The orange man is very bad
Shitposting our way out of democracy
We’re trying something new with The Closing Argument. Jerusalem will still be writing The Verdict (the short-ish article at the top), but each week, one of our Fellows will be writing the bottom half of the newsletter. Today, that’s Milan Singh, our polling and political data fellow.
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The Verdict
While not everybody loved Barack Obama, his attempt to appear virtuous in public was well-documented. Remember the popular Key-and-Peele-sketch-turned-White-House-Correspondents-Dinner skit Obama’s Anger Translator?
At one point in the Key and Peele version, fake Obama addressed the governments of Iran and North Korea: “We, once again, urge you to discontinue your uranium enrichment programs.”
Fake Angry Obama interrupts him to translate this polite request: “I think I already done told both y’all, 86 your shit bitches, or I’mma come over there and do it for y’all. Please test me and see what happens.”
Our current president has no interest in the appearance of virtue. This morning, he posted on Truth Social: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Deciphering the social media posts of a madman is a fool’s errand, but, unfortunately, the madman is our president, and he appears to be threatening to intensify an unpopular war. Notably, going after civilian infrastructure can be a violation of international humanitarian law if there’s no clear line between the targeted bridges or power plants and the hostile military regime.1
Trump’s Truth Social post isn’t just a norm violation for us to clutch our pearls at, it is civic education. It is the president teaching the public that politics is about domination, about cruelty, and about the power to treat the deaths and immiseration of millions flippantly.
I’ve grappled with what the value of appearing virtuous even is.
George W. Bush, for instance, made sincere efforts to display a high level of personal morality — no affairs, no personal financial corruption, and a public commitment to his faith. A Pew Research Center poll in 2000 indicated that Bush’s “advantage with the voters on personal qualities is now trumping Al Gore’s edge on the issues.”
Simply put, people saw the Republican candidate as more likable and honest.
Notably, Bush would go on to launch several wars and end up plausibly responsible for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths. So, seeming like a nice guy isn’t actually everything.
But behavior is contagious, particularly from the powerful. The impact of Bush’s policies was bad enough, but a Bush with the character of Trump? Well, that’s quite possibly where we’re headed right now.
When Trump signals contempt for Muslims through his snide “Praise be to Allah,” he frees his supporters to go even further and rewards those that signal they will bear public censure to defend his cruelty.
Whose interests are served by a normalization of aggression and a domination-oriented politics? An ideal liberal democracy demands a lot from its citizens. Not just to care about Trump’s war in Iran because of what it might do to oil prices, but to care about the fact that our president treats human life as expendable. Not just to care about homelessness when it threatens our parks, but to care what it does to a person to sleep on a sidewalk.
So much political analysis is, reasonably, focused on the question of “What do we do right now, given the citizenry that we have?” But equally important is “What are our leaders doing to shape our virtues, our aspirations, our goals, and our morality?”
Being a good person doesn’t mean you’ll be a good president, but a nation comfortable with such casual cruelty from its elected leaders is not one that I will be happy to live in.
Top stories this week
As we grow, we want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.
Can a liberal society do affirmative action right?
Kelsey Piper's principled case against race-based affirmative action
Worth watching...
Matthew Yglesias, writer of Slow Boring and a columnist at The Argument, is cohosting a new podcast with Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument’s editor-in-chief. Episodes start this Thursday, April 9, and you should subscribe wherever you get your podcasts (ad-free versions available for paying subscribers only!)
Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data, joined Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini on Wednesday to discuss the Democratic Party’s resurgence among non-college-educated voters.
The Sidebar by Milan Singh
On Monday, Jerusalem published a piece about the bipartisan hostility toward renters. Renting is a legitimate choice in a free country; not all renters are temporarily embarrassed homeowners, and public policy should treat renting as a valid choice for individuals and households, not something to be discouraged.
Also on Monday, Rotimi Adeoye, a contributor at The New York Times, published a column arguing that Democrats should run on a “House by 30” program, wherein the federal government would cover a portion of a first-time homeowner’s down payment, up to $50,000. The total benefits would accrue based on years worked, and the check would arrive at the closing of the sale.
To pay for it, Adeoye suggested that “Congress could raise taxes on the wealthy and close loopholes that let billionaires pay lower tax rates than the people who work for them.”
I think this piece is a good encapsulation of the pro-homeownership bias in our political discourse. Adeoye is likely correct that the “House by 30” program would be popular, but I don’t think it would actually make housing more affordable.
The reason is simple: If you give people more money with which to buy a house, but do not increase the supply of houses, then the price of homes will be bid up. For instance, even though people in San Francisco have gotten richer, the supply of housing has not kept up with demand, so that increased wealth famously hasn’t fixed the Bay Area’s housing crisis.
Now, it’s possible that Adeoye’s “House by 30” plan could work as a component of a broader package of reforms to increase the supply of housing. But by itself, it’s just another demand-subsidization proposal that would make the housing crisis worse.
What’s News with The Argument
We’re hiring a Senior Editor to join our team. Are you a liberal? Do you love to argue? Do you read social science research for fun? Apply!
Also a reminder that The Argument merch is for sale.
The Argument recommends
This week I asked my colleagues to, in addition to sending me their recommended watches, listens, and reads, also tell me a little bit about why they made each recommendation.
Maibritt, our gender, families, and culture fellow, told me that she recommended the “Tiny Desk Concert by Geese from February, specifically their performance of the song Cobra.” She said that “even if you identify as someone who does not typically enjoy Brooklyn-coded things” — guilty — “this band is leading the indie sleaze revival and should be your one exception.” I think we have very different tastes in music, because I have no idea what “indie sleaze” means.
Justin, The Argument’s new video editor (everyone say hello to Justin!), said that he was rereading Actual Air by David Berman, the late front man for the indie rock band Silver Jews. He described it as “a small collection of droll and absurd poems that are often both funny and melancholic.”
Jerusalem read The End of Romance by Lily Meyer and said, “I’m not sure if I recommend this book or just recommend the experience of reading this book. There are times I thought the book was wrong and other times when I thought it was confused, but I enjoyed the thoughts it provoked and it was so engrossing I finished it in a single evening.”
As for myself, my editors did not explicitly say that I could not recommend short-form videos. So here are my top Instagram reels of the week.
Here is a reel about Ten Cent Beer Night, which was a failed MLB promotional event from 1974. (The failure mode was that there was a riot.)
Here is a reel about a book called A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and Other Winged Dinosaurs, which combines two of my special interests, birds and dinosaurs.
And here is a dope edit of Obama hanging out with Anthony Edwards. No other president even comes close to this level of motion.
More to read:
The perfect storm hitting millennials
If you had asked me who was having the worst time in the modern economy, I would have said Gen Z.
We tried answering a few big questions this week:
Lakshya Jain asked: “Is Graham Platner worth the gamble?”
Jerusalem Demsas asked: “Does it suck to have a job?”
Elliot Haspel and Ivana Greco asked: “Are most Americans illiterate?”
Bush must be held accountable for the wars he started and mismanaged. However, he must also be given credit for PEPFAR, the program to combat AIDS in less developed countries.
Something to add to the roundup: I thought Kelsey's appearance on the podcast Frames of Space to talk about AI was interesting. I particularly liked her rant at the end about AI boosters giving AI credit for things it hasn't done yet, like curing cancer.
Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kelsey-piper-on-whether-ai-will-kill-us-all/id1756833505?i=1000758919309