully but his actions smacked of the raw exercise of power. They gave the impression that court members are nothing more than political pawns of the party with momentary control of the Senate. And that, in turn, paints the court itself as little more than a super-legislature.

In 2006, wrote a book about the “Confirmation Wars” bedeviling Congress, recounting the long history of political conflict over judicial appointments. Since then, the miasma of partisanship has only gotten worse. Such partisan machinations in the Senate undermine the famous rebuke to then-President Donald Trump by Chief Justice Roberts that the courts are not filled with Obama judges or Trump judges, but merely judges.

But such partisanship in appointing judges would not, I believe, by itself have created a legitimacy problem for the court if the court had not behaved in a way to diminish its own reputation. However, two major trends that the court itself is responsible for have been major contributors: failing to articulate the reasons for its decisions and reducing the importance of the doctrine of stare decisis.

The Shadow Docket Sleight of Hand

In defending the court, Justice Barrett recently adverted to its defining characteristic—that it explains the reasoning behind its decisions. The court lacks any overt enforcement authority. So its ability to influence (and thus attain social acceptability) is intimately tied to the persuasiveness of its reasoning. The most reviled decisions in the court’s history (like the fugitive slave case, Dred Scott, and the Japanese internment case, Korematsu) reveal in their texts the very source of their ignominy—they lack a convincing rationale and the power of persuasion. In the long run, the court’s success is linked directly to the words it writes—its only stock in trade.

Offering in-depth consideration also enhances the image of thoughtful decision-making. In the normal course of events, litigants have the opportunity to fully develop their arguments and then to make their case, in person, before the court, answering any questions the justices might have. The process, though somewhat time-consuming, contributes significantly to the appearance of regularity on the part of the court.

But if the court embraces an abbreviated process and then fails to even attempt to articulate the reasoning for its decisions, how can it then expect to enhance its reputation? Yet that is what it has done. As has been documented, since 2017, there has been an increase in the frequency with which the Supreme Court intervenes in lower court proceedings on an emergency basis without the benefit of a full briefing schedule or oral arguments—the so called shadow docket. Even more concerning is the fact that many of these decisions are issued without any explanation at all. If persuasive reasoning (even in controversial 5-4 decisions) tends to insulate the court from the appearance of politicization, then the absence of any attempt to provide their reasoning (especially in controversial 5-4 cases) makes the justices look like voting ciphers, registering their positions in a “yay” or “nay” manner that is little different from the one used in Congress when passing legislations.

Staring Down Stare Decisis

Even more relevant from the standpoint of the court’s legitimacy is its respect—or lack thereof—for stare decisis—the doctrine that later court decisions should respect the decisions of earlier courts and not overturn them without good justification. This court’s rejection of the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade precedent in Dobbs is a paradigmatic example of a court disregarding the commands of stare decisis and substituting its own judgment for that of an earlier era.

Of course, stare decisis is not an inexorable command. If it were, the country would still be mired in its segregated past. It should be clear to everyone that not all of the court’s prior decisions are worthy of respect. Some errors should be corrected, no matter how old.

Now, it is true that stare decisis can become an obstacle to correcting the court’s past errors. Still, adherence to it signals a respect for the judicial process by individual justices. It shows that they understand that sometimes it is better for the cause of justice that they “live with” an earlier decision—even one they consider wrong—instead of correcting it. Why would that be?

Citizens have ordered their lives around the earlier rule. They have settled expectations and often unalterable plans. So changing the law increases the potential for social disruption.

That’s often a compelling argument, but in many cases it is insufficient. After all, there are transition costs with every change of law (whether by the courts or by the legislature). If avoiding transition costs were of paramount importance, we would never change the law. And that, manifestly, is impossible. Laws can, and indeed must change with the times.

But fidelity to stare decisis enhances the court’s legitimacy in two distinct but interrelated ways:

One, it assures the public that the law is different from politics by insulating changes in the law from changes in personnel. In the political sphere, policies change as party control shifts. That is both to be expected and, often, welcomed.

In the judicial branch, we expect something different. Legal interpretation garners public respect and support principally to the extent that it appears to be the application of neutral principles. That is why Chief Justice Roberts’ famous characterization of judges as calling “balls and strikes” resonated so well with the public. We all know, of course, that the strike zone changes depending upon which umpire is behind the plate (see, for example, the fans’ views of Angel Hernandez). But we want our system of law to aspire to mitigating and minimizing that difference as much as possible.

Dobbsian Hubris

Two, when changes in the court’s personnel lead directly to changes in the law, the appearance of the court as a neutral arbiter is significantly eroded. There is no reason to doubt that the justices appointed by the Trump administration came by their legal views honestly—in other words, they weren’t simply embracing them to get appointed to the court or for some other crass motivation. But it is equally the case that no reasonable observer can doubt that the precise reason they were appointed was to achieve the result in Dobbs. The overturning of Roe is the endpoint of a concerted 50-year project by those who felt the original decision was in error. That the justices’ beliefs are sincere cannot obscure the fact that the overturning of Roe was the end result of a political project.

Stare decisis is doctrinally intended to combat the politicization of results and thereby enhance the perception of law and the court as neutral arbiters. When it so transparently fails, the resulting loss of judicial prestige cannot be surprising.

But all of this does not fully capture the vital concerns behind the stare decisis doctrine. If the opinions of the justices on the court currently are entitled to a presumption of intellectual honesty, aren’t the opinions of those justices who issued the original ruling? One critical part of the doctrine of stare decisis is a respect for the opinion of one’s judicial predecessors and a realization that, even though one may think they were wrong, their errors are not (except in rare-edge cases) so out of bounds intellectually as to be undeserving of judicial acceptance.

One cardinal virtue that enhances judicial legitimacy is humility—recognition by the court that it is exercising the great power at its disposal with great responsibility and circumspection. That requires jurists to acknowledge the possibility that their own heartfelt views might be mistaken and therefore they should show restraint. It ought to count for something that dozens of justices, most with equally good motives and of equal intelligence, have reached the opposite conclusion from the one they espouse.

In other words, stare decisis increases legitimacy by admitting the possibility that earlier judgments of the court may be correct, even though the current group of justices thinks they were not. The current court, however, has not followed that path.

Doubting Thomas

Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs is the veritable embodiment of judicial hubris in its disregard for stare decisis. Casting aside the doctrine whose roots go back over a hundred years—and the opinions of jurists before him—he opined that he would throw overboard all of the jurisprudential developments that protect sexual intimacy. In his view, not just abortion but contraception and gay marriage are all beyond the scope of constitutional protections (as Timothy Sandefur noted in a previous piece at The UnPopulist). It takes a jurist of remarkable self-confidence to so blithely assert that he, alone, of all those who came before him, truly understands what the Founders intended.

Even those who think that Thomas has a persuasive argument should recoil at this stunning lack of humility—his belief that he has insight into constitutional imperatives and that this permits him to impose that judgment on society. Is it any wonder that the public increasingly sees such claims to unilateral power, unchecked by reason or history, as illicit?

The best indicator of the court’s legitimacy problem, however, comes from Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Dobbs concurrence, which can only be read as a plaintive plea for a “good one time only” pass from the public. Recognizing the raw exercise of power inherent in the court’s majority opinion, he rushed to assure readers that the rule it creates is unique to the abortion context. Trust me, he pleaded, gay marriage is not at risk.

Perhaps as a practical matter he is correct. Without his vote, other privacy rights are safe, at least for now. But if we take the court seriously in its analysis, we cannot take Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence as anything other than special pleading. After all, if the test for recognizing an unenumerated right is whether it is “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history,” as Alito argued in the Dobbs ruling, then gay marriage, for example, is on far thinner footing than abortion. At least Justice Thomas’ view has the virtue of intellectual consistency. By arguing for an exception for abortion, Justice Kavanaugh is rather transparently trying to reclaim legitimacy in a self-contradictory way. The fiat-like nature of his argument is the very antithesis of legitimate reasoning.

Justice Elena Kagan was right when she recently noted: “The very worst moments [in the court’s history] have been times when judges have even essentially reflected one party’s or one ideology’s set of views in their legal decisions. The thing that builds up reservoirs of public confidence is the court acting like a court and not acting like an extension of the political process ... If, over time, the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that is a dangerous thing for democracy.”

One can only hope that Justice Kagan’s commitment to this principle is not situational. If, having lost in Dobbs, she recanted her commitment to stare decisis that would even further erode the court’s standing with the public.

Strikingly, Justice Kagan’s view used to be the conservative position. The principles of the Federalist Society, where I have been a proud member since 1983, state: “[I]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.” Justice Scalia, the hero of conservative originalists, was an ardent defender of stare decisis on pragmatic grounds. He said: “In its undiluted form, at least, [originalism] is medicine that seems too strong to swallow. Thus, almost every originalist would adulterate it with the doctrine of stare decisis—so that Marbury v. Madison would stand even if Professor Raoul Berger should demonstrate unassailably that it got the meaning of the Constitution wrong.”

Justice Scalia was no fan of Roe so it is not impossible that, had he been alive, he would have joined the court’s other conservatives to overrule it, repudiating his avowed commitment to stare decisis. That would have only made the conservatives on the bench look even more hypocritical.

Indeed, even if conservative justices had not made the condemnation of activist judges who ignore precedent their intellectual project, their contempt for stare decisis principles right now would have been troubling enough. But when they appear to do a total volte-face from their own judicial philosophy, how is the perception that they are acting politically to advance their own causes to be avoided?

That the court’s legitimacy is waning should come as no surprise. Contrary to Justice Alito’s desire, legitimacy cannot be commanded—it must be earned. And he can’t earn it by accusing Americans of bad faith rather than reexamining his—and his conservative jurists’—own recent record of hubris.

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Trump's Still Outside the GOP Establishment. That might matter more than you think.

Trump's Still Outside the GOP Establishment. That might matter more than you think.

Julia Azari — Read time: 6 minutes

The past couple of weeks have produced some very ambiguous news about the future of Trump and the GOP. One of the most prominent interpretations of the surprising midterm red “ripple” – as opposed to wave – has been the poor showing by Trump-endorsed candidates. Candidates either hand-picked by Trump or very consciously adopting Trumpist politics went down to defeat in competitive states across the country – New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania. The “America First” slate of candidates for Secretary of State mostly crashed and burned. It was not only not a good night for Trumpist politics, it was the kind of electoral repudiation for racist and anti-democratic appeals that the pro-democracy coalition has been hoping for for years. It was, in many ways, the night that observers expected on election night 2016, and seems to have taken a bite out of the narratives that emerged from that election about the appeal of Trump’s brand.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. On Tuesday night, Trump announced a third bid for the presidency. Media opinion was both similar and different from what followed his 2015 announcement. On the one hand, major media figures expressed boredom and disinterest – very different from the sideshow that drew journalists’ attention seven years ago. On the other hand, elite dismissiveness had a familiar ring to it – and we all remember how well that worked in 2016 when TV talking heads and the folks at the National Review pointed out that Trump wasn’t a qualified or serious candidate.

This leaves those of us in the commentary business with a dilemma about how to react. Obviously, most of us dropped the ball in 2016… with the nomination and again in the general election. But how do we think analytically about Trump’s chances, and how they’re shaped by his evolving relationship with the Republican Party?

My thoughts on this are partly from a chapter I’ve written on party politics for an in-progress volume on the Trump Legacy (co-edited by myself, Bert Rockman and Andy Rudalevige, with a terrific roster of contributors). The main point I want to make here is that while the story is usually framed around Trump’s remarkable hold on a party he wasn’t a member of 15 years ago and had no past history with, the frame should be flipped. The friction between Trump and the establishment GOP is always part of the story, even when it isn’t the biggest part of the story. This is the unspoken premise of all of these stories – it seems to be Trump’s party, despite all the reasons it shouldn’t be. But the cracks in the foundation of the coalition are always there.

In order to think about how this might work in 2024, we have to think about how it worked in 2016. There are 2 frameworks to understand how Trump won the 2016 nomination, and both are important.

Framework 1 is the party elites vs. party voters one. This one has produced a lot of scholarship and commentary about who actually holds power within the party coalition, about the differences between party leaders and voters and about the limitations of parties to address such a crisis or have any legitimacy to do so.

Framework 2 is about coordination – that the GOP could have defeated Trump in the primary if they’d coordinated on an alternative. If 70% of Republican primary voters wanted Trump, then the coordination point would be moot. And that could happen, especially if Trump’s announcement clears the field. But seems just as likely not to, and newly reelected Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been gaining on Trump in some polls. Most likely, coordination will matter again.

In some ways, the 2016 election was an important lesson to both parties about the importance of acting like a political party and trying to work together. It broke the individualist fever of the 80s and 90s a bit. And if this continues, the persistent daylight between Trump and Republican Party leaders might create some powerful incentives to coordinate on a Trump alternative. Three features of Trump’s tense relationship with establishment Republicans are worth looking at.

1. Trump sets the terms of debate… by constantly doing weird and objectionable things. In my forthcoming chapter, I describe this as “leadership by dilemma.” Trump exerts control over the GOP and its agenda by forcing them to respond to him, thus ensuring that he’s always setting the terms of debate. But without either the novelty of the first presidential bid or its nods in the direction of more economically liberal policy, there isn’t much that’s of broad appeal. Prominent Republicans are constantly in a position to have to respond to things like white nationalism, anti-immigrant language, or election denialism. While it’s been successful at crowding out other figures and perspectives, and thus setting the agenda, it’s possible that Republicans who haven’t relished this experience will have some incentive to coordinate against it.

2. Trump hasn’t really build the coalition. There are arguments that the 2020 and 2016 elections saw some Republican gains with Black and Latino voters – but these groups are still pretty solidly Democratic. Trump’s 2016 Electoral College victory was tied to the diploma divide and the movement of the much-storied, elusive “white working class.” The educational divide is a real and interesting political development, but the pivotal gains in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have been uneven and somewhat ephemeral. Taken together, these two developments look less like assembling a new majority and more like waiting for opportunities to slice up the Democratic coalition. This is a playbook that can win elections sometimes, but looks decidedly like what an opposition party does.

In the meantime, see point 1 – every time Trump or his closest adherents do something that violates basic principle of democracy, the coalition shrinks just a little bit. It’s never the mass exodus that liberal commentators and academics want. But forcing allies to defend things they don’t want to defend, while taking unpopular stances that alienate some swing voters and galvanize opposition is not a way to build a stable majority. The Trump movement has never been a majority-focused one, and it shows.

3. We now have a somewhat clear picture of the post-Trump Republican Party. People waiting for GOP elites to abandon Trump en masse and channel the spirit of George H.W. Bush are still waiting. But in addition to a small anti-Trump contingent, seemingly at least a bit empowered by the 2022 midterms, we have both what I’ll call the Trump Lite politicians – who embrace most of Trumpism, but not the most extreme forms of election denialism and insurrectionism. This group includes people like Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence. The other group, people who are interested in out-Trumping Trump, includes figures like DeSantis as well as Kari Lake. For any other ex-president, this would look like a pretty successful party legacy. For Trump, it looks like the success of his brand within party ranks has created a bunch of potential competitors with ambitions of their own. How these two groups relate to each other, and how many presidential contenders each produces, will determine a lot about how the next nomination contest unfolds.

None of this is definitive, of course. But I think we benefit from both asking more focused questions, and from flipping the frame around: the fact that Trump makes some Republicans uneasy matters, even as so many have embraced him.

Mailbag forever

Mailbag forever

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 12 minutes

Mailbag forever

Anger management, Wakanda, the CHOAM monopoly, and the state of Kamala Harris

Trump is running again. It seems to me and to everyone else like his campaign is flailing and he can’t possibly win. At the same time, that’s how it seemed to me and everyone else in 2015. Maybe this time we’re right? I know “everyone underestimated Trump before so they’re probably underestimating him now” isn’t exactly a valid inference. But I can’t help but wonder.

Cameron Parker: If Dems get 51 senate seats, and in theory no longer have to please Joe Manchin, how does that change what's on the policy agenda? Or does it?

The Georgia Senate race is important on a number of levels, and I really encourage anyone who’s able to give Raphael Warnock some money, but it shouldn’t significantly alter the 2023-24 legislative agenda for the simple reason that Republicans are going to control the House. Can some legislation pass with mostly Democratic votes despite a GOP House majority? Yes, in theory, though McCarthy may not allow it. But you’re not going to see a reconciliation bill done that way, so any bills that pass the House will be 60 vote bills.

Marie Kennedy: You’ve mentioned before that you attended anger management classes once upon a time. Has it had a lasting effect on you? You seem remarkably cool-headed for someone who is an extremely online commentator for a living. I was particularly impressed by your reply a while back that the “beef” was not mutual with the podcasters behind “Know Your Enemy. It’s a reaction that few people seem to have the emotional maturity to know is an option.

The whole issue is that I’m not at all cool-headed, but I did learn some strategies in cognitive behavioral therapy that I find helpful.

Basically, though, I think most people can get kind of mad and act out a bit, and that blows off steam and helps them feel better. But just like alcoholics can’t have a beer and a half and leave it there, when I start expressing anger, it spirals and goes to bad places. So I try, to the extent possible, to not do that.

James Schapiro: What’s your take on the geopolitics of Wakanda Forever?

I enjoyed a lot of the movie on a scene-for-scene level, but without spoilers, the big-picture plot didn’t make sense to me. I thought they nicely set up the conflict with Namor as stemming from some pretty fundamental ideological disagreements, and it seemed to me those disagreements didn’t actually get resolved.

Longwalkdownlyndale: We were having fun arguing on Twitter on who should get "credit" for winning World War II. Noah Smith put forward Phillip OBrien's theory that the USSR's contribution is “overrated” and it's much more about the US's/UK's air and sea power. Does Matt have a strong opinion on this? (I follow the "classical revisionist" theory that pushed back against early Cold War era histories that often brushed over the Eastern Front and argued that while it was obviously a group effort the USSR bore the brunt of the assault and caused the most Wehrmacht casualties so deserves an equal share/plurality of credit.)

I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, yes, conventional Anglo-American pop culture and pop historiography overrate the military significance of the western theater relative to the generally larger battles fought by the Soviet Union.

But if you think in terms of counterfactual and but-for causation, I think the USSR looks less impressive. If Hitler had never invaded the Soviet Union, the Allies would have still won the war. Germany lacked the capacity to invade Britain, and eventually it would have been settled by American nuclear bombs. By contrast, if Britain had signed a separate peace with Germany in 1940 and America hadn’t offered lend-lease aid, Hitler could have beaten the USSR one-on-one. So there’s a sense in which British sea and air power and American technology and industrial production really were the decisive factors in the war, even though it was the Soviets who did the biggest part of the fighting.

Joshua: What TV show or movie best depicts how actual political progress is made in government? I'm thinking vote-wrangling, deal-making, compromise, etc. Let's leave out fantasy shows, or if that is a problem, why are there no realist shows that demonstrate that well?

I don’t think there really is a great show that depicts politics in a realistic way as you’re suggesting. Probably the closest is the Danish show Borgen.

I do think the much-derided West Wing has a bit more merit than people give it credit for. This is often stereotyped as a show about how giving a rousing, high-minded speech will solve problems and get things done. But while Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for “The American President” does have that structure, the Bartlet administration just doesn’t actually achieve very much domestic policy change because they are dealing with constant GOP congressional majorities the whole time. What they show on the series — gridlock, and an administration that becomes absorbed with scandal defense and foreign policy initiatives — is actually what you would expect from that situation. Now of course there are also a million ridiculous things about that show, but I did want to speak up for it a little.

What’s interesting to me is that to the best of my knowledge, we’ve never seen a show that’s set primarily in Congress that even attempts to dramatize how legislating actually works.

Thomas: Going into the 2024 election, would you rather be the Republicans or the Democrats? I can see why Democrats would be the obvious answer, but maybe Republicans are finally free of their Trump problem and it's worth noting that where they didn't have problematic candidates it mostly functioned like a normal midterm.

Incumbent presidents are usually re-elected and the 2024 Senate map is very favorable to Republicans. Beyond that, it’s premature to speculate.

Jeff: US government debt plays a very important role in finance & in economics. Imagine we completely retired the debt & ran no deficits / balanced budgets forever after. What effect would this have on finance & economics?

In the corporate world, you frequently see profitable companies issue bonds for various financial engineering reasons.

And by the same token, even a government running a budget surplus could still sell bonds and use the capital to buy stocks or build up foreign exchange reserves or accumulate other kinds of financial assets. If for whatever reason you told me the government had to run a surplus, that’s what I would recommend precisely because — as you say — the existence of the bonds is useful.

But of course instead of accumulating financial assets, it might be better to accumulate hard assets like aircraft carriers, port upgrades, highways, etc. Which is to say it might be better not to run a budget surplus at all. This gets us into what’s a little weird about public sector accounting that just treats all “spending” as equivalent. But in a business, there’s a difference between spending money on a big corporate retreat, in which case the money is just gone, and spending money on building a new conference center, in which case you have a conference center. Either kind of spending might be wise or foolish depending on how much it costs and what you were hoping to achieve, but there’s a categorical difference between obtaining a durable asset that is useful over time and a one-off expenditure.

Eric Wilhem: Why couldn't anyone compete with CHOAM in the interstellar trade of melange? And how does CHOAM compare to OPEC's control of crude oil on Terra?

First off, to quote St. Alia of the Knife, CHOAM is “much more than the Priesthood or melange. It was inkvines, whale fur, shigawire, Ixian artifacts and entertainers, trade in people and places, the Hajj, those products which came from the borderline legality of Tleilaxu technology; it was addictive drugs and medical techniques; it was transportation (the Guild) and all of the supercomplex commerce of an empire which encompassed thousands of known planets plus some which fed secretly at the fringes, permitted there for services rendered.”

In terms of why CHOAM is a monopoly, I take this to be a political issue rather than a market structure issue. Today we take it for granted that states will obtain revenue primarily through taxes. But setting up a system for collecting taxes is logistically difficult, and so is organizing public sector bureaucracies to do things and provide services. Historically, one common way to get a bridge built or get a ferry service running was to provide an entrepreneur with a legal guarantee of a monopoly. And a common way to raise revenue was to sell monopoly rights to certain aspects of trade in certain regions.

Befitting the whole quasi-feudal nature of the setting, Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles is supposed to be something along those lines. The Great Houses of the Landsraad came together to create a trade monopoly. But instead of selling the monopoly rights, they turned themselves into shareholders. So each house gets a cut of the profits from interstellar trade rather than relying on a local tax base. On one level, this incentivizes cooperation and prosperity. But it also weakens Tiebout Competition and lets houses be wealthy whether or not their home planet is well-governed. And of course it should also greatly reduce the total volume of interstellar trade and raise prices. In part, that’s a transfer from commoners to the Great Houses. But the deadweight loss involved must be enormous, and the galaxy as a whole is much poorer than it could be with better policy.

Eli Youngs: What’s your take on Scott Alexander’s idea of using prediction markets to crowdsource the trustworthiness of public figures (including yourself)?

One area where prediction markets have proven to be very useful is in these situations where you have a slow west coast vote count and you want to know what are the odds of winning.

And the reason I think markets are so valuable here is that the questions — what is Katie Hobbs’ existing lead, how many votes are still outstanding, where are those votes, what can we infer about the remaining uncounted votes based on the last batch that did get counted — involve a lot of tedious math and busywork but are fundamentally tractable. For media organizations, doing the work tends not to pencil out for a few reasons. It’s labor intensive and the reputational upside to getting it right just isn’t all that high. Betting markets, by giving people a concrete financial stake in putting in the time to do the analysis, deliver a lot of value.

The other place I find betting markets useful is for questions like “will Russia take Kyiv by July 2022?” The virtue here isn’t so much that the market has magical insight, but that aggregating and quantifying conventional wisdom is itself a useful service. People like to argue about whether things are overrated or underrated, but those arguments often end up hinging on disagreements about how things are rated. So just being able to say “look, this is what the conventional wisdom is” becomes helpful. And if you think the CW is wrong, you can make a bet on it, which is fun.

In terms of betting on public figures, I think you’d optimistically end up with a conventional wisdom aggregator, which could be handy but is unlikely to be revelatory. To really secure information out of these things, you need it to be the case that a question could be answered with busywork but that absent the betting, nobody is going to put in the time.

Evan MacBeth: From a practical politics perspective, with attention to what could actually be done given political constraints, what laws or regulations could be passed or implemented to curb gun violence in the wake of this year's elections. (Not that I am self-interested sitting in Charlottesville or anything.)

My general view of this hasn’t changed and that view, unfortunately, is pessimistic.

I do think that blue states and cities can probably make useful progress on overall violence by refocusing their efforts on deterring illegal gun carrying. That should mean stiff punishments for people caught with illegal guns, and it should mean strict enforcement against people who violate “low-level” rules, because searching farebeaters and street urinators and speeders and open-container drinkers is a way to catch people with illegal guns. That kind of measure could do a lot to reduce lethal violence in the states that already have fairly strict gun laws. But of course a lot of states don’t have strict gun laws, and I also don’t think routine enforcement would do much to stop the kind of spectacular spree shootings that unnerve people so much. There just isn’t a lot that can be done to remediate those given the actual state of public opinion and preference intensity.

Jim: How much is Biden’s Approval Rating (say 538 avg) depressed by progressives for whom he is not progressive enough? I assume in the twitterverse this is a much bigger deal than the real world, but I’ve never seen the numbers.

I don’t think “progressives who wish he were more progressive” is a big thing. But there is a related issue, which is that as you can see with Trump, the perception that someone is a loser can hurt them with their own party. My suspicion is that Democrats doing well in the midterms will boost Biden’s numbers with Democrats as they decide, “hey, this guy knows what he’s doing.”

Greg Ellington: Should Biden pick a new running mate in 2024?

Would it be better if Biden had another running mate? Yes. Would actually dumping Kamala Harris from the ticket be a good idea? I doubt it. The reason nobody does this in the modern world is that the dumping saga itself would be a ton of bad news cycles and create big problems.

The best solution by far for Joe Biden, for Kamala Harris, for down-ballot democrats, and for the country is for Harris herself to change her image and be more popular. Hire some operatives who work for Laura Kelly and Andy Beshear and Roy Cooper. Go on some factory tours with Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro. I think she feels vulnerable and defensive right now because it’s palpable that few people in the party want her to be the nominee in 2028. But she’s still the Vice President and she has huge, obvious advantages — if she can become more popular, tons of people will want to bandwagon with her. So instead of being defensive, she should just follow the lead of people who are winning in red and purple states and trust that the rest will follow from that.

JasonB: I know you probably don't have any special knowledge here, but I'd love some thoughts on how the Elon who created SpaceX, an incredibly successful company that has pioneered game-changing technologies in rocketry, can be such a screw-up running Twitter.

Alternatively, how can screw-up Elon be so successful running a complicated, sophisticated company like SpaceX?

I think we shouldn’t be overconfident in our assessment of how ElonTwitter will go. It absolutely does seem bad so far. But imagine a story in which a controversial billionaire makes a high-profile leveraged buyout, enacts dramatic cost-cutting under intense scrutiny, and successfully ratchets up the pressure to increase productivity and improve the product. That story would feature a period in which things “look really bad” because you have a bunch of disgruntled ex-employees, a bunch of nervous current employees, and a bunch of spectators eager to say bad things about the controversial billionaire. I’m not saying the people who think the current situation seems bad are wrong, just that the evidence is, I think, a bit murkier than people want to admit.

But I do think the fundamental issue is that leading LBOs of established companies is its own line of business that’s pretty distinct from leading early-stage startups. And in particular, we already know that Musk screwed up the crucial first stage of a successful private equity takeover by offering way too much for the stock. In a successful LBO, you need to find efficiencies that are large enough to exceed the debt service costs associated with the acquisition. That’s dramatically harder to do if you are overpaying for the equity.

The Playbook for Turning Around a Dysfunctional Company

The Playbook for Turning Around a Dysfunctional Company

https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1593515620942815232

🪄Smart summary:

The thread describes the steps necessary to take over a dysfunctional company and turn it around. This includes replacing the CEO and senior executives, as well as the HR department. It is important to do this quickly and comprehensively. The author also advises against immediately terminating other employees, as they may have valuable insights into the company.

-------

If I had to bet on whether Elon will pull through and Twitter ultimately succeeds, I’d probably still bet on the success case. Social networks are surprisingly durable.

Still, there is a KNOWN playbook for how to take over a dysfunctional company and quickly turn it around.

🧵

Plenty of hedge funds know how to do this, but it was probably most famously put into practice when Carlos Ghosn took over Nissan in 1999, executing the “Nissan Revival Plan” and returning the company to profitability within a year and reducing its debt by 50% within 3 years.

(Ghosn was so incredibly successful at this that his influence grew to encompass MULTIPLE car companies, which freaked out the Japanese, who then conspired in 2018 to have him arrested and accused of accounting irregularities...

… culminating in a dramatic escape from Japanese house arrest assisted by an ex-special-forces soldier, but that’s a story for another time)

I spent the early part of my career reading biographies and corporate turnaround stories for fun, so I’m familiar with the process. That’s what I’ll describe in this thread.

Beware, it is pretty cold-blooded, but you are taking a company that’s dying a slow death and performing a radical intervention, so extreme measures are necessary no matter what.

First, there IS a degree of immediate decapitation required.

There are two sets of people you replace right away on Day 1:

1) All of the senior execs reporting to the CEO who are known to have had a long working relationship with him, e.g. more than 1-2 years.

2) The HR department

I’ll explain both.

The first one is pretty obvious: You need to ensure loyalty. No matter how much one thinks that people can be swayed by the logic of a better plan or new future, you need deep loyalty to execute a complex and difficult plan.

Having your company taken over and your boss fired is an emotional event for even the best people, and senior staff who are (at best) conflicted or (at worst) subversive will slow you down. So you remove them immediately.

Don’t worry, people like that land on their feet. They are highly-paid execs. It’s not like closing down the factory and putting line workers who need to feed their families out on the street (which you may do later, and THAT sucks).

A couple senior-level execs might be ok to keep around if they are new, or known to be actively sympathetic to the new direction. Typically they will backchannel to you before the first day and let you know this.

Next, you need to replace almost everyone in the HR department.

Why? Because the HR department is the mechanism you employ to hire and fire, which you will need control over without having to doubt if they’re going to drag their feet or subvert you.

You need to have your new senior HR execs ready to go on the first day to take over the department, because they are the ones who process the terminations for the execs you are firing!

And, since you will be recruiting new execs to fill critical positions, you need an HR staff aligned with your recruiting priorities and culture. It’s unlikely the old one will fit that (because that’s how the company became what it was in the first place).

What you don’t do is immediately terminate swaths of other personnel, especially ones involved in key production or even support roles.

Here is why: in almost EVERY company, there is often a lot that’s known internally that’s not known externally.

In some companies, the public perception of how the company works may be totally at odds with how the company actually works. Sometimes this is even deliberate, or a fundamental consequence of the space the company operates in.

For example, during my time at Facebook, external perception was that FB cared not a whit for privacy and didn’t understand privacy concerns.

The reality was that inside the company, people understood privacy issues VERY deeply, and wrestled continuously with nearly-intractable privacy issues, trying to formulate product and policy solutions that would satisfy a very complex and contradictory universe of user needs.

In this case, it was a consequence of the space the company existed in, i.e. most people don’t really understand privacy. For more on this subtopic:

https://t.co/msrfbWEFs1

I encountered this situation again when I first took over at Reddit: upon going in, I had no clue whatsoever of the actual, real issues facing the company. I was stunned when I received my first “reading in” briefing from then-General Manager @hueypriest

External “data” about a company is often a mix of politically- and commercially-motivated opinions, deliberate PR (by the company and competitors), and pure hearsay and fabrications by stock traders. You can’t rely on it to form an accurate view of how a company works.

All you know going in are the financial results (e.g. the company isn’t making money), but you don’t know exactly why. So you don’t know who to keep and who to dump on Day 1.

The above groups MUST be immediately replaced only because they are necessary for you to act quickly and comprehensively.

So how you figure it out?

Well, it turns out that typically in a dysfunctional company, there are plenty of people who know what the company is doing wrong.

Sometimes a company isn’t performing because there’s a small cabal of powerful managers who are upholding certain decisions or policies, and they just need to be removed. You have to figure out if this is the case, or if it’s something else.

So you embark on a listening tour. You see new CEOs do this all the time. Schedule meetings with EVERY front-line team all over the company, and you just talk to them, and you ask them how the company can improve.

Front-line people are not politically-motivated actors. They’re just regular people doing their jobs, and collectively they have a pretty good view of things that’s untainted by ambition or politics.

You can meet with them as a team, with their line managers, but without any other senior/middle management present. You just listen. Bring along a couple of your own staff to help remember things, and then debrief and write down notes afterwards.

(Do NOT record the meeting. That sends the wrong message and will make people afraid)

This might take a few weeks. Your days are full of meetings. For a global multinational, it’s often a “100 day global listening tour.” You’ve seen this happen when a new CEO comes in. That’s what this is. Tell the teams that if they think of anything else to email you later too.

After you do this, you will have a very good “vector field” of where the problematic areas of the company are, which people or teams are jamming things up, and what the real challenges are that need to be surmounted.

While every team may be self-serving, there will be plenty of peer teams who make it clear whether another team is truly useless or counterproductive, or merely under-appreciated. In any case, now you have REAL intel from insiders.

If at this point there is some clearly problematic person, people, or org that needs to go, you can cut them. You are much more likely to have success in surgically targeting the cancer at this point.

Next, if there are people (like senior managers) you can’t get rid of but need to be upgraded or routed around, you do the following trick to subvert them:

You create new cross-functional teams comprised of line managers or teams underneath them, and charge them with identifying and implementing key improvements, and have them report their progress directly to you.

The “vector field” you’ve formed from your listening tour should help you shape exactly who and what departments you want to ask to contribute people to these new cross-functional teams.

Carlos Ghosn did this to great effect at Nissan, especially as Nissan had many senior executives and in Japan, seniority rules and strong traditions prevent you from just dumping useless senior executives.

The senior executives who can’t be removed aren’t very dynamic people (or they’d have led a turnaround already), so you can just stall them by doing business-as-usual process meetings and keeping them out of the way of the junior turnaround teams with rock-fetches and busywork.

Those teams, eager to prove themselves and seeing opportunities, will be motivated to work hard, so you give them the urgent timelines and hard deadlines.

Ghosn talks about how he did that here: https://t.co/eoqR7ZBLsW

Give these teams a deadline for executing a set of key improvements, then repeat. A lot can be done in a few months, and you can run this cycle multiple times a year and yield major improvements within a year’s time.

As they work, new leaders will emerge, and weak leaders will fall apart from the dynamism (some people get comfortable and when things get shaken up, they self-destruct). Now you have your new crop of internal leaders to promote.

One of the advantages of this process is that you don’t need to do things like explicitly “rewrite company culture.”

A lot of times when new management comes in, they have a culture clash with the existing company culture. This causes a lot of “organ rejection.”

By empowering the employees and line managers, you are saying to them, “Live up to the true values of this company, and make it great again!”

Most employees believe in the values of the company (or they wouldn’t be there), and the most motivated employees who take up the challenge usually do.

Of course, the truth is that it’s all about how the values are really interpreted and practiced, but that doesn’t really matter:

Motivated by the desire to do better, employees will re-interpret the values to serve the new better ways of doing things, and feel like they are upholding them, even strengthening them. They will feel like new management is MORE aligned with the “old” values.

Finally, once things are running really well and you’ve promoted a new set of internal leaders who are driving this ongoing transformation and the success is tangible, you can remove the remaining deadweight.

Now you know. Go forth, corporate raider.

And please only use this new knowledge I’ve given you for GOOD.

If you liked this thread, follow me for more spicy takes on the tech industry and REAL TALK about solving climate change like this article in TIME by Tom Crowther (@TWCrowther) about restoring forests and biodiversity!

https://t.co/pSAeJYvnou

Published by Save to Mem · 5:45 PM

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The Playbook for Turning Around a Dysfunctional Company

I would like to know Ron DeSantis’ opinions on major policy issues

www.slowboring.com

I would like to know Ron DeSantis’ opinions on major policy issues

Matthew Yglesias

12 - 15 minutes

After last week’s midterms, the Great Wheel of Discourse has landed on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But even though he’s been a constant presence in the news for the past few years, I feel like I am missing obvious and crucial pieces of information about him.

It’s perhaps an odd analogy, but I found myself talking recently to a veteran of the Julián Castro presidential campaign and revisiting some of my feelings about that campaign.

Castro’s entire 2020 primary campaign was, I thought, really bad. I disagreed with his whole strategy, and I ended up maybe saying some meaner things than he deserved because I really liked the idea of Julián Castro. I thought that given his record as a pragmatic mayor of San Antonio and as HUD Secretary, he was well-positioned to occupy the Joe Biden lane of the primary and say “Obama was good, we need an ‘heir to Obama’-type nominee.” I think he could have been great, but instead Castro ended up auditioning to be Elizabeth Warren’s Vice President.

What does this have to do with DeSantis? It’s a reminder that what we knew about Castro from his time as mayor and as HUD Secretary really underdetermined how he would run. He ended up taking his campaign in a direction that I found surprising and misguided.

And by somewhat the same token, I think everyone’s impressions of DeSantis are dominated by the positions he staked out during the Covid-19 pandemic. But whatever you think of those decisions, they seem unlikely to be the front-of-mind policy debates in 2023 and 2024 and very unlikely to be top governing priorities in 2025. DeSantis has this superficial appearance of a well-defined national brand, but he hasn’t really taken positions on the kinds of issues that Republicans sometimes disagree about. That’s not a knock on him; there’s no particular reason the governor of Florida should have spent the past four years leaping into controversies about national policy issues. But if you run for president, you have to start talking about your views on national policy issues. What I make of DeSantis as a presidential candidate is going to depend in part on what he says about those issues, and I think it’s odd so many people are staking out clear positions before they hear what that is.

Part of what’s weird about this whole conversation is that DeSantis has long occupied a liminal space in intra-conservative battles. DeSantis was an early example of a GOP primary candidate who was put over the top by a Trump endorsement, so he has clear branding as a MAGA-friendly figure. At the same time, when he scored that endorsement, he’d already served several terms in the House of Representatives. And before that, he went to Yale and Harvard Law School and served as a Navy JAG.

So he was a Trump guy, but also a guy with a normal rising star politician resume.

Absent that specific context, it’s a little hard to understand why his star would shine so much brighter than, say, Greg Abbott’s. But if Republicans want to improve their electoral fortunes, they need an alternative to Trump — an actual professional politician with a solid resume and some discipline who would be better at winning elections than a maniac. And it’s the Trump connection, the sense that RDS is a MAGA guy, that makes him an ideal alternative.

Conservative elites have decided en masse that DeSantis’ 2022 performance was amazingly good and a striking rebuke to the losses of Trump-backed candidates in key Senate races. And DeSantis did do very well. But that amounted to doing just as well as Marco Rubio. In Ohio and Georgia, we see GOP gubernatorial candidates do way better than their Senate candidates. In Texas, Abbott in 2022 ran significantly ahead of Trump in 2020. And of course in Nevada, we saw the GOP candidate elected governor even while their Senate candidate lost.

So while DeSantis certainly could be a more effective politician than Trump, he’s also being puffed up with a degree of myth-making that doesn’t really seem justified. Republicans’ best electoral performance last Tuesday was Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, and nobody is talking about him because he’s too moderate. But that raises the question of how conservative DeSantis actually is.

Trump’s gravitational influence on GOP politics has re-written the normal rules of factional division.

In the contemporary GOP, to be conservative means to be pro-Trump. So a very conservative candidate is one who claims to believe the 2020 election was stolen, while a mainstream Republican doesn’t talk about Trump much — but when he does, he says positive things. Brian Kemp in this paradigm is a somewhat moderate Republican because he was put on the spot in 2020 and stood up to Trump. That meant Trump backed a primary challenger to him, but Kemp won.

DeSantis in this view is the ideal mainstream Republican — he has never, ever criticized anything Trump has ever done, no matter how insane or criminal, but he also hasn’t explicitly endorsed the 1/6 riots or efforts to overturn elections. In other words, he’s more conservative than Kemp.

This is different from a traditional paradigm based on policy issues. Kemp responded to the Dobbs decision by pressing forward with a controversial six-week abortion ban, while DeSantis has played it much more cautious with a considerably more moderate 15-week ban.

And the Trump realignment raises lots of these big policy questions. When it came to the votes on trade deals like NAFTA or PNTR with China or DR-CAFTA, you normally saw most (but not all) Republicans in favor and most (but not all) Democrats opposed. Then Trump came along as a spokesperson for the minority faction of Republicans who agreed with most Democrats that these trade deals are bad. Which is to say that in conventional terms, Trump was a moderate. But because conservatism has been redefined in Trumpian terms, I now think an “America First” trade policy might be seen as more conservative than the traditional free market pro-trade view. Similarly, it used to be that hawkishness on foreign policy was a defining feature of the right. It still is in some circumstances. But these days I think the minority of congressional Republicans who are pro-Russia are seen as “more right-wing” than the ones who have traditional Russia hawk views.

Then there’s the confounding question of entitlement programs. Trump ran for president promising not to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. In office, he reversed himself on Medicaid and pushed hard for a Paul Ryan plan to enact draconian cuts. He also repeatedly tried to cut Social Security Disability Insurance. But he did hold the line against cutting Medicare or Social Security old-age benefits. Then after 2018, Trump stopped talking about Medicaid cuts and the Affordable Care Act repeal.

At the same time, Trump is an egomaniac. So the Trumpist faction of the party is defined not by “agreeing with Trump’s relatively moderate stances on entitlement programs” but by “agreeing to condone any kind of crazy shit that Trump does.”

DeSantis was in the House for the ACA repeal vote.

If he had his way, insurance companies could return to declining to sell policies to people with pre-existing medical conditions. They could return to doing “rescissions,” retroactively canceling insurance policies once someone gets sick and needs medical care. They could go back to charging women higher premiums than men. They could return to imposing cost-sharing (i.e., higher prices) on preventative care. That bill called not only for undoing the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, but for imposing deep cuts that would make the program smaller than it was pre-Obama.

DeSantis, like most Republicans, hasn’t said much about this agenda in years, but he certainly hasn’t disavowed it or outlined a new vision for health care. And as governor of Florida, he’s been relentlessly hostile to Medicaid expansion.

He also served in Congress during Obama’s second term, when he voted for a few different iterations of Paul Ryan’s budget framework. These budgets cut Pell Grants, they cut SNAP, and they cut discretionary spending across the board — less money for K-12 schools, for police grants and federal law enforcement, less of everything. And those Ryan budgets famously proposed replacing both traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage with a new kind of voucher program that would feature higher unit costs and reduced coverage over time.

Like most Republicans, DeSantis has moved away from those positions without disavowing them. And the agenda continues to be a live item in GOP circles. Some very Trump-aligned candidates in the 2022 cycle, including Blake Masters and Ron Johnson, are big-time Ryanite entitlement cutters. Rick Scott, who is factually neutral, tried to get Senate GOP candidates to unite around a program of subjecting these programs to a five-year reauthorization cycle to prime them for cuts. It was establishmentarian Mitch McConnell who said they wouldn’t sign on for Scott’s plan but also wouldn’t articulate any plan at all.

Part of DeSantis’ appeal is that right now, people can project two different ideas onto him:

    Ron DeSantis is a professionalized version of Trump who will take Trump-like policy positions but tone down the zaniness and criminality to maximally own the left.

    Ron DeSantis is a Trumpified version of Paul Ryan, who will toss the chumps enough culture war chum to hang onto GOP gains with working-class voters while in fact reverting to the pre-Trump policy agenda of cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. 

If you put a gun to my head, I’d say that DeSantis is #2. That he’s a veteran conservative true believer, and that the reason he has so much elite support and donor support is that he’s made quiet commitments on these points. Republican governors in states like Arizona, West Virginia, and Ohio have made their peace with Medicaid expansion, and the fact that DeSantis hasn’t seems to me like a hint that he believes in hard-right economics. But there isn’t a gun to my head, there’s just the pressure to develop somewhat premature DeSantis takes. What I would like, if DeSantis moves ahead with a national campaign, is to see coverage that front-loads these known-unknowns rather than covering him like a circus.

Aside from Covid-19, DeSantis is most identified with beefing with leftist Florida teachers over K-12 curriculum issues. What I have always thought is underrated about this dispute — and I’m glad to see Patrick Brown from a conservative think tank agree — is that he paired those initiatives with generous school funding and pay increases for teachers.

Most progressives think you should understand the classroom culture war as an extension of a larger conservative war on public education, the goal of which is to dismantle, discredit, and defund neighborhood schools. That’s a powerful political frame and there is some truth to it, although prolonged Covid school closures obviously hurt Democrats’ brand as the party of public education. But Covid debates are in the past now. DeSantis’ best shield against the claim that he’s running a secret plot to dismantle public education is that he was right there handing out money to public school teachers. It’s a potent political combo, and it speaks to the very real potential power of the Professionalized Trump concept.

But of course, the reason DeSantis was able to be so free with school money is that the American Rescue Plan pumped state and local governments up with tons of money they didn’t necessarily need.

If Joe Manchin could take a time machine and re-write ARP, he’d probably take that money out and use it to fund what became the climate title of the Inflation Reduction Act instead. And if that happened, Florida wouldn’t have faced a fiscal crisis or anything, but DeSantis would have had to make hard choices about taxes and spending — the tax cuts + more school money + culture war combo was a gift from Biden and the Democrats. A gift that, crucially, DeSantis opposed.

Trump himself happened to be president during four years of very low interest rates. He guessed that most economists were wrong, that the 2016 economy was not at full employment, and that it would be fine to raise domestic spending and raise military spending and cut taxes. And he was right. But that’s not the situation in 2022, and I don’t think it’s very likely to be the situation in 2024. If Republicans want to enact big tax cuts, they will need spending restraint. So to be Professionalized Trump, you would need to not only replicate aspects of Trumpism that disappointed GOP elites (i.e., moderate positioning on Medicare, not crimes) but actually challenge the longstanding Republican obsession with tax cuts.

If DeSantis actually does that, he’ll be a huge political superstar. But will he? I’m incredibly skeptical. But that’s why you need to run the campaign and debate the policies.