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Now I’m gonna do some base self-promotion, which I find deeply shameful, and I’m very sorry for.
This newsletter is a pretty good value, if I do say so myself. I think the analysis I’ve provided over the past couple of years of Trump has been pretty solid! Who else called the Iran war in November 2024? Not too many people! Who else predicted the emergence of the tech right in 2022? Who else analyzed and dismissed “the vibe shift” back then, too? Who originally coined the term “groyperfication?” If you want to remain on the cutting edge of political and social commentary, this is the place to go. You read about here what you’ll be reading about in The New Yorker and The New York Times two years from now. I’m kinda kidding, but it’s also sorta true!
Everyone is still processing the terrific victory of the Democrats on Tuesday. I hope to write about it more in the coming week, but I especially liked the commentary of political scientist Daniel Schlozman, interviewed in n+1:
MK: Speaking of the ongoing conversation around progressives versus Atlantic-pilled moderates, there’s some discussion online happening about underperformance. Can you explain it to me?
DS: I have thoughts, but you need to ask me a question.
MK: Could you just give me your thoughts?
DS: No.
MK: Hm, OK. I mean, I don’t think this is world-historically important discourse that we need to spend a lot of time on, but I’ve seen commentators, by which I mean Matt Yglesias, lay out this shifting story about how Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan wasn’t actually that impressive because the margins were worse than, say, Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia or Roy Cooper’s in North Carolina. That line of thought has a thin, tautological quality I find sort of puzzling. [Here, here! —JG]
DS: In February 2020, E. J. Dionne published a book that mostly went unnoticed—because it was February 2020—called Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country. The thesis was that progressives and moderates are not only stuck together in the Democratic Party, inside a two-party system that isn’t going anywhere, but also that each bloc has qualities the other doesn’t and can’t have. Moderates have a special sauce when it comes to winning races in places that are hard to win. Progressives have a special sauce in that they have a long-term vision of where they want to take the country, and in identifying and instantiating core values—real core values, not the fake, TED Talk kind.
Code Red was sort of an instabook, but for all that there’s wisdom to this observation. In social science terms, there’s an internal validity question about underperformance: what is it, and then an external validity question, which is what does it explain? Which is related to questions about the benefits of moderation, however we’re defining moderation. Underperformance in comparison to what? What do you control for in your model? If you can raise more money, is that internal to the model? If your opponents are attacking you really, really loudly, is that internal to the model? There are some modest benefits to electoral moderation, I think that’s correct, but what then do you make of those benefits? That’s the external validity question. Once you’ve run your statistical model—and some of the statistics around underperformance seem to me more and less dodgy—what does that mean? Eventually the meaning of cross-sectional over- and underperformance on a given ballot looks much less clear than the people touting it would claim.
This gets at the political positivism (I’m really struggling with coming up with a good term for this; I’ve called it “abstract empiricism,” “logical pop-tivism,” “technocratic positivism,” “quantitative myopia”—maybe I should try something catchier like “number trash.”) That’s been bugging me for a while, and I’ve written about it quite a bit. It’s very difficult to abstract from the actual circumstances of the races and then generate these metrics like “overperformance.” You’re left with bullshit that looks and sounds objective and scientific, which can become a huge problem both practically and also more broadly impoverish our intellectual culture as well. This is not about “moderation” per se—I have no problem with a candidate modulating their message to their audience; I just don’t think you can advise politicians well with this kind of nonsense, and a ton of donor money flows into it. Obviously, they should send their money to humanistically informed newsletter writers instead. More to come on this front soon.
Speaking of the humanities and the social sciences, I found a somewhat strange collection of essays in honor of Herbert Marcuse called The Critical Spirit at a very strange used bookstore in Upstate New York. One of the essays, by historian Peter Gay, is on the work of the Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whom I’ve talked about a little bit here before. His description of Cassirer’s concept of history appealed to me and clarified very nicely what I love about my vocation:
