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Matthew Yglesias Profile picture
Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
Slow Boring, cohosting https://t.co/wxUj3JFSFf, Bloomberg columnist
44 subscribers
Nov 21 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
One salient example of “identity politics” that hurt Democrats recently was the decision in 2020 to make Kamala Harris the VP nominee despite her poor electoral track record and unimpressive performance on the campaign trail because Biden “needed” to pick a black woman. But this also worked in the opposite direction, as when Democrats became so sure in 2024 that Harris’ vulnerabilities were identity-based rather than issue-based that they selected Dopey White Guy Tim Walz rather than someone more impressive or who could help her in key states.
Nov 19 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
A true fact is that I have some readers in the Biden White House and some good relationships there.

A non-true fact I have seen on social media is that the Biden administration "did everything Yglesias wanted."

A few examples: In March of 2021, I wrote that Biden's approach to the asylum issue was too lax and posing big political risks and he'd need to crack down. This happened, but it took *years* and I think was obviously politically costly.

slowboring.com/p/america-need…Image
Nov 19 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
No, what happened is that in countries with disparate economic policies — ranging from the robust welfare state of Germany to the highly regulated labor market of France to the United States and beyond — working class voters have swung against left stances on cultural issues. In the US context, if you roll the tape back to 2014 it was universally understood at the time that things like DAPA and the embrace of criminal justice reform were political risks. And despite those risks they nearly won in 2016. But it hasn’t worked out.
Nov 9 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The thing to consider is that people who pay the least attention to politics are likely to align with whichever coalition seems like it has the chiller, larger tent and makes the fewest demands of what it counts to be on the team. To be a resident in good standing of MAGA Island you need to basically say nice things about Trump — that’s a huge leap for many (he’s actually a scumbag!) but it’s pretty simple.

To be a Progressive In Good Standing is hard, long list of items to follow.
Nov 9 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
What’s tragicomic is the extent to which the very existence of The Groups is largely a silly misreading of like one Theda Skocpol essay.

The whole machinery could (and should) be turned off. Skocpol has a long line of scholarship about the role of social movements and mass membership organizations in American politics, and she’s critical of the replacement of that form of politics by a politics dominated by professionalized insider lobby shops.
Oct 28 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you deprive Social Security of revenue, the benefits get cut.

That’s the facts and the law.

If you don’t want to believe a Committed for a Responsible Federal Budget chart because you’re invested in simping for plutocrats who hate you, that’s your right as an American. Something I think you see every time I get into it with these people is that MAGA is sincerely terrified of discussing the concrete policy stakes — tax cuts for billionaires that explode the deficit, raise interest rates, and bankrupt social security.

It’s not fun for them.
Oct 15 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
A top think tank put out a report about how to build solar power faster, but all of their recommendations — tougher protection for forests & “arid landscapes,” more community benefits, project labor agreements — would make it harder and more expensive.

slowboring.com/p/tradeoffs-ar…Image It reads almost like an op to keep the electricity grid as dirty as possible, but the real truth is dumber — they’ve convinced themselves that if you layer on enough process you can do things without tradeoffs.

slowboring.com/p/tradeoffs-ar…Image
Oct 10 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
So I was doing a panel discussion with @DKThomp today about the idea of "abundance" and this bunch of jackasses funded by a Getty Oil heiress showed up to yell at me because I agree with VP Harris and Joe Biden that we shouldn't ban fracking. In addition to slandering hotel staffers by pretending he got pushed, this guy and others kept yelling "why do you support fracking!?!?"

I said they know I support fracking because I wrote an article about it — the reasons are in the article!

slowboring.com/p/harris-is-ri…
Sep 12 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
You are absolutely being lied to, by Elon Musk and Donald Trump who are peddling bullshit about crime statistics to try to frighten you into cutting taxes for Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Image This entire conspiracy theory is based on data reporting problems *from 2022*

Please look at a calendar and report back to me what year it is today. Image
Aug 17 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Trump says: "A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. That's the way it is. And a lot of people like to say, 'oh, it's a tax on us.' No, no, no, it's a tax on a foreign country."

Not true IMO. Tax incidence is complicated, but a good rule of thumb to any question of the form “who pays the tax?” is that it’s some of both.

Note that unless consumers pay much of the incidence of a tariff it can’t help domestic producers!

slowboring.com/p/the-surprisi…
Jul 29 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
"School choice" as a rhetorical construct is ambiguous between two kinds of ideas:

1) Students/parents can pick whatever school they want, but eligible schools need to admit all comers on an equal basis.

2) Subsidies for attending schools that select their students. Option (1) has a lot of advantages for poor kids even though unions don't like it, but is also disadvantageous to many affluent homeowners who have obtained a quasi-property right to the good "public" schools via the real estate market and exclusionary zoning.
Jul 24 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
The Tea Party was widely understood to be a call to remake the GOP along more libertarian lines.

At the time, Theda Skocpol & Vanessa Williamson said that was out of touch with grassroots activists who liked retirement programs and were strongly motivated by anti-immigration. Mitt Romney ran to the right on federal spending in 2012 but he *also* moved to the right on immigration — his platform was so far right that despite a broadly appealing personality and a bad economy, he lost to Barack Obama.

slowboring.com/p/the-mythical…
Jun 17 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
I wrote today against Trumpstalgia — the perverse impulse to give him undeserved credit for not wrecking a recovery he inherited while resolving him of all blame for a failed federal response to Covid and soaring crime.

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Image The key is to arbitrarily switch standards — you’re supposed to not worry that Trump’s stated economic ideas don’t make sense because the outcomes were fine, but not worry that the crime outcomes were terrible because he said police are good.

slowboring.com/p/trumps-presi…
Jun 6 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
This New Republic article suggests that people like me who are critical of the Sunrise Movement “don’t really get climate activism.”

Which is true, so yesterday I asked Sunrise for some help in understanding.

newrepublic.com/article/182295… I was told that this document contains the best available evidence for the causal efficacy of Sunrise’s voter mobilization efforts.

I think if you read it extremely generously you will see it contains no evidence at all.

sunrisemovement.org/report/general…



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Jun 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Instead of just whining that Democrats should be more aggressive about this stuff, I am going to do a thread where I highlight good behavior.

Be the change! They disagree about Israel, but AOC and Fetterman both support aggressive partisan politics. Image
Apr 23 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The stated position of SJP groups (see point 5) is that even if Biden successfully pressures Israel into a unilateral ceasefire, withdrawal from Gaza, resumption of humanitarian aid, etc. they would still maintain the campus occupations until the "right of return" is fulfilled. Why bring this up?

Well, I think Trump is really bad, and that abortion rights, tax policy, climate change, and the American public's health care are very important issues so I am annoyed that pro-Palestinian protestors are doing a lot to sandbag Biden's re-election.
Apr 22 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you ask a typical Israeli about a Palestinian state they'd say it's fine idea in theory, but in practice they're opposed to any meaningful concessions because Palestinians will never accept Israel and independent Palestine will be used as a platform for new attacks. If you think that's wrong, paranoid, or mistaken then you need an advocacy movement whose slogans and demands go out of their way to *avoid* re-litigating the questions of 1948 — exactly the opposite of radical chic posturing.

slowboring.com/p/radicalizati…
Mar 20 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
In case anyone is still covering the IVF question, today's new Republican Study Committee budget specifically endorses the idea that embryos have the full legal rights of persons under the 14th Amendment. Image They're not going to say "we support Rep Mooney's bill to ban IVF" but that's a ban on IVF as well as a national ban on all abortions at any week with no exceptions.
Feb 13 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Braindead rightists are enraged by my suggestion that people worried about the budget deficit should support the candidate who has proposals to reduce the budget deficit. To be clear, I’m not even asking anyone to vote for Joe Biden.

If your priority is corporate tax cuts and such then by all means vote for Trump!

But don’t run around pretending to be motivated by the national debt while you do that.
Feb 11 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
One notable thing about the 2024 primary is it’s easy to find polling evidence that Nikki Haley would be a stronger candidate than Trump, but GOP primary voters and most conservative influencers apparently don’t care. Conversely, in the 2020 primary there was a good deal of polling evidence that Joe Biden was a stronger nominee than Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and it seems like Dem elected officials — and ultimately voters — cared a lot about this.
Feb 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The context for something absurd like “Woke Kindergarten” is that 10-20 years ago there was a lot of interest in trying to advance equality by improving basic schooling which generated stakeholder demand for reasons why pushing schools for measurable results was actually racist.
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Image This is also related to the effort to get people to stop saying that diversity (or lack thereof) in the workplace is in part a downstream consequence of stuff that happens in school.

slowboring.com/p/why-progress…
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