I have a new essay, in which I write,
I think that his posts have the potential to kick off discussions (which is a point category), but so far they have not done so. Perhaps this is a drawback to being paywalled.
Read the essay to its depressing conclusion.
The “depressing conclusion” from the essay: “We have reached an odd juncture at which each party seems hell bent on scaring away moderate voters rather than winning them over. Political scientists’ faith in the median voter theorem is wavering. And those of us who are not members of either the Woke tribe or the Trump tribe are feeling squeezed.”
Solution: look at deeds, not words. Evaluate policies, not rhetoric.
What is the “moderate voter” anyway? The person who reluctantly but willingly goes halfway to meet the most extreme just to be nice?
If we evaluate policies, then the “Trump tribe” looks pretty moderate. One the other hand, the “Woke tribe” does not; the current administration is part of the “Woke tribe.”
I’m curious how Matt thinks that the “Trump tribe” should moderate. Propose the same policies, but have Romney as your mouthpiece?
“an odd juncture at which each party seems hell bent on scaring away moderate voters…Political scientists’ faith in the median voter theorem is wavering.”
Concentrated interest groups’ intense interests winning out over the mainstream’s dispersed “rational ignorance” is actually not odd; it’s expected under prevailing public choice models. We usually apply this model when explaining some industry group’s behind-the-scenes actions to pass some tax break or protectionist regulation. For some reason, we seem unwilling to apply this model to minority culture war factions’ dominance in primaries, when most voters aren’t paying attention (especially congressional primaries).
General election mainstream voters are reduced to choosing among the lesser of two evils, which explains Yglesias’s observation, “The moderate candidate often wins.” Concentrated vs. dispersed interests explains why, after the election, the Biden Administration still seems beholden to the far left and Republican officials still seem beholden to ardent Trump supporters.
Yglesias’s comments about backlash can be interpreted as advice to (culture war) special interest groups to follow the industry special interest groups’ playbook: work behind the scenes to gain more political influence than popular support for ones views would otherwise merit. However, culture war special interest groups are different from industry special interest groups in at least two respects. First, they want to influence popular culture as well as, if not more than, government policy. Second, they need some way of indentifying each other to find loyal allies, organize, etc. Industry groups can rely on observable industry membership. Culture warriors rely on saying out-of-the-mainstream things that only a true believer would say. That’s why culture warriors’ rhetoric seems to perpetually escalate in its ridiculousness. They are competing against each other to lead their factions, and escalating rhetoric demonstrates their loyalty to the cause.
I found your pull-quote from Yglesias’s essay a little opaque; I didn’t fully understand it. And you begin your analysis with: “I think what he is saying is that…”
That doesn’t reflect positively on the essay, and reveals a problem.
However you score intellectuals, clarity and comprehensibility in writing surely underlie the scoring in some way. I agree with your point that being behind a paywall restricts dissemination of ideas. But a related phenomenon, I think, is that an intellectual’s blog or Substack post tends restrict the absorption of ideas even if disseminated. Such essays tend to cater ever more closely to the intellectual’s particular audience base (especially a paying base), fostering a drift toward shorthand ways of communicating with the in-crowd, who are familiar with the context from having read earlier posts. This unintentionally erects “entry barriers” to outsiders who are unfamiliar with the private language. I’d say Brad Delong’s blog is the polar extreme of this phenomenon—it reads like gibberish to an outsider like me (or maybe it is just gibberish; I can’t tell).
Maybe a “solution” to the problem is to keep to the private language when communicating with the intense fan base, but then collect and rewrite the ideas in more accessible form for a book aimed at a broader readership.
Your own blog posts and books have always been distinguished by crystalline clarity, making digestion of your ideas very easy (and in case a reader disagrees, the reader can understand precisely why). I hope that as you transition to Substack, you resist the drift I describe above.
I just don’t see how Trump’s policies were immoderate in practice. Most of them were espoused by centrist Democrats less than a decade ago. In contrast the Democrat promotion of near open immigration via stealth, in opposition to the median voter of the US (and probably the median voter even of Democrats), the imposition of Woke rules and the tolerance of loss of freedom of speech, the unwillingness to follow thru with the Justice Depts lawsuit against Yale for anti-Asian discrimination, the constant support for critical race theory in government and education, the support for destroying any meritocracy and for forcing racial quotas are clearly more radical by the median voter’s standards. And of course we don’t even have a press questioning all these facts as well as Biden’s fiscal profligacy in spending and fecklessness on China. How can the Republican not support the Trump wing if failure to do so means ratifying the Woke movement, only in slow motion? People are tired of nice Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully.
The right way to take Matt Yglesias is as a Party Intellectual par excellence. As he goes, so follows the Democratic ruling clique. There are a few others of this stature, such as Ezra Klein.
What we see with Matt since November 2020 is a strong consciousness of victory which he senses could be permanent. Hence the decreased emphasis on persuasion, democracy, etc. and the frank admission that his favoured policies are unpopular. This does not concern him – the task of his Party is to rule.
I thought that Yglesias’ whole schtick was to castigate Wokesters for costing the Democratic Party votes, and also to advocate that the Democratic Party has a lot of policies that are popular with voters and should campaign and govern on those popular policies. What are the unpopular policies that Yglesias has been recommending?
Most clearly the one referred to in the title of his recent book.
This is Olivia Nuzzi’s source in New York Magazine: “They may get criticism in think pieces about it, but at his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we’ve had–and the public thinks he’s a moderate. That’s a winning strategy to me. They’re willing to accept that you’re gonna write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren’t gonna read it.”
Nobody reads the think pieces, no backlash.