Hello friends! My apologies for the month-long hiatus while traveling. I originally expected to keep this coming every Tuesday, but inevitably something distracting happened at the beginning of every week on the road — exploding light fixtures due to earthquakes and the like —and eventually I decided I was better off just resuming when I returned. In this newsletter I've got a short note on my travels, an essay on the problem with using terms like "likability" when discussing presidential candidates, and reading recommendations.
South America was brilliant. I started off in Argentina and Uruguay for a week with my girlfriend before heading to Bolivia alone for three weeks.
My take on Buenos Aires: It's the Paris of South America. I've been told that I'm far from the first to say this, but allow me to explain my reasoning. The quality of life is high, leisure is taken very seriously, quality fine dining abounds, the history and culture of the city are rich and fascinating, and the people are ... not too charming. I made a few friends who were extraordinarily kind and inviting, but overall the introverted public culture of Buenos Aires seems to defy the trend of soul-warming hospitality one finds across Latin America and, more broadly, the Global South. (Montevideo, by contrast, seemed like a neighborhood of Buenos Aires where everyone is particularly liberal, stoned, obsessively committed to sipping on yerba mate and more open to spontaneous interactions.)
One of the most interesting things I did in Buenos Aires — and easily the most harrowing — was visit ESMA, one of the most notorious clandestine detention centers overseen by the military dictatorship that reigned in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. I was vaguely acquainted with the brutal history before, but seeing the detention center firsthand (which is still being used for ongoing investigations and trials) was deeply disturbing. Around 30,000 people were jailed, tortured, murdered or disappeared while the junta was in power and about 5,000 of them were processed through that site, which was outwardly still functioning as a military academy. People were, among other things, kept in dog kennels, tortured for years, had their money and property confiscated by the state, and then were often injected with an anesthetic and thrown in the ocean. The whole thing was backed by the US in the name of anticommunism.
Many countries endure sadistic dictatorships but I was struck by how systematic the use of state terror against dissidents was, and how recent it was. Even more remarkably, since then the Argentinian right has not tried to disavow all association with that regime but persistently tried to downplay the horrors of the era and find ways to protect or minimize the sentences of many of the officials responsible for what happened then. It's happening to this very day.
The state of the economy is reason for despair in Argentina at the moment — in South America, Argentinian inflation is surpassed only by apocalyptic Venezuelan inflation; ATMs frequently run empty because the currency has such little value. On a more optimistic note, a mass movement to legalize abortion in Argentina appears to be growing rapidly.
A number of leftists I spoke to there looked longingly toward their neighbor to the north: Bolivia. Evo Morales is the last man standing from the Pink Tide that swept Latin America in the 2000s, and he has a good chance of being re-elected this fall while the rest of the region is generally swinging to the right.
I headed that way to figure out how his leftist experiment there is faring these days. I traveled through about half a dozen towns — big cities and the countryside — and talked to scores of people from all walks of life. I also randomly ended up partying in a house that Che Guevara lived in during his time in Bolivia, shortly before he was executed. There are so many things to say about that tremendously fascinating country, but I'm saving them for an article that I'll either publish in a magazine or in this newsletter in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Abolish likability
With so many candidates entering the Democratic race for the presidential nomination, and so many of them crowding around a broadly similar set of progressive policy proposals, I have no doubt that shallow discussion of personality is going to feature even more heavily than usual in the talking head banter about who can win the White House. And one of the worst narratives that will shape this awful soap opera will be “likability.”
At first blush, the likability of a candidate appears to be a reasonable metric. Surely it’s hard to imagine the public flocking to a candidate who is plainly un-likable — so why not discuss it? The likability debate appears to be a candid reckoning with the reality that emotional appeal matters in political life.
In reality, though, likability is a deeply pernicious measure, and it should be banished from the vocabulary of analysts and commentators. Allow me to explain why:
Likability is overly subjective. Unlike talking about a candidate’s past experiences, style of oration, or policy platform, there is no widely agreed upon quality or behavior to hang an analysis of likability on. And yet it’s something that pundits can’t resist talking about as if it’s a science and as if their personal assessments of likability are clearly shared uniformly by the public.
Likability distilled to its own metric is irrelevant to the presidency. One would think that voters come to “like” certain candidates due to some combination of their credentials, their values, their political persona and style of oration, and their vision for the future. So what does likability mean if it’s supposed to be considered distinct from all that? That they’re the kind of person you’d gravitate toward at a dinner party? The kind of person you’d trust to watch your kids if you went away for the weekend? Sure, one could measure that, but why should this be a salient factor in the public’s decision to elect the president to office?
On a related note, a fixation on likability represents a kind of hyper-casualization of the presidency. Of course citizens want to be able to relate to the president, but polling and discussion about who you’d want to grab a beer with go too far. In my own life, when I’ve assessed leaders of companies I’ve worked at or organizations I’ve participated in, I haven’t even once thought about how fun they’d be to drink with when appraising their leadership abilities. I suspect most people are the same. Likability is a distraction from the fact that the presidency is a job that requires exceptional ability and performance.
One of the biggest reasons to oppose the use of likability is because it gives male candidates an unfair advantage over their female counterparts. The day Sen. Elizabeth Warren kicked off her 2020 bid, Politico ran a remarkable piece predicated on the claim that she had a likability crisis akin to Hillary Clinton in 2016. In her very first 2020 presser, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was basically asked if she might be too likable. The reporter raised the same concern about Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is also running for president. Not only are prominent male candidates not being hammered with these kinds of questions, they’re also not faced with the outrageous dilemma of being deemed either unlikable or overly likable.
This is disappointing, but not surprising, given decades worth of social science research showing that female politicians (a) face likability tests that male politicians don’t (likability is much more of a prerequisite for female politicians than for male politicians) and (b) are stigmatized for showing ambition and acting in the very ways that are required to succeed. Warren, in particular, seems to be plagued by concerns about likability, but as Peter Beinart points out, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to work backwards from her low approval ratings given what we know about how the public responds to women perceived as aggressive. I’ve not looked into the research on how likability affects whites vs minorities, but common sense suggests there are double standards there as well.
This is not just a “discourse” problem — it has real world implications. Not only are pundits shaping citizen beliefs and behavior, but the the reputation of likability or lack thereof can shape the way donors and staffers migrate between candidates, and concretely boost or hurt their chances of success before voters really get to know candidates. How many fundraisers and campaign managers are gravitating toward Beto instead of Warren because of the likability primary?
Likability has cousins too, like “authenticity” and “electability.” These terms require their own critiques, but they share with likability a vexing vagueness and a tendency to hurt women more than men. While these terms are always problematic, it’s particularly galling to use them in post-2016 America. Quite simply, anyone who tells you they really know what makes someone electable or unelectable today is a fool or a liar.
I also have some solutions to offer. If you’re some kind of public figure and want to get at that “X” factor about a candidate, get specific and give reasons. Maybe a politician's ease and attentive listening while talking with angry voters at a lunch counter suggests composure or emotional intelligence. Perhaps describe how their fiery rhetoric gets crowds especially raucous. Don't tar or boost candidates with useless descriptors based on a gut feeling!
I also think that the term “charismatic” is significantly more defensible than “likable.” It probably has some problems, but it's fundamentally about persuasiveness and can be backed empirically by crowd sizes and behavior, numbers of small donations, volunteer mobilization, or the ratio of public name recognition to length of time in the public eye. The idea is to find tangible phenomena that indicate that a candidate’s message is resonating with people.
Mostly, though, I think that public analysts and advocates should talk about politicians' records and proposed policies and leave the rest for citizens to figure out for themselves. The problem is that since this hellish circus goes on for about two years, the commentariat seem to need more to gossip about.
What I'm reading
It's time for Congress to do it's job and investigate Trump.
Nobody who matters has read the Mueller report yet.
David Cay Johnston versus Glenn Greenwald on the Mueller report.
The past and future of the American strike.
What is a bullshit job?
Hey David Frum, Americans' support for immigration is at a record high.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an optimist now.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is troubled by Michelle Obama's Becoming.
The DCCC warns it will cut off vendors that work with primary challengers.
Instagram may come to rival YouTube in its role in hosting and spreading right-wing extremism.
Thanks for reading. If you want to give me any feedback or just want to share some thoughts, you can reply directly to this email and I'll be able to read it — and respond.
If this was forwarded to you or you caught this online: Hello! I'm a journalist and I publish notes on politics and society through this newsletter about once a week. You can sign up here and check out the archive here.