February 2025 – J. W. Mason

Democratizing Finance

(This is the text of a talk I gave for a workshop organized by the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning. The video of the conference is here.)

The starting point for this conversation, it seems to me, is that planning is everywhere in the economy we already live in.

There’s a widespread idea that production today is largely or entirely coordinated by markets. This idea is ubiquitous in economics textbooks, of course; it also forms a major part of unspoken economic common sense, even for many socialists and others on the left politically. But it seems to me that when you look at things more critically, the role of market coordination in the economies that we live in is in fact rather limited.

Within the enterprise, markets are almost nonexistent. Production is organized through various forms of hierarchy and command, as well as through intrinsic motivation — what David Graeber calls everyday communism or what we might call the professional conscience — the desire to do one’s job well for its own sake.

The formation, growth and extinction of enterprises, meanwhile, is organized through finance. People sometimes talk about firms growing and dying through some kind of Darwinian process, but the function of finance is precisely to prevent that. By redistributing surplus between firms, finance breaks the link between the profits a firm earned yesterday and the funds available for it to invest today.

The whole elaborate structure of banks, stock markets, venture capital and so on exists precisely to make funds available for new firms, or firms that have not yet been profitable. We see this very clearly in Silicon Valley, as in the current boom in “AI” investment — this is as far as you can get from a world where growth is the result of past profits.

On the other side, institutions like private equity, and the market for corporate control, ensure that that the surplus generated in one firm need not be reinvested there. It can be extracted — consensually or otherwise — and used somewhere else.

In both cases, this is not happening through any kind of automatic market logic, but through someone’s conscious choice.

Once we think of finance as a system of planning , it is natural to ask if it can be redirected to meet social needs, such as addressing climate change. I want to make four suggestions about how we can pursue this idea most effectively.

First. We need to think about where financing constraints matter, and where they don’t.

Many firms do fund investment largely from their own profits; in others, investment spending is modest relative to current costs. In both these cases — where investment is internally financed, and where investment requirements are low relative to costs of production — finance will have limited effects on real activity.

Where finance is most powerful is in new or rapidly growing, capital-intensive sectors, especially where firms are relatively small. Green energy is an important example — for wind or solar power, almost all the costs are upfront. Housing is also an area where finance is clearly important – while this is of course, a very old sector, firms are relatively small, capital costs are large, assets are very long-lived, and there is a significant lag between outlays and income. It is clear that booms and busts in housing construction have a great deal to do with credit conditions.

Labor intensive sectors like care work, on the other hand, are poor targets for credit policy, since costs and revenues occur more or less simultaneously, and capital needs are minimal. Subsidies or other “real” interventions are needed here.

Large, established firms are also likely to be fairly insensitive to credit policy. There’s a great deal of evidence that the internal discount rates corporations use to evaluate investment projects are not tightly linked to interest rates. At best, financing may relax an external constraint where decision makers already operate with long horizons. But what we know about corporate investment decisions suggests that they are not much affected by credit conditions — something that thoughtful central bankers have long understood.

Second. Channeling credit to constrained areas will have a bigger impact than penalizing credit to unwanted areas.

This seems like an important limitation on the types of green policies adopted by the ECB, for example. For firms that issue bonds, the interest rate they face is not likely to be a major factor in their investment decisions. Where credit matters most is for smaller, bank-dependent firms and households, which face hard limits on how much they can borrow.

This is even more the case for the stock market. Firms for which stock issuance is a significant form of financing make up a very, very small group. In general, changes in stock ownership will have no effect on real investment at all.

Related to this is the question of rules vs discretion. It is relatively easy to write rules for what not to invest in. Targeting finance-constrained sectors requires more strategic choices. So this is an instrument that is state-capacity intensive. In a setting of limited capacity, credit policy is unlikely to work well.

Similarly, if we want to see across-the-board changes, as opposed to fostering new growth in particular areas, credit is not the right tool. In that case it is better to directly regulate the outcomes we are interested in. If you want higher wages, write a minimum wage law. Don’t tell your central bank to penalize holdings of shares in low-wage firms.

Third. We need to think carefully about what parts of finance we want to socialize, and where new institutions are needed and where they aren’t.

Various financial institutions offer funding to real activity (directly or indirectly) on their asset side, while issuing liabilities that some particular group of wealth owners wants to hold. In the case of many institutions — banks, insurance companies, pension funds — their social value comes as much or more from the distinctive liabilities they issue, as from the activities that they finance.

It’s natural to imagine public finance in similar terms, and think of a public investment authority, say, issuing distinctive liabilities that are somehow connected to the activities that it finances. I think we need to tread very cautiously here. The connections between the two sides of private balance sheets are largely irrelevant for the public sector.

The public sector already finances itself on the most favorable terms of any entity in the economy. The private sector’s need for retirement security and other forms of insurance can be addressed by the public sector directly. Public provision of new assets for retirement saving would be a step backward from current systems of public provision.

There is a case for a larger public role in the payments system, and in the direct provision of banking services to those who currently lack access to them. But there is no reason to link this service provision to public credit provision, and a number of good reasons not to.

The stronger arguments for socializing finance, it seems to me, lie on the asset side of the public-sector balance sheet. We don’t need to find new ways of financing things the public already does. We do need to bring public criteria into the financing of private activity.

It’s worth emphasizing that what matters is what gets financed, and on what terms. Who owns the assets has no importance in itself. Setting up a sovereign wealth fund does nothing to socialize investment, if the fund is operated on the same principles as a private fund would be.

I observed this first-hand some years ago, when I worked in the AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment. The idea was to use the substantial assets of union-affiliated pension funds to support labor in conflicts with employers. But in practice, the funds were so constrained both by legal restrictions and by the culture of professional asset management that it was effectively impossible to depart from the conventional framework of maximizing shareholder value.

Fourth. We need to link proposals for socializing finance to a critique of conventional monetary policy. We need to challenge the sharp lines between planning, prudential regulation, and monetary policy proper. In reality, every action taken by the central bank channels credit towards some activities, and away from others.

One important lesson of the past 15 years is the limits of conventional monetary policy as a tool for stabilizing aggregate demand. But central banks do have immense power over the prices of various financial assets, and monetary policy actions have outsized effects on credit-sensitive sectors of the economy. A program of using credit policy for what it can do — fostering the growth of particular new sectors and activities — goes hand in hand with not using credit policy for what it cannot do — stabilizing inflation and employment. In this sense, socializing finance and developing alternative tools for demand management are complementary programs. Or perhaps, they are the same program.

It’s worth noting that Keynes was very skeptical of the sort of fiscal policy that has come to be associated with his name. He did not believe in running large fiscal deficits, or boosting demand via payments to individuals. For him, stabilizing demand meant stabilizing investment spending. And this meant, above all, reorienting it way from future profitability, which is inherently unknowable, and beliefs about which are therefore ungrounded.

This is a key element in the Keynesian vision that is often overlooked: Our inability to know the future matters less when we are focused on providing concrete social goods. It may be very hard, even impossible, to know how much the apartments in a given building will rent for in thirty years, depending as it does on factors like the desirability of the neighborhood, how much housing is built elsewhere, and the overall state of the economy. But how long the building will stand up for, and how many people it can comfortably house, are questions we can answer with reasonable confidence.

Wouldn’t it be simpler, then, to stabilize private demand in the first place, rather than try to offset its fluctuations with changes in the interest rate or public budget position? From this point of view, our current apparatus of monetary policy would be rendered unnecessary by a program of reorienting investment to meet real human needs.

UPDATE: I have added a link to the video of the conference.

Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States

This is a guest post by Michael Kinnucan.

A longstanding concern on the US electoral left is the issue of “candidate accountability” – if we elect a left-wing candidate, how can we be sure that he or she will stay true to our politics while in office? It’s a big problem. One solution regularly proposed is that the left needs to break with the Democrats and build a third party. Rather than continuing to run candidates on the Democratic ballot line, the left should create its own party; such a party could endorse only candidates fully vetted by and accountable to the party membership, and could discipline candidates–even revoke their party membership–if they moved right in office.

This is an appealing idea. Unfortunately, here in the United States, creating a formal political party which exerts this kind of control over candidates is illegal.

I want to be clear that I don’t mean building such a party is merely difficult. Many opponents of third-party strategies point to various aspects of the US political system that make it hard to get a third party off the ground: first-past-the-post elections, the presidential system, ballot access laws, Duverger’s Law, etc. These points are well-taken, but if our goal is to create an ideologically unified and accountable party, they’re simply beside the point. Building a party that can enforce candidate accountability to the collective political judgment of party members isn’t merely difficult in the US, it’s impossible. US election law simply forbids such parties.

What do I mean by this? Well, let’s say you and I and our friends feel like we have a good idea for doing Socialism, and we form the Socialism Party together, and we write some bylaws and create an endorsement process and jump through the hoops of getting ourselves a ballot line. (This process varies by state but usually involves collecting a lot of signatures and so forth. In most states the barrier isn’t insuperably high; even PSL often manages it.) Our idea is that we, the dues-paying members of the Socialism Party, will vote on who to endorse, and then whoever we endorse for any office will appear on the Socialism ballot line and voters who like Socialism can vote for them. The Socialism Party will never endorse milquetoast liberals, and if some of its elected officials stray from the fold, the Socialism Party will drop them from its line. When voters vote the Socialist ticket they’ll be sure they’re voting for genuine Socialists.

Procedural Regulation Makes Candidate Accountability Impossible

At this point many moderate progressives will raise pragmatic objections; they’ll ask whether we have enough of a base to launch a party, worry about the spoiler effect, and so forth. But these objections are irrelevant, because what I just described is illegal in the US. You just can’t do it! Because, in the US, the state will come in the moment we’ve won a ballot line, and it will say “hold up, wait a minute, you want to just have some self-selecting party insiders endorse candidates based on whatever made-up system is in your bylaws? Well, we won’t stand for that. We make the rules. The only way you’re legally allowed to select candidates is through a state-sponsored formal election (a “primary”) run according to state rules and administered by state and local boards of elections.”

What are the state’s rules? Well, they’re things like:

Maybe the Socialism Party wants to select candidates at its annual convention after a rich and edifying political debate. Too bad, that’s illegal. The state doesn’t care for these smoke-filled room candidate selection processes, it got rid of them back in the Progressive Era. Candidates will be selected inside a state-sponsored ballot box by individual voters.
Maybe the Socialism Party wants to select candidates on a statewide basis–deciding strategically which districts to run candidates in, strategically targeting resources to those races, and ensuring ideological unity across the slate. Too bad, that’s illegal. The state thinks local voters should have a voice in who runs locally. Candidates will be selected by party members in whatever district they want to run in. If the six party members in some random rural county want to run one of themselves for mayor, the rest of the party will just have to live with it.
Maybe the Socialism Party wants to make sure that only dues-paying party members can vote in elections; they don’t want random people who joined because they heard about the Socialism Party on Twitter determining endorsements, and they especially don’t want some grifter stealing the party’s ballot line by persuading all his friends to join and vote in the primary. Too bad, that’s illegal. The Socialism Party is welcome to collect dues and require political education courses to its heart’s content, but the state says it can’t set up arbitrary barriers so that only insiders get to vote in primaries. The state says that the only thing you need to do to vote in the Socialism Party primary is check the appropriate box on a voter registration form.

And so on and so forth, for trivial matters and major ones. Do members of the Socialism Party want to pick candidates through RCV? Too bad, that’s illegal (except for the few places where it is mandatory). Do members of the Socialism Party want to strip SP elected officials of party membership if they support a war or genocide? Too bad, the state says those elected officials will still be eligible to run and vote in SP primaries.

At this point we in the Socialism Party are really in a bad way. We created a party specifically so that we could escape corruption by the liberals and impose party discipline and so forth, but instead we’ve created a system where any state rep candidate who can get a couple dozen people to check a box on a form in any district in the state can run as an official candidate of the Socialism Party and we can’t do a thing about it.

The Practical Consequences of Procedural Illegalities

Would this really happen? It very much would. To take the most obvious example, in states where the Green Party has a ballot line, Republican candidates can and do pick up the Green line, figuring to get a few votes out of leftists who vote straight-ticket without doing much research.

Some may think this is just an edge case and not a fundamental objection. Sure, tiny and pointless parties like the Greens may not be able to use a ballot line effectively, but a true mass-base socialist party will be a different matter. A Socialism Party candidate running in a primary where only Socialism-registered voters can vote will still be accountable to Socialism.

This is an illusion. Candidates of the Socialism Party in local constituencies will become rooted in those constituencies; they’ll develop a strong base of local support among local Socialism-registered voters by tailoring their message to the views of those voters. They will also work (as they certainly should) to develop strong roots in their district and help build the Socialism Party’s base in their district, and will naturally encourage more people to register as Socialism Party voters. Many of those new registrants will have a much stronger connection to their local rep than they do to the party as a whole. An extremely successful Socialism Party, one that really came to dominate specific demographics and constituencies, would find itself in such a dominant position in some districts that many people would register Socialism just to vote in the primary—just as we do now.

In these conditions, there’s simply no reason to think that the Socialism Party as such could exercise meaningful control over its candidates. When the Party demanded that its elected officials take unpopular votes, many candidates would respond that they didn’t think those votes were right for their district, and that Socialism voters in their district agreed with them—and they’d be proven right in the next Socialism Party primary, which they would win hands-down.

Socialists who doubt me on this would do well to consider the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America. Many people in DSA have spent an enormous amount of time worrying about AOC’s accountability to DSA. These concerns came to a head last year when DSA’s 18-member national leadership body voted not to endorse her last year (although New York City DSA chose to endorse anyway). But it has always been pretty clear that AOC would win a referendum vote of DSA members on endorsement at either the national or the local level. The average DSA member doesn’t know much about the complex concerns some DSA leaders have with her position-taking, they just know her as a prominent, charismatic and successful socialist elected official, and they like her. And no one can doubt that a poll of DSA members in AOC’s district would go overwhelmingly in her favor: Many of those people joined DSA because of AOC’s campaigns, many of them know her personally, and they are overwhelmingly aligned with her politics. If DSA were a formal political party, the only body empowered to make endorsement decisions about AOC would be those in-district members—and all it would take to become a member would be to check a box on a voter registration form. A DSA non-endorsement of AOC would become inconceivable.

Some people on the left wing of DSA argue that we need to form our own party so we can avoid candidate accountability issues like the ones they perceive in our relationship with AOC. But, as I have shown, this is exactly wrong: DSA can address candidate accountability issues only to the extent that it is not a formal political party. A formal political party would have no way of unendorsing someone like AOC.

Why is the US like this?

To be clear, this isn’t some special feature of left-wing third parties in the US; it applies to all ballot-line political parties, including the Democrats and the Republicans. That’s why AOC was able to win a Democratic primary in the first place, taking out one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress against the entire weight of the state and national Democratic Party structure. If the Democrats had been able to disqualify AOC from running as a Democrat, or disqualify left-wing voters from voting in primaries, or overturned her primary win at a higher level of government, no doubt they would have. But they can’t.

It’s a bit of an odd situation, when you think about it. If you and I and our friends decided to start some other kind of organization–a cat fanciers’ club, or a soup kitchen, or the National Rifle Association, or the Democratic Socialists of America–we could set whatever rules for membership and office-seeking we thought best and the state wouldn’t say a thing about it. Indeed, it would be seen as grossly intrusive and perhaps a First Amendment violation if the state were attempt to dictate the bylaws of civil society organizations. But the case is different with political parties. In the US, all the most significant decisions of a ballot-line political party are determined by state law.

This isn’t true in most countries. In the UK, for example, the national elected leadership of the Labour Party is perfectly capable of forbidding an individual from running for office as a Labour candidate; that’s what they did to Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Party didn’t have to go to Corbyn’s district and door-knock, or drop a million-dollar independent expenditure on him, to knock him off the Labour line; they simply voted him off, as they had a perfect right to do. In most countries the idea that the elected leadership of a party can decide who runs on that party’s line seems quite natural–what else could it mean to have a political party?

But in the US, parties just aren’t allowed to do that—not the Democratic Party and not the Socialism Party. The Democratic Party can’t stop AOC (or Joe Lieberman, or Kyrsten Sinema, or Ilhan Omar) from running as a Democrat.

The question of why the US regulates political party selection of candidates down to the last detail would take us beyond the scope of this essay. Briefly, though, state regulation of parties is best seen as a reformist compromise ameliorating the anti-democratic effects of the two-party duopoly. In most countries, parties can choose candidates in any way they see fit, including in ways that exclude ordinary voters from having a voice. But the potentially undemocratic effects of these selection processes are mitigated by the fact that voters who don’t like the outcomes can split and form another party. In the US, our law on political parties reflects a judgment that voters can’t (as a practical matter) form a separate (viable) party, and so as a consolation prize we have the legal right to influence the candidate selection processes of the parties we’re stuck with.

This compromise means that US political parties are strange institutions, quite unlike political parties in other democratic countries. It would be barely overstating the case to say that the US simply doesn’t have political parties. The two major US political parties are perhaps best viewed not as civil society organizations but as features of the US electoral system; in this interpretation, the US effectively has a two-stage “runoff” electoral system like the French presidential election system, where anyone can run in the first round and the top two vote-getters then run head to head. But unlike in France, the first stage of this runoff is organized on roughly ideological lines, where candidates who choose to label themselves as vaguely left-of-center run in a separate first-round election from candidates who choose to label themselves as vaguely right-of-center. In this analysis, becoming a “member” of a major party means no more than deciding which first-round election to vote in. The parties aren’t so much civil society organizations that have their major internal decisions shaped by electoral law, as features of the electoral law that for historical reasons are named after formerly significant institutions in civil society.

That may be going too far, but it’s very important emphasize the enormous gap between the major parties in the US and what the rest of the world understands by the term “political party.” If you went to the leadership bodies of political parties in other countries and said “we are forbidding you to choose which candidates run for election as candidates of your party,” they would be justified in asking “good lord, what’s left to us? What does it mean to be a party without that? How can we meaningfully advance a political program in the legislature if we can’t even determine in any organized way which candidates we elect to office?”

In the US, we know what’s left: Moribund and irrelevant state committee structures that serve as the replaceable appendages of wealthy donors and powerful individual politicians, plus a vague brand with which voters can vaguely identify. It’s really not very much.

The Objections

It is difficult for many Americans to grasp this point because Americans simply don’t have any experience of a “real” political party. They’ll say “how can you say that the Democratic Party doesn’t exist as a real political party? Democratic Party powerbrokers, including shadowy donors and prominent politicians, screwed Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman, for example; the party exerted real power.”

The objection itself is telling. For Americans, a “party” is a vague and nebulous constellation of wealthy donors, prominent politicians and political brand identifications whose power consists in their ability to coordinate to influence primary voters. That nebulous constellation certainly exists, and it’s not tied to a particular ballot line—many interest groups, like AIPAC and the charter school lobby, coordinate to influence primary voters in both major parties (and could do so in the Socialism Party, too). But Americans tend to miss the glaringly obvious fact that “the Democratic Party,” as a formally constituted institution in civil society—as the DNC and state Democratic committees and so on—is utterly powerless to decide who runs as a Democrat, while the UK Labour Party can ban a prominent and popular former party leader by a simple vote at a scheduled meeting. Americans miss this because they’re barely aware of the formally constituted Democratic Party bodies, and they’re barely aware because these bodies mostly don’t matter. Because, again, having formal party bodies that matter in the way that the Labour Party’s leadership committee does is illegal in the US.

Finally, some will argue that this legal regime shouldn’t be an obstacle to the left. They’ll say “come on, Michael, you say that it’s illegal to form political parties in the US, but Socialists formed independent political parties even in tsarist Russia. Surely the legal regime is less hostile here, and in any case, surely it’s our job to overcome it.”

And what I’d say is–well, yes, if by “political party” you mean an organized group of socialists who make collective decisions on the basis of their shared politics and contest elections, we certainly can build such an organization–and not only that, but we already have done so. It’s called DSA!

But if you mean “an organization like DSA, and also we control a ballot line” – no, I’m sorry. Ballot lines are creatures of the state. The state gets to set the rules on who gets to use one and under what circumstances, and the state has set rules such that it is ILLEGAL for us to have an organized group of socialists who make collective decisions and have those decisions be binding on an electoral US party. It’s not merely hard or impractical – it’s impossible.

Conclusion

In DSA and on the US left more broadly, when we argue about whether to use the Democratic Party ballot line or create our own ballot line so we can have a disciplined party, the debate is often over whether our own ballot line is a necessary condition for party discipline and coherence (“can we build a caucus of elected socialists if they’re elected on the Democratic line, or do we need our own line?”) That’s the wrong question. The right question is whether our own ballot line is even compatible with discipline and coherence (“can we maintain electoral unity when our decision-making process on who to back electorally is taken out of our hands, broken up across hundreds of districts and opened to anyone who wants to participate?”) and the answer is, obviously, no we can’t.

This is a double-edged sword for the left. On the one hand, we can’t build our own ballot-line party that enforces candidate discipline through collective decisions. But on the other hand, neither can “the” Democratic Party. “The” Democratic Party is legally bound to let us run on “their” ballot line in “their” internal (primary) elections. If they weren’t – if the laws were different – then we’d find it both necessary and also possible to form a ballot-line third party. As things stand, it is not necessary and also not possible.

None of this is to say that we can stop worrying about candidate accountability and party discipline. The absence of real, disciplined political parties is a colossal problem in US politics; not only does it confront the socialist left with the constant threat of political co-optation, but the very same issue makes it enormously difficult for even moderate Democrats to enact their political agenda. One need think only of the fate of Biden’s very progressive domestic agenda in 2021-22 at the hands of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The lack of a framework for meaningfully accountable electoral representation in the US is a huge barrier to enacting not only radical but even moderate reforms.

But the left is deluded if it believes that forming a new ballot-line political party will help overcome this barrier. Realistic efforts to address the problem of party accountability and discipline must begin from the observation that these characteristics, which are intrinsic features of formal political parties in most democracies, are incompatible with formal political partyhood in the US.

Writing about Policy in the Trump Era

Policy writing is a particular kind of writing. It’s defined not just by its topic but by its orientation: What should government do, to address some agreed-on problem, or achieve some agreed-on goal? It is premised on a public debate, in which ideas are adopted based on their merits. It is addressed to no one in particular; it assumes we all have a say in the decision, and a stake in the outcome. It posits some shared values or ends, so that particular actions can be compared on a rational basis. It implies a vision of politics as conversation.

Is that sort of thing worth doing? Is it worth doing now?

Some people might not think this kind of writing is ever worthwhile. (One can imagine various reasons.) Obviously I am not one of them. I have written many policy pieces of this sort, mostly for the Roosevelt Institute. (For example here, here, here, and here.) I would like to keep doing it. The premise of shared problems and a political authority that is both attempting to solve them and responsive to the public, has always been false in some important ways, and effaced important dimensions of politics that are about organized conflict rather than rational debate. But it nonetheless seemed to me that, within its limits, “policy” was a useful framework for asking some important questions. (For example, the links above.)

But one might say: The US government is now in the hands of a clique whose defining purpose seems to be precisely the rejection of collective solutions to common problems and a public of equal citizens. Their immediate project is dismantling the systems through which any kind of rational policymaking operates. So hasn’t, now, the gap between the imagined world of policy writing and the real political world gotten unbridgeably wide? When the people in authority are actively ripping up all the efforts to, say, expand renewable energy, does it still make sense to propose helpful ideas about how to decarbonize? Or is that simply an exercise in denial? Or worse, does it legitimate a project that’s fundamentally hostile to that goal, and should be approached instead as an enemy to be defeated?

One doesn’t have to write about policy. There are plenty of other kinds of politically oriented writing. You can write poems, or fiction. You can write about books. You can write about history — perhaps especially valuable right now, as long as one approaches the past on its own terms and not simply as a negative space for whatever one wants to say about the present. You can do journalism. You can do practical work — write speeches, press releases, technical reports — provided you are part of an organization.

Most obviously, for someone who might otherwise be doing policy writing, there’s descriptive work, trying to understand and explain what’s going on in a clear and precise way. In this moment, simply documenting what is happening is extremely valuable. As time goes on, we will also want to understand the consequences of what’s happening. If a big increase in tariffs happens, say, we’ll want to be able to describe what happens to prices and trade flows and production in the US. This kind of work doesn’t require one to be proposing anything, in the way that policy writing does.

But let’s say we do want to do policy writing. How should we approach it?

That’s what I started writing this post to try to clarify for myself. The post got quite long as I was writing it. I wrote down 10 points in an outline, and I’ve only gotten through four of them. So this should be the first of a couple posts. In this one I’m writing about general principles; hopefully in the next I’ll move toward more specific questions.

These thoughts, I should emphasize, are not intended as directives for anyone to follow. They’re preliminary notes rather than developed arguments. They’re an effort to put down on paper some things that I have been thinking about, as I think about how to be useful.

1. There’s only a very loose connection between policy substance and electoral outcomes. It’s tempting to argue that a better program will help the Dems or whoever win elections, but I think we need to accept that this isn’t something one can say with any confidence. I don’t think people voted for Trump because of his platform, whatever that is. I’m not sure that a better or stronger position on climate or immigration or labor would reliably help win elections. The problem isn’t that voters don’t want that; the problem, from my point of view, is the implicit model in which voters have well-established presences on the whole range of issues, and pick the candidate who best matches them. You can win an election as strong opponent of immigration (obviously); I think you can also win an election as a strong supporter of immigration. What matters is having some substantive position, and connecting it to a larger vision and persona and program. It’s not a question of checking the right item off on a list.

Conversely, I am not sure that better substantive outcomes are mainly a function of better electoral outcomes. (There’s some connection, of course.) To take the immigration example again, Trump’s biggest impact so far has not been anything he’s done (so far!), but the extent to which leading Democrats have adopted his position. It’s not so many years ago that some of the most prominent Republicans were supporting legislation to legalize millions of undocumented people. Here in New York, we have a lot of horrible people in charge – I’m not sure if, considering them strictly as individuals, there is much to prefer about Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams over Donald Trump. Nonetheless we do get some nice things here from time to time, because the environment they operate in is so different from the national one.

Admittedly, this doesn’t make a big difference right at this moment. I put it first mainly to make a negative point, that “how will this help win the next election” is not a very helpful question as a guide to writing about policy right now (or ever, perhaps, unless you are actually working for a campaign.)

2. Good ideas are worth arguing for on the merits. This is the converse of the previous point. The reason to argue for good ideas is because good ideas do not get adopted, or even come into being, without people arguing for them.

The reason to talk about welcoming migrants rather than driving them away, is because welcoming migrants is better than driving them away, not only for them but for the rest of us as well. Arguments for better regulation of food safety or power plant emissions will, over time, result in safer food and cleaner air. Defending the rights of trans people expands everyone’s freedom to exist in our bodies in different ways regardless of what sex we’re assigned. Again, I don’t think that one should count on any immediate electoral payoff from preferring good ideas to bad ones. The reason to argue for good ideas is that arguing for good ideas makes good ideas more likely to be adopted. But I do think that, over the long run, organizations and politicians that consistently hold positions on the merits will be more successful than ones that tack to the prevailing winds.

I feel like arguing for good ideas on the merits has gotten a bit undervalued lately. When, let’s say, Ezra Klein says that we should pay less attention to “the groups,” what he’s rejecting is the exact thing he himself used to do — assessing policy ideas on the merits. He’s saying that politicians should listen less to people who have devoted themselves to studying some problem and to coming up with ideas to deal with it.

There’s another reason to focus more on arguing for good ideas because they are good. It’s a useful form of self-discipline. It’s easy to get too clever, and think that something that is bad on the merits will lead to something better down the road, when those further steps are tenuous or uncertain or just assumed. It’s easy to get too angry, and base all your arguments on being against people who are wrong. Wrong they may be! But there are many ways to be wrong, and the opposite of a bad idea is often another bad idea. Focusing on making positive arguments for things you believe in is a way of avoiding these errors. Politics is always a mix of moving toward a distant destination and starting from where you are. But when your immediate surroundings are especially treacherous or confusing, it becomes more important to keep yourself oriented toward that ultimate goal.¹

3. Professionalism is worth defending. The disinterested desire to do one’s job well, and the norms and institutions that go with that, are, it seems to me, both essential to the routine functioning of society (more so than, for instance, markets) and an important base for socialist politics.

This is something I’ve thought for a while, and written about occasionally, but it seems especially relevant now. It’s not just that this administration is beginning with an all-out attack on professionals and professional standards in the federal government. (Although that is a central fact about this moment.) It’s also clear that for many of the billionaires who the administration answers to, the labor problem that concerns them most is the relative autonomy of their professional employees. Listen to this from Marc Andreesen:

Companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.

He is not talking about the cleaning staff here. He is talking about technicians, engineers, low-level managers who are using their relative independence and lack of replaceability to assert their own values and priorities, against those of their bosses. A bit later in the same interview, he complains that

you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. … all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.” But as a C.E.O., I can’t fire 80 percent of my team.

It’s very clear, when you read stuff like this, that complaints about “DEI,” “wokeness” and so on are in part complaints about workers who are not obedient, who reverse the natural order of things by berating the boss, and who can’t be replaced and who’ve been spoiled by a college education.

A purely negative, reactive criticism of these attacks on professional employees is not enough. What’s needed is a positive argument for the values of professionalism — of technical expertise, credentials, the autonomy of the professional to do their work according to their own standards. The post-Luigi controversy about insurance companies limiting anesthesia services was a nice teaching moment for these values. The backlash reflected people’s concerns about being denied care, but it also reflected a broader sense that certain decisions — like how long a patient needs anesthesia for — should be made by the domain expert who is doing the work.

Or think about strikes by teachers or journalists, which are motivated not only by demands for better pay — which god knows they deserve — but also by demands to be able to do their job properly. Something that’s very needed in this moment, I think, is a positive defense of why professional civil-service jobs (and their private sector equivalents) are important. Air traffic controllers, say, need job security not just for fairness, the way all workers do, but even more so because that’s what frees them to focus on doing on their work according to their own professional norms.

There are endless examples around us, which we normally don’t even think about. I watched a video with the kids the other night about postal codes, which talked about Ireland redesigned theirs from the ground up so a single 8-digit code specifies any mailbox in the country.² That didn’t happen because people voted for it, let alone because there were market incentives. It happened because the people with the responsibility for organizing the postal system, who had the relevant expertise, took their jobs seriously and were given the freedom to do them right.

Attacks on professional norms, it seems to me, are a central part of the Trump project, and defense of those norms are one of the central grounds on which that project is being resisted. When the California Department of Education announces its refusal to comply with Trump’s orders banning LGBTQ materials in the classroom, they are not doing so (just) out of self interest, or even out of concern for the kids it would harm. They are doing it because government is not a monarchy, there are rules that assign certain specific authorities to certain roles, and domain-specific decisions — say, what textbooks to use in the classroom — are assigned to the specialists in that domain. It’s these specifically professional norms that are the organizing principle for collective action here.

And of course there’s another reason why an affirmative defense of professionalism is important now. It’s what allows government to do all the other policies we might want it to. Bhaskar Sunkara has been urging socialists to reject “professional-class” politics and focus on working-class issues like Medicare for All. I also am a big supporter of universal public health insurance. But I am not sure how it is going operate without professionals or managers. I certainly see the appeal of “anti-PMC” politics, and there may be contexts where it is called for. But what we need right now is exactly the opposite. We need a program that moves from the defense of specific groups of professionals (like teachers or air traffic controllers) to a broader argument in favor of professional norms and civil service protections in general.

4. Our program needs to be argued for in a principled, positive way. Many of the actions this administration is taking will make the lives of many people much worse. But is that the best grounds to oppose them on? I am not sure it is. I think that in most cases, in both the short and long term, we are better off arguing for what we think is right, rather than that what they are doing is wrong.

Take the case of deportations. A negative critique can just as well be that he is deporting too few people as that he is deporting too many. The only solid footing from which one can oppose the administration’s actions on immigration is a clear principled position on what immigration policy should look like. The same goes for trade policy: 25% tariffs on Canada seems very crazy! But is the counterargument that free trade is the only correct policy, or is it that deglobalization should be a more cautious and gradual process, or is it that steep tariffs should be imposed on enemies but not on allies?

The answers to these questions are not easy, and not everyone on our side (for any reasonable value of “our”) is going to agree on them. But one way or another, opposition to this set of policies is going to require an affirmative case for a different set of policies. And that is going to require articulating some general principles about how society should be organized. If the Trump administration was wrong to put people on planes to Brazil and Colombia, does that mean that those people should have been allowed to stay in the USA? Does it mean they should be allowed to return? Does it mean that other people in those countries should also be allowed to travel to the US, and live and work here? I personally think the answers to these questions are Yes. You don’t have to agree with me. But you are not going to be able to oppose Trump’s actions towards migrants unless you have a substantively different immigration policy to offer in their place.

The problem — or perhaps the opportunity, depending on how you look at it — is that the state of things pre-Trump was not the application of any particular set of principles. It was just the way things had worked out. So any kind of principled argument against what’s happening now, is necessarily going to be an argument for something quite different from what we are used to. Take the very basic principle of one person, one vote. If you are going to oppose current efforts to roll back the franchise on the grounds that every person has an equal right to choose their government, then you are going to have to oppose other long-standing features of American politics, like the malapportioned Senate or felon disfranchisement or Democratic primaries that let some states vote before others, or limiting the franchise to US citizens. And this goes even more when we are talking about mobilizing people and not just making arguments. If you expect people to fight and bear costs and take risks, it is going to have to be for a positive program.

(A related problem, with immigration particularly, is that almost no one has any idea what the existing policy is. Under what conditions can someone from Mexico legally immigrate to the United States? Unless you are a specialist in immigration law, or you or someone close to you has been in that position, I would bet you don’t have any idea.)

This point is stronger now than it was before Trump was elected. “Trump will be a disaster, better to stick with the safe status quo” obviously was not a winning argument, but at least it was an argument. Now there is no status quo to stick with.³

That’s enough for now. I will put up a second post continuing this discussion in the next week, I hope.

ETA: Michael Kates on Bluesky helpfully points out the passage from the Republic I was trying to remember:

Glaucon and the rest entreated me by all means not to let the question drop, but to proceed in the investigation. They wanted to arrive at the truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly, about their relative advantages. I told them, what I really thought, that the enquiry would be of a serious nature, and would require very good eyes. Seeing then, I said, that we are no great wits, I think that we had better adopt a method which I may illustrate thus; suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance; and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place in which the letters were larger—if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser—this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.

How good an analogy this is for the relationship of long-run goals and immediate tactics I was talking about, you can judge for yourself.