Ezra Klein Profile picture
24 Feb, 15 tweets, 4 min read
I subscribe to — and enjoy! — @DavidAFrench's Dispatch newsletter. But I think he gets something consequential wrong in yesterday's edition, "Doubling down on the yeehaw."
The phrase refers to politicians distracting from governance failures by leaning into the culture war. The first example is the entire Republican leadership in Texas. It's a great example.
David's second example, though, is the San Francisco school renaming debacle, and it's built around my recent column on California. And here I think David errs. There's a huge difference between these examples.
The difference is this: In Texas, the state's political leaders — up to and including both the current and former governors — went full culture war rather than deal with their governance failures.
In SF, the city's political leaders have been fighting like hell to focus on governance and downplay things like school renaming. SF Mayor London Breed repeatedly criticized the school board, and the city literally sued to reopen the schools.
This is a common form of false equivalence I see: it's true that there's wacky and counterproductive stuff swirling through the base on the left and the right.

But on the right, the top politicians — including governors and presidents — buy into it, and even drive it.
There's much less true on the left (note I am not saying it is *never* true). Top Democratic politicians are very interested in governance, and often try to pull their own base back from the brink on grievance fights and conspiracies.
You've really seen the difference across the Texas mess. President Trump routinely withheld disaster aid and cooperation from blue states: huffpost.com/entry/trump-di…

Ted Cruz mocked California during our fires and blackouts.
What have top Democrats been doing during the Texas crisis? Biden declared a disaster. @AOC has raised millions of dollars for Texans. The leading Democrats have not used this as a moment to show they can help Texans, not prosecute a culture war against Texas.
This is a *big* difference between the coalitions. Top Democratic politicians and institutions have simply been more responsible and governance-oriented in recent years. Republican politicians have been much more culturally oriented.
You even see this in where the negative partisanship flows. Democrats obsess about Republican officeholders, and their perceived misdeed. Watch MSNBC and it's endless stuff about congressional Republicans,. Watch Fox News and it's college campuses and media organizations.
This is something Yuval Levin and I discuss in the podcast we did recently, but there's a huge difference in how responsible the institutions on the left and right have been, and how their politicians have acted in recent years. nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opi…
You can find weird stuff in both bases, but the key question is what those in power do.
The SF school board — opposed by the SF mayor! — and the *Governor of Texas* are not comparable examples. French's column is structured to suggest equivalence, but the interesting question is what accounts for difference.
I have structural theories for this in my book, related to differences in media ecosystems and electoral geography. But there's clearly more. Republican elites have so much less immune system against base nonsense than Democratic elites, and it's created a crisis for the system.

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More from @ezraklein

26 Feb
You all know how I feel about the filibuster, but the parliamentarian was right to rule that minimum wage changes don't fit budget reconciliation rules. That's not what budget reconciliation is for. The answer here is to end the filibuster, not abuse other rules.
Not to get all Coen Brothers on this, but the coin has no say here, and nor does the parliamentarian. This is all a distraction. Every Senate rule can be changed with 51 votes. The issue isn't what the parliamentarian wants to do, but what Manchin, Sinema, etc, want to do.
As I wrote here, this weird dance around the rules is just cowardice, and it comes with real costs. nytimes.com/2021/02/04/opi…
Read 9 tweets
24 Feb
If you haven't read @CitizenCohn's interview with president Obama on the lessons of Obamacare yet, you should. huffpost.com/entry/obama-in…
"If you ask me what has contributed to the cynicism ― of government, and to some degree what contributed to the cynicism around the health care initiative ― it’s the fact that a small minority of people can put a halt to everything," says Obama.
One important, but less sexy, theme in there is that the mixture of endless partisan opposition and paralyzed institutions make it really hard to do iterative legislating. But we need to do that! There's got to be a feedback loop between implementation and tweaking. Image
Read 4 tweets
22 Feb
I still kinda can’t believe Marvel actually made Wandavision and, even more so, that they pulled it off so well. What were those pitch meetings even like?
One thing Marvel does way better than the other nostalgic IP entertainment plays out there is treat the familiarity of their characters as capital they can spend down on more experimental and ambitious stories and aesthetics.
It’s hard to imagine you’d get Thor Ragnarok or Wandavision greenlit without familiar characters at the core. The scripts would just be too alienating and weird for studios to take the chance.
Read 5 tweets
19 Feb
"Imagine if somebody saw in all the wrong colors and all the shapes that he saw were incorrect. And all of his understandings were messed up. That person would be wise to be a little humble, because the data’s coming in, and he’s messing it up."
"And essentially, I think that’s what human beings are doing in our little, sweet, pathetic way."
"So then, if you are in that kind of flawed thinking machine, and you see another flawed thinking machine, it would seem almost crazy and irrational to start judging and fighting that person."

"You might more reasonably say, oh, wow, you too."
Read 4 tweets
18 Feb
This is a piece I've been thinking about for a long time. One of the most dominant policy ideas in Washington is that policy should, always and everywhere, move parents into paid labor. But what if that's wrong? nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opi…
My reporting here convinced me that there's no large effect in either direction on labor force participation from child allowances. Canada has a bigger one than either Romney or Biden are considering, and more labor force participation among women.

But what if that wasn't true?
Forcing parents into low-wage, often exploitative, jobs by threatening them and their children with poverty may be counted as a success by some policymakers, but it’s a sign of a society that doesn’t value the most essential forms of labor.
Read 11 tweets
11 Feb
So I'd recommend reading this thread from Dave, but I thought about some of these policies, and how they fit into the whole, a lot, and want to offer a different interpretation.
I think California is world leading on progressivism that doesn't ask anyone to give anything up, or accept any major change, right now.

That's what I mean by symbolically progressive, operationally conservative.
Take the 100% renewable energy standard. As @leahstokes has written, these policies often fail in practice. I note our leadership on renewable energy in the piece, but the kind of politics we see on housing and transportation are going foil that if they don't change.
Read 13 tweets

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