Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring Substack is always worth a read, but I often find myself disappointed by his basic sense of how in American politics progress is made, as if compromise and bipartisanship are the only part of the nation’s DNA no matter what. Anyone trying to decide within a group of friends trying to choose what restaurant the group should patronize will know the need for compromise, and the practicality demanded in legislative efforts is the same need, writ large.

Got it.

This holds true in many instances, but Yglesias’s bias against “radical” calls to action—or perhaps more accurately, what he sees as “radical “issues—insisting the only political effort worth considering is slow and steady work that chips away at the status quo. But what’s also worth considering is that this tenet can serve to keep very much needed progress at bay. For instance, he’s argued that climate change should remain off the list of election issues argued by Democrats because the issue will keep too many Democratic candidates from electoral victory and thus hurt progress on the issue itself. He sees political progress resulting from safe and centrist positions so that enough Democrats get elected to actually get things done. But today’s politics is not the normal politics, and much less like friends agreeing on a restaurant and more like having Thanksgiving dinner with your Trumpist uncle who insists on wearing his MAGA cap to the table.

I’m hard-pressed to see how his Slow Boring theory explains Donald Trump, but maybe I need to go into his archives to understand how he’s addressed that particular instance, although I can guess one explanation is that the ”Republican” victories are indeed the result of “slow and steady” work. But what is the nature of such work? The execution of Project 2025 and decades of effort by right-wing think tanks to regenerate racism and xenophobia as levers of “Us vs. Them?” Or the machinations of the Koch and Scaife outfits and their copious dark money to attack pollution regulations and capture the Supreme Court? Such long-term efforts fall into the category of “slow and boring” work but hardly serve as examples of what was once the more normal political landscape.

I’ve addressed the issue of climate action as an electoral issue in a recent post, “It’s the cost of living, stupid: Critiquing Matthew Yglesias’s “Doubling down on climate won’t win the Senate.” His post argues that the focus on the science of climate change or the anti-fossil fuels rhetoric may be the problem focus. I agree to the extent that such a focus is weak if the economic benefits of the renewable energy transition aren’t front and center.

One more thing about the above-referenced Slow and Boring post is that Yglesias parrots one of the most absurd claims made by the anti-climate action interests, which is that somehow “the climate movement is so over-funded and so shot-through with expressive politics and misinformation that I’m worried party leaders won’t say that it’s a terrible idea.” Over-funded? Really? Just the other day, in the Joe Rogan interview with Bernie Sanders, I heard Rogan make a similar claim, which is that there’s so much money being made by climate scientists (and, presumably, clean energy companies, although this wasn’t stated specifically) that the science is being slanted so the trough keeps getting filled. My answer:

…who the hell actually thinks “the climate movement is so over-funded”? The eight top American fossil fuel corporations posted profits—not revenue—of over $100 billion in 2022, and a good chunk of that in 2023. Climate change movement funding is a tiny shadow of such funds.

I’m pretty sure the claim of climate movement “over-funding” is a good psychological example of projection by Big Oil and their minions. It sure seems like the Trump Administration has shaped projection to Goebel-like perfection, but let’s leave that assessment to the professionals.

Today’s Substack by Yglesias, “What true political leadership looks like: Sarah McBride’s slow boring of hard boards,” stays true to his message, quoting McBride, taken from a recent Ezra Klein podcast :

“You can’t compromise on civil rights” is a great tweet. But tell me: Which civil rights act delivered all progress and all civil rights for people of color in this country? The Civil Rights Act of 1957? The Civil Rights Act of 1960? The Civil Rights Act of 1964? The Voting Rights Act of 1965? The Civil Rights Act of 1968? Or any of the civil rights acts that have been passed since the 1960s? That movement was disciplined, it was strategic, it picked its battles, it picked its fights, and it compromised to move the ball forward. And right now, that compromise would be deemed unprincipled, weak, and throwing everyone under the bus.

A quick Internet search finds “that 59% of Americans approved of the Civil Rights Act [1964], while 31% disapproved and 10% were undecided, according to Gallup News.

Let’s look at several polls today about climate change, where the public support for climate action easily exceeds public support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Don’t these findings suggest that climate change, as an issue, is better positioned in voter sentiment, and thus can be disciplined, strategic, and pick its battles, and win elections to move the ball forward? It seems to me that climate action is a solid electoral focus, but the work, as I’d argued in my previous post critiquing Yglesias, is about messaging, and messaging should be on the economic benefits clean energy transition.

So why am I writing this post, if I’ve already made my argument in my previous post on Yglesias? Well, he quotes critically a hero of mine, calling his political takes “slipshod,” when David Roberts, of Volts, reacted to an opinion piece by McBride titled “Why the Left Lost of Trans Rights.” Robert points to her arguments and concludes:

And here we have it: an explicit, straightforward argument against the very idea of political leadership. The Democratic Party ethos in its purest form.”

One odd issue with Ygelsias’s Substack is conflating the fight for trans rights with the potential for electoral success with climate change. One difference is that only a slight majority of Americans (of which I am a member) believe that LGBTQ+ individuals should be protected from discrimination, and other more specific trans rights issues poll far worse. On the other hand, according to the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication’s latest polling, majorities believe the American Government should take climate action:

About six in ten registered voters (64%) think developing sources of clean energy should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress. This includes large majorities of liberal Democrats (93%) and moderate/conservative Democrats (79%). About four in ten liberal/moderate Republicans (39%) think developing sources of clean energy should be a high or very high priority, as do about one-third of conservative Republicans (35%; +9 percentage points since we last asked this question in Fall 2024).

The more shocking result, in my opinion, is “80% of registered voters say nobody has ever asked them to contact officials about global warming,” which suggests to me that the politics as usual isn’t doing us much good.

But back to my main point, which is that climate action is most strongly presented as an economic issue, and that majorities of voters are positively inclined toward climate change issues, and that not pursuing climate action as a political topic makes no sense. I’m hard-pressed to see Yglesias’s use of the political history analysis of how “public opinion is a thermostat” argument against using climate action as an electoral issue. He cites Christopher Wlezien:

In his original paper, Wlezien looked at how in the lead-up to Ronald Reagan’s election win in 1980, public opinion was swinging in favor of higher levels of defense spending. Then after Reagan won and defense spending started going up, opinion shifted in the other direction. This is a pretty common pattern. When a Democrat is in the White House, the share of the public saying the government is “doing too much” tends to rise sharply.

Isn’t the “thermostat” now set to turn on regarding climate action, with public opinion against Trump’s backsliding? The polls certainly argue for this, and so the politicians might want to pay attention to the issue and not worry about compromising with a Republican Party that actually is in the hands of their richly funding masters.