In a post that amounts to a mini-memoir, the popular blogger Matt Yglesias recounts how his political views have moved from his youthful leftism to a middle-aged (he’s 43) sort of center-leftism. What’s happened, basically, is that he has encountered too many instances in which he thinks policy prescriptions dear to the left fail to jive with practical and political realities. Leftists, he thinks, have what he calls an epistemological problem. Though he doesn’t clearly define it, it seems that he feels leftists are apt to apply ideological tests to issues when what is needed are practical, problem-solving approaches. He cites, in particular, climate change. He thinks it’s wrong-headed to try to ban US exports of natural gas, or to try to discourage developing countries from investing in fossil fuel projects.
Yglesias is what is called a policy wonk. He loves to get into the nuts and bolts of policy issues—whether it’s climate change, macroeconomic management, housing, etc.—and come up with specific practical solutions, i.e., to figure out how to put the nuts and bolts together to make something work. And, Yglesias seems to be saying, too often the nuts and bolts work—the requisite careful, detailed policy analysis—is neglected by the left. He may well be right in a lot of his specific complaints. But in politics, it’s more important to be able to paint a big picture—to tell a story—than to have an inventory of specific, smart policy proposals. Somebody on the Internet—I forget who—recently said that you don’t convince people by explaining things to them; you convince them by telling a story.
The left, I think, has a story to tell. It starts with the observation that economic inequality in the United States (and in other industrialized countries) has reached levels not seen for a century. It moves on to the proposition that economic inequality sustains political inequality. Rich people, whether acting individually or collectively, are more politically powerful than the rest of us. They use that power to secure their wealth and privilege. So, economic inequality begets political inequality which reinforces economic inequality. There is no way to combat this spiral of economic and political inequality except through government action on behalf of the non-rich. I think this is an accurate and compelling story, but a lot of Democrats—people who would identify, like Yglesias, with the center-left—are reluctant to tell it. They will say that it smacks too much of old-fashioned class warfare. It’s outdated. It’s not cool. That diffidence, no doubt, also reflects consideration for the sensitivities of the donor class. A lot of rich people give a lot of money to Democrats. They’re relatively enlightened rich people, of course, but often not so enlightened as to embrace rhetoric that challenges the legitimacy of their privilege.
I think the center left has suffered for its lack of a story to tell. Democrats may have a lot of good proposals, but they don’t fit into a broader narrative of what it’s all about. The right has a narrative: it’s all about smug, self-serving elites who are foisting wokeness and unwanted foreigners on average, real Americans. It’s mostly garbage but it wins votes and generates passion. Barak Obama generated passion for a while, but he never laid out a broad narrative of what it’s all about, and the passion gradually dissipated.
To be clear: there is no incompatibility between wonkishness and left politics. Wonkish leftism abounds, for example, in the pages of The American Prospect (a journal where Yglesias used to work). It is a hallmark of one of my favorite politicians, Elizabeth Warren. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor, is another nuts and bolts guy who tells a good story from the left. So, yes, the nuts and bolts need to be dealt with, but they can best be made to work politically when they fit into a larger story.
I was more sympathetic to the Yglesias piece, and I want to try to say a bit about why.
There's an idea in political philosophy called "leveling down". Leveling down is achieving equality just by worsening the position of the better off, without improving the position of the worse off. It's generally taken for granted that an attractive version of egalitarianism won't endorse leveling down.
Part of what makes me uneasy about the kind of story you tell is my sense that the contemporary progressive left in the US (unlike the Yglesias center left) isn't particularly sensitive to the badness of leveling down, or the possibility that their preferred policies might amount to it.
Education is a salient example for me. When districts like San Francisco get rid of middle school algebra on egalitarian grounds (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/nyregion/middle-school-math-algebra.html), or when my own public school district got rid of tracking in elementary school, it's hard for me to see that as anything but leveling down. It makes the high achieving kids worse off, but realistically, it doesn't make the lower achieving kids better off. Moreover, thinking in terms of inequality--e.g., noting that the class/racial makeup of middle school algebra classes tends to differ substantially from the class/racial makeup of the school districts in which they occur--rather than thinking in terms of whether some policy would actually help the worse off, makes it easier to miss when policies only reduce inequality by leveling down.
While it's a harder case, I think the popularity of wealth taxes--most extremely, the proposal to ban billionaires (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/abolish-billionaires-tax.html) -- around the 2020 primary was broadly similar. Wonkish Yglesias types told us that lots of countries in Europe tried wealth taxes and largely got rid of them for boring technoratic reasons; compared to other forms of taxation, they're a lot less efficient (ie, they raise less revenue) and more distortionary (ie, they cause people to do wasteful stuff to avoid them). But if you've already bought into an eat-the-rich story, those considerations just sound like excuses to avoid fighting the good fight.
Basically, in both cases, my sense is that the form of egalitarianism popular on the contemporary progressive left involves identifiyng inequalities and adopting policies that are intended to reduce them, without thinking too hard about whether the reduction will come in the form of leveling down. And since it's often easier to level down than to raise up, I think this is a recipe for making the country as a whole poorer without improving the lot of the poor.
I completely agree with you that the Yglesias style center left wing of the coalition lacks a good story, and that the progressive left story makes for better politics. But I worry that without a lot of restraint from the Yglesias wing, it often makes for bad policy.
I am not familiar with Yglesias' thought, but I do know my own. As I have gotten older, I have become less committed to ideologies and more of a pragmatist. I want to know how specific policies and programs will actually make the lives of people better, noting that progressive pragmatism is not a contradiction in terms. Yes, to convince people politics need to be converted to stories. We are mythopoeic creatures who live and interpret the world through narratives. However, ideologies are not equatable to stories. Ideologies are baseline positions; stories are means of communication. While the threat from the right is currently overwhelming, I have grown weary of ideologies espoused by sectors of the left, which tragically promote conservative positions, especially those that emerge from transmogrified identity politics.