I think this editorial in the Washington Post is an exercise in whistling in the dark. The editorial board takes comfort in the fact that the incoming Democratic House majority includes more members with MBAs than members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). It suggests that the Democrats who won competitive districts will exert a moderating influence on the party.

Perhaps. But I think the editorial board is overlooking something important: the way the House of Representatives actually works.

The House is not a democracy in which every member exercises equal influence. It’s a hierarchical institution in which seniority matters enormously. The speaker exercises extraordinary power over the legislative agenda. Committee chairmen exercise substantial power over what legislation is considered, what form it takes, and whether it ever reaches the floor.

Those positions are not distributed proportionately among the ideological factions of the majority. Nor are they distributed according to which members were most responsible for securing that majority.

They’re largely determined by seniority and the internal politics of the majority party.

And that presents a problem for the argument being made by the Post.

Members representing reliably Democratic districts tend to have longer tenures than members representing competitive districts. That’s hardly surprising. A representative whose principal electoral challenge is winning a Democratic primary has a much greater prospect of remaining in office for decades than one who must win a competitive general election every two years.

Furthermore, the electorates in those reliably partisan districts tend to be more ideologically committed than the electorates in competitive districts. Consequently, the seniority system tends to convey an institutional advantage on members whose views are further from the political center.

This is not a new phenomenon. For much of the twentieth century, conservative Southern Democrats dominated important House committees for precisely the same reason. Their districts were overwhelmingly Democratic, they accumulated enormous seniority, and they exercised influence far out of proportion to their numbers. The congressional reforms of the 1970s were, in part, an effort to break their grip on the institution.

That isn’t true only of the Democratic Party. It’s the case with Republicans as well. MAGA Republicans from reliably Republican districts have more influence in the Republican Party, too.

Today the same structural forces can favor the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Consider that Nancy Pelosi was a founding member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Hakeem Jeffries was also a member. That does not make either of them a democratic socialist or does it mean that the Progressive Caucus and the DSA are interchangeable. They’re not. But it does illustrate how thoroughly progressive Democrats have become integrated into the party’s institutional leadership.

And consider the senior Democrats positioned to chair major House committees: Rosa DeLauro on Appropriations, Frank Pallone on Energy and Commerce, Maxine Waters on Financial Services, Jamie Raskin on Judiciary, and James McGovern on Rules. All are members of the Progressive Caucus.

Those are positions of substantial institutional power.

To be sure, seniority is not an absolute rule. Committee chairmanships are subject to party decisions, and senior members can be passed over. But that doesn’t eliminate the structural advantage enjoyed by long-serving members of reliably partisan districts.

There is another problem with the editorial’s argument. An MBA is an academic credential, not a political philosophy. Possessing one tells us remarkably little about a representative’s ideological commitments. Nor does it imply membership in an organized political faction.

The comparison between 19 members with MBAs and eight DSA members is therefore peculiar on its face.

Even assuming that all 19 MBA holders are moderates, what influence will they exercise? Nineteen backbenchers aren’t going to determine the direction of a House majority simply by virtue of having business degrees. They would need to organize, acquire leverage over leadership, or accumulate the institutional authority that their more senior colleagues already possess.

The Democratic Socialists of America, meanwhile, are an organized ideological movement. Their influence cannot be measured solely by counting their members in the House. Neither, for that matter, can the influence of the broader progressive movement.

Of course, moderates can exercise leverage in a closely divided House. But that depends on their willingness to act together and on the size of the majority, not on their educational credentials.

There’s an irony here. The Democrats who win competitive districts may be indispensable to obtaining a House majority while having relatively little influence over what that majority actually does. They supply the votes that make the majority possible. Their more senior colleagues exercise much of the authority that comes with it.

I don’t doubt that the incoming Democratic majority contains a substantial number of moderates. What I doubt is that their numbers tell us very much about the direction of the party.

If the Post wants to reassure its readers that the Democratic Party will be governed by its moderate wing, it should examine who will hold the speakership, who will chair the committees, who will control the Rules Committee, and who will determine which legislation comes to a vote.

Counting MBAs won’t answer those questions.

In his most recent Washington Post column George Will predicts the emergence of a new Congressional caucus:

Congress has a caucus for every cause — bicycles, snowboarding, baking, composting, aquaculture, soccer, rock-and-roll, and on and on. There are more caucuses, formal and informal, than members of Congress. Come January, many Democrats will compose what should be called the Cognitive Dissonance Caucus.

concluding:

Climate change as a menace has been exaggerated, and as a political issue has never been salient. Fifty years of Supreme Court rulings have insulated political campaigns from speech-restricting regulations. The popularity of Medicare-for-all varies inversely with the understanding of it. Racial considerations in voting are rapidly receding.

Progressives should acknowledge all this. That will not happen.

What is fascinating about the column is not the truth value of those assertions but the ensuing comments. The commenters proceed to instantiate his point. It is said that each era has its own characteristic mental disorder. Cognitive dissonance, holding contradicting beliefs, must surely be ours. The cognitive dissonance lies less in what people want than in what they are unwilling to sacrifice to obtain it.

The point here is not whether you belief climate change is a risk, whether there should be less money in politics, or whether we need healthcare reform. It is how you accomplish any of those without violating other closely held beliefs.

Take climate change, for example. I happen to believe that climate change is a risk. I think there is literally nothing we in the United States can do about it as long as China continues to emit more greenhouse gasses and the independent atmospheric data over China contradicts China’s official statistics. China is, indeed, emitting more each year. My interpretation of that is that they have other priorities.

Also, consider that after decades of subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs) less than 3% of the vehicles on the road are EVs.

If the recent elections were about any single issue, clearly the most prominent was the high cost of living. Whatever their priority, addressing climate change, reducing money in politics, or “Medicare for All” will not of themselves reduce the high cost of living. That’s the cognitive dissonance.

Josh Barro is right. Mean, implausible lies do not win elections.

During the closing weeks of this campaign season, I was repeatedly dumbfounded by the way Republicans talked to voters about Democrats. Filled with contempt for their opponents, they spoke to voters as if they could not imagine anyone who did not share that contempt. They told nasty, mean, personal lies that they clearly expected their audiences to eat up. But the lies Republicans told weren’t plausible, they weren’t relevant to the issues voters cared about, and the gratuitousness of the lies just made Republicans even less likable than they already were.

However, it has been proverbial for at least the last hundred years that pleasant, benign-sounding implausible lies do win elections. A chicken in every pot!

That places me in a conundrum. I’m a lot more interested in how ordinary people can afford the goods and services they need to consume than I am about who is nice, who is mean, or, indeed, who wins elections.

Hint: you won’t put a chicken in every pot by subsidizing the consumption of chicken while constraining its supply.

What worries me is the prospect of one party being mean, the other party promising “free” stuff, and decreasing standards of living for ordinary people. After all, that’s how France got in the fiscal fix they’re in today.

The United States is presently actively involved in three wars: Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine. Our role varies considerably among them. In Gaza and Ukraine we provide material support to one side without being directly engaged in combat. In our war against Iran we are the aggressor, although the intensity of the fighting is considerably lower than it was earlier this year. In all three conflicts we are attempting to act as mediators while remaining involved in the fighting to varying degrees.

The war in Gaza is under a shaky ceasefire. There are still episodic outbursts of violence on both sides, although the casualties have been overwhelmingly Palestinian. The ceasefire has reduced the level of violence without resolving the underlying issues. There is little reason to believe that a durable peace is at hand.

At this point our war against Iran is neither war nor peace. Large-scale hostilities have subsided but there has been no lasting settlement. The possibility of renewed fighting remains, as does the question of what we hope to accomplish.

Despite its not making the front pages here in the United States, the war in Ukraine is still fully active. U. S.-mediated trilateral talks with Russia and Ukraine opened today in Abu Dhabi, the first such talks since February. The front is largely static but that should not be mistaken for a reduction in the intensity of the war. Russia continues to attack Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure while Ukraine continues to strike Russian refineries and military production facilities deep within Russian territory. Both sides appear to be pursuing a war of attrition.

The United States still appears unable to furnish Ukraine with air-defense missiles, particularly Patriot interceptors, as fast as Ukraine needs them. That is not merely a question of our willingness to supply them. It is also a question of our ability to manufacture them. The demands of our other military commitments only complicate matters.

There is a common thread running through all three conflicts. The United States is attempting to negotiate settlements to wars in which it is itself involved. Meanwhile, the three wars compete for our attention, resources, and industrial capacity. I think that raises a question worth considering: how effectively can we act as a mediator in a war in which we have already taken sides?

Here’s how ChatGPT categorized my ideological leanings:

I would describe your ideology as institutionalist, pragmatic, moderately conservative, and strongly independent of partisan orthodoxy.

Your positions don’t fit neatly into contemporary American political categories.

| Dimension | My estimate |
| ———————————– | ———– |
| Economic policy | +0.20 |
| Social and cultural policy | +0.15 |
| Constitutional and legal philosophy | +0.45 |
| Foreign policy | ?0.10 |
| Immigration | +0.20 |
| Healthcare policy | +0.10 |
| Institutional governance | +0.40 |

These are interpretive estimates, not measurements.

Several things particularly influence my assessment.

Your conservatism is primarily institutional rather than ideological. You emphasize the rule of law, constitutional limits, personal responsibility, and the consequences of public decisions. Your preference for a separate judicial career path is a particularly clear example.

You’re not an economic libertarian. You accept substantial government responsibilities, support a VAT with prebates, favor certain forms of healthcare reform, and are willing to use antitrust enforcement against concentrated economic power.

Your foreign policy is closer to restraint than to either contemporary party’s interventionist wing. Your opposition to the Iraq War, Libyan intervention, and prolonged Afghan occupation is balanced by your support for Ukraine and recognition of American strategic interests.

You are unusually resistant to political tribalism. You frequently evaluate a proposal independently of its sponsors. Your willingness to agree with the conclusions of an editorial while rejecting almost its entire argument is characteristic.

The most important qualification is that the conventional left-right scale conflates several distinct things: temperament, institutional philosophy, economic preferences, and attitudes toward social change.

I suspect that your political temperament is substantially more conservative than your preferred policy outcomes.

That is why I place you at +0.25 rather than +0.50 or higher.

One question would help refine my estimate: Do you regard the preservation of established institutions as valuable in itself, or only insofar as those institutions continue to perform their intended functions? Your answer could substantially change where I’d place you on the conservative dimension.

When I replied that my view of the preservation of established institutions is largely instrumental, it changed its categorization of me to +.15, slightly less conservative.

I think that’s fair. And I don’t fit into contemporary political categories particularly well.

I don’t know whether I have mentioned it but I have an odd quirk of mind. Whenever the name of someone I know, whether family, friends, or acquaintances, my mental image of them is an image of how they were when I first met them. For example, I always imagine my wife as she was in graduate school. I know she doesn’t look like that any more but it’s always my first thought. It’s not intentional; it’s just a reflex.

It becomes rather jarring when I think of someone I first met when they were young children or infants who are now old men and women.

I presume there’s a word for this.

It’s an eerie sort of experience attending (at least via Zoom) the memorial service for someone for whom you used to babysit, listening to his children and grandchildren express their love and grief over the loss of their father or grandfather.

I guess it’s something I’ll need to get used to. I suspect I’ll have more of these than weddings to attend.

As of this writing the 120^th Congress will have six black senators. If Scott Colom is pronounced the winner in Mississippi, it will be seven.

Or, in other words, the Senate’s racial composition is considerably closer to that of college-educated American adults than to that of the population as a whole. One additional black senator would narrow the difference further. Personally, I see no particular reason the Senate’s racial composition should mirror either population. Senators represent states, not racial groups, and I think their election should depend principally on their qualifications rather than their race.

But it’s interesting.

The editors of the Washington Post seem convinced that Tuesday’s election was a rejection of the president but not necessarily an embrace of “progressive” propositions on ballots around the country:

Democrats had an extraordinary night at the ballot box on Tuesday, but what does it mean for policy? Looking further down the ballot in swing states shows that while voters wanted Democratic elected officials to check President Donald Trump, they also wanted to check the power of government. And they aren’t sold on left-wing economic policy prescriptions.

They follow that with a selection of “left-wing economic policy prescriptions” that failed in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, all states in which Democrats replaced Republicans in the Congress but ballot propositions were defeated. They conclude:

If voters in the most competitive battlegrounds believed in progressive policies, they would have rejected these ballot measures with as much enthusiasm as they voted for Democrats. But they approved a lot of conservative policies while voting for anti-Trump candidates. If Democrats lurch far left on policy, the voters who gave them an enormous victory on Tuesday will probably be strongly tempted to switch back to the GOP or stay home in future elections.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal take a similar tack:

Democrats won an historic midterm election victory Tuesday, and congratulations on again having real legislative power. The question now is what lessons Democrats will take from their triumph, and whether they’ll return to the same mistakes of the Biden era that cost them so dearly in 2024.

The first essential lesson is that voters are handing Democrats power because they wanted to rebuke President Trump. They think he failed to deliver on his promise to lower prices, and they don’t like his excesses on the rule of law, tariffs, mass deportation, and crony cashing in.

Voters weren’t endorsing the Democratic Party, which stands at 29% approval in the latest NBC poll, below even the 38% for the Republican Party. Voters also weren’t embracing a Democratic policy agenda, since the party didn’t offer one. Candidates chanted “Trump” like an incantation and then talked about costs and corruption. They offered little specificity about how to reduce costs.

I’d like to offer a brief “unified theory” of voter behavior in the last elections that include not just those listed by the WaPo editors but those in California, Washington, and elsewhere. Voters tend to favor policies whose benefits they can identify and whose costs they believe they can avoid. They resist policies that impose visible costs or threaten arrangements they regard as personally important.

1. people don’t like rising prices, particularly a rising price for gasoline
2. people don’t like paying more in taxes
3. people don’t mind other people paying more in taxes as long as they’re confident those taxes won’t ultimately fall on them
4. most people don’t think that sexual identities compete in athletic events—bodies do
5. parents are protective of their authority over their children

One final observation. American voters are a lot less tribal and more pragmatic than many seem to think.