Should Democrats Be a Little More Like Elon?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity

I saw this so now you have to too. Photo via Flickr.

As soon as he took over as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order that changed the name of an obscure government organ called the United States Digital Service to the Department of Governmental Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk. Republicans always try to cut the size and scope of government whenever they take power, but DOGE has been remarkable for its speed and volatility.

Its new employees — many of whom had worked previously for Musk’s companies — quickly embedded themselves into other parts of the executive branch. They got access to the system that controls government payments then at least attempted to use that access to halt the flow of money to USAID, the agency that handles foreign aid. The Office of Personal Management (another largely unknown corner of government taken over by Muskites) sent out a mass email informing all federal employees that if they resigned now they would get paid until September. DOGE is now live-xeeting a list of contracts it is cancelling, the leases it is selling off, and the government websites it is taking down. Musk, the richest person in human history and now apparently one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government, has bragged to friends that he’s sleeping at the DOGE office. Some of his workers are apparently doing the same, even bringing “sleep pods” into the buildings where they work.

The DOGE-ification of the federal government is questionably legal, possibly fascistic, and above all an expression of the hubristic Silicon Valley slogan “you can just do things.” It has provoked, naturally, protests and lawsuits from Democrats, along with a lot of posts on Bluesky. But I wonder if it should also provoke a twinge of jealousy for everyone on the left: They can do things, why can’t we?

The book is still being written on the Biden administration, but I imagine that as time goes on the adjective that will be used most will be indecisive. According to one New York Times article from early in Joe Biden’s presidency, he “takes days or weeks to make up his mind as he examines and second-guesses himself and others.” On the domestic policy front, this quality manifested as “a refusal to prioritize, a paralyzing fear of pissing off any Democratic faction that too often wound up winning nothing for any of them,” as Vox’s Dylan Matthews recently wrote. Instead of picking a particular issue to focus on, the major legislation Democrats passed during this era was a smorgasbord of piecemeal policy wins for different constituencies.

Under Biden, the Democrats established the Child Tax Credit, a major progressive policy goal that provided money to parents and other caregivers — but only for a year before it expired. Biden’s 2021 Covid relief bill allocated $42 billion to provide broadband internet access to rural communities — but attached such onerous requirements to the funding that Biden left office before anyone got broadband. That same bill provided $7.5 billion to build chargers for electric cars — but only 214 had been built three years later.

Biden moved slowly to deal with crises at the southern U.S. border and in Gaza, but maybe the most damning case of his lethargy is his treatment of “the former guy.” After Trump whipped up hundreds of his most deluded fans into storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it took the Biden administration nearly two years to appoint a special prosecutor to look into it. And remember, Biden’s whole stated reason for running for president was that Trump’s refusal to denounce white supremacists supposedly convinced Biden that “the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.” I guess the threat wasn’t that serious? Or maybe Biden thought he’d licked the threat after winning in 2020? Either way, whoops.

But the problem isn’t limited to just Biden. Many parts of the Democratic coalition seem unable or unwilling to focus on their self-proclaimed policy goals. The Sunrise Movement is so concerned about the climate crisis that it interrupts Democratic National Committee meetings — but not concerned enough to back reforms that would make it easier to build clean energy infrastructure, and not so concerned that it won’t occasionally oppose solar panel construction. The Democrats who run West Coast cities (all facing varying levels of housing affordability and homelessness crises) will occasionally admit they need to build more housing — but not until they have several years of meetings, then more meetings. Then there’s the rallying cry of California Democrats:

What do we want?
High speed rail connecting LA and San Francisco!

When do we want it?
Never!

When it comes to building housing and other infrastructure, Democrats are sometimes hamstrung by self-imposed rules aimed at supporting small businesses and unions or advancing racial equity. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dubbed this “everything bagel liberalism”— the idea that every piece of progressive policy must support a thousand different priorities at once¹. In other cases, Democrats may appear indecisive because they’re confronting hard problems, like tens of thousands of migrants showing up at the border. Sometimes, Democrats don’t move aggressively on an issue because the obvious solution is some combination of illegal, logistically impossible, or wildly unpopular — there’s a reason that even gun control advocates don’t talk about the mass seizure of guns, even though that would really reduce gun violence.

But strategic caution, consensus-building, and a fetish for following proper procedure provide Democrats with a million excuses not to get anything done, or at the very least to slow themselves down. That’s how you spend money building rural broadband while also not building rural broadband.

Moving quickly carries political risk, of course. It invites backlash² and court challenges; it will invariably make people upset and create news coverage around the thing you are trying to do, not all of it positive. This is one of the cornerstones of Trumpism: Trump does something rash or illegal and it generates drama, with heroes and villains and stakes. A policy battle, in the Trump era, is an entertainment product. Trump is always fighting, and if you support him you assume he’s fighting for you.

Who was Biden fighting? To what end? What was the story of the Biden presidency? In the 2020 campaign, Biden could at least say he was fighting to restore a sense of normalcy to a country badly fractured by a pandemic and Trump’s first chaotic presidency. But then he won, and the “normalcy” he restored was an uninspiring, sluggish morass. He failed to keep people engaged, and they stopped caring about what he was doing. No wonder voters didn’t give him any credit.

No one knows which Democrats will emerge as leaders and presidential contenders in the post-Trump era. My hunch, though, is that they will all be better storytellers than Biden (or Harris) was. One easy way to tell a story is to start with a problem, cast yourself as the hero who can fix it, and then try to solve it, loudly and vigorously.

This doesn’t have anything to do with national politics, but Keith Wilson, the new mayor of Portland, Oregon, fits this bill. He’s a political outsider who won a decisive victory by centering his campaign around a single promise: He wants to end unsheltered homelessness in the city by the end of the year. Is that realistic? I have no idea. But I’ll be rooting for him. It’s refreshing to find a politician who is willing to treat a crisis like a crisis.

1. One hilarious example of this was the extraordinarily narrow student loan forgiveness plan cooked up by Kamala Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign: It would give $20,000 in forgiveness only to Pell Grant recipients who founded small businesses in “disadvantaged communities” and kept them running for three years.

2. DOGE will certainly generate a lot of backlash if it succeeds in cutting government so drastically that services suffer.

Who Said You Couldn't Say That?

Thoughts on the anti-woke ascendency

Remember these? Photo via Flickr user Mustafa and Aziza

A few weeks ago, the Financial Times ran a story about how, after a period of at least paying lip service to diversity and social justice, major companies are ditching DEI initiatives and anything that could be perceived as “woke.” Conservatism, and sucking up to Donald Trump, is now in style. You may have seen it, or you may have seen a screenshot of the line that made it viral (italics mine):

Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

I was thinking about that quote when I read the recent cover story from New York Magazine¹ by Brock Colyar about a crew of callous young people who were in D.C. to celebrate Trump’s inauguration. These are podcasters and influencers and publicists and crypto advocates, on the margins of fame and at the tip of the spear of the conservative movement. To give you an idea of the crowd, one young woman calls Matt Gaetz “truly one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” which is something only someone who lives in Florida could say.

“This set’s most visible political stance is a reaction to what it sees as the left’s puritanical obsessions with policing language and talking about identity,” Colyar writes. One young Democrat-turned-Trumpite tells them, “I hate watching the things I say.” A former Bernie Sanders supporter “wanted the freedom to say ‘faggot’ and ‘retarded.’” It seems that what Barack Obama’s election was for Black people, Trump’s 2024 win is for Americans who want to sing along to the original lyrics of “Let's Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas.

What’s interesting here is the all the talk about how these people aren’t “allowed” to say certain things. Who was stopping them? After all, the Joe Biden administration wouldn’t arrest you if you walked down the street saying “retarded faggot” over and over again. If these folx feel a sense of liberation, it isn’t because the country’s legal and political machinery is now on their side. It’s more that Trump’s victory, for them, is proof of the much-discussed “vibe shift,” a rightwing societal swing that follows the last decade of progressive cultural dominance.

On a certain level, I understand where Colyar’s subjects are coming from. I got into the media industry at the hinge point of the last vibe shift, in the early 2010s. Social media was a new thing, and we were all learning in real time what “going viral” meant. All of a sudden, a paragraph or an image could be lifted out of its original context and spread around the world, in the process pissing thousands of people off, which of course would just cause it to spread faster and further. Before “getting cancelled” became a term, I saw firsthand how online controversies could blindside writers, editors, brand managers, and public figures. It’s no wonder that gradually, we all became a little bit more cautious about what we put on the web. It's disorienting to have a hundred strangers become angry at you, and in that new era of Facebook and Twitter, a hundred strangers now got mad at dozens of things every day.

Larger publications and institutions, surveying this new landscape where every move could set off a tripwire of outrage, adapted by trying to find safe ways to post. When I started at Vice in 2010, my first job as an intern was to phone up convents all over New York City in an attempt to find nuns who would let Terry Richardson, the king of the hipster scumbags, photograph them in their habits. By 2016, when Vice’s Instagram account put up a “Fuck Trump” post, it was self-censoring the word “fuck.”

At the same time, corporations began catering to the progressive sensibilities of their millennial customers and workers through diversity and sustainability efforts. In many cases, these were just meaningless gestures and often disconnected from any sort of left-wing politics; even Raytheon now celebrates Pride. As an employee, if you disagreed with this stuff or even just found it pointless and cringe, you probably didn’t want to kick up a fuss and potentially end up in some kind of weird HR situation. Workplaces and online spaces both shifted — however superficially — to the left.

This era had its positives. A lot of artists and writers of color earned justified recognition that might previously have been denied them; the culture as a whole began to take rape accusations more seriously². But there were undeniable downsides to this new vibe as well. A lot of people were shrugging through a lot of DEI trainings they privately thought were silly, a lot of institutions were posting transparently phony affirmations of progressivism. Free speech, as a concept, began to be regarded with skepticism by many on the left. In some quarters, there was an inordinate focus on what words we should use, and what should be considered offensive. If you wrote or made art, you likely noticed that the bounds of what counted as “uncontroversial” kept shrinking, and fewer institutions had any appetite for controversy. Maybe you censored yourself a bit in order to fit in with the new climate. Maybe when you did this, it felt like someone else — the libs? The PMC? The NPCs? The DNC? — was censoring you.

Those little Trumplets from the New York story did figure out something: A lot of those supposed restrictions on speech don’t have any real power. Political correctness is not a wall, but a door you can choose to walk through, provided you’re willing to make some people mad. And sometimes, making a few enemies can lead to finding a larger audience — plenty of figures who walked away from progressive media are much more successful now that they’re free to be “heterodox.”³ A similar dynamic may be playing out in corporate America, per that Financial Times article, as C-suites realize that fewer people really wanted that DEI stuff than was previously thought.

Importantly, these right-wing influencers celebrating the inauguration seem mostly to be self-employed, and therefore don’t have the public relations or advertising concerns that lead media companies to be cautious. This independence confers the ability to be more provocative, or outright offensive, than someone who has to answer to an editor, and whose editor has to answer to a manager, and so on up the chain.

But even these free speech warriors can’t always say what they really think, because some of them are Nazis. Bryce Hall, an MMA fighter Colyar describes as “downing shot after shot of tequila” at an inauguration party, said this week that Adolf Hitler was a “good guy” and subsequently lost at least one sponsor. The language police, it seems, are still on the case.

Maybe many people regard DEI initiatives and trainings with indifference bordering on annoyance. Are they going to be on board with the right’s attempts to blame everything on DEI? On the Trump White House’s rambling claims that the recent midair collision above D.C. is connected to DEI programs? (Some of which, incidentally, started during the first Trump administration.)

Progressives have discovered that you can’t wrench the country’s politics to the left by trying to police the discourse. Conservatives may find, similarly, that winning an election does not transform American culture into an anything-goes right-wing playground. Or more simply: If you’re an asshole you’re an asshole, no matter who the president is.

1. Disclosure: I work for Vox Media, which owns New York.

2. Not entirely seriously, since the country did elect an accused rapist as president, twice.

3. Matt Yglesias, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan — you can probably think of some more names yourself, they’re all over Substack.

The Bernie Sanders Movement Is Finally Dead

When will the left admit it?

Bernie Sanders in 2016. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

In 2017, when I was the politics editor at Vice, I commissioned a profile of Paula Jean Swearengin, an environmental activist running a longshot campaign in West Virginia to unseat Senator Joe Manchin, one of the most conservative elected Democrats in the country. It was a story about the tangled politics of a state where the coal industry had boosted the economy and poisoned the water, and about the loneliness of being a progressive in a part of the country that had essentially rejected the Democratic Party. But it was also a story wrapped around a broader idea.

“Swearengin and her supporters hope that by running on a left-wing populist platform that stresses economic and environmental justice, they can turn back the tide of red that’s swept over the state,” wrote the story’s author, Paul Blest. “It gets at the heart of a larger question that liberals all over the country are trying to find an answer to: Can progressives save the Democratic Party in red states?”

Wouldn’t it have been nice if the answer to that question had been yes?

For decades — my entire life, essentially — Democrats have been committed to a squishy, defensive sort of centrism. Even Barack Obama, for all his aspirational rhetoric, didn’t break this mold. But the 2016 election seemed to scramble politics. Hillary Clinton, the personification of the Democratic Party establishment, endured a surprisingly strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, then lost in the general to Donald Trump. Maybe voters, especially working-class voters, were signaling that they loathed the status quo; maybe Democrats should therefore embrace their own form of populism to counter Trump’s. Maybe Sanders was a herald of our future, where Democrats embrace a European-style welfare state that provides citizens with healthcare, tuition-free attendance at public universities, and strong wages.

In the wake of Kamala Harris’s defeat to Trump, we’re re-running those circa 2017 arguments now, with the same rhetoric and even the same cast of characters. Sanders recently said the Democrats have “abandoned working class people”; Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has been running around talking about the “the wreckage of 50 years of neoliberalism.”

“The only move for the Democratic Party,” the labor journalist Hamilton Nolan recently wrote, “is to get more radical.”

I would love it if Americans embraced politics like Nolan’s. Imagine if they demanded that the rich pay their fair share and that private health insurance be abolished and that our many, many corrupt institutions either be fundamentally reformed or burned to the ground. I would love it if America was a different country, if the world were a different way. Unfortunately, I lived through the last several years of political history, and unlike the leftists currently advocating “Bernie Sanders, now more than ever,” I remember how badly these people lost.

The great leftward lurch

Immediately after the 2016 election, a standard narrative about Democrats’ Obama-era failings crystallized on the left. The pollster and political consultant Stanley Greenberg did a fair job of summarizing it in a 2017 American Prospect column:

Working-class Americans pulled back from Democrats in this last period of Democratic governance because of President Obama's insistence on heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites [after the 2008 economic crisis], while ordinary people's incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially. They also pulled back because of the Democrats' seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs. The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation's growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over American citizens'. Instinctively and not surprisingly, the Democrats embraced the liberal values of America's dynamic and best-educated metropolitan areas, seeming not to respect the values or economic stress of older voters in small-town and rural America. Finally, the Democrats also missed the economic stress and social problems in the cities themselves and in working-class suburbs.

The solution, lefty Democrats determined, was to return to the roots of the party and embrace the working class in both policy and aesthetics. This shift was almost excessively documented by journalists looking for a new trend to jump aboard. An enormous amount of media oxygen (and donor money) was sucked up by Randy Bryce, a Wisconsin union iron worker running a quixotic campaign for the seat formerly occupied by House Speaker Paul Ryan¹. Richard Ojeda, a former paratrooper and Trump voter turned Democratic populist out of West Virginia, was feted by the left and profiled by Politico. (I was far from the only editor dispatching reporters to West Virginia.) Across the country, politicians inspired by Sanders ran on progressive messages that ordinarily would have terrified Democrats. A few even won elections in 2018, most notably a handful freshly minted left-wing members of Congress who got dubbed the “Squad” (Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.)

Pundits began to muse that radical ideas could inspire voters, not turn them off. “Ahead of an election where enthusiasm may make the crucial difference, Democrats should see this rhetoric — this energy — as a critical asset,” future New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote of “abolish ICE.” Leftists insisted that Medicare for All was popular. Climate advocates said that there was an untapped population of young voters passionate about fighting climate change who needed to be pushed to vote but could win elections for Democrats.

Graffiti in 2020. Photo by the Turducken via Flickr.

There was a kind of intellectual drift during this time, too. The original notion that Democrats should woo the working classes with economic populism got replaced with the theory that left-wing ideas of all sorts were surefire winners. Or maybe what happened was that left-wing populists were, in practice, just across-the-board leftists. Squad leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t just a champion of Medicare for All, she made videos explaining the virtues of the term “Latinx.” Bernie Sanders in 2016 was somewhat pro-gun and anti-immigration, but by 2020 he’d flipped on both issues and had adopted standard progressive positions. So had a lot of the other candidates in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary, which featured proposals to decriminalize border crossings and promises to give gender affirming care to prison inmates.

To the old-school, moderate wing of the Democratic Party, all this looked like a flirtation with electoral suicide. But leftists insisted they were being pragmatic and that progressivism would inspire the youth. “We need to bring working people back into the Democratic Party,” Sanders said during one 2020 primary debate. “We need to get young people voting in a way that they never have before. That is what our campaign is about.”

Populism without the popularity

I wanted Sanders’s theory of politics to work. The arguments he and his followers made sense to me intellectually, and I was excited by the prospect of a youth voting surge ushering in a new, more progressive era of American politics. But this didn’t happen.

Outside of a few deep-blue big cities, all those firebrands lost their elections. Left-wing candidates failed to find purchase in red states or swing states. The one who probably came closest, Nebraska congressional candidate Kara Eastman, did manage to win a primary against a more moderate Democrat in 2018, but went on to lose her general election, and then lost by a bigger margin in a 2020 rematch. Justice Democrats, a group founded by former Sanders staffers that tries to elect left-wing candidates, has notched just four wins and over 60 losses, according to a tally of its endorsements on Ballotpedia; in 2023 it laid off staff amid fundraising struggles. Paula Jean Swearengin lost by 40 points to Joe Manchin.

Hidden reserves of voters yearning for Medicare for All and tuition-free college have refused to materialize, time and time again. Instead, the Democrats who win elections in swing districts have tended to be moderates, or even conservatives.

As for Bernie Sanders, he failed to increase youth turnout in the 2020 presidential primary — or more accurately, he turned out young people, but even more older people voted. The uninspiring Joe Biden, one of the few primary candidates not to actively court the progressive vote, led in the polls for nearly the entire campaign and won the nomination.

Leftists have a way of explaining why these losses shouldn’t count. “The Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders,” the pundit Krystal Ball recently wrote. One Jacobin piece from 2021 attributes Sanders’s 2020 defeat to the Democratic establishment, Barack Obama, Covid, a lack of attention paid to Biden’s fourth-place finish in Iowa, and an “all-out media campaign” that reinforced the idea that Biden would be more electable than Sanders. Even years later, leftists claim that Sanders would have ushered in “a massively popular FDR style presidency that would have permanently vanquished Trumpism,” to quote Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson.

This cosmology leaves quite a lot out. It ignores the repeated failure of Sanders-esque candidates to win elections. It doesn’t take into account the large number of Democratic primary voters who, on the eve of the 2020 campaign, self-identified as moderate and so oppose Sanders for mundane, non-nefarious reasons. It leaves out polls showing that Trump was perceived by voters to be more moderate than Clinton in 2016 or Kamala Harris in 2024² while in 2020 Biden was more likely then Trump to be seen as moderate. The Sanders dead-enders — at this point, that’s what they are — want everyone to believe that the Democratic establishment is at once fantastically unpopular yet powerful enough to squash a populist uprising. Sanders’s Senate campaign got fewer votes than Harris’s presidential campaign in his home state of Vermont, yet left-wing pundits still insist he would have defeated Trump nationwide in a hypothetical 2024 matchup. In 2017, “Bernie would have won” was at least a hot take. In 2025, this stuff is plainly just cope.

The problem is the voters

If the last few years of history teaches us anything, it’s to be suspicious of the idea that America is on the brink of revolution. The US voting public is exceedingly comfortable; they largely want the future to be like the past, but with slightly larger pickup trucks. They elected Trump on a platform of weaponized nostalgia, elected Biden to clean up the chaos of the Trump years, and then went back to Trump because they missed the economic status quo of 2019.

To point out that such sanguine voters resist large-scale progressive change is not to make a moral judgment about progressivism. Bernie Sanders was right about so many things — but his fans insist that his ideas were not just correct, but wildly popular. The electoral record suggests this second part just isn’t true.

Ironically, the left’s greatest policy victories have come not through grassroots mobilization but through persuading party elites to embrace progressive ideas. Those dastardly Democratic bosses running the Biden administration didn’t govern wholly as centrists. Biden signed far-reaching climate legislation into law, appointed crusading anti-monopolist Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission, and attempted to forgive student debt until blocked by federal courts. Biden also resisted calls from centrist pundits to attack progressives publicly.

The next wave of moderate Democrats may take a different tack. Already you’re seeing figures like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman (a political wind vane and and rabid Israel hawk) openly bash the left. Some centrists, like New York Congressman Richie Torres, openly blame the left for the 2024 defeat.

Isn’t that unfair? Didn’t Harris run as a moderate? Isn’t the party establishment trying to both claim credit for the 2020 victory and shift blame for the 2024 loss? The left has failed in its efforts to seize control of the Democratic Party, and now they have to listen to moderates pretend that the left was in control this whole time.

The problem for the left is that the last eight years of discourse, posting, organizing, and campaigning has failed to result in a true mass movement. Sanders is too old for another presidential run. The Squad, rather than building power, lost two House seats in 2024. Few moderate politicians need to worry about left-wing primary challenges. There’s no leftist who has won a major election in a swing state who can provide a blueprint for the future. If it seems like everyone’s punching left, that’s because the left can’t punch back.

NOTE: This post has become my most popular Substack article ever and by far the most commented one. That's great, I'm happy to have y'all discourse in the ‘ments, but please be respectful and do NOT use crappy language. While I don’t have the time to closely monitor the comments section, I reserve the right to remove dumb/nasty comments and ban aggro/moronic commenters, which I will do without a second thought and without giving anyone a chance to argue with me. Thank you everyone for reading!

1. Correction: I originally wrote that Bryce ran against Ryan, when in fact he ran against Bryan Steil.

2. If this surprises you, remember that unlike many Republicans, Trump opposed cuts to Social Security in 2016 and toned down his anti-abortion rhetoric in 2024.

Write for Free: A Bleak Little Manifesto

Putting the "free" back in freelancing

Imagine that you’re a struggling freelance journalist and you get a big break — a high-profile publication, the Prestige Times, has accepted a pitch of yours! It will pay $400 for a 1,200-word story, which seems like a fair rate to you, especially because having this high-profile byline to your name will enhance your reputation and portfolio. If this story performs well, maybe you’ll be able to write more for the Prestige Times.

Very quickly, you will find out that this big break is a kind of trap.

On the surface the pay seems reasonable. And if you can spend just 10 hours writing the story you’ll make $40 an hour, which isn’t bad. But when you factor in the time required to write and send pitch emails, the time spent making revisions or prodding editors to respond to your revisions, the research and reporting that might be involved, the follow-up effort it sometimes takes to actually get paid — add that all up, and you’ll have devoted a lot more than 10 hours to this project. Maybe more like 20, which means Prestige Times is paying you less per hour than the starting wage at the burger place down the street from me.

And beyond the hourly rate, you’ll likely find it difficult to pay your rent on these $400 checks. Write 100 of those Prestige Times joints a year (a very productive year), and congrats, you’ve replicated the salary of a burger flipper. Bump your rate up to $500 a piece and 100 stories will net you $50,000, pre-tax, barely a living wage, especially if you have to buy health insurance.

The point of this exercise is to show you that the economics of writing for money are unfathomably awful. Being a full-time freelance writer generally entails actual poverty, a supportive family or partner who acts as your patron, or eking out a living wage in a strange, non-publicized corner of the industry. For me, this has meant “sponsored content,” which is basically advertising that doesn’t quite look like advertising. I’ve interviewed bands for shoe companies, written guides to cities I’ve never stepped foot in for a canned Paloma brand, and once edited some stories about the UN for a project funded by big tobacco. Any writer who’s been around the block at least once has done these kinds of jobs and omitted them from their resume; actual journalism for name-brand publications is no way to make a living.

At best, writing those prestige stories gives you a chance to get a staff job at a publication when one opens up, though these jobs are scarce, and to get one you’re competing against a hundred other qualified, underemployed journalists. And a staff job is no guarantee of stability at a time when many publications are becoming leaner and more focused on the bottom line. The only way off the treadmill is to become famous enough to attract fans willing to pay you for your podcasts, articles, and whatever else constitutes your “brand,” or else ascend to management, so that when the next cycle of cuts comes, you’ll be the one sitting in the Google Hangout telling writers and editors about their severance packages.

If the last few years have seemed like dull ones in journalism, with few fresh voices and fewer new publications of any note, it’s easy to explain why. Everyone is exhausted and burned out. Everyone is writing and editing, consciously or unconsciously, in a defensive crouch. Everyone is feeling constrained by low pay and cramped budgets that preclude ambitious work — how many writers regularly get to go on paid reporting trips? For that matter, how many editors are actually training up the young freelancers who land in their inbox? How many of us can conceive of a career path that has a logical upward trajectory?

The only solution I can see at the moment is to ditch the whole “career” thing altogether. Lose the idea of pitching editors or writing for clients, skip the concerns over SEO or traffic or post counts — write something and give it away for free.

In the early 2010s, when Twitter was just evolving into a place for writers to talk shop and talk shit, I remember a recurring debate over whether you should write for free. The savvy people at the time said that of course you shouldn’t, writing was labor and in order to make employers value your labor, you need to value your labor first.

That logic made sense to me at the time, but now? The value of writing as labor has cratered across the board. The ladder that used to lead from freelancing to a stable newsroom gig is disintegrating even as the current generation of young writers — sorry guys — tries to climb it. And I find myself in the middle of that disintegrating ladder, a bad place to be, even metaphorically.

I personally do not need to scrape together $200 checks to make rent. What I need is a little bit of freedom, a little space to jot ideas down that is unsullied by the demands of the market, which as discussed is pretty awful right now. I need to try things, because I’m tired of not trying things.

In vulgar terms: I’m relaunching this blog. It’ll mainly be about journalism and writing and politics, since those are the things I have been thinking about and working inside of for a decade and a half. But more importantly, it will be an escape for the whole writing-for-money trap.

Why would you want to read such a thing? That’s not really my problem. Subscribe below.

Can we murder our way to Medicare for All?

On the limits of edgelordism.

I’m considering reviving this dormant Substack in the new year as an outlet for writing I don’t get to do in my day job — it’ll probably have a new name — but in the meantime I wanted to talk about the thing no one can stop talking about: The death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. What more could we ask for? A dramatic shooting, a nationwide manhunt, a suspect from a wealthy family with made-for-TV looks, the possibility that the suspect was acting as a kind of vigilante who murdered a health insurance executive to strike back against a cruel industry. Oh, how desperately we all want there to be a good reason for violence.

You’ve probably seen the memes about how hot the suspect Luigi Mangione is and how great it is to kill health insurance executives, some of it ironic, some of it earnest, most of it a mixture of the two, none of it novel. “Edgy” humor has been around forever, and being horny for a murderer does not make you interesting — people lusted after Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer too. (If criminals weren’t sexy, there wouldn’t be so many TV shows about them.)

The unusual thing about the Mangione fandom is how many of its adherents seem to believe that not only was the shooting a political act, but that celebrating the alleged shooter is a form of progressivism. Journalist Taylor Lorenz described the online celebration of murder as being a result of people being “fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people.” The restaurateur and TV personality Eddie Huang posted a borderline incoherent rant that included the line, “Democrats and Republicans are within degrees of each other in the center… They are all fucking scum bags. The only true leader we have is The United Health Care Shooter.”

Politicians obviously don’t say stuff like that, but a few Democrats have empathized with or excused these sentiments. Senator Elizabeth Warren described the shooting as “a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “we need to understand that extreme levels of inequality in the United States yield high degrees of social instability.”

Statements like these are not actually endorsing the murder — no one, except Eddie Huang I guess, goes that far — but it is sympathetic to the feting of the murderer. If you feel that Thompson deserved it in some sense, if you share a fraction of the anger the shooter must have felt, there are plenty of prominent voices on the left who will tell you, in soothing millennial therapyspeak, your feelings are valid. And more, there’s a sense that such feelings could be politically useful. “Just putting this out there: the jacket the CEO-murderer wore is flying off the shelves,” the historian Rick Perlstein wrote on X. “That sort of popular anger was there to be harvested this past November by the Democratic Party, were they led with the kind of valor, empathy, and populist courage FDR showed.”

Wouldn’t it be great if that were true?

I’ve been writing about healthcare policy for a long time, going back to the debate over the Affordable Care Act in 2010, when I was typing away about it on my personal blog for an audience of no one. For as long as I can remember, progressives have been talking about how inhumane and illogical the United States’ healthcare system is. And they’re not wrong. People suffer horribly and die or are driven into medical debt because insurance companies deny claims; many more people are hit with surprise bills because they accidentally get out-of-network care. Quitting a job or leaving a marriage can result in people losing their health insurance, putting them in a precarious position where a broken leg can all but bankrupt them. The solution the left has for all this is a “single-payer” healthcare system, a.k.a. Medicare for All, where the government provides health insurance for everyone. Medicare for All’s advocates have long argued that this would (metaphorically) kill the rapacious health insurance industry and also reduce the country’s total healthcare spending by a combination of lower administrative costs and the government negotiating lower payments to healthcare providers. The people posting about Mangione’s immaculate hog may not necessarily also post about healthcare policy, but if they’re part of the amorphous online left, they likely support Medicare for All.

But there’s reason to question the idea that there’s a huge untapped desire for Medicare for All. In 2020, Bernie Sanders, who made Medicare for All his signature issue, ran for president and seemed to have a pretty good shot at securing the Democratic nomination. Healthcare policy was a major topic of debate during the primary, and some polls showed that a majority of Democrats supported Medicare for All. But primary voters fairly decisively picked Joe Biden — who was critical of Medicare for All — over Sanders. At the exact moment when a critical mass of voters displeased with the healthcare industry could have scored a meaningful electoral victory¹, all that rage failed to materialize at the ballot box. The movement Sanders had been building since 2016 came up short.

One way to explain that defeat is that many Americans are quietly supportive of the status quo . A recent Gallup poll found that while a majority of respondents were unhappy with the U.S. healthcare system, most rated their own healthcare “excellent” or “good” — in other words, voters may feel some level of trepidation about actually swapping their insurance out for a government-provided plan. No one goes online to post, “I feel pretty OK about my insurance,” just like no one posts, “I do not want to do anything sexual with Luigi Mangione,” but there are vast numbers of normies out there, a population ignored by left-wing commentators who want to paint the U.S as a dystopia on the brink of revolution.

But clearly, the U.S. is on the brink of something. How else to explain the rapturous response to the shooting? Progressives would probably prefer to think of it as anger specifically directed at the health insurance industry, since that’s an industry they’d like to eliminate². But across the political spectrum, Americans have become more comfortable endorsing violence against their enemies. On the right, Derek Chauvin and Kyle Rittenhouse (and now maybe Daniel Penny) have become minor celebrities solely on the basis of their having killed someone in “self-defense”; Donald Trump is poised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists. On the left, we had the whole “punching Nazis is righteous” moment in 2017, followed later by endorsements of looting during the George Floyd protests in relatively mainstream places.

This thirst for violence is only tangentially related to politics in the normal sense. It’s far outside of elections and policy debates. It’s something mainstream institutions can barely describe, much less explain: a bone-deep understanding that we have enemies, and they deserve no quarter. A man whose name you’ve never heard is gunned down on a Midtown street. Upon hearing who he was, you understand, without having to be told, that his murder was justified — there is a war of sorts going on, and anyone can become a combatant. This violence is sometimes said to be carried out in the name of various political goals but in fact there is no logical path connecting the two; the violence is always an end to itself.

Conceiving of politics as a war doesn’t just serve to excuse violence, it excuses more mundane kinds of viciousness. All your worst impulses, your cruelest jokes, your petty hatreds — all the muck from the bottom of your soul — it's all fine, actually, better than fine, it’s praiseworthy, because you are on the correct side, and that means you can never truly be wrong. When your most combative opinions are picked up by a combat-loving algorithm and your political opponents deride you, that is proof of their toxicity, because it is not your responsibility to be respectful or find common ground. You don’t even have to learn anything about whatever you’re passionately opining about. What good is knowledge when compared to righteous anger?

This atmosphere of distrust and hatred may be sometimes useful to populist politicians like Trump, but it’s anathema to progressivism. Enacting Medicare for All does not just mean the end of private insurance, it means creating a massive new government health insurance program. If Americans live in an atmosphere of distrust, will they trust that government insurer, especially when it is controlled by the political party they hate? When the bureaucrat who denies claims is a government worker rather than a corporate employee, will there be no hard feelings?

Progressivism as a political project entails the building of trust. It requires people to have faith that change will improve their lives, that they and their neighbors can benefit from new government programs, that prosperity is a shared endeavor rather than an endless, grasping competition. At a time when it’s clear that many voters are suspicious of progressivism — as Trump’s victory demonstrates — convincing people of these values is more urgent than ever. You can try to do all that, or you can make shitty little jokes online. But you do have to choose.

1. A President Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have been able to actually enact Medicare for All due to a closely divided Congress, but electing him would have sent a powerful signal.

2. I’m speaking in the third person here but for the record I’d be perfectly happy if the U.S. adopts a Medicare for All system. I don’t think that’s particularly likely, but fortunately you could also achieve universal coverage by more politically viable routes, i.e. a “public option” plus more Medicare and Medicaid expansion. Maybe I’ll write about this sometime.