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1. Springfield
I’m heading to Ohio in a couple hours because we’re doing a live show tomorrow to raise money for the Haitian community in Springfield.
You guys always step up. If you can contribute, the donation page is here:
All proceeds from the show go to the Haitian Support Center. And if you can’t be there in person, you can help from wherever you are.
Thank you.
I want to thank you for something else, too, but I’m not really sure how to say it correctly. It may take me a minute to get there.
When I was in Seattle with Sarah last week, I was overwhelmed by the crowd at the show. People weren’t just kind to us. They weren’t just supportive of Sarah. They weren’t just out for a fun event.
It was an act of love. Just about every person I talked with said that The Bulwark means something to them. That it touches them. That they came to reflect those feelings back to us.
This is the part I’m not certain how to verbalize, but I want to try:
I was overwhelmed by what a privilege it is that we get to mean something to each other.
And not just a privilege, but an honor and a responsibility.
Thank you to everyone who is part of this thing of ours. To everyone who reads the newsletters, or watches the shows. To everyone who corresponds with me or builds the community in the comments. To everyone who steps up and gives when we try to help those in need.
Getting to have this be my job is the most extraordinary privilege imaginable. Thank you, fam.
2. The People
Janan Ganesh had a very JVL-friendly piece in the Financial Times yesterday. His thesis is roughly:
The leaders of Western democracies have been historically unpopular over the last twenty years.
Whether in the United States, Germany, France, Australia, the United Kingdom, Italy, or elsewhere, nearly every single leader has been remarkably unpopular.
It doesn’t matter if the leaders are conservative or liberal, young or old, successful or terrible. Their unpopularity is durable.
As such, nearly every election is a change election.
So either (a) the quality of leaders in Western democracies has declined; or (b) the citizens of Western democracies have become . . . problematic.
Ganesh votes for (b).
What the west has is a followership problem. Voters reject policies — however objectively necessary — that cost them anything. One result is huge levels of government debt, which investors are now demanding higher yields to finance. Another is the flaying alive of almost any leader who tries to fix this or almost anything else. In this decade alone, policies from which heads of government never really recovered include, in France, an increase in the state pension age to all of 64 and, in Britain, a cut to winter fuel subsidies amounting to £1.4bn annually. It isn’t a Greece-style adjustment that people are rebelling against, but modest and apologetic savings.
The quickest, surest way to save Merz’s chancellorship is to give up the reforms to healthcare, pensions and the like. It would also be unconscionable. Likewise, Andy Burnham’s best chance of winning the next UK election is to attempt no fiscal tightening, which would be negligent of him. These are so often the choices: self-immolation or dereliction. The idea of a third path, in which leaders pursue reform but explain it better — “bring people on board” — is podcast-level hogwash. Outside of crises, when fear makes them pliable, voters are determinedly off board.
I agree—but with one qualification.
Things are dark out there. And none of us knows for sure what the next six weeks before the midterms—or the next two years before 2028—will bring.
What we do know is that it helps to have good people alongside you: people who pay attention, tell the truth, and stand up for what’s right. Together.
You’re already here. So stick with us. Join the side you’re already on.
It is self-evidently true, at least in America, that voters are not serious adults. (Please don’t make me show my work; we’ve done dozens of newsletters on this topic.) Are they less serious at the innate, human level than they were twenty years ago? Or forty years ago? Possibly.
It’s possible that environmental factors—such as changes in technology and media—have made them more decadent and less serious.
But it is also true that in America the structural processes by which our leaders are chosen have changed in ways that have lowered the quality of the leaders.
There have been three major developments.
(1) Geographical sorting by partisanship. For forty years Americans have been gathering geographically around ideological (and hence partisan) poles. (Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort is the ur-text here.) This has dramatically increased the number of counties in America where one party is utterly dominant. And in a one-party system, the lack of ideological competition lowers the overall quality of the leaders who win power.
(2) Gerrymandering. Those demographic trends have been organic. They have been magnified by the artificial structure of gerrymandering, which further reduces ideological competition and functions as a multiplier for radicalism. When elected officials only have to worry about intraparty primary fights and not general elections, they become more extreme over time.
(3) The democratization of primaries. Once upon a time political parties chose their candidates through an opaque process governed by elites. This was anti-democratic. It was also reasonably successful. We got a lot of quality candidates that way—especially at the presidential level.
In the 1970s, the parties shifted toward letting their voters choose presidential nominees. This sounds like a nice idea. In practice, it has been suboptimal.
I can’t speak to German, or French, or British politics. But in America there have absolutely been structural changes that have given us worse leaders. The people are to blame, yes. But the system needs reform, too.
3. Pocket Gambling
Some day people will look at online gambling the way we look at Big Tobacco today: an industry that dishonestly profiteered on addiction and human misery.