Mailbag: The Audacity Of Moral Clarity

Barack Obama ... Kamala Harris ... Joe Biden

Thanks again for your questions, readers. I leave tomorrow evening for a two-week vacation, which means no more Thursday mailbags until June… UNLESS!

Well, it isn’t really up to me, but… I’ve asked a good friend of Off Message, the writer and broadcaster

Todd Zwillich

, to take over here while I’m gone. If you listen to public radio, or read or watched Vice News before the fall, then you’ve likely come across his work. I’ve given him the keys and asked him to treat the newsletter as a blank canvas, so he may decide to do something interactive with you all.

If not, never fear, I’ll be back at the helm on June 9. And either way, give him a warm welcome.

I’m able to do this, offering competitive pay, thanks to your generosity as subscribers. If you haven’t already picked up a paid membership, you can do that here:

Now to this week’s mailbag

(Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

.Bill: 1) Back on January 3rd of this year you announced a New Year’s Resolution to experiment in a different type of media content for non-political as well as political types. It was meant to counter all the subliminal (and otherwise) right-wing messaging seen in supposedly non-political content (fitness for one). How’s that going?

Let’s generously call it a work in progress. I’ve written a couple pieces in this vein that were widely read and well received, and I’m proud of them. My friend

Mikala Jamison

is putting together a feature for her own Substack Body Type based on a long conversation we had a couple weeks back. I haven’t let the concept slip altogether.

But I’ll admit I’d hoped to have done more at this point, and just found it difficult to settle into a separate new groove.

I have a handful of interests, fitness foremost among them, that while facially nonpolitical have been infiltrated by partisan politics. But by trade, I work in news. News happens all the time. It constantly replenishes my well of ideas and arguments. My other interests aren’t really like that, and fitness really isn’t like that. It’s mostly just a thing that I do for health and recreation, and a topic that I enjoy reading and learning about. It hardly confronts me with questions or controversies that serve as onramps to some larger discourse. And so I’ve struggled a bit with how hard I should strain to make it a regular part of my production here.

To take just one for instance, I recently happened upon this piece in Vanity Fair about the fitness world and its obsession with protein. How did it come across my transom? Because fitness influencers were savaging it online, of course. And I was really tempted to write a whole piece about what I think is really going on here. (Short version: fitness people stress the importance of protein because it facilitates muscle growth. Some of them, because they’re neurotic or motivated by profit, make overhyped claims about how essential it is to hit optimal daily protein goals, or take various specific supplements, or stick to extreme diets. The most visible people in this latter regard are big players in what we now call the man-o-sphere. And because they play to stereotype, the Vanity Fair article about the supposed scourge of protein is actually an article about the scourges of male insecurity, men’s rights, “fitness bros,” etc., which allows the influencers to say or imply that feminists/progressives/the media want you to believe eating protein or building muscle is “toxic masculinity.”)

The mutual incomprehension here is intentional, and it leaves media consumers on each side of the divide worse informed. Readers of Vanity Fair would be better off knowing that if they want to build muscle, they’ll have an easier time if they increase their protein intake (both nominally and as a share of overall calories) and (in most cases) maintain a slight calorie surplus. People who follow influencers should know there’s nothing magic about protein supplementation or fad diets, and that it’s a bad idea to take major health and lifestyle advice from Type-A obsessives and/or people who make their livings manipulating others into buying supplements. There’s nothing masculine about being in a cult or a sucker for a marketing gimmick, and there’s nothing toxic about wanting to be fit or muscular or strong.

Maybe more to the point: people who decide to take an interest in their health and fitness shouldn’t be making big decisions about diet and exercise and supplementation in this tribal way. All else equal, I’d probably trust a journalist over a marketing professional, even a very fit one—but not as much as I’d trust my doctor, or a nutritionist she referred me to, or a certified trainer, or even my own body, and how it responds to different combinations of healthy foods.

Long story short, I talked myself out of writing the piece earlier this month because…well, what’s this got to do with politics and the news, my two areas of bona fide expertise? Would it really do anything to depolarize this discourse? Self-doubt won the day.

Here’s another example: For reasons I won’t elaborate on now, I decided a couple months ago to begin training myself (or retraining myself, I suppose) to to complete strict muscle-ups.

I knew going in that regaining this level of proficiency after 20 years would entail weight loss, a bit more upper body strength, and a repetitive practice with elements of form. And I’ve made progress on all fronts (though this vacation will probably set me back a ways). But I’ve also talked myself out of writing a dedicated piece about it, because, again, what’s this got to with politics and the news? It’d be more of a diary entry than a piece of writing that might reach an audience where their values and interests overlap.

Perhaps I’ll circle back in June and write both of these pieces up at length. If nothing else, current readers seem to enjoy glimpses behind the scenes. But I’ve been thinking, too, about trying to break into these less-politicized realms in other formats. Maybe by making use of the Substack Live feature. As your question demonstrates, it’s easier to wax on about this stuff in dialogue with other people than it is to write essays about it unprompted. But it’s a goal I really do want to make headway on, and I haven’t given up on the resolution.

2) Sometime between the election and inauguration I seem to remember you saying that when the voter files came out in a few months you would do a deep-dive. It appears that this information is out. How’s that going?

I suspect you’re referring to the Catalist report, which just landed this week. I’m not sure I ever committed to doing a “deep dive” in the sense of writing one big piece with all my takeaways (though I’d be happy to take that on as a post-vacation assignment, if readers are interested) so much as reading it closely, to check my assumptions heading into the election against the most credible post-mortem analysis.

Going through it, as I have over the past couple days, I’ve learned some things that surprised me, e.g. that college-educated white voters swung right, and fairly hard. Kamala Harris basically matched Joe Biden with non-college whites. That didn’t match my assumptions about turnout demographics at all. But the most useful big-picture takeaway so far is that Harris basically lost ground with every subset of the electorate, no matter how you slice or dice it, except with people who vote in every election. The less engaged and more vibesy the voter, the more likely they were to swing toward Trump.

I haven’t yet fully thought through whether I think this means Harris should have emphasized different issues or whether she lost a winnable race, or almost won a race that was always out of reach. But I do think it suggests Democrats need to be more magnetic—by which I mean they need to loosen up and be unique, not that they need to take advice from image consultants about how to be likable. And they need a party leader who isn’t hidebound—whom civically disengaged people can find themselves rooting for. I have a few archetypes in mind, but suffice it to say, I suspect the right person will be less Obama ‘08 (let’s bring everyone together after this divisive period) and more like “try me,” or “we’ve had enough of your bullshit.” John Cena, if you’re listening¹²…

3) I recently bought a National Geographic devoted to inflammation. It had a little bit about the connection between inflammation and long covid. Have you looked into that on a deeper level?

I’ve done a fair amount of reading about COVID and thrombogenesis (that is, why it puts people at greater risk of developing blood clots) and inflammation is definitely part of the story there. But I selfishly take a narrow interest in that particular COVID complication, because it’s the one I got stuck with. I usually don’t refer to my situation as “long COVID,” because most people seem to think of long COVID as a family of syndromes that doctors don’t understand well and don’t really know how to treat. I don’t have brain fog or chronic fatigue (at least anymore than I did before!) but I did develop these blood clots in my lungs, which turned into scar tissue. Lung damage. Doctors know how to detect that, treat it, even potentially remove it. So it’s a pretty different situation (better in some ways, worse in others) than most long-COVID stories you might read or hear about.

David Wolkenfeld: How would you explain Obama's "evolution" on same-sex marriage in light of this argument. Wasn't that a textbook example of a politician adopting a politically expedient position that he did not believe in personally before jettisoning it as the politics changed? Or perhaps Obama sincerely believed that civil unions were a stable long-term solution to ensuring civil rights while respecting tradition etc.? Or maybe Obama, as a once-in-a-generation political talent, was able to succeed at something other politicians could not pull off?

It’s a fair question, but, counterintuitively, I actually think the Obama same-sex marriage example supports the point I made in that piece. Not to be pedantic or weaselly about it, but the argument isn’t that Democrats should never adopt politically expedient positions—it’s that they should be clear in their own minds about what they believe, and make considered decisions about rhetoric and strategy from there. It’s why I wrote, “That is not to say that politicians should always be uncompromising advocates for their most deeply held views,” and echoed the same caveat, in this earlier piece: “These guys just need to figure out what they actually believe, and then express it compellingly, or else consciously betray their principles for narrow political advantage.”