The SR Conversation: Matthew Yglesias

BLM, free speech, neurosis, Trump, Biden, 2024, and how politics became symbolic.

Good afternoon. Welcome to the latest Saturday Read Conversation, our new periodic Q&A with a leading writer or thinker. If you missed the last edition, we spoke to Helen Lewis. This week we’ve spoken to

Matthew Yglesias

, whose Substack is one of the leading publications on here.

We have both been reading Matt’s writing for a long time. He has been an essential guide to American politics and policy for at least 15 years, and he was one of the founders of Vox in 2014. This conversation has been edited for clarity. We hope you enjoy it. HL

You can subscribe to Matt’s Substack, Slow Boring, here:

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Will

Matt, you wrote a piece on the “Great Awokening” back in 2019 in which you said the next Democratic president would have to “confront the legacy of America’s racial caste system”. You talked up the “prospects of sweeping policy change when the newly invigorated anti-racist coalition does come to power”. Have we seen these sweeping changes under Biden?

Matt

In 2018 I envisioned a future Democratic administration taking office and putting racial justice on the agenda. Instead we had this incredible wave of protests during Trump’s final year in office, and an incredible amount of non-profits and businesses doing Black Lives Matter stuff. By the time Biden becomes president, a backlash to all of that is already in place, and violent crime has gone up quite a bit in American cities.

Most of what Biden has done has been at representational level. He has put together, I think, the most diverse cabinet in history, the most diverse set of judicial nominees. He’s continuing in the trajectory that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and even Jimmy Carter started, of building a more integrated national policymaking elite.

But there was so much energy expended in 2019, and especially 2020, that most of what we’ve seen, I think, is Biden trying to distance himself from hardcore anti-policing ideas. Biden is a classic liberal integrationist. He doesn’t have a radical critique of America. Things are playing out pretty differently from how I’d anticipated because 2020 was such an accelerant.

Harry

So there has been less policy change than you would have hoped, in part because activists expended energy in 2020 in ways that turned out to be alienating?

Matt

Absolutely. A lot of energy and enthusiasm was expended in ways that were so apart from the material concerns that influence people’s quality of life that it wound up being alienating. We have gotten some big legislation from Biden that will make a big difference, in particular the infrastructure bill which is going to end up doing a lot for low-income communities of all kinds. But I had been hopeful that the diminution of racism [in public opinion data as of 2018] meant we were going to see big policy changes of the sort that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King once pushed for. Traditionally in the United States, efforts to do redistributionist class politics have been very undermined by racial antagonism.

Instead, what happened was that at a time when people on the left held very little practical national political power, we had this incredible outpouring of very identity-specific grievances that wound up locating itself really heavily in the basic operation of the criminal justice system. It’s obviously important to not have police officers doing bad things. But there’s so much more to society than that, right? And all the energy was expended in ways that ended up being somewhat counterproductive.

For instance, we had one year of an expanded child tax credit [across the US in 2021]. Tony Blair’s government did something similar in the 1990s. And it dramatically reduced child poverty in America, which does an incredible amount to reduce racial poverty gaps because child poverty here is much more concentrated in the black community. But it’s a completely race-neutral distribution policy. And unfortunately there was not enough enthusiasm to get that made permanent. Those are the kinds of changes that make a real difference in people’s lives in a sustainable way. And there was a loss of focus on those kinds of things.

Will

How has this happened?

Matt

Politics has become, I think, more symbolic for a lot of people and less material, less concrete. And I think that’s unhealthy in a lot of ways. It’s led people to deprioritise effective action. It’s also generated a lot of anxiety. It’s one thing to feel bad because an election didn’t go your way and then a programme that you rely on got cut, or your taxes went up. But a lot of people I know experienced all this psychological distress from the fact that Donald Trump was in the White House, that was not related to anything tangible happening in their lives. Just the symbolism of it wounded them. You saw a lot of that on the other [Republican] side with Obama, where you can draw a link to racism. People now see certain lifestyles as being vindicated based on who wins the presidential election. But we’re a gigantic, diverse country. You can’t have the president be like everyone. That doesn’t work.

Harry

You want people to focus on policy rather than this psychological distress.

Matt

The thing about policy is that it’s not zero-sum, right? If you make good governance decisions, you hope to have a more prosperous country, and you hope to have a fair division of that prosperity. You can have a situation where things are just better than they were ten years ago. Whereas these symbolic politics are inherently zero sum. You’re either championing the small-town people left behind, or you’re championing the cosmopolitan vision of the future. And it makes people miserable.

Harry

You have written that “we’re living through a time of toxic self-involved drama that threatens to make things worse through twitchy overreaction”.  I wondered how you think that has played out in the media. When you left Vox for Substack in late 2020, you described the outlook of a new type of journalist that was becoming dominant in America: “if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work… it is definitely the mentality of a lot of people working in journalism today.” Do you feel like that mentality is still gripping the media?

Matt

I think the grown-ups have taken back command of a lot of these media institutions. We had a cresting peak with the pandemic, the George Floyd protests and Trump being in office, and since then there has been a move back towards sanity. I do see entrenchment. The idea that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never harm me”, I think that idea has gone out of style among people younger than me [Yglesias is 42]. Of course that was never literally true. But there was a wisdom to it. It was trying to teach people to be more resilient in the face of mean-spirited dialogue or whatever else. For people under 40, under 30, a lot of what they got acculturated to in school is the idea that stopping people from saying bad things is a really important part of life.

A lot of the concern about misinformation on the internet has a very partisan and very ideological valence to it. There’s this idea lurking behind it that if we can get all the educated liberals together, we can stop people from saying the bad conservative things, and then nobody will believe this stuff. And then we’ll carry the day all over the town.

Harry

You’ve talked a lot about the Biden Boom^TM recently: inflation’s down, the “misery index” – the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate – is low, wages are rising. It looks like the soft landing may be in sight. Why do you think his approval ratings remain subdued? They are no better than Trump’s at the same point in his presidency.

Matt

It’s a good question. Consumer confidence has just started to go up over the past two months.  One theory is that we have a lag, and in a couple of months the political numbers [will] start getting better. I hope that’s true. People may be so dug in on social and cultural issues, that if you disagree with Biden on abortion and guns and transgender youth and sports, you just won’t give him credit no matter what happens. But if you look at the polling of state governors, the good economy is helping incumbents of all parties. It’s just not helping Biden. It raises questions about the White House’s communication strategy, and, frankly, about age. If you poll people they say Biden is too old. And he does not have a mechanism to become younger, unfortunately. He seems like he’s doing the job fine. But he does fewer public appearances than presidents normally do.

Will

It sounds a bit morbid, but what happens if Biden dies in the next 18 months?

Matt

I think everybody would feel better about that scenario if Kamala Harris was wildly popular. One of the paradoxes of the Biden administration is that he would be better off politically if Harris were more popular, except that you would have tonnes of people saying he should step aside and let her run if she was. For the three years of his presidency it was good for Biden that she was not held in high esteem by the public. There’s a move under way to rebuild her political standing. She’s out talking a lot about abortion rights now, which is a very good issue for them. At the beginning of the administration, they tasked her with border security, which is the worst assignment you could possibly be given in a Democratic administration. She’s been a very effective politician at earlier times in her career. She’s been a little bit lost in the fog [as vice-president].

Will

Is abortion going to hand Biden the 2024 election? You’ve been highlighting data showing how powerful an issue it is for Democrats.

Matt

It depends exactly what Trump says he’ll do. But it’s a potent issue. Republicans were given a big gift by Roe vs Wade [the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion nationwide], which let them tell their base that they were 100 per cent anti-abortion, but also tell swing voters “there’s nothing we could do about it, don’t vote against us”. The Dobbs case [which overruled Roe last year] has pulled that rug out from under them. It’s a really big deal politically.

Republicans are trying to reassure people that there isn’t going to be a federal abortion ban. But in every state they gain power, they make abortion illegal. After the [2024] election, it’s going to depend on how many votes they have, but it’s clearly what they think they should do. It’s what they do when they have power. It’s something they are willing to spend political capital on in Texas and Ohio and Georgia. So it’s very alarming to people.

Harry

Can you put a number on it? Out of ten, how confident are you Biden wins next year?

Matt

I think it’s a six. In 2020, the electoral college was very heavily tilted towards Trump. Biden won the popular vote by four points and only narrowly won the election. Dobbs has reconfigured the geography a little bit, so Biden’s odds of winning a 50/50 election are a lot better than they used to be. Pair that with a growing economy, and the incumbent will probably get re-elected. But it will be close.

Will

Are you surprised Trump has managed to weather four indictments? You’ve written about not being bewildered by his success. As you put it: “The basic ideas of ‘cops and troops are good, we should have less immigration and wave little flags a lot instead of obsessing over racism’ just have a lot of appeal.”

Matt

I think that he succeeded because he hit on some good stuff politically. He’s definitely a disaster as a person, and so plagued by scandal that I think everybody knows – except for Republican primary voters – that they’d be better off with some random governor. But as a person, rather than as a set of ideas, he has a real grip over a lot of people.

Harry

Why do you think that is?

Matt

I don’t know. Except that conservatives have developed this very oppositional stance towards American society. And it makes them feel that they have something in common with this one guy. That’s something we’ve seen in the past at a local level, with scandal-plagued mayors successfully wielding ethnic grievance concerns to make people feel that “I uniquely represent you, my legal troubles mirror your alienation from society” – whether that’s Buddy Cianci in Providence or Marion Barry in Washington DC, where I live. It’s unusual to see that in national politics, and to see conservative institutions have so little ability to check it.

Will

I think the piece you wrote about Hungary is interesting. I wanted to talk a little bit about the mistakes you think conservatives are making by following this path towards Orbánism.

Matt

It’s weird to have a world in which traditionalists have decided that big cities and the people who live in them, and the people who are educated and successful, are so bad that it would be better to have this homogeneous, middle-income, Central European, backwater country. I mean I’ve been to Budapest, it’s a beautiful city. But it’s such a strange aspiration to say we want the politics of rural Hungary, rather than London and New York and San Francisco. These are the crowning achievements of Western civilisation.

The success and dynamism of the richest country on Earth is something that, traditionally, American conservatives would celebrate. And they become really very alienated from the biggest icons of American society. You see it in Trump. Everything Trump does is this seething resentment against his social peers from New York City who never respected him. And he’s now going to vindicate every person who thinks somebody else is looking down on him.

Will

Could you speak to the impact of neuroticism on American politics?

Matt

From what we can tell, liberal people are a lot more neurotic. When you lump all the edgy, low-emotional stability people together in one political camp, I do think that, as an emergent phenomenon, you start to get a neurotic politics. Take Covid. There was a new virus, and there was a social response to it that I think was necessary. There was also a lot of uncertainty. At a certain point it became taken for granted on the left in America that whatever was the maximally cautious mode of behaviour, that was correct. That’s not how societies have traditionally worked. There’s always been a value placed on not shutting yourself up in your home or being paralysed by fear and terror.

It ties in with what we were talking about before with speech and expanding concepts of harm, right? You can have norms that say you should try to buck up and learn to deal with something. Or you can have norms that say: we all have to be more interpersonally sensitive to the foibles of the weirdest guy in the room.

Will

I wondered if you agree with Adam Tooze and others that we’re living in a “polycrisis”.

Matt

Politics is always high stakes. So if people want to say it’s a crisis, I mean, sure, but compared to when? I’d compare today to my grandfather’s stories about invading Italy to fight the Nazis, or my dad ducking under desks because there might be nuclear war, or even just when I was a college student and 11 September happened and the United States was invading various countries. The stakes seem lower than they were back then.

Harry

You’re taking me back to the Obama presidency. What errors do you think he made?

Matt

I think Obama made fewer mistakes than most people think. But there was one really big one: across his whole first term, the administration consistently underrated the potential to create jobs through fiscal and monetary stimulus. We had this very slow labour market recovery all through his eight years in office, and things were really, really bad in his first term. The Obama White House thought there were a lot of fake problems. Obama used to talk a lot in public about how ATMs and automatic ticket kiosks had reduced labour demand. But we saw over the course of his second term, and then Donald Trump’s whole term, there were just a lot of people out there who needed work and could be put back into work with a less austere fiscal policy. I think that is what prevented him from being a Reagan-like figure. He won re-election in 2012, it was a very well-run campaign. But he never got that “It’s morning again in America” moment.

Harry

One policy of Obama’s that Biden inherited and did away with was American military involvement in Afghanistan. You argued recently that Biden gets no credit for this. Do you think he should, given the nature of the withdrawal from Kabul? His approval rating cratered at the time. It fell from 50 to 46 per cent in ten days in August 2021, and has not recovered since. (It is at 41 per cent today.)

Matt

Obviously, not every specific of that withdrawal was done perfectly. But the mission was failing; he was correct to end it. Given what’s happening in Ukraine, and tensions with China, having the American military pinned down indefinitely in Afghanistan was a disaster. I think the media was incredibly harsh on Biden, and that was the proximate cause of the fall of his approval rating [in 2021].

Harry

How optimistic are you, ultimately? Because on the one hand you see great possibility in the small triumphs of policy, at a local, state, or national level, but then on the other you describe all these forces that are making such success less and less probable, from the antagonising radicalism of some parts of the American left to the impotence of the Trump-bitten right.

Matt

I try not to be too optimistic about anything. We’re starting to see Republican-run states really taking an axe to their higher education systems. What I would hope to see happen [in reaction to campus illiberalism on the left] would be a recalibration. What I’m afraid is going to happen is we’re going to detonate the red-state universities and they won’t exist. And then elsewhere [in blue states] things are going to go further. So that there is total social polarisation of the concept of university. Ron DeSantis clearly just wants to be seen as fighting with college professors. His politics aren’t about technocratic improvements to the Florida university system. It’s about war. And that makes it hard to make things better.

We have also moved to a media where more people are reading the internet instead of a local newspaper. They are getting information about symbolically-freighted fights happening in communities they don’t live in, rather than information about practical stuff happening where they do live, and that twists everything around. People feel like they’re engaging in politics because it helps people, because it’s important. There are lots of things you can do in politics that are constructive and do help people. But the thing I always urge people to ask themselves is – is this thing that I am actually doing right now helping people? Does it make you happy to doom-scroll and read about allegedly terrible things that governors of states you don’t live in are doing?

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Thanks for reading. If this interview was of interest, you can sign up for more Saturday Read Conversations below. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. Thank you.

— Harry & Will

Thanks to Barney Horner.