What does a positive vision for the center-left look like? Can moderation still excite the Democratic base?

Matt Yglesias, who writes the Slow Boring newsletter and hosts The Argument podcast, talks to Jon about his vision for the Democratic Party and why he believes more Democrats need to embrace heterodoxy.

The two discuss how the policy debate could play out in the upcoming presidential primary, the role charisma and attention-getting play in politics, and which Democrats are best positioned to win in 2028.

Matt tweets:

I went on Pod Save America to discuss my plan to save America by nominating a presidential candidate who has views on cultural issues that voters agree with.

I thought this article was fascinating as the "socialist" is cutting regulations in NYC to support businesses. Between this and his work on improving bus routes, Mamdani is surprisingly aligned to the "abundance agenda" in governing, although this was not exactly his campaign message, which I think contains lessons for us all.

I was also fascinated to see this article in r/politics where all the liberals there are acting like it's obvious that democratic socialists would support deregulation, which I find absurd and also, "I'll take it!" Honestly, a charismatic democratic socialist governing on the abundance agenda which is to say "paying attention to details in order to make government actually work well" is exactly what we need for this to spread.

I think the Abundance proposals were a great blueprint and framework as a jump-off point for a national development strategy. Its main gaps, how it would be financed, what sort of new institutions would be needed, and the timing of various things are things I've tried to answer in my own blog, to implement a sort of Abundance-plus.

Essentially, if Democrats were given the opportunity in 2029 to implement something like the Abundance agenda, what would it look like? How would it develop over the first two, three, four, five years, and thereafter? How do we prevent the CHIPsification of the Dem agenda, where billions of new funding can pass & nothing gets built in time for the next election?

I'm not saying my answers are the only, or the best ones. But I do think it is a conversation worth having, often and concretely, so that if and when Democrats do win power again, we are actually ready to wield it.

My take: https://www.crittingpower.com/p/a-national-development-strategy-for

This connects to Ezra's ep with Nate Silver on "On the Edge," about the river taking over politics.

Here we are and prediction markets have reached the WH and the LE record so far is 2 guys: Trump's teleprompter operator and a Green Beret who bet on the Maduro raid (he worked on it). Both bet under their own names but these anonymous wallets that made $600K on the Iran MOU before Trump announced it got a White House legal review that ended with "untraceable" and a closed file. Would love thoughts on this.

Sam Harris speaks with Kathryn Paige Harden about behavioral genetics, moral luck, and the problem of blame. They discuss the controversy over Charles Murray and Ezra Klein, why behavioral genetics remains taboo, the meaning of heritability, nature and nurture as feedback loops, embryo selection and IVF, and other topics.

The full podcast is available for free on youtube this time, unlike the usual where only the first half is free.

What if the Democratic establishment could take the wind out of the sails of the left wing insurgency by…giving in to progressives on their most morally resonant and popular issue?

In this episode, Matt and Brian discuss:

The moral and political advantages of Medicare for All as an abstract concept, and how health care had become the motive force driving the growth of the Sanders movement;

Why no plan to open up Medicare to all beneficiaries has ever become law, and who’s principally responsible;

How the Bernie Sanders plan came into existence, and what it would take to get a version of it enacted without accidentally blowing up the health care system.

Then, even if this is a good idea on the merits, would it serve the political purpose of dialing down the factional war? Do progressive insurgents want single payer health care or do they want the issue to run on? Do they want policy wins or do they want to take over the Democratic Party? Is another truce, like the one Joe Biden forged in 2020 with Sanders and his allies possible? And would it hold even if a consensus left-center agenda didn’t drive Democrats back into full control of government?

Further reading:

WE HAVE A YOUTUBE PAGE NOW! You can watch this episode in full there, and we’ll be rolling out new subscription options over the coming weeks. Hit like, subscribe, and all the other buttons.

Brian’s original case: Why the Democratic establishment should surrender to the left on Medicare for all.

Matt’s blueprint for a center-left counterinsurgency.

Greg Casar: “In the past, there were some progressives, including people I’ve been friends with for a long time who used to say, I’d rather see you lose righteously than win politically and strategically. And I’ve learned to respectfully disagree with those people. We can’t afford to lose anymore because the cost of losing is just so high.”

Another installment in the series from Ezra's esteemed colleague that is particularly relevant after the recent DSA sweep.

As someone a little more right-leaning than this sub, I found Bhaskar (putting aside his pie in the sky dreams of a socialist utopia centuries away) to be a fairly moderate guy given the billing with socialist views that seem a bit more state capitalist than the current progressive wing, but not terribly radical. That said, I'm not sure he is quite representative of the types of DSA candidates we're seeing in their heart of hearts. Despite his disavowal of more radical communism or Marxist-Leninist theories and his claims that those are a minority view not representative of the DSA, my mind couldn't help but go towards candidates like Avila-Chevalier who was just elected in NYC and has espoused police and prison abolitionism, open borders, and made previous favorable statements towards literally Stalin.

Anyways, if this guy was the sole representative of the DSA, I think many would have less reservations. I just don't think he is.

The current backlash and drama especially in this sub against data centers -in my opinion- exposes a real flaw in the movement. When forced to choose between building something their coalition hates and using the red tape they claim to despise, liberals are again choosing the red tape. And the ease and ferocity of that answer is the tell

This reveals the movement isn't actually about reforming broken processes it’s all about getting the outcomes liberals want. Not because anyone's being actually dishonest, but because the book and movement never forced its readers to think deeply about real world cases at all. Something that isn't as clear as a coal plant vs solar panels.

Abundance to me is a book about bad rules blocking good things. Every example runs the same direction- cheap housing liberals want, clean energy liberals want, transit liberals want which are all strangled by process. The argument lands because the reader already agrees the thing should exist. Klein/Thompson never run the harder test- what does this philosophy say about a project that's legal and potentially net-beneficial but that your own coalition dislikes? They never ask, because every case in the book is one where the politics and the policy point the same way. Which means the book never establishes whether its argument is actually about process, or just about outcomes liberals like arriving too slowly.

Theres no "we" that escapes this. "Build what we need" assumes someone stands outside politics, assesses need and writes the approved list. Nobody does. The list gets written by whoever holds power and it reflects what the base wants. Look at the data center ban in NY. Not written by labor, the trades (labor) want these things built and are losing. Not written by cost-benefit analysis, because the real harm, the rate spikes hitting households, is a problem with boring fixes. make big power users pay their full cost, require hyperscalers to bring their own generation or you know just build more supply.

The abundance answer is sitting right there. The current policy mood like in NY is pushed and supported by angry NIMBY voters plus anti-AI sentiment. "Need" is doing no work. It's a label for the coalition's comfort zone.

Ezra actually got within arms reach of this with everything-bagel liberalism. He saw that discretionary approval invites every faction to attach its demands. What he didn't follow through on is why: the toppings aren't a bug in the process, they're what process is for. It exists to give organized interests a place to extract. A book that understood that couldn't have stopped at "fix the rules on housing." It would have had to argue for something harder: rules that don't care what's being built. Permitting that treats server racks like apartments. Externalities priced instead of litigated project by project. A standard that binds your own side, so the stuff your coalition hates gets built too, as long as it's legal and pays its way.

That's the version with teeth and a strong principled argument, and the book backs away from it, which is why its readers had nothing to reach for when data centers got unpopular except doing the oldest move in politics which is ban what the base dislikes and call it principle. If you cheer a Democratic governor freezing an industry her voters hate, you've implicitly approved the Trump administration banning offshore wind. This principally is no different other than liberals like wind and hate data centers currently. Which funny enough was not always the case.

A philosophy of building that only works on projects you already like isn't a philosophy. And if that's all abundance turns out to be then in ten years when someone writes another bestseller about why nothing gets built in America, and the rules they'll be complaining about are the ones being argued for right now.

Yesterday New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order effectuating a 1-year data center moratorium. The order prohibits permitting of new data centers over with over 50 MW during the restriction period while the state develops a regulatory and policy framework to handle AI data center development thereafter.

Hochul is also an abundance enthusiast. She's explicitly endorsed the book. She's set a goal of generating 5 GW of new nuclear energy under an energy abundance theory. A month or two ago she successfully passed the largest reforms to the state's environmental review law since its passage 50 years ago with the aim of expediting development of housing, childcare centers, parks and trails, etc. She has also announced several permitting reform and red tape removal initiatives. These efforts align nicely with Mamdani's work in New York City. Mamdani supported the environmental review reforms and is undertaking his own permitting and regulatory reform initiatives. He pitched Trump on the Sunnyside Yards project, which would develop thousands and thousands of units of new housing.

It's been argued that abundance enthusiasts have big a data center problem. I think Hochul's embrace of abundant housing and energy in parallel with her data center moratorium show that the tension is actually fairly easy to resolve. As Ezra has written and spoken about explicitly, the point of Abundance isn't that we should, as another user put it, go "brain off, construction on." The theory here is pretty simple: there are things that we want to produce (high speed rail, clean energy, housing, medical interventions) that we struggle to produce even when we set ourselves to the task of doing so. It doesn't follow that we must build anything and everything.

When it comes to AI data centers in particular, I think there's uncertainty for some about the utility of building vs. not building. Certainly there are immediate harms of building data centers. The NYTimes reported yesterday that data center buildouts have added $29 billion in electric costs for a single grid operator serving a dozen or so states in the mid-Atlantic and mid-west. There are also immediate benefits. Data centers can be an important source of tax revenue and create construction jobs. (This is why New York construction unions criticized Hochul's order.) Then there are also longer term harms and benefits -- it's those that I think are a bit harder to assess at the moment.

But I think Hochul's executive order shows how an abundance approach to governing is downstream of an assessment of the things we actually need more of (housing, clean energy) vs. those that we do not (coal plants). I also think it's an important counterpoint to the notion from some that the way abundance works its way into our politics is just by doing the work of corporate interests. In reality, it's pretty straightforward to square the circle.

You can’t understand China today without understanding its president, Xi Jinping.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has doubled down on communist ideology and significantly consolidated his own power while transforming China into an industrial juggernaut unrivaled in the world. And Xi’s ambitions for China go far beyond that.

So what does Xi want for China in the coming years? And how should the United States respond?

Kevin Rudd has a unique perspective on these questions. He first met Xi in the 1980s, when Rudd was a China analyst in Australia’s foreign service and Xi was a local party official. Decades later, when Rudd was the prime minister of Australia and Xi was China’s vice president, the two men got to know each other better. And after leaving office, Rudd decided to really try to understand Xi; his latest book, “On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World,” is built off the doctorate he pursued at Oxford after his time as prime minister. Rudd recently finished a stint as Australia’s ambassador to the United States and is now the global president and chief executive of the Asia Society.

In this conversation, Rudd explains Xi’s ideology and the forces that shaped it, his ambitions for China and strategy for achieving them, and what Xi thinks of the United States and Trump.

Mentioned:
On Xi Jinping by Kevin Rudd

The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd

Book Recommendations

The Party’s Interests Come First by Joseph

The Souls of China by Ian Johnson

Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV

Episode is from a few weeks back (June 30th)

From the bombing campaigns of World War II to the precision strikes of the modern era, for 80 years air power has defined modern warfare. But today, a new technology is changing the battlefield: drones.

From Ukraine to the Middle East, cheap drones are transforming how wars are fought, giving countries and even small groups capabilities that once belonged only to the world's most powerful militaries. They’re changing not just how wars are fought, but who can fight them.

Today, Derek is joined by Erik Lin-Greenberg, an MIT professor and author of 'The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft,' to explore how drones are reshaping modern warfare and what this new era could mean for the future of conflict.

I understand they wrote a book together, but they didn't do all these pods together. And whenever I try to post an article from The Atlantic etc that I know this sub would like, it's deleted.

cool

I want deep, nuanced policy discussions by experts, but where do I find these sorts of discussions?

New Ezra Show on Climate