Some people have some very disingenuous definitions of "radical" here in these comments.
Then again, they don't really know what Marxism, socialism, or liberalism are either, so they will be wasting everyone else's time with their not-worthwhile criticisms, too.
Capitalism is going to need better defenders than these folks.
One fact that makes it hard to buy his "neighborliness" idea is his setting up a hot line during the lockdown so neighbors could turn other neighbors in.
The problem with Walz's Covid hotline isn’t that it wasn't "neighborly"—it's that it veered into illiberal territory. This not a defense of Walz but an appeal for Walz's critics to more intelligently formulate their criticisms. Walz justified his hotline on the basis of helping vulnerable neighbors. At a time when compromising on social distance regulations was believed to be a death sentence for some, Walz set up a hotline specifically to incentivize rule-following. Again, not what I would've done, and in fact I criticize Walz over it, but the idea that it's the antithesis of neighborliness badly misses the mark.
Furthermore, this is yet another occasion in which you side with people who utterly repudiate the very thing you're nitpicking Democrats for doing. Trump and Vance are as far as you can get from promoting neighborliness, from embodying the neighborliness ideal, within our multicultural democracy—yet because Walz set up a Covid hotline that makes him un-neighborly all the while his rivals just spent an entire news cycle turning neighbor against neighbor in Springfield, Ohio, and who will, if they win the election, likely empower an immigration policy advisor who says he wants to deport naturalized citizens. If you care about neighborliness, it seems the latter stuff should bother you a whole lot more.
I'm not sure how you got the idea that I side with Trump and Vance. I don't. I think they're horrible. And, in fact, I have denounced their disgusting ideas on Springfield Haitians on this very site.
And Trump's and Vance's views on immigration DO bother me a lot more. I was challenging the neighborliness idea, nothing more, nothing less.
I got the idea that you side with Trump from your statement earlier this summer, published on your own site, in which you said: "I have come to favor Trump over Biden in recent months." And from the reflexively anti-anti-Trump nature of your replies to our articles.
The allure of anti-anti-Trumpism, for people like you, is the idea that you can safely continue to criticize his rivals exclusively, or near-exclusively, without jeopardizing your intellectual credibility by being one of those unbecoming Trump enthusiasts. You make sure to say "I don't like Trump" and throw in a critique of him in every tenth post or so, but your main interest is in arguing that Trump's rivals are just as bad as Trump, if not worse. Unfortunately for its practitioners, an anti-anti-Trumpism that *doesn't* significantly downplay Trump's awfulness is impossible. It invariably requires exaggerating the less worrisome faults of his rivals, and minimizing the glaring, democracy-corroding actions of Trump and his movement. That's what you routinely do, as when you indefensibly claimed that Jan. 6 wasn't an insurrection. It's soft apologia.
Yes, you side with Trump and Vance. You don't want to put it in those terms, but that's an implication of your words and actions.
And also ignored the rest of Trump's efforts to overturn the election result prior to instigating the coup attempt. My depth of disappointment in David is profound, which is really sad given my very high regard for him previously.
I also object to the hotline. Covid policies aren’t something I wade into much because I tend to think a lot of confused and bad policy was made due to it being a time of heightened contingency and poor information.
LOL! I have a feeling there is just never going to be enough evidence if the mountains we have is not sufficient. Too many anti-woke libertarians simply can't weight the threat of an actual authoritarian appropriately as Steve Horwitz pointed out in 2017. Trump has become even worse since then, trying to steal and election, leading an insurrection, talking like a fascist on immigration, but nothing seems to move the needle for them. https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2017/01/liberalism-in-the-balance/
Whereas in my case, although I think you overstate on some of these, e.g., insurrection, I find that there is evidence against Trump and so it does move the needle. The question is, "Does it move the needle enough?" I'm not there yet.
Neighborliness? Most of the things he considers neighborliness require someone with a gun to take from you and give to your Neighbors. If my neighbor show up and said I want you to pay for my time off and my kids breakfast and lunch, I would think it rude but I would have a choice. Waltz is sending someone with a gun and saying you will pay or else we will take everything from you. How Neighborly?
If Walz isn't radical, why did he appoint a leftist who explicitly called for the "overthrow" of America to develop Minnesota's ethnic studies curriculum: https://archive.ph/volVp
If Walz isn't radical, why did he adopt policies that made Minnesota poorer? As Minnesota think-tank president John Hinderaker points out at the Powerline blog, "“Walz has a terrible record as governor….Under Walz, Minnesota became a high-crime state for the first time ever….Under Walz, student achievement tumbled even as spending on schools skyrocketed….Under Walz, per capita GDP in Minnesota fell below the national average, for the first time ever…Under Walz, increases in energy costs have far outstripped the national average.”
There's something pathetic about this Unpopulist blog or whatever it is. The owner seems to want to retreat from the nominal libertarianism that stains her brand on the left. So she commissions puffery like this and then shrieks at a rather mild critic in her comments section. But former libertarian gigs are rare, and Will Wilkinson is near the front of the line for them. This blog will have to wait its turn.
Very dumb comment. This is not a libertarian publication, so there is nothing we are trying to "retreat" from. We are an analysis and commentary operation putting out essays, podcasts, and videos, and none of it is in pursuit of a "former libertarian gig" anywhere else. Bringing up Will Wilkinson out of nowhere is super weird.
Of course it isn’t libertarian, smart boy. That’s why I said “former libertarian.” The adjective plays a critical role that you overlooked. I’m afraid your leader’s brand is indeed stained by her former associations with libertarianism, and you will have to retreat from that; and you are trying to do so by puffing Tim Walz as neighborly. Nobody cares about your sad little Substack, though, so it won’t work. That’s why I am unsubscribing. Enjoy your one like.
While I have libertarian-flavored views on some issues, I’ve never been a libertarian. So my piece isn’t the pov of a former one.
When asked to write about Walz, I settled on his idea of neighborliness as one of the most interesting things about him. But I didn’t set out to fluff him.
Biden didn't step down. He was pushed out after they could no longer cover up the fact that he was senile, and now he's almost completely disappeared from the public eye.
Waltz is strange as they come. And not in a good way. He's creepy.
It's great that neither of your touched on the fact that Biden was pushed out, that there was no primary, that they Left covered up his senility for 4 years, covered up the fact that he was incapable of actually running the country and that he's almost completely disappeared from the public eye.
Walz's Joy is really what's most important to the Left these days. Good job.
The only people who don't care about a proper democratic procedure are the people like you, who are willing to win at any cost even if it means subverting democracy.
Perhaps it would be more persuasive if you gave any factual data supporting that Biden is senile now and certainly over the last four years. Did you not see his last State of the Union speech where he was able to spontaneously scorch Republicans heckling him. He is old no doubt but senile is hardly true.
He delivered a solid speech at the UN on Wednesday as well. At least he didn't have the international community snickering out loud as Trump did before the UN.
He has "disappeared" first because he is busy Presidenting and while he has campaigned some for Harris it is now HER campaign and he has to get out of the way.
When you look at his BIPARTISAN legislative successes it is clear that he has been more than able to steer the country in positive directions. Presidents don't run countries they head governments that work for the people.
We all understand that you guys are bitter that he dropped out of the race because Trump was winning against him and now he's being hit with a different, stronger and younger opponent.
We would gladly trade Biden's senility with old and tired Trump's prefrontal dementia any day. Even if he were senile because he has dignity you could take him out in public whereas demented Trump is the weird and creepy uncle you are embarrassed to be seen with in public.
On Wednesday Biden told the assembly of world leaders that “some things are more important than staying in power.”
“It’s your people that matter the most,” the president added.
Such ideas that are simply alien to someone a criminally corrupt as Trump who risked creating a constitutional crisis in an attempt to hold onto power.
Biden can't walk a straight line and trips over his own feet at times, has no idea where he is some days, can't speak clear sentences and the entire reason he was pushed out of running for the Presidency again was because it was on full display for the world during the Trump debate and that they could no longer hide it...and you're arguing that he's not cognitively compromised?
Wow. Unreal. It's pointless having a discussion with someone who can't even admit the obvious truth. Ridiculous.
I do see a run of the mill, “small a” authoritarian, prairie populist politician, who tells small and stupid lies with little compunction. I see someone I want as far away from serious power as possible, which goes double for his running mate.
If someone considers Walz a radical, they are telling on themselves.
Maybe one day people can treat word "radical" with the same eye roll some use when the word "racist" comes up.
Some people have some very disingenuous definitions of "radical" here in these comments.
Then again, they don't really know what Marxism, socialism, or liberalism are either, so they will be wasting everyone else's time with their not-worthwhile criticisms, too.
Capitalism is going to need better defenders than these folks.
One fact that makes it hard to buy his "neighborliness" idea is his setting up a hot line during the lockdown so neighbors could turn other neighbors in.
This is conceptually confused.
The problem with Walz's Covid hotline isn’t that it wasn't "neighborly"—it's that it veered into illiberal territory. This not a defense of Walz but an appeal for Walz's critics to more intelligently formulate their criticisms. Walz justified his hotline on the basis of helping vulnerable neighbors. At a time when compromising on social distance regulations was believed to be a death sentence for some, Walz set up a hotline specifically to incentivize rule-following. Again, not what I would've done, and in fact I criticize Walz over it, but the idea that it's the antithesis of neighborliness badly misses the mark.
Furthermore, this is yet another occasion in which you side with people who utterly repudiate the very thing you're nitpicking Democrats for doing. Trump and Vance are as far as you can get from promoting neighborliness, from embodying the neighborliness ideal, within our multicultural democracy—yet because Walz set up a Covid hotline that makes him un-neighborly all the while his rivals just spent an entire news cycle turning neighbor against neighbor in Springfield, Ohio, and who will, if they win the election, likely empower an immigration policy advisor who says he wants to deport naturalized citizens. If you care about neighborliness, it seems the latter stuff should bother you a whole lot more.
I'm not sure how you got the idea that I side with Trump and Vance. I don't. I think they're horrible. And, in fact, I have denounced their disgusting ideas on Springfield Haitians on this very site.
And Trump's and Vance's views on immigration DO bother me a lot more. I was challenging the neighborliness idea, nothing more, nothing less.
I got the idea that you side with Trump from your statement earlier this summer, published on your own site, in which you said: "I have come to favor Trump over Biden in recent months." And from the reflexively anti-anti-Trump nature of your replies to our articles.
The allure of anti-anti-Trumpism, for people like you, is the idea that you can safely continue to criticize his rivals exclusively, or near-exclusively, without jeopardizing your intellectual credibility by being one of those unbecoming Trump enthusiasts. You make sure to say "I don't like Trump" and throw in a critique of him in every tenth post or so, but your main interest is in arguing that Trump's rivals are just as bad as Trump, if not worse. Unfortunately for its practitioners, an anti-anti-Trumpism that *doesn't* significantly downplay Trump's awfulness is impossible. It invariably requires exaggerating the less worrisome faults of his rivals, and minimizing the glaring, democracy-corroding actions of Trump and his movement. That's what you routinely do, as when you indefensibly claimed that Jan. 6 wasn't an insurrection. It's soft apologia.
Yes, you side with Trump and Vance. You don't want to put it in those terms, but that's an implication of your words and actions.
And also ignored the rest of Trump's efforts to overturn the election result prior to instigating the coup attempt. My depth of disappointment in David is profound, which is really sad given my very high regard for him previously.
Perhaps then at least now you'll be willing to revise your assessment that Trump/Vance pose a lesser threat to liberal democracy than Harris/Walz, which cheerfully ignored the worst things about the former, as Dan Shapiro noted: https://open.substack.com/pub/prosociallibertarians/p/getting-it-wrong?r=6jqoy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm always willing to revise. I've not seen enough evidence to cause me to revise.
I also object to the hotline. Covid policies aren’t something I wade into much because I tend to think a lot of confused and bad policy was made due to it being a time of heightened contingency and poor information.
I'm glad we agree on that.
LOL! I have a feeling there is just never going to be enough evidence if the mountains we have is not sufficient. Too many anti-woke libertarians simply can't weight the threat of an actual authoritarian appropriately as Steve Horwitz pointed out in 2017. Trump has become even worse since then, trying to steal and election, leading an insurrection, talking like a fascist on immigration, but nothing seems to move the needle for them. https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2017/01/liberalism-in-the-balance/
Whereas in my case, although I think you overstate on some of these, e.g., insurrection, I find that there is evidence against Trump and so it does move the needle. The question is, "Does it move the needle enough?" I'm not there yet.
Neighborliness? Most of the things he considers neighborliness require someone with a gun to take from you and give to your Neighbors. If my neighbor show up and said I want you to pay for my time off and my kids breakfast and lunch, I would think it rude but I would have a choice. Waltz is sending someone with a gun and saying you will pay or else we will take everything from you. How Neighborly?
If Walz isn't radical, why did he appoint a leftist who explicitly called for the "overthrow" of America to develop Minnesota's ethnic studies curriculum: https://archive.ph/volVp
If Walz isn't radical, why did he adopt policies that made Minnesota poorer? As Minnesota think-tank president John Hinderaker points out at the Powerline blog, "“Walz has a terrible record as governor….Under Walz, Minnesota became a high-crime state for the first time ever….Under Walz, student achievement tumbled even as spending on schools skyrocketed….Under Walz, per capita GDP in Minnesota fell below the national average, for the first time ever…Under Walz, increases in energy costs have far outstripped the national average.”
There's something pathetic about this Unpopulist blog or whatever it is. The owner seems to want to retreat from the nominal libertarianism that stains her brand on the left. So she commissions puffery like this and then shrieks at a rather mild critic in her comments section. But former libertarian gigs are rare, and Will Wilkinson is near the front of the line for them. This blog will have to wait its turn.
Very dumb comment. This is not a libertarian publication, so there is nothing we are trying to "retreat" from. We are an analysis and commentary operation putting out essays, podcasts, and videos, and none of it is in pursuit of a "former libertarian gig" anywhere else. Bringing up Will Wilkinson out of nowhere is super weird.
Of course it isn’t libertarian, smart boy. That’s why I said “former libertarian.” The adjective plays a critical role that you overlooked. I’m afraid your leader’s brand is indeed stained by her former associations with libertarianism, and you will have to retreat from that; and you are trying to do so by puffing Tim Walz as neighborly. Nobody cares about your sad little Substack, though, so it won’t work. That’s why I am unsubscribing. Enjoy your one like.
While I have libertarian-flavored views on some issues, I’ve never been a libertarian. So my piece isn’t the pov of a former one.
When asked to write about Walz, I settled on his idea of neighborliness as one of the most interesting things about him. But I didn’t set out to fluff him.
Biden didn't step down. He was pushed out after they could no longer cover up the fact that he was senile, and now he's almost completely disappeared from the public eye.
Waltz is strange as they come. And not in a good way. He's creepy.
What's strange or creepy about him?
If Walz is creepy, and Trump and Vance are not, we must be living on different planets. Really. Alternative facts and alternate realities……..indeed…….
It's great that neither of your touched on the fact that Biden was pushed out, that there was no primary, that they Left covered up his senility for 4 years, covered up the fact that he was incapable of actually running the country and that he's almost completely disappeared from the public eye.
Walz's Joy is really what's most important to the Left these days. Good job.
We disagree about all of that, but mainly didn’t talk about Biden because the piece isn’t about him. Can’t focus on every topic.
The only people who care about there not being a primary are people like you, who were never going to vote for a Democrat in the first place.
The only people who don't care about a proper democratic procedure are the people like you, who are willing to win at any cost even if it means subverting democracy.
Yeah? Then who were you going to vote for in the primary?
By the way, you don’t have to vote for Kamala. You have options.
Why on EARTH would it matter who someone votes for, for them to want a proper democratic procedure to be upheld?
Perhaps it would be more persuasive if you gave any factual data supporting that Biden is senile now and certainly over the last four years. Did you not see his last State of the Union speech where he was able to spontaneously scorch Republicans heckling him. He is old no doubt but senile is hardly true.
He delivered a solid speech at the UN on Wednesday as well. At least he didn't have the international community snickering out loud as Trump did before the UN.
He has "disappeared" first because he is busy Presidenting and while he has campaigned some for Harris it is now HER campaign and he has to get out of the way.
When you look at his BIPARTISAN legislative successes it is clear that he has been more than able to steer the country in positive directions. Presidents don't run countries they head governments that work for the people.
We all understand that you guys are bitter that he dropped out of the race because Trump was winning against him and now he's being hit with a different, stronger and younger opponent.
We would gladly trade Biden's senility with old and tired Trump's prefrontal dementia any day. Even if he were senile because he has dignity you could take him out in public whereas demented Trump is the weird and creepy uncle you are embarrassed to be seen with in public.
On Wednesday Biden told the assembly of world leaders that “some things are more important than staying in power.”
“It’s your people that matter the most,” the president added.
Such ideas that are simply alien to someone a criminally corrupt as Trump who risked creating a constitutional crisis in an attempt to hold onto power.
Biden can't walk a straight line and trips over his own feet at times, has no idea where he is some days, can't speak clear sentences and the entire reason he was pushed out of running for the Presidency again was because it was on full display for the world during the Trump debate and that they could no longer hide it...and you're arguing that he's not cognitively compromised?
Wow. Unreal. It's pointless having a discussion with someone who can't even admit the obvious truth. Ridiculous.
I don’t see creepy.
I do see a run of the mill, “small a” authoritarian, prairie populist politician, who tells small and stupid lies with little compunction. I see someone I want as far away from serious power as possible, which goes double for his running mate.
Biden spoke to the UN yesterday. You are brainwashed and Trump is not senile right? You are sad…. I quit now……
Why does a criticism of the obvious on the Left mean that someone is immediately an enemy? That only happens in cults.