As I’ve said here before, Matt Yglesias’s status as both uber-aggressive YIMBY radical and cautious incrementalist popularist makes no sense. Popularism, for the unfamiliar, is the idea that politically-minded folks should only ever publicly pursue political ideas that are already popular and avoid any association with unpopular ideas, which imperil electoral gains. They have some sort of weak waves in the direction of how to accomplish things that are necessary but aren’t currently popular, but it’s all quite vague, and their hearts clearly aren’t in it. As has been pointed out many times, in 1955 the popularists would absolutely have been telling the civil rights movement to pull back and get serious and accept that the public believes that separate can be equal, so simmer down. As I’ve said before, this is always a stalking horse for what popularists actually want - they advocate for neoliberal incrementalist politics because that’s what they substantively believe in, with the tactical argument a fig leaf to protect those preferences. Besides it’s entirely empirically unproven that a popularist approach even accomplishes more electorally. (If Martin O’Malley had been the best candidate, he would have… won the presidential election.)
But forget about popularism qua popularism for a second - the combination of popularism and Yglesias’s status as king YIMBY makes absolutely no sense. For one thing, popularists tend to advocate for non-confrontational and respectful engagement, and Yglesias’s whole shtick is to act like a condescending choch to everyone who disagrees with him. (I do too, but I don’t go around calling myself a guru of disciplined political messaging.) More to the point, a) YIMBYs are a species of centrist neoliberals who enjoy the opportunity to finally be the passionate activists for once, and b) they do not act like popularists in any way, shape, or form, pursuing total rhetorical and policy maximalism at all times and treating anyone who asks any challenging questions as corrupt idiots. It’s remarkable, to me, how Yglesias has handled the cognitive dissonance here - he mocks and derides activists as a class, on Twitter, but there is no group that better exemplifies what people mean when they talk about social media activists than the YIMBYs. Look at Yglesias’s own feed! He’s dismissive, strident, patronizing, moralizing, and uncompromising when it comes to housing. So why are those same attributes unforgivable among climate activists? Could it be because (just spitballing here) Yglesias believes in the substance of YIMBYism and disagrees on substance with the climate activists?
Yglesias says we should only pursue popular policies. But he embraces extremist views on housing. He’s said many times that he believes that there should be literally no local control in housing, that local communities should have absolutely no input in zoning or regulatory decisions about their own neighborhoods. (This sort of thinking is why there are so many NIMBYs of color, a large and influential group that the YIMBYs strenuously insist do not exist.) Please, tell me - how is resistance to local control in total and in principle a “popularist” standpoint? Is that not the exact definition of an inflexible and extremist belief, of the type that popularists say smart political movements should avoid at all costs? Embracing popularism as a strategy and the total demolition of local control as a goal makes no sense at all.
It makes no sense because, while I largely disagree with them, the public loves single-family housing, exclusionary zoning, suburbs, and car-based lifestyle. You could pull from a raft of evidence supporting this contention, but you don’t need any indicator other than the price of single-family suburban houses in exclusionary zoning. It keeps going up, and up, and up…. That’s demand, baby. That’s popularity. And we know that a lot of people who rent would prefer to own single-family houses, while few who own single-family houses would prefer to rent, because if you own a house you can sell it and use the money to rent. So, I ask you: how is opposition to single-family under-exclusionary-zoning detached suburban housing a “popularist” concern? Maybe Yglesias could square this circle, but he never tries, instead simply doing the YIMBY thing of dismissing anyone who pokes and prods at the foundations of their thinking as a rich white landowner. Do you know why we have the zoning ordinances we do just about everywhere in this country? Because they are popular. Do you know why it’s so hard to amend those ordinances? Because they are popular.
(Hey urbanist YouTube! Do you know why we build so many of those stroads you all hate so much? Because they are popular. People love shopping and they love their cars and they absolutely love a “built environment” that enables them to go shopping with as little walking as possible. It’s hard to get better biking infrastructure in this country because most people don’t want to bike anywhere, they’d like to drive everywhere. You are weird, when it comes to this preference. It’s unfortunate that that’s true but it’s true.)
Of course, Yglesias’s usual maneuver is to say that what he says on Twitter is just shit-talking that doesn’t amount to actual political advocacy. This too is very strange, as he constantly finds things he doesn’t like being said by “activists” on Twitter and then treats them as though they are very much actual political advocacy. What explains the difference? It certainly seems that it’s just a matter of personal convenience - Yglesias wants to be able to just spout off about whatever political ideas flit into his mind at any given time, including ones that are very extreme in comparison to what the country actually believes, but he wants the “activists” he disagrees with to practice perfect message discipline at all times. That’s not helpful. And this, lordy, this is funny.
… really? Really? You wrote a 300-page book for Penguin Random House as a minor lark that meant nothing to you? But if some climate activist tweets that we should leave oil in the ground, that’s indicative of their entire approach to politics, a mark of deep unseriousness? If a book that you spend months writing and then do publicity for is just something more interesting to talk about, then where does advocacy end and jus’ talking begin? I don’t know. It all seems very arbitrary. New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang is here reacting to a piece about a tired effort to get Democrats to win by pulling the party (wait for it, you’ll never guess) to the right. The patently false pretense is that Sunrise activists are running Joe Biden’s election strategy, or something, and that he’s struggling because he’s in favor of forcing the country to be vegan and keeps turning up to campaign stops wearing a keffiyeh. I would suggest that it’s because he’s a million years old and voters stupidly think the economy is bad. Either way, though, you’ve got this friction: who is doing politics, and who gets to just shoot the shit?
The funny thing is that, if the Times is to be believed, Yglesias invented the concept of the Pundit’s Fallacy: “The pundit’s fallacy is that belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.” Well, Yglesias is a center-left guy, emphasis on the center, and he always thinks Democrats should move in a more centrist direction. He loves Barack Obama and wants to marry him and doodles on his notebook little pictures of him and Barack Obama with hearts around them and, surprise surprise, he thinks the Democrats should be more like Barack Obama. His opinions about politics and his opinions about substance are one and the same! Shouldn’t a centrist guy who invented the Pundit’s Fallacy be saying, like, “Well I don’t personally agree with it, but I think Biden should use an executive order to start paying out generous reparations for slavery, right away”?
I said this about popularism two years ago: it’s a disagreement about political values masquerading as a disagreement about political strategy. And it’s the same thing with so much of this shit - everybody wants to affect some dispassionate stance of pure political gamesmanship that exists separate from the grubby business of wanting things politically. But it turns out no one can do that. I don’t blame Yglesias for wanting to turn over irrevocable control of all land use questions to private equity, that’s his business. But it’s a really bad fit with his self-styled position as Most Reasonable Popularist Guy in Chief.
Hang on a minute. If the high and increasing pricing of single family sprawl and stroads reveals public demand for them, then the even higher and even more rapidly increasing pricing of dense walkability in superstar cities reveals even higher public demand for that, no?
I feel like housing issues are so sensitive to framing concerns that you probably can advocate for yimbyist concerns in a way that’s consistent with popularism.
I feel like there’s a part of popularism that’s just envy for the way the business lobbying community doesn’t have to say the unpopular thing to get it on the agenda they can just vote for Republicans and know it’ll get done usually quietly.