Four years of Noahpinion - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
Today is the fourth anniversary of this incarnation of my blog. Noahpinion began on the old Blogger website in 2011, but I switched over on November 23, 2020. It’s hard to believe how far it’s come since then — Noahpinion now has over 280,000 readers and 14,500 paid subscribers! As always, I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who reads my blog, and I’ll do my utmost to keep delivering you top quality content. I do it all for you folks.
Anyway, every year, I do a roundup of seven big themes I wrote about ( here’s last year’s). The links below are all links to other posts I wrote over the past 12 months, so you can use this post as a reference if you want to know what my main focus was in 2024.
The most important event of the year, at least from a U.S. perspective — and possibly from a global perspective as well — was the election of Donald Trump earlier this month. This probably shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, given that incumbent politicians and parties lost all over the globe this year, and also given the fact that Biden was too old to run again and the Dems had to quickly shoehorn in a replacement. Still, though, the election of Trump is, in my view, a very bad result, for a variety of reasons. Trump looks likely to accommodate America’s foreign adversaries, feud with key U.S. institutions, unleash divisive rhetoric, and hire a bunch of poorly qualified people of low moral character. A Democratic President would have done much better.
And yet this was the result Americans wanted, and we have to deal with that. Democrats need to spend a lot of time and honest effort grappling with the fact that the brand of politics they built up since 2012 just isn’t working very well. Identity politics — courting minority voters by offering targeted benefits and appealing to historical grievances — just ended up pushing away significant numbers of Latinos, Asians, and Black men. Prioritizing low unemployment over low inflation enraged the American people. Progressive cities are governance disasters — blocking new housing, being too permissive toward crime and urban disorder, and wasting city budgets on grifting nonprofits, expensive consultants, and thickets of red tape. And the educated professional class that forms the Democrats’ base is too out of touch with the values of the American majority.
