Quick Hits

Ukraine, feckless Democrats, and the geography of remote work

Obligatory beach photo.

We were in Florida visiting family until Wednesday last week, and then I had a two-day work meeting Friday and Saturday, so I’ve been slow to get back on the blogging train. And I’ve got a public event tomorrow night and a couple of deadlines Friday, so I’ll probably be somewhat scarce this week, too. But I wanted to do some blog writing, as part of re-establishing my work pattern, so here are a handful of quick-hit items about various things that have happened recently that probably would’ve rated a full post had I had the time and energy:

— First and foremost, let me note that like basically everyone else in the too-online world I inhabit, I am concerned about and closely following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don’t know much about the underlying situation beyond a kind of ancestral Polish “Fuck the Russians, anyway” attitude, though. As a result I don’t feel like I have anything all that useful to contribute, which means I’m highly unlikely to post all that much about it, and will mostly default to posting the same kinds of stuff I always do. The theory being that the most helpful thing I can do is offer people who might feel overwhelmed a respite from doomscrolling.

I will note that I’ve been impressed with the resilience of the Ukrainians and also their PR operation; I hope both of those push this toward a better outcome than we would’ve expected a short time ago. I also hope the international response to this, which has been stronger and more unanimous than I would’ve guessed, moves things in a positive direction. Which makes a kind of segue toward the next item:

— I 100% endorse the point of Kevin Drum’s weekend post, “Democrats need to back Biden more loudly on Ukraine,” namely that it’s pretty remarkable how well the Biden team have been managing things to this point, and we should be hearing more about that. To a certain extent this specific case makes sense as the conflict in question is essentially military in character, and as such is kind of hard for left-leaning folks to cheer. But, as Drum notes, this issue is very much of a piece with a more general phenomenon where Democrats just don’t do enough bragging about their successes in any arena.

If I had to speculate as to why this is, I would guess it has to do with the nature of the Democratic coalition, which just always seems looser than the Republican one. Republicans benefit from a narrower set of core interests and also a more transactional approach to basically everything, so the anti-tax crusaders are willing to endorse the gun nuts in exchange for the gun nuts having their back the next time taxes come to the fore. Individual Democratic figures, on the other hand seem less willing to talk unless it can be made directly relevant to their particular policy focus. Which leads to flailing about trying to find a climate change angle, or a way to pivot from intra-European conflict to white supremacy, or arguing that the war demonstrates the need for liberal education, rather than any kind of coherent messaging.

— And that kind of feeds into the next tab in the list of things I wanted to write about, namely this Josh Barro post about “base-stealing” efforts to leverage Covid measures into more permanent societal changes. Again, this feels like something that’s very much of a piece with a longer history of left-leaning elites wanting to bypass the hard work of changing the minds of enough people to get a solid legislative majority. Which is part of why the Supreme Court has come to loom so large in modern US politics, to the detriment of basically everything.

— The last tab I had flagged as something to write about is Matt Yglesias’s most recent mailbag post, which includes a bit about what cities will benefit from increased remote-work opportunities:

By contrast, places like Miami or Portland, Maine or Charleston, South Carolina are spots where lots of people go and enjoy spending time and then lament that there aren’t necessarily great career opportunities there. But if you can make it in the big time while working remotely, lots of people will choose to locate in spots like that. I think the main reason this matters is that I think the cities that won’t benefit are the ones that most need help: the cold industrial cities of the Midwest and interior northeast. I think people are always searching for reasons to be optimistic about St. Louis and Cleveland and Buffalo and I just don’t see it. Cities like Nashville and Austin and Denver that already had momentum will pick up speed and be joined by a wider set of leisure destinations.

(Big quote because I think it’s paywalled.) This is an argument that I find interesting as a marker of a kind of class divide in politics, particularly as regard our media elites. That is, when successful pundits write about the future of remote work, they tend to jump right to this “People will move to places that New Yorkers like to go on vacation” kind of thing, which I don’t think is especially compelling. (I believe a past exchange over a version of this is why Derek Thompson has me blocked on Twitter, forcing me to open a lot of links in incognito tabs…)

The best argument, to my mind, that work-from-home could be good for “cold industrial cities of the Midwest” isn’t that young people who live in Park Slope now are going to pick up and move to Cleveland for the cheap real estate. Instead, the idea is that people who already live in the Midwest won’t need to move to Brooklyn in the first place, but could instead move to smaller cities closer to their families. I suspect that there are quite a few people who grew up in Akron or Youngstown or places like that who would find the option of a good remote-work career a short-ish drive away in Cleveland more competitive with Charleston or Austin than the weather alone might make you think. Let alone moving to NYC and paying $1500 a month to live in a closet in a basement. I think that’s the real opportunity for those cities, and something the people who run them ought to be trying to push as hard as they can.

In other words, this is an argument that puts me very much in the Chris Arnade camp. In large part because I’ve never had the slightest desire to live in NYC, and I’m very happy to have landed in a small city within easy driving distance of my parents. So, you know, confirmation bias all the way around…

And that’s the decks cleared, as it were. I’ll probably do some weeks-in-review stuff over the next couple of days, to get the rest of the vacation backlog out, but this is enough for now.

---

Here are the traditional buttons:

And if you’d like to welcome me back by yelling at me about one of these topics, the comments will be open.