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My wife made this video to celebrate our engagement a few months ago and it's my favorite thing: youtube.com/watch?v=HWkE3g0w…
Reihan Salam retweeted
At the very least people who told you that serious democratic contestation was going to disappear (because of mass immigration or left-elite cultural power or Trumpist authoritarianism or the undemocratic Constitution) have been consistently mistaken.
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It seems to me that democracy has on the whole worked very well in America over the last decade, and perhaps better than in any other major country in the West. National outcomes have repeatedly been responsive to underlying voter preferences on meaningful questions, and significant changes in policy have ensued. I’ve been reading Democracy in America this past week, and it’s striking how much it still rhymes nearly two centuries later.
Reihan Salam retweeted
3 - Harvard. Early last year, Harvard looked ready to settle & make some policy changes & move on. Then the admin made over-the-top demands & forced an adversarial standoff. Harvard’s strategy has been to wait it out. It surely feels pretty good about that strategy now.
Reihan Salam retweeted
Regardless of the partisan messaging, DEI is likely on its way back. Left-leaning policy professionals are still committed to race-conscious practices. They’re already putting together model legislation to “rebuild” DEI. For them, this is the easy higher ed agenda item.
Reihan Salam retweeted
Some Democrats thinking about 2028 might still spurn identity politics and opt for a race-neutral message. Others (Ro Hanna) are already announcing that “DEI is back!”
Reihan Salam retweeted
2- DEI. The term “DEI” lost the PR battle two years ago. It seemed plausible that universities would substantively curtail their diversity infrastructure. Now its clear that some will go right back to what they were doing.
Reihan Salam retweeted
One advantage the civics schools have is that they’re a positive policy initiative. Leaders of these schools should think about how to make the bipartisan case for civic and liberal education.
Reihan Salam retweeted
This doesn’t spell immediate doom. The key actors are the legislature and university boards. In both states, board members have to be approved by the senate, which Republicans held. Buckle up for some crazy appointment shenanigans.
Reihan Salam retweeted
1 - Civics centers. Texas and Ohio are hugely important for the civics school movement. These schools are the creation of state lawmakers—and they require the support of friendly board appointees—so the governors matter.
Reihan Salam retweeted
A few takes:
The actual ideological content of the non-Democratic coalition is genuinely up for grabs in a way that hasn’t been true in a decade.
The whole damn country is purple. Anyone can win anywhere. Democrats can win statewide in the reddest parts of the country: Mississippi, Kansas, Texas, South Carolina, you name it. And Republicans can win in the bluest parts—including Vermont and New Hampshire—even amidst a generational blue tsunami if they embrace a little heterodoxy.
It would be unwise to make inflationary populism the future of the right.
Demographics are not destiny. Illegal immigration is bad. The border should remain closed and aggressively policed. But you cannot deport your way out of every problem.
Hyper-online, right-coded slop mongering is just as politically toxic as wokeness—perhaps even more so.
At least we can take comfort in the fact that many GOP campaign consultants have made insane amounts of money.
Should I add pronouns to my bio? I really don’t want to go to the gulag.
Reihan Salam retweeted
Despite last night's blue wave, California voters appear poised to reject Proposition 40, a ballot initiative that would have imposed the nation’s first-ever statewide wealth tax.
The billionaire tax is on its way to defeat—but California will still pay the price.
@Shawn_Regan's latest: city-journal.org/article/cal…
Reihan Salam retweeted
California voters elected Democrat Xavier Becerra as governor, but appear poised to reject the billionaire wealth tax.
North Carolina voters sent Roy Cooper to the Senate by nearly 20 points, but approved voter ID, a limit on property-tax increases, and a cut to the top income-tax rate on the same ballot.
Then the five Sanders-backed Senate candidates underperformed.
Last night, voters punished Republicans. That doesn’t mean they endorsed the far Left.
@Jesse_Leg & @mattrshor on the midterm mandate mirage: city-journal.org/article/mid…
Reihan Salam retweeted
Apropos of nothing, read my three-part series from earlier today about why the changes in Texas are likely to stick, at least to some extent.
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Reihan Salam retweeted
Having won an election because people hated inflation, I simply would not have imposed tariffs, badgered the Fed for rate cuts, run enormous budget deficits and thrown in a Middle Eastern war. But I appreciate there are different schools of thought.
Reihan Salam retweeted
My favorite part is when he points out that the money Hochul promised him is coming from other people's pockets
Reihan Salam retweeted
"What you doing, bitch? Look, the police when they arrest me now, they take me to the hospital."
This is a jaw-dropping encapsulation of several of New York's public policy problems.
Reihan Salam retweeted
This month we're launching STATE OF THE ART no.2, the RE-ENCHANTMENT edition. STATE OF THE ART (@sotazine) is San Francisco's premier techno-literary zine.
This edition features original writing and interviews by Gwern, Erik Davis, @deepfates, @LapsusLima, @BjarturTomas, @npceo_, @digitlartifacts, and more.
Plus gorgeous art + design by @JaredRPoblete.
If you want to get on the list for the limited print run and newsletter, sign up below:
Reihan Salam retweeted
There's a lot in here, but all of it is simply dodging the problem with PMs' sports gambling offerings.
I explain in my @WSJopinion letter to the editor.
==
Regarding Tarek Mansour’s op-ed “When Is a Sports Bet Not a Sports Bet?” (Oct. 28): Nearly 90% of wagers on Kalshi, the nation’s largest prediction market, are on sports. This has prompted dozens of states to sue, arguing that Kalshi is an unlicensed sportsbook operating in violation of their laws. The states keep winning their suits.
Against this, Mr. Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, contends that Kalshi is “a market, not a casino,” and should be regulated like any other futures exchange—by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and with an eye to issues like fraud and insider trading.
But sports gambling isn’t regulated like traditional securities because its primary risk isn’t fraud, but addiction and its associated harms. A mountain of social science evidence links legal sports gambling to increased bankruptcy, credit card delinquency, food instability and even suicide. Regulation must limit the extent to which profit seeking exacerbates this suffering.
Mr. Mansour argues that Kalshi’s fee-per-transaction model means it doesn’t make money off of losers, ostensibly limiting its incentive to encourage addiction. But almost everyone loses on Kalshi, and the site profits from the frequency of those losses.
Kalshi has belatedly fielded “responsible trading” tools, mostly modeled on the sportsbooks it decries as less responsible. It has also limited 18-to-20-year-olds—who can’t gamble in most states—to betting $30,000 per year. These are tacit recognitions of the problem, but not actual solutions.
Kalshi’s preferred regulator, the CFTC, has neither the competency nor statutory authority to regulate gambling. The government offers no gambling hotline and funds no gambling addiction treatment; there is no national self-exclusion list.
Bad-faith actors sometimes accuse serious securities markets of being dressed-up gambling. Mr. Mansour is doing the same, but in reverse, hiding his sportsbook behind the respectable veneer of a real securities exchange. In reality, if it walks like a sports bet, and talks like a sports bet, it needs to be regulated like a sports bet.
Charles Fain Lehman
Manhattan Institute
Rockville, Md.
Yes, a bet and a trade often look similar.
But how they work is fundamentally different.
A sportsbook sets the odds and takes the other side of your bet. Prediction markets are markets, where buyers and sellers compete to discover and produce efficient prices and enable important public benefits.
What the market is about can change, but the structure doesn't.
My op-ed on prediction markets and regulation:
Reihan Salam retweeted
My take on Greg Clark's too-hot-for-academic-publishing new book, about why social status runs in families: city-journal.org/article/gre…
