Democrats in the Headlights

And more from this week...

Good Saturday to you. We’re running a bit behind this week as American Compass gears up for Tuesday, when we’ll host our 5^th Anniversary Gala and release The New Conservatives: Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry. While I’d of course love for each of you to buy yourself a copy of the book, it occurs to me that you might feel like you already get the gist of what’s in it having loyally read two books worth of Understanding America articles over the past year. Fair enough.

So allow me to make a slightly different pitch: The New Conservatives is the definitive explanation of the New Right’s economic thinking and how that thinking is reshaping American politics. It is the book to press into the hands of that person in your life who doesn’t understand what’s going on but wants to. If you appreciate Understanding America and what we’re doing at American Compass, please order a copy of the book right now and then give it to someone—getting these ideas in front of more people is the only way we will make more progress, and everyone can help.

After you’ve done that, you can proceed to your one thing to read this week, from the New York Times, “Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward.” The article has been making the rounds for this brutal passage:

For now, Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.

The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

But I find most useful the opening anecdote, in which a voter likens the Democratic Party to “a deer in headlights… You stand there and you see the car coming, but you’re going to stand there and get hit with it anyway.” This echoes an observation I made last month, that progressives are “paralyzed” because they “committed themselves irrevocably to the principles of ‘Social Justice’ and ‘Defending Democracy,’ and now find themselves operating in a democracy that does not share their vision of social justice. Something has to give, but they can give on neither.”

As the Times story demonstrates, Democrats thus far are attempting to square this circle by defining their problem as one of messaging. This is a bad habit of the political class on all sides, and their consultants especially, for whom communication and wordsmithing are the primary tools of the trade and so the hammers to be swung at every nail in even a rotting platform. But while good messaging beats bad messaging, it rarely overcomes bad ideas. I suspect the next successful leader of the Democratic Party will be someone who, like Trump did on the Republican side, replaces the messaging hammer with a crowbar and rips the old platform and its assumptions apart.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

The Best Natalist Policy: Good Jobs | John DiIulio, UnHerd

DiIulio served as the first Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the of the George W. Bush administration and is an excellent example of someone bridging the gap from the older conservative establishment to the new one more focused on workers’ interests. “Well, we might start by recognizing that while politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from economics with respect to fertility rates,” he writes here. “Specifically, the quantity of high-quality blue-collar jobs for men matters greatly to marriage rates and birth rates: the better and more plentiful the jobs, the higher the rates of family formation and childbearing.”

The Weaknesses in the Trump Tariff Rulings | Jack Goldsmith, Executive Functions

Goldsmith is the leading conservative scholar and practitioner of interpreting executive power in the context of foreign affairs, so he is the first place I would look for thoughtful commentary on the recent trade court ruling against the Trump administration’s emergency tariffs. (And you should also listen to his terrific conversation about executive power generally on the American Compass podcast.)

Behind the Curtain: A White-Collar Bloodbath | Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, Axios

People with AI models to sell making outlandish claims about their own products should be the classic “dog bites man” story at this point, but the media keeps covering it with the breathless excitement of “talking dog takes man’s job.” Must get a lot of clicks. Heck, this time it even got an Obama tweet. So I guess I’ll just have to be the brave soul making the apparently important and contentious claim that we will not see the disappearance of half of all entry-level white collar jobs in one year.

Note also that when Axios attempts to substantiate the importance of this story with the observation that “you’re starting to see even big, profitable companies pull back,” they can’t come up with a single example of workers actually being replaced by AI, only companies pursuing layoffs for other reasons, as companies are wont to do from time to time. Even in trying to cite their own experience, they can offer only that “at Axios, we ask our managers to explain why AI won't be doing a specific job before green-lighting its approval,” without a single example of a job they have decided they no longer need or an assertion that they will reduce their own workforce.

Bonus link: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick, by Jonathan Malesic at the Hedgehog Review.

I Was Obama’s Budget Director. It’s Time to Worry About the National Debt. | Peter Orszag, New York Times

This is a nicely clear-eyed description of the dangerous U.S. fiscal position paired with an extraordinary unwillingness to talk seriously about the tradeoffs and sacrifices necessary to address it. Or, put another way, this is a great example of why we’re in the position we’re in. After making the compelling case that we need to reduce our budget deficit and increase national savings, and helpfully noting the connection to the trade deficit as well, Orszag’s answer to “what should we do?” is a set of non-sequiturs.

First, “embrace being the world’s reserve currency,” which is an interesting abstraction, but means nothing in terms of action policymakers might take. You mean, like, hug it?

Second, “we should eliminate the debt limit.” How would that “manage the risks associated with our fiscal situation and achieve the administration’s trade goals”? He doesn’t say.

Third, “when we had the chance to lock in low long-term rates, we should have extended the maturity of Treasury debt.” Faithful readers will recognize this as… Joey Advice! The thing we should do is… something we should have done and didn’t, you just wanted to say told-you-so.

Fourth, “higher growth would help.” I don’t even have to tell you how unhelpful this is, Orszag does so himself: “we don’t know much about how to meaningfully affect growth through policy changes, so put this in the hope rather than the strategy category.”

Fifth and finally, “there is plenty we could do — but probably won’t — to generate fiscal savings in our large entitlement programs and raise revenue.” Orszag doesn’t deign to offer proposals here, or concede that anyone might need to accept reduced services or increased taxes, beyond some handwaving about reforms that might hypothetically “lower cost growth in health care without harming health outcomes.”

Just unserious.

Trump Is Right: Those Student Loans Need to Be Repaid | Ramesh Ponnuru, Washington Post

The Biden administration’s decision that people just shouldn’t have to pay back student loans, because Covid or something, stands among the most socially corrosive of its lawless actions. And as Ponnuru notes, efforts to reform the failed system rather than merely pay for its continued failure are among the strongest elements of the “big, beautiful bill” making its way through Congress.

Bonus link: As we argue frequently at American Compass, reforming higher education and reducing its public funding is vitally important, but that should be paired with efforts to increase support for better non-college pathways. So it was encouraging to see, “Trump Threatens to Redistribute $3 Billion in Harvard Grants to Trade Schools,” from Jack Gillum in the Wall Street Journal.

AND AT COMMONPLACE

The Media's Original Sin by Drew Holden. The new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson reveals the press’s role covering up Biden’s decline.

The Dangers and Possibilities of AI in Schools by Brad Littlejohn and Jared Hayden. Before we embed AI into our education system, some questions need to be answered.

The Data Center Dilemma by Aaron Renn. Communities are right to be skeptical of ‘investments’ that drain resources and provide little.

Assembly Required by Jim Peyser. The future of American innovation depends on a skilled workforce, and its alignment with the needs of employers.

And on the American Compass Podcast, Matthew Continetti, director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, joined me to talk about The New Conservatives, how the ongoing construction of a conservative coalition differs from Reagan’s, and where elements of the Old Right will eventually end up in our new political environment.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!