Crazy at Any Price

Hey,

“Put your money where your mouth is” is terrible advice if taken literally—it’s hard to do, it’s bad hygiene, it’s bad financial management, and generally speaking it’s a really weird look. But figuratively, there’s a reason people say it all the time.

Last Friday, in an aggressively par-for-the-course G-File, I wrote:

As with everything important in life, the real question is: What price are you willing to pay for it? I want to be an Olympic water polo player. But I have steadfastly refused to pay the price in time and effort to make that even remotely possible.

I’m coming to believe that “What price are you willing to pay for it?” may be the most important question in American life these days. And if I can’t convince you of that, I’ll start with a far more defensible claim: It’s the most important question in my writing of late. 

I love it, if it’s free.

The other week I noted that a lot of Americans say they want the government to provide free college tuition and free universal health care, and to fight climate change. But when you ask them if they’re willing to pay $2, $10, or $100 more a month for these things, support drops precipitously (even if they’d still come out ahead).

Progressives constantly insist that the contents of the Build Back Better pinata are popular. But such popularity rests on the fact that people have been told that this stuff will be free because the rich will pay for it all. Ask people to pony up—even a little—and the support drops.

I increasingly think that Democrats confuse “popularity” with intensity. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that 90 percent of Americans want Joe Biden to clog dance on the Tonight Show. (“Michael Flatley ‘Lord of the Dance’ my ass, watch this.”) 

That doesn’t mean there’s an enormous demand for such a spectacle. Nobody is going to vote against Joe Biden if he doesn’t do it. In other words, polls are fairly good at measuring support for something “horizontally,” but they’re less reliable “vertically” because the depth of the demand is harder to poll. It’s the difference between the quantity of people who support something and the quality of that support. Sure, you can ask people if they believe something “very strongly,” but I think this is often code for, “Are you certain you’re right?” Not, “Do you believe passionately that X should be done?”

This is especially true when you’re honest about the potential consequences of what people say they want. Imagine you told people that if Biden tried to clog dance on TV, there’s a good chance he’d injure himself horribly or humiliate himself because he’s a terrible dancer. I’m sure some people would say, “I’m willing to take that chance.” In fact, some people would be even more eager to see it. But the overall support for the idea would still drop appreciably. Similarly, if pollsters say he’ll do it on the condition you agree to a $100 increase in your annual taxes, support would drop even more.

Let’s take a concrete example. Polls generally showed that a lot of Americans wanted America to leave Afghanistan. Those polls reflected a lot of broad—or horizontal—support, but not a lot of vertical depth. If you asked Americans, “Should we leave Afghanistan in such a way that the Taliban takes over, Americans and allies are stranded, and the U.S. appears to the whole world like an incompetent, defeated country?” (i.e., if you asked them, should we leave the way we actually left?) the numbers would plummet.

We have some circumstantial evidence of this. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that only 28 percent of Americans think “we did the right thing” by withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan. Surely some of that just reflects disapproval with Biden’s incompetent handling of the withdrawal, but I think some of it is the result of a lot of people saying, “This is not what I had in mind.” As a general proposition, everyone supported American withdrawal from Afghanistan, either eventually or on favorable terms. But most people weren’t passionate, leave-at-all-costs types. Surprise! Americans don’t like losing wars.

Or, let’s take the topic of my latest column. If you believe that climate change is literally an “existential” or “extinction level” crisis, you should presumably be willing to do almost anything and everything to fight it.

Imagine a bear enters your house, threatening to kill you and your family (yes, it’s a talking bear). Lacking a weapon, you decide you need to scare it away. Now, you might prefer not to throw the good china at it (“Aunt Mabel gave us that gravy boat!”). But if that’s all you have near to hand, you’d be a fool not to huck it. Well, the evidence is incontrovertible—to my mind—that nuclear power is essential to reducing carbon emissions. Again, I don’t think climate change is an existential crisis, but I’m not the one saying it is. But if you’re one of the people saying it, and you don’t have any serious arguments against using nuclear energy to fight climate change, I’m skeptical you’re as serious about the problem as you claim.  

The question is not what you are for, but at what price you’d be willing to have it.

Quo pretio?

As some of these examples demonstrate, price here isn’t merely about financial cost or economic value, but about psychology. Anyone who has had to apologize to someone they didn’t want to apologize to—which, I think, covers just about everyone—knows that pride puts a value on stuff beyond the fiscally quantifiable. Heck, talking to people you don’t want to talk to, or about stuff you don’t want to talk about, can come with a huge psychological price tag.

And that brings me to why I think the “At what price …?” question is such a valuable heuristic. When you’re talking to, or performing for, a bunch of people inside your bubble, it’s easy to let your mouth write enormous checks you’d never think about cashing.

For five years now, I’ve heard a chorus of people talk all sorts of garbage about secession, civil war, the end of America, the end of democracy, etc. Trumpists in California would harangue me about how not voting for Trump was tantamount to destroying the country. That was nonsense for all sorts of reasons. But as with the climate change Chicken Littles rejecting nuclear power, I wasn’t the one who believed it. They did. And yet, were any of them willing to move to a swing state so their vote would matter? Or were any voters from reliably red states willing to move to California to bring it into the fold? That’s a very small price to pay if you actually believe we’re one election away from the apocalypse.

Likewise, tens of millions of people believed the reverse in 2016 and 2020—that if Trump was elected the country was doomed, DOOMED! How many of them left New York or California, where their votes didn’t matter, in an effort to save the country? Did they leave their jobs to work for the campaign?

Heck, how many non-rich people dug deep to donate the maximum legal amount ($2,900) to Trump’s campaign? Let’s just say it was a fraction of the people saying the fate of the nation hung in the balance. 

A lot of Democrats honestly believe that Biden needs to succeed politically to save the country from Trump. But a good chunk of them don’t think his political success should come at the expense of subsidized daycare or free community college. A lot of Democrats (rightly) fear that the effort to place election conspiracy theorists in state governments is a threat to democracy. How many Democratic politicians are willing to scrap their election “reform” wishlists to actually deal with that problem? Not a lot.

Quo pretio? (Assuming my Latin is right) is like a power-washer for the massive piles of excrement in the bull’s stall of our politics.  

Michael Anton, who’s been accusing me of cowardice of late, claims I’m merely trying to curry favor with liberals and that I lack the heroic courage—that he has in abundance—required to save the country. This is the same Michael Anton who wrote the execrable “Flight 93 Election” essay likening the 2016 contest to a terrorist hijacking of a jet. There’s only one choice: “Charge the cockpit or you die”! It was bullshit, but he claimed to believe it. And yet, while he was “brave” enough to write it, he couldn’t muster the courage to put his name on it. He couldn’t risk his lucrative job. So he used the name of a Roman general who sacrificed his life in battle. It’s as if he thought there were some transitive property of courage that would confer upon him figuratively what he lacked a fraction of literally.

In a private memo and on the stage of a January 6 rally, John Eastman was willing to say Mike Pence could steal the election. But now, when questioned by a journalist, he says the memo never reflected what he actually believed. (And in a hidden camera interview, he said January 6 was a set-up.)

Back when Jon Stewart hosted the Daily Show, he’d often respond to any serious criticism by saying, “Hey, I’m just a comedian.” Millions of people hung on his every word, including many elite journalists, but the moment he was challenged he’d scurry back across the border to his safe haven in Comedystan. “Clown nose on, clown nose off,” we used to say. But at least Stewart’s defense had some truth to it. He could be very funny. He was, in fact, a comedian.

But when Rudy Giuliani told a mob that the presidency should be decided by “trial by combat,” it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t intended as a joke. Now he uses essentially the same defense, but no one is laughing.

I subscribe to the theory (confirmed by some people on the inside) that a lot of the ideological asininity that spills into public view at places like the New York Times can be traced to their in-house Slack channels. They’re like saloons in revolutionary Paris, where angry young people work each other into a frenzy of radical zeal and then make the mistake of taking their boozy courage outside.

I think America itself is bedeviled by a similar dynamic. On the right, conservative TV and radio networks brooked no dissent on Trump’s faults and convinced themselves and their audiences that the country was fully behind him; the inconvenient polls, and often the facts themselves, were all fake. No wonder they thought the election was stolen; they’d gotten so high on each others’ green room farts that no other explanation made sense. Democrats had a similar problem and a similar reaction in 2016, and many of the same Republicans who claimed 2020 was stolen had spent four years mocking Democrats for saying the same thing.

More broadly, progressives want to live in a socialist country, and in their bubbles, they convince themselves that everyone else does, too. They then test the steel of their confidence outside their bunkers and suddenly discover that vast swaths of Americans don’t agree with them. At least not when they’re told one of the most empirically ratified facts in all of economics: Socialism is expensive, particularly for poor people. Similarly last summer, lots of people were happy to say “abolish the police,” but when the consequences—political or practical—become apparent it all gets memory-holed. 

A few hundred, maybe even a few thousand, self-described nationalist intellectuals think they have the numbers on their side because their theory says they should. They’re like Marxist revolutionaries convinced the proletarian masses are with them because a book said they must be.

The problem with this thick fog of aerosolized bovine excrement is that there are some people who mistake the mist for the truth. Most of the bloviators talking about the need for storming the cockpit, or secession, or socialism, or some Hungarian new republic, wouldn’t sacrifice a day’s pay for the causes they claim are so vital. The same goes for most of their political fanfic disciples. But such rhetoric still moves the political Overton window, which is why Joe Manchin is hailed, or reviled, as a “moderate” because he favors spending “only” another couple trillion dollars we don’t have. It’s why people can say that Bernie Sanders made a “compromise” by agreeing to climb down from his $6 trillion demand. It’s why Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Republican in good standing, but Liz Cheney isn’t.

But the price can still get much steeper. Some of the people listening actually believe the hype; they take the crazy talk literally rather than figuratively (and figuratively is bad enough). Amid all the apocalyptic playacting on display, the wish becomes the father of the thought for some. And the price for that might be very high indeed.