Kausfiles Gets Bloggy

#44: Killer issues!

Jack Shafer writes: "If you’re a “name” writer with 100,000 followers on Twitter, you might make a go of it on Substack if you can be interesting three times a week." … High bar! Not gonna happen. Not here anyway. But one way to move in that direction is more short items, fewer long “takes.” (“Takes” became the dominant Web opinion form sometime in the 2000s when the way to get hits stopped being “score high in a search” and became “get links from bigger sites.” People started writing long, portentous “takes” in order to attract those links, even when they could easily make their point in a paragraph. The old, staccato blog style might have been better. I suppose that is a “take.”)

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The scandal is what’s mainstream: This NPR piece, on the surprisingly close New Jersey governor’s race, makes an important point: Parents aren’t necessarily shocked by outlandish new gender ed fads. They're shocked by mainstream ed that's been around for years but that they hadn't been paying attention to. For example, the Republican candidate in New Jersey said this:

JACK CIATTARELLI: I've heard parents, particularly mothers, say that a young child came home questioning their sexuality, questioning their gender. If that's the consequence of what's being taught, that should tell us there's something terribly wrong with this curriculum.

Reporter Nancy Solomon says the campaign of Ciattarelli’s rival “thought that would sink him, but it turned out that that really tapped into a lot of concern going on in the exurbs, that outer ring of suburban New Jersey.” America’s not all Park Slope. Yet.

P.S.: Do they know about the Genderbread Man? Been around for a while!

P.P.S.: Maybe this is a corollary to the Michael Kinsley maxim that “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal.” The scandal isn’t what’s transgressive. It’s what’s mainstream.

But wait, there’s a larger point! When explaining election results, political journalists and commenters tend to focus on what’s happened lately — e.g., what did Candidate X say a month ago that pissed people off, did Congress’ failure to pass an infrastructure bill hurt, etc. But voters aren’t necessarily reacting to what’s new. They might be reacting to old things they’ve just discovered (e.g. when the pandemic caused fathers to work from home where they saw what their kids were being taught via remote learning). Or they might be reacting to old things that had been bottled up but that somehow come to the fore, magma reaching the surface — like when the government paid them money to stay home during the pandemic and they realized, seemingly en masse, that they hated their jobs and their lives and wanted to do something different! Those political issues — antipathy to deep trends in modern life —may be the most powerful.

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Chain of Tools: Polls suggest the Democrats’ problem is that their Build Back Better agenda is focused on what professional Democrats in Washington want, not what swing voters care about (which is the economy, jobs, inflation, Covid, and immigration). Is there a topical issue Biden could stress instead, one that would speak directly to actual voter concerns as well as long term, troublesome trends. Yes there is: Bring the supply chains home. The pandemic has shown how precarious it is to base your economy on things made in China from components made elsewhere and then shipped thousands of miles in containers to U.S. ports. Start building more things here, creating manufacturing jobs and at least partly countering the invidious stratifying drift of what might be called the Michael Young Pathway —-namely, a society that rewards brain work but not the equally hard work that may involve less smarts (and fewer education credentials).

Not like this is something Biden hasn’t already called for. Maybe he should spend his energy and pulpit time on that, not on pleasing Rep. Jayapal. …

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Hassles “R” Us: In the New York Times, hard-working infrastructure chronicler David Dayen proposes a rule of simplicity for new Democratic programs— they should be “hassle free.” His big example of what to avoid is the current Build Back Better proposal on parental leave.

To use the benefit, workers must learn whether their employer or their state offers paid leave or whether they are eligible for federal assistance, and then apply with the proper entity, turning in some combination of pay stubs, tax information and work history evidence to comply with numerous eligibility requirements.

What Dayen doesn’t note is that the biggest offender of his Simplicity Principle is Obamacare (the “Affordable Care Act” of 2010). It divides the populace into three tiers: those with private insurance through their jobs, those poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, and those in between, who are assigned to scrounge on the Obamacare “exchanges,” which means reasearching and choosing between multiple plans in multiple tiers (“gold,” “silver”), and changing plans frequently in order to get the best deal. Even the liberal Matt Yglesias has complained about all the complication.

How did Dayen’s Democrats end up with such a mess of hassle? Well, they were trying to cover everyone without disturbing the private insurance of people with good jobs. And there were budget constraints. But it’s also because a) they are economistic, meaning they paid close attention to the dollars they were redistributing and less attention to the invidious social classes they were creating. The worst example of this: Americans poor enough to qualify for Medicaid were actually forbidden from buying unsubsidized policies on the exchanges even if they were willing to pay out of their own pockets. “Sorry, you can’t eat here. You look respectable enough but you are in the poor caste.”

Also b): Too many Democrats, at least Democrats in the interest groups that shape this sort of legislation, are bureaucrats. (I’m including unionized government workers.) They don’t hate paperwork. Paperwork is what they live on. Asking them to cut the hassle is like asking a fish to cut the water.

P.S.: It’s not as if Obama didn’t have an appealing alterantive. He did: Lowering the Medicare eligibility age gradually, year after year. Compared with not being on Medicare, being on Medicare is a heaven of hasslelessness. It’s wildly popular. Expanding it would have taken care of older uninsured cases — i.e. the most illness-prone, expensive cases — and made other patchwork fixes like a public option more affordable for the younger cases that remained.

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All Tomorrow’s Infrastructure: There were driver shortages in the 1960s too, but they came up with creative ways to fill them:

(That is glamorous pop icon Nico driving the Velvet Underground tour bus in the mid 1960s. The photo, or a better version of it, appears in Todd Haynes’ new Velvet Underground documentary. I enjoyed the doc, but as this New Yorker review points out, it fails to give a good idea of what all the fuss about this band was about. It was mainly about the sound, which was like a giant dark machine reeling out of control—unrelenting and, it’s true, sometimes boring. None of the band’s records capture the sound — Sister Ray comes closest — something that might be impossible since it involved various feedback waves bouncing off the walls of whatever venue they were playing. It’s left to Jonathan Richman to describe it. He does a good job—but, as they say, show don’t tell.

Also they omitted the heartening Czech angle!)

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