A Mendacious Fool

No, not Ron. Three posts in four days referencing Matt Stoller is too much, but there are some issues here which I think highlight some of the very serious problems with his approach. In brief, to imagine that the SAG and the WGA don’t care about the kinds of social issues that Stoller is indifferent to is a catastrophic misreading of the strike.  As it happens (and most people don’t know this), LGBTQ+ folks are heavily represented in the entertainment industry, and they care a lot about the kinds of policies that Ron Desantis is interested in pursuing.  They fully understand that Desantis is not a friend, is not someone who can be worked with, and is not someone who is conceivably likely to improve the workplace and social situations of the workforce. To his credit Ron Desantis also understands this and has made no bones about it; he wants to break Disney because of the policies that the corporation has taken as a result of internal pressure from its workforce.  Desantis only hates corporate power insofar as corporate power represents an obstacle to his culture war priorities. 

Stoller is a tactical liar and a strategic fool.  He surely understands that Hawley, Desantis, and whatever other GOP reactionaries he’s determined to fall in love with are completely poisonous to the Democratic interests he’s trying to browbeat into compliance, and when he pretends not to understand the actual demands of the Disney workforce or the entertainment unions, he’s simply lying. His strategic idiocy is in a colossal misunderstanding of coalition politics. There certainly are situations in which bipartisan coalitions are possible, even in America at this late date. But the coalitions that enabled the infrastructure bill and that have continued to enable support for Ukraine (to pick a couple of examples) are built around values that extend across party lines; the GOPsters who chose to work with Democrats saw the value of infrastructure to their districts and support the survival of the Ukrainian state. To put it bluntly there is no shared set of values in the fight that Stoller is describing. The unions and workers want to limit corporate power for entirely different reasons than Hawley, Vance, and Desantis, and indeed the goals of either side are deeply inimical to the other. There is no positive sum agreement here, because both sides would prefer the status quo to what the other has to offer. I genuinely don’t think that Stoller has bothered to try to understand this. Incidentally, this is why Red-Brown alliances always fail.

And while we’re here, let’s talk the defense budget, something that Stoller is genuinely ignorant about. Matt has been the leading “progressive” voice for war with China for the last couple of years. I don’t think that’s much of an exaggeration; he has consistently described US-China relations as zero sum with war as virtual inevitability. Stoller isn’t the only such voice, but most of the other folks who think about such things in depth know something about either a) international politics, or b) the defense industrial base. Stoller is ignorant of both, and hopelessly misunderstands the DC foreign policy conversation:

I would say that the case for reducing the US defense budget is weaker now than at any time since… well, very possibly since the 1950s.  China is a more significant military competitor than the Soviet Union for most of the latter’s existence, and a more significant economic competitor than at any time in Soviet history. Does that call for radical increases in military spending?  Meh.  The US is currently bleeding Russia to death with barely a finger’s worth of effort in Ukraine.  Japan and Australia, US treaty allies, both have formidable military establishments. The US defense budget could certain needs some reallocation, but it is not faintly obvious that an increased defense budget would reduce the chances of war with China or give the US much more in the way of leverage over the China-Taiwan relationship. At the very least, the argument that the country with the world’s largest defense establishment and that happens to be a treaty ally with five of the remaining nine out of the top ten, and has better relations than China with another two of the top ten needs to dramatically increase its defense spending requires a good deal of additional care and attention than even Noah Smith has offered.

Anyway the best way to not think about Matt Stoller is to ignore Matt Stoller. I have failed on this occasion but shall strive to do better next time.