Weekly Roundup 7/23/21
The thing everyone seems to be missing about the threat of Republicans throwing presidential elections to the House, is that this was intended by the Founders as a tiebreaker, a backup, not the primary route through which to contest elections.
The left fails to contest this on these grounds, to its own detriment.On this week’s Pod Save America…
(1) The battle for the soul of the GOP may be over, contra popular reports of it raging on, but any historian would tell you that the war has merely entered a new phase. The anti-Trumpists are beaten, but they haven’t completely given up on the party, otherwise they’d be proudly crowing about being new Democratic converts.
(2) The last interview shows Dems yet again convincing themselves to pitch immigration to Latinos as if it’s the key issue. This time, it’s a “gateway” theory - that somehow it’s an issue which allows Dems to make their other pitches. On first glance, I’d say they have this backwards: It should be the last applause line Dems make in their stump speeches, something they build up to by talking about other issues, not the center of the appeal.
(3) On that note, I’d like to point out that border security does affect Latinos, especially the most recent immigrants who are fleeing violence. People who have been through that trauma don’t want to hear about how you want to make life easier for some DACA recipient who got here 20 years ago, they want to hear about how you’re going to protect them from the threats that drove them to leave their entire lives behind. They probably only care about DACA to the extent that it means you’ll protect their children.Someone on Quora asked if Americans “buy guns because they can buy them”. I think this actually kind of makes a sort of “whoa-dude”, stoner-moment sense - guns as a meme. Most self-defense is a myth, as is the idea of mounting an effective insurgency (all those rednecks would quickly discover themselves out of ammo once an invader or tyrannical federal government stopped Bass Pro Shops from selling 5.56), let alone the crime that people are supposedly defending themselves from.
Most gun sales in the US are fueled by the fact that… guns are legal. I mean, yes, on one level, duh, but I’m not just saying it’s street-legal to buy them, but that their legality’s central place in our constitutional system encourages gun nuts to come up with all kinds of reasons why they need guns.
By contrast, imagine if the 2nd Amendment had never been ratified. Gun regulations would have continued developing based on local laws. The gun lobby, as it may have ever existed, wouldn’t have some overarching philosophical point to rally around (#2A), they’d just be fighting a bunch of localized gun laws, probably unsuccessfully - without a legion of grassroots organizers sharing talking points, every fight is an uphill battle.Just started reading The Bulwark, and man some of the things they say are stupid. Like this article about the dangers of becoming a “nation of renters”.
I’m not going to bother debunking it here; suffice to say their political economy analysis is laughably simplistic, even for a zeroth- or first-order attempt. Rather, I’d like to make a broader point: If the goal is to be a “nation of owners”, then we literally cannot do anything we’ve already tried for goosing homeownership.
A century of financialization and mortgage subsidies has only driven up the price housing. Loosening mortgage standards has backfired several times in several different but uniformly catastrophic ways - from the Clinton/Bush attempts to use subprime to raise minority homeownership, to earlier mortgage-based crises like Savings & Loan. Single-family zoning and the countless mini-regulations like setbacks were an attempt to create the ideal suburban existence, and have mostly just served to drive up prices.
At some point, we have to acknowledge that we keep making it easier to spend money on a house, which is not the same thing as making it easier to buy a house. Bemoaning a departure from a policy baseline dominated by the former - with its myriad failures - doesn’t magically prove that the latter is superior to shifting to an entirely different - and perhaps valid! - mode of housing.An axiom of our Discourse here ought to be that the smart things smart people say we should do, are rarely actually done in history. We here should seek to find the rare things we can influence instead of screaming at the void.
[Last] Week’s Weeds:
(1) Although I hate feeding overused narratives, I wonder if perhaps it IS too late for the nativists to reverse demographic change. White American guilt over the Holocaust helped integrate Eastern and Southern Europeans, and the laws that were made based on that acceptance, accidentally left the door open for Latin Americans to come on in. The major difference between today’s immigration debate and then, is that there’s nothing for Whites to feel guilty about.
(2) There may be a silver lining in Anti-CRT laws. Sure, they’re dumb and hatefully motivated, just like the Sharia bans, but if they actually stop the worst excesses of the right by creating public skepticism that anything needs to be done, and help brush back the nutsoid left in the process, then what are we complaining about?
Also, like the Sharia bans, these laws distract the right from more substantive issues where they can cause more damage. The new generation on the right is more dangerous because they were raised almost entirely within a hermetically sealed propaganda bubble. But they’re also more incompetent because of that. The true danger they pose is that so were the Nazis. It’s easy to underestimate incompetence. But if we can avoid that pitfall, then the incompetence opens up a path to figuring out just how to defeat these guys.People love talking about degree inflation, which is absolutely a problem, but it’s also true that economists spend a lot of time debating hyperspecialization in the sciences as a source of the productivity gap. Given that both trends started roughly in the 1970’s, it’s not crazy to consider that they may be linked. I see a few potential scenarios:
(1) Disciplines already were growing to be infungible from each other, but the postwar tech explosion all but eliminates the ability of the average STEM grad to freestyle in other disciplines. This drives siloization through the establishment of monodisciplinary licensure requirements, and infects the labor market with a tendency towards credentialism. Hiring practitioners then see
(2) Hiring practitioners are overwhelmed by hyperspecialization’s jargon, and begin relying on credentialism just at the moment when higher education is pumping out an historic surplus of graduates.
(3) Both trends are basically just products of overinvestment in education.The carbon tariff is actually a really great idea. I hope it sells well!
The Bulwark’s Republican Autopsy is excellent. What I find most interesting is that this method which the Founders considered to be a contingency - the House tiebreaker - is now genuinely being considered by the GOP as its primary avenue towards power. This is an unmistakeable sign that they’ve progressed past merely playing constitutional hardball, breaking norms as part of the neverending partisan race-to-the-bottom, and into actually undermining the constitutional system.
The underappreciated danger of the GOP’s Option 3 strategy is that their voters might not bother turning out. When you keep telling your own people that the other side cheats so much, you have to break the system in order to maintain it, it kind of hurts your case for all but the hardcore to turn out. This operated in the opposite direction for Trump 2020, because he was merely priming his voters to contest his loss, but the long-term cost is that this only mobilizes your nonvoting supporters off the sidelines when it looks like you came close enough to win.
I’ll be the first to point out that this hasn’t actually happened yet, and the fundamentals are strongly against it, but it’s still possible on a deep level. If anything, it’s a useful tool to track as any other of the narratives we track, as its failure to materialize provides us a great scope for analysis of any fundamentals we might otherwise miss going into 2022 and 2024.I finished Chuck Marohn’s Strong Towns. It’s a great book, I highly recommend it.
What’s scary to me is that if the cycle of the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme keeps just muddling on, perhaps we don’t experience a grand correction like Chuck wants to see. Our hinterlands contain countless hectares for the suburban pattern to be repeated as exurbs, and it’s already happening. Left uninterrupted, the bond market might just keep enriching land speculators, building up a mountain of municipal debt to create the illusion of growth, until the ownership class start butting up against each other. This resembles nothing so much as feudalism, which is what happened the last time an industrial-track society collapsed.
Also, if Chuck’s correction does happen, one wierd interim thing we’ll see is that we’ll revert to the historical pattern of poor people living in a ring around urban elites. They’ll probably live in the enormous suburban houses that we’re building today, as their municipalities fail under successive generations of debt burdens. Today’s elites would be astonished, but they really shouldn’t be, because this has already started happening - we (I’m including myself) tend to live in cramped but expensive and nice houses in urban-pattern neighborhoods.One thing I find interesting about the infrastructure bills is that we’re seeing a piecemeal, stealth, quasi-abolition of the filibuster1. Democrats have innovated to give themselves a full 3 reconciliation bills, and they’re making all these small, tentative pushes to include more and more policy angles under reconciliation.
One likely avenue is that we’ll see major policy overhauls come to be characterized as “fees”. Taxes are near-universally unpopular, but in order to get a DACA bill past reconciliation, you’ll need revenue. Fees give you that! And you can make them as small or high as you want. Call it “Reconciliation With Fees”, or as is more befitting our current age, “Reconciliation+”.
The intersection of partisan politics and race-class politics is also going to be fun here. It’s impossible that it hasn’t occurred to some Senate Democrats to do immigration reform as a fee- or tax-based proposal. Their hesitation is likely because of something else - and I’d bet that it has something to do with them not wanting to (1) provoke a White backlash to ambitious immigration reform, while (2) also imposing taxes on the very people they’ve been insisting are oppressed by the current system. The latter is a particularly bad look, especially for a party that’s been traumatized by 40 straight years of its proposals being propagandized as cynically as possible.
Regardless, I think they’ll get there eventually, and probably even get some “help” from the Republicans once their base sees Democrats actually managing to pass real policy under Reconciliation+. In fact, the Republicans will be even more effective at it, given their better discipline. The saving grace for liberals is that Republicans will be just as hampered as Democrats, and Republicans are better at doling out to their base in more manageable chunks. However, I still can see a future where, just like happened with using the filibuster to block everything, both parties’ voters end up demanding their party use Reconciliation+ to pass everything. The parliamentarian becomes a politicized post, and the filibuster can gets kicked down the road another decade or two as both parties vie for advantage in the Reconciliation+ Era.
In a world where you get 3 shots at policy, and you have to pass them as fees or tax rebates, this distorts a lot of policy. For instance, instead of a “Kids’ UBI”, we have the (Soon-To-Be) Permanent CTC doled out as a monthly rebate check. Instead of an honest-to-God immigration overhaul, you’ll have a “processing and integration fee”. But it’s all going to come in fits and starts. Small-c conservatives who wail about preserving the filibuster will get a funhouse version of their impossible dreams - legislation that is infrequent and in theory restricted to a certain scope, but because of all the contortions required to get it there while “keeping the filibuster”, is also the very bloated, tinsel-laden legislation they profess to hate.
It’s going to be hilarious to see how the history textbooks eventually describe Reconciliation+.
Call it the flip side to “Secret Congress”.