READINGS: Preliminary Food for Thought for Þs Morning's "Hexapodia" Taping

I anticipate þt Noah Smith will back Brianna & Matt 100%. & I am going to be off in the corner whimpering "but what does þt really mean?"...

Let’s start with the highly estimable Brianna Wu:

Brianna Wu: ‘There’s a huge schism growing on the left I’ve struggled to understand. And, I think I’ve figured out how to put words to it, please tell me if this rings true to you. There are Policy Leftists and Infinite Leftists. I am a Policy Leftist. There are specific policies I want with a beginning and end. I can argue them from a rational basis without calling you names if you disagree. Single payer healthcare. Lowering housing costs. Civil rights for LGBT people. It brings me into conflict with Infinite Leftists. They see all these issues in terms of a purity test that spirals into infinity. You start with one issue, and you ride it leftwards. If you ever stop, you are a moral monster.

Single payer healthcare should be universal health care. Actually, that’s capitalism so nationalize it. Actually, medical establishment discriminates against trans people so informed consent for all medication. Actually, why take hormones at all, gender itself…

It’s not that those policy goals the problem. It’s that all these arguments are so moralistic, Policy Leftists like myself can’t ever have a moment to go, “Hold on, how are we going to do that?” If you do, you get screamed at by your own side. Infinite Leftism works well online. I myself was caught up in it for much of the Gamergate era. But when it comes to actually getting policy passed, it’s cancer. It trains people to expect Utopia with none of the compromises needed in a democracy.

Infinite Leftism does incredible damage, particularly to the marginalized people it’s supposedly trying to speak for. Because the people most hurt by the system are held to the highest infinite standards of purity. This shitshow with Infinite Leftism is like coronavirus. Everyone catches it eventually. And I think a lot of people like have had it often enough to be immune to it. It’s why Infinite Leftism is so much weaker than it used to be.

If there’s any future for progressives taking over the party from corporate Democrats—it’s going to come from Policy Leftists who have a narrowly defined set of objectives. That’s a base requirement to build the coalitions needed in a Democracy. The Infinite Leftists will scream. They’ll call us names. They’ll puff their chests and insist their way is the only way to win. I think most people are frankly tired of their bullshit. Our reasoning and strategy are better than theirs…

Who, exactly, is she talking about? Where are they? And how important are they?

We also have Matt Yglesias, recently writing:

Matt Yglesias: The two kinds of progressives: ‘Moralists vs. pragmatists…. As political scientist Matt Grossman recently told Tom Edsall, there’s no “evidence that the Democratic Party has abandoned redistributive politics or changed its positions on business regulation. Instead, they are increasingly emphasizing social issues and combining social concerns with their traditional economic concerns.” Indeed, I would say that rather than moderating on economics, many Democrats have if anything moved left and become more forthright in arguing that the country ought to try to shift to something much closer to a European welfare state.

At the same time, it’s not a coincidence that the Biden administration has enacted only small increases in the generosity of the welfare state, even though they’ve proposed huge ones. Democrats didn’t have the votes to enact the full Biden agenda, and running up against hard fiscal constraints, they chose to spend more on climate change than on welfare state expansion. And I think you can see how, from the point of view of a working-class person who (like most people) does not care that much about climate change, this can look like an abandonment of the traditional economic agenda.

That’s especially true if thought leaders are putting forward the idea that economic issues have, in some sense, lower moral stakes than other issues.

In particular, I think it’s worth considering the impact of this way of thinking on cross-pressured voters. Imagine a Texan who favors Medicaid expansion but thinks student athletes should play on chromosomally-appropriate sports teams. Well, you could tell that person that Medicaid has enormous concrete stakes for 1.4 million uninsured Texans while the sports issue impacts a tiny number of people.

But if progressives take the view that identity issues are fundamental moral principles and are too important to brook any compromise, that encourages people with the non-progressive view to see it the same way. And when you’re on the unpopular side of the fundamental issue of conscience, that just means you lose elections and lose on both policy issues.

And:

Matt Yglesias: The two kinds of progressives: ‘Moralists vs. pragmatists…. For a good sense of what I think is actually the most important divide in the broad center-left camp, it’s instructive to listen to the April 23 episode of Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer’s podcast with Johns Hopkins political scientist Liliana Mason as a guest. The thesis of the episode is that it’s wrong to frame “polarization” as a problem because the real problem is that Republicans are bad. On climate change, for example, Zimmer says the parties clearly have moved further apart. But, according to him, “Democrats aren’t moving toward an extreme position,” they’re moving toward an expert consensus, while Republicans are “driving into fantasyland.”

Then Mason follows up by talking about the impossibility of compromise on what she sees as fundamental questions of rights.

“You can compromise on what level of taxation we should have,” she says. “You can compromise on things like, you know, how much aid we should give to foreign nations.” By contrast, “the problem is when we’re talking about whether an entire group of human beings in the country who are American citizens should be eradicated. There is no compromise position there. We can’t compromise on whether Black Americans should be treated equally as white Americans.”

And to be clear, Mason isn’t talking about a hypothetical situation where an extremist party gains critical mass and it’s impossible to compromise with them.

That’s her characterization of the present-day Republican Party’s stance on transgender rights and racial equality. Zimmer has occasionally tweeted unkind things about me in ways that I’ve found somewhat puzzling, and this episode helped me understand where he’s coming from. Because this idea they are articulating — that there is a set of identity-linked issues that are beyond the scope of normal political give and take — strikes me as truly the most fundamental divide in progressive politics today. A divide so important that it transcends disagreements about everything else, precisely because the claim being made on the Zimmer/Mason side of the line is that the imperative for a principled stand on these topics trumps all other considerations….

To put my cards on the table, I think Mason has this wrong…

And:

Matthew Yglesias: Every policy objective, all the time, all at once: ‘I wrote a column critiquing the Biden administration’s approach to industrial policy as lacking adequate focus…. Then on April 2, Ezra Klein wrote a piece with similar themes in which he coined the phrase “Everything-Bagel Liberalism” to describe the phenomenon of unfocused policy. That catchphrase really did set the world on fire, generating a lot of enthusiasm from people who agree with me and Ezra, but also considerable pushback…. The BlueGreen Alliance stands up for the everything bagel of industrial policy—climate action, union jobs, U.S.-made goods, and advancing racial and economic equity. Heather Boushey from the White House Council of Economic Advisors was also at pains to note recently that she likes everything bagels.

Boushey’s reply in particular made me think that people are getting a little distracted by the metaphor here…. Ezra is not talking about actual bagels, he is making a reference to the Academy Award-winning film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” whose plot features an “everything bagel” that includes literally all of multi-dimensional metaphysical possibility. Contemplating this totality induces paralysis and insanity and drives the plot of the movie forward. Nobody is saying that everything in real-world politics needs to be maximally fastidious technocratic policymaking designed to pursue a single goal monomaniacally. That’s not how the world works. I know that, Ezra knows that, everyone knows that. The disagreement here is not over the legitimacy of combining a few different ingredients into a harmonious blend. It’s over whether that is in fact what’s happening — are we dealing with a Call Your Mother everything bagel or the Everything Everywhere All at Once bagel of insanity?

To climb down a bit from the mount metaphor, here’s a very non-catchy way of making the point: progressives would benefit from giving more weight to dull Economics 101 considerations when making choices…. Rigorous policy analysis has become underrated and… Biden in particular should listen somewhat more to orthodox economists and economics. The basic fact that multiple objectives will dilute the efficacy of a subsidy program is one thing that might pop out of that…. You need to recognize that under present-day macroeconomic circumstances, something like wasteful spending on over-engineered mass transit projects is pure waste…. Right now we have essentially no unemployed construction workers. That’s bad because construction is very useful. So we shouldn’t be paying people to build stuff that’s useless…. I’d ultimately like to frame this in a more positive way…. Biden… need[s] to take the win and recognize that their success means we’re now in a world of much tougher constraints and tradeoffs…

And:

Ezra Klein: The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism: ‘“What they’re trying to do with industrial policy is incredibly difficult,” Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, told me. “If you try to build a highway and your costs are too high, you just throw more money at the problem. The highway still gets built. But when you’re trying to catalyze the expansion of a globally competitive industry, there’s something pass/fail about it. That’s not the kind of environment where you want to be trying to accomplish seven or eight other goals, especially when people from that industry say the reason they don’t invest as much in the United States as they used to is the red tape and the costs.”…

When I spoke to members of the administration… a core argument I heard: A huge problem for building a domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry is work force development. We don’t have enough skilled semiconductor technicians. We don’t have enough skilled fab builders. All these companies complain about work force shortages. And so the administration is trying to push them to take a broader view of work force development. They need to build and staff their factories now, and they need a pipeline of talent for later.

Some of what’s in the notice of funding opportunity fits that argument…. But does that really explain the push for diversity in supply chain contracts? The call for community investments? Do Taiwanese semiconductor firms really know how to expand the role of women in the construction industry?… Cost, not just productivity, is a core problem for the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry, and many of these rules seem likely to raise costs…